The Body Of Jonah Boyd

Four

LATE 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.
It was around this time that the so-called nosebleed incident occurred. One morning Nancy rose later than usual, went into Ben’ room to make his bed, and found the sheets and walls spattered with blood. In a panic she threw a coat over her nightgown and rushed over to the high school, where she tracked Ben down in his gym class, one of two dozen boys waiting to throw a basketball at a hoop. And there she pounced on him, at once relieved that he was alive and furious that he had given her such a scare. It turned out that during the night he had had a nosebleed (he was prone to them), woken, sneezed blood all over the wall and bedclothes, and fallen back asleep. Then in the morning he had dressed in the dark and left without even realizing what had happened. And now here was his mother, a harridan in pink slippers and a raincoat, a scarf tied over her hair, hurling herself at him in front of a group of boys who would never forget what they had witnessed, or let him forget it.
Years later, when he was famous and people cared about his life, he described the incident. In a memoir titled The Eucalyptus, he wrote: “My mother’ intrusive arrival at the school that morning merely confirmed what I already sus-pected: that she was a meddler and an hysteric. At the same time, it opened my eyes to a certain ferocity in her character of which I had so far only caught glimpses. Later she told me that it was my brother as much as me of whom she was thinking, when she switched on the light in my bedroom and saw all that blood: Mark, his body bullet-riddled, or dismembered, in some remote theater of war. And so, as she put on her coat that morning, she made a vow to God that if I were to be spared, she would devote the rest of her life to the protection of her children. And I was spared. And yet it was a fatal pact, because by making it, she was effectively telling us that our safety mattered more to her than our loving her, or feeling that she loved us; that she would rather have us safe at a great remove than at danger near her.
“I now see that the reason I myself decided never to have children is because I knew I could never be as selfless as my mother.”