“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the goddamned things you say.”
In the bathroom she gargled loudly, ferociously cleared her throat, coughed on and on. He could hear her in his study. She discovered a large black moth on the wall and socked it relentlessly with a rolled-up towel.
Kitty misplaced her diary and asked Dubin whether he had seen it. It was an on-and-off affair in a spiral notebook, rebegun recently in black ink. When they were first married her diary was written in green ink and he occasionally glanced into it when she wasn't around. He felt she left it in sight so he could read what she wanted him to know, but would rather not talk about. A diary was a punitive instrument.
She had begun a book on modern philosophy and after twenty pages set it aside. That afternoon she drove to Winslow to shop for a dress. She couldn't find one she wanted and drove to Albany. There she bought a pair of shoes and a green dress. She returned the dress the next morning. “Green offends me,” she said to Dubin. He had said he didn't care for the dress. She kept the cross-strap elegant black shoes. She had also tried on several hats, but none suited her. Sometimes she bought things to return them.
That night she informed Dubin she had been seeing Evan Ondyk. “Not about you,” she said uneasily. “About myself.”
He knew why but asked anyway.
She said nothing, then went to the bird-feeder window and looked out as she talked. “Since Myra's funeral I haven't felt right. You remember I couldn't stop crying at the cemetery? A sense of loss has stayed with me.”
Dubin remembered.
“Since then I've been thinking of my lifeâwith you, and with Nathanael. That seems to be starting again, though I haven't done it in years.”
“You were dreaming of him last summer.”
“Not as often as I used to. I have no intense feelings about him, but he's still a familiar stranger who keeps standing on the street corner, expecting me to come over and say hello. I remember the most trivial things of our life together, for instance buying him a pair of tennis sneakers one Saturday afternoon while we were out wheeling Gerald in his carriage. Isn't it strange the way we're constitutedâI mean about the past? Jesus, why are we?”
He felt again as though he had married her marriage.
Once when she used to talk about Nathanael, herself, Gerry as a baby, Dubin had felt a sense of being out of it; he no longer felt that.
“Don't make too much of it,” he said.
“I honestly don't want to, but certain things keep bothering me. I don't mean Nathanael. Now I think of Myra alone in that empty farmhouse and I scarcely gave her the time of day.”
He reminded her she had visited the old woman almost daily. “When you couldn't you telephoned. Sometimes you'd shop for her in the morning and also call at night.”
“I could have done more for her when she was sick. She was alone too often. And I feel terrible about Ben running away. I should have paid attention to him.”
Dubin thought it might have been better if she hadn't given up the library job. “At least it got you out of the house half the day.”
“Lay off about that job,” Kitty said in irritation. “I think you'd like it if I was never in the house.”
He denied it.
“All you want is to be alone. If I died you'd get along very well without me.”
“I'd want you to get along without me.”
“I hate your beastly love of solitude.”
She had again been playing the harp. Kitty pulled the gilded frame down on her shoulder, pressed her feet on the pedals, and began to pluck the strings, her hands moving like birds flying at each other. When she sang in a soft mezzo her singing voice was small. One day she played for hours and whatever she playedâChopin, Schumann, Hugo Wolfâsounded lonely. The next day she played as though she were in love or wanted to be; and wanted him to know.
He heard the harp as he sat upstairs at his desk, and found it impossible to read. She never played while he was at work. Dubin was angered, then thought she must be certain he wasn't writing. Yet as he listened to her playing he felt the possibility of life with feeling. He thought, as he listened, of meeting someone with whom he might fall in love, a woman of thirty perhaps. He wanted another chance in marriage; he could do it better than he had done it. And he'd be his bride's first husband.
Kitty tore the strings into a reverberant jangle, then went out for a drive.
When she returned she gaily told Dubin that a young man had tried to pick her up in the parking lot of the supermarket when she came out with her bundle of groceries. “He had a heavy mustache and wore bell-bottom trousers. He looked like a New York actor,” she laughed.
“What did he say?”
“He called me Cutie and asked me to come for a ride. I said I had a ride and took off. He knew I could see through him.”
She then regretted her nature. “I should have flirted with him.” And said she had frittered away much of her life. “I find it distressing not to be better pulled together at this time of my life. I should have done more for myself and not depended so much on my husbands. I'm upset about your problems and the way we are. I'm also upset because I feel I've been a lousy mother, or my kids would write once in a while. I'm tense about Maud coming home âif she ever does.”
She approached a mirror to look at herself and turned quickly away. She went into the kitchen to brew herself a cup of tea and deeply breathed above the burners before setting down a pot and lighting the gas.
The next morning she misplaced her wedding ring. “I can't find it anywhere, it's lost.” It was an inexpensive thin band. She had always liked its design, its simplicity. Kitty could not find it after taking her shower and spent the morning grimly going from room to roomâunmaking beds to hunt for it. She pulled up rugs, opened drawers, stood on chairs searching closet shelves, feeling along every inch. In the afternoon when after an hour's restless rest she went on relentlessly looking, Dubin offered to buy her a new wedding ring if this didn't turn up.
“I want my old ring,” said Kitty. “It took you a month to find the one you wanted. It was your first real present to me.”
She went on vigorously searching and at last found the ring in a plastic glass in the bathroom.
“Bravo,” said Dubin.
They faced each other in hatred.
