Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  But Janet had already taken care of that too. When she got off the bus I knew she’d be getting married again some day: she had gained about ten pounds, probably from all that cheap food while Bob went to school, but she had always been on the lean side anyway and now she looked better than I remembered. Her hair was long, about halfway down her back. The boys were five years old now, and I was glad she hadn’t had any more, because they seemed to be good little boys and not enough to scare off a man. We took them home—it was a Friday night—and Daddy gave Janet a tall drink of bourbon and everybody talked as though nothing had happened. Then we ate shrimp étouffée and after supper, when the boys were in bed and the rest of us were in the living room, Janet said by God it was the best meal she had had in five years, and next time she was going to marry a man who liked Louisiana cooking. When she saw the quick look in Mother’s eyes, she said: ‘We didn’t get married in the Church, Mama. I just told you we did so you wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘Bob was so mad at Father Broussard he wouldn’t try again. He’s not a Catholic, you know.’

  ‘There’s more wrong with him than that,‘ Daddy said.

  ‘So I can still get married in the Church,’Janet said. ‘To somebody else.’

  ‘But Janet—’

  ‘Wait,’ Daddy said. ‘Wait. You’ve been praying for days so Janet could stop living with that son of a bitch and still save her soul. Now you got it—right?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Well,’ Mother said, ‘I guess so.’

  They went to bed about an hour past their usual time, but Janet and I stayed up drinking gin and tonic in the kitchen, with the door closed so we wouldn’t keep anybody awake. At first she just talked about how glad she was to be home, even if the first sign of it was the Negroes going to the back of the bus. She loved this hot old sticky night, she said, and the June bugs thumping against the screen and she had forgotten how cigarettes get soft down here in the humid air. Finally she talked about Bob; she didn’t think he had ever loved her, he had started playing around their first year up there, and it had gone on for five years more or less; near the end she had even done it too, had a boyfriend, but it didn’t help her survive at all, it only made things worse, and now at least she felt clean and tough and she thought that was the first step toward hope.

  The stupid thing was she still loved the philandering son of a bitch. That was the only time she cried, when she said that, but she didn’t even cry long enough for me to get up and go to her side of the table and hold her: when I was half out of my chair she was already waving me back in it, shaking her head and wiping her eyes, and the tears that had filled them for a moment were gone. Then she cheered up and asked if I’d drive her around tomorrow, down the main street and everything, and I said sure and asked her if she was still a Catholic.

  ‘Don’t tell Mother this,’ she said. ‘She’s confused enough already. I went to Communion every Sunday, except when I was having that stupid affair, and I only felt sinful then because he loved me and I was using him. But before that and after that, I received.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘Not while you’re married out of the Church.’

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Church is so smart about sex. Bob wouldn’t get the marriage blessed, so a priest would have told me to leave him. I loved him, though, and for a long time I thought he loved me, needed me—so I stayed with him and tried to keep peace and bring up my sons. And the Eucharist is the sacrament of love and I needed it very badly those five years and nobody can keep me away.’

  I got up and took our glasses and made drinks. When I turned from the sink she was watching me.

  ‘Do you still go to confession so much?’ she said.

  I sat down, avoiding her eyes, then I thought, what the hell, if you can’t tell Janet you can’t tell anybody. So looking at the screen door and the bugs thumping from the dark outside, I told her how it was in high school and about Yvonne, though I didn’t tell her name, and my aborted confession to Father Broussard. She was kind to me, busying herself with cigarettes and her drink while I talked. Then she said: ‘You’re right, Harry. You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘ know this much: too many of those celibates teach sex the way it is for them. They make it introverted, so you come out of their schools believing sex is something between you and yourself, or between you and God. Instead of between you and other people. Like my affair. It wasn’t wrong because I was married. Hell, Bob didn’t care, in fact he was glad because it gave him more freedom. It was wrong because I hurt the guy.’ A Yankee word on her tongue, guy, and she said it with that accent from up there among snow and lakes. ‘If Bob had stayed home and taken a Playboy to the bathroom once in a while I might still have a husband. So if that’s a sin, I don’t understand sin.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. Then looking at her, I grinned and it kept spreading and turned into a laugh. ‘You’re something, all right,’ I said. ‘Old Janet, you’re something.’

  But I still wasn’t the renegade Janet was, I wanted absolution from a priest, and next morning while Mother and Daddy were happily teasing us about our hangovers, I decided to get it done. That afternoon I called Father Grassi, then told Janet where I was going, and that I would drive her around town when I got back. Father Grassi answered the door at the rectory; he was wearing a white shirt with his black trousers, a small man with a ruddy face and dark whiskers. I asked if I could speak to him in his office.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Do you come from the Pope?’

  ‘No, Father. I just want to confess.’

  ‘So it’s you who will be the saint today, not me. Yes, come in.’

  He led me to his office, put his stole around his neck, and sat in the swivel chair behind his desk; I kneeled beside him on the carpet, and he shielded his face with his hand, as though we were in the confessional and he could not see me. I whispered, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned,’ my hands clasped at my waist, my head bowed. ‘My last confession was six weeks ago, but I was refused absolution. By Father Broussard.’

