Dubin's Lives
Page 14
She was asking him in a loud whisper to trust her, confide what ailed him.
My pain in the gut, Gerald replied. I hate the stupid war. I know I’ll have to fight in it sooner or later. I hate the goddamned stupid military. I hate how America is destroying the world.
Things will improve, Kitty pleaded. Don’t take everything so brutally hard. One must live, the world goes on. A man should enjoy his life or what’s it for? Please, Gerald.
He rushed down the stairs.
Dubin, embarrassed to be standing there, stepped to the wall as he ran by.
You’ve got to live, Kitty, leaning over the banister, shouted after her son.
At lunch she smiled at Gerald, her lips compressed, eyes uneasy. He dipped chunks of bread into the soup and sucked them. Dubin, peacemaker, rattled on about the miserable youth of Edgar Allan Poe; his mother had died young. Kitty asked him to change the subject.
My son the stepson, early exile from self. He is contemptuous of war but won’t, after quitting graduate school, register as a conscientious objector, because he can’t define himself as one. He insists on accuracy of definition.
You’re close to one in spirit, his mother says. You certainly are in principle.
Close enough is not good enough, says the honest lad. Dubin dislikes the mother for her son’s passionate honesty.
Gerry considers flight to Canada as a war resister but decides against it. He is drafted and shipped to West Germany for training prior to Vietnam. He is kept on in Germany as a Signal Corps instructor. Three months before his term of enlistment is over, the night before he’s due to be flown in an army transport to a jungle in Southeast Asia, he goes AWOL in a Cessna to Sweden.
Whose fate is he running after?
Gerald Willis stepped out of the dripping doorway, exhaling wet smoke. He was a broad-shouldered tall man who walked with a heavy-footed tread. Dubin had last seen him still wearing part of his army uniform and a short haircut going to seed. After crossing the narrow street walled by old houses, the biographer followed him a few paces along a thin strip of sidewalk, then called his name.
The youth swung around in alarm as Dubin, his arm extended, hastened forward. Gerald peered at him in disbelief. “Jesus, William, is it really you?”
“Who else?” He offered his hand. Gerald shook it vaguely and Dubin pumped his. The youth, in his odd hat and long hair, looked like no one he knew.
“What are you here for? What do you want?” His voice had the tone of a man objecting.
Dubin said he had flown in from Venice a few hours ago and had been looking for him since.
“What for?”
“What for, he says.” He tried to laugh.
“Sweden isn’t next door to Italy. It touches the North Pole. What’s on your mind, William?”
“Not much. I was in the vicinity, you might say, and decided to come to see you.”
“Why didn’t you wire? I might have been in Lapland.”
Dubin explained he had come on impulse.
“Is my mother with you?”
“Not this time.”
“Anything wrong?”
He didn’t think so.
Gerald, working his shoulders, blew his white breath on his wet hands.
They stared at one another. Dubin asked him if he wanted a drink.
Gerald shook his head. “You look like hell.”
Dubin described the spill he had taken near a square with a church. “I missed my step and hit the street on both knees and my belly. I’m not comfortable. Is there somewhere we can sit? Have you eaten yet?”
He knew the question was useless: Gerry would not sit and talk. With him he felt as he often had: a man trying to finish a puzzle with a piece that never fitted. Here was this haunted house needing a door or window and the last piece he had was a hand holding a wilted flower.
“I have to do something. Give me your number, I’ll call in the morning.”
Dubin said what had to be done had to be done. “Did you find my note under your door?”
Gerald shook his head.
“I see by your nameplate that you’ve changed your name.”
“It’s my name.” He seemed not to be sure. His breath misted, vanished.
“I wish you the best, whatever the name. I’m not taking offense. I consider you my son, or why did I adopt you when you were a kid?”
He felt off-balance, annoyed with his defensive tone. If I have any eloquence, in his presence I lose it. Those who don’t approve me diminish me.
He diminished those who diminished him.
“I’ll walk over to your hotel in the morning,” Gerald said.
“Fine. I’m at the Skeppsbron. But why not take another minute to tell me what you’re into these days. I’ll probably be telephoning your mother and would like to say I saw you.”
“You can say it.”
Dubin said last time they were there Gerald had talked of taking some courses in biology and maybe going to med school.
The youth shot his lit butt into the gutter. “I don’t think of that as a viable alternative any more.”
“Alternative to what?”
“Other alternatives.”
“Why don’t you name one?”
He said nothing.
“How’s your Swedish coming?”
“On stilts, on little cat stilts.”
“You were considering studying Russian.”
“I’m still considering it.”
“Are you still working on the docks?”
He said he wasn’t working.
“I’m sorry. Could you use some money? I have some traveler’s checks I can cash.”
Gerald shook his head.
“Are you living alone?”
“Alone.” The word tolled.
Dubin compulsively went on: “I gather you’re not much satisfied here?”
“You’ve gathered what there is to gather.” From under his dripping hat he stared at his adoptive father. His eyes were expectant, expecting nothing.
