Kitty's old friend, Myra Wilson, died in her farmhouse of heart failure. She knew she was dying but would not be moved to a hospital. She died a week after her seventy-ninth birthday, a woman more vital than her body permitted. She had rarely mentioned her age or ailments. In her presence Kitty spoke little of hers. Myra would kiss Dubin mouth to mouth when they met, a way she saw herself. Kitty had wired her daughter that her mother was dying and wired again the next morning to say she was dead. Mrs. Meyer flew in from Milwaukee late in the afternoon. With Kitty's help she completed the funeral arrangements.
Mrs. Meyer was a restrained bulky woman in a brown felt hat and black cloth coat. She was about Kitty's age but looked older. Her right eye was tearingâthe effect, she said, of a cold. She stayed with the Dubins for two nights and was restless to be home with her family. “Mr. Meyer said Mama could live with us,” she told them. “She had her choice.” Her youngest child was a boy of thirteen. The girls were nineteen and twenty-four. “My daughter is nineteen,” Dubin told her. “Twenty,” Kitty said. “She was twenty in October.” Dubin felt he had misplaced a year of Maud's life.
There were eight at the graveside: the Methodist minister; Kitty and Dubin; Flora Greenfeld, moody handsome ladyâOscar was on a concert tour
in Australia; Ursula and Fred Habersham; Craig Bosell, carpenter and handyman, who had looked after the house and barn for Mrs. Wilson; and there was Mrs. Meyer facing a leafless elm, holding the family Bible. It snowed at the graveside. It snowed lightly into the open grave. As the casket was lowered and the prayers recited, Kitty wept brokenly. Mrs. Meyer darted her a startled glance and wiped her wet eye with a handkerchief. Kitty tried to suppress her sobs, squirmed, bit her lip, but couldn't stop. She walked away from the grave and sat in the car. Dubin, when the ceremony was over, drove her home.
“I couldn't help it,” Kitty said.
Mrs. Meyer telephoned them from the Wilson farmhouse. She was shutting up the place and would return in the spring.
“Your mother was a courageous woman living alone in that big house, I couldn't have done it,” Kitty said.
“She didn't have to but that's the nature she had.”
Mrs. Meyer delivered the farmhouse keys to Kitty in case someone had to get in. “Bosell is closing the house,” she said. “He's drained the pipes and when the company takes out the phone he'll lock the doors and shutters. There's no stock left in the barn or henhouse and the dog she had ran away.”
Kitty regretted it. “I should have remembered Ben.”
“When I come back in the spring I'll put the place up for sale. We sold off seventy acres after Pa died. Now there are twenty-four left, and the house, barn and henhouse. Thanks kindly for your kindness and consideration to Mama and me.”
“Myra was a favorite of mine.” Kitty quickly turned away.
Mrs. Meyer left for Milwaukee.
“Why am I always crying?” Kitty asked Dubin. He praised her generous nature while disliking her for outdoing Mrs. Meyer at the graveside.
Kitty, after mulling it awhile, had quit her job at the library. Dubin had urged her not to, but she said she had to think of Roger Foster: he needed a professional librarian who could work full-time. “I'm no great help to him.”
“That wasn't what he said to me.”
“What did he say to you? When did he say it?”
“He said you were doing a very good job or words to that effect. I met him by chance on a walk in town.”
“What else did he say?” she spoke casually, studying him.
Had Roger mentioned Fanny? Was Kitty alluding to her? “Nothing I can recall,” Dubin said.
“I quit because the work was becoming a bore,” Kitty said, looking bored. “I'd rather give you the time I gave them.”
Dubin said she gave him as much time as he needed. He spoke gently and she was gentle with him.
Her first morning as housewife resumed she spent showing the new cleaning woman, a bulky French-Canadian of fifty-five, how she liked things done. Kitty also sewed on the sewing machine, typed and filed recipes she had torn out of newspapers and magazines, arranged and catalogued their old travel slidesâDubin often studied the villas and farmhouses Lawrence and Frieda had lived inâand energetically wrote letter after letter, some of which she tore up and at once rewrote. “I owe to everybody, especially the kids.”
She started something new with a burst of energy. She had begun a reading project: to read a book on contemporary philosophy and all of Jane Austen. She had never read Lawrence's poetry or Thoreau's
Cape Cod,
which she thought she would do.
Shortly after leaving the library she suffered a spell of indigestion and for a while was worried about her health. “I've not been feeling well. My color has been poor for weeks. You don't think there's anything wrong, do you?” She was nervous and pale, her eyes troubled.
He didn't think so. “You're on edge about something. Just watch your diet. That usually does it for you.”
She said she would. When the indigestion disappeared so did her worries about cancer. She kept busy and had few complaints.
Once more Kitty slept late to make up for weary periods of wakefulness in the pit of night, but she would come down in her robe for coffee with Dubin if she was not sleeping when he rose at some outrageously early hour.
Afterward she got back into bed. She still experienced flashes of feeling hot and cold. When she was hot her face looked as though she had just stepped out of a hot shower, or was deeply blushing. She blushed scarlet; so did Maud. When Kitty felt cold she raised the thermostat and went to her dresser for a sweater.
She was not content when she looked at herself in the mirror. Recently while standing without clothes in front of the full-length glass in the bedroom, she had touched her hair, then lifted her breasts and said, “Don't you think I look reasonably young for my age?” She confessed, “I'm mourning my losses. If only one could get used to it. But one doesn't. I see it so clearly, the loss of my looks.”
“Du bist noch die alte Marschallin?”
“I wish I were, she was thirty-eight.”
“You don't look your age. You'd easily pass for forty-five.”
“I wouldn't,” she said. “I don't think I would. I'm fifty-one and look every bit of it.”
He left her standing sadly naked before the glass.
