Conversations with Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus’s Knuckler Keeps Him in the Game

120 Andre Dubus’s Knuckler Keeps Him in the Game Tim McCarthy / 1990 National Catholic Reporter 13 July 1990: 1, 16–17. reprinted in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking. ed. ross gresham. new orleans: Xavier review Press, 189–99. reprinted with the permission of the National Catholic Reporter, 115 e. armour blvd, Kansas city, Mo 64111. www.ncronline.org. In the darkest hours of a July morning in 1986, writer Andre Dubus stopped to help some accident victims on a Massachusetts interstate north of Boston . Fearing the worst and looking for more hands to deal with it, Dubus tried to flag another car down. The driver bashed into him, nearly cut him in half. Dubus came out of the ordeal with one leg a stump and the other a moribund appendage that he has to keep elevated so it will not turn black with clotting blood. That physical mutilation of a boisterous man was more than enough, but his art, his marriage, his way of life—all of it came a cropper on that black highway and Dubus has spent the last four years trying to mend, fighting to find his way, to realize that he cannot go back and at the age of fifty-four has to begin most of it all over again. Apart from some faithful friends, three things have kept him going: his children, his faith, and the struggle to reconstruct his art. With half a dozen collections of short fiction under his belt, Dubus has been hailed as one of the best writers in the country. He has no compunction about declaring himself a Catholic writer. Schooled by the Christian Brothers in the Cajun country of his native Louisiana, he grew into an abiding love for the Eucharist , for ritual, for sacraments of every kind. Most of his characters are secular as sour mash, but it is through that Catholic sensibility that he conceives them and bears them to life. tiM Mccarthy / 1990 121 In Voices from the Moon, a story long enough to have been published separately as a short novel, an aging man named Greg announces that he is about to marry his son’s ex-wife. Brenda is a dancer. She tells Greg of her need to dance every day, whether she is working professionally or not. “Some people have things like that,” Greg replies, “and they don’t have to make money at it. It’s something they have to do, or they’re not themselves anymore. If you take it away from them, they’ll still walk around, and you can touch them and talk to them. They’ll even answer. But they’re not there anymore.” That is how it is with Dubus and his writing, the reason why the loss of his art would be far more devastating than the loss of his legs, why healing has been such an anguished process for him, why he is fighting so hard for the patience to wait it out, to let his mind and spirit heal along with his body. “Without the children and stripped of writing, I don’t really have a reason to get up,” he said one morning last spring. “So that’s why I’m trying to get (the writing) back. I know the world doesn’t need it. I need it to be happy.” Children’s Hour Dubus was resting on his bed that morning, black satin sheets, the dead leg propped on pillows, in the room where he works at a drawing table in one corner. “Best desk I ever had,” he said. The desk looks out onto a high deck, over the front yard with its homemade swing set, swimming pool, and playhouse , across the country road to the greening ridge beyond. It is a hillside house outside Haverhill, one of the old and ailing mill towns along the Merrimack River just north of Boston. Dubus’s two youngest children , ages three and eight, have turned the walls of the long hallway down to the bedroom into a rollicking mural. More children’s drawings decorate the dining room beyond. Love messages to their father are chalked on a table there. A wheelchair ramp angles down to the living room below, where the girls’ art materials are stored along the windowed wall. The girls stay with their mother, who left Dubus after the accident, but the house is still very much a place where young children live, their presence echoing even in...