Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  The waterfront, through his hotel window, was lined with white craft: sailboats, sightseeing launches, a two-masted schooner; an ice-breaker waiting for winter. A smoking one-stack steamer was leaving for Finland. The whistle boomed.

  How easy it is to go away. He watched the boat move slowly out to sea.

  What would I do alone in a foreign country?

  Dialing Gerry to say he was in Stockholm, he got back a high-pitched busy signal; so he slipped on his raincoat and walked out into the narrow high-walled streets of the Old Town. The biographer asked at the address of a Mrs. Linder for Gerald Dubin and was told no one by that name lived there. There had been a Gerry Willis.

  “That’s his name,” Dubin told her. “Willis was his father’s name—he’s entitled to it. I’m his adoptive father, William Dubin, a biographer.”

  The Swedish lady had begun speaking English at his approach; she said Gerry Willis had moved out a month ago. Her daughter might have his address. She might not. He could try returning at seven, when she came home from work. The lady shrugged. Would he excuse her now? She had supper to prepare.

  Did she know whether Gerry was short of funds? “Was that why he moved?”

  “I can’t say if this is true. I think he likes to move, he has that nature. Our socialist government provides well the American deserters. It comes from our taxes.”

  He lifted his hat in apology. Dubin said he would return at seven and went back to the hotel.

  Restless in his chilly small room, he went again into the city. Stockholm, where he explored, exhibited an austere dignity of space and proportion. He liked the well-formed stately buildings of past centuries. He liked the broad clean canals between sections of the city connected by street-level causeways and bridges. Dubin felt the melancholy of the gray-blue mid-autumn sky, as though some hidden Norse God, if not Ingmar Bergman, pointed eternally to winter, warning Swede and stranger it was more than a season; it was a domain.

  Having little to do but wait and think more than he cared to, the biographer embarked on an hour’s excursion by launch on the waterways. The boat passed along canals, under bridges, sailed by villas close to the water, old red-brick factories, parks lined with yellow-leaved maples and yellowing pines.

  He had been idly watching a man and woman a few rows in front of him in the all but empty motor launch. The man was a middle-aged Indian sitting with a long-faced attractive white girl of twenty-three or so. She might be English, a darkish blonde, motionless, reflective, as though she might think them into an embrace. They looked at each other and looked away. He seemed self-conscious, shy. The girl smiled gently. Neither moved close to the other though their feeling was intense. They talked in whispers, then sat silent. The biographer watched until it grew dark and raindrops splashed on the window of the launch. It seemed to Dubin that there were only three on the boat, the shy couple and himself. They hadn’t touched though they wanted to. When the boat docked he left quickly.

  Once she went to Montreal to visit a friend hurt in a ski accident. Kitty traveled by train and when she returned Dubin was waiting for her at Grand Central. Coming up the ramp, she walked right at him, yet passed without seeing him. Angered, he called her name. It took her fifteen seconds to recognize her husband. I’m sorry, I got very little sleep on the train. They kissed formally.

  Dubin, carrying her bag, asked her if she knew she was married. How can I forget? she said, and laughed. They stopped to kiss.

  He asked her to sew a button on his trench coat. Kitty took the button and put it in her plastic button box. She said she would sew it on one morning if he left the coat home. Dubin left it there for two weeks, then wore it without the button.

  She quietly talked of her first husband in a seemingly detached way. In Gerald’s room there was a picture of Nathanael taken by a Daily News photographer: of an intern in an oilskin raincoat attending a man lying on his back after an accident in a wet street.

  That was taken years before I met him. In college I cut my leg in a fall off a bike and he stitched and bandaged it. I still have the scar. I was an undergraduate when we were married. Nathanael knew a lot and taught me to think a little. I’m naturally skeptical and he helped me to a more solid intellectual base. He had me reading philosophy for a while; he used to read it the way I read fiction. Though I loved him I wasn’t sure about getting married at twenty. I married him, a pretty uncertain woman, but he helped focus me. I wish he had encouraged me to do something serious about a vocation.

