He dressed in the dark so as not to awaken the girl.
“I don’t want to die,” Fanny moaned in her sleep.
A universal lament.
Dubin went down in the cage elevator and through the dimly lit lobby, though it was not much past eleven, into the street. Where does a concerned father seek his erring daughter? The sky was clouded, no sign of moon, the night air hazy, cool; he crossed a stone bridge over a narrow canal exuding mist. In an alley he passed a blind black man touching the wall with his fingers. The biographer drifted through a maze of crooked streets around La Fenice, peering into lit places, staring at elderly men with young women. Though his search, if it was one, came to nothing, he fantasied meeting Maud—she wandering alone wanting to find him—their encounter, embrace. Afterward they’d walk together. He wanted to tell her why he was in Venice though she’d probably not want to know. Perhaps they had experienced similar disappointments and might, tomorrow morning, leave together for the States. Dubin doubted it in afterthought. He doubted Maud was in Venice.
Entering Harry’s Bar he sat at a table in a corner. An old waiter with long gray sideburns brought him a brandy. Dubin was moved to speak to the man but did not. He sipped his brandy, watching those at the bar and tables, smart-looking men and sensuous women, even when oddly dressed, beautifully dressed. He sought among them a woman with a sense of past: past time, past pain, awareness of the difficulty of loving. Only the young, the raw young, were present. He did not want to be among them.
Dubin wandered into St. Mark’s Square, through the piazzetta to the water. It was a square walk he was making in a circle. There were a few tables in front of Florian’s—three or four people sitting quietly in the dark. The other cafés were closed, their tables set top on top, chairs stacked in columns. Some of the summer tables were piled up under the gallery arches. On the embankment by the mooring poles several gondolas lay like dead fish out of water, to be stripped and stored in back canals and there await the end of winter. Two gondolas were still moored in the dark water. The tide was rising and the undulating water slapped the boats and sucked at them. A narrow plank boardwalk on carpenter’s horses had been laid across the piazza for the winter floods.
Over the water the night was starless. A string of dim lights ran along the misty shore of the Giudecca. Behind the shore lights rose a dark mass of houses, lit windows here and there in a sparse ascending diagonal. Behind this island other islands floated in the sea. An island is a mystery, he thought. A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all a loneliness and men know it best.
Dubin stood at the low wall overlooking the water in front of the small tufted umbrella pines in the giardinetta. A half dozen starved cats were consuming the remains of somebody’s spaghetti supper on a spread newspaper. An old man in a light coat approached and asked him for a cigarette.
“I have forgotten my own,” he said.
Dubin thought it was the waiter he had seen at the bar but this was another man. He handed him his pack of cigarillos.
“Thank you, signore.”
“For not much. They’re bad for your health.”
“I have no health.” The old man touched his hat and walked slowly along the embankment. He crossed the steps of the small stone bridge and disappeared.
The biographer thought of that other waiter, his father, who had waited all his years for life to catch up with him. He was waiting when he died. He died waiting.
Papa, his son said, you died before much had happened with me. I wasn’t married. You only once met my future wife, never saw your granddaughter. I am a biographer. I want you to know that President Johnson—he was also after your time—gave me a medal for a book I wrote about someone called Henry Thoreau, a large-souled man in the natural world. That’s what I do: write books about the lives of men.
He looked at his hands as he spoke. They were his father’s.
What do you know about people’s lives? said the waiter.
I’m not a kid any more, Papa. Some things I know.
So what kind of a medal you got?
It’s called Medal of Freedom—an award for accomplishment.
It would be better if it was from President Roosevelt.
I was only a child then.
Believe me, if I could write a book it would be a wonderful book. I saw a lot in my time. I’m not a waiter thirty years for nothing.
I wish you’d been alive when they gave me the medal. There was a dinner in the White House.
This I would enjoy. I would also donate my services if they needed an extra waiter.
I hoped you would live till I began to earn some money. I wanted to make your life easier.
A living I always made. Not much a living but I made a living. Enough to take care of your mother.
I wish she had lived.
In good health, said the waiter.
He was a round-shouldered man of medium height with purple-veined legs and an overly patient nature. Waiting was congenial to him; not much changed as you waited. He had wet blue eyes and a puffy pinkish face. His eyelids itched and he rubbed salve on them. At work he wore an alpaca jacket whose stains he rubbed out by brushing them with a rag dipped in hot coffee; a daily washed white shirt, snap-on bow tie, black wool trousers. He wore white cotton socks he changed twice a day and knobbed ankle-length shined black shoes. The shoes, when at last he abandoned them, looked like misshapen baking potatoes. He carried a yellow pencil stub on his right ear and worked mostly in Jewish dairy restaurants.
Charlie Dubin was an infinitely patient man, not known for his humor. He did not endear himself to his customers as other waiters did, with their bantering, wisecracks, jokes. He did not do as well with tips as some of the other men. The bosses said you could depend on Charlie but he made no great effort to make those he served happy.
I give good service, said Charlie Dubin. Let the food make the customer happy.
