— I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian «tssk-tssk» and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — «what a balagur (wag) you are!» — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable («priceless for impudence and absurdity») Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles?
The last butterflies of 1905, indolent Peacocks and Red Admirables, one Queen of Spain and one Clouded Yellow, were making the most of the modest blossoms. A tram on their left passed close to the promenade, where they rested and cautiously kissed when the whine of wheels had subsided. The rails hit by the sun acquired a beautiful cobalt sheen — the reflection of noon in terms of bright metal.
‘Let’s have cheese and white wine under that pergola,’ suggested Van. ‘The Vinelanders will lunch à deux today.’
Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles; the open bags of a Tirolese couple stood unpleasantly near — and Van bribed the waiter to carry their table out, onto the boards of an unused pier. Ada admired the waterfowl population: Tufted Ducks, black with contrasty white flanks making them look like shoppers (this and the other comparisons are all Ada’s) carrying away an elongated flat carton (new tie? gloves?) under each arm, while the black tuft recalled Van’s head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook. Coots (which had returned after all), swimming with an odd pumping movement of the neck, the way horses walk. Small grebes and big ones, with crests, holding their heads erect, with something heraldic in their demeanor. They had, she said, wonderful nuptial rituals, closely facing each other — so (putting up her index fingers bracketwise) — rather like two bookends and no books between, and, shaking their heads in turn, with flashes of copper.
‘I asked you about Andrey’s rituals.’
‘Ach, Andrey is so excited to see all those European birds! He’s a great sportsman and knows our Western game remarkably well. We have in the West a very cute little grebe with a black ribbon around its fat white bill. Andrey calls it pestroklyuvaya chomga. And that big chomga there is hohlushka, he says. If you scowl like that once again, when I say something innocent and on the whole rather entertaining, I’m going to kiss you on the tip of the nose, in front of everybody.’
Just a tiny mite artificial, not in her best Veen. But she recovered instantly:
‘Oh, look at those sea gulls playing chicken.’
Several rieuses, a few of which were still wearing their tight black summer bonnets, had settled on the vermilion railing along the lakeside, with their tails to the path and watched which of them would stay staunchly perched at the approach of the next passerby. The majority flapped waterward as Ada and Van neared; one twitched its tail feathers and made a movement analogous to ‘bending one’s knees’ but saw it through and remained on the railing.
‘I think we noticed that species only once in Arizona — at a place called Saltsink — a kind of man-made lake. Our common ones have quite different wing tips.’
A Crested Grebe, afloat some way off, slowly, slowly, very slowly started to sink, then abruptly executed a jumping fish plunge, showing its glossy white underside, and vanished.
‘Why on earth,’ asked Van, ‘didn’t you let her know, in one way or another, that you were not angry with her? Your phoney letter made her most unhappy!’
‘Pah!’ uttered Ada. ‘She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing — stupid enough to warn me against possible «infections» such as «labial lesbianitis.» Labial lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for Lucette to look up Andrey in town and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved before my marriage. He didn’t dare annoy me with his revived curiosity, but he complained to Dorothy of Lucette’s neopravdannaya zhestokost’ (unjustified cruelty).’
‘Ada, Ada,’ groaned Van, ‘I want you to get rid of that husband of yours, and his sister, right now!’
‘Give me a fortnight,’ she said, ‘I have to go back to the ranch. I can’t bear the thought of her poking among my things.’
At first everything seemed to proceed according to the instructions of some friendly genius.
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to Visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of routine tests’ — or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude.
During the next few days, Dorothy used her leisure to spy upon Ada. The woman was sure of three things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided Van with another source of amusement.
The Three Swans overwinged a bastion. Anyone who called, flesh or voice, was told by the concierge or his acolytes that Van was out, that Madame André Vinelander was unknown, and that all they could do was to take a message. His car, parked in a secluded bosquet, could not betray his presence. In the forenoon he regularly used the service lift that communicated directly with the backyard. Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy’s contralto: ‘La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,’ ‘La Trompette n’était pas contente ce matin,’ et cetera. Then the friendly Fates took a day off.
Andrey had had a first copious hemorrhage while on a business trip to Phoenix sometime in August. A stubborn, independent, not overbright optimist, he had ascribed it to a nosebleed having gone the wrong way and concealed it from everybody so as to avoid ‘stupid talks.’ He had had for years a two-pack smoker’s fruity cough, but when a few days after that first ‘postnasal blood drip’ he spat a scarlet gob into his washbasin, he resolved to cut down on cigarettes and limit himself to tsigarki (cigarillos). The next contretemps occurred in Ada’s presence, just before they left for Europe; he managed to dispose of his bloodstained handkerchief before she saw it, but she remembered him saying’ Vot te na’ (well, that’s odd) in a bothered voice. Believing with most other Estotians that the best doctors were to be found in Central Europe, he told himself he would see a Zurich specialist whose name he got from a member of his ‘lodge’ (meeting place of brotherly moneymakers), if he again coughed up blood. The American hospital in Valvey, next to the Russian church built by Vladimir Chevalier, his granduncle, proved to be good enough for diagnosing advanced tuberculosis of the left lung.
On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, ‘frantically’ trying to ‘locate’ Ada (who after her usual visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for