We set the appointment for a crisply sunny September day. He was to meet me following noon mass at the campus Catholic church, a ritual he observed every day.It was my first encounter with Andre Dubus, the noted American short story writer and, for that semester, a writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama.
But nothing went as planned. He emerged from the church, and I emerged from my car, introducing myself as I walked toward him.
“I can’t talk,” were his first words. Shorter than I, with a powerful chest and arms, this man with the cheeks of a Santa and a slightly graying beard—a former Marine--looked at me and shook his head.
“I just can’t do this,” he said. “I’m too emotional.” His damp eyes were sorrowful, a contrast with his powerful physical presence.
“We’ll have to reschedule,” he continued, my introduction still stammering on my lips.
And because there was nothing else to do, we did.
New to my job and to my graduate studies in English, I had prepared for the interview by reading his award-winning short work. I was ready with my lofty questions and literary analogies, but I wasn’t ready for Andre Dubus. Nothing could have prepared me for that.
So a few days later, I knocked on the door of his campus housing, and we settled in to his study for the interview. I know some of what was said, because I still have a copy of the published article. But I have no idea how the 15-minute interview became a three-hour conversation that took its own detours, driven by the electric curiosity of the interviewee. I just knew I was in the presence of a personality that filled the space around it and somehow enlarged it. The conversation was energizing and exhausting.
I left that day with my book signed. We never had the drink.I thought of this as I recently read the haunting memoir by Dubus’ son, the very talented Andre Dubus III. The oldest of four children of Dubus and his first wife, the son tells a story of life on the edge.
Parents divorced. Talented, famous father working for a professor’s meager pay and often absent. Mother struggling. Growing up in the rough parts of Boston, often scrounging for food and too often involved in fights that escalate toward violence. Embracing the violence by learning boxing. Drifting in and out of jobs, relationships. Finding writing as a redemption and, ultimately, knowing his father as a friend.
He movingly writes about his father’s last years and death in 1999. The elder Dubus had stopped on a freeway late one night to assist stranded motorists, when a car veered toward the group. Those of us who had known Dubus, even briefly, heard about the tragedy and were on email lists seeking support to help him through a bad time.
Because of the accident, Dubus had one leg amputated and lost use of the other. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, from his son's account at peace with himself. The eldest son and his brother built their father's casket themselves, and Dubus was buried in Haverhill, Mass.One of the only stories by his father that Andre Dubus III mentions in his memoir, Townie, is one that, many years earlier, I asked the elder Dubus about. It’s called “Killings.”
Here are the published question and answer.
"On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt's older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: 'I should kill him.'" --Killings
We had talked about the influence of Catholicism on his writing. He said it was "entirely" influenced by his faith.
My question:
"Does a story such as 'Killings' illustrate this principle? Is the empathy for character there?"
His answer:
"That's not a Catholic story. That's a father story. That story was based on a killing which actually occurred in Massachusetts. In that incident, the father did not kill the murderer. The murderer was sent to jail for five years. When he was out on bond, the young man's mother kept seeing him--in the grocery store, in the drug store. Two friends approached the father and said, 'Do you want me to kill him?'
So I thought: 'What if the father agreed?' That's where that story came from. If there's any Catholicism in it, it's one of the universal truths of Catholicism, and that is in the moment that he pulls the trigger he has violated his harmony with nature, and he will never again be back in harmony with nature, because he has killed.
My sense of fatherhood has influenced my writing because I've been a father since I was 22 years old. I don't remember what it's like not to be a father. If someone killed a son of mine, I hope that I would have the moral courage to kill that person--if my son didn't deserve to die. If someone killed my daughter, it wouldn't matter whether she deserved it or not. I'd go kill him."
