The next day Maud flew back to California.
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One freezing night Dubin drove through the white silent streets to Oscar Greenfeld's. He had had to get out of the house, could not stand being alone with Kitty.
Flora had called a week ago. She said she had wanted to talk with him about a book she was reading, but they had never got to it. On the phone Dubin wasn't sure what they were talking about. Oscar was in Europe.
“Are you all right?” he had asked Flora.
“More or less. Listen, William,” she said with mellifluous intensity, “you and I ought to be better friends.”
“How would that work?”
Flora hung up on him.
“Who was that?” Kitty had asked. She'd been in the bathroom. Dubin rarely answered the telephone; it was her instrument.
“Flora.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to talk about a book she was reading.”
“What book?”
He said he had forgotten to ask.
“I think she's been lonely since she's given up traveling with Oscar,” Kitty said. “I had that feeling when I saw her at Myra's burial.”
“Should we invite her over?”
“If you want.”
“You don't want?”
“God knows I've tried, but I simply don't take to her.”
That very cold night, a week after Flora's call, Dubin parked his car in the driveway by the birch trees, and rang her bell.
“What a nice thing to do,” Flora said.
“This isn't the wrong time to come?”
She insisted it wasn't. Flora was wearing a tight pleated white blouse and a long burgundy skirt. Her voice was chesty, throaty, musical. She said Oscar was in Prague.
“Are you dressed to go out?”
“I dress to practice.” She took up her bow and went on with a Bach violin sonata. She played zestfully, a little wildly, her body swaying. The Bach was lively, vibrant, earthy. He had heard her say Bach should not be played like Bach. “He should be played like a gypsy.”
Flora then went into the first movement of a Vivaldi violin concerto, playing him like a gypsy.
Afterward they sat in silence, he in a rocker by the fireplace, Flora on the sofa.
“Were you angry when I hung up on you?”
Dubin said he wasn't.
She laughed throatily. “Dear William, how little surprises you. Your understanding surpasseth surprise. Don't you sometimes feel cheated?”
He said he sometimes did.
“You look low,” Flora said sympathetically. “You looked like hell at your birthday party.”
“It was Kitty's party.”
“It certainly wasn't yours.”
“How long has Oscar been gone?”
“Three weeks tomorrow. He'll be back in a week.”
“Why don't you travel with him any more?”
“Travel keeps me on edge. Besides he's happy to go alone.”
She gazed into the fire. Dubin watched the small flames along the glowing log.
“Would you like a drink or what would you like?”
He asked for brandy. Flora poured herself a full glass of red wine.
“I hear Maud was home.”
“For five days.”
“What is she up to besides her Spanish?”
“She didn't say.”
“I wish I had a daughter,” Flora said. “I'd call her every night.”
“No you wouldn't,” Dubin told her.
“The music was lively, the talk is sad,” Flora said. “Let's not talk sad, William. Let's surprise each other joyfully.”
She went to her bedroom and returned in a white flowing caftan and jeweled sandals. She had pinned up her hair and her neck was long and lovely. She had light hair and high cheekbones.
“Do you know what we're doing?” Dubin asked her.
“Don't you?”
“You're my friend's wife.”
“Your friend is away more than he's home. We've not been getting along well. Oscar is an egoist. And I'm honestly hard up.”
“We've been good friends for years.”
“You're not that much friends nowadays and I've never been friends with your wife. Come, we're not children. You and I have touched looks and fingers in many homes. We've loved each other lightly. Somewhere in a lifetime that calls for a consummation.” She held out her hand.
Dubin rose. “Not in his bedroom.”
Flora led him up to a guest room on the second floor. She removed her caftan and underpants and slid into the bed. Dubin undressed and got in beside her.
Flora's eyes were wet as they kissed. “Bodies are kind, other bodies. Passion is priceless.”
Dubin said she was kind.
Afterward in the quiet dark she asked what he was thinking about.
“Oscar. Kitty a little.”
“Think of me,” Flora said. “I'm fifty today.”
