The Body Of Jonah Boyd - By David Leavitt Page 0,51

imposed on him by the junior college only worsened. He managed to get himself together enough to apply for some grants, though, and in the spring of 1967, much to his surprise, he won a Guggenheim fellowship—enough money to allow him, at last, to take a leave of absence from his job, and travel, for one blessed spring, in Europe. This was the trip during which he happened upon the leather and paper goods shop in Verona where he found the notebooks. As he told Susan in a letter, he had just arrived in Verona, it was late afternoon, and he had left the legal pad he was carrying with him on the train (a foretaste of future absent-mindedness). In a bit of stupor he’d wandered into the shop, and been captivated both by its owner and her merchandise. Even today Susan can quote much of that letter from memory, especially the part about the white gloves.

In April, he returned to Dallas. It was a painful reentry. After Provence and Venice and Rome, Texas seemed to him cheesy and insular. Having gotten habituated to eating tar-tares and salads with gesiers, he could no longer bear the food Mary cooked him. When she served him a TV dinner, he threw it at the TV. Nor could he bear his job, the bored students in whom it was his thankless task to instill some respect for literature. One evening at a party he picked a fight with the chairman of his department, and bloodied his nose. He was fired after that. You might think the nose incident would have spelled the end of Boyd’ academic career, but in fact, in literary circles, it rather enhanced his reputation; after all, this was the age when Norman Mailer was lionized for trying to kill his wife. And so when the chance to teach at Bradford arose—brokered by a mutual friend, another drunken novelist whose brother happened to be the chairman of the Bradford English department—he jumped at it as a sort of lifeline. Not that Bradford was any paradise—it was merely an industrial New England town in which most of the factories were closed—but at least it was east, and, as such, in the same general direction as Europe. Boyd didn’t even tell his family where he was going; he just packed a suitcase, kissed them good-bye, and drove off, promising to call in a few days. That was the last Susan ever saw of him, because when he finally did call—six months later—it was to tell Mary that he would not contest a divorce. She could keep the shitty house and the crappy car. He felt bad for the children, but could see no way at this point to be of any use to them; once he finished his new novel, and got rich, he would try to make up to them for his cruelty, at least by sending some cash.

It goes without saying that at this stage Susan Boyd’ feelings toward her father were ambivalent, to say the least. On the one hand, his departure wrecked her chances of going to college, as now she had to take care of her brother and sister. On the other hand, she understood his reasons for leaving: “Because it was a dead end, that household,” she told me, “and there was no way, given the environment, that he could have ever finished another book. In retrospect, it’ amazing that he managed to get out the books that he did.” Although, during his Bradford years, Boyd wrote his daughter a score of letters, and called her at least once a week, whenever she hazarded the possibility of a visit, he found an excuse to put her off. Later, when she learned about the lost notebooks and his resulting relapse into alcoholism, she thought she understood at last what had lain behind this seemingly inexplicable standoffishness. And yet at the time his refusal to see her provoked in her only perplexity and hurt—"as if somehow he was ashamed of us, or embarrassed by us, me and Karen and Bradley. Of course, he wouldn’t tell me what was really going on. I guess he couldn’t bear to.”

Susan met Anne the winter that Boyd died, when she flew to Bradford, with her siblings, for his funeral. Bradley—now a baker in Houston—was chiefly interested in smoking pot, while Karen put most of her energy into the small stakes beauty pageants that she habitually entered but never won because she was