Someday he’ll change, Dubin thought. We’ll sit together and talk with ease.
“Have you heard from Maud recently?”
“A card I couldn’t read.”
“Where was it from?”
“Ask Maud.”
“Not from Italy?”
“Ask her.”
“If you answered a letter once in a while,” Dubin said testily, “it’d be easier on both of us than standing in the rain in a foreign city, asking and not answering questions.”
“Neither of you approved of what I did when I screwed the army, so I don’t care to inform you what I am doing.”
“We didn’t agree with your timing. You were about to escape the army if you had just been patient.”
“It was my own fucking timing.”
“Let’s walk,” Dubin said. “We may be going in the same direction.”
Gerald bolted off. Dubin followed him.
The hazy wet street sloped down to the Baltic. Dubin talked to the youth’s back and Gerald talked to the night.
“What we didn’t like was your going AWOL three months before you were due for discharge. That wasn’t a rational thing.”
“The army’s no place to be rational,” Gerald said to the night. “If I had stayed in it another month I’d have killed somebody, not necessarily a Viet Cong.”
“You’d have been free in a few short months.”
“The months were short in your head, not mine.”
Dubin said it was possible there’d be some sort of amnesty soon. “Congress is talking about it. Nixon will have to go along.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Some deserters are already coming home. They are making deals with the government.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s handcuffs at the airport, court-martial, Leavenworth. I’m not going to prison.”
“Where do you think you are?” Dubin asked Gerald’s back.
“I am where I choose to be.”
Dubin said he hadn’t meant the prison thing the way he had said it.
“That’s the way I heard it.”
“Gerry, a father is a man who treats you like a son. At least walk with me. I’m the only father you’ve got.”
The youth took off in a heavy-footed run.
Dubin awkwardly trotted after him.
At the Skeppsbron bridge Gerald slowed to a fast walk. The biographer limped along behind him. It was a bleak night, the lights of the long bridge glowing foggily in the freezing drizzle.
“Wait up, Gerry. I can’t go fast.”
Gerald told Dubin he had passed his hotel a block back.
I have to follow him, the father thought. It’s the only way to be with him.
On the bridge a man with a soaking burlap sack on his head was fishing at the rail. Nearby stood a girl in a white cloth coat with a hood, yellow shoes, and a soggy yellow muff.
“Ett nyp?” she said to the biographer as he limped by.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Lof?” she asked him.
Dubin followed his son across the bridge, haranguing his back, and for a while the girl in the yellow shoes followed him.
Four
On the road a jogger trotted toward him, a man with a blue band around his head.
He slowed down as Dubin halted.
“What are you running for?” the biographer asked him.
“All I can’t stand to do. What about you?”
“Broken heart, I think.”
“Ah, too bad for that.”
They trotted in opposing directions.
Dubin dropped his bag and embraced his wife. His arms stiffened as it seemed to him hers did. Kitty was nothing if not intuitive, sensed change of emotional weather before it was weather. He had considered telling her he had holed up for a few nights with a young woman in Venice—wouldn’t say who because it would humiliate, wound her, more than if it had been someone other than Fanny Bick—anyway, it had come to nothing, if not less.
Kitty seemed constrained, preoccupied. He wondered whether she sensed something not quite right, off-balance—something wrong? Dubin said nothing about the trip, wouldn’t unless she asked, would then say the necessary
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lies. It was painful not to be honest with a woman who did not lie. He was, on arrival, heavyhearted.
“You’re late,” she said. “Let’s eat, I’m ravenous.”
He unlocked his bag and produced a sculptured silver bracelet he had bought her in Stockholm. As she admired it, after a moment of hesitation he unwrapped a pair of antique gold earrings he had chosen for Maud and handed them to Kitty. She inspected the bracelet and earrings with interest. “They’re beautiful, William, but one or the other would have been enough. Do you mind if I keep the bracelet and give the earrings to Maud?”
“Suit yourself.”
They kissed affectionately, sat down for a drink, enjoyed dinner. She had prepared a tasty coq-au-vin. Kitty had the wishbone and when they broke it she won the wish.
“For Gerry?”
“For your new biography, and I guess for him too.”
Dubin thanked her.
“How was he?”
He told her in detail; said Gerald had changed his name back to Willis.
She shook her head, eyes distant. “You were so loving to him. It was thoughtful of you to go see him; thank you.”
He asked her not to thank him.
He built a fire in the living-room fireplace and they talked as they sipped coffee. The worst is over, Dubin thought, sitting by the fire, looking forward to his work in the morning. Kitty played the harp, some songs by Mahler. She sang in a small sweet voice.
Dubin woke that night relieved to be rid of Fanny. The week abroad had seemed a year. He sensed his wife was awake and drew her to him. Soon they made love. He would not admit the girl to his mind.
Before she slept he asked Kitty how she had fared while he was away.
“Not badly. I kept busy. The house behaved.”
“You weren’t afraid to be alone at night?”
She said she was.
“Why didn’t you sleep at Myra’s?”
“It doesn’t bother her to be alone day or night. I want her to respect me.”