Â
It was a long white winterâleaden skies broke, spilling snow endlessly on snow. Sometimes it snowed lazily half the day, sometimes savagely for a day or two in flowing waves of white. The biographer stood at his window watching the snowflakes flying, white curtain lowered, ending no play, beginning none. When it stopped snowing for several days, or a week, the scene, the drama, was the endless white world mournfully searched by an eyeless wailing white wind. The monochrome white dulled the mind, restricted movement, experience. Yet the roads were continually plowed, salted, sanded; and Dubin, heavily coated, scarved, booted, against the weather, walked, the one man in town visible on the snow-rutted roads. The temperature rarely rose above zero. The stringy willows in the dead fields were a greenish mustard-yellow. Pines and bent spruce bristled with icicled snow. Once as he tediously walkedâit seemed to him nowhereâhe plunged into a snowy field up to his gut and waited for his life to change.
The long walk-run was still routine. He had fitted himself for the task: you did it daily and therefore could do it. The experience proved you could. He was compelling a willed experience to contend with another, unwilled, that lingered. But as soon as it became easier to do, the wind, freezing cold, and the icy earth, made it harder to do. If you stopped for a single day, much you had accomplishedâat last got used toâyou had to accomplish again. For two days at the end of the month the temperature rose and it rained steadily, drearily, foggily; then the weather again turned frigid, the snow stiffened, slush froze; the roads were inches thick with ice. There was a week of twenty below, two awesome days of thirty below. The rumbling clanking snowplows only thinly shaved the stony ice-ruts on the road. Dubin gave up the long walk, against the insatiable will. Now when he left the house he picked his way along the glistening slippery ice only to the covered bridge and back. Even a mile seemed a mad thing to do. People offered rides and shook their heads when he waved them off. They sensed his creation: his trial.
The radio called it a hard winter. It was desolate; and in his study the windows were frozen over. Icicles hung from the deep eaves of the roof and grew thick and long. One long icicle was a four-foot spear before it broke in sunlight and crashed below.
Kitty was sick of being housebound. “Let's, for God's sake, get away to a warm place. We've never been to the Caribbean. What have you got against a warmer climate?”
He offered to let her go alone.
“I don't want to go alone, don't ask me to. Let's both go for a week. I'm married to you, not your book. I want to be free of it.”
“You are free of it.”
“I want you to be.”
He had to hang in. She thought, he guessed, that he might be getting back to work and said no more about going away. Dubin kept to his room for long hours each day, letting her think what she might be thinking. He let her think so but sat at the desk reading. He read one biography after another, famished for lives.
From his window he watched the sunset reflected on the nearby hills. As the winter sky darkened the hills were suffused in rose, lilac, mauve, and these colors, in contrast to freezing daylight, seemed warm, warming the bluish-gray outcroppings on Mt. No Name. One evening the icy mountain blazed in rose flame. From this illusion of warmth he traveled to another: the rosy winter sunset was the promise of spring. Hadn't Thoreau said the mind was the only stronghold against winter: it could, at least, anticipate spring. Good, but not if spring held out to the end of spring: it shunned the anticipating mind. The outside thermometer read six below and winter had far to go before it yielded to reason or mercyâor to the thunder of the wheeling earth: through February and March into the teeth of cold April. In the Northeast, at the thin edge of New England, it sometimes snowed on the flowers of May. If spring comes can spring be far behind? Anticipation admits there is tomorrow, not much more.
Kitty, nursing a cold, was too restless to stay in bed. She wandered in the house, straightening things: ashtrays, vases, flowers. She wiped her oak table. “When I have nothing to do I do everything.” She wore a voluminous robe over her bed jacket and nightgown, and a pair of Dubin's black socks he hated to see on her, to keep her feet warm. In another mood she wore a brown housecoat and silver slender mules; and a kerchief to warm her head.
Her hair fell in strands on her shoulders. Colds, she complained, made her hair lank and darkened her complexion. Her nose ran, her eyes were rheumy; she was like a small animal he couldn't name. Kitty pulled up the living-room window and poured sunflower seeds on the bird-feeder shelf, then sat sniffling, sneezing, waiting for a winter bird to appear. After an hour a blue jay landed on the feeder with a thump, saw her watching, and flew off scattering sun seeds.
She sat in the kitchen, grooming her housecoat, picking off long hairs. “I seem to be shedding.” She jumped when Dubin coughed, then apologized for being startled. She sighed restlessly, seemed someone's lost selfâhis fault, he thought. Dubin was burdened by his lack of affection; knew she felt it.
The telephone rang. When she picked up the receiver a boy's voice said, “Why don't you go get yourself fucked?” Kitty flung the phone against the wall.
Sometimes when she answered the ring the telephone clicked off. She gave up a call reluctantly. “Hello, hello,” she called. “Hello!âHello!” she insisted to the telephone.
“Who are you trying to hear from?”
“That's a stupid thing to say.”
One night she waked from a dream and woke Dubin to tell it to him. She said she would not have minded his waking her.
“I dreamed I was menstruating again. I was flowing profusely and was frightened. I said in my dream, âWilliam, what shall I do, I'm bleeding so heavily?' And you impatiently said, âCut it out!'”
“I apologize,” said Dubin. “Now let me sleep.”
“I'm burning tonight,” Kitty sighed five minutes later. “Is the house overheated?”
“No. Don't open the window or the wind will blast us out of bed.”
She turned on her bed lamp and changed, panting, from a white flannel nightgown to a pink sheer sleeveless one; then fell instantly asleep, while he remained awake thinking useless thoughts until the alarm rang in the dark and he groped his way to the shower.
“Drop dead!”
She woke. “Who?”
“Nobody you know.”
“I'll bet I do.”
“I spoke to the mirror, don't take credit.”