  I had Gerald when we were three years married. I was nervous with a baby, but it wasn’t hard to calm down with a doctor around. Afterward there was a time I thought the marriage was on the rocks. We were both irritable and I felt I was a bad mother. Then we got along well and I was not a bad mother. You can imagine how I felt when he died at forty. I know I’ve told you this often, but every time I tell you I have to.

  Dubin said he was listening.

  One rainy morning he shouted, Why the hell don’t you sew the button on my coat? If you can’t, or don’t want to, bring it to a tailor.

  Her eyes were shut as though she was concentrating on the button. I have it in my button box. I will sew it on. But she didn’t.

  One winter’s night Gerald was sick with the flu; his temperature hit 105° and Kitty was frantic. She telephoned the doctor but couldn’t reach him. Fearing the child would go into a convulsion, she ran with him from one room to another. Dubin, also made anxious by the illness of children, said they ought to call an ambulance. Kitty thought it would take too long to come. She wanted to wrap the child in a blanket and get him to the hospital in a taxi. Dubin then looked up fever in a medical adviser she had bought after her husband’s death, and began to rub the shrieking child’s naked body with alcohol. Kitty held her hands over her ears. Within minutes Gerald’s temperature had dropped. Kitty sewed on Dubin’s button.

  In sex she needed, Kitty said, a man of patience. He provided, plus whatever other talents a man like Dubin had. They were both limited sexually; so apparently had Nathanael been. What she had solved with him she had to resolve with Dubin. There were times he lived on little and ate desire. What she missed seemed not to rankle her.

  In bed one night Kitty said, You mean a lot to me, William.

  How much?

  Because I haven’t put Nathanael out of my mind doesn’t diminish my feeling for you.

  Is it love?

  That was the wrong question: She said, I’m not sure what or how much of something is something, philosophically speaking.

  Speaking simply, like now in bed?

  She admitted she couldn’t say she loved anybody without qualification. One had to be honest.

  When she asked him, Dubin said he loved her.

  Without qualification?

  With love.

  Sometimes as she was saying one thing he knew from the way she looked at him that she was reflecting on another.

  Dubin waited in the small hotel lobby until ten to seven, then walked back into the Old Town and got Gerry’s address from his former landlady’s plain and distant daughter. He went in the rain to the number she had given him, also in the Old Town, a heavy-shuttered stone house in a curved badly lit cobblestone-paved alley; though he rang repeatedly and rapped on the heavy wooden door, no one responded. He vainly called Gerry’s name. He called for Gerry Willis and Gerald Dubin and got no one. Dubin waited in the low wet dripping doorway for someone to come into the alley. He watched the water pour out of the iron downspout of the house and run along a stone drain into the street.

  There were better nights for waiting, yet he felt not bad about it. Here he was with nothing else to do. If he gave time generously maybe the waiting would end well. He’d been thinking of Gerald as a child, their mutual need: he needed a father, I wanted a son. Dubin nostalgically remembered their affection. He wondered if Gerry did. But what can he know of me as I am now, or I of him? One guesses at essences—identities. Maybe love is a means of making a useful assumption
about another person. Yet once I was his father; he let me be.

  He rang, listening in the drumming rain to silence within, then left the alley and sought a telephone in a bar. Dubin opened his address book and dialed the American Deserters Committee. The secretary, a Texan, answered. He looked up Gerald Dubin and said he was registered but hadn’t visited the office for a year. “He wrote and asked us to stop sendin the newsletter.”

  “Any address for Gerry Willis?”

  “Not that I have iny record of. Some men get depressed here,” the Texan said. “They hate the cold climate and the cold Swedes, not to mintion the government bureaucracy that has you fillin out forms every time you want to pee or lose a pound of weight.”

  The man said that not everybody got acclimatized to Sweden. Some could not get used to the weather, or the language, or find a satisfactory job, or get on with their education. “They git druggy or go ape and are locked up in prison. I tell them if they can’t make it here they sure as hell aren’t goin to make it in the U.S. of A.”

