The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,4
which Nancy still called the study, and where you would usually find Little Hans, the family schnauzer, asleep on a leather rocking chair. (Little Hans, Dora—everything in that house was a Freud joke.) It was in the study as well that Ernest kept his collection of toy airplanes, a rare foray into sentimentality for him, gathered mostly to honor the memory of his father, who had dreamed of flight since boyhood but had himself flown only once, near the very end of his life, on a commuter plane that carried him from St. Louis to Chicago to visit a heart specialist.
On the other side of the front hall was the bedroom wing. There were four bedrooms, the largest Nancy and Ernest’, the smallest Ben’. Mark’ room Ernest had had made over into a library almost as soon as his son had left for Vancouver. Daphne’ had a queen-size bed and therefore did double duty as the guest room on those rare occasions when there were overnight guests. A corner bathroom with two entrances connected this room to Ben’. He often complained that his sister woke him up in the small hours with her loud and frequent peeing. About these rooms I can tell you less than I can about the others, because I very rarely had occasion to go into them.
Outside, in addition to the barbecue pit, there was a good-size swimming pool that the Wrights themselves had had built, and in which Nancy swam a rigorous twenty laps daily, even in bad weather. There was also a camellia garden, and a vegetable garden, and a koi pond with no koi; one winter, preparatory to repairing a leak, Ernest had drained it and put the koi into a barrel, from which they’d been stolen, over the course of a single night, by a family of raccoons. After that he gave up on koi, and filled the pond with impatiens—another oddity, the fish pond/flower bed, in that yard where nothing was what it had been meant to be.
As for Nancy—well, if the barbecue pit was Carcassone, she was Dame Carcas: tall, with a stately bearing. Tight curls, black going to gray, helmeted her head. She had a snub nose. Her eyes were the color of raisins. I remember that in those years, as was the fashion, she often dressed in flowing saris, muumuus patterned with exotic flowers, the sort of dresses that transform fat women into shapeless balls but lend to statuesque women like Nancy an even more imperious, aristocratic aspect. Her breasts protruded, one might say, with pride, they were like the buttresses of a cathedral. Whether she was smoking a cigarette on the porch, or feeding the cat, or overseeing the preparation of the Thanksgiving turkey, she radiated the slightly weary, slightly burdened grandeur of one of those monarchs whose biographies she was forever reading—Mary, Queen of Scots, Catherine the Great. But more than either of them, Elizabeth I. In her imagination, I fancy she saw herself as the reincarnation of the Virgin Queen.
One peculiarity of home ownership in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the Wellspring campus is that the university itself owns all the land. When you buy a house, you buy only the house; the land will then be leased to you for ninety-nine years at the rate of a dollar a year—but only on the condition that you are a tenured professor or senior administrator at the university. And though a spouse can inherit a lease, it can be passed on to a child only in the unlikely circumstance that the child, too, is a tenured professor or senior administrator at the university—a rule that enraged Nancy, who had a mystic feeling for her home, and wanted it to remain in the family. What plots were hatched in the seventies to get Daphne—now a psychologist—a position at the student health center! All to no avail. Ernest was killed, and Nancy died, and the house passed out of the family’ hands, until Ben, rather remarkably, reclaimed it.
To understand how this odd provision came into being (and it really is the heart of the story), you need to know something about Wellspring’ history. The university was chartered in 1910, when cattle baron and theosophy devotee Josiah Red-dicliffe sectioned off ten thousand acres of hilly farmland for the purposes of founding a college that would serve as “a wellspring of knowledge and hope forever more.” The “forever more” is key: Although the charter invested the board of trustees with the