Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  Dubin became aware of a presence, something within or close by, like a disturbing memory waiting to occur. Was the red-bearded ghost of D. H. Lawrence, risen in contempt of the biographer’s desecrations of his life, haunting the place to revenge himself? One day the feeling grew so oppressive he was drawn into the barn to look around. The old barn was dark, gloomy, wet-cold. Dubin, picking up a hammer handle from the floor, went cautiously among the boxes, garden tools and machines, fertilizer bags, the furniture junk there. He found nothing unusual and was about to return to the study when he was struck by the sight of a pair of glowing eyes. He heard a thud and the eyes disappeared. The biographer was momentarily frightened—had a wild animal got into the barn? After a minute of frozen silence he decided it wasn’t likely; yet it could be a stray dog or raccoon. He hoped it was not a skunk. As he approached the corner of the barn, still grasping the hammer handle, an animal hissed. Dubin raised his arm protectively. Behind a barrel he beheld a long black cat lying on a moldy burlap sack. The cat hissed thickly, then mournfully yowled, but was too sick to move.

  He considered prodding the animal with the hammer handle, to force it out of the barn.

  You mean bastard, he thought, the cat’s sick.

  The black cat got to its feet, its yellow eyes glaring. It snarled weirdly, its matted soiled fur thickened by fear. The cat stank of shit. Bile leaked from its mouth.

  Dubin went back to his table, found he could do nothing, then left the study, walking across the field to the house. He thumbed through the yellow pages of the phone book and called a vet. He said he had a poisoned cat in his barn. “What can I do for him?”

  “If it’s poison,” the vet said, “not much, depending what poisoned him and when.”

  “Would you want to see the animal if I can get him to you? Could you pump its stomach?”

  “No, I handle horses and cows. We had a small-animal man in town but he died last year.”

  Dubin hung up. What was he doing this for? He had to work. Going back to the barn he poured some water into the tin top of a jar he found. The cat, yowling low in its throat, let him approach but made no attempt to take the water. It coughed sickly, then tried a few licks. The cat choked, coughed hoarsely, then began to vomit, moving backwards as it regurgitated part of a rabbit or bloody rat. Dubin later flashed a light on the mess; the cat had gorged itself sick.

  The next morning he went with Kitty to the barn. The black cat was better and lapped a little of the water she gave it. “Don’t feed it anything, William. I’m pretty sure it will get better by itself and then I’ll hose it to get rid of the smell.”

  Squatting, she patted the cat’s head. He recalled how she had handled the kids when they were sick. She was affectionate and competent and tried not to be anxious.

  The next day she arrived with some milk in a glass, and a saucer, and brought a box of dry cat food. The black cat lapped up the milk and chewed a little of the dry food.

  In a week it had recovered. It was a long-bodied lithe almost lynx-like male, with an upright head and twitching tail. Kitty thought they ought to take it to the house. Their old cat had died, but Dubin wanted this one for the barn.

  He called the cat Lorenzo. At first it showed no affection for him, then began to rub its head against his legs. Sometimes it jumped up and lay in his lap as he sat on the sofa reading. It’s become my cat. He thought of the cats that had come and gone in the family.

  Lorenzo lived in the barn and roamed the fields. One day it scratched at the study door, and when Dubin opened it, to his disgust the black cat held a broken-winged bloody cardinal in its mouth.

  “You bastard.” He tore the red bird from the cat’s jaws. But the cardinal was dead. Dubin drove Lorenzo away.

  An hour later he went searching for the animal far into his neighbor’s field.

  Kitty said she had liked helping him with the cat in the barn. “We do so little together.” Dinner was quiet. She seemed like a clock listening to itself.

  “What would you like us to do that we aren’t?”

  “I’d like you to respond to more than my voice. Why do you never think of putting your arms around me without my having to ask?”

  “Other than that?”

  “Other than that, I’m alone in the house. You live by yourself in the barn.”

  “I don’t live there. I’m sorry you feel lonely. It doesn’t raise my spirits, but at least you’re seeing Ondyk. I’m glad of that.”

  “Are you?”

  “If you are.”

  “I’m tired of ‘seeing’ someone. I’d like not to have to. I’d like my life to take over.”

  “Give it time.”

  “I have. Something’s wrong with the way we live. We take no joy in each other.”

  “I like the way you look,” Dubin said, trying to take joy. “Often I look at you and like the way you look.”

  “Thank you. You know what I mean.”

  “My work is mainly what’s wrong. But I’m having better days. It’s not easy to see Lawrence whole, but I’m closer to it. You can’t explain him till you see him whole. It’s hard to do that, but there are good signs.”

  “I’m glad of that. I’m glad something is good.”

  Dubin said he was reading a new biography of Freud. “This seems to get closer to the man than any I’ve read, with his neurotic qualities—hypochondria, constipation, anxiety, bladder difficulty. I’ve told you about his fainting, usually in Jung’s presence. He was tied for half his life in an unexplained triangle with his wife and sister-in-law. But the neurosis, such as it was, led in part to his own self-analysis and thus to his life’s accomplishment. His work shrived him.”

  “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 alone—I 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 st
ars 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 nothing—and 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 down—perhaps 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 say—out of pride—what 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 wrong—mixing 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 woman—someone 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 before—I mean, instead of—Nathanael.”

  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 saw—peace to the day—Fanny 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.”