  “You don’t remember Gerry?”

  “I honestly wish I could.”

  Dubin returned to the shuttered house, rang again, and waited until he was tired of waiting. He slipped a damp note under the door and left the alley.

  The rain had turned into a cold drizzle. The biographer momentarily removed his hat to feel the wet on his face. If he doesn’t call tonight I’ll try again in the morning.

  He felt he hadn’t minded not seeing Gerry tonight; he was not much in a mood to. Dubin wondered if he had come to see the boy so he could tell Kitty he had stopped off in Stockholm to visit him. He wanted her to be grateful to him before he lied to her about Venice.

  She woke him to explain herself: her father had killed himself when she was a child—after his wife had betrayed him. Yet I loved her till she deserted me for a lover she went to Europe with. I could no more do that to a child than I could destroy it. My grandmother disliked her. I’ve only once been to her grave. I want you to know what my young life was like. There’s a gap in me I will never fill. I’ve never slept well since I was little. Either a gene is missing or I’m afraid to for understandable reasons. But the world is very real to me and I don’t want to make it seem unreal. I’ve always been honest with myself. What you won’t admit, you never understand.

  Nathanael loved me more than anyone else ever has.

  Including your grandmother?

  You know what I mean.

  Q. She mythologized him?

  A. Whatever it was, there were times I felt I had married him.

  Mimosa, she said, is always the beginning of spring.

  One spring morning she suffered a miscarriage.

  My dear baby, Kitty wept.

  It was a fetus, he said, astonished by the depth of her grief, guilt, mourning.

  No more death, please, no more.

  He did not ask her to define death but promised no more. Nathanael packed his suitcase and moved down the street. She spoke of him rarely now, perhaps to make a point about a short life, or something about the nature of marriage. Simply a sufficient time had passed.

  A year later Maud was born; Kitty was very happy to have a girl yet promised Dubin a boy of his own. He said he thought of Gerry as his son. She said she believed him.

  He delighted in his daughter. Went often to look at her as she slept in her room; enjoyed her childhood. She called for him when she had had a nightmare. He pressed her warm shivering body to him. He kissed her head; she kissed his lips. He read to her; loved her red hair, often combed it.

  Kitty slept better. The house was in order. There were parties, house guests, visitors. She was good with the kids: sewed their clothes and knitted them woolen hats. She lived easily in their world. And she baked, made jellies, put clothes in garment bags, watered the house plants, nightly wiped a round oak table with soaped sponge to give it a driftwood quality.

  Having a family satisfied a harsh hunger in Dubin. He relished his wife’s warm womanly body. And Kitty played the harp for him. She drew it down on her shoulder and with dancing movements of the arms plucked the strings.

  Though she said she hardly had time to think of herself, she kept herself informed, judged public events well. She defined things accurately—Nathanael had insisted on careful definitions. She was analytic, skeptical—questioned what Dubin too easily accepted or inaccurately explicated. She hated obfuscation, hypocrisy, ignorance. She praised clear thinking and tested his thought the way Nathanael had tested hers. She analyzed Dubin’s behavior aloud as Nathanael had analyzed hers.

  Q. You resented him?

  A. I resented her.

  She lived with her fears—could not live without them—lived above them. She did not indulge in self-pity. What she had to do, ultimately she did. He gave her credit. Kitty wished she was a braver person; he said she was brave enough. That day she deposited what remained of Nathanael’s life insurance in their joint savings account. Dubin said he didn’t want Nathanael’s money there. She withdrew it.

  One morning she was formal with him, caught in uncertainty, trying to be calm. Kitty stood by the bedroom window in her nightgown.

  He asked her what was the matter.

  She smiled no smile to speak of, looked at him as if she weren’t seeing him. It took her a while to reply in a strained voice. William, you have to palpate my breast; I think I felt a lump.

  She slid into bed, drawing her nightgown over her chest, and he, trying not to think of it as a momentous act, pressed his fingers into her left breast, then gently into the right. He did not like to be doing this.

  What am I supposed to feel?

  A hard little lump the size of a pea.

