“Law doesn't have to be only that way,” Fanny said. “What I think I'd like to get into is the law protecting the environment and dealing with women's rights. I'd also like to represent poor people in court. I like that pro bono stuff.”
“You'd have to do more than pro bono to make a living.”
“I could grow most of my food here and work in the legal-aid office in town. Or if I couldn't get a job there I'd do half of make-a-living law and half pro bono, once I passed the bar.”
He asked her if she would go away to law school if she was accepted. “There's an old established one in Albany and a new one in Royalton.”
“In the first place I couldn't afford that. In the second place I want to live here.”
“It isn't that you're without potential funds, Fanny. Real estate keeps going up. You could sell this farm for a good profit.”
“I told you I don't want to sell my farm,” she said, sitting up. “I expect to go on living here.”
“Don't get angry in bed.”
“Stay the night,” Fanny said. “I feel lonely.”
He said he couldn't.
Kitty, when Dubin got home, was awake, reading. She no longer set up his breakfast dishes for the morning. She no longer paired his washed socks; she dropped them in a heap on his dresser.
“Do you think I could find work as a secretary?” she asked him. “I'm a good typist, all I need is shorthand. I could pick that up in an extension class at night, but who would want to employ a woman over fifty as a secretary?”
“Some people would.”
“Not many.”
He thought she could make it.
“That won't absolve you from supporting me.”
He was not expecting absolution.
“It'll be an empty life,” Kitty said.
He said nothing.
After a while she said, “I'm smoking too much. Sometimes when I take a deep breath my lungs seem to be burning.”
“Cut down,” he advised.
She said her sleep was dreadful.
“Why don't you try a sleep-disorder clinic? There are many now. Maybe they can help you.”
She said she just might. “Will you come with me?”
He said he would.
After a restless night Dubin made several morning calls to attorneys in nearby Vermont. He took a tablet for heartburn and drove to Arlington to see two lawyers who had said they could see him that morning.
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Dubin returned to Fanny's a few days laterâthat windy pre-spring night in early Marchâto tell her it was possible to study law by clerking in a law office and thus not have to go to law school.
“You'll have to decide pretty quickly because the State of Vermont isn't permitting this procedure much longer.”
“I'd want to start right away if anybody wanted me,” Fanny said in excitement. “What do I have to do?”
“You'd have to be pretty sure of it or it would be an awful waste of time for you and the attorney who had taken you on.”
“I
am
sure, William. I know I am.”
Dubin explained he had been to see Ursula Habersham, a friend of his wife's. “She's a State Senator who's giving up politics because of her husband's poor health. Now she's trying to revive her law office. When I told her about you out here on a farm, wanting to study law, she was interested. I recommended you as a responsible person with a B.A., who by now would have fulfilled the residency requirements. She said she might take you on as a clerk if you were as apt as I said.”
Dubin told her she would read law with Habersham and after four years under her tutelage would take the bar. “If you pass you can practice. There's no salary while you're learning. What you learn is what you're paid.”
Fanny hugged him. “It's what I want to do. I will be a good apprentice. It's just the kind of thing I need.”
“Four years is a long haul.”
She said she wasn't going anywhere.
Dubin said, “I've got you an interview for Monday afternoon.”
Fanny said her mind was made up. “Except what will I do with my goats?”
“Sell them.”
“All but Trudy and her baby. I can take care of them. Jesus, I'm excited, William. My father will fall on his face when he hears I am studying law. Do you think she will take me on?”
“She liked what I told her about you. She liked the fact you had done secretarial work in a law office. I think you stand a fair chance. I praised all your talents but one.”
“I think you like me, lover,” Fanny said.
In her bedroom Dubin gave her a packet of notes he had saved from law school. “These are my old notes on contracts.”
She promised to read them. “If I get into the law office I will throw a blast to celebrate. I've never had a party in this house.”
“Who would you want to come?”
“People around and whatever friends of yours you invite.”
As they were undressing in the bedroomâshe kept an electric heater going on nights Dubin appearedâFanny said she had run into Kitty at the grocery market that morning. “We were both picking out loaves of bread and then recognized each other.”
White or rye? he wondered.
“What did she say?”
“Only what was I doing in town. I said living on a farm. She has bigger feet than I remembered. I could feel she didn't like me though she was polite. I felt sorry for her. She looks mousy and sort of sad.”
“Did you say anything else?”
“She looked at the gold bracelet you bought me in Venice but didn't say anything although she looked as if she had guessed you had given it to me. Then we went our different ways.”
Fanny suggested Dubin ought to stay three days with her and four with his wife. “She could have Thursday to Sunday. I'd like you to be with me Monday to Wednesday. There's a nice warm room with a desk for you to work in downstairs while you're here. I'd like to have that to look forward to. It would be less lonely those nights you aren't here.”
Dubin said he didn't think Kitty would agree to that.
Fanny smiled vaguely. “Try it and see. I bet she would now. It's only fair.”
He said he might.
“I don't understand why you stayed married to her.”
“It wasn't so hard,” he explained. “I'm a family man. We had kids we loved. I had my work to do. Conditions were good. There are other things.”
“But do you love her?”
“I love her life.”
“Do you love me?”
He said he did.
She put on softly a Mozart flute concerto. They embraced in bed. “God bless you, dear Fanny.” She wet his flesh with her pointed tongue.
Dubin soon heaved himself out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, got into pants and shirt.
As he came out of the farmhouse Fanny's window went up and she leaned out in the orange light, her hair flying in the pre-spring wind.
“Don't kid yourself,” she called.
Roger Foster waited in the shadow of a long-boughed two-trunked silver maple as Dubin ran up the moonlit road, holding his half-stiffened phallus in his hand, for his wife with love.
Works by William B. Dubin
SHORT LIVES
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
MARK TWAIN
H. D. THOREAU
THE PASSION OF D. H. LAWRENCE: A LIFE
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ANNA FREUD (WITH MAUD D. PERRERA)