While his customers were eating he withdrew to the coatracks and waited. He waited earnestly, attentively, patiently.
Whyn’t you crack a smile once in a big while? a patron asked.
Give me your order and I will deliver to you right away, Charlie said. Smiles I am not serving.
The man left a nickel.
One boss said he depressed the place, the customers complained.
Mr. Goldfein, said Dubin, I am a good waiter. I write down right the order and deliver quick from the kitchen. I don’t want to be a vaudeville entertainer. Don’t ask me I should be Pat Rooney or Smith and Dale. If the customer wants vaudeville let him go to RKO.
Take a walk, said the boss.
Charlie Dubin took another walk. A month later he was working elsewhere. But he told no jokes, seemed to know none. His life had made him a deadly serious man. He had seemed to want little, made do, lived a meager life. All he knew was being a waiter. When he was a boy William had found it hard to approve him. He gave me all he could, more than I wanted of his: an inclination to a confined lonely life. It was mine before I knew it; for years I held it against him.
Charlie winked at him.
Hannah Dubin, a thin small once redheaded whispering woman, cracked her knuckles against her breast, whispering, Siz mir nisht gut. She had, in her late thirties, not long after the death of her nine-year-old son, become mentally ill. She was afraid of the white window shades and of the long dark hallway of the railroad flat. She was afraid of footsteps on the stairs in the hall. She hid in the back bedroom, coming out to clean; or cook a chicken, then hid in the bedroom. Her face tightened against old friends visiting. The waiter feared sending her to a hospital; he feared she would suffer there. The doctor who had talked to her told Charlie Dubin that keeping her home wouldn’t help; still she might recover, remissions were possible.
One winter morning, alone in the house, she swallowed half a bottle of disinfectant, and William, sent home from school because
he was running a fever, came upon her lying on the clean kitchen floor, the acrid-smelling uncapped bottle of CN sitting in her shoe. He rushed downstairs to the drugstore and afterward induced vomiting by getting her to swallow the contents of a bottle of citrate of magnesia he had bought in panic.
Yes, she whispered, yes, yes. She drank from the bottle as though famished, as though she had wanted all her life to drink the miraculous potion he served her. It would make her sane again, healthy, young—would restore her chance to have everything she hadn’t had in her life. She drank her own everlasting hunger. When she recovered, her graying hair coiled in braids on her head, she promised she would never—never again.
Willie, don’t tell Papa I am crazy.
Mama, don’t say that.
She warned him: Don’t go in the rain, Willie, not in the rain. You will catch a cold, the doctor will come, you will get pneumonia. Don’t go, Willie, out in the rain.
Hannah sat in the darkened bedroom, shades drawn, whispering to herself. She was meek in the house but when she ventured into the street to buy something to eat she shouted at those she said were following her.
The steak is in the bathtub, she whispered in the dark.
The doctor thought she ought to go to the hospital but Charlie, waiting for her to get better, cooked, and cleaned when he could and talked to her in whispers. Hannah, he said, get better or your whole life will be wasted. When her eyes were wet she lifted her skirt and wiped them with her cotton petticoat.
Look how clean she is, the waiter said to his son.
She was dead at forty, of pleurisy and anguish. She did not thank her husband for waiting for her to get better; she did not thank her son for having kept her from taking her life.
He hid from his memories of her.
William and Charlie Dubin lived alone in the house.
After William had met Kitty he told his father about her, and the old man said miserably, Why do you want to marry a goyish widow with a goyish child that he will someday call you names? She won’t be comfortable with you.
Dubin said he would take his chances.
William, said the waiter passionately, you know what we went through with Hitler. Don’t marry somebody that she will take you away from the Jewish people.
He wrote his father a note: Dear Papa, How can a man be a Jew if he isn’t a man? How can he be a man if he gives up the woman he wants to marry?
His father kept his letter in his pants pocket and Dubin found it there when Charlie died. He tried to have him buried in a grave near his wife’s but there were no plots, so they lay in different cemeteries.
“Go look for your daughter,” the waiter’s voice said.
In a street near the embankment a long-faced girl in sweater and jeans sat on a stool bowing a cello clasped between her legs. The music she played was from a Bach suite for cello unaccompanied. Dubin had the record but stayed to listen. He listened, standing to the side, not to distract the girl. It was late. On the ground lay a small cardboard box with a few lire in it. The girl did not play all that well but he listened till the end of the movement. Dubin liked the harsh-sweet gutty bowing. He liked the sensuous dignity of J. S. Bach, husband of two wives and father of twenty children, jigging in a state of grace, his music flowing like water falling in an iron fountain. The pouring fountain was the music. The cellist was not a beautiful girl—her face was long and her figure meager; but she looked handsome playing the cello in the Venetian night and Dubin felt he loved her.
In the morning Fanny said she was so much better, though her gut felt tender. “It was all the wine that did it. I always overreact to wine.” Dubin had hovered over her like a mother duck. He had given her a pill that stopped diarrhea and another that diminished nausea. They were pills that Kitty brought along when they traveled. He fed Fanny dry toast with sugarless tea. She was hungrier than she had any right to be but he wouldn’t let her have more food. “I’m dying of hunger,” Fanny complained. She still felt queasy and had cramps but they weren’t bad and she was decently comfortable and even “cozy.”
It was raining on the canals. They watched the rain through the window, Fanny lying propped against two pillows in their double bed, her legs covered with a blanket. She wore a light black nightgown. She was reading Sons and Lovers and said she liked it.
“I’m up to here,” she read aloud: “‘He only knew she loved him. He was afraid of her love for him. It was too good for him, and he was inadequate. His own love was at fault, not hers.’ Why is he such a shnook?”
“She reminds him of his mother. He senses it.”
“Don’t tell me the end, I don’t want to know.”
“The end is there already.”
“I don’t want to know it.” For a while she stopped reading, seemed depressed.
“Anything the matter?” Dubin asked.
“I was thinking about myself. I’m not the world’s most stable woman.”
He said, after a moment, that the feeling was not an unnatural one at her age.
“Yes, but why now?”
“You tell me.”
“Just a mood, I’m tired of being in bed.” Sighing, she went back to her reading as he flipped through a guidebook of Venice. He felt close to her, easy in his mind—at home; he was glad he had suppressed his doubts and gone off with her.
She told him about her life—the usual happy unhappiness of childhood. She had an older sister she called a bitch and a father who thought of Fanny as one. “My mother is the only friend I’ve got.”
“You’ve got me.”
Playing with her long hair, she observed him. “I like to be with you, William. I also like the vibes you have with what you’re doing. I wish I could do more with my life.”
“More what?”
“More good,” she said hostilely.
He said he had often had the same thought.
Dubin got up and kissed her dry lips, and her ears and eyes. She pressed his hand to her breast.
She had tossed her blanket aside and lay in bed in a nightgown that touched her body like an enduring kiss. Extraordinary the grace a bit of draping gives nudity. Her every casual movement stirred him.
“But I still have cramps that come and go,” Fanny said.
Dubin went into the bathroom and briskly brushed his teeth.
She said she could eat half a horse and, when he advised her nothing solid yet, said she would settle for some ginger ale. “Ginger ale is what my mother used to spoon us after an upset stomach.”
There was nothing in the midget-refrigerator in the room but hard liquor and mineral water. Dubin called down for a bottle of ginger ale but the waiter offered only Pepsi. Fanny made a face: she had this thing about cola drinks —they gave her hives. Dubin said he would hunt up a bottle of ginger ale. He put on his raincoat and borrowed an umbrella from the porter.
He walked in steady rain from their hotel to the Rialto before he was able to find the soda. He was happy he had found it for Fanny. He imagined her saying, when he returned, that she had bathed and wanted him to undress and get into bed with her.
“I think you’ll feel better after we make love,” Dubin, speaking to himself, said to her.
When he returned to their room she was lying in bed wearing sunglasses. “Jesus, William, I thought you were dead and gone.” She said she had ordered a sliced chicken sandwich because she was painfully famished, had eaten every bit of it, and held it down.
He was happy to hear it. He thought he’d take a shower.
She came into the bathroom as he was standing in the shower and retching, threw up the bread and chicken into the toilet bowl; her diarrhea returned; and hours later he began to spoon-feed her some warmish ginger ale, which, by God’s grace—if not her own—she was able to retain. Fanny promised not to do anything equally stupid. “Please don’t hold it against me.”
Before falling asleep she whispered, “Tomorrow, William, I promise.”
Tomorrow appeared exquisite—warm, clear—“insp
iring,” Dubin said. Fanny awoke glum, as though she’d long worried in her sleep; but after chancing—against his solemn advice—a continental breakfast without suffering consequences, she took a bath with salts, vigorously shampooed her hair, opened windows and doors to air the room, and though still pale, was energetic, vitalized.
“Let’s zap out and see the sights.”
He readily agreed. She put on the crucifix, then removed it and dropped it in the drawer. Fanny took it out again and draped it around her neck.
He felt at times he would like to be rid of her.
They hurried to St. Mark’s, she—after shedding a cardigan because of “the heat”—in white jersey over black bra and in denim swing skirt, carrying her suede shoulder bag. Though she wore heavy-heeled shoes there was a ripple in her walk and people on the street seemed to like to watch her go by.
Fanny and Dubin hurried on in the brilliant sunlight, she keeping pace with his practiced long strides. The biographer wore his blue blazer, with flared reddish plaid slacks, and blue striped shirt with watermelon-pink tie. He was growing longer sideburns whose dominant color was gray. Dubin had occasional thoughts of dyeing his hair. Venice, absolved of fog and rain, had let a golden day rise like a balloon over its annealed islets. The sky floated azure over the green canals of antiquity. The effect was of island, plage, seashore—once more of holiday.
“Fanny,” Dubin advised, “take those silly glasses off and look around. Some extraordinary painters took their light from this sky.”
She blew a kiss to the sky, removed the glasses and slipped them into her bag. She walked close to Dubin, their bodies touching. He had never felt younger.
Dubin's Lives Page 9