He pointed to a cluster of light-blue tiny flowers. “Do you know those?”
“Yes, forget-me-nots, I know them.”
“Do you know the red ones there—trillium? They’re also called red rooster.”
Fanny clucked like a hen.
Dubin picked a flower and handed it to her.
At first she looked as though she didn’t know what to do with it, then held it in her left hand.
“The bright yellow flat open ones are celandine,” he said. “I once knew a girl by that name.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“I loved her.”
“Is there a Fanny flower?”
“Not that I know but there is a sweet William.”
“Male chauvinism,” Fanny laughed.
Dubin chuckled huskily. He waded into the grass and plucked a white blossom. “This could be wild lily of the valley. I’m not sure, I’ll have to look it up when I get home.” He slipped the flower into his wallet.
“Do you have a flower book?”
“My wife has a dozen.”
Fanny thought she would buy herself one next time she went into a bookstore. “It’s about time I got to know some of them.” Then she asked, “What about the blossoms on those bushes? Do you know the names of them?”
Dubin said it was odd about the shrubs there. “They’re cultivated, not wild. The only way I can explain it—I figure this from the depression in the earth—is that once the house I mentioned stood here. The woman had shrubs growing around the place. That’s bridal wreath you asked about. It’s beginning to wither.”
“How pretty some of those names are. What do you call those?”
“Mock orange. You have to smell the blossoms to be sure. There are others that look like them but have no scent.”
“I can smell the orange,” Fanny said. She had picked a blossom and touched it to her lips.
“It’s mock orange.”
“How do you know them all?”
Dubin said he didn’t know that many. “Lawrence seemed to recognize every flower in creation. Thoreau catalogued anything he saw or met in the woods, literally hundreds of flowers. I know few.”
“Man, you know all these.”
“My lucky day. Some fields I pass I don’t know more than Queen Anne’s lace. My wife taught me most of them and some flowering bushes. When I forget their names I ask her again.”
“How is she doing these days?” Fanny wanted to know. “Are her glands still bothering her?”
He said she was fine.
“You mentioned her yourself just now,” she said slightly stiffly. “Roger happened to tell me she was good in her library work.”
He affirmed his wife was fine.
“Does she still go around sniffing the gas burners?”
Dubin said he was used to the burners. “I try not to say anything when she smells them, and for that I expect her not to comment when I yell at myself in the bathroom mirror.”
“She and I never liked each other much.”
“Cleaning house wasn’t your act, Fanny.”
They were walking a few feet apart, Fanny kicking the flowers. “I’m not criticizing or anything like that but did you know she’d go around smelling the gas before you married her?”
“You can’t know everything in advance or what’s marriage for? You take your chances. Whoever marries you will be taking one.”
“You can say that again. But I may not want to get married.”
“It’s not so bad. In a marriage, after a while you learn what’s given: who your wife is and you are, and how well you can live with each other. If you think you have a chance you’re married. That’s your choice if nothing else was.”
“It’s not much of one.”
“We met in a curious way,” Dubin explained. “Once I said I’d tell you about it. It was like not really meeting until we were ready to. She had written a letter more or less advertising for a husband.”
“And you answered it?” Fanny said in pretend-astonishment.
“I happened to read it, though it wasn’t addressed to me, and another she wrote canceling the intent of the first. To make it short, I became interested in her. We corresponded until we had developed some sense of each other. If a man and woman stay around trying to define themselves, at a certain point they become responsible one to the other. So we met, looked, talked, and after a while arranged to be married.”
“What do you mean ‘arranged’?”
“That’s how I think of it. Kitty may have a better word.”
“Were you in love with her? Like with Celandine?”
“She was someone I wanted to love.”
“Did she feel that way?”
They had gone through the flowers and were approaching a small wood of thick-armed dark-green oaks whose trunks were spotted with mold.
“I imagine there was an expectation of love. If you feel that, it doesn’t take long to happen.”
“Why didn’t you live together first and try it out?”
“In those days,” he explained, “few did that, Fanny. You got married. Those who didn’t were rare birds and not always happy ones. Kitty was a widow with a child. I needed to be settled.”
“Do you love her now? When I passed you on the road before I thought you looked lonely.”
“Some are lonelier than others. My mother, in her sad way, was very lonely; my father had to be. I suppose I’m more than ordinarily a solitudinous type. It’s not a curse if you learn what the pleasures of it are. But that’s another story.”
“I can’t stand being lonely. There are no pleasures in it for me.”
“You shouldn’t have many worries, you seem to make friends easily.”
She wanted to know how he meant that.
Dubin said he was not saying she was promiscuous.
“You’d better not because I’m not. If I was once I’m not any more.” She looked at him intently. “Do you believe that?”
He wasn’t sure but said he did. “What are your questions asking, Fanny?”
“About marriage. Everybody talks about it differently. I like to know what it is.”
“‘Bear and forbear,’ Sam Johnson defined it.”
