Anne was fascinated. She had never met a writer before, and told him so. He got her a drink. He himself did not drink, he
explained, because he was a drunk. “Huh?” Anne said. This was back in the days when social drinking, far from being frowned
upon, was the principal leisure activity of the academic classes, and most people who worked at universities drank like fish.
Regenerate alcoholics had not yet become the staple of television talk shows that they are today, and former inebriates who
had gone off the sauce were usually as reticent in their newfound sobriety as in the past they had been secretive in their
intoxications. Yet Boyd not only admitted that until recently he had been, in his own words, a “boozer,” he seemed to take
an almost gustatory satisfaction in describing the depths of wretchedness to which “the bottle” had dragged him. For it was
his intention, he said, to write a great novel, and contrary to all the nonsense spouted about Hemingway, you could not write
a great novel if you were a drunk. Great writing required an evenness of disposition that the fuzzing haze of alcohol obliterated.
Anne listened raptly, and drank. Curiously, he seemed to have no problem with
her
drinking. He kept fetching her fresh gin and tonics. He was a handsome man, if oddly foppish, with his bow tie and manicured
mustache. In certain ways he reminded her of Clifford—who better embodied “evenness of disposition” than Clifford?—and yet
in other ways he was so much less restrained, so much easier to talk to, that she found herself wondering what had induced
her to marry Clifford in the first place.
They retreated to a sofa. People were watching them—colleagues, wives of colleagues, women whose husbands might tell Clifford
what they had seen. She didn’t care. Boyd’ openness—his obliviousness to convention—had brought her past caring. Such openness,
she knew, might have nothing to do with her. It might be a side effect of his having been a drunk, or of his being a novelist.
Yet how much more pleasant if it turned out that she herself had inspired this response from him, this intuitive trust that
allowed him to speak to her of things about which, with others, he would have stayed silent! If that were the case, then Anne
owed it to him to be equally forthcoming.
She touched his collar. Lightly, just for a fraction of a second. Still, the gesture was noticed. She could feel a prickle
of unease leap about the room. They were being watched, which both amused and emboldened her. Was he married? she asked. Sort
of, he answered. Sort of? Well, he was in the middle of a divorce. This too, in Anne’ sphere, was a novelty, and she asked
for details. He and his wife, Boyd said, had been married straight out of high school. They had three children. For nineteen
years they had lived together in a ranch house outside of Dallas, where his wife worked for the company that published the
yellow pages, and Boyd cobbled together a living out of odd teaching jobs, while devoting the principal part of his energies
to drinking and writing, in that order. The house was never clean, nor were the kids. “Cat scratches on the sofa, holes in
the children’ socks. It wasn’t that we were poor. Oh, we
were
poor—just not to 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.
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, along with two friends from Wellspring, both of them hippies with stringy hair
and none-too-clean faces, Mark loaded into a battered Datsun with no reverse gear, his eventual destination the Canadian border,
and a future the repercussions of which we could only guess at.
That morning Nancy loaned me her camera and asked me to take some pictures of the assembled, one of which I still have. In
it the Wrights and their friends are posed clumsily in the driveway, in front of that famous Datsun that would later play
as crucial a role in the family lore as the black Ford Falcon with red interior. In the front, Mark kneels between his scruffy
friends. His expression is grave, and there is just a whisper of a beard on his chin. Behind him stands Daphne, holding a
tin containing some chocolate chip cookies she had baked that morning as a farewell present, and next to Daphne stands Mark’
girlfriend, Sheila, her hair tied in a single braid that drapes over her shoulder and hangs below her belt, and next to Sheila,
the bizarre Boxers, both victims of the McCarthy blacklist, and hence eager to show their support of Mark in this gesture
of defiance. Nancy is slightly to Bertha Boxer’ right, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, while to
her
right, Hettie Longabaugh, who always managed to be around at dramatic moments, perches on one foot and casts a solicitous
and possibly lewd glance at Ernest, who is hunched at a little distance from the others. From his expression you can see that
this theatrical and overly public departure his wife has orchestrated embarrasses him deeply, that given his druthers, he
would prefer for Mark to leave furtively, under cover of darkness. But there is nothing to be done about that.
The only person missing from the picture is Ben, and that is because, just at the moment that I was about to snap it, he separated
himself from his parents and ran off toward the garage, against which he put his face. Today I can still feel his presence
to the right of the yellowing frame, as remote from the rest of the family as Pluto from the other planets, and with an orbit
just as eccentric.