  ‘Is that so? You don’t look like a very bad young man to me. Are you some kind of criminal?’

  ‘I confessed masturbation, Father.’

  ‘Yes? Then what?’

  ‘I told him I didn’t think it was a sin.’

  ‘I see. Well, poor Father Broussard: I’d be confused too, if you confessed something as a sin and then said you didn’t think it was a sin. You should take better care of your priests, my friend.’

  I opened my eyes: his hand was still in place on his cheek, and he was looking straight ahead, over his desk at the bookshelf against the wall.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘And now I’m bothering you.’

  ‘Oh no: you’re no trouble. The only disappointment is you weren’t sent by the Pope. But since that’s the way it is, then we may just as well talk about sins. We had in the seminary a book of moral theology and in that book, my friend, it was written that masturbation was worse than rape, because at least rape was the carrying out of a natural instinct. What about that?’

  ‘Do you believe that, Father?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Neither do I. I burned the book when I left the seminary, but not only for that reason. The book also said, among other things, let the buyer beware. So you tell me about sin and we’ll educate each other.’

  ‘I went to the Brothers’ school.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Nice fellows, those Brothers.’

  ‘Yes, Father. But I think they concentrated too much on the body. One’s own body, I mean. And back then I believed it all, and one day I even wanted to mutilate myself. Then last fall I had a girl.’

  ‘What does that mean, you had a girl? You mean you were lovers?’

  ‘Yes, Father. But I shouldn’t have had a girl, because I believed my semen was the most impor
tant part of sex, so the first time I made love with her I was waiting for it, like my soul was listening for it—you see? Because I wouldn’t know how I felt about her until I knew how I felt about ejaculating with her.’

  ‘And how did you feel? Did you want to mutilate yourself with a can opener, or maybe something worse?’

  ‘I was happy, Father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So after that we were lovers. Or she was, but I wasn’t. I was just happy because I could ejaculate without hating myself, so I was still masturbating, you see, but with her—does that make sense?’

  ‘Oh yes, my friend. I’ve known that since I left the seminary. Always there is too much talk of self-abuse. You see, even the term is a bad one. Have you finished your confession?’

  ‘I want to confess about the girl again, because when I confessed it before it wasn’t right. I made love to her without loving her and the last time I made love to her I told some boys about it.’

  ‘Yes. Anything else?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Good. There is a line in St. John that I like very much. It is Christ praying to the Father and He says: ‘I do not pray that You take them out of the world, but that You keep them from evil.’ Do you understand that?’

  ‘I think so, Father.’

  ‘Then for your penance, say alleluia three times.’

  Next afternoon Janet and I took her boys crabbing. We had an ice chest of beer and we set it under the small pavilion at the center of the wharf, then I put out six crab lines, tying them to the guard rail. I remembered the summer before she got married Janet and I had gone crabbing, then cooked them for the family: we had a large pot of water on the stove and when the water was boiling I held the gunny sack of live crabs over it and they came falling out, splashing into the water; they worked their claws, moved sluggishly, then died. And Janet had said: I keep waiting for them to scream.

  It was a hot day, up in the nineties. Someone was water-skiing on the lake, which was saltwater and connected by canal to the Gulf, but we had the wharf to ourselves, and we drank beer in the shade while Paul and Lee did the crabbing. They lost the first couple, so I left the pavilion and squatted at the next line. The boys flanked me, lying on their bellies and looking down where the line went into the dark water; they had their shirts off, and their hot tan shoulders and arms brushed my legs. I gently pulled the line up until we saw a crab just below the surface, swimming and nibbling at the chunk of ham.

  Okay, Lee. Put the net down in the water, then bring it up under him so you don’t knock him away.’

  He lowered the pole and scooped the net slowly under the crab.

  ‘I got him!’

  ‘That’s it. You just have to go slow, that’s all.’

  He stood and lifted the net and laid it on the wharf.

  ‘Look how big,’ Paul said.

  ‘He’s a good one,’ I said. ‘Put him in the sack.’

  But they crouched over the net, watching the crab push his claws through.

  ‘Poor little crab,’ Lee said. ‘You’re going to die.’

  ‘Does it hurt ’em, Harry?’ Paul said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’d hurt me,’ he said.

  ‘I guess it does, for a second or two.’

  ‘How long’s a second?’ Lee said.

  I pinched his arm.

  ‘About like that.’

  ‘That’s not too long,’ he said.

  ‘No. Put him in the sack now, and catch some more.’

  I went back to my beer on the bench. Paul was still crouching over the crab, poking a finger at its back. Then Lee held open the gunny sack and Paul turned the net over and shook it and the crab fell in.

  ‘Goodbye, big crab,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye, poor crab,’ Lee said.

  They went to another line. For a couple of hours, talking to Janet, I watched them and listened to their bare feet on the wharf and their voices as they told each crab goodbye. Sometimes one of them would stop and look across the water and pull at his pecker, and I remembered that day hot as this one when I was sixteen and I wanted to cut mine off. I reached deep under the ice and got a cold beer for Janet and I thought of Yvonne sitting at that kitchen table at three in the morning, tired, her lipstick worn off, her eyes fixed on a space between the people in the room. Then I looked at the boys lying on their bellies and reaching down for another crab, and I hoped they would grow well, those strong little bodies, those kind hearts.

  PART IV

  ROSE

  In memory of Barbara Loden

  SOMETIMES, WHEN I see people like Rose, I imagine them as babies, as young children. I suppose many of us do. We search the aging skin of the face, the unhappy eyes and mouth. Of course I can never imagine their fat little faces at the breast, or their cheeks flushed and eyes brightened from play. I do not think of them after the age of five or six, when they are sent to kindergartens, to school. There, beyond the shadows of their families and neighborhood friends, they enter the world a second time, their eyes blinking in the light of it. They will be loved or liked or disliked, even hated; some will be ignored, others singled out for daily abuse that, with a few adult exceptions, only children have the energy and heart to inflict. Some will be corrupted, many without knowing it, save for that cooling quiver of conscience when they cheat, when they lie to save themselves, when out of fear they side with bullies or teachers, and so forsake loyalty to a friend. Soon they are small men and women, with our sins and virtues, and by the age of thirteen some have our vices too.

  There are also those unforgivable children who never suffer at all: from the first grade on, they are good at schoolwork, at play and sports, and always they are befriended, and are the leaders of the class. Their teachers love them, and because they are humble and warm, their classmates love them too, or at least respect them, . and are not envious because they assume these children will excel at whatever they touch, and have long accepted this truth. They come from all manner of families, from poor and illiterate to wealthy and what passes for literate in America, and no one knows why they are not only athletic and attractive but intelligent too. This is an injustice, and some of us pause for a few moments in our middle-aged lives to remember the pain of childhood, and then we intensely dislike these people we applauded and courted, and we hope some crack of mediocrity we could not see with our young eyes has widened and split open their lives, the homecoming queen’s radiance sallowed by tranquilized bitterness, the quarterback fat at forty wheezing up a flight of stairs, and all of them living in the same small town or city neighborhood, laboring at vacuous work that turns their memories to those halcyon days when the classrooms and halls, the playgrounds and gymnasiums and dance floors were theirs: the last places that so obediently, even lovingly, welcomed the weight of their flesh, and its displacement of air. Then, with a smile, we rid ourselves of that evil wish, let it pass from our bodies to dissipate like smoke in the air around us, and, freed from the distraction of blaming some classmate’s excellence for our childhood pain, we focus on the boy or girl we were, the small body we occupied, watch it growing through the summers and school years, and we see that, save for some strengths gained here, some weaknesses there, we are the same people we first knew as ourselves; or the ones memory allows us to see, to think we know.

  People like Rose make me imagine them in those few years their memories will never disclose, except through hearsay: I was born in Austin. We lived in a garage apartment. When I was two we moved to Tuscaloosa. … Sometimes, when she is drinking at the bar, and I am standing some distance from her and can watch without her noticing, I see her as a baby, on the second or third floor of a tenement, in one of the Massachusetts towns along the Merrimack River. She would not notice, even if she turned and looked at my face; she would know me, she would speak to me, but she would not know I had been watching. Her face, sober or drunk or on the way to it, looks constantly watched, even spoken to, by her own soul. Or by something it h
as spawned, something that lives always with her, hovering near her face. I see her in a tenement because I cannot imagine her coming from any but a poor family, though I sense this notion comes from my boyhood, from something I learned about America, and that belief has hardened inside me, a stone I cannot dissolve. Snobbishness is too simple a word for it. I have never had much money. Nor do I want it. No: it’s an old belief, once a philosophy, which I’ve now outgrown: no one born to a white family with adequate money could end as Rose has.

  I know it’s not true. I am fifty-one years old, yet I cannot feel I am growing older because I keep repeating the awakening experiences of a child: I watch and I listen, I write in my journal, and each year I discover, with the awe of my boyhood, a part of the human spirit I had perhaps imagined, but had never seen or heard. When I was a boy, many of these discoveries thrilled me. Once in school the teacher told us of the men who volunteered to help find the cause of yellow fever. This was in the Panama Canal Zone. Some of these men lived in the room where victims of yellow fever had died; they lay on the beds, on sheets with dried black vomit, breathed and slept there. Others sat in a room with mosquitoes and gave their skin to those bites we simply curse and slap, and they waited through the itching and more bites, and then waited to die, in their agony leaving sheets like the ones that spared their comrades living in the room of the dead. This story, with its heroism, its infinite possibilities for human action, delighted me with the pure music of hope. I am afraid now to research it, for I may find that the men were convicts awaiting execution, or some other persons whose lives were so limited by stronger outside forces that the risk of death to save others could not have, for them, the clarity of a choice made with courage, and in sacrifice, but could be only a weary nod of assent to yet another fated occurrence in their lives. But their story cheered me then, and I shall cling to that. Don’t you remember? When first you saw or heard or read about men and women who, in the face of some defiant circumstance, fought against themselves and won, and so achieved love, honor, courage?