He brought the letters downstairs to Mrs. Meyer. Kitty, after reading two,
asked if she could have them if Mrs. Meyer didn't want them; and she, with a little laugh, handed both bundles to Kitty.
The visit to the farmhouse, especially packing Myra's clothes, affected Kitty for days after Mrs. Meyer had gone. She was down again, she confessed. “I still feel bad that I wasn't able to do more for her when she was dying.” Dubin said, “There are some things one has to forget.”
“I can't forget. I regret what I should have done and didn't do. And I have the feeling that in her death I am diminished. I'm afraid I won't easily get over this. Oh, why did you ever marry me?”
He advised her to skip that one.
“It's the same useless guilt,” Kitty confessed, “and it bores me stiff. If Myra is in my thoughts, along comes Nathanael to join us. âAh, Nathanael,' I say, âwhy don't you go see someone else, please? My name is Kitty Dubin and I've been remarried for years to a man who writes biographies, so please leave me alone.' But he looks at me with his trusting intelligent eyes, the true color of which I am no longer sure of, and seems terribly alone. Then I think of his vulnerable son, far away somewhere in Sweden, doing his thing alone, never writing a word, never getting in touch, and I feel a failure at the way I handled him. If I could only shove him up and make him over.”
“The same water under the same bridge. Why do you bother?”
“Because I am Kitty Tully Willis Dubin. Because of my stupid nature. Because you know very well why and keep asking me the same stupid questions. Because I feel you don't love me.”
“Resistâfight it, for Christ's sake!” Dubin was waving his arms.
She said quietly, “I do, I am.” Kitty looked into the distance through the window. She seemed someone on an island with no boat nearby. “I'm seeing Evan,” she said. “He's helping me.” She began to cry. Dubin put his arm around her and she wept briefly, her head pressed to his shoulder.
Let her go to Ondyk, he thought. I've done what I can.
Kitty blew her nose and nasally said thanks.
The next morning, with a last wheelbarrow-load of books, Dubin completed his move from the house to the barn.
He had set his writing table at a window that looked out on a mountain ash. Kitty had offered to make curtains for the windows but he wanted none. As he sat at his table he could see on his left Kitty's Wood, ragged and sparse after winter, just beginning to be green in spring. He sat alone in the silence
of the barn and the surrounding land. It was at first oppressive: he did not want this much quiet, so much space for thought. Then he began to enjoy it. And he was on the move again in his work, perhaps even on track; certainly on the move.
Dubin had at last completed the opening section of the biography, to the death by cancer of Lawrence's mother, and his own illness a year or so after that; and apparent recovery. Then came the watershed year for him, 1912, when in a burst of creativity, among other things he eloped with Frieda Weekley. He had come to consult his French professor; she was his wife, mother of three. Lawrence arrived to have lunch, “a long thin figure,” she thought, “quick straight legs, light sure movements,” and in a sense he never left.
They took off for the Continent together. David Garnett described him as “a slightly-built, narrow-chested man, thin and tall with mud-colored hair, a small moustache and a hairpin chin.” Frieda was “a noble and splendid animal,” a tall woman, blond, with high cheekbones and gold-flecked green eyes. Her movements made you think of a lioness. She had never lived, she once said, before living with Lawrence. She had abandoned husband and children. They fled to Germany and later lived in Italy. But she mourned her children; it enraged him. If she loved them she was not in love with him. He wrote a poem, “Misery.” Frieda was happy and miserable, vivacious and gloomy. “She has blues enough to repave the floor of heaven.” “Nevertheless, the curse against you is still in my heart / like a deep deep burn / The curse against all mothers.” But she was present, day and night, and he woke to the beauty of her body and the sensuous delight and self-celebration it roused in him. “She stoops to sponge, and her swung breasts / Sway like full blown yellow / Gloire de Dijon roses.” He wrote poem after poem and also finished
Sons and Lovers.
“My detachment leaves me and I know I love only you.” “Frieda and I have struggled through some bad times into a wonderful naked intimacy all kindled with warmth that I know at last is love.” “Look, we have come through!” They were “two stars in balanced conjunction.” They had lived it well and Dubin was writing it well.
Kitty came over to see the furnished study. “It's grand. Is there some way I can help youâresearch, type, anything at all?”
He said he would let her know when there was. She then went home,
pausing to ask if he wanted the mail brought over when it came, and Dubin said no.
“You used to love to have the mail the minute it came.”
“I no longer do.”
“I guess I think of the past.”
When he was through for the morning she had a light lunch waiting and afterward went to Ondyk, or to work in the Youth Opportunity program in town. Ondyk wanted her to keep busy and had persuaded Kitty to take on a voluntary job three afternoons a week.
“All I do is type. I wish I could counsel, but I can't. Still the cases are interesting. The youth are the maimed.”
“What about the middle-aged?”
“The middle-aged are the maimed,” she said.
At home she pottered around, played the harp, tried to organize her reading. She had started Thoreau's
Cape Cod.
She had dipped into Lawrence's poems but had found the early ones not to her liking; she liked some of the love poems, “though it's his love mostly.” She was occasionally in her garden. The weather was cold. She got down on her hands and knees and weeded a section of the perennial border. Kitty read the newspapers for hours. They went out to dinner to celebrate her fifty-second birthday.
The birds, given cold spring, sang in cold trees. Dubin knew the phoebe's callâit sounded like “see-bee”; blue jay's aggressive scream; “tisk” of cardinal, its near voice. He sometimes spied the red bird in the mountain ash. It stayed a minute and flew off. He could afterward hear its shrill whistle, its other voice, in the distance. The cardinal appeared in the mountain ash, barely showing itself, hiding its presence as it hopped on the branch, tisking, trying to have a look at him. Whatever he was doing or not doing, whenever the bird lit on a white-blossomed branch of the tree Dubin sensed it was there.
One morning he laid out some sunflower seeds, from Kitty's feeder, on the ledge of the window in front of him. But only when he left the table and stood elsewhere in the room would the cardinal float down. It pecked at the seeds, then flicked its head up, its beady eye watching, until it flew off. Once when Dubin was at work, to his surprise the cardinal flashed down from the tree to peck at the seeds on the window ledge. For an instant he was caught by the bird's eye, black, mysterious. He marveled at its immaculate beauty.
Where had it come from? Why is it so magnificent? To civilize man to protect the bird? “Don't ever die,” Dubin said. The cardinal flew off and he listened for its distant song. He pictured it hidden in the tree in midsummer when the berries of the mountain ash had turned orange-red.
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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 frightenedâhad 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.
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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 âseeing' 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 qualitiesâhypochondria, 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.”