The Curse by Andre Dubus

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The 1980's

Locale: A small town in Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

  • Mitchell Hayes, a middle-aged bartender
  • Susan, his wife
  • Bob, The bar's manager
  • Bar patrons

The Story

Mitchell Hayes, a forty-nine-year-old bartender at a small-town, working-class bar, feels old, exhausted, and depressed one night. He is alone in the bar with its manager, Bob, after closing time. The police have just left, after taking Mitchell's statement about a rape that occurred in the bar that night.

Earlier that night, five men had arrived on motorcycles near closing time and ordered beers. The men were loud and edgy, and Mitchell thought they had been using drugs. The stepfather of a teenage boy and girl, Mitchell fears and hates drugs. A young woman came into the bar to buy cigarettes and asked Mitchell for change. The five men intercepted her before she could get to the cigarette machine and raped her on the floor, despite Mitchell's presence. After the rape, Mitchell went to the sobbing woman and handed her clothes to her, then called 911 and Bob. Mitchell wished he could comfort the young woman, but she kept crying. He knew both of the police officers who responded to his call and had gone to high school with one of them, Smitty. After the woman was taken away on a stretcher, Mitchell told Smitty that he could have stopped the assault, but Smitty said that was the job of the police, and if Mitchell had intervened, he would probably be in the hospital along with the girl.

When Mitchell gets home, his wife, Susan, awakens and comes into the dining room, where he is smoking and drinking a beer. He tells her what has happened, and she agrees with Smitty that he could not have prevented it. However, Mitchell is sure that if he had intervened and ended up in the hospital, she still would have said he did the right thing. Susan, who has been a caregiver for elderly persons, soothes her husband until he falls asleep.

In the morning, Mitchell is awakened as usual by the sounds of his family getting ready for their jobs. On ordinary mornings, he quickly falls back to sleep, but today he gets up and joins them at the breakfast table. Joyce and Marty, his stepchildren, wonder why he is up so early. He tells them of the incident at the bar, adding that when he went to call the police, one of the men stopped him. He thinks he should have attacked the man with a bottle, but Marty says that Mitchell would have put himself in danger and would not have been able to overcome five drugged, violent men. Susan says that the men were caught and proudly says that Mitchell will be a good witness at the trial.

That night, Mitchell is back at work. The regular customers are all there, and Mitchell observes that none of the women fear the men there, even the young men who ride motorcycles. Mitchell also notices that not even the women treat him as if he had been an uncaring coward. He feels shamed that many people act as if he had been a victim himself.

Reggie, a regular customer, has had too much to drink, as he sometimes does. When Reggie asks for another shot of whisky and a beer, Mitchell tells him it is time to switch to coffee, adding that he does not want to hear that Reggie has died. Reggie does not argue, and when he goes home, he leaves a sixteen-dollar tip for Mitchell. As Mitchell presses the money into his overflowing tip jar, he sees the woman being raped, and hears the men cheering and the woman screaming, then hears her sobs melt into the sound of the ambulance siren fading into the night. From behind him, he feels "her pain and terror and grief, then her curse upon him. The curse moved into his back and spread down and up his spine, into his stomach and legs and arms and shoulders until he quivered with it. He wished he were alone so he could kneel to receive it."