Afterward she got back into bed. She still experienced flashes of feeling hot and cold. When she was hot her face looked as though she had just stepped out of a hot shower, or was deeply blushing. She blushed scarlet; so did Maud. When Kitty felt cold she raised the thermostat and went to her dresser for a sweater.
She was not content when she looked at herself in the mirror. Recently while standing without clothes in front of the full-length glass in the bedroom, she had touched her hair, then lifted her breasts and said, “Don’t you think I look reasonably young for my age?” She confessed, “I’m mourning my losses. If only one could get used to it. But one doesn’t. I see it so clearly, the loss of my looks.”
“Du bist noch die alte Marschallin?”
“I wish I were, she was thirty-eight.”
“You don’t look your age. You’d easily pass for forty-five.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “I don’t think I would. I’m fifty-one and look every bit of it.”
He left her standing sadly naked before the glass.
It was a long white winter—leaden skies broke, spilling snow endlessly on snow. Sometimes it snowed lazily half the day, sometimes savagely for a day or two in flowing waves of white. The biographer stood at his window watching the snowflakes flying, white curtain lowered, ending no play, beginning none. When it stopped snowing for several days, or a week, the scene, the drama, was the endless white world mournfully searched by an eyeless wailing white wind. The monochrome white dulled the mind, restricted movement, experience. Yet the roads were continually plowed, salted, sanded; and Dubin, heavily coated, scarved, booted, against the weather, walked, the one man in town visible on the snow-rutted roads. The temperature rarely rose above zero. The stringy willows in the dead fields were a greenish mustard-yellow. Pines and bent spruce bristled with icicled snow. Once as he tediously walked—it seemed to him nowhere—he plunged into a snowy field up to his gut and waited for his life to change.
The long walk-run was still routine. He had fitted himself for the task: you did it daily and therefore could do it. The experience proved you could. He was compelling a willed experience to contend with another, unwilled, that lingered. But as soon as it became easier to do, the wind, freezing cold, and the icy earth, made it harder to do. If you stopped for a single day, much you had accomplished—at last got used to—you had to accomplish again. For two days at the end of the month the temperature rose and it rained steadily, drearily, foggily; then the weather again turned frigid, the snow stiffened, slush froze; the roads were inches thick with ice. There was a week of twenty below, two awesome days of thirty below. The rumbling clanking snowplows only thinly shaved the stony ice-ruts on the road. Dubin gave up the long walk, against the insatiable will. Now when he left the house he picked his way along the glistening slippery ice only to the covered bridge and back. Even a mile seemed a mad thing to do. People offered rides and shook their heads when he waved them off. They sensed his creation: his trial.
The radio called it a hard winter. It was desolate; and in his study the windows were frozen over. Icicles hung from the deep eaves of the roof and grew thick and long. One long icicle was a four-foot spear before it broke in sunlight and crashed below.
Kitty was sick of being housebound. “Let’s, for God’s sake, get away to a warm place. We’ve never been to the Caribbean. What have you got against a warmer climate?”
He offered to let her go alone.
“I don’t want to go alone, don’t ask me to. Let’s both go for a week. I’m married to you, not your book. I want to be free of it.”
“You are free of it.”
“I want you to be.”
He had to hang in. She thought, he guessed, that he might be getting back to work and said no more about going away. Dubin kept to his room for long hours each day, letting her think what she might be thinking. He let her think so but sat at the desk reading. He read one biography after another, famished for lives.
From his window he watched the sunset reflected on the nearby hills. As the winter sky darkened the hills were suffused in rose, lilac, mauve, and these colors, in contrast to freezing daylight, seemed warm, warming the bluish-gray outcroppings on Mt. No Name. One evening the icy mountain blazed in rose flame. From this illusion of warmth he traveled to another: the rosy winter sunset was the promise of spring. Hadn’t Thoreau said the mind was the only stronghold against winter: it could, at least, anticipate spring. Good, but not if spring held out to the end of spring: it shunned the anticipating mind. The outside thermometer read six below and winter had far to go before it yielded to reason or mercy—or to the thunder of the wheeling earth: through February and March into the teeth of cold April. In the Northeast, at the thin edge of New England, it sometimes snowed on the flowers of May. If spring comes can spring be far behind? Anticipation admits there is tomorrow, not much more.
