We drove in silence back to the Wrights’ house. “Any luck?” Nancy asked eagerly as she opened the kitchen door for us, then—seeing
the answer in our faces—tightened her smile into a line and went to make coffee. The Boyds stayed another half hour before
heading off to Big Sur in their rented red Chevrolet. Anne was no longer frantic. Waving goodbye, we promised to call if we
heard anything from the police, or if anything showed up at the house. But I think at this point we all felt fairly certain
that the notebooks were gone for good.
It was nearly dinnertime. Rather gloomily, Nancy set out bread, mustard, mayonnaise, and lettuce. Ernest sliced leftover turkey.
We made sandwiches for ourselves—Ben, to my surprise, did not toast his bread—and then Ernest, Ben, Daphne, and I sat down
at the tulip table and watched the evening news, which seemed oddly comforting under the circumstances. Only Nancy could not
rest. While we ate, she ricocheted around the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers and peering inside them, until Ernest
shouted, “Will you stop that? You’re not going to find his goddamn novel in the cutlery drawer.”
“I’m not looking for his novel,” Nancy replied. “I’m looking for the blue bowl I use for potato salad.”
“But we’re not having any potato salad.”
She turned to the television. More news of the war. “I wonder where the Boyds are now,” she said, as if to herself. “Do you
think anyone will ever find the notebooks?”
“No.”
“Ernest, don’t be such a pessimist! Anne seemed so sad. To be perfectly honest, I’m worried about her.”
“If you ask me, she’ been hysterical from the get-go. Leaving Clifford Armstrong like that—not the behavior of a well-adjusted
adult woman.”
“But Ben and Jonah Boyd certainly hit it off. Didn’t you, Ben?”
“I guess.”
“Did he read you more of his novel?”
“Yes.”
“And was it as good as what he read aloud on Thanksgiving?”
“I guess.”
“Oh, it seems so awful, to lose something like that. Like losing a child, almost . . . I don’t know what I’d do if it were
me. Maybe he can reconstruct it, from memory.”
“A four-hundred-page novel? I don’t think so.”
“Don’t be fooled,” Ernest said. “What people get, most of the time, is what they want.”
The phone rang. Nancy hurried to answer it. “Oh, Mark,” she said, her voice rising with a mixture of pleasure and fear she
seemed barely able to contain. “Honey, are you all right? Is something the matter?”
Suddenly Ben was on his feet. “Let me talk to him,” he begged, grabbing his mother’ arm.
“Just a second, Ben! Your brother wants to talk to you. Hold on! Honey, what’ wrong? How was the Thanks giving?”
Daphne and I cleared the table. As he was wont to do when he thought no one was looking, Ernest winked at me. The turkey carcass,
from which several meals had already been scraped, lay bony and denuded on its platter, surrounded by trembling flakes of
gelatinized juice. Perhaps Nancy would boil it for broth, before throwing it into the trash she had earlier searched so patiently
and so fruitlessly. In any case, she would get rid of it. No one wanted to look at the thing anymore. And then she would return
to her piano and her crowned heads, and I would pick up my car. Daphne and Glenn would make love in his apartment. Ben would
write another poem.
You see, for most of us, I could envision a future. Even for Ben I could envision a future. And yet for the life of me I could
not envision what was going on inside that red Chevrolet.
I put on my coat. “I’m taking Denny home,” Ernest suddenly announced to his wife, who either didn’t hear him or elected not
to answer him, so caught up was she in her conversation with Mark, and in pushing Ben off her arm.
That is as much as I knew of what happened that Thanksgiving, and as much as I would know—for almost thirty years.
T
HE NEXT SATURDAY morning I went, as usual, to play with Nancy. She didn’t mention Anne’ name once. During the week the ersatz
guest room had been dismantled, Daphne’ frog figurines and stuffed animals and peace sign poster returned to their rightful
places.
Nancy didn’t speak of Anne the Saturday after that, either, which was odd only in that during the months leading up to Thanksgiving
she had spoken of little else. She was now preoccupied with Christmas, a holiday from which, at the Wright house, we strays
were excluded as vociferously as at Thanksgiving we were welcomed. As Ben later explained to me, Christmas at 302 Florizona
Avenue involved a sequence of private rituals in which each member of the family was required to play a specific role (Ben
was the “elf"), all leading up to the climactic unwrapping of the presents, after which the rest of the day was pure letdown.