Oh, what a sad and peculiar ceremony that was! None of us had any clue as to how we should behave. We were like wedding guests
at that moment just after the reception when the bride and groom climb into a car dragging tin cans and drive off into some
glorious future, leaving us to clean up the rice we have just thrown—only that day there was no rice, there were no tin cans,
and the future into which these boys were driving, far from glorious, was possibly tragic. Eyes stern, Mark bade his farewells
to the assembled, hugged his mother, kissed his girlfriend, shook his father’ hand. His brother’ hand he tried to shake too,
but Ben refused to look at him, so Mark simply patted him on the shoulder, provoking a visible shudder. And then he climbed
into the passenger seat of the Datsun, and the dirtier of his two friends, who was driving, started up the engine, and because
the car had no reverse gear, he had to circle over the lawn, damaging the border grass, which made Ernest wince. “Goodbye!”
Daphne called as the Datsun veered out of the driveway, and then at that instant she realized that she had forgotten to give
Mark the cookies. “Wait, wait!” she cried, running after the car, which had turned the curve, and was out of view. Daphne
burst into tears, and Nancy said, “Now what good is crying going to do anyone?” and stomped into the house, leaving the rest
of us to stare at the space where moments before Mark had stood, and who knew if he would ever again stand there? Dusk was
falling. We all trooped inside after Nancy for coffee and the forgotten cookies—everyone except Ben, who had retreated to
the barbecue pit, where he remained until well after dark with a flashlight, writing a poem.
Some years later, Ernest told me that in his professional opinion Ben was doomed from the start, because insofar as Nancy
was concerned, he could never hope to live up to his brother. And it is true that from the July day Mark drove off to Canada,
his handsome face, by virtue of its enforced removal, suddenly seemed to be everywhere in that house. From the kitchen countertop
next to the television, and Nancy’ bedside table, and the mantel in the dining room, versions of Mark smiled out at us, a
constant reminder that he was not where he should have been. Mark had always been an easier child than either of his siblings:
wholesomely athletic, even-tempered, a favorite of all his teachers. At Wellspring he had majored in political science, and
would have graduated cum laude had the disaster of the draft lottery not interrupted his otherwise effortless ascent. But
it had, and now he was living in the most tenuous of exiles, a fugitive who would be jailed if he even dared to come back
to his mother’ house for Thanksgiving. As if to craft for himself an identity more in keeping with his new outlaw status,
he grew his hair long; sent back snapshots of himself, scrawny and bearded, that made Nancy weep with pride. “He looks almost
holy,” she’d tell me. “Like Saint Francis, or Saint Blaise.” For Nancy, draft dodging amounted to a kind of martyrdom.
Today, when the saga of the draft dodgers is talked about at all, it is usually as a sort of sidebar to the greater drama
that was Vietnam itself. In 1969, though, the fate of these young men troubled the American conscience at least as much as
that of the soldiers who were starting to return from the war maimed or dead or with pregnant Vietnamese wives in tow. And
nowhere was this more the case than on Florizona Avenue: After all, of the twenty-four houses on that street, three had sent
sons to Canada, whereas none had sent sons to Vietnam. Their affluence protected Nancy and her neighbors, allowing them the
luxury of worrying about children who were safe and well-fed in row houses in Vancouver or Toronto instead of bleeding on
the fields of battle. At least this was how I saw it. I never dared voice this opinion to Nancy, who would have considered
it treasonous, and thrown me out of the house.
Ernest, by contrast, understood, and to some degree shared, my skepticism. Although he distrusted Richard Nixon, and loathed
Kissinger, he had also inherited from his immigrant father a patriotic belief in America as a land of possibility whose principles
it was a citizen’ duty to defend, and therefore he could do no more than tolerate Mark’ flight to Canada. At heart he was
a deeply conformist man, his Freudianism of an old-fashioned and narrow variety that inclined him to regard all types of atypical
behavior as pathologies for which it was the physician’ duty to seek a therapy. And what was more nonconformist than a son
who had not only broken with his country but broken the law? Or a wife who stormed out of dinner parties whenever the host
happened to say something with which she was in political disagreement? For in the wake of Mark’ departure, Nancy had taken
up the mantle of his radicalism, and now, rather than hosting faculty wives teas, she organized petition drives for a variety
of antiwar groups. Ernest would come home to find mobs of hippies parked in the living room, eating brownies and discussing
protest strategies. Her outspokenness offended both his natural tactfulness and his abhorrence of what he called “scenes"—and
now she was making them all the time. For instance, one afternoon at the faculty club, Bess Dalrymple, the elderly and soft-spoken
wife of the retiring history chair, made the mistake of blithely quoting her husband’ opinion that the draft dodgers “were
no better than deserters and deserved to be shot.” Nancy, eavesdropping at the next table, leapt up and let the poor thing
“have it with both barrels,” as she put it—barraging Mrs. Dalrymple with rhetoric until the foggy old creature burst into
weeping and had to take refuge in the ladies’ room. For Ernest this was the last straw, and not only because from that day
on Jim Dalrymple—chivalrous to the last—stopped speaking to him; also because the episode confirmed that Nancy was no longer
in any way under his control. “Let her send Mark money,” he told me later. “Let her write letters to congressmen, letters
to senators. But for God’ sake, let her shut up.”
