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Authors: Bernard Malamud

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BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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“Shush,” Dubin warned himself, then remembered Kitty had left their bed. He tried to hold down the talk when she was in the bedroom because —if she was awake or it woke her—it made her uneasy; still, after these many years. If you shouted, groaned, or muttered for no apparent reason, or gestured Up Yours in her presence, you were showing loose ends, reminding her of hers. She would rather not be reminded. Kitty, when Dubin rambled on, made clicking noises with her tongue. He would then shut up, though he had more than once reminded her that Montaigne himself used to groan “Confounded fool” in the morning mirror. And Dr. Samuel Johnson was a noisy beehive of crackpot mannerisms.
“I'm not married to them.”
“Montaigne's motto was, ‘What do I know?' He was a wise man. And Johnson—‘winking and blinking,' Blake described him—though he looked like a mad hatter, inspired men to reason and courage. He had learned from life.”
“It's your voice I hear, not theirs.”
He beheld in the mirror, under stress of course—like this morning beginning a new biography—a flash of himself in his grave, and with a grimace clutched his gut where he had been stabbed. “Papa,” he cried, wishing he had done things better, and made unhappy gestures of evasion and shame that irritated Kitty when she observed them. He would strike his chest with his fist, point at the sky; his nose twitched like a rabbit's. Or he would intone a single sentence like: “My daughter never learned to waltz.” That, after six times, would awaken Kitty; she asked through the closed bathroom door what it meant. Dubin pooh-poohed it all. But here he was at it again—a relief this particular morning, conversing with himself at length, glad she had got up and gone out, rare thing for her to do this early in the day. Through the window he watched her contemplating her flowers in thinning mist on the ground. Kitty, wearing blue sneakers and faded pink straw gardening hat, though there was no sun to speak of, looked up and casually waved. The biographer lifted his razor like a sword in salute.
When he arose at seven, usually she slumbered on. Kitty slept raggedly and liked to pick up an hour or more at the morning end. Her sleep, after a fairly decent springtime interval, had got worse in summer. She slept deeply awhile, then was restlessly awake for hours; and slept again in the early morning before Dubin awoke. He left her lying on her stomach, wound in a sheer nightgown, the coffee au lait birthmark on her buttock a blemished island, visible when it was too hot for sheet or blanket. Though she tended to deny it—this depended on how well she was presently treating herself—her figure was good, despite large slender feet and thin shoulders. Kitty, brown hair fading, was still an attractive woman. She said she slept best mornings, when he was no longer in bed; and her most memorable dreams were morning dreams.
He had asked her recently what she thought about when she was awake and she said, “Lately the kids again—mostly. Sometimes silly things like a pair of shoes I paid too much for. Or a clerk who said something rude to me. Or I wish I had been born beautiful, or could lose weight. Some worthless things grind on all night.” “Hemingway prayed when he couldn't sleep,” Dubin said; “he fished and prayed.” “If I prayed it would have been to be more purposeful, organized, kinder. One would have liked to do less harm.” “To whom?” “Anyone.—To Gerald,” Kitty confessed. He asked her if she thought of death. “I think of those who've died. I often play back my
life.” Sometimes she went downstairs to read if the house wasn't too cold. She'd rather not read because it woke her thoroughly and she could afterward not find her way back to sleep. She lay listening to the singing bird-world in the 5 a.m. trees. Or sometimes wept that she wasn't sleeping. Once in winter Dubin woke to soft stringed music and went downstairs to find her playing the harp in the dark.
Last night she'd waked him to say she had dreamed of Nathanael, her first husband. “This is the second time this month and I don't think I've dreamed of him in years. We were on our way somewhere, maybe to church to get married. He was young, about his age when I met him, and I was my age now. Somehow I was pregnant, though I couldn't tell whether it was with Gerald or Maud—that's what made the dream so weird. I wanted to say I couldn't go with him, I was living with you, but then I thought Nathanael's a doctor, he'll know. What a mishmash. What do you make of it?”
“What do you?”
“You're better at dreams.”
“Did it frighten you?”
“Nathanael wouldn't frighten me.”
“Then why wake me up? I've got to start my Lawrence this morning.”
“I woke up, thought of the kids gone.”
Dubin said that could be what it was about. “The kids are gone. You're floating around with time on your head. You want to be young again.”
“People are always leaving,” she yawned.
Irritated, he tried to sleep—the curse of an insomniac wife. Kitty crept close and held him; Dubin ultimately slept.
The house, she often complained, was all but empty. “Get some kind of work,” he had advised, and now after months of unsatisfactory seeking she was reluctantly working as a volunteer in the town clerk's office. “I stop thinking when I go there.” “You're overqualified,” Dubin said. “I feel underqualified.” She complained she had accomplished little in life. “I have no true talents, I've tried everything.” He had given up arguing with her about her life.
Mornings she was active, sleep or no sleep, though she dawdled as she dressed. “Thank God, I have energy.” Dubin, after half a night's loss of sleep, had to conserve his. Kitty went to the stores before noon, did her husband's errands, phoned friends—always Myra Wilson, an old widow on a farm in Vermont, a mile and a half up the road, whom Kitty shopped for—then she
attended her house. She kept it well; sparsely furnished, suiting the cold climate. Center Campobello shrank, seemed to lose streets and people in wintertime. She was good with space, placed it where it showed. Each piece of furniture looked as though it had been set like a small sculpture. She hated accumulation, clutter; yet placed things around it was pleasant to discover: small antique bottles, oriental tiles, lacquered boxes and pieces of stained glass. Kitty was good with flower arrangements, although she mercifully picked them late and the flowers in her bowls and vases were often slightly wilted. She was strict with her cleaning women, yet patiently showed them how to do things she wanted done. Dubin appreciated the order of the household; it went with his work.
Outside, she was continually digging in her perennial border, pulling up bulbs and planting them elsewhere as though transposing the facts of her life. Dubin enjoyed the flowers brightening the back lawn, but when he complimented her on her garden Kitty said she had no real green thumb. He called it a light-green thumb. The biographer appreciated his wife's good taste. He admired her kind nature, her honesty, even when it hurt. Kitty was spontaneously generous; Dubin had to measure his out. She was empathic: a single string bean in the sink was “lonely” to her. One flower of ten, fallen from a vase, had immediately to be restored to its “home.” When Dubin was thinking of the gains over losses in marriage, he felt he had honed his character on hers. In all she had helped stabilize and enlarge his life; but he was not so sure, after a generation of marriage, that he had done the same for her or why wasn't she at peace with herself? Though he thought he knew the answer he continued to ask the question.
Kitty, as he dried his razor by the sunlit window, seemed to be dancing on the lawn. The dance astonished Dubin although she had as a young woman thought of becoming a dancer; had taken lessons. Yet he had not seen her perform anything like this before, this flow of movement—giving herself to it so. Shows you can't know everything about those you know best. The soul has its mysteries. Kitty waved to Dubin, he waved back. It was a running dance, very expressive—fertility rite? Her straw hat flew off and she made no attempt to retrieve it. She ran with her arms raised toward the flowers, twirled and ran the other way; then again to the garden. Her arms moved like a bird's wings; she swooped, turned, now hopped sideways toward the trees. He thought she'd duck into the grove of silver maples and dance there—marvelous sight—but instead she ran toward the house.
“Happy,” Kitty called.
He opened the window wide. “What?”
“Hap-pee!”
“Wonderful!”
She danced on the lawn, her body bent low, then rose tall, graceful, once more flapping her arms. He tried to figure out what the ceremonial meant: wounded bird, dying swan? My God, Dubin thought. He had seen her in some happy moments but nothing to dance to. He felt how strange life was, then began thinking of his
Passion of D. H. Lawrence: A Life,
before he realized Kitty was in the house, screaming as she sped up the stairs. Dubin opened the bathroom door as she rushed in, shouting to him, her face red, eyes angered, frightened.
“Why the hell didn't you come and help me?”
“What for?”
“A
bee,
William,” she cried.