Kitty, nursing a cold, was too restless to stay in bed. She wandered in the house, straightening things: ashtrays, vases, flowers. She wiped her oak table. “When I have nothing to do I do everything.” She wore a voluminous robe over her bed jacket and nightgown, and a pair of Dubin’s black socks he hated to see on her, to keep her feet warm. In another mood she wore a brown housecoat and silver slender mules; and a kerchief to warm her head. Her hair fell in strands on her shoulders. Colds, she complained, made her hair lank and darkened her complexion. Her nose ran, her eyes were rheumy; she was like a small animal he couldn’t name. Kitty pulled up the living-room window and poured sunflower seeds on the bird-feeder shelf, then sat sniffling, sneezing, waiting for a winter bird to appear. After an hour a blue jay landed on the feeder with a thump, saw her watching, and flew off scattering sun seeds.
She sat in the kitchen, grooming her housecoat, picking off long hairs. “I seem to be shedding.” She jumped when Dubin coughed, then apologized for being startled. She sighed restlessly, seemed someone’s lost self—his fault, he thought. Dubin was burdened by his lack of affection; knew she felt it.
The telephone rang. When she picked up the receiver a boy’s voice said, “Why don’t you go get yourself fucked?” Kitty flung the phone against the wall.
Sometimes when she answered the ring the telephone clicked off. She gave up a call reluctantly. “Hello, hello,” she called. “Hello!—Hello!” she insisted to the telephone.
“Who are you trying to hear from?”
“That’s a stupid thing to say.”
One night she waked from a dream and woke Dubin to tell it to him. She said she would not have minded his waking her.
“I dreamed I was menstruating again. I was flowing profusely and was frightened. I said in my dream, ‘William, what shall I do, I’m bleeding so heavily?’ And you impatiently said, ‘Cut it out!’”
“I apologize,” said Dubin. “Now let me sleep.”
“I’m burning tonight,” Kitty sighed five minutes later. “Is the house overheated?”
“No. Don’t open the window or the wind will blast us out of bed.”
She turned on her bed lamp and changed, panting, from a white flannel nightgown to a pink sheer sleeveless one; then fell instantly asleep, while he remained awake thinking useless thoughts until the alarm rang in the dark and he groped his way to the shower.
“Drop dead!”
She woke. “Who?”
“Nobody you know.”
“I’ll bet I do.”
“I spoke to the mirror, don’t take credit.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the goddamned things you say.”
In the bathroom she gargled loudly, ferociously cleared her throat, coughed on and on. He could hear her in his study. She discovered a large black moth on the wall and socked it relentlessly with a rolled-up towel.
Kitty misplaced her diary and asked Dubin whether he had seen it. It was an on-and-off affair in a spiral notebook, rebegun recently in black ink. When they were first married her diary was written in green ink and he occasionally glanced into it when she wasn’t ar
ound. He felt she left it in sight so he could read what she wanted him to know, but would rather not talk about. A diary was a punitive instrument.
She had begun a book on modern philosophy and after twenty pages set it aside. That afternoon she drove to Winslow to shop for a dress. She couldn’t find one she wanted and drove to Albany. There she bought a pair of shoes and a green dress. She returned the dress the next morning. “Green offends me,” she said to Dubin. He had said he didn’t care for the dress. She kept the cross-strap elegant black shoes. She had also tried on several hats, but none suited her. Sometimes she bought things to return them.
That night she informed Dubin she had been seeing Evan Ondyk. “Not about you,” she said uneasily. “About myself.”
He knew why but asked anyway.
She said nothing, then went to the bird-feeder window and looked out as she talked. “Since Myra’s funeral I haven’t felt right. You remember I couldn’t stop crying at the cemetery? A sense of loss has stayed with me.”
