The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,40

that in the wake of losing his novel, Boyd had stopped writing. “They say he’ put off his tenure vote,” she told me. “No one ever sees him—or Anne.” One afternoon in 1972 he was killed. In the midst of a blinding rainstorm, he crashed his car into the wall of the abandoned coffin factory. He had been on his way to the liquor store. “And is it any wonder?” Nancy asked. “I mean, imagine it. You work and work on something, you hold it close to your heart, and then one day—poof—it’ gone. And to make matters worse, you can’t blame anyone but yourself. No wonder he started drinking again. Oh, I just wish it hadn’t happened in my house.”

“Dr. Wright thinks Boyd lost them on purpose,” I reminded her—rather coldly, yet there is consolation to be gained from such knowledge. For those of us on the outside, disaster courted is less threatening than disaster stumbled upon, since pathologies only imply holes in the psyche, whereas accidents . . . well, they imply holes in the universe, and who’ to say you won’t be the next one to fall through?

After Boyd’ death, for a brief time, Nancy was once again in regular contact with Anne. They spoke several times by telephone; there was even, for a while, talk of Anne flying out for a visit, though this trip never got beyond the planning stages, mostly because Anne refused to be pinned down to a specific date. Eventually Nancy gave up on trying to persuade her, after which the phone conversations became less and less frequent, and then stopped altogether.

And that, more or less, is everything I knew about Anne and Jonah Boyd, until the day several decades later when, rather out of the blue, Ben Wright called me up to tell me that he was in town, and that he wanted to invite me to dinner.

This was not something I expected. Although Ben and I had remained on civil terms through the years, we had never become what you would call “friends.” Indeed, since Nancy’ death, I’d seen him exactly once, when he’d given a reading at a Wellspring bookstore: The line for autographs had been so long, I hadn’t bothered to wait. Still, I’d followed the trajectory of his career with interest and some vicarious pride. It was a strange story, as likely to inspire cynicism as hope, depending on your point of view and time of life. At some point after Jonah Boyd’ visit, Ben had stopped writing poems and started writing stories, which he proceeded to send off to The New Yorker with an alacrity to match that of his poetry days. Like the poems, the stories came back unfailingly with rejection forms attached, provoking despondency in Ben and a sort of futile fist-shaking at the universe in Nancy. Still, he kept sending new ones. He was by now a junior in high school, and though he remained an indifferent student, nonetheless I think he took it for granted that he would get into Wellspring, as his more academically minded brother and sister had before him. And in this delusory belief, Nancy, out of the same misplaced impulse that had led her to give him false hope about his writing, backed him up. I shall never forget the black April morning when the rejection letter came—Nancy trying to console him, saying, “It doesn’t matter. Who needs a big-name college? You’re too good for them.” To which Ben replied, “But you were the one who told me I’d get in! You said it was a sure thing! You promised me!” Round and round they went, her efforts to persuade him that the rejection was not a tragedy only fortifying his conviction that it was. A tragedy, moreover, for which she bore ultimate responsibility: Because she had encouraged him, she was easier to blame than that pitiless abstraction, the university.

Ben went off to college: not to Harvard or Yale (they also turned him down) but to Bradford, where Ernest still had connections in the admissions office. He majored in European history. As in high school, he was an indifferent student. He continued to write, publishing a few stories in undergraduate magazines, and even winning the recently endowed Jonah Boyd Prize for Short Fiction, which brought with it a hundred-dollar gift certificate at the campus bookstore. (Nancy kept note of these achievements in a discreet brown leather scrapbook, which took pride of place on the piano.) Then after graduation