Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus Page A

money, and has never complained to me about that, or about anything else either. For several years in the seventies and eighties, Dick lived in an apartment on Beacon Street in Boston. It is a street with trees and good old brick buildings. He lived on the second floor, in two rooms. The front room was where he wrote and slept. A door at the far end of it, behind his desk, opened to the kitchen; and adjacent to that was the room I never saw him enter. I suppose his youngest daughter, Gina, slept there when she came to visit. Gina’s paintings and drawings hung in the first room, above the bed against one wall, and his desk facing another.
    His desk was two tables he placed in the shape of an L; he sat inside of it, the leg of the L on his right, and a window on his left. Below the window was an alley and parking spaces. On the floor near the kitchen was a small radio, plugged into an outlet; he listened to classical music. The back of a couch was against the long table of the L, and the couch faced the apartment’s door, the bathroom, his shelf of books, the closet, and the bed. When I went to visit him I sat on the couch, and he sat on the bed, and we drank Michelob and talked about writing, and writers.
    Fluffs of dust were on the floor, and to some eyes that one room where he lived may have looked dirty and cluttered. It was never cluttered. He wrote with a pencil on legal pads; but usually, when I went to see him, he was working on a typed draft, his manual typewriter on the shorter table, before his straight wooden chair; and the typed manuscript stacked on the long table, along with galley proofs and other writers’ manuscripts he was reading. His room reminded me of my own bachelor apartments, where I too lived in one room, and rarely entered the other, and my childrens’ paintings and drawings hung on the walls: the bed always made, the refrigerator stocked with breakfast food and beer, and every manuscript and book and bit of clothing in place, readily at hand. It was, I believed — and still do — a place that should have been left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should be able to go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.
    He woke each morning at seven and ate breakfast, then worked till noon, when he walked perhaps a hundred yards to Massachusetts Avenue, where it intersects with Beacon Street, and across it to a restaurant called The Crossroads. After lunch he napped, then wrote till evening and returned to The Crossroads for dinner and, even if I ate with him, even if we had dates, he went home around ten o’clock. He did not go to movies, and he never plugged in the television set Penelope Mortimer gave him after she taught at Boston University, then went back to England. It was on the living room floor, facing the couch, its cord lying behind it like a tail.
    On Beacon Street now there is only resident parking, but in those days I left my car near Dick’s and walked to the Red Sox games. One warm and dry and sunny afternoon, a Saturday in spring, I was walking past The Crossroads, toward Fenway Park, when Dick walked out of the restaurant. He had just eaten lunch and, as always, wore a suit and tie. I have rarely seen him without a tie. I had time before the game for a beer, so we went into The Crossroads and sat in a booth, and I congratulated him on receiving a second Guggenheim grant.
    â€œHow much did you get?” I said.
    â€œWell,” he said, smiling. “How much did you get?”
    He was talking about several years earlier, in 1975.
    â€œI asked for twenty,” I said. “But I was making eleven-five teaching, so they gave me twelve.”
    He nodded, his eyes merry.
    â€œThe first time,” he said, “I got sixty-five hundred. But that was nearly twenty years ago,