Dubin remembered.
“Since then I’ve been thinking of my life—with you, and with Nathanael. That seems to be starting again, though I haven’t done it in years.”
“You were dreaming of him last summer.”
“Not as often as I used to. I have no intense feelings about him, but he’s still a familiar stranger who keeps standing on the street corner, expecting me to come over and say hello. I remember the most trivial things of our life together, for instance buying him a pair of tennis sneakers one Saturday afternoon while we were out wheeling Gerald in his carriage. Isn’t it strange the way we’re constituted—I mean about the past? Jesus, why are we?”
He felt again as though he had married her marriage.
Once when she used to talk about Nathanael, herself, Gerry as a baby, Dubin had felt a sense of being out of it; he no longer felt that.
“Don’t make too much of it,” he said.
“I honestly don’t want to, but certain things keep bothering me. I don’t mean Nathanael. Now I think of Myra alone in that empty farmhouse and I scarcely gave her the time of day.”
He reminded her she had visited the old woman almost daily. “When you couldn’t you telephoned. Sometimes you’d shop for her in the morning and also call at night.”
“I could have done more for her when she was sick. She was alone too often. And I feel terrible about Ben running away. I should have paid attention to him.”
Dubin thought it might have been better if she hadn’t given up the library job. “At least it got you out of the house half the day.”
“Lay off about that job,” Kitty said in irritation. “I think you’d like it if I was never in the house.”
He denied it.
“All you want is to be alone. If I died you’d get along very well without me.”
“I’d want you to get along without me.”
“I hate your beastly love of solitude.”
She had again been playing the harp. Kitty pulled the gilded frame down on her shoulder, pressed her feet on the pedals, and began to pluck the strings, her hands moving like birds flying at each other. When she sang in a soft mezzo her singing voice was small. One day she played for hours and whatever she played—Chopin, Schumann, Hugo Wolf—sounded lonely. The next day she played as though she were in love or wanted to be; and wanted him to know.
He heard the harp as he sat upstairs at his desk, and found it impossible to read. She never played while he was at work. Dubin was angered, then thought she must be certain he wasn’t writing. Yet as he listened to her playing he felt the possibility of life with feeling. He thought, as he listened, of meeting someone with whom he might fall in love, a woman of thirty perhaps. He wanted another chance in marriage; he could do it better than he had done it. And he’d be his bride’s first husband.
Kitty tore the strings into a reverberant jangle, then went out for a drive.
When she returned she gaily told Dubin that a young man had tried to pick her up in the parking lot of the supermarket when she came out with her bundle of groceries. “He had a heavy mustache and wore bell-bottom trousers. He looked like a New York actor,” she laughed.
“What did he say?”
“He called me Cutie and asked me to come for a ride. I said I had a ride and took off. He knew I could see through him.”
She then regretted her nature. “I should have flirted with him.” And said she had frittered away much of her life. “I find it distressing not to be better pulled together at this time of my life. I should have done more for myself and not depended so much on my husbands. I’m upset about your problems and the way we are. I’m also upset because I feel I’ve been a lousy mother, or my kids would write once in a while. I’m tense about Maud coming home —if she ever does.”
She approached a mirror to look at herself and turned quickly away. She went into the kitchen to brew herself a cup of tea and deeply breathed above the burners before setting down a pot and lighting the gas.
The next morning she misplaced her wedding ring. “I can’t find it anywhere, it’s lost.” It was an inexpensive thin band. She had always liked its design, its simplicity. Kitty could not find it after taking her shower and spent the morning grimly going from room to room—unmaking beds to hunt for it. She pulled up rugs, opened drawers, stood on chairs searching closet shelves, feeling along every inch. In the afternoon when after an hour’s restless rest she went on relentlessly looking, Dubin offered to buy her a new wedding ring if this didn’t turn up.
“I want my old ring,” said Kitty. “It took you a month to find the one you wanted. It was your first real present to me.”
