Dubin's Lives Read online

  He became aware he was leaving his study more often than usual; he would drift down into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. He’d be restless, Dubin explained it to himself, well into beginning a work—it might take fifty, sixty pages before you were settled in, sure you were working right. He had the sense of having been more quickly into Thoreau, wasn’t yet knee-deep in Lawrence. Once he was securely placed in the life he’d stick it out steadily—hours at his desk without a break, except for an occasional visit to the john. Holding cup on saucer he’d wander through the house, sipping absently, standing around thoughtful, probing his problems. If Fanny, on days she was there, happened to appear, Dubin nodded as though in thought and went on thinking.

  Once when he lifted his coffee cup in greeting she said “Hi” cheerily and ducked out of the room.

  “How come,” Kitty inquired one morning, “you’re drinking lots of coffee?” Years ago she had tried bringing up a cup of mid-moming broth to his study. This had soon come to an end: not really her style, not really his. It took time and added weight.

  “Beginnings are tough.”

  “But you’ve begun.”

  One did not necessarily begin at the beginning, Dubin explained. “Beginnings may be more effective independent of strict chronology—where the dominant action of the life starts, the moment of insight, cohesion, decision. You can search that out or perhaps define a moment as a beginning and let what follows prove it. I’m not sure I’m there yet.”

  “You will be,” Kitty said. “Don’t strive for perfection right off.”

  He ignored the remark. They’d agreed she was not to advise him how to work unless he asked her.

  She poured herself a sherry; it was near lunchtime. He was aware how well she looked this summer, her long body retaining its shape, if slightly heavier than last year. She looked younger than fifty-one, but if you said so she tittered, or sadly smiled at all you hadn’t tallied.

  “How’s the girl working out?” He poured from the coffee pot.

  “Not badly. She tries. I told you she’s off to New York in September. I’ll advertise then.”

  “Has she said anything about herself?” Kitty had long talks with people who worked for her.

  “Not very much. She’s intelligent, has a mind of her own and the usual dissatisfactions of someone her age, plus a few I can only guess at. Her old man’s let her down, but I don’t know how or why—the usual crise de confiance, I suppose. She’s apparently decided to drop out of college, after a year in, two out, in again into her senior year and now wanting out for sure, she says.”

  “What brought her to Center Campobello?”

  “She was living in an upstate commune, got fed up, and was on her way to New York City when she had an accident coming off the highway outside town. So she stopped off to earn some money to have her car repaired, et cetera. She’s hinted some vague other reason, maybe looking up an old lover —I don’t know. She’s a mild depressive, I’d say.”

  Kitty analyzed people; she’d long ago been psychoanalyzed.

  “She reminds me a little of Maud,” Dubin said.

  His wife was incredulous.

  “Lots of vitality,” he offered. “Direct too, wouldn’t you say?”

  “She’s energetic enough when she wants to be, otherwise tends to droop.”

  “Seems to present herself as sexy?”

  “I’d say so—does Maud?”

  “Don’t run it into the ground. Just an impression.”

  “Impressions either have or haven’t validity.”

  Dubin was silent.

  “She knows Roger Foster,” Kitty said. “Apparently she applied for a job in the library but they had none. Now he calls for her after work—waits in his car in the driveway. I’ve asked him to come in but I think he’s uneasy with you.”

  Dubin grunted.

  “What more could you ask for a single attractive slightly blowsy girl who isn’t your daughter, or for that matter much like her?” Kitty asked. “Fanny strikes me as not quite put together.”

  “Is Roger her lover?”

  “How would I know?”

  He’d never liked him, a sandy-haired large-shouldered insistent young man. When Roger was in college he’d worked one summer for Dubin, theoretically assisting a carpenter who was altering the barn Dubin was in part turning into an outside study that he had since then not much used. Roger hadn’t worked well, goofed off. Lazy bastard.

  “Maud never liked him either,” Dubin said. “He hung around when she was barely fifteen. She had his number.”

  “With your assistance,” Kitty said. “That was years ago. He’s a serious man now and a really good librarian. Crawford isn’t coming back and Roger, I hear, will replace him.”

  “He won’t get my vote.”

  “He won’t need it.”

  Dubin was uncomfortable with his judgment of Roger Foster, because he had disliked him on meeting him and forever thereafter. The biographer did not care to be the victim of that kind of response to people. It indicated objectivity missing, a quality he could not afford to be caught short of.

  He glanced at his watch and whistled. “I’ve been talking to you for half an hour. Lawrence will fry me alive.”

  “Don’t regret it,” Kitty said. “I hardly see you once you’re into a new biography.”

  “You see me forty times a day.”

  She wanted a hug before he left. “I’ve been feeling lonely.”

  They kissed affectionately as Fanny entered the room and at once headed out.

  Dubin would wander through the house with his cold coffee cup, sipping from one room to another: a momentary break from work—he’d return refreshed. He enjoyed coming on Fanny in motion: forcefully stroking the rugs with the vacuum cleaner; the choreography with a mop over the kitchen floor; her intense private gestures of ironing; hurrying up and down the stairs. He enjoyed her hips in bloom, ample bosom—she wore a brassiere now after a glance or two by Kitty—everything in her figure more beautifully rounded because of the dramatic narrowing of waist between bust and bottom. She was gifted in femininity, Dubin had decided. Fanny wore miniskirts; on hot days she appeared in shorts and gauzy blouses—black, orange, yellow—her white or black bra visible through the garment.

