Broken Vessels

by Andre Dubus

  The two lawyers went back to their tables and The Judge said: “I’m going to dismiss this case. What we have here is a classic case of Adam and Eve and the Snake in the Garden. You, young man,” he said, his voice low, “the next time you’re with a girl, you keep your hands to yourself. Do you understand me?”

  Nick told his honor that he did. Then the judge looked at Jan beyond the railing, among the spectators, and those awaiting trial. He spoke loudly, with anger: “And as for you, young lady — Stand up.”

  She stood erectly while her face reddened and tears flowed down her cheeks and she remained silent as his voice rose.

  “You are the prime instigator in this case. You started it all, and I strongly advise you in the future to control your temper; that’s all.”

  I watched her standing, her back and shoulders still straight, and I watched her face. Then I raised my hand and stood and softly his honor acknowledged me, and softly I asked to address the court, and politely he said Yes. Not so softly then I said that I could not believe that here in this court in the United States of America in the nineteen eighties I had just heard what I had heard. I said: Your honor, I was there; I saw him banging her head against a brick wall; he could have killed her.

  His honor was talking too, but I did not hear him. My lawyer friend shook my hand, and I left the court room, to gather in the adjoining room with my wife, the prosecuting attorney, Jan’s mother and grandmother, to join in voiced anger and disbelief as Nick and his girlfriend walked past us, arm-in-arm: the girl who was going to take the stand and testify that Jan had attacked Nick with a knife. Either the prosecutor did not know about this until The Judge called him and Nick’s lawyer to the bench, or he chose not to talk about it with Jan, or with anyone else, until we stood together. There was a knife: a penknife that had belonged to Jan’s grandmother; it fell from her purse when Nick held her down, her back on top of the park bench’s back, as he choked her. Then I looked around for Jan. She sat on a bench against a wall, crying, and I went over and held her and sobbing she said: “I got beat up. He beat me up, and nothing happened.”

  We all left the court house. It was noon and cold and the sun was low, at its winter angle, beyond the city and the Merrimack River. In the car I said to my wife: “She did everything she was supposed to. How will she ever believe in the system again? Why should she?”

  Then we drove home and I went to bed and slept and woke to the early dark of winter.

  1985/1986

  ON CHARON’S WHARF

  SINCE WE ARE all terminally ill, each breath and step and day one closer to the last, I must consider those sacraments which soothe our passage. I write on a Wednesday morning in December when snow covers the earth, the sky is grey, and only the evergreens seem alive. This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal. This has nothing to do with immortality, with eternity; I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life. No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.

  And that is why I am drawn again and again to see Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, to watch the knight who, because finally he has been told by Death that he is going to die, must now act within that knowledge, and for the rest of the movie he lives in constant touch with his mortality, as we all should every day, with everyone (but we don’t, we don’t, we are distracted, we run errands … ); and that is why one of my favorite scenes in the movie is the knight sitting on the earth with the young couple and their child, and the woman offers him a bowl of berries: he reaches out with both hands, receives the bowl from her, and eats; and the scene is invested with his awareness that his time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people, with this gift of food, he has been given an eternal touch: eternal because, although death will destroy him, it cannot obliterate the act between him and the woman. She has given him the food. He has taken it. In the face of time, the act is completed. Death cannot touch it now, can only finally stop the hearts that were united in it.

  So many of us fail: we divorce wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half-pleasures which are not whole because they are not shared. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

  As lovers we must have these sacraments, these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves. For our lives are hurried and much too distracted, and one of the strangest and most dangerous of all distractions is this lethargy of self we suffer from, this part of ourselves that does not want to get out of bed and once out of bed does not want to dress and once dressed does not want to prepare breakfast and once fed does not want to work. And what does it want? Perhaps it wants nothing at all. It is a mystery, a lovely one because it is human, but it is also dangerous. Some days it does not want to love, and we yield to it, we drop into an abyss whose walls echo with strange dialogues. These dialogues are with the beloved, and at their center is a repetition of the word I and sometimes you, but neither word now is uttered with a nimbus of blessing. These are the nights when we sit in that kitchen and talk too long and too much, so that the words multiply each other, and what they express — pain, doubt, anxiousness, dread — becomes emotions which are not rooted in our true (or better) selves, which exist apart from those two gentle people who shared eggs at this same table which now is soiled with ashes and glass-rings.

