The Body Of Jonah Boyd by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page A

that degree. We could have afforded to buy our son a new pair of socks. The problem was, we couldn’t get
     our act together. We were drunk all the time.”
    “How awful.”
    “It gets worse,” he said. “I beat her.”
    Anne’ eyes widened.
    “I mean, badly. I put her in the hospital twice. Broke her collarbone. The second time I felt justified, because I’d caught
     her with someone else.”
    Now this was exciting. Had they been having this conversation thirty years later, Anne might have walked away, frightened
     or disgusted. According to the standards of Bradford in 1968, though, physical violence was forgivable in men, a natural response
     to having their virility stifled or thwarted, to the provocations of a shrewish wife. She pushed me over the edge, the hitch. Boyd had not said these words, yet if he had, Anne’ reaction—arousal, combined with surprise that Boyd, now so pinkly sincere,
     could have ever been capable of taking such decisive action—would only have been enhanced.
    It can sometimes take very little to propel one into a fatal decision, especially when there is nothing—not children, not
     patience, not a sense of duty—to hold one back. Anne left Clifford the next day, and moved in with Boyd. Until their divorces
     came through, they shared a cheap one-bedroom apartment, in a complex with cinder-block walls near a highway overpass. Her
     decampment titillated the faculty wives, and worried Nancy, who seemed uncertain whether her reaction ought to be one of maternal
     disapproval or sisterly support. In the end, she split the difference—the wrong thing to do, as it turned out—and wrote a
     letter in which she both warned Anne that she ought to “think twice” and wished her well. Offended (yet she refused to explain
     why), Anne stopped calling. The flow of letters dwindled to a trickle. This was the thing that hurt Nancy the most. She was
     not invited to the wedding, which took place in January—an omission not to be taken personally, Anne assured her in a rare,
     rather cool letter, as in fact no one had been invited to the wedding: not Jonah’ children, nor Anne’ parents, nor any of his colleagues; only another novelist
     and her husband, new friends, who would act as witnesses. By way of a present, Nancy sent an expensive crystal bowl that in
     its very lavishness was meant to carry a message of injury and rebuke. By way of reply, she received a cursory thank-you note
     on lilac-scented paper. And then, for almost a year, Bradford went silent.

Four
    L ATE ONE CLOUDY afternoon in the middle of July, the members of the Wright family, along with a small contingent of friends
     and neighbors, gathered in the driveway of 302 Florizona Avenue to bid Mark Wright goodbye. Earlier that week, watching the
     draft lottery on the little television in the kitchen with his mother, Mark had learned that his draft number was four. In
     the intervening days, all sorts of desperate measures had been proposed and dismissed. Orville Boxer suggested that Ernest
     ask one of his psychiatrist friends to write a letter asserting that Mark was a homosexual, but Ernest wouldn’t hear of it.
     Then Ken Longabaugh advised that Mark bite the bullet and enlist, since with his education he’d most likely be given an intelligence
     post anyway, as Ernest had been during World War II; yet this proposition Mark himself wouldn’t hear of, not because he objected
     to war per se (otherwise he would have declared himself a conscientious objector) but because in recent weeks he had undergone
     a crash course in radical politics, and now he understood that the war in Vietnam was merely part of a corrupt imperialistic
     campaign spearheaded by Henry Kissinger to suppress the will of the Vietnamese people; he would fight gladly, he said, if
     he could fight on the side of the North Vietnamese. At this Ernest threw up his hands, and Nancy wept, but there was to be
     no more arguing. And so that July afternoon,