Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

8

arriving mont roux bellevue sunday

dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows

Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van’s stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien’s discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.

‘Lucien,’ said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, ‘I may have — as your predecessor would know — all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen — que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.’

‘Merci infiniment,’ said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought.

He engaged two spacious rooms, 509 and 510: an Old World salon with golden-green furniture, and a charming bed chamber joined to a square bathroom, evidently converted from an ordinary room (around 1875, when the hotel was renovated and splendified). With thrilling anticipation, he read the octagonal cardboard sign on its dainty red string: Do not disturb. Prière de ne pas déranger. Hang this notice on the doorhandle outside. Inform Telephone Exchange. Avisez en particulier la téléphoniste (no emphasis, no limpid-voiced girl in the English version).

He ordered an orgy of orchids from the rez-de-chaussée flower shop, and one ham sandwich from Room Service. He survived a long night (with Alpine Choughs heckling a cloudless dawn) in a bed hardly two-thirds the size of the tremendous one at their unforgettable flat twelve years ago. He breakfasted on the balcony — and ignored a reconnoitering gull. He allowed himself an opulent siesta after a late lunch; took a second bath to drown time; and with stops at every other bench on the promenade spