Authors: Bernard Malamud

Dubin's Lives (30 page)

BOOK: Dubin's Lives

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“I'll bet you like that thought.”

“Don't you?”

She admitted she did. “I wish I could work steadily at something I liked.”

“Why don't you?”

“Because I never could.”

“Don't blame yourself,” Dubin said.

“For years I never did, now I do. Being home when the children needed me was a time of privilege and grace. Now that they're grown I wish I had some useful work to do.”

After they had gone to bed she was still restless. “Listen to that wind, you'd think it was early March.”

“April is March.” He tried to sleep but couldn't and felt himself grow worried. Then for a few minutes he fell heavily asleep against Kitty's warm scented back until she moved restlessly and woke him.

The wind had died down. Kitty was sleeping. Dubin, worried about being able to work in the morning if he did not sleep well, got up and dressed in the dark. He wanted a cigarillo but had none and was unable to find Kitty's cigarettes. From the linen closet he got two sheets and a blanket. Then he returned to the bedroom for a flashlight.

Kitty awoke and switched on the bed lamp. She sat up.

“What are you doing with those sheets and blanket?”

“I'm going to the barn.”

“What for?”

“To get to sleep so I can work in the morning. I've got a lot to make up. I need every bit of my energy to be sharp. You can do only so much on your nerve.”

“I promise to lie very still,” Kitty said. “Or you can go up to Gerald's room or sleep in Maud's. Please don't go to the barn. I won't sleep a wink with you gone.”

Dubin said it would be best if he went.

“Why?” Kitty asked. She was on her knees in bed, in a flowered nightgown.

“To be aloneâI have things to think of.”

“I thought you wanted to sleep?”

“That's what I want to do first.”

She said, “I don't know why you ever got married.”

“You know why I got married,” Dubin said.

He zipped up his windbreaker, went downstairs, and left the house. The spring night was austerely cold, and the sky, like a lit ceiling that had been lowered, teemed with jeweled stars. It had been a long time since he had seen so many bright stars so low in the sky.

Dubin dropped the sheets and blanket on the sofa. He got out the bag of kibbles and fed Lorenzo, then gave him some water. The cat wanted to stay but he tossed him out and shut the study door. He unfolded the sofa into a double bed and covered it with the sheets and blanket. He had forgotten a pillow and pajamas and lay on his back in his underwear, relieved to be alone. The cat scratched on the door, then gave up.

Dubin lay in the dark thinking what he would do in the morning. As he
was dozing off, a tapping on the window woke him. He listened, wide awake, knew who it was and rose, angered.

He flicked on the light. From the sofa he could see her at the window, peering in, her eyes searching, face strained, white. Under his anger he felt concern for her.

Dubin got up and let her in, irritated by her appearance, by her constant interference in whatever he planned, whatever he did. Kitty had no flashlight. She had found her way to the barn by the light of his toilet window until she had got halfway across the field; then it had gone off. She had fallen once. She was wearing Maud's old hooded yellow oilskin over her flowered nightdress, wet below the knees. Her bed slippers were soaked by the wet grass. When, after she had tapped on the glass, his light went on, she had looked as though she hadn't expected it to. She acted now as if she had never been in this room before.

He gave her a towel to wipe her legs.

“I had to come,” Kitty said. “The house was beginning to go at me.”

He told her to get warm in bed. “I'm going back to the house.”

Kitty looked at him vacantly. “You don't have to,” she said. “I'll go back after I tell you what I have to. William, I've been holding back something I feel guilty about, not because of what it came to, which was zilch, but you probably sensed something and it might have made things harder for you than they should have been. I feel ashamed and sorry.”

He asked her what she was talking about. Her eyes were restless, dark. her fists tight.

“While you were in Italy that week in the fall I had a sudden very brief and unexpected involvement with Roger. I was involved, not he. I think I was momentarily in love with him. I don't know what else to call it though it came to nothingâand I never told him how I felt. If it sounds slightly crazy that's what it was.”

“Roger Foster?” Dubin said in disbelief.

“It was a crazy thing to happen. He's only a year or two older than Gerald. I felt tender to him. I also felt as though my wits were leaving me. When you came home I wanted to tell you but was too embarrassed. In the winter, when you were depressed, I felt awful. I imagined you had sensed a change in me and were let downâperhaps I was foolish, I don't know. I asked Evan what to do and though he said I wasn't what had caused your overwhelming change of mood, my guilt was like salt corroding my thoughts and I knew
I would have to tell you. I held back until now because the whole thing was senseless and trivial, and I didn't want you to lose respect for me.”

“Did you want to sleep with him?”

“I would have.”

“But he wouldn't oblige?”

“I hate the way you distance yourself from me,” Kitty said bitterly. “Why do you put it so meanly? I said nothing came of it. I told you he never knew how I felt.”

“Maybe you should have told him.”

Kitty looked at him coldly. “If I should have I didn't. I'm sorry to say I couldn't arrange it. I wasn't about to begin an affair with someone twenty years younger than I by apologizing for the birthmark on my ass and my flabby breasts.”

“Did he ever show in any way that he was interested in you?”

“That's my business.” Her voice wavered. She wasn't crying but she looked as though she had cried. One sensed old tears. He thought of his bad time in Venice and felt compassion for her.

Dubin then began a story of his own.