  Intermission, he called his viewing of her—the serious looking when she seemed inattentive yet had surely invited. Is she flirting with me? Whatever for—a man my age? When she bent it was a gracious act. A beautifully formed female figure suggested ideal form—her ass a bouquet of flowers. Ah, my dear, if I could paint you nude, if I could paint. Fanny as “sexual object” was balanced by the responding thought that he wouldn’t mind being hers if she could imagine it. Is she really so tempting a dish, he asked himself, or am I beautifying every cubit of her according to my need? Women move me to deepest feeling, of pleasure and loss. As if they are eternally mine yet never belong to me. He felt at his thought, as it reverberated amid others, a mounting loneliness. Dubin waited till the feeling had passed. Afterward he reflected that this intense unexpected response to her had probably occurred at the thought she would soon be gone—in a few weeks to the omnivorous city. A momentary source of innocent pleasure lost—the beauty of a vital young woman. Too bad she’d never know. My God, how long does this romantic hunger—residue of old forms, habits, daydreams—haunt the blood?

  Though he foresaw her departure he might as well enjoy the time she’d still be around. As for interrupted concentration, so long as he produced his daily two pages he had little to criticize himself for. But Fanny, as though to prove that his foreboding of an end was itself an ending, seemed to tire of the entertainment: his seeking her; her unwilling continuous performance. How juxtapositions distort intent, pleasure. She seemed all at once actively avoiding him. Dubin, concerned, looked less her way, would play no wolf to her harried Pamela. Once when he accidentally came upon her in the kitchen as she was ironing his underpants, Fanny’s expression was grim. Both were embarrassed as t
heir glances met. Dubin drained his coffee cup and hurried off.

  Afterward she hid when he appeared, or attempted to, whatever his amiability or good intentions; she dropped what she was doing and walked off. Fanny ducked into the bathroom or hastened down the cellar stairs and in a few minutes the washing machine was rumbling. Or she slipped out on the porch and had a cigarette, leaning against a white pillar, staring at the old hills; the hills at least were eyeless. But the biographer enjoyed the sight of her: Susanna turned away from leering elder—lovely figure, something lonely about her. What sort of life does she have? Too bad she can’t feel my admiration—as admiration—or perhaps she does and still would rather not. We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers—terrible construction, and here’s Moses-Jesus preaching love thy neighbor as thyself. He went back to his study, dejected. Old billy goat—these feelings at fifty-six, disjunctions of an ordered life. We are all clowns.

  Dubin resumed work with affection for it—truly working kept one from useless emotion—on keel, more or less content. The chapter was bestowing more, resisting less. The facts had been laid out easily enough though he wasn’t satisfied with all they said or didn’t say. But patience: good beginnings, those that assured the biographer they were right and so was he, blew in like spring winds; some like storms. Some you coaxed out of the blue. The sky was in the process of yielding. What grew word by word grew in value. The young Lawrence had appeared, his face in a pool, or the pool his face. That is to say, the boy, from the first, reflected himself. Double self—never, then, recognized as such? Was this one of the hidden keys of the life—explains the sexual things, never at peace—and his love of ideologized metaphor—double image defined as one? The essential broken self?—unity achieved only in the work, his rainbow? Dubin, concentrating sentence by sentence, no longer ventures out of his room when the girl’s around. Were she clinging to his door, he’d hold his water.

  Fanny, he thought, a foolish name.

  Summer was ending.

  Winter waits in the wings.

  One morning in early September Dubin hurried downstairs for a cup of hot coffee to keep him awake. Kitty had slept badly and borne him along part of the ride. When he returned to the study he found Fanny there, gazing at the pictures and mementos on the wall; she was examining in particular a framed blue-and-white beribboned gold medal.

  The girl was standing close by the wall. Nearsighted, he thought, yet she rarely wears glasses, terrible vanity. In any case she was reading the citation of the medal in the frame. Dubin knew it by heart: “Presented by Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States of America; to William B. Dubin, for his achievement in the Art of Biography; at the White House, December, 1968.”

  “Medal of Freedom,” Dubin explained; formal—would not impose.

  “Far out,” Fanny said, amiably turning to him. “I’ve seen it here but never read what it said because you like to get back into your room so fast. The reason I came in just now is the door was standing open and I thought you were reading in Gerald’s room so I could dust here.”

  He set down the cup on his desk, trying to keep it from rattling. A puddle of coffee had formed in the saucer.

  “It was presented to me after the publication of my H. D. Thoreau—you’ve heard of him?—American essayist, 1817—62, author of Walden and other works. He was a disciple and somewhat ambivalent friend of Emerson —idealized his wife Lidian, might have been in love with her but there’s no impressive evidence. A biographer can’t afford to lean toward guesses of that sort, no matter how sympathetic his nature.” “I’ve read Walden. Some chapters turn me on—the scenes in winter and at night.” “Wonderful.” Dubin had been about to say they had much in common but caught himself.