“That’s not much.”
“He was very sensible about marriage as he was in most things.”
“What about you?”
“In the best of marriages you give what you can and get back as much or more. With the right people it’s a decent enterprise. It gives pleasure.”
“It sounds too much like work to me.”
“Thomas Carlyle, who had an awful marriage, called it ‘a discipline of character.’”
“I wouldn’t want that kind of marriage,” she said impatiently.
“What kind would you want?”
“I don’t think I want to get married. It wore my mother out. She hates my father.”
Dubin said he understood.
“What do you understand?”
“A little more about you.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t.”
“I think I do.”
“What I mean is do you really understand what I’m like—what my needs are, for instance?”
He had some idea. “You’ve described yourself in your letters.”
“I didn’t tell you everything.”
“I’ve seen you in action. Some things I can guess.”
“I bet you’d be wrong.”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly,” she mimicked him.
Fanny dropped the red trillium he had given her into her shoulder bag. “Did you ever want a divorce?”
He said he and his wife had discussed the subject more than once that past winter.
“What did you decide?”
“Nothing new. We were married, we stayed married.”
Fanny reached down and plucked a blade of grass to suck on. “Like she expects you to go on forever protecting her?”
“Like she has chara
cter,” Dubin answered. “Like I respond to it.”
She threw the grass away. “Maybe I have character too.”
Dubin hoped so.
After a wet morning and overcast late morning a warm sunny afternoon evolved. Large long clouds slowly sailed by.
“Oh, shit,” the girl suddenly cried, hopping on one leg. “My foot is bleeding. I stepped on something.”
She had cut the ball of her left foot on a piece of slate. Fanny sat down in the grass. The cut bled. Dubin got down on his knees to examine her foot.
“It doesn’t look deep but it ought to be bandaged so you can get back to your car. The pond is close by. I could wet my handkerchief, wash the cut, and bandage your foot.”
“You don’t have to wash my foot, William. Just tie something around it so I don’t get my sandal sticky with blood when I put it on. I just bought a new pair.”
Dubin tried finger pressure to stop the bleeding.
“Here’s some kleenex,” Fanny said, pulling a wad out of her bag. “Use it and don’t get your hankie bloody.”
But he insisted on binding his handkerchief around her foot, knotting it on the arch. “The cut should be sterilized.”
“I have a tube of first-aid cream in my glove compartment.”
“I’ll go get it.”
“Not now,” said Fanny. “I won’t get blood poison. Or will I?” she asked worried.
“I’ll get the cream.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not a bad cut.”
“Is the bandage too tight?”
“It feels comfortable.”
With Dubin’s assistance she got up. “Every time I see you I get some kind of free medical treatment. Did you ever want to be a doctor?”
“A lawyer,” he said, “a drastic mistake.”
The biographer suggested they turn back to the car but Fanny still wanted to see the water in the quarry.
“Can you go where it’s rocky?”
“I’ll take it easy. I think the bleeding has stopped.”
They went on in the grass, Fanny hop-walking on her heel, and passed through the warm leaf-dappled mildewed oak wood; then ascended the sloping granite rock to look down at the green water in the jagged deep basin.
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought. Do you swim here?”
“I come to look at the water.”
“Want to try?”
“It’s dirtier than I thought. Besides, we have no towels.”
“You could dry yourself with your underwear.”
“Why don’t you go in yourself?”
“Never mind,” Fanny said. “It might start my foot bleeding again.”
They sat at the edge of the water, opposite them a palisade of earth and marble debris out of which some alders and white birch grew and many thick ferns; below, the granite wall was stained tan, gray, black.
The granite had been almost totally mined and the pit left to weather many years before Dubin came to Center Campobello. He had found the quarry in an adventurous jaunt with Kitty and still came every season to observe the reflection of the trees in the water. In the autumn Dubin watched yellow leaves floating in green water.
Fanny, piling her hair on her head, tried to see herself in the pond.
“Do you like my hair this way? It’s not too short?”
Dubin didn’t think so.
She let her hair fall and combed it, looking for herself in the water.
Fanny, with her bandaged foot and shorn hair, sat close to William Dubin as if they had no prior history. Her thighs were bare, bosom relaxed. The day was high and quiet.
Dubin recalled Venice dispassionately. Ah, William, nature’s child, who would remotely have guessed you’d find your way to this spot in her company this day? He sat listening as the girl, her fingers interlocked behind her head, unshaved armpits visible, talked about her travail in Rome.
Harvey’s death had seriously got her down. “He was always kind to me, sort of kidded me out of the blues I got into. I met him through his shmucky son Mitchell, who was an orthodontist in Jersey City. Mitch misused me when I was a kid and Harvey found out in a stupid letter I wrote that he had left around. I mentioned the sexual things he had taught me and told him those I liked. After he read the letter Harvey got pissed and warned him to leave me alone or I might get him thrown in the can on a statutory-rape rap, plus impairment of the morals of a minor. Harvey said if I or my father didn’t bring charges he just might.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen when I met him, sixteen when Harvey broke it up.”
