In the dark basement, I stroked the silky head of a wolf.
When the light returned and all cried: «Ah!,»
it turned out to be only Mиdor, a dead dog.
I again praised her talent, and kissed her more warmly, perhaps, than the poem deserved; for, actually, I found it rather obscure, but did not say so, and presently she yawned and fell asleep on my bed, a practice I usually did not tolerate. Today, however, on rereading those strange lines, I see through their starry crystal the tremendous commentary I could write about them, with galaxies of reference marks and footnotes like the reflections of brightly lit bridges spanning black water. But my daughter’s soul is hers, and my soul is mine, and may Hamlet Godman rot in peace.
4
As late as the start of the 1954-1955 school year, with Bel nearing her thirteenth birthday, I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses—a few hot drops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff—my relations with her remained essentially innocent. But whatever qualities I might have possessed as a Professor of Literature, nothing but incompetence and a reckless laxity of discipline can I see today in the rearview reflection of that sweet wild past.
Others forestalled me in perspicacity. My first critic happened to be Mrs. Noteboke, a stout dark lady in suffragettish tweeds, who instead of keeping her Marion, a depraved and vulgar nymphet, from snooping on a schoolmate’s home life, lectured me on the upbringing of Bel and strongly advised my hiring an experienced, preferably German, governess to look after her day and night. My second critic—a much more tactful and understanding one—was my secretary, Myrna Soloway, who complained that she could not keep track of the literary magazines and clippings in my mail—because of their being intercepted by an unscrupulous and avid little reader—and who gently added that Quirn High School, the last refuge of common sense in my incredible plight, was astounded by Bel’s lack of manners almost as much as by her intelligence and familiarity with «Proust and Prиvost.» I spoke to Miss Lowe, the rather pretty petite headmistress, and she mentioned «boarding facilities,» which sounded like some kind of wooden jail, and the even more dismal («with all those rippling birdcalls and wickering trills in the woods, Miss Lowe—in the woods»!) «summer instruction» to replace the «eccentricities of an artist’s (`A great artist’s, Professor’) household.» She pointed out to the giggling and apprehensive artist that a young daughter should be treated as a potential component of our society and not as a fancy pet. Throughout that talk I could not shake off the feeling of its all being a nightmare that I had had or would have in some other existence, some other bound sequence of numbered dreams.
An atmosphere of vague distress was gathering (to speak in verbal clichиs about a clichи situation) around my metaphorical head, when there occurred to me a simple and brilliant solution of all my problems and troubles.
The tall looking glass before which many of Landover’s houris had onduled in their brief brown glory now served me to behold the image of a lion-hued fifty-five-year-old would-be athlete performing waist-slimming and chest-expanding exercises by means of an «Elmago» («Combines the mechanical know-how of the West with the magic of Mithra»). It was a good image. An old telegram (found unopened in an issue of Artisan, a literary review, filched by Bel from the hallway table), was addressed to me by a Sunday paper in London, asking me to comment on the rumors—which I had already heard—to the effect that I was the main candidate in the abstract scramble for what our American kid brothers called «the most prestigious prize in the world.» This, too, might impress the rather success-minded person I had in view. Finally, I knew that in the vacational months of 1955 a series of strokes had killed off in London poor old Gerry Adamson, a great guy, and that Louise was free. Too free in fact. An urgent letter I now wrote her, summoning her back to Quirn at once, for a serious Discussion of a matter concerning both her and me, reached her only after describing a comic circle via four fashionable spots on the Continent. I never saw the wire she said she sent me from New York on October 1.
On October 2, an abnormally warm day, the first of a week-long series, Mrs. King telephoned in the afternoon to invite me with rather enigmatic little laughs to an «impromptu soirиe, in a few hours, say at nine P.M. after you have tucked in your adorable daughter. I agreed to come because Mrs. King was an especially nice soul, the kindest on the campus.
I had a black headache and decided that a two-mile walk in the cool clear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitions are so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I really walked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open gallery running along the front side of our second floor, or what.
The first person to whom my hostess introduced me—with a subdued fanfare of social clarion—was the «English» cousin with whom Louise had been staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, «daughter of our former Ambassador and widow of the Oxford medievalist»—shadowy figures on a briefly lit screen. She was a rather deaf and decidedly dotty witch in her middle fifties, comically coiffured and dowdily dressed, and she and her belly advanced upon me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time to sidestep the well-meant attack before getting wedged «between the books and the bottles» as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. I passed into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss Louise’s expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me with the kind of Latin accolade that he had especially developed to mark the highest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I had seen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if the fifty hours elapsed since our last chat had been magically blown-up into half a century. We were only six people in a spacious parlor, not counting two painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose presence, identity, and very existence have remained to this day a familiar mystery—familiar, because such zigzag cracks in the plaster are typical of the prisons or palaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I have prepared to make, as I was to do now, a difficult, climactic announcement that demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we were only six animal people in that room (and two little phantoms), but through the translucid unpleasant walls I could make out—without looking!—rows and tiers of dim spectators, with the sense of a sign in my brain meaning «standing room only» in the language of madness.
We were now sitting at a round clockfaced table (practically undistinguishable from the one in the Opal Room of my house, west of the albino Stein), Louise at twelve o’clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgain at four, Mrs. King in green silk at eight, Audace at ten, and I at six, presumably, or a minute past, because Louise was not quite opposite, or maybe she had pushed her chair a sixty-second space closer to Audace although she had sworn to me on the Social Register as well as on a Who’s Who that he had never made that pass at her somehow suggested by his magnificent little poem in the Artisan.
Speaking of, ah, yesternights,
I had you, dear, within earshot of that party downstairs,
on the broad bed of my host
piled with the coats of your guests, old macks, mock minks,
one striped scarf (mine), a former flame’s furs
(more rabbit than flipperling), yea, a mountain of winters,
like that upon which flunkeys sprawl in the vestibule of the Opera, Canto One of Onegin,
where under the chandeliers of a full house, you, dear, should have been the dancer
flying, like fluff, in a decor of poplars and fountains.
I started to speak in the high, clear, insolent voice (taught me by Ivor on the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus when inaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching at Quirn: «What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom I shall call—«
Mrs. Morgain set down her glass of whisky and leaned toward me confidentially: «You know I met little Iris Black in London, around 1919, I guess. Her father was a business friend of my father, the Ambassador. I was a starry-eyed American gal. She was a fantastic beauty and most sophisticated. I remember how thrilled I was later to learn that she had gone and married a Russian Prince!»
«Fay,» cried Louise from twelve to four: «Fay! His Highness is making his throne speech.»
Everyone laughed, and the two bare-thighed Tyrolean children chasing each other around the table bounced across my knees and were gone again.»I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case