In retrospect, I often wonder what it must have been like for Ben, those months after his brother’ departure, watching his
parents’ marriage degenerate into a rancorous silence. At least Daphne had her burgeoning love affair with Glenn to retreat
into; Ernest had me; Nancy had her various subcommittees and commissions and meetings. But Ben, in a way that at the time,
I think, none of us understood or acknowledged, was alone. He had no friends to speak of, most of his coevals on Florizona
Avenue having long since dismissed him as a loser or freak. I myself avoided, as much as possible, meeting his eye. That testy
encounter at the hairdresser’ had set the tone for our acquaintanceship, which would for years after be marked by unease on
my part and on his by a remoteness bordering on hostility. Perhaps he never forgot the clinch in which he had caught his father
and me that first Thanksgiving. Perhaps he simply didn’t like me. Nor can I pretend, at this stage, that I much liked him.
As I saw it, Ben at fifteen had only one salient characteristic, and that was brattiness. It never occurred to me to wonder
what might lie behind his more bizarre behavior (for example, his food phobias), for I was young myself then, and heedless
of any suffering I could not exploit. Instead I wrote him off as simply a source of interruption. It seemed that he lived
to pester, to complain to his mother about her cooking, or interrupt our four-hand to demand that she listen to one of his
poems. He was always writing poems. He never did his homework, and his grades suffered accordingly. And Nancy, I am sorry
to say, rather than informing him in crisp tones that there was a moment to read poetry and that this was not it, usually
buckled under to his insistence, stopping whatever she was doing to listen to him and then responding to his recitations with
that brand of offhand, reckless praise that in most cases speaks more to a parent’ desire to get a kid off her back than to
any genuine enthusiasm or belief in his talent. She had learned the hard way that offering criticism was a mistake, since
with Ben even the mildest complaint invariably provoked a wail of frustration, an enraged “You just don’t understand!” after
which he would run off to his room, slamming the door behind him. Much easier to provide the balm of immoderate laudation.
Still, I sometimes wondered if she went too far. For instance: “Mark my words,” she told him once, “you’ll be the youngest
person to win the Nobel prize for poetry.” A fateful exhortation, as it turned out, for he did mark her words—he forgot nothing—and
later, when the youthful success she had forecast failed to materialize, he blamed her.
As a poet, Ben was both ambitious and lazy. He never revised, appeared oblivious to basic principles of spelling and grammar,
took little care to type up clean copies or to follow the rules of poetic form. Thus his sonnets never scanned, while his
villanelles were approximate at best. Generally speaking I thought his poems tendentious and humorless, though I never told
Nancy this. Even so, starting when he was about twelve (and with her blessing) he began sending them out by the dozen, and
not only to contests and publications specifically aimed at teenagers; also to such august publications as
Poetry
and
The New Yorker,
which invariably returned them with form rejection slips paper-clipped to each bundle. Then Nancy would rail at what she called
the editors’ “lack of vision.” “It’ a matter of who you know,” she’d tell Ben, “an inside job"— evading the tricky question
of why, if it was an inside job, she had encouraged him to send the poems out in the first place.
It was Ernest’ contention (which he shared only with me) that Ben suffered from an underdeveloped sense of reality. In Ernest’
view, Ben’ problem was that he lived half in a world of dreams, the borders of which he could not clearly delineate; much
of his bad temper and frustration, his father felt, owed to the refusal of the “real world” (whatever that was) to conform
to his wishes. A reasonable diagnosis, I thought at the time—and yet today I cannot help but wonder whether in this regard
Ben differed all that much from most other writers. Everything that Ernest said of him, for example, he could just as easily
have said of Jonah Boyd. Also, I think it would be a mistake to understate the degree to which Nancy encouraged Ben in his
delusions, if for no other reason than because they lent ballast to her own: that she had been a perfect mother, and that
her children, thanks to everything she had done for them, would go far. So she abandoned him. This is awful but true. The
only person who might have gotten through to Ben at this time was Mark, and Mark was long gone, though Ben spoke eagerly of
the Easter break when Nancy had promised that he could fly to Vancouver for a visit. (Mark didn’t want his parents to come.)
Ben was proud to have a rebel for a brother, and put Mark’ picture above his bed, and made a FREE MARK WRIGHT button out of
red and blue construction paper that he wore to school every day for a week, until one of his teachers infuriated him by pointing
out the illogic of the message, given that Mark had gone to Canada of his own free will.