  “You may not think so but all my life I’ve wanted to live close to nature, except I’ve never figured out how.”

  She said she had joined a Buddhist commune near Tupper Lake that summer. “Which was to be no sex and very vegetarian, including growing your own lettuce and beans. I liked it at first but one of the swamis there, a secret acid tripper, got on my nerves, so I split.”

  The swami pursued her with his naked eye? Dubin felt drawn to the girl in a way that saddened him.

  He pointed to a small photograph in a hand-carved frame on the wall. “That’s Henry—he was called Davy when he was a boy—not exactly a handsome man but people liked his looks. Hawthorne said they became him more than beauty.” He beamed at her.

  Fanny looked closely at the picture.

  “Note the longish nose,” Dubin observed. “Emerson said it reminded him of the prow of a ship. They say Thoreau would pretend to swallow it—tried to get his lower lip over it for laughs. He also tooted a flute as he danced with himself. In winter they skated on the frozen Concord, our boy waltzing like Bacchus on ice. Emerson leaned his ministerial face into the wind and self-reliantly shoved off. Hawthorne, his daughter Rose wrote, skated like a Greek statue on runners. Henry clowned on the ice. With luck he might have been a comedian. Mostly he settled for a solitary life in the woods—one makes his fate: he was there in every wind and weather. Some say eventually it undermined his health and shortened his life—but it’s the old business of what for which. Out of this experience came his journal, where he appeared as a figment of his own imagination. And from which he extracted many treasures, including much of Walden. Or it might have worked the other way: he had started a journal on Emerson’s say-so and went into the woods to let it find its world.”

  Fanny gave him the first warm smile he’d had from her.

  Dubin went on, “He was ambitious to be great—become a major American artist. He is said to have felt a guilt-ridden desire to surpass at all costs and did so by turning nature into a personal possession. Perry Miller made him more conscious of every move toward his literary destiny than I. Not everybody knows what his personal metaphors mean or what he’s secretly becoming, though one may sense it, of course. To my way of thinking his major concern, given who he assumed he was, was learning how to live his life. ‘One doesn’t soon learn the trade of life,’ he said. He spent years trying, which is to say he lived to learn, to apprehend and control the forces that shaped him. He said he didn’t want, when it came time to die, to discover he hadn’t lived.”

  “Neither do I,” said Fanny.

  “Nor I,” Dubin allowed. “Once he accidentally set fire to the Concord woods and burned up several hundred acres. The townspeople were furious. His behavior was strange: he watched the fire and made no attempt to help put it out. Death, one might expect, inhabited the journal. His brother John’s short life was something he never ceased mourning. They’d been rivals for a young woman who turned them both down when each proposed marriage.”

  “I know he wasn’t married. What did he do for sex?”

  “Apparently he died chaste—as they say,” the biographer soberly answered. “He’s one of those people who live on sublimated sex. There are more around than one would think. You marry nature and live in solitude, having it both ways. But given how he lived, and considering what he accomplished, who’s to say how much he missed, or that he missed much?” Dubin seemed to put it tentatively.

  Fanny made a face. “I don’t buy that. I don’t care what he accomplished in his books, when you get right down to it he missed the most satisfying pleasure of life. I mean we’re human, aren’t we?”

  His glance fell on her bosom. Dubin quickly looked up into her light-green eyes. Fanny observed him with nearsighted intensity. Her expression momentarily surprised.

  “One of his best friends,” he admitted, “said, ‘No man had a better unfinished life.’ I’m not attempting to justify his celibacy or whatever part of it he practiced, Fanny. I simply say he found his way. In essence, like many men of his type, he was a happy man. ‘I love to live,’ he said, and I believe him.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  He listened for mockery but heard none.

 
“Why do you ask?”

  “Because I ask myself.”

  “What do you answer?”

  “It’s my question.”

  “Affirmative,” Dubin replied.

  Her eyes, he thought, reserved judgment.

  “I have my doubts about how happy he was,” Fanny said. “It must be a pretty dry lay, banging nature.”

  “There are many ways of love,” he ventured.

  “Not if you have to do it to a tree, Mr. Dubin.”

  He laughed warmly. “Please call me William.”

  “William.”

  To hold her there he went on concerning his medal: “I didn’t want to accept it at first because I didn’t like what Johnson had done to escalate and prolong the Vietnam War. But my wife said it wouldn’t be courteous to turn the medal down if my country wanted to honor me and my book; so I took it.”

  Fanny mildly grunted.

  “After dinner Johnson took me aside and asked me to write his ‘truthful biography.’ He held my hand in his big hand and said that Lady Bird had loved my book and there was no doubt in his mind that I could do a first-rate Life of LBJ. I said I was honored but couldn’t accept his kind suggestion.”

  “Good for you.”

  “That’s what my daughter said. Anyway, I backed off as best I could. I said that though I’d done a life of Lincoln, on the whole I preferred to work with literary figures. ‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ his eyes said, ‘I’m a better man than you.’ ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘I took your medal.’”