`Broken Vessel' details writer's pain

The Boston Herald

I didn't know him before the accident. Not his name. Not his face. Not his words.

The accident is what introduced me to him. A man, a writer, had been seriously injured while stopping to help two people whose car had broken down on the highway. The man was a hero. He had saved a woman's life.

But he'd lost a leg and badly injured the other doing it, and he had a young child and a pregnant wife and no income because after the accident he wasn't writing at all, because he was in the hospital for months and then at home, in a wheelchair, struggling just to survive.

That's all I knew about Andre Dubus four years ago. I knew his present and none of his past. I didn't know that he had grown up in Louisiana, had been a Marine, had been married before and had older children; that he was a man's man and a woman's, too, because he knew what women thought and how they felt; and that he was religious, not overtly, but quietly, sustained by a faith that had molded him and would comfort him, when little else could.

I was to learn all this later, not just at his kitchen table, where I learned some, but in his writings, where I learned so much more.

"We like to believe that in this last quarter of the century, we know and are untouched by everything; yet it takes only a very small jolt, at the right time, to knock us off balance for the rest of our lives," Dubus wrote years before his accident in a short story called, "Rose." The words proved prescient. One moment, one jolt, catapulted this gentle bear of a man into a life full of pain, then of loss, then of dependence.

"I remember the headlights, but I do not remember the car hitting Luis Santiago and me, and I do not remember the sounds our bodies made," Dubus writes in his new book, "Broken Vessels." "Luis died, either in the ambulance, or later that night in the hospital. He was 23 years old. I do not remember leaving the ground my two legs stood on for the last instant in my life, then moving through the air, over the car's hood and windshield and roof, falling on its trunk. I remember lying on that trunk and asking someone: What happened?"

What happened was that invisible something, which is like glass, which separates the well from the unwell, the able from the disabled, shattered. The well can see pain, but they can't feel it. The well can imagine what it's like to be in a wheelchair, but they can't know it.

But you come close to knowing, reading "Broken Vessels."

"Madeline grew inside of my wife as she visited the hospital, then as she cared for me at home, changing bandages as they taught her in the hospital, emptying urinals, bringing food to the hospital bed in the library, and juice and water, and holding my leg when I transferred from bed to chair to couch and back again; Madeline growing inside of her as she soothed the pain in my body and soul, as she put the bed pan under me then cleaned me and it, and she watched with me as the Red Sox beat the Angels in the playoffs and lost to the Mets in the World Series, sacrifice enough for her, to watch baseball til late at night, pregnant and caring for a four-year-old energetic girl and a crippled man."

I read the book backward, starting with the emotional aftermath of the accident. Reading it forward, beginning in happier times, would have led me to hope that when I got to the end, the end would have changed. Dubus wouldn't have been on the road that night; he wouldn't have stopped. A man and a woman wouldn't have needed his help, and he'd have gone home and kissed his daughter, Cadence, and his pretty, young wife and they would have lived happily every after.

Starting with the end invalidated fancy. For there is no getting away from the inescapable truth that Dubus will spend his life in a wheelchair; that his surviving leg won't get better; that his young wife took his young daughters and left for whatever reasons, because tragedy doesn't strengthen a marriage, it tears it apart, because of the burdens it imposes, not just physical, which are bad enough, but emotional, too.

"The potter is making a pot and it cracks,"Dubus's physical therapist told him one day. "So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can't make a new vessel out of a broken one. It's time to find the real you," she said.

But the real Andre Dubus was never his body or his marriage. The chalice only holds the host. The real Andre Dubus has always been his soul.

"One Sunday afternoon in July, Cadence asked Jack to bring up my reserve wheelchair from the basement," he writes. "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."

Everyone who reads "Broken Vessels" will know, for a moment at least, what it's like to be Andre Dubus, in body and in soul.