Broken Vessels Read online

  When David and Jack and Cadence and I got home from Lawrence General, I put Cadence on my lap and wheeled to my bedroom and lifted her to my bed. She lay on her back and held her pincher and sucked her thumb. She watched me as I told her she had been very good when Madeleine was hurt, that she had not panicked; she asked me what that meant, and I told her, and said that some children and some grown-ups would not have been able to help Suzanne and me, and that would be very normal for a child, but I only had to tell her to get me a bandana and she had run down the hall to the drawer in my chest before I could even tell her which drawer to look in. She turned to me: “I heard you when I was running down the hall. You said the second drawer, but I already knew and I was running to it.”

  I told her that was true courage, that to be brave you had to be afraid, and I was very proud of her, and of Suzanne, because we were all afraid and everyone controlled it and did what had to be done. She said: “You were afraid?”

  “Yes. That’s why I was crying.”

  She looked at the ceiling as I told her she must never blame herself for Madeleine’s finger, that no one had seen the notch in the chain guard, the bicycle had looked safe, and she had tried to stop Madeleine, had said Madeleine, no, and two grown-ups were right there watching and it happened too fast for anyone to stop it. She looked at me: “I started pedaling backwards when I saw her reaching for the wheel.”

  Then she looked up again, and I said she had done all she could to keep Madeleine from getting hurt, and it was very important for her never to feel responsible, never to blame herself, because that could hurt her soul, and its growth; and if she ever felt that way she must tell me or Mommy or Suzanne or Andre or Jeb. Her thumb was in her mouth and her pincher lay across her fingers, so part of it was at her nose, giving her the scent she loves. Finally I said: “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  Still gazing straight up, she lowered her thumb and said: “I only have one question. Why does it always happen to me? First you got hurt. Now Madeleine is hurt. Maybe next Mommy will get hurt. Or I will.”

  I closed my eyes and waited for images, for words, but no words rose from my heart; I saw only Cadence’s face for over a year and a half now, suffering and enduring and claiming and claiming cheer and joy and harmony with her body and spirit, and so with her life, a child’s life with so very few choices. I opened my eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you’re getting awfully good at it.”

  It is what she would tell me now; or encourage me to do.

  Today is the twenty-ninth of August 1988, and since the twenty-third of June, the second of two days when I wanted to die, I have not wanted my earthly life to end, have not wanted to confront You with anger and despair. I receive You in the Eucharist at daily Mass, and look at You on the cross, but mostly I watch the priest, and the old deacon, a widower, who brings me the Eucharist; and the people who walk past me to receive; and I know they have all endured their own agony, and prevailed in their own way, though not alone but drawing their hope and strength from those they love, those who love them; and from You, in the sometimes tactile, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes seemingly lethal way that You give.

  A week ago I read again The Old Man and the Sea, and learned from it that, above all, our bodies exist to perform the condition of our spirits: our choices, our desires, our loves. My physical mobility and my little girls have been taken from me; but I remain. So my crippling is a daily and living sculpture of certain truths: we receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses. No one can do this alone, for being absolutely alone finally means a life not only without people or God or both to love, but without love itself. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is a widower and a man who prays; but the love that fills and sustains him is of life itself: living creatures, and the sky, and the sea. Without that love, he would be an old man alone in a boat.

  One Sunday afternoon in July, Cadence asked Jack to bring up my reserve wheelchair from the basement, and she sat in it and wheeled about the house, and moved from it onto my bed then back to the chair, with her legs held straight, as I hold my right one when getting on and off the bed. She wheeled through the narrow bathroom door and got onto the toilet, her legs straight, her feet above the floor, and pushed her pants down; and when she pulled them up again she said it was hard to do, sitting down. She went down and up the ramp to the living room, and the one to the sundeck. Now I know what it’s like to be you, she said. When she was ready to watch a VCR cartoon, she got onto the living room couch as I do, then pushed her chair away to make room for mine, and I moved onto the couch and she sat on my stump and nestled against my chest; and Madeleine came, walking, her arms reaching for me, and I lifted her and sat her between my leg and stump, and with both arms I held my girls.

  1988/1989

  A Biography of Andre Dubus

  Andre Dubus (1936–1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983) and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared to Anton Chekhov and revered as a “writer’s writer.”

  Born on August 11, 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Dubus grew up the oldest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in Lafayette. There, he attended the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic school that helped nurture a young Dubus’s love of literature. He later enrolled at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, where he acquired his BA in English and journalism. Following his graduation in 1958, he spent six years in the United States Marine Corps as a lieutenant and captain—an experience that would inspire him to write his first and only novel, The Lieutenant (1967). During this time, he also married his first wife, Patricia, and started a family.