  Is that what you felt?

  I thought so.

  Kitty shut her eyes as he tried again to locate the lump, then, without expression, watched his face. Dubin dipped his fingers into her flesh, his eyes growing wet at the thought of the fragility of life. After a while he had found no lumps.

  She then felt both breasts carefully; her mouth trembled in relief. Thank you.

  He shaved with a mild erection.

  At night as they lay together after making love, Kitty confessed her life with Nathanael hadn’t gone all that well. He could be very hard on me.

  Dubin said he had understood that; had put it together from things she had told him about Nathanael.

  Once he hit me, she confessed; he said he hadn’t meant to.

  Dubin muffled a laugh.

  Would you hit me, William?

  If you hit me. Kitty, laughing, later whispered, Don’t ever leave me.

  Q. It was about this time you got into biography?

  A. He was still doing obituaries for the Post and book reviews for The Nation. He was tired of the obits but stayed with them because he liked summarizing people’s lives. The editor had asked him to emphasize successful careers but he sometimes managed to slip in a failed life.

  After Maud was born Dubin had to make a better living. Kitty, concerned about their finances, suggested he go back to practicing law. He felt it made her nervous to think her husband had given up his profession. He’d consider it, he said, if he could be in law without being a lawyer. She then suggested teaching. He doubted he knew enough to face serious students.

  One morning as he was typing out the obituary of a poet who had killed himself by jumping from the George Washington Bridge into the icy Hudson—a fragment of ice floe, like a bloody raft, carried his body down the river —Dubin felt as he wrote that the piece had taken on unexpected urgency. The dead poet was terribly real. He felt an imperious need to state his sorrow, understanding, pity—wanted with all his heart to preserve the man from extinction. Dubin, you can’t relight lives but you can re-create them. In biographies the dead become alive, or seem to. He was moved, tormented, inspirited; his heart beat like a tin clock, his head aching as though struggling to pop through the neck of a bottle in which it had been enclosed, imprisoned. He felt for a brilliant moment
as though he had freed himself forever.

  Afterward Dubin knew he had discovered—affirmed—his vocation: the lives of others, there was no end to them. He sensed a more vital relation between books and life than he had allowed himself to feel in the past. He felt that the pieces of his own poor life could be annealed into a unity. He would understand better, be forewarned. He felt he had deepened, extended his life; had become Dubin the biographer.

  A month later he showed Kitty his short life of Schubert. She said it was a moving piece of writing but oh so sad. Dubin told her Schubert had once said he didn’t know any cheerful music. He wasn’t listening, Kitty said. A short life is a short life. He was dead at thirty-one. I’d rather not think of it, she said.

  He searched for a restaurant amid a block of stores along a sidewalk that ran level, as the cobblestone street sank in a slant below the sidewalk. Dubin, thinking his thoughts, failed to notice he had to go down a double step before crossing the street. On the unexpected step he lost his footing, groped in the air, fell in disbelief; therefore with a semblance of calm. As he lay in the wet gutter the pain rose so thickly he had to struggle to keep from passing out. He had hit the cobblestones with his knees before pitching forward. Through the nausea and dry retching Dubin felt he had broken both legs. He lay in the street shivering and writhing. If someone had touched him he would have shrieked.

  It seemed to him a man appeared in the rain, staring distantly at him, then walked off.

  “Gerald,” he called.

  The man did not look back.

  “Help me, I’m in pain.”

  “Who are you?” someone said in Swedish but did not wait for an answer. In a moment he had vanished. No one assisted him. He wasn’t sure anyone had gone by. Dubin lay in the street until the cold wet penetrated his clothes. Fearing he would be run over, he managed to pull himself up. His trousers were shredded, knees dripping blood. He got up the steps, limped into a bar and found the men’s room. There, after removing his soiled raincoat and torn pants, Dubin cleaned himself as best he could. He felt depleted, dizzy. In the mirror he beheld a stone-gray face disgusted with him for having fallen; for being in Stockholm rather than home; for having gone through the waste of Venice.