Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [193]
We talked awhile about the fight, about who had the reach advantage and who might be hungrier for this, Trinidad or De La Hoya? This was the only sport we could talk about because it was the only one I’d ever done and most of the knowledge my father had of it had come from these talks. Before them, he’d had only a passing interest in boxing, but now it was more than that for him, and it seemed to come from my passion for it, the way my eventual and late interest in baseball would come from my sons.
Pop had never seen me box. We’d had that night at the Tap together twenty years earlier, but my father had been on the floor and hadn’t seen me knock down the man trying to make peace. Over the years, he’d heard the fight stories about me to the point where they had taken on the mantle of myth, and this often left me feeling like a poseur and a liar, even though I had been in those fights. I had done those things.
Not long before this night, the editor of a magazine wanted to do a story on my father and me. Pop kept calling my house to hear when I could do the interview. I told him of the work yet to be done on Suzanne’s house, of my commitments at home. “I don’t know, Pop, I might not be able to make this.”
“You have to, man. It’s about the two of us. It’ll be fun.”
I loved my time with my new father. I loved our easy rapport, but I did not want to do this interview partly because it was my book coming out, not his. Once he’d been interviewed by a woman who began to talk at length about one of the stories in my first book. Later he mentioned that to me. He said that he’d almost said to her, “Hey, lady, whose work are we talking about right now anyway?”
“I get that all the time, Dad.”
That’s where we’d left it. But why shouldn’t every journalist I’d ever talked to bring up my father and his masterful work? I was his firstborn son with the same name writing fiction, too. What did I expect? In these interviews, I was treated with a vaguely disguised pity: how hard it must be to follow the footsteps of a real master, a writer’s writer, to share his name and probably not his gifts, an assumption I shared but honestly did not think much about. Sometimes there was outright irritation that there would be two Andre Dubuses now. One journalist, a woman in her thirties who smoked one cigarette after another and wrote in shorthand, said, “God, don’t you want to do something different from your father? Why don’t you go into another field?”
But I had never thought about writing as a field or a career. These were not words that came to me. Ever since that night in my apartment in Lynn when—instead of running to the gym to box—I’d sat down with tea and a pen and a notebook, writing had given me me, and this was the only reason I’d kept doing it. Only when I published something was I aware there was now a reflection of me, however small, in some cultural mirror. When my first novel was published, it got a favorable review in Library Journal, but the reviewer wrote that this was a novel by my father and listed his books. I felt the violation of the robbed, but I also felt protective of my father’s name. Was it fair to him that people would think he, a master, had written the prose of an obvious apprentice? Wasn’t it time I wrote under a new name? But my first name was Andre and my last name was Dubus, and I just could not bear to paint a fake name over the truths writing had carried me to; there had been Alexandre Dumas, père, and Alexandre Dumas, fils; there was Hank Williams and Hank Jr. and Hank III. Now there were two Andre Dubuses, that’s all.
It was not this simple, though. Pop kept calling me about doing that interview and I kept resisting, but it wasn’t because I did not want to share time and attention for a book I had just finished, nor was it to avoid sitting in the long shadow of his substantial body of work either. No, it seemed to go beyond work and “career” into something far deeper, into blood and bone and spirit and what comes after we all leave this earth: it was having to be joined to him forever by name, the way the