Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  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, specifical
ly, 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.

  Sometimes he felt like an ant about to eat an oak tree. There were several million facts of Lawrence’s short life and long work, of which Dubin might master a sufficient quantity. He’d weave them together and say what they meant—that was the daring thing. You assimilated another man’s experience and tried to arrange it into “thoughtful centrality”—Samuel Johnson’s expression. In order to do that honestly well, you had to anchor yourself in a place of perspective; you had as a strategy to imagine you were the one you were writing about, even though it meant laying illusion on illusion: pretense that he, Dubin, who knew himself passing well, knew, or might know, the life of D. H. Lawrence: who seemed not to have stepped beyond his mythic mask—explained himself without revealing himself; created an ur-blood mystique that helped hide who he ultimately was. Beyond that is more: no one, certainly no biographer, has the final word. Knowing, as they say, is itself a mystery that weaves itself as one unweaves it. And though the evidence pertains to Lawrence, the miner’s son, how can it escape the taint, subjectivity, the existence of Willie Dubin, Charlie-the-waiter’s son, via the contaminated language he chooses to put down as he eases his boy ever so gently into an imagined life? My life joining his with reservations. But the joining —the marriage?—has to be, or you can’t stay on the vicarious track of his past or whatever “truth” you think you’re tracking. The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction. What does that tell you about the nature of life, and does one really want to know?

  By mid-afternoon he had done two pages and was feeling good when Kitty returned from the town clerk’s office to pay the cleaning person. Dubin was sitting in the living room with a drink. The bee sting no longer bothered. The girl had gone after slantedly writing her name and address on an old envelope on the kitchen counter.

  “I’ll mail her a check,” Kitty said. “What do you think of her? The house is fairly clean. Should I keep her for a while or look for someone permanent?”

  He had barely caught a glimpse of the girl but felt magnanimous. “What have you got to lose?”

  The cleaning person—Fanny Bick—he had read her name on the envelope—who had appeared Tuesday morning, returned to work on Friday—resisting it all the way, Kitty said. Fanny, a nervously active girl, vacuumed and dusted, and was supposed to do a wash but hadn’t got to it the first time. Kitty had done the wash on Thursday and had left a pile of Dubin’s underwear, pajamas, socks, to be ironed—she had tried to talk him out of ironed socks but he liked them that way. As he worked that morning he was vaguely aware of the girl outside his door yanking the vacuum cleaner from room to room; and he later asked Kitty to tell her not to come into the study, because there were so many note cards laid out on the desk and worktable that he didn’t want touched. She could clean his room next time, once he had the cards weighted down. He’d have lunch meanwhile or would read upstairs in Gerald’s old room.

  The girl had left before Dubin stopped working—he had eaten while she was in the master bedroom and as he went downstairs for coffee, had caught a look at her on hands and knees, shoving an aluminum hose under the double bed. But on the following Tuesday, when he left his study in mid-morning to visit the bathroom—he went sometimes to think a thought through—there she stood barefoot, a brush in her hand, grimly swabbing the toilet bowl.

  Fanny sweated as Dubin apologized—he would use the downstairs toilet, no trouble at all. The biographer had recognized her; she seemed younger than he’d remembered, possibly because he now knew she was still in college. Or had he suddenly grown older? Her light hair hung loosely down her back, and he was again aware of the random bleached hairs under her chin—counted four or five and wondered why she hadn’t had them removed, a matter of esthetics. Fanny wore a faded denim wraparound skirt and black shirt without bra. Her abundant body, though not voluptuous, clearly had a life of its own.

  Dubin stood at the bathroom doorway. The girl had retreated to the tub, holding the brush behind her.

  “I’m Fanny Bick,” she said, in annoyance and embarrassment. “I’m helping your wife.”

  “She mentioned it. Glad to know you.” He spoke gently, sorry for her unease, apparently a persistent quality of her.

  Fanny explained her situation—after a moment seemed calmer—and he lingered to hear: that she was working in his house because there wasn’t much else to do in town. “I tried the State Employment Office and all the guy there does is show you unemployment figures for the county and shakes his head. Makes you feel zonky.”

  “That so?”

  “Twittery. So I bought the town gazette, or whatever you call it, and put together four mornings of work at three different houses—this and two others. I had no choice but I don’t like cleaning.” She made a face. “I do an absolute minimum for myself. I’m not a slob but I don’t like housework.”

  He nodded seriously, not entirely approving.

  She smiled dismally.

  He clucked in sympathy. “You should have gone on to Winslow. It’s a bigger town—more variety. You might have picked up something at the piano factory there.”

  “Not the way things have been going for me lately. My car pooped out after an accident. My fault, and all I carry is liability.”

  He shook his head at her luck.

  She said with a tense laugh, “Please don’t tell your wife I don’t like this job. I wouldn’t want to lose my two mornings here.”

  “Have no fear.”

  Her body eased and she brought forth the brush.

  Fanny said she was broke and had to settle for whatever she could get. “I’ve had it with college and have just about made up my mind I’m not going back. Anyway, my father said he wouldn’t support me any more, so I’m trying to put together enough to take me to the Big Apple.”

  “To do what?”

  “Ask me when I get there.”

  “Haven’t we met before?”

  She regarded him with fresh interest. “On the road? I thought I’d got lost though I guess I hadn’t. I was where I was looking for.”

  “You can’t be much more than twenty-one or -two?”

  Her glance was friendly yet reserved.

  Dubin said lamely, “Maybe I’m intending to prove I know something about people your age?”

  �
��Twenty-two,” she said. “Yesterday, actually. My friends say I look older.”

  It struck him he had almost hoped so. Dubin said he was fifty-six and after a moment laughed huskily.

  She mulled over the news, her face impassive.

  “Don’t cheat yourself on education,” he advised. “College is limited but at least it’s a beginning. That’s what I told my daughter.”

  “Giving up college isn’t giving up your education. Far from it.”

  “William James, the psychologist and pragmatist philosopher, reflecting on the social value of the college-bred, thought the major effect of a college education might be to help you recognize a good man when you saw one.” Dubin laughed saying this; had often said it. I have a one-track mind.

  He tightened his belt. “Here I am offering free advice again,” he apologized. “I am a biographer is why. I often have this souped-up sense of other people’s lives so that I don’t always mind my business. Pardon me, I don’t mean to offend.”

  “No sweat.” Fanny was amiable. “You feel empathy for people?”

  “That’s putting it kindly.”

  He had noticed her Star of David. Nodding abruptly, Dubin broke off and returned to his study. He was surprised at the time he had given her; and it annoyed him a bit that he had felt her sexuality so keenly. It rose from her bare feet. She thus projects herself?—the feminine body—beautifully formed hefty hips, full bosom, nipples visible—can one see less with two eyes? Or simply his personal view of her?—male chauvinism: reacting reductively? What also ran through his mind was whether he had responded to her as his usual self, or as one presently steeped in Lawrence’s sexual theories, odd as they were. He had thought much on the subject as he read the man’s work. Despite his reservations it tended to charge him up some. Dubin counteracted the effect by recalling the continuous excitement of Thoreau, woodsy dybbuk, possessing him as he was writing his life. The biographer had for a time become the celibate nature lover, or so it had seemed.