Dubin's Lives (52 page)

Read Dubin's Lives Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

“I'll git you for murderin' my dog, you homusexual bastard!” He was a large-faced gray-haired man in a white undershirt, dirty work-pants, earth-stained leather boots. His face poured sweat as he wandered in the gloomy wood. He seemed dazed, frightened, mourning his dog.
Dubin shivered in the cold tree. He was moved to call out—beg the man's pardon, explain what had happened tonight, perhaps tell him the story of his life—why it had brought him at this moment to this wood. But he dared not utter a sound—felt the farmer would shoot at his voice. He'd be dead before he could identify himself—a madman hiding in a stranger's tree.
The farmer sank to his knees before his dead dog, its head and neck dark with blood. He lay with his cheek on the dog's flank, his shoulders shaking. Dubin, watching from above, thought: At midnight I was in bed unable to sleep, and a few hours later am up somebody's tree after causing him to kill his dog. He regretted there wasn't time to live more than once and maybe do things better another time.
To his dismay, the burly farmer, rising, began to shoot into the trees. He would stand under one, grimly shoot a bullet into it, then pass to the next. “I'll git you, you-Jew-son-of-a-bitch, one way or t'other!”
Dubin, on the verge of calling out who and where he was, held back, fearing the man would fire before he had two words out. He saw himself fall to the ground like an ungainly huge bird.
The farmer aimed his pistol and shot into Dubin's tree. The bullet broke a branch over his head; it brushed his face as it cracked through others on its way to the ground. To keep himself from falling, he clasped the trunk of the rough oak with both arms.
The gun banged twice more as the man aimed at nearby trees. When the pistol was empty, he stumbled into the house, probably to reload. Dubin began hastily to descend, but before he could get halfway down, the farmer reappeared with a quilted blanket and tenderly covered his dead dog. Lifting the animal as if it were a child, he carried it into the wood. Dubin knew an empty grave where he could bury it.
It had begun to rain. The moon had gone; the wood was pitch-black. He slid down the tree, his raw hands bleeding. Avoiding the wood where the farmer had disappeared, he ran in the brush through the trees into the open.
Skirting the lit narrow farmhouse, Dubin ran in the wet dark, expecting a bullet in the back of his head.
Then he saw the cornfield. In the rain he trotted alongside the rows of silage corn, the stalks sighing in the wet. As he turned the end of the sloping field, he beheld through trees the blinking orange light of Kitty's car on the road. In a few minutes he was in it, drenched to the flesh, his teeth chattering. His watch read a minute after three.
Dubin sat exhausted in the freezing car, waiting for morning. He tried to sleep but his consciousness was lit like a lamp. He could not put out the light in the dark. When the sky turned gray he staggered out of the car, came back to lock it, and in the misty drizzle headed toward the highway. As he walked the wet road Dubin thought of the long night. His panic was gone. He knew where he had left it, but not where it would find him again. He promised himself to send the old farmer a dog.
I've had it with testing myself, he thought. Du bist Dubin. I know who I am—well enough to take the next necessary step. I learn best when struggling with the work—with the lives I write. Tomorrow I'll go on with it or I may find myself up another tree, trying to change my life. I must stop running from Lawrence dying. I must act my age.
A dog barked shrilly in the nearby woods, and Dubin began to run. He ran poorly, hardly a trot, came to a stop in a few paces, hobbled on. Until this night he hadn't run in an age. He could not run now. If a dog appeared out of the trees he could do nothing but cry murder. He was holding his pants up with his hand. Blood oozed from the toe of the shoe the dog had torn; he was limping.
As he crossed the wet highway in predawn traffic, a car with blazing lights bore down on him. Dubin waved both arms, crying out a warning. The lights dimmed but the car, after hesitating, again came at him. With a cry he broke into a limping run, holding his pants. A horn honked. The auto stopped with a clonk abreast the biographer running in the highway, a door fell open. “I thought it was you, get in, William.” She was wearing her blue-tinted glasses. The car was warm. He slid in with relief and gratitude. Fanny, calling Dubin lover, said she had come back to stay. Was it this, he wondered, he had earned tonight?
He remembered Dr. Johnson in the marketplace at Uttoxeter, standing bareheaded in the rain where his father's bookstall had been. Years before, the old bookseller, ailing that day, had asked his son to go there in his place and the son had refused. “Pride prevented me.” Fifty years later Samuel Johnson, an old man, laboriously journeyed to the market and stood an hour in the rain by the stall his father had once used, to do for the dead man what he hadn't done.
 