  After concluding his military service in 1964, Dubus moved with his wife and their four children to Iowa City, where he was to earn his MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. While there, he studied under acclaimed novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, whose particular brand of realism would inform Dubus’s work in the years to come. In 1966, Dubus relocated to New England, teaching English and creative writing at Bradford College in Bradford, Massachusetts, and beginning his own career as an author. Over an illustrious career, he wrote a total of six collections of short fiction, two collections of essays, one novel, and a stand-alone novella, Voices from the Moon (1984)—about a young boy who must come to terms with his faith in the wake of two family divorces—and was awarded the Boston Globe’s first annual Lawrence L. Winship Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

  In the summer of 1986, tragedy struck when Dubus pulled over to help two disabled motorists on a highway between Boston and his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. As he exited his car, another vehicle swerved and hit him. The accident crushed both his legs and would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Plagued by residual pain, he sunk into a depression that was further exacerbated by his divorce from his third wife, Peggy, and subsequent estrangement from their two young daughters, Cadence and Madeleine. Buoyed by his faith, he continued to write—in his final decade, he would pen two books of autobiographical essays, Broken Vessels (1991) and Meditations from a Moveable Chair (1998), and a final collection of short stories, Dancing After Hours (1996), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist—and even held a workshop for young writers at his home each week.

  In 1999, Dubus died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two. He is survived by three ex-wives and his six children, among them the author Andre Dubus III. Since his death, two of Dubus’s short works have been adap
ted for the screen: “Killings,” which was featured in Finding a Girl in America (1980), became the critically acclaimed film In the Bedroom (2001), starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei; and We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), starring Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Peter Krause, and Naomi Watts, is based on Dubus’s novella of the same name from his debut collection, Separate Flights (1975).

  Dubus Sr., with a sixteen-month-old Andre in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Andre’s sister Elizabeth is on the left and Kathryn is on the right. The family is bundled up for the Louisiana winter, which Kathryn remembers as being much colder during her childhood than it is now.

  Dubus with classmates from his first- or second-grade class, around 1940. Dubus is second from the left, displaying what his father called his “ethereal face.”

  The Dubus family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, around 1941. Andre Jr., stands in front, while his father, Andre Sr.; mother, Katherine; and sisters, Elizabeth and Kathryn, from left to right, stand in the back.

  Dubus’s freshman or sophomore school photo from Cathedral High School, around 1951. Dubus gave this photo to his recently married sister with a note on the back saying, jokingly, “To a good cook from the only one polite enough to eat her meals.”

  A fifteen-year-old Dubus, seen here in 1952.

  Dubus as a young Marine in Quantico, Virginia, where he received his training and became a commissioned officer in 1957.

  Dubus around 1967, while he was working at Bradford College in Bradford, Massachusetts. This photo was taken by one of his students.

  A photo of Dubus taken by a fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, around 1965. This photo was used as a dust jacket picture as well as in a newspaper story from Dubus’s hometown announcing the publication of his first novel, The Lieutenant (1967).

  Dubus in Iowa with his daughter Cadence in 1983. Cadence was born on June 11, 1982.

  Dubus with his sister Kathryn in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in October of 1987, the first time Kathryn saw Andre after the car accident that claimed his left leg.

  The signatures of six participants in a lecture series organized by Seattle Arts & Lectures from 1989 to 1990. Among the participants were John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, and Andre Dubus.

  A typed manuscript of Dubus’s personal essay “Love in the Morning,” which centers on Dubus’s spiritual experience of morning Mass while confined to a wheelchair. It features a note and his signature, dated September 20, 1994. He later said of the essay that he “knew before starting it that it was coming like grace to me, and I could receive it or bungle it, but I could not hold it at bay.”

  Andre Dubus III with his dad in the mid- to late-1990s. Andre III has gone on to enjoy a successful literary career, publishing five books, including the National Book Award finalist The House of Sand and Fog (1999) and The Garden of Last Days (2008), both of which were New York Times bestsellers.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  “Out Like a Lamb,” “Running,” “The End of a Season,” “Railroad Sketches,” “Of Robin Hood and Womanhood,” “The Judge and Other Snakes,” “On Charon’s Wharf,” “Selling Stories,” and “Marketing” first appeared in Boston Magazine; “After Twenty Years” in North American Review; “Two Ghosts” in Mid-American Review; “A Salute to Mister Yates” and “Lights of the Long Night” in Black Warrior Review; “A Woman in April” in Gentleman’s Quarterly; “Under the Lights” in The Village Voice; “Intensive Care” in Indiana Review; “Bastille Day” in Yankee; “Into the Silence” as the introduction to the anthology Into the Silence published by The Green Street Press; “Broken Vessels,” in a condensed version, in Special Report; and “Sketches at Home,” “Breathing,” and “Husbands” in Epoch.

  copyright © 1991 by Andre Dubus

  cover design by ORIM

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-9966-1

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com