She said she had met Mitchell at her cousin Mildred’s wedding. “He was built, with a good ass and strong shoulders. He had brown hair, reddish sideburns, and came on very macho. Anyway, he gave me a lot of attention and a wedding is where you want to feel good. He turned me on by talking about sex in a way that made me feel it was very mysterious and only he knew how to make it happen.
“I was having hot thoughts and went with him to his apartment after the wedding. Then for the next year almost, till Harvey found that letter, we were in bed or on the floor every Sunday afternoon. I took the bus in Trenton to Jersey City, then a cab to his apartment. He gave me the carfare. Mitchell taught me all the joys of sex and some that were kinky.”
“Bastard,” murmured Dubin.
“When I finally got away from him I was pretty much scared of sex for years. I bet you never guessed that? The best thing that came of my experience with Mitchell was that night Harvey called me when I was feeling low, and we got to be friends, and I have never regretted it.”
“Why did you let the affair with the son go on so long?”
“Because I wasn’t sure about it and thought the more I learn about sex the better for me. I thought everybody had to know what I learned from him. Besides, he said he loved me and I thought he really did. He even filled my cavities and straightened my front teeth. The first thing he did when I got there on Sundays was to take off my braces so that kisses wouldn’t hurt.”
“An ape,” Dubin ventured.
Fanny said he wasn’t such a bad guy. “I liked certain things we did. Outside of his habit of screwing whenever he wasn’t working his heart was in the right place. He practiced a day a week in a free clinic and wouldn’t charge poor people. Harvey said he was the narcissist of the family. When I understood his nature I felt sorry for him. He’s been in psychoanalysis about twenty years.”
Dubin grunted.
“I had a shaky time after we broke up. When I was seventeen I felt fifty years old. I wasn’t getting much out of school but hung in because somehow or other my grades were decent. I went to college. About then I began to sleep around. I was afraid I might become frigid after Mitch, and was scared. I got anxious and slept with people I shouldn’t have slept with. I was depressed and used to pray. Then one day I read a book by Havelock Ellis and it helped me orient myself differently. I also was seeing a shrink although my father begrudged every nickel. Anyway, by the time I was twenty I began to enjoy sex again and I want to go on enjoying it, like forever.”
“Once you told me your sexual experience had made you a more moral person. Does that relate to the experience with Mitchell or its aftermath?”
“I said a better person.” She looked him full in the face. “I’ll bet you thought of me as a hooker?”
“If I did, I don’t.”
“I’m not. I was ashamed of what happened in Venice. It was freaky, I was confused.”
Fanny had opened her bag, found the trillium, and tossed it into the water.
He asked her why.
“I wanted to see it float.”
They watched the three-petaled red flower floating in the green quarry water.
Fanny, after a while, asked Dubin what his first sex was like.
“With an older woman,” he replied, “doing a repair job.”
“On you?”
He nodded. “She was married, a teacher of mine. I had read Sons and Lovers with her.”
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“How long did it last?”
“Not long. Long enough.”
He asked her about Harvey. “Was he your lover before we met?”
“Not really. He was into marijuana and pottery, never quite putting it together. I stayed with him for weeks just to be with one man. There were times when we wanted to love each other but couldn’t. I tried to help him keep up his confidence.”
“You were kind to him?”
“We were kind to each other.”
Fanny’s arms were wrapped around her knees. She extended her left hand so he could see the bracelet he had bought her. “I wear it for luck.”
“How so?”
“You let me keep it.”
The light on the eastern hills was dark gold as the sun descended in the west.
“It’s late,” Dubin said.
“I’ll bet you don’t know why I first came to Center Campobello,” Fanny said.
“Was there a particular reason?”
“I read your book Mark Twain when I was staying in the commune on Tupper Lake. The way he was at the end of his life after Susy died, and then his wife, and he also felt miserable for treating his epileptic daughter like an idiot all her life—that part wiped me out.”
“At the end of his life he lived in a theater of shmalzy misery,” Dubin said.
“Shmalzy?”
“He enjoyed cigars and being a celebrity. He was deteriorating physically and mentally, but maybe in the book I laid on his aging and loneliness a bit much. Thoreau is a better-proportioned, more objective work.”
“I read it in Rome. Harvey bought it for me as a present when I was in the hospital. I like Thoreau but wouldn’t want to live his kind of life, although I liked the way he felt about himself at Walden. What I mean is that after I finished reading Mark Twain somebody said you had a house in this town and I decided to see if you would meet me if I came here.”
“Extraordinary.”
“I hoped we could really talk, that you would want to. I wanted somebody other than a shrink to advise me about my life, how to get it together better than I did. I had the feeling you could tell me useful things about myself. I never thought we would end up going to Venice. When you asked me I felt let down.”
Dubin's Lives Page 25