Oscar Greenfeld appeared in the hospital room.
He had come to see Dubin because his own brush with death had revived in him a sense of their old friendship.
The biographer, recovering from bacterial pneumonia, thanked him; pointed to a leather chair. He was lying on a raised pillow watching the green-streaked short November sunset. Each was moved. Each tried not to notice how old they were becoming. Both for a while sat in silence.
Greenfeld then told Dubin the joke about the rabbi who when his shammes prayed, “Dear God, I am nothing, you are everything,” remarked, “Look who says he's nothing.”
Dubin laughed fruitily.
Oscar placed on the bed the book he had picked up on the chair: “I'd have thought Lawrence.”
“Montaigne,” Dubin said, “premeditating death as premeditation of freedom.”
“Why bother?” The flutist coughed raucously, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. “Not to worry, I am not contagious.”
Dubin said that sometime after an accidental foretaste of death in a collision on horses with a servant riding forth to greet him, Montaigne had concluded that death was of minor concern to him. “He felt if we don't know how to live it's wrong to teach ourselves to die and so make the end inconsistent with the whole.”
“He's got his nose in his belly button,” Oscar said in irritation.
“He had no belly button,” Dubin snapped.
“He sounds like Buddha.”
“In the end the great sound alike.”
“Are you afraid of death?”
“No more than ever.”
“After my heart attack I got fed up with the way it buzzed in my mind. To save my sanity I stopped thinking.”
“I have to know.”
“So much is evasion, illusion. How often do we truly know what is? Do I know you? Do you know me? I thought you and I agreed on that?”
“It's a practical thing,” Dubin said gloomily. “I'm tired of the number of times I make the same error. One fails at a certain point when he continues to fail.”
“My sense of it,” Greenfeld said, “is that there is little serious changing of self in life, no matter what one knows. Who knows how to change? It comes or it doesn't. I don't say one mayn't try to make the wrong thing harder to repeat—sometimes he succeeds, usually no. I'd rather concentrate on improving my fluting.”
Dubin said he wanted to know what a man his age ought to know.
“Wasn't it your friend Lawrence who insisted there's no knowing one's way through life?”
Dubin admitted it. “He lived in his own personal mystery, infinitely expanded. I won't relinquish for myself what he failed to know about himself.”
“Forgive him: he wrote well and died young.”
Oscar had brought with him his leather case and began to assemble his silver flute on the chair he'd been sitting in.
Dubin, as he watched, mused: “I thought biography—the thousands of lives I've read and the few I've written—would make the difference between badly and decently knowing. I thought I would know, at my age, what to do when I had to.”
“Still into knowing? Your friend says in an unforgettable passage you read me once to let life invade you. Don't prejudge a flower or the blue sky. Here, William, let me play you, please, a song of Schubert's I've just transcribed —“Seufzer,” a good word for “Sighs.”
Wetting his lips, he played the lied with silvery intensity, moving his head as he moved his fingers. The notes were light clear liquescent.
In the growing dark Dubin listened to the fluting melody of unfulfilled wanting:
“Denn ach, allein irre ich in Hain.

“Not me,” the man in the bed insisted. “I've had it with loneliness. I've had it with youth. I'll take only what I'm entitled to.”
“A ripe old age?”
“I'm an odd inward man held together by an ordered life.”
Oscar unscrewed the flute and placed the parts in its velvet-lined case.
“It's a song, a short song, all I can offer.”
He was, at that time of his life, a thin man with saddened eyes and a hacking cough, except when he played his flute. When he played he was a young man with a silvery voice.
Sunset had turned the clouds light-green streaked with charcoal. When Oscar left it was night.
“Will you want the light on?” he asked as he was going.
“It's mad to die,” Dubin passionately cried.
“Flora,” said Oscar, “sends her best.”
“Please give her mine.”
They kissed in the dark and parted.
 