“She respects you.”
“I want her to.”
“Well, I’m home now,” Dubin said. He asked her if Maud had called.
“I called her. She had a nasty cold but is back in class now.”
“Anything new with her?”
“Not with her but there is with me,” Kitty said in the dark bedroom. “I’ve been working part-time in the library. Mrs. Eliscu is sick and Roger Foster rang me up the day you left to help him out. At least I get paid for work I do. I put in four weekday mornings and one afternoon. I’d prefer afternoons, but they need me most in the morning. I hope you don’t mind? I can do your errands after lunch. I’ll bring back the paper when I come home at one. Roger asked me to work a full day, but I said I simply couldn’t.”
“Let’s get back to sleep, we both have to work in the morning.”
“When we were first married I always got up with you.”
Dubin remembered.
After flipping through a folder full of outlines the biographer began his working day. Rereading what he had written before he took off with Fanny, he was satisfied although a mild sense of waste lingered. Now he felt he’d soon complete the opening chapter and wrote well all morning. Dubin wrote listening to Lawrence’s high-pitched insistent voice in his ear, to some degree resisting what he passed on as truth. He had to distance himself from the man to see what he must see. Lawrence wore a coat of many colors, pretending to wear nothing.
Dubin liked what he was writing. Nothing like interrupting the course of daily life to get the mind flowing, enjoying. At least he’d been to another country and had gone through something intense and different; now he lived his life writing another’s. He felt for his wife a rush of affection.
On the Saturday morning following the Monday of Dubin’s arrival from Sweden, Kitty came upstairs with an airmail letter. “From Italy.” He went on with his typing. “Thanks.” After a minute she left.
He thought he would finish the page.
When he had completed it, Dubin reached for the letter. It was addressed, as he had guessed—his thoughts of her already were fatiguing—in Fanny’s large open slanted writing. Dubin’s impulse, after a flash of self-disgust, sadness, remembrance of desire, was to destroy her letter without reading it. He had sensed he would hear from her, although not so soon. Standing apart from himself he tore open the envelope to get it over with so he could go on with his work.
The girl wrote: “I’m in Murano now with the capitano of the motorboat you waited for with me. I changed my mind about going to Rome. I’m writing this after midnight. The stars are out. I love the late hours when nobody but me is awake—feel closer to myself. I’m smoking as I look out of Arnaldo’s window across the lagoon where Venice is. I like it a lot more than when you and I first came here, have got used to it.
“William, I’ve been thinking of you a lot and just got out of bed to write to you. I’m wearing the black nightie you liked me in. Over that I have on Arnaldo’s sweater. He isn’t a bad guy. He has a sense of humor and makes me laugh. He also cooks for us and I don’t have to do very much although I wouldn’t mind. Anyway, I had this urge to write you. Try not to think too badly of me if you can. Though we aren’t the same kind of people in some ways, I think we are alike in others. I wear your bracelet even in bed. Maybe it will bring me luck. I hope you are less angry now—not that you don’t deserve to be—and will write me sometimes. William, I would honestly like to hear from you. I remember some of our nice talks. I’m sorry it ended the way it did. Kind regards, Fanny B.”
Dubin, as he tore the letter up, felt a punitive sense of disgust. From the gondolier to capitano
in a short hop over his head. Another promiscuous lover to make her a better person. “I wear your bracelet even in bed.”
Curbing an impulse to lay on sarcastically, the biographer typed out a plainspoken note. “You’re right, Fanny, we have fundamental differences of values, not to speak of simple taste. Life is cheapened when there is no basic consideration by people of others. You’ve cheapened and shamed me. Please don’t bother writing again. Yours most sincerely, William B. Dubin.”
He tore her letter to shreds and burned the mound of paper in an ashtray.
In the afternoon he walked with Kitty to the green bridge.
The weekend was pleasant—unexpected visitors from New York City, an old law-school friend with his wife. They drove to Great Barrington to see a mutual friend.
On Monday morning, after quickly putting down a solid paragraph, Dubin felt as though he had walked into a wall. His thoughts were scattered. He felt vapid, vague, something pecking at the back of his mind, as though he’d forgotten to do what he had meant to. Nothing he could think of except to be joyfully into his biography. After a half hour of trying to concentrate he realized there’d be no second paragraph, good or bad, that day. It was a darkish November morning. Dubin turned on the desk lamp but that didn’t help. He set aside his notes and spent the rest of the morning on business correspondence.
In the afternoon he went for his walk and after returning got into the car and slowly drove the same route, as though searching for something he had lost on the road.
“You look like someone holding his breath underwater,” Kitty said as she came down the stairs. “Would you like me to fix you a drink?”
“Too early.” Dubin remarked he’d had a poor day.
“They come and they go,” she said.
“They come and they go.”
“Sometimes I feel I’d like to see you give up that freaky D. H. Lawrence.”
Dubin said he couldn’t, had invested years in him. His voice sounded throaty.
Kitty, at the window, cheerfully said it was beginning to blizzard. She called any snowstorm a blizzard.