AFTER JANE DIED, BOYD TRIED to settle back into life in Needham. It had always been a quiet, stiff house, but now it was insufferably so. Nobody talked about what had happened. His father went back to work at Radcliffe and fielded parents’ concerns about their daughters’ safety. He would not mention his own daughter in his replies to them. His mother was consumed with grief. “Everything was gloomy. Everything was involved with her pain, and everything was involved with her still feeling that nothing was ever right.” Boyd felt completely suffocated. There was no room to move.
Though Jane’s parents were high-profile enough to make sure their daughter’s murder was fully investigated, their carefully tended status in that elite society depended on upholding those institutions. Whatever their private beliefs may have been, they let their silence speak for them instead: The police would get it solved; Harvard was innocent.
Jane’s father, J. Boyd, had gotten the job at Radcliffe in the first place because the Cabots of Cabot Corporation were on the board of Harvard. When they heard that J. Boyd had gotten a hernia shoveling snow, and was going to have to retire from Cabot Corp., they told him not to worry. J. Boyd, who had no experience in academia, was suddenly the vice president of one of the best colleges in the country.
Boyd knew the rich took care of their own. He also knew that as long as you don’t embarrass them was the unspoken second half of that sentence.
Jane’s father may have been well connected to the upper crust of Boston, but he wasn’t of that class. He had been invited in. J. Boyd had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, and for a time he played the banjo in dance bands on the riverboats. He had worked his way up Cabot Corporation, first in sales, then management. He married a woman in Springfield, Illinois, and had two children, Charlie and Susan. Susan was born with cerebral palsy. He had just divorced Charlie and Susan’s mother when he met Ruth Reinert on a business trip to California. She was from a wealthier family in Wisconsin and was teaching at Scripps. They soon married, and she moved with him to Massachusetts.
The social self-consciousness of the Brittons couldn’t be exaggerated. After Boyd embarrassed them by leaving Princeton for the second time and announced that he was going to head to California to work in radio, they told him to call up a guy in Watertown. The next thing Boyd knew, he was taking a physical exam for the army. While other parents were doing everything they could to keep their children out of Vietnam, the Brittons had cleared all the paperwork for him.
Boyd’s deployment was scheduled for late November 1968. His parents took him to the airport. J. Boyd shook his hand. “I hope they send you to the peace talks,” he said. His mother burst into tears. Boyd couldn’t remember if Jane came to the airport. The goodbye that made the biggest impression on Boyd was a hug from Jane’s Dana Hall friend Tess Beemer, whom he happened to run into in the Square just before setting off. Tess would remember the hug fifty years later, too. “Oh my goodness, I haven’t had a hug like that…” Tess remembered Boyd had said. She trailed off.
Boyd stayed with friends in San Francisco waiting for his flight number to come up. The morning he left Oakland for Vietnam, the Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” kept playing on the radio.
Then, just three months later, Boyd was back in Needham. His family had called in some favors and gotten him compassionate reassignment. But Boyd had had no say in that decision; it was made because sending him back to war would further devastate his mother. Once again, Boyd felt like a puppet.
Now, not only was their daughter dead, but if they pushed for investigation, there was the indignity of her reputation being besmirched in death and the risk of being thrown out by the elite circles that formed their community. As Elisabeth said, “I had the feeling they would almost have preferred not to know what happened.”
* * *
The silence became its own kind of poison.
Boyd got the “one job I never wanted,” handing out posthumous medals to the families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. One woman lived in a brick basement apartment in Southie. He had to tell her that her only son was gone. She never stopped weeping. Another family up in Andover had so many kids, it seemed like they barely noticed the loss.
Boyd was so eager to get out of town he even put in some long-distance calls to Saigon to reserve a slot for himself on Armed Forces Network radio. Going back to war was preferable to staying in Needham. One night, the suffocation finally became too much. “Nothing’s ever going to be right,” he screamed. “I have no purpose in being here because I can’t make it right.” Boyd stormed away from the dinner table, and he left for the West Coast as soon as he could. “If anything I regret having done in my life, it was having had no other way to deal with my mother than to get the hell away from her,” Boyd reflected.
A couple of years after Jane’s death, Ruth developed cancer. “Her end was deeply sad,” Boyd would remember. She had been a lifelong smoker, but Boyd was absolutely certain that heartbreak was to blame. Doctors operated to take out the lung tumor, but they botched the surgery and left her in permanent pain. It was unrelievable except with strong opiates. The cancer came back as a metastasized tumor on her brain, the “size and shape of a small pancake,” which caused dementia.
“She continued to decline physically, medically, mentally for the next eight years and I stayed away. I didn’t want any part of it. ‘I’m sorry you’re dying. I’m sorry you’re unhappy. But you never were happy that I remember much about. Sorry I disappointed you.’”
Boyd’s father, in contrast, rarely left her hospital bedside. He did needlepoint and waited for the end. Ruth’s one request was that he never put her in a nursing home, and J. Boyd had gone through a great deal of trouble to make sure she had hospital care for her final days. But one day, the community hospital where Ruth was being taken care of told J. Boyd that she would have to be moved. They’d lose their Medicare accreditation if they kept taking care of a terminal patient. He reluctantly drove her to the nicest nursing home he could find. It was in Wellesley. He checked her in and then briefly went back to the hospital to get her sweater and other belongings. By the time he returned, she was dead.