“Can't we go on being lovers?”
If it was the wrong question how do you know till you ask?
Fanny and Dubin were standing at the long narrow window that Myra Wilson used to call “the west parlor window,” where she had often watched sunsets; often with Kitty Dubin, who afterward described them to her husband. Kitty collected sunsets. Fanny's hair was loosely braided into a pigtail
halfway down her back. Both were wearing coats and wool hats—Dubin his red, Fanny a beige hat pulled down over her ears—in the cold farmhouse as they gazed through the slightly distorted green glass at the long stretch of weedy snow that went on for miles to the dense gray forest rising beyond the fields of Fanny's farm. She had bought it with her inheritance. Her mother had died of a stroke that past summer. “I got half of what she left, my sister the other half. My mother is the only person I feel really loved me.”
Dubin did not protest nor deny.
She told him that her father, recovered from his recent illness, had gone with a chick to the South of France. “Don't expect anything more,” he had said to Fanny. “Whatever you're getting out of my pocket you got from your mother.”
“I don't expect a thing from you, you ape,” she said she had said.
Dubin, as father, winced.
She had soon thereafter driven across the country to Center Campobello, not exactly sure why. “Except that I like small Northeastern towns, even if they are too freaking cold. But I love to live in the country and already have friends here. A lot of young people are coming into the area, buying farmhouses, some doing marginal farming as well as things of their own.” Not long after her arrival she had seen, bargained for, and bought the Wilson farm.
That's for a long time to come, Dubin thought.
He asked Fanny why she hadn't been to see him at the hospital after delivering him there the rainy morning he became ill. Their present meeting, as they gazed out of the window, one overcast frozen day in December, was their first since he had left the hospital.
“I phoned but wouldn't go because I didn't want to walk into your wife.”
Her plain face was serious, light-green eyes distant, calm as they talked; but she hadn't once laid a finger on his arm in the intimate way she had. There was no more than an inch between them where they were standing. It was that kind of window: to see out of it together two had to be standing close. Dubin did not touch her because he sensed she wasn't about to touch him. It was a game of losses: probability annulled possibility.
“About that question you asked me,” Fanny at last said, “I don't think I ought to go on sleeping with you as we used to, William. I have my own life to live.”
It was the wrong question: he oughtn't to have asked, at least not now.
“I know the good things about you,” she said. “And I know you understand me. I even feel you love me in your way but I still can't sleep with you. I have to look out for myself and you're not free to be with me. But I would like to be friends, William, if you want to be mine if we don't go to bed any more. I came back here to find something different for myself, something that might last—which doesn't mean going on sleeping with a married man. I have to be careful of my future. It's my life and I have to respect it.”
He nodded sagely, as though he had put the words in her mouth.
“Still,” Dubin said, “if it was over between us, past redemption, what drew you back? Was it Roger?”
“Not really,” Fanny answered with a quivering yawn, “although I'm glad he's here just as much as I am you are. I'm not sure why or when I made up my mind to come back. Part of it was because I went to U.C.L.A. last summer and got enough credits for a B.A. degree, which N.Y.U. says it will give me in January. I finally got that done partly because of you—because I wanted to show you I could—but most of all because I want to go on to the next step of my life. I think I have got my head together by now. I wasted all I want to waste of life. If I waste more it's cutting my bone. I feel this is the right scene for me. I've always had a nice feeling about being in the country, as if something good might happen to me here.”
“Did you foresee a farm in your life? I never heard you say so.”
“Not necessarily a farm but something to do with the earth—with having land. I don't know much about nature but now I would like to. There are new things in my thoughts that tie up with some that are old.”
Dubin, in a stray thought, remembered her lying receptive to him in a field of flowers.
“I had this shrink once,” Fanny said, “who said because my father was so flighty and unconcerned I had this image of myself with roots in the earth. I've often felt I wanted to dig my hands into soil and make something grow.”
Dubin wondered if she felt the sexuality of the earth. “You're a vital sexual creature, Fanny—in a good sense.”
She laughed breathily. “Anyway I'm not oversexed, although I think my father thought I was.”
“I never thought so.”
“I liked it when you once said I celebrate life with my sexuality.”
He said so had he with her.
“Craig Bosell's brother-in-law,” Fanny went on, as Dubin in silence lamented
his loss, “wants to rent twenty-five acres of my land to put in corn and soybeans. I will plant a vegetable garden next to the house and besides that I already have six goats in the barn and a dozen Rhode Island Reds that I handle myself. I had a course in animal husbandry last summer and it's not all that hard if you have patience and don't mind getting your hands in animal shit. I think I can support myself with what I grow and earn on this farm. I'm sure I will get along although all I have left in cash is six thousand of the forty-eight I got from my mother.”
“Why did you buy the farm outright? Why didn't you take a mortgage and leave yourself more cash?”
“I felt I wanted to completely own my property when I moved in.”
“Fanny Farmer,” Dubin said with a limp laugh this winter's day.
She tittered.
Lifting his hat, he said he had to be going.
Raising her arm, she showed him she still wore his bracelet.
Fanny then embraced Dubin and he was about to pull her into a desperate clinch until he realized she was hugging him formally, as if he were her cousin Alfred if she had one; and Dubin felt this was indeed the coup de grace—their affair had run its course.
He trotted all the way home but had to walk back for the car.
 
That night after supper, Dubin, repossessed by desire, waited in the auto, parked without lights beyond a stand of sugar maples fifty feet up the road from Fanny's farmhouse. The biographer had sad thoughts of free will; of functioning and failing at this time of his life. Greenfeld was right about significant change in a man's life: as you were grooved so you were graved. He berated himself for spying on the girl, fried himself alive. He could not justify his renascent jealousy; lived badly with it. It had, against his will, boiled up, monotonizing feeling, wearying, irritating him; but there was no escaping it. You fled; it grabbed you by the cock and swung you round. Why be jealous now they had formally buried the corpse of their intimate relationship? No rational answer to an irrational response; yet he waited to see if Roger Foster showed up, not knowing what he would say or do if the youth did. Would a fistfight settle anything more than Dubin's hash?
The light went out in the farmhouse kitchen, then bloomed upstairs in Fanny's bedroom. The girl didn't know that Myra Wilson had died in that
room or would she have slept elsewhere? Yet there was something chaste about a young woman sleeping alone in a room where a courageous old woman had died. Dubin, when the bedroom light went out, drove home.

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