The goats weren’t easy to handle. The pregnant doe, Trudy, a large-eared black-and-white yammering Nubian that Fanny had bought bred, was a neurotic beast. Left alone in the dark she trumpeted in fear until she learned to flip the light switch with her nose after Fanny had left the barn. The barn light burned all night and she had to fence the goat into another stall. Trudy bleated throughout the night. Fanny returned her to her former stall and let her turn the light on when she wanted to. “I was afraid of the dark myself when I was a little girl.” She loved the pregnant goat. “She’s about to kid and I almost hate to see it happen she’s so satisfied to be a pregnant goat.”
She shoveled the goats’ hay into the overhead manger and filled with warmish drinking water their rubber buckets hooked to the wall; she also cleaned their stalls, carried out manure; laid new sawdust, and spent an hour every day brushing their coats. Later she collected the warm newly laid eggs from the hens’ nests, sold or bartered them in town; had a dozen other tasks that kept her busy till dark. Although she complained she was dead-tired she seemed always to have energy for sex. “Or what’s it all about?” In her bedroom she changed into a sheer nightgown before Dubin came upstairs. In bed she was adventurous, exciting, even wise. Afterward they quietly talked, affectionately, honestly. Then Dubin showered, dressed, and trotted back to his study, sitting there contemplatively ten or fifteen minutes before going home.
“How did it go tonight?” Kitty asked.
He told her fine.
One night in February when the temperature had fallen below zero, Fanny’s pipes froze and it cost her seventy-two dollars to repair the one that had burst in the cellar and thaw out the others to get the water running. In a driving storm a week later the roof leaked around the chimney. Patching that cost another fifty. She worried about the rising cost of services; Dubin worried with her. She said she didn’t know how she would go on doing all she did, plus milk Trudy twice a day after she had kidded; and that summer take care of the vegetable garden she wanted. “Besides that I would like to plant some flowers to look at when I feel like it.” Dubin said she had to have help and suggested, to begin with, hiring a high school boy part-time. He offered to pay his hourly wages. “I’ve lectured twice lately for good fees.”
Fanny said no.
“Why not?”
“I’m not your goddamned wife—I don’t want your money.”
“What can I do for a friend?” he said after a minute.
“I will pay my own bills.”
He sometimes came over in the afternoon to work at whatever he could. Dubin sawed wood for the kitchen stove. Once he replaced a broken window. He fixed an electric light socket—little jobs he hadn’t done for years. And Roger Foster, Fanny informed him, came on weekend mornings. “He helps me clean my barn.”
Though her hips and bosom seemed fuller, Fanny said she had lost weight. Her face was thinner. One night as she unbraided her hair he found a strand of gray in it; and Dubin noticed that the four or five darkish hairs under her chin had once more sprouted forth. Fanny, hopping out of bed to look in the mirror, was incensed. “I spent over a hundred bucks on electrolysis and injections. I thought I’d got rid of them forever.” She said angrily: “Even if they grow seven feet long I will never cut those hairs again.”
“Lady Bluebeard,” he teased.
“Don’t you call me that,” she yelled at him.
He begged her pardon.
“You also call me Kitty, in case you don’t know it.”
“Often?”
“Once in a while.”
Dubin said he was sorry.
Crawling back into bed she complained about her life: “Nothing is going the way I hoped. I haven’t had any time to myself since Craig broke his hip. I have no time to read. I feel flaked out when I look at a page of print. Sometimes the feeling that my life is not turning out right floods over me.”
“Do you think taking on this farm was a mistake?”
He disliked his question because he feared her answer, but Fanny said after a pause, “Not actually coming here but maybe my idea of having a barnful of tender loving animals welcoming me with yaps of joy in the morning was out of my childhood books. Still this place is right for me, and I love the house and have been fixing it up, little by little, the way I want.”
Dubin said it was tastefully done.
“I wouldn’t think of leaving it. My main gripe is I am tied down too much. Everything I do I have to.”
“Not everything.”
“You’d be surprised.” Smiling in afterthought she said, “Not everything.”
Fanny said she had been thinking a lot about the future.
“Relative to what?”
“To myself—that I still find it hard to zero in on what I want out of my life.”
“You know yourself better than you did, not a long time ago.”
“Yes, but I am still not sure what I want to do—what I want to work at. Sometimes I say, the hell with that, I’d rather get married. I want to have a baby before I am too old. I want to get settled. I don’t want to be a single woman forever.”
He said she was entitled to these things.
“With you?”
“With or without me.”
Fanny let it slowly go at that, then said, “Other times I think I’d rather stay single and in some career I respect. I honestly think that. I want to work at something worthwhile that I could do well. I want to do something really well, not get lost in the shuffle. I want to like myself up to the hilt sometime in my life.”
He asked her what she had in mind to do.
“I’ve thought a lot about that, and have even thought of selling antiques in my house,” Fanny said. “My mother did that once, and I have taste but it doesn’t take much of a brain. I thought of teaching but don’t want to. I don’t feel I have the right to—everybody knows what I know. I’ve also looked at veterinary-medicine catalogues but there I am fantasizing. What I keep going back to in my mind—ever since I worked as a secretary in a law office —is to study law and practice it. But the trouble is I don’t think I can handle law school right now, though I think I could get accepted if I applied. They’re taking more women nowadays and I have good grades even if it did take me six years to knock off my B.A.”
They had talked before about studying law and talked of it now as they lay in bed. Dubin had told her about his own disappointing experience as a lawyer. “I got little pleasure out of it though perhaps the fault was mine for not being more patient. I could have changed the nature of my practice if I wasn’t so anxious about making a living. I lived on cases involving small finaglers and found myself engaged in pisher dishonesties. I told myself the law is not perfect and neither are men, but I couldn’t stand what I was doing. Montaigne wanted to get out of public life so he could stop lying for convenience’ sake. I wanted to stop lying, period.”
“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.
Dubin returned to Fanny’s a few days later—that windy pre-spring night in early March—to 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 bedroom—she kept an electric heater going on nights Dubin appeared—Fanny 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)
By Bernard Malamud
THE NATURAL
THE ASSISTANT
THE MAGIC BARREL
A NEW LIFE
IDIOTS FIRST
THE FIXER
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE TENANTS
REMBRANDT’S HAT
DUBIN’S LIVES
GOD’S GRACE
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
THE COMPLETE STORIES
Copyright © 1977, 1979 by Bernard Malamud
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Thomas Mallon
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
First published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2003
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466805927
First eBook Edition : November 2011
Portions of this book originally appeared,
in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, and Playboy.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003106122
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Dubin's Lives Page 44