Ann deChira Malamud, 89; shaped husband's novels

Reading her father's novel "Dubin's Lives," Janna Malamud Smith was haunted by uncomfortably familiar scenes and told her mother she was disturbed by "the spooks of the familial unspoken."

Ann deChiara Malamud was no stranger to watching her husband, Bernard Malamud, transform family life into potent fiction. And in Dubin's wife she saw glimpses of the author's wife.

"I guess by now, after 7 novels, I do accept the fact that if you know a writer, you may become part of one of his characters," she wrote. "I suppose my feeling toward Kitty is -- well, whatever parts of her are me give me the only immortality I'm likely to have! But time has to some extent inured me ."

In the 1940s, she typed letters to secure her husband a college teaching post, and was quietly present at each juncture of his career as an award-winning writer. Remaining out of the public eye, she devoted much of her final years in Cambridge to helping ensure his literary future.

Mrs. Malamud, who was 89, died Tuesday in Mount Auburn Hospital of kidney failure. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about two decades ago.

"Her greatest achievement after he died was that she just took it upon herself to go through every manuscript, every paper, every bit of his legacy and place them in libraries," her daughter said. "It was a continuation of what she did in life for him. She was the person who set his life in order. Her work was the work of his career, basically."

Ann deChiara grew up outside New York City in New Rochelle amid an extended Italian family. At 8 she went to Italy with her mother and grandmother to spend a year in Naples.

She spent her junior year of college in Paris, graduated from Cornell University in 1939, then worked at the Young & Rubicam advertising firm in Manhattan.

In 1942, she met Bernard Malamud at a party in the apartment of "a mutual friend who had been gossiping to my Mom about the cute young writer that she knew," their daughter said. "Their second or third date was a Brooklyn Dodgers double header. When she made it through that there was some thought the relationship would last."

In her memoir "My Father Is a Book," Smith quotes from a letter her father sent to her mother a few months after they met:

"What does it mean when, increasingly, you find yourself thinking about one girl; when you read, and the words are woven into thoughts of her; when you work, and her image, like light falling upon darkness floats into your mind; when you rest, and her presence is with you? What does it mean when, in memory, you hold her beautiful body in your arms and rekiss kisses: when you constantly hear her voice, see her face, remember her laughter, tell her loveliness and take quiet pride in her wisdom ."

They married in 1945 and moved into a Greenwich Village apartment so small people joked "that you could wash dishes and sit on the toilet at the same time," their daughter said.

Their son, Paul, was born in 1947. The family moved to Corvallis, Ore., two years later so Bernard Malamud could teach at Oregon State College, a job that left enough time for his writing.

"I think she took to Oregon more than he did," said their daughter, who was born in 1952, the year her father's first novel, "The Natural," was published.

She wrote in her memoir that "his tiny instructor's salary led my Italian-American mother to cook meals with inexpensive local farm ingredients. . . . I can see her picking the skin and soft bones out of canned salmon before mixing it with eggs into a loaf, or grating a block of orange Tillamook Cheddar into a soufflé."

"She was a vivacious woman who liked people a great deal," their son said. "She made a whole social life for him."

"She really was the proverbial writer's wife," their daughter said.

That meant typing manuscripts as his second and third novels were published. His first collection of short stories, "The Magic Barrel," won the National Book Award.

"She typed things endlessly for him, not always 100 percent happily. She could be a very, very direct person. If she didn't like something, she would tell him," their daughter said. "He was a guy who didn't like to be criticized. And she was a person who could become very quickly very critical."

In 1961, the family moved to Vermont where he taught at Bennington College, which then had only female students.

"Bennington was getting into its '60s mode early so family life got somewhat disrupted. I think the good news is that the marriage survived even Bennington," their daughter said. "Bennington was an extraordinarily strange place. . . . It just was open season on marriage."

If Mrs. Malamud had grown used to recognizing herself in her husband's work, the hair's-breadth distance between people on the page and those in the author's life evaporated when their daughter published her memoir last year. At 88, Mrs. Malamud found herself fielding a call from a New York Times reporter about passages that touched on marital straying decades past.

"Essentially, I feel that my husband and I had a very strong bond," she told the Times. "Other relationships sometimes happen in life of various sorts. That does not mean that they destroy everything."

And they didn't. More fame and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, came to her husband during the Bennington years. They lived in Cambridge for two years in the late 1960s while their daughter attended private school, and later split time between Bennington and an apartment in Manhattan. Bernard Malamud died in the apartment of a heart attack while Mrs. Malamud was meeting a friend for lunch. She held onto the Manhattan apartment for several years.

"She would always put a plant or flower on the floor on the spot where he died on the day of his death," her son said. "That always said something to me about the relationship."

Mrs. Malamud also took a Central Square apartment in Cambridge to be close to her daughter, who lived in Milton, and her two grandsons. Always a loyal friend, she kept up relationships by phone as illness kept her inside. Always a dedicated reader, she finished reading the novels of Henry James when she was 75.

"She created quite a charming little apartment for herself here with books and paintings," her son said, speaking by phone from where his mother had lived.

"She adored Jane Austen. She would go back to Jane Austen," her daughter said. "I would say, 'What are you reading?' And she'd say, 'Well, I just pulled out "Pride and Prejudice." ' "

A memorial service will be held at a later date.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, the maiden name of Ann deChiara Malamud was misspelled in her obituary Sunday.