  These nights can destroy us. With words we create genies which rise on the table between us, and fearfully we watch them hurt each other; they look like us, they sound like us, but they are not us, and we want to call them back, see them disappear like shriveling clouds back into our throats, down into our hearts where they can join our other selves and be forced again into their true size: a small I among many other I’s. We try this with more words and too often the words are the wrong ones, the genies grow, and we are approaching those hours after midnight when lovers should never quarrel, for the night has its mystery too and will not be denied, it loves to distort the way we feel and if we let it, it will. We say: But wait a minute … But you said … But I always thought that … Well how do you think I feel, who do you think you are anyway? Just who in the hell do you think you are?

  There are no answers, at least not at that table. Each day she is several women, and I am several men. We must try to know each other, understand each other, and love each other as best as we can. But we cannot know and understand all of each other. This is a time in our land when lovers talk to each other, and talk to counselors about each other, and talk to
counselors in front of each other. We have to do this. Many of us grew up in homes whose table and living room conversations could have been recorded in the daily newspaper without embarrassing anyone, and now we want very much to explore each other, and to be explored. We are like children in peril, though, when we believe this exploring can be done with words alone, and that the exploring must always give answers, and that the exploring is love itself rather than a way to deepen it. For then we kill our hearts with talk, we place knowing and understanding higher than love, and failing at the first two, as we sometimes must, we believe we have failed at the third. Perhaps we have not. But when you believe you no longer love, you no longer do.

  I need and want to give the intimacy we achieve with words. But words are complex: at times too powerful or fragile or simply wrong; and they are affected by a tone of voice, a gesture of a hand, a light in the eyes. And words are sometimes autonomous little demons who like to form their own parade and march away, leaving us behind. Once in a good counselor’s office I realized I was not telling the truth. It was not that I meant to lie. She was asking me questions and I was trying to answer them, and I was indeed answering them. But I left out maybe, perhaps, I wonder. … Within minutes I was telling her about emotions I had not felt. But by then I was feeling what I was telling her, and that is the explosive nitroglycerin seeping through the hearts of lovers.

  So what I want and want to give, more than the intimacy of words, is shared ritual, the sacraments. I believe that, without those, all our talking, no matter how enlightened, will finally drain us, divide us into two confused and frustrated people, then destroy us as lovers. We are of the flesh, and we must turn with faith toward that truth. We need the companion on the march, the arms and lips and body against the dark of the night. It is our flesh which lives in time and will die, and it is our love which comforts the flesh. Beneath all the words we must have this daily acknowledgment from the beloved, and we must give it too or pay the lonely price of not living fully in the world: that as lovers we live on Charon’s wharf, and he’s out there somewhere in that boat of his, and today he may row in to where we sit laughing, and reach out to grasp an ankle, hers or mine.

  It would be madness to try to live so intensely as lovers that every word and every gesture between us was a sacrament, a pure sign that our love exists despite and perhaps even because of our mortality. But we can do what the priest does, with his morning consecration before entering the routine of his day; what the communicant does in that instant of touch, that quick song of the flesh, before he goes to work. We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of all sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: We are, we are, we are …

  1977

  Part Three

  AFTER TWENTY YEARS

  I PROMISED TO write a reminiscence about my two and a half years as a student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but this morning I read the mail before going to my desk and, after reading a letter from my twenty-six-year-old son, I could no longer write about my life in a good place from mid-January 1964 until mid-August 1966. I was going to write that I learned much at Iowa, more even than I knew I was learning then, and always I was learning. I was deeply grateful to my teachers and to my faculty friends who were not my teachers in classrooms but taught me anyway. When I left Iowa and began teaching more than a graduate assistant’s load, my gratitude became awe. I truly did not understand how those men had given so much of themselves in the classroom, in conferences, and in bars and their homes and our homes and on the phone.