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Dubin, at fourteen, would cross off on the stiff little calendars his father brought home from the Waiters Union the days and weeks of winter. He crossed off the dark days, slush, freeze, rain/snow, wind wailing. One by one he crossed off the icy mornings he dressed in the cold. His mother filled the kitchen stove with balls of newspaper and strips of wood from egg crates Charlie Dubin had got from the grocer on the corner; and when they were lit, spread on them small shovelfuls of pea coal from the pail on the floor. He would dress fast in front of the tepid stove. As a youth he crossed off loneliness. When will winter end? When will it go where winters go? He breathed the January wind, testing it for change, mildness, promise of spring. He was moved by the sight of dead leaves caught in the branches of leafless bushes. He crossed off the cold season as though he were crossing off an unworthy life. In his room he wrote, many times, a single word: “Will i am.”
Now, in Center Campobello, he crossed off nothing. If you mangle time it mangles you. Winter, ancient operator, deaf and blind to his mood, lingered long after Maud had gone. The white sky reflected the white landscape. He hungered for change, change of him. But the iron season would not budge. Mornings were still dishearteningly cold. It snowed almost daily in March, a half inch, quarter inch at a time; the snow melted for a day or so, then it snowed again although rows of maples along the road already wore spigots over metal buckets, and the sugar house near the bridge was pouring white clouds of sweetish steam from its roof vents. There had been a momentary scent of sap and spring. The snow turned heavy-wet, melting as it touched ground. One day when Dubin awoke it was gone. The next morning it covered woods, hilltops, earth.
Again the snow receded, left soiled streaks of white on the hard ground. Except for evergreens the massed bare-branched trees were still winter-gray. The melting snow uncovered meadows wet with grass in soggy clumps and swaths, as though the earth was strewn with soaking rags of brown, yellow, faded-green. After a long rain the bare tree trunks turned brown or black. When the sun reappeared through morning mist some trees flushed rose, some shone an opalescent green. The silver maples, after rain, looked as
though they were wrapped in wet brown blankets. Willows were suffused in bright yellow-green. At the end of the month there were tiny seed clusters on maple branches, but no leaves. It was gently snowing.
March he had given up to winterâwho claimed choice?âbut a wintry April tormented him. Yet the frozen dancer invisibly danced. One day he discovered snowdrops amid traces of snow in the woods. The snow vanished in the sun; earth dried or tried to; it got to be mud season later than last year. The sun grew stronger daily. On the long walk Dubin saw a darkly plowed field that shone with a greenish cast to its turned soil. Birds appeared in clusters on Kitty's feederâjays, robins, house sparrows, starlings Dubin recognized; now and then a purple finch. And when they had flown off a mysterious black-masked loner, a crested red cardinal who had been in and out all winter, popped its beak at grains of corn, stopping as it ate to stare at invisible presences. When a sudden shower struck the earth the birds burst off the ground, flying in crazy arcs. Minutes later they were pecking in greener grass in a soft rain. Then from nowhereâfrom its graveâa mournful dark wind arose trailing bleak streamers of snow. Moments later the sun flared in the bright blue sky. Dubin, on Thoreau's advice, stopped loitering in winter and called the season spring.
He felt, oppressively, the need of an action to take. To do something differentlyâcreate a change that would lead to others. Why hadn't he moved beyond the weight of winter? He was bored sick with expecting something to happen. He felt a hungry need to simplify his life, to see what he could do differently. He felt, before long, the need of a new place to be, observe from, reflect inâafter the gloom of these past months and his uneasy compromises with Lawrence. Dubin at length decided to move his study from house to small barn, where years ago he had built a room to work in, and for one or another reason never furnished or occupied it. Kitty had liked the idea of his having another place to work nearby. She had foreseen a time when Maud and Gerald would come for summer visits with their children, who would not have to be quiet, because Dubin was out of the house.