“My God, where?”
“In my blouse. It crawled up my sleeve. Help me!”
“Unbutton it,” Dubin advised.
“I'm afraid, you do it.”
He quickly unbuttoned her blouse. A dull buzz sounded as the bee flew forth, a fat black-and-yellow noisy bumblebee. It buzzed in the bathroom close to the ceiling. Dubin defensively seized his razor, waved the weapon. The droaning bee zoomed down on a course between his eyes, shot up, twice circled his head, and barreling down, struck him on the back of the neck.
He had expected it, he thought, but not, after her gasp and his grunt, Kitty's uninhibited laughter.
 
Not long after breakfast Dubin sat at his desk in his study about to begin. “What's my opening sentence going to be? Christ, it may point the way forever.” Kitty, without knocking, entered quietly and handed him his mail. “It came early today.” She read on a yellow slip of paper on his desk the daily list of things to do and quickly crumpled it. He pretended not to see. Kitty said she didn't think the cleaning person would work out. She was a college student who would stay on only till school reopened in September. “She's competent but I doubt her heart's in it. She's doing this to earn a buck and take off. I guess I'll have to advertise again.”
On the way out she paused. “William, why do I have strange dreams of Nathanael at this time of my life?”
“You tell me.”
She said she didn't know.
He impatiently begged off. Kitty stepped out of the room.
After calling up, “Goodbye,” she left the house to go into town for her groceries, his newspaper. Dubin heard her back out of the driveway. He laid down his pen and waited with shut eyes two minutes till she had returned, easily imagining her strained face, compressed mouth, eyes mourning as she got out of the car. Kitty hastily reentered the house, hurried into the kitchen, fighting herself. Herself won. She approached the gas stove and drew long deep breaths over each of the four burners, as though after a time of drought she was taking in the salt breezes of the sea. She then pulled down the oven door and breathed in, as her chest passionately rose and fell. Slowly her body relaxed. There was no gas leak; there never was. Kitty then sang up, “Goodbye, dear,” and Dubin once more picked up his pen. She swept out of the house, briskly, sensually, almost gaily, as he savagely wrote down his opening sentence. The biographer was in business again, shaping, illumining lives.
He had seriously resisted Lawrence, so intricately involuted, self-contradictory, difficult a man. He had traveled so mercilessly, lived in so many out-of-the-way places; had written so well, so badly, so goddamned much; was so vastly written about—someone had said second to Shakespeare; or if not second, third, Samuel Johnson intervening—therefore who needs more by William Dubin? Who needs, specifically, yet another life of David Herbert Lawrence? Kitty, who had conscientiously traveled with her husband four summers as he had researched Lawrence's obsessive pilgrimages, had asked much the same question. But one fantastic day in Nottinghamshire Dubin had discovered, in an old miner's widowed daughter's slate-roofed attic, two dusty packets of Lawrence's unpublished correspondence: eleven impassioned notes to his mother—surly complaints against the father; and no fewer than twenty-six letters—once thought burned—to Jessie Chambers, his boyhood girl, whom he had ultimately rejected because she had too much the genteel spiritual and intellectual quality of the mother—vagina dentata, or so he thought; he had never visited her there. It was she, who by one means or another, became the Miriam of
Sons and Lovers.
Later, in a London bookshop, Dubin had also found seventeen unpublished letters of Lawrence to J. Middleton Murry, loveless husband of Katherine
Mansfield; there'd also been a strange love-hate relationship between the men. “Weasel,” “dirty little worm,” “rat,” the novelist had called him, “I despise you”; and after breaking off their friendship, Murry, drawn to Lawrence and Frieda, time and again returned to try once more. Dubin's elation at his discoveries—extraordinary good luck—had at last resolved his doubts and hooked him firmly to the biography of Lawrence, at the same time apparently convincing Kitty. He had more new material than anyone in recent years and felt he could do a more subtle portrait of the man than had previously appeared. That was the true battleground for the biographer: the vast available documentation versus the intuition and limited experience of Wm. B. Dubin, formerly of Newark, New Jersey.
BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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