“Kitty,” he said, “Don't blame yourself for what happened to me. I made my own misery. I had a girl with me in Venice and it turned out badly. I give her little, she gave me less. There was more feeling in the aftermath. When I came home I wanted to tell you but couldn't, partly because I didn't want to hurt you, partly because I was unable to sayâout of prideâwhat a beating I had taken because I had done it badly, or she had done it badly and I let her.”

“I'm sorry, terribly sorry.” Her eyes were lit with feeling. “I knew something was troubling you but thought I was wrongâmixing up my sense of you with what I was feeling. It took me a while to understand how unhappy you were.”

They went to each other and kissed.

“Please let me stay with you tonight, William.”

“Stay with me.”

“My nightgown is wet.”

“Take it off, wear my shirt.”

In bed they forgave themselves; had done it before. That he had told her what had happened in Venice only after she had confessed her feeling for Roger did not seem to bother Kitty, but Dubin regretted he hadn't told her
long ago. They talked into the night, watching the low stars out of the window.

“I feel as though we were away somewhere, don't you?” Kitty said. “I feel like a young bride snug in bed with her husband in a faraway country, with cables of stars glowing in the sky. I feel so much relieved.”

Dubin said he felt better.

“You're the one I really love,” Kitty said, “though I sometimes feel you ought to have married a different kind of womanâsomeone closer to you in temperament, who might have given you more than I seem to be able to give. Someone less concerned with keeping her own life together.”

He said he had never had a better friend. “You don't always give me what I want but you give.”

She laughed embarrassedly. “I wish I had given you more. I wish you had given me what I wanted when I wanted it. Sometimes I wish I could have met you beforeâI mean, instead ofâNathanael.”

Dubin thanked her. “But I don't think you would have married me if you hadn't been married to him first. You had to have at least a touch of marriage, perhaps with someone like him, before I could mean something to you.”

“What you have to know before you
know
is hard to understand,” Kitty said. “Maybe I shouldn't have said that about Nathanael.”

“Thanks for thinking it.”

They then made love and slept heavily. Dubin felt eased, the self annealed, until he thought of Flora in his sleep and awoke. He felt he oughtn't to tell Kitty about her. He would hold it for another time, for Flora's sake as well as his.

Kitty, moving spasmodically in her sleep, opened her eyes. “What do you think was the happiest time of our lives?”

“When we began to know each other, when we were secure in our trust of each other.”

“When the kids were young and needed us. I felt used, useful.”

“I was completing
Short Lives
and then did
Lincoln
and
Mark Twain.
I was content, and even the lousy things that happened seemed to fit harmoniously into life. I went to sleep wanting it to be tomorrow.”

“That's the time I most remember.”

But after lunch that day, perhaps because Kitty had asked him who
the girl in Venice was and he hadn't answered, Dubin told her he had once slept with Flora; and Kitty, trying to master it in her thoughts, passed out.

One Sunday morning in late April Dubin was in a stationery store on Grand Street, picking up his newspaper. As he was fingering an adventurous cigar at the counter, through the window he sawâpeace to the dayâFanny Bick as large as life and enjoying it, across the street with Roger. He had had a recent card from her: the fountains of Rome: “Hi.” The girl, in morning sunlight, was vivid, familiar, as though he'd been with her yesterday, a sad blow to experience. She had cut her hair; it fell barely to the shoulders. Dubin saw her without desire or regret, yet envied her and her friend their youth. So what else is new?

Thinking they might be coming in for a paper, he retreated to the phone on the wall in the rear of the store.

But they did not come into the place, had better to do than waste a Sunday morning reading the newspaper. He felt a saddened pleasure in thinking of her. She had joined the mythological types who lived in his mind: she who had deceived his desire, more than desire, a sort of belle dame sans merci, invention of the self intending to treat itself badly. No, he thought, I'm off that kick. No more slogging in the mud of jealousy; let me act the age I've earned. He was well rid of her. After remaining several more minutes at the phone with the receiver held protectively against the ear, Dubin left the store with his newspaper, got into his car at the curb, and lighting the cigar he had bought, drove off.

He drove a roundabout way home but to his startled surprise got onto the highway going the wrong way and was forced, amid visions of disaster, to crawl in embarrassment along the outer lane for half a mile, his brights on, horn blasting as the drivers in oncoming cars rushed at him in contempt, fury, or glee, before swerving to the next lane; until Dubin, ashamed, could at last make a turn between dividers and swing around to the other side of the highway.

He went to the barn to calm down before Kitty saw him. He decided he would stay out of downtown until he could be reasonably sure Fanny had left.

Before returning to the house he wrote to each of his children.

“Dear Gerry, we miss you, talk of you often. The amnesty issue is coming up in Congress soon. Where mercy arises in society I can't say, but there are good signs. It wouldn't at all surprise me if an offer of conditional amnesty is made to deserters. If the situation changes, as it may overnight, and you can leave Sweden, why don't you come here and stay with us until you decide your next move? We'd all like to see you. I know our relationship is difficult, sometimes no relationship at all, but that can change with good will if we stay in touch. Yesterday needn't be tomorrow. I wish I knew more about your nature but the key to mine, so far as you're concerned, is that I love you as I did when you were a boy. Your father, William Dubin.”

A month later Gerry wrote on a postcard that the U.S. knew where it could shove conditional amnesty. He wanted unconditional amnesty and a public apology.

“As for who loved who and when, I never think of it.”

Dubin also wrote to Maud. In the late spring she returned home and stayed the summer, a surprise to all.

BOOK: Dubin's Lives

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