Of course, that Christmas was to be like no other due to Mark’ absence, and though Nancy tried to put a brave face on things,
I could tell that she was having a hard time. I myself spent Christmas alone. I went to the movies. And then it was New Year’
Eve (I spent most of
that
holiday in the backseat of a chemistry professor’ car), and the seventies. On Saturdays Nancy and I played, on Sundays Ernest
visited me at my apartment. I stopped thinking about the Boyds, who, to the extent that they still existed for me, did so
behind a sort of blackout curtain, and not merely because Nancy and Ernest, so far as I could tell, no longer talked to them;
also because what had happened—a loss, despite what Nancy had said, not nearly so terrible as that of a child, but terrible
enough—placed them outside any realm of experience that I could touch. Of course, I knew they went on in their exile; they
had to go on. What I didn’t know was what that going on felt like.
Sometimes a letter or a birthday card arrived from Anne. Then Nancy would shake her head and say, “Remember that awful Thanksgiving?
Afterward, for weeks, I kept hoping I’d find the damn notebooks, even when it became eminently clear that I never would.”
From contacts in Bradford, Nancy learned 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 he moved to New York
City, hoping, like a character in a Willa Cather story, to make a name for himself there before returning triumphant to the
home town that had failed to appreciate him. (That Wellspring, with its symphony orchestra and coffee bars, bore not the slightest
resemblance to Cather’ windswept Nebraska hamlets seems not to have deterred him in the least in this ambition: further proof
of Ernest’ theory that his son lived half in a dream world.) I think he was imagining ticker-tape parades, and speeches during
which the university president would hit himself on the head for having undervalued Ben, all the while marveling at the grace,
the utter lack of vainglory, that marked his heroic return. The dolts who had bullied him in high school would stare up dumbfounded,
his former teachers would claim to have encouraged him when they had not . . . And through it all he would just smile and
wave, the very embodiment of generosity, a man so successful he could afford to forgive. Let’ not mince words. Ben, at this
stage, had delusions of grandeur. He was avid to explore New York—but
his
New York, which was the New York of
New Yorker
covers, foggy and wistful and consisting exclusively of capacious apartments in which well-dressed women drank whole-leaf
tea and talked about Tolstoy. The bohemian East Village to which his coevals were flocking held no allure for him. He was
too much of a snob for railroad flats. Rather than move in with downtown friends, he sublet a noisy efficiency apartment above
a vegetable market on Second Avenue—overpriced, but it
was
East Seventy-fourth Street. To survive, he took a job shelving at the Strand; still, his mother had to send him money each
month, sometimes surreptitiously, as Ernest did not approve of their supporting an adult son in this way. The several girlfriends
he went through shared his father’ uneasiness—especially once Ben finished his novel, and was unable to publish it, and set
to work on a second novel, and couldn’t publish that one, either. As he told me later, he was too arrogant to condescend to
getting a full-time job. “Really, I was a little shit,” he said, smiling at his own callowness as one can only from the vantage
point of great success achieved later in life. And when, eventually, he did move back to Wellspring, it was neither in triumph
nor by choice. For Ernest had one afternoon been murdered in his office, and Nancy had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain
tumor, and keeping the house on Florizona Avenue for her children was now the driving ambition of her remaining days. She
more or less insisted that Ben come home to help her in her campaign, and he came not unwillingly, for as he explained to
me, it was a relief to have an excuse to get out of New York, a city which, because it had once been the locus of his hope,
was with each day that passed becoming more and more the nexus of his despair. A third novel had now gone untaken. He could
no longer abide having to watch, he said, the spectacle of writers younger than himself achieving the very goal—publication—that
eluded him. And he was no longer so young himself. He was nearly thirty. The girl he claimed to love was growing exasperated
with his indolence, eager to marry him yet wary of taking on the financial burden of an unemployed (and possibly unemployable)
husband. Perhaps if he could offer her a house, he reasoned, he might be able to convince her not to look for someone else.
It was at this point that he reentered my orbit. Except for Daphne and Glenn’ wedding and the occasional Thanksgiving (he
did not always come home, often preferring to be a “stray” at the apartment of some New York friend), it had really been quite
a few years since I’d spent a sustained chunk of time in his company. And now here he stood on Nancy’ doorstep, a young man.
His long hair fell to form a sort of awning over his forehead. His nose reminded me of his father’. All told, he looked alarmingly
like his father.
Since Ernest’ murder, I had been promoted; I was now office manager for the entire psych department, a job that kept me on
my toes all week and some weekends. I no longer lived in Eaton Manor, but rented a house of my own, far from the noise of
the freeway, and had several lovers, one of whom wanted to leave his wife for me. My life was busy. Even so, I tried to spend
as much time as I could with Nancy. It was my fervent hope that the Wrights would succeed in keeping their house, which I,
too, simply could not imagine in other hands. Nancy was by now very sick, as much from the radiation and chemotherapy courses
she was undergoing as from the tumor itself, though to their credit, Ben and Daphne did everything they could to keep her
out of the hospital. She dreaded the hospital, and feared especially the prospect of dying there.