  Here’s what my son, Andre III, wrote from New York City:

  I saw two men sleeping on a grate in front of the Waldorf-Astoria last Friday night. It was around midnight and I was just walking around. … One of the men was black, the other white. Both were clean shaven. Both were in work clothes and long Salvation-Army-looking overcoats. Both had shoes. Both looked and smelled sober while they slept. They had their duffle bags in their laps. And I’m convinced they did not know each other. They looked like two strangers sharing some warmth. Women in fur coats and men in five hundred dollar suits and coats did not even pause in their banter as they passed them on their way to a stretch limousine and dinner. Did you read about Evelio Javier today, the Harvard-educated Marcos foe and provincial leader of Aquino’s campaign, who was chased across a town square in that country by six masked gunmen then slaughtered in an outhouse in somebody’s backyard? He was forty-two. It happened in San José de Buenavista. What did Anne Frank write in her diary? “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”

  Peace, Pop.

  These days I barely have the heart, the will, to do something as insignificant as writing fiction. I cannot write about something as trifling as my life at Iowa, where my first wife and I thought we were poor because we had four children and a twenty-four-hundred-dollar a year assistantship and surplus food every month and I sold blood for twenty-five dollars a pint every three months and earned a hundred dollars a month teaching the Britannica Schools Correspondence Course; in my final year Richard Braddock and Paul Engle gave me a thirty-six-hundred-dollar assistantship, and we were no longer eligible for surplus food. Our children never knew we were poor. And of course we weren’t. As Joe Williams said during his performance at a jazz club near here, about nine years ago: There’s poor, and there’s po’.

  I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged — those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home — are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.

  C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously is not only one of the best novels I’ve read in decades but the only one I recall that confronts mass poverty and the callousness of the powerful, the wealthy, and the futility of those who do not despise the poor, who even love them, grieve for them, and can do nothing. Yet still it is a novel, of no use to the poor unless they can eat it, drink it, wear it, use it as a home, and still that is not enough. I believe Koch would agree. There is much pain in his book. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he now lives in Tasmania.

  My new young wife and three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I are living now on nine hundred dollars a month, because I tried to follow the example of my Iowa teachers, and after eighteen years, exhaustion and high blood pressure drove me to retirement, to normal blood pressure and serenity; and still we are not poor. Tonight I watched a movie on the VCR. Even as I write this I am listening to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland and Pavarotti, on a Panasonic stereo cassette player, and I am wearing ear phones so I will not wake my sleeping family. I am not hungry. My wife and daughter are not hungry.

  We are warm. Outside ice covers the bare branches of trees, and earlier they shone in the light from our one neighbor’s house; so did the ice-covered snow under the trees, and between our houses. I stepped outside and looked for a while at that shining white beauty in the peaceful quiet here on the hill in the country. Then I stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen and now, hours later, I remember R. V. Cassill saying: Nature isn’t lethal; it’s indifferent. And I sit with a pen and a notebook and Sutherland and Pavarotti while across the land cold air and frozen snow are lethal: for my indifferent country has made them so: made them silent air raids on our people.


  We were not poor at Iowa City, my brave young wife Pat, and me, and our children: Suzanne, born in 1958; Andre in 1959, Jeb in 1960, Nicole in 1963. We had all the time we wanted to spend with each other and with our new and good friends. We had time to read, to talk, even to think. We had time, my wife and I, to make love and a place where we could read about and talk about our Church’s opinions and pronouncements about artificial birth control; and to decide that we could resort to contraception and still receive the Catholic sacraments. We had time to love each other, to understand better the complexity of marital love, and to try to achieve what we understood. So we had time to fail; and our later failure, nearly four years after leaving Iowa City, probably began there. But we suffered no more than our friends whose marriages ended. We will never know what our children suffered, and can only hope they are healed now; or will be: if there is complete healing, so long as memory exists.

  Our children did not know we had very little money, and they did not know their parents would fail. Nor did we. One day there was an ice storm and when it was over the six of us looked out the living room window at the sparkling trees. We were all very young then, and had lived only on Marine and Navy bases and in small towns, and none of us knew that such beauty was, in the wrong nation, a killer of human beings. I see us now at that window: the red-haired little girl, the two blond boys, the blond girl and the blond mother and me, and I know that the only poverty afflicting my wife and me in Iowa City was youth: educated, Caucasian, never affluent but always safe youth. We knew about blacks, and because we had lived and had two sons at Camp Pendleton, California, we knew about migrant Mexican workers. But at the window we believed in the promise of these moments with our children, and believed that all white Americans could feel as we did, our six bodies pressed together as we exclaimed and pointed and murmured, and looked through cold glass at that afternoon’s lovely gift from the sky.