We hardly talk any more.
They talked at long length in the dead of night.
Don't be sarcastic. You're obsessed with work.
Better than with alcohol.
When will you take time to live?
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
Hemingway at least fished after he wrote.
I walk.
Why can't we all walk together?
We can on Sundays.
You don't have to work so hard or long, Kitty argued. I doubt you really enjoy being with people. I have needs other than solitude, certainly the kids have. You're either reading or writing biographies, or thinking your biographical thoughts.
The kids know their father loves them.
Love is being there; it means giving affection.
Much of his past had been badly used, Dubin often had to explain. Don't
begrudge my taking time to do difficult work. To do it well one has to do it many times. You have to make time or steal it.
You steal it from us all.
He read her a note about Thomas Carlyle from a biography he was reading. His wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, wrote to a friend: “All he asked, was, simply, that his wishes come first, his comfort be put before all else, the household so arranged that his sleeping, walks, hours of work or reverie should be when and how he wanted them.” Think of that when you criticize me.
What a disgusting man, said Kitty.
Then there was Gustav Mahler.
She covered her ears with her hands: I don't want to hear.
She complained there was little conversation at the table unless she initiated it. You can listen to us speak and hear nothing. I can tell from your eyes you've gone for a walk in your book.
He mistreated holidays, she said. After Christmas-morning exchange of presentsâChristmas was for Gerald and Channukah for Maud; Kitty said she wanted her to be a Jewish child out of respect for her fatherâDubin went back to his desk to work.
He wrote a note to himself: I do few things perhaps to do one thing well.
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Gerald kept a loose-leaf diary whose pages he occasionally tore out and burned in the fireplace. Once he handed Kitty a poem and she wept to be given the gift. He never gave her another.
He fed his words into the fire, telling his parents little or nothing of what he was thinking or doing; as though, if he did, he had betrayed himself.
But he talked to Maud, who kept his secrets. When they were talking together they stopped at Dubin's approach. Maud, he wanted to say, don't be corrupted by him. I am your loving father.
Yet there were times when Gerry seemed to want an adult to talk to. He would appear in Dubin's study before going to school, his book bag strapped to his shoulders, to say why last night's TV news had sickened him. Not why his flight had begun and where it was taking him.
If Dubin spoke about himself as a boy Gerry would listen and leave without comment. One lonely youth was all he could abide.
Dubin asked him to say what was troubling him. He wouldn't say why he didn't say.
We were once closeâtell me what happened?
The boy stood stiffly silent, the back of his neck inflamed. With impassioned silence he answered nothing.
If we don't talk I can't tell you what I know, Dubin said. What good is my experience if you won't let me share it with you?
That's your problem. I don't have any interest in autobiography.
That's your problem.
If Dubin extended his hand, Gerald stepped back.
He had unwillingly become distant to the boy, matching a distance equal to his own from Dubin; as if he had held up a mirror to a mile and made it two between them.
I overdid mourning, Kitty lamented. He backed away from me. And from you because of me. I know he loves you, William, but I can't explain the change in him, except that at a certain point the person I wasâI amâweighed too heavily on him. You're your screwy self a day too long and one or another of your kids takes off without telling you why or waving goodbye. Once he began to change he changed as though he was pursued by change.
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Dubin, standing silent on the stairs, overheard her talking to Gerald in his room when he was home from college at Thanksgiving, during his freshman year.
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?
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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.”