Â
Maud Dubin, who had come home only for short stays last year, appeared at the house in early February, her beautiful long red hair shorn and dyed black. Her brows were lined black. Her light eyes seemed to have darkened. “Maud, for God's sake!” Dubin cried. Her eyes appealed to him not to say more. He momentarily turned away, then put his arms around her, kissing the cheek she offered, and after an attempt at casual talk, trotted up the stairs. For a while he stood at his study window watching the leafless swaying trees in the windswept field near the side of the old barn. In ten minutes he trotted down once more to greet his daughter, but
Maud had called a friend and had driven off in Kitty's car. Dubin stared out of his window.
She'd kissed full on the lips as a child, it was her way. She gave feeling so naturally he thought he had earned it. Maud had a raucous laugh and high voice and seemed a little girl until she opened her mouth and spoke in full sentences. She grew according to his vision of what she must ultimately be. Maud resembled Kitty more than Dubin although her red hair derived from his mother, whom he rarely remembered as other than gray-haired. Charlie had told him that as a girl she had a deep-red head of hair. “So people came miles to look on her.” Maud's bronze hair had hung thickly down her back. Kitty had knitted her a white wool hat with a blue band that she wore for years in and out of the house. One night Dubin entered her room as she slept wearing her hat. As he tried to remove it she had lifted her warm arms and held him in sleep.
At fifteen Maud plaited her long hair into a pigtail; and when her father heard the front door shut in the morning he would put down his razor and go to the bedroom window so he could watch her on the back lawn striding along in brown boots, white hat, blue coat, the wooden-barretted pigtail swinging as she sturdily walked toward the woods on the way to the bus stop at the covered bridge.
He would sometimes stand in her room after she had left for school, or was away for the summer, to reflect in it, reflect on her. He would look over her books, surprised by some he had given her. He liked the many volumes of poetry she had collected; her small desk; the flowered coverlet on her prim bed in a soft-yellow room; throw rug on the floor; colored pictures of savage and saint taped on the wall above her head. Dubin looked out of her windows to see what she saw. She was a handsome lanky active girlâswam, backpacked, skiedâwith a slender firm body that grew lovely, after a crisis of fat, as she matured. She had a quiet handsome face with light-blue eyes, uneven lipsâthey were Dubin'sâand a small bony chin. Maud had unexpected qualities and did unexpected things. By Kitty's edict she was Jewish and she called herself a Jew. Kitty had said, “There are only five in town and no house of worship, how can she learn?” but Dubin said, “If she thinks of herself as Jewish let's see what she makes of it.”
Her parents' marriage had been best to her teens; she knew when it was at its less than best. Though Gerry, in his private world, had given her short
shrift, she spoke up passionately for his rights. Among her own, apparently, was a curious impatience with childhood. She seemed to want to live life in contravention of timeâbefore it permitted. Whatever you're running after, her father thought, wait a bit, it'll catch up with you.
“What's her hurry for experience?” he asked his wife.
“I was never like that,” Kitty said. “I played with dolls long past the time she'd given them up. Maybe she's read
Short Lives?”
She had, in fact, years ago.
Maud had departed her room and house in what had hardly seemed sufficient time. After going away to Berkeley she returned comparatively infrequently. She had spent one summer on a dig in Mexico. Another, she worked as a professor's research assistant. She preferred to work when she could, earn part of her keep. “Not that I don't miss you but there's a lot to see and get done.”
Dubin saw the connection with himself yet could not fully comprehend it. “Why should you be gone so long so often?”
“It's not as though I'd left the house, if I keep coming back.” She said in afterthought: “I think of you both a lot.” Perhaps she shared his hunger to live many lives? In imagination he lived hers. She had eased in him a wanting of much he hadn't had as boy and youth. Kitty, it seemed to him, had loved him in part for his love of the girl.
Dubin was disheartened that he had only this ragged self to offer on her short visit home. And that Maud had appeared almost unrecognizable, the fiery flame of her dyed black. She had walked into the house masked. What is she hiding? Had she seen him, after all, with Fanny in Venice? Had it been she in the gondola with the old man? Who is she, nervously clumping around in boots and poncho, who comes as my child, though I can hardly recognize her? What have we become to each other, who were once so much more than we presently are?
When they were alone during the evening after her arrival, Dubin asked his daughter why she had dyed her hair black.
She answered, “Because I'm me”; then said, “I wanted to see how I look in black hair, I know how I look in red.”
“How do you look in black?”
She was for a moment uneasy. “Pretty much as I expected.”
“Couldn't you have imagined it?”
“I'm not good in imagining. I'm good in seeing.”
He said he sensed a symbol in her mask. “This sort of thing a bit extended could hurt you.”
She was annoyed. “Please don't read symbols in everything I do, Papa. I'm not a book. And if I'm masked I'm not the only one.”
“Am I?”
“Maybe. Anyway, let's not go ape on this. Everybody overanalyzes in this house.”
He called it an occupational problem.
“If you want a symbol, be satisfied with something simplerâmaybe somebody looking for herself.”
Dubin therefore apologized.
He recalled, the week she was there, other dissatisfactions of hers: she had, for instance, from childhood, complained about her name. Kitty had suggested her own grandmother's nameâChristinaâfor her, which Dubin had doubted. After considering Crystal they had settled on Maud, later discovered it derived from Magdalene; but Maud was by then Maud. Her middle name was his mother's, Hannah. Who's in a name?
“Maud, Maud, the birds cawed,” she had parodied Tennyson when she was in high school. “Boy, what a jackass name.”
“On you it sounds good.”
“It sounds like a cow call. I'm maudlin is what it amounts to. In grade school the kids made it âMuddy' and now all I hear is âMoody.' What a shitty thing to do to your little girl.” She laughed at that.