Although he visited only twice in that period, Mark sent flowers almost daily. He was recently married to a Canadian girl,
a lawyer with much disposable income, his house in the Toronto suburbs (of which Nancy showed me pictures) so lavishly bourgeois
that I could only think what an odd destination it was for him, given that he had begun his journey in a Datsun with no reverse
gear. During his visits, Mark stayed at the Ritz-Carlton; in the afternoons he would stop by to interrogate the nurse who
made periodic visits, or scrutinize insurance statements in search of small errors on the basis of which he could chastise
Ben or Daphne. This atmosphere in which a dying and increasingly demented woman lay propped up in her bed, smelling of roses
and disinfectant, her bald head wrapped in a turban that made her look like some sort of antique film actress, must have seemed
more than a little bizarre to Daphne’ children, though they were still young at the time, and reeling from the suddenness
with which their mother had left their father. I spent a lot of hours at Nancy’ bedside, for she always recognized faces,
even if, toward the end, she hardly seemed to know where she was. Where the IV needle entered her hand, she said that a tulip
bulb was sprouting. She thought she was a flower bed. One afternoon she confided that a mule got into her bed with her every
night. “But he’ a very polite mule,” she added. “He never moves or makes noise.”
On another occasion she spoke of Jonah Boyd. “Did he ever find that novel?” she asked.
“No, he didn’t,” I said.
“Tell him to look in the pantry. You know there was some foie gras Ernest brought back from Paris—a tin of foie gras—and for
months, for the life of me, I couldn’t find it. But then it turned up way at the back of the pantry, behind the soup cans.”
“But Nancy,” I said, “Jonah Boyd is dead. He died years ago, in a car crash.”
“Anne should never have married him. Clifford was a decent man. Boring, but decent. But she wanted adventure, and I suppose
she got it.”
“Yes.”
“She comes over every Saturday. We play four-hand piano.”
“No, Nancy.
I
come over every Saturday.
We
play four-hand piano.”
“Next week we’re trying the Grand Duo.”
“Do you think you’re up for it?”
“Well, you know what my husband says. You never can tell till you try.”
Ernest had never once in his life said anything so optimistic.
“No, you never can,” I agreed. I suppose it was as good a principle to follow as any.
After Nancy’s death, I lost touch with Ben once more. With his third of the money from the sale of the house, he moved to Milwaukee,
and bought a small house of his own. Milwaukee was where the girlfriend came from. Her name was Molly. They got married, and,
so far as I knew, he returned to writing.
By way of an inheritance from Nancy, I received all of her music and the scrapbook in which she kept the stories Ben had published.
I think she must have figured that I could be counted on to keep up the scrapbook, and so when Ben at long last did publish
a novel, about four years after her death, out of a sense of duty, I kept my eyes peeled for mentions of him in newspapers
and magazines. As it happened, there were none that I could find. The novel, which was called
The Sky,
got very little attention, and went quickly out of print. Later, Ben renounced it. And yet with his next novel,
Backwards,
he won for himself not only accolades from critics and an important prize, but a youthful following that remained devoted
to him until his death, buying his books as soon as they appeared and filling the lecture halls and bookstores in which he
gave readings. This second published novel of Ben’ was a road novel, and its subject, not surprisingly, was the fate of the
draft dodgers; as it opens, the sixteen-year-old narrator is on his way to Vancouver in a Toyota with no reverse gear, intent
on finding and moving in with his brother.
Backwards
was optioned for a film and sat for about six weeks near the bottom of the
New York Times
best-seller list. Each Sunday I dutifully scissored the list out of the newspaper and pasted it into Nancy’ scrapbook, which
was now running out of pages. I would have to buy another one, I realized, preferably covered in the same restrained brown
leather—yet I could find nothing even remotely like it anywhere in Wellspring. Or Pasadena. Sifting through the supply of
blank scrapbooks at Vroman’ one Saturday, I found myself wondering what had become of the little shop in Verona where Jonah
Boyd had bought
his
notebooks. Was it still in business? Were the notebooks even made anymore? Of course, in trying to envision the shop, I had
only his description to go on; even if I did make it to Verona someday, even if the shop still existed, the likelihood of
my nosing it out was slim. That Thanksgiving, Ernest had asked Boyd what he would do if his notebooks ever ceased to be manufactured,
and Boyd had barely been able to answer (not that this mattered very much, in the end). It seemed to me, that day at Vroman’,
that Ernest had been wise to decry such a mystic dependency on things and houses as both Boyd and Nancy were susceptible to,
and in silent support of him, I picked out the scrapbook that was the least like Nancy’ I could find—indeed, the one most
likely to offend her sensibilities, all hot pink and yellow daisies, with a huge Hello Kitty rising up in the background like
some grotesque parade float. In this, I continued the record of her son’ career.