She went on vigorously searching and at last found the ring in a plastic glass in the bathroom.
“Bravo,” said Dubin.
They faced each other in hatred.
Maud Dubin, who had come home only for short stays last year, appeared at the house in early February, her beautiful long red hair shorn and dyed black. Her brows were lined black. Her light eyes seemed to have darkened. “Maud, for God’s sake!” Dubin cried. Her eyes appealed to him not to say more. He momentarily turned away, then put his arms around her, kissing the cheek she offered, and after an attempt at casual talk, trotted up the stairs. For a while he stood at his study window watching the leafless swaying trees in the windswept field near the side of the old barn. In ten minutes he trotted down once more to greet his daughter, but Maud had called a friend and had driven off in Kitty’s car. Dubin stared out of his window.
She’d kissed full on the lips as a child, it was her way. She gave feeling so naturally he thought he had earned it. Maud had a raucous laugh and high voice and seemed a little girl until she opened her mouth and spoke in full sentences. She grew according to his vision of what she must ultimately be. Maud resembled Kitty more than Dubin although her red hair derived from his mother, whom he rarely remembered as other than gray-haired. Charlie had told him that as a girl she had a deep-red head of hair. “So people came miles to look on her.” Maud’s bronze hair had hung thickly down her back. Kitty had knitted her a white wool hat with a blue band that she wore for years in and out of the house. One night Dubin entered her room as she slept wearing her hat. As he tried to remove it she had lifted her warm arms and held him in sleep.
At fifteen Maud plaited her long hair into a pigtail; and when her father heard the front door shut in the morning he would put down his razor and go to the bedroom window so he could watch her on the back lawn striding along in brown boots, white hat, blue coat, the wooden-barretted pigtail swinging as she sturdily walked toward the woods on the way to the bus stop at the covered bridge.
He would sometimes stand in her room after she had left for school, or was away for the summer, to reflect in it, reflect on her. He would look over her books, surprised by some he had given her. He liked the many volumes of poetry she had collected; her small desk; the flowered coverlet on her prim bed in a soft-yellow room; throw rug on the floor; colored picture
s of savage and saint taped on the wall above her head. Dubin looked out of her windows to see what she saw. She was a handsome lanky active girl—swam, backpacked, skied—with a slender firm body that grew lovely, after a crisis of fat, as she matured. She had a quiet handsome face with light-blue eyes, uneven lips—they were Dubin’s—and a small bony chin. Maud had unexpected qualities and did unexpected things. By Kitty’s edict she was Jewish and she called herself a Jew. Kitty had said, “There are only five in town and no house of worship, how can she learn?” but Dubin said, “If she thinks of herself as Jewish let’s see what she makes of it.”
Her parents’ marriage had been best to her teens; she knew when it was at its less than best. Though Gerry, in his private world, had given her short shrift, she spoke up passionately for his rights. Among her own, apparently, was a curious impatience with childhood. She seemed to want to live life in contravention of time—before it permitted. Whatever you’re running after, her father thought, wait a bit, it’ll catch up with you.
“What’s her hurry for experience?” he asked his wife.
“I was never like that,” Kitty said. “I played with dolls long past the time she’d given them up. Maybe she’s read Short Lives?”
She had, in fact, years ago.
Maud had departed her room and house in what had hardly seemed sufficient time. After going away to Berkeley she returned comparatively infrequently. She had spent one summer on a dig in Mexico. Another, she worked as a professor’s research assistant. She preferred to work when she could, earn part of her keep. “Not that I don’t miss you but there’s a lot to see and get done.”
Dubin saw the connection with himself yet could not fully comprehend it. “Why should you be gone so long so often?”
“It’s not as though I’d left the house, if I keep coming back.” She said in afterthought: “I think of you both a lot.” Perhaps she shared his hunger to live many lives? In imagination he lived hers. She had eased in him a wanting of much he hadn’t had as boy and youth. Kitty, it seemed to him, had loved him in part for his love of the girl.
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