Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle Read online

  ‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed, on catching sight of the gory trophy, ‘somebody must have chopped off a thumb!’ Patting his thighs and his chair, he sought and retrieved — from under the footstool — the vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to look up ‘groote,’ which he had been groping for when disturbed.

  The simplicity of its meaning annoyed him.

  Through an open french door Dack led his pursuers into the garden. There, on the third lawn, Ada overtook him with the flying plunge used in ‘American football,’ a kind of Rugby game cadets played at one time on the wet turfy banks of the Goodson River. Simultaneously, Mlle Larivière rose from the bench where she had been paring Lucette’s fingernails, and pointing her scissors at Blanche who had rushed up with a paper bag, she accused the young slattern of a glaring precedent — namely of having once dropped a hairpin in Lucette’s cot, un machin long comme ça qui faillit blesser l’enfant à la fesse. Marina, however, who had a Russian noblewoman’s morbid fear of ‘offending an inferior,’ declared the incident closed.

  ‘Nehoroshaya, nehoroshaya sobaka,’ crooned Ada with great aspiratory and sibilatory emphasis as she gathered into her arms the now lootless, but completely unabashed. ‘bad dog.’

  12

  Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.

  (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact — that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history — because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure — combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

  The males of the firefly, a small luminous beetle, more like a wandering star than a winged insect, appeared on the first warm black nights of Ardis, one by one, here and there, then in a ghostly multitude, dwindling again to a few individuals as their quest came to its natural end. Van watched them with the same pleasurable awe he had experienced as a child, when, lost in the purple crepuscule of an Italian hotel garden, in an alley of cypresses, he supposed they were golden ghouls or the passing fancies of the garden. Now as they softly flew, apparently straight, crossing and recrossing the darkness around him, each flashed his pale-lemon light every five seconds or so, signaling in his own specific rhythm (quite different from that of an allied species, flying with Photinus ladorensis, according to Ada, at Lugano and Luga) to his grass-domiciled female pulsating in photic response after taking a couple of moments to verify the exact type of light code he used. The presence of those magnificent little animals, delicately illuminating, as they passed, the fragrant night, filled Van with a subtle exhilaration that Ada’s entomology seldom evoked in him — maybe in result of the abstract scholar’s envy which a naturalist’s immediate knowledge sometimes provokes. The hammock, a comfortable oblong nest, reticulated his naked body either under the weeping cedar that sprawled over one corner of a lawn, and granted a partial shelter in case of a shower, or, on safer nights, between two tulip trees (where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the bright blood blotching his pillow).

  The windows in the black castle went out in rows, files, and knight moves. The longest occupant of the nursery water closet was Mlle Larivière, who came there with a rose-oil lampad and her buvard. A breeze ruffled the hangings of his now infinite chamber. Venus rose in the sky; Venus set in his flesh.

  All that was a little before the seasonal invasion of a certain interestingly primitive mosquito (whose virulence the not-too-kind Russian contingent of our region attributed to the diet of the French winegrowers and bogberry-eaters of Ladore); but even so the fascinating fireflies, and the still more eerie pale cosmos coming through the dark foliage, balanced with new discomforts the nocturnal ordeal, the harassments of sweat and sperm associated with his stuffy room. Night, of course, always remained an ordeal, throughout the near-century of his life, no matter how drowsy or drugged the poor man might be — for genius is not all gingerbread even for Billionaire Bill with his pointed beardlet and stylized bald dome, or crusty Proust who liked to decapitate rats when he did not feel like sleeping, or this brilliant or obscure V.V. (depending on the eyesight of readers, also poor people despite our jibes and their jobs); but at Ardis, the intense life of the star-haunted sky troubled the boy’s night so much that, on the whole, he felt grateful when foul weather or the fouler gnat — the Kamargsky Komar of our muzhiks and the Moustique moscovite of their no less alliterative retaliators — drove him back to his bumpy bed.

  In this our dry report on Van Veen’s early, too early love, for Ada Veen, there is neither reason, nor room for metaphysical digression. Yet, let it be observed (just while the lucifers fly and throb, and an owl hoots — also most rhythmically — in the nearby park) that Van, who at the time had still not really tasted the Terror of Terra — vaguely attributing it, when analyzing his dear unforgettable Aqua’s torments, to pernicious fads and popular fantasies — even then, at fourteen, recognized that the old myths, which willed into helpful being a whirl of worlds (no matter how silly and mystical) and situated them within the gray matter of the star-suffused heavens, contained, perhaps, a glowworm of strange truth. His nights in the hammock (where that other poor youth had cursed his blood cough and sunk back into dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra — as suggested to him by career physicians) were now haunted not so much by the agony of his desire for Ada, as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere, the demon counterpart of divine time, tingling about him and through him, as it was to retingle — with a little more meaning fortunately — in the last nights of a life, which I do not regre
t, my love.

  He would fall asleep at the moment he thought he would never sleep again, and his dreams were young. As the first flame of day reached his hammock, he woke up another man — and very much of a man indeed. ‘Ada, our ardors and arbors’ — a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribution to Anglo-American poetry — sang through his brain. Bless the starling and damn the stardust! He was fourteen and a half; he was burning and bold; he would have her fiercely some day!

  One such green resurrection he could particularize when replaying the past. Having drawn on his swimming trunks, having worked in and crammed in all that intricate, reluctant multiple machinery, he had toppled out of his nest and forthwith endeavored to determine whether her part of the house had come alive. It had. He saw a flash of crystal, a fleck of color. She was having sa petite collation du matin alone on a private balcony. Van found his sandals — with a beetle in one and a petal in the other — and, through the toolroom, entered the cool house.

  Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: ‘real things’ which were unfrequent and priceless, simply ‘things’ which formed the routine stuff of life; and ‘ghost things,’ also called ‘fogs,’ such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a ‘tower,’ or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a ‘bridge.’ ‘Real towers’ and ‘real bridges’ were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral ‘thing’ might look or even actually become ‘real’ or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid ‘fog.’ When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with ‘ruined towers’ and ‘broken bridges.’

  The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van’s, "and that morning — as on most mornings — he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.

  Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.

  (When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.)

  The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love’s bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.

  ‘Real thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Tower,’ she answered.

  And the wasp.

  The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.

  ‘We shall try to eat one later,’ she observed, ‘but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can’t sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person’s tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man’s tongue lying like that in the desert’ (making a negligent gesture).

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘It’s a well-known mystery.’

  Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock.

  ‘All right. And the third Real Thing?’

  She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him.

  Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.

  13

  For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday and Ida’s forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red poppies or peonies, ‘deficient in botanical reality,’ as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.

  (Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)

  She had stepped into it, naked, while her legs were still damp and ‘piney’ after a special rubbing with a washcloth (morning baths being unknown under Mlle Larivière’s regime) and pulled it on with a brisk jiggle of the hips which provoked her governess’s familiar rebuke: mais ne te trémousse pas comme ça quand tu mets ta jupe! Une petite fille de bonne maison, etc. Per contra, the omission of panties was ignored by Ida Larivière, a bosomy woman of great and repulsive beauty (in nothing but corset and gartered stockings at the moment) who was not above making secret concessions to the heat of the dog-days herself; but in tender Ada’s case the practice had deprecable effects. The child tried to assuage the rash in the sort arch, with all its accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable sensations, by tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal apple tree, much to Van’s disgust as we shall see more than once. Besides the lolita, she wore a short-sleeved white black-striped jersey, a floppy hat (hanging behind her back from an elastic around her throat), a velvet hairband and a pair of old sandals. Neither hygiene, nor sophistication of taste, were, as Van kept observing, typical of the Ardis household.

  She tumbled out of her tree like a hoopoe when they all were ready to start. Hurry, hurry, my bird, my angel. The English coachman, Ben Wright, was still stone-sober (having had for breakfast only one pint of ale). Blanche, who had been to a big picnic at least once (when rushed to Pineglen to unlace Mademoiselle, who had fainted), now perfomed the less glamorous duty of carrying away snarling and writhing Dack to her little room in the turret.

  A charabanc had already conveyed two footmen, three armchairs and a number of hampers to the site of the picnic. The novelist, wearing a white satin dress (made by Vass of Manhattan for Marina who had lately lost ten pounds), with Ada sitting beside her, and Lucette, très en beauté in a white sailor blouse, perched next to sullen Wright, drove there in the calèche. Van rode behind on one of his uncle’s or grand-uncle’s bicycles. The forest road remained reasonably smooth if you kept to its middle run (still sticky and dark after a rainy dawn) between the sky-blue ruts, speckled with the reflections of the same birch leaves whose shadows sped over the taut nacrine silk of Mlle Larivière’s open sunshade and the wide brim of Ada’s rather rakishly donned white hat. Now and then Lucette from beside blue-coated Ben looked back at Van and made slacken-speed little signals with the flat of one hand as she had seen her mother do to Ada when fearing she would crash with her pony or bicycle into the back of the carriage.

  Marina came in a red motorcar of an early ‘runabout’ type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s gray flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of the picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau from which emerged one by one, nimbly or slowly, depending on age and condition, the Erminin twins, their young pregnant aunt (narrationally a great burden), and a governess, white-haired Mme Forestier, the school friend of Mathilde in a forthcoming story.

  Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doct
or (and chess partner), the famous Dr Krolik, who called himself Ada’s court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present early on the following day — three exquisitely carved chrysalids (‘Inestimable gems,’ cried throatily Ada, tensing her brows), all of which were to yield before long, specimens of a disappointing ichneumon instead of the Kibo Fritillary, a recently discovered rarity.

  Stacks of tender crustless sandwiches (perfect rectangles five inches by two), the tawny corpse of a turkey, black Russian bread, pots of Gray Bead caviar, candied violets, little raspberry tarts, half a gallon of Goodson white port, another of ruby, watered claret in thermos flasks for the girls, and the cold sweet tea of happy childhoods — all this is more readily imagined than described. One found it instructive [thus in the MS. Ed.].

  One found it instructive to place side by side Ada Veen and Grace Erminin: the skimmed-milk pallor of Ada and her coeval’s healthy hot flush; the straight black witchwench-hair of the one and the brown bob of the other; my love’s lackluster grave eyes and the blue twinkle behind Grace’s horn-rimmed glasses; the former’s naked thigh and the latter’s long red stockings; the gipsy skirt and the sailor suit. Still more instructive, perhaps, was to note how Greg’s plain features had been transposed practically intact into his sister’s aura where they acquired a semblance of girlish’ good looks’ without impairing the close resemblance between sailor boy and maiden.

  The ruins of the turkey, the port wine which only the governesses had touched, and a broken Sèvres plate were quickly removed by the servants. A cat appeared from under a bush, stared in a shock of intense surprise, and, despite a chorus of ‘kitty-kitty,’ vanished.