The Body Of Jonah Boyd Read Free

Mark’ hand from when he was in kindergarten. On the first day of December, though, all of this decorative rubbish would be
     cleared away to make room for the onslaught of Christmas cards that the Wrights received annually, as many from psychoanalytic
     institutes, colleagues, and former patients of Ernest’ as from relatives and friends. In those volatile years, it was fashionable
     to write a Christmas letter or verse and have it printed on the card along with a photograph of the sender’ family, and sometimes
     these works had an unintended edge of heartbreak:
    Jane and Allen’s twelfth anniversary
    Was celebrated with divorce.
    The party, though, was only cursory,
    The marriage having run its course.
    To the right of the fireplace, a curved archway led into the living room, the least used room in the house, with its Danish
     modern leather chairs, one of which the cat, Dora, had peed on the day it had been delivered; the stain was still there a
     dozen years later. Here, too, was the piano, a matte black 1920 Knabe with beautifully fluted legs. Nancy had bought it “for
     a song” (her joke) at an estate sale. And then—the bar connecting the two parts of the H—there was the front hall, with the
     stained-glass door that nobody used, and off of that a sort of family room that had been Ernest’ study before he’d moved into
     the attic above the garage, but which Nancy still called the study, and where you would usually find Little Hans, the family
     schnauzer, asleep on a leather rocking chair. (Little Hans, Dora—everything in that house was a Freud joke.) It was in the
     study as well that Ernest kept his collection of toy airplanes, a rare foray into sentimentality for him, gathered mostly
     to honor the memory of his father, who had dreamed of flight since boyhood but had himself flown only once, near the very
     end of his life, on a commuter plane that carried him from St. Louis to Chicago to visit a heart specialist.
    On the other side of the front hall was the bedroom wing. There were four bedrooms, the largest Nancy and Ernest’, the smallest
     Ben’. Mark’ room Ernest had had made over into a library almost as soon as his son had left for Vancouver. Daphne’ had a queen-size
     bed and therefore did double duty as the guest room on those rare occasions when there were overnight guests. A corner bathroom
     with two entrances connected this room to Ben’. He often complained that his sister woke him up in the small hours with her
     loud and frequent peeing. About these rooms I can tell you less than I can about the others, because I very rarely had occasion
     to go into them.
    Outside, in addition to the barbecue pit, there was a good-size swimming pool that the Wrights themselves had had built, and
     in which Nancy swam a rigorous twenty laps daily, even in bad weather. There was also a camellia garden, and a vegetable garden,
     and a koi pond with no koi; one winter, preparatory to repairing a leak, Ernest had drained it and put the koi into a barrel,
     from which they’d been stolen, over the course of a single night, by a family of raccoons. After that he gave up on koi, and
     filled the pond with impatiens—another oddity, the fish pond/flower bed, in that yard where nothing was what it had been meant
     to be.
    As for Nancy—well, if the barbecue pit was Carcassone, she was Dame Carcas: tall, with a stately bearing. Tight curls, black going to gray, helmeted her head. She had a snub nose. Her
     eyes were the color of raisins. I remember that in those years, as was the fashion, she often dressed in flowing saris, muumuus
     patterned with exotic flowers, the sort of dresses that transform fat women into shapeless balls but lend to statuesque women
     like Nancy an even more imperious, aristocratic aspect. Her breasts protruded, one might say, with pride, they were like the
     buttresses of a cathedral. Whether she was smoking a cigarette on the porch, or feeding the cat, or overseeing the