When the biographer inspected the study in the barn one day in early April it was dampâsmelled distantly of silage and manure; and was abuzz with green-bellied flies that had hatched in the walls. The roof had dripped under the stress of heavy snowfalls, and several feet of top bookshelf were discolored. The smell was dankâwinter's corpse. But the electric heat
worked and soon baked out dampness and attendant odors. A roofer replaced a section of cracked rotting shingles. Dubin killed off the green flies with a spray gun although Kitty had offered to shoo them with a newspaper. He had bought a rectangular pine table for a desk and transported two chairs from the attic room. Kitty gave him a floor lamp she had got as a wedding present when she married Nathanael; and Dubin bought a sofa that converted into a bed in case he felt like sleeping out in the heat of summer. She suggested putting in a phone but he resisted: “It costs money.”
“Suppose I need you in a hurry?”
“When have you since the kids grew up?”
There was no telephone.
Before installing himself Dubin went to the barn in work clothes and galoshes. He swept the study floor and with rags wiped everything within reach. Kitty offered to help but he said he had been wanting for months to do something with his hands. The study was a walled-off quarter of the rear of the barn, a two-windowed room with a long interior wall of shelves halfway to the slanted ceiling. A lavatory with bowl, sink, and a small window had been put in. Dubin lugged boxloads of books across the field in Kitty's garden wheelbarrow. He enjoyed arranging the books, packets of note cards, folders full of manuscript pages, typed and retyped, on the shelves, carefully putting things in place after the disorder of the winter. He hung his picture of Thoreau on the wall by the window where the pine table stood, and near the picture, his Medal of Freedom.
Kitty hoped he wouldn't think of this room as his permanent place to work, though she conceded a change might be helpful now; and Dubin did not tell her that the move had seemed a little like permanently leaving the house.
The morning he tried to work he was assailed by the shrilling of birds in the barn. Dubin knew that a family of starlings had been in the eaves inside the barn but there were no signs of nests. They had got in through a missing windowpane, and when he was cleaning the study he drove them out simply by appearing in the barn. He had opened the double doors and the birds rose with short frantic whistlings and whirring of wings, and flew out into the trees. They sat in the high branches shrilling raucously at him. Dubin replaced the pane and kept the barn doors shut. But the birds slithered in through a two-inch gap under one of the doors; he heard their noisy chirping
when he sat down the next morning. He then nailed a long board to the bottom of the barn door. The starlings, after being driven out again, hung around complaining in nearby trees, then, in a week, disappeared.
Kitty called him heartless.
It had led to an argument about his character, their life together, who had failed whom.
Ten days ago they had been to the Wilson farmhouse with Mrs. Meyer, who had come from Milwaukee to clear out her mother's effects and put the farm up for sale. Mrs. Meyer had seemed stricken at all that had to be done and Kitty did much of it. She had asked Dubin to go along. While Kitty, in head scarf and coat, and Mrs. Meyer, in her black overcoat and brown hat, in the cold farmhouse, were sorting out and packing into small cartons the old woman's house dresses, faded underwear and worn shoes, Dubin went through the trunks in the attic.
In one old trunk he found a half-dozen jars of petrified seed, a shoebox full of family photographs, and two bundles of letters, of James to Myra Wilson, and Myra to James, dated around the First World War. Dubin read several of the letters by candlelight. None could be called a love letter. Through the years of marriage they were pretty much the sparse same; little changed, little grew, little was revealed. Contemplating them Dubin felt tired of marriage, wanted to be alone. Solitude was a clean state of being. He wished he'd had less of it when he was young and more now. He thought Kitty and he would have got along better if they were with each other less often. They were too intent on what each did and said. Even when they spoke lightly each heard more than was said. Even when you were not saying it you were saying it. You sat there with the self your wife saw, not necessarily the self you were into; more comfortable with. He felt the long wear and tear and was glad he had decided to work in the barn, where he was away from her. One thing that wore on Dubin was the eternal domesticity of Lawrence and his wife. They were almost always together unless Frieda went to England to see her children; or detoured to indulge in a short affair. They rarely stopped traveling. Their way was to rent a villa or cottage for a season or two, move in, wash it down, paint where necessary; and live tightly and inseparably together. Lawrence cooked, scrubbed floors, sewed if he had to. Describing his intense domestic life wore on Dubin.