She entered, set down two bottles of port for the invalid, and pulled off her wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls and naked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was the best-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows, sapphire eyes registering (and that’s the right word) constant amazement at earth’s paradise (the only one she would ever know, I’m afraid), pink-flushed cheekbones, a rosebud mouth, and a lovely concave abdomen. In less time than it took her husband, a quick reader, to skim down two columns of print, we had «attired» him. I put on blue slacks and a pink shirt and followed her downstairs.
Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London weekly bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible black raincoat—a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:
GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting «Vadim» incorrectly on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only now in the British edition).
VADIM May I give you a drink? We’ll toast him and roast him.
GERRY Yet he’s right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complхte, says the man. Knows French, too.
LOUISE No drinks. We’ve got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair. Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I’ll bring you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school.
How different it all was, I mused, from the refined adulteries in the castles of my early youth! Where was the romantic thrill of a glance exchanged with one’s new mistress in the presence of a morose colossus—the Jealous Husband? Why did the recollection of the recent embrace not blend any longer as it used to do with the certainty of the next one, forming a sudden rose in an empty flute of crystal, a sudden rainbow on the white wallpaper? What did Emma see a fashionable woman drop into that man’s silk hat? Write legibly.
2
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver’s seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor’s widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.
Mr. Peppermill, whose natural faculties were no match for his legal acumen, warned me that if I desired to relinquish the child to her grandmother in France, certain formalities would have to be complied with. I observed quietly that Mrs. Blagovo was a half-witted cripple and that my daughter, whom her schoolteacher harbored, should be brought by that person to my house AT ONCE. He said he would fetch her himself early next week.
After weighing and reweighing every paragraph of the house, every parenthesis of its furniture, I decided to lodge her in the former bedroom of the late Landover’s companion whom he called his nurse or his fiancée depending on his mood of the moment. This was a lovely chamber, east of mine, with lilac butterflies enlivening its wallpaper and a large, low, flouncy bed. I peopled its white bookshelf with Keats, Yeats, Coleridge, Blake, and four Russian poets (in the New Orthography). Although I told myself with a sigh that she would, no doubt, prefer «comics» to my dear bespangled mimes and their wands of painted lath, I felt compelled in my choice by what is termed the «ornamental instinct» among ornithologists. Moreover, knowing well how essential a pure strong light is to reading in bed, I asked Mrs. O’Leary, my new charwoman and cook (borrowed from Louise Adamson who had left with her husband for a long sojourn in England) to screw a couple of hundred-watt bulbs into a tall bedside lamp. Two dictionaries, a writing pad, a little alarm clock, and a Junior Manicure Set (suggested by Mrs. Noteboke, who had a twelve-year-old daughter) were attractively placed on a spacious and stable bedtable. All this was but a rough, naturally. The fair copy would come in due time.
Landover’s nurse or fiancée could rush to his assistance either along a short passage or through the bathroom between the two bedrooms: Landover had been a large man and his long deep tub was a soaker’s delight. Another, narrower bathroom followed Bel’s bedroom easterly—and here I really missed my dainty Louise when racking my brain for the correct epithet between well-scrubbed and perfumed. Mrs. Noteboke could not help me: her daughter, who used the messy parental facilities, had no time for silly deodorants and loathed «foam.» Wise old Mrs. O’Leary, on the other hand, held before her mind’s eye Mrs. Adamson’s creams and crystals in a Flemish artist’s detail and made me long for her employer’s speedy return by conjuring up that picture, which she then proceeded to simplify, but not vulgarize, while retaining such major items as the huge sponge, the jumbo cake of lavender soap, and a delicious toothpaste.
Walking still farther sunriseward, we reach the corner guest room (above the round dining room at the east end of the first floor); this I transformed with the help of a handyman, Mrs.
O’Leary’s cousin, into an efficiently furnished studio. It contained, when I finished with it, a couch with boxy pillows, an oak desk with a revolving chair, a steel cabinet, a bookcase, Klingsor’s Illustrated Encyclopedia in twenty volumes, crayons, writing tablets, state maps, and (to cite the School Buyer’s Guide for 1952-1953) «a globe ball that lifts out of a cradle so that every child can hold the world in his or her lap.»
Was that all? No. I found for the bedroom a framed photograph of her mother, Paris, 1934, and for the studio a reproduction in color of Levitan’s Clouds above a Blue River (the Volga, not far from my Marevo), painted around 1890.
Peppermill was to bring her on May 21, around four P.M. I had to fill somehow the abyss of the afternoon. Angelic Ex had already read and marked the entire batch of exams, but he thought I might want to see some of the works he had reluctantly failed. He had dropped in some time on the eve and had left them downstairs on the round table in the round room next to the hallway at the west end of the house. My poor hands ached and trembled so dreadfully that I could hardly leaf through those poor cahiers. The round window gave on the driveway. It was a warm gray day. Sir! I need a passing mark desperately. Ulysses was written in Zurich and Greece and therefore consists of too many foreign words. One of the characters in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan is the notorious actress Sarah Bernard. Stern’s style is very sentimental and illiterative. A car door banged. Mr. Peppermill came with a duffel bag in the wake of a tall fair-haired girl in blue jeans carrying, and slowing down, to change from hand to hand, an unwieldy valise.
Annette’s moody mouth and eyes. Graceful but plain. Fortified by a serenacin tablet, I received my daughter and lawyer with the neutral dignity for which effusive Russians in Paris used to detest me so heartily. Peppermill accepted a drop of brandy. Bel had a glass of peach juice and a brown biscuit. I indicated to Bel—who was displaying her palms in a polite Russian allusion—the dining-room toilet, an old-fashioned touch on the architect’s part. Horace Peppermill handed me a letter from Bel’s teacher Miss Emily Ward. Fabulous Intelligence Quotient of 180. Menses already established. Strange, marvelous child. One does not quite know whether to curb or encourage such precocious brilliance. I accompanied Horace halfway back to his car, fighting off, successfully, the disgraceful urge to tell him how staggered I was by the bill his office had recently sent me.
«Let me now show you your apartаmenty. You speak Russian, don’t you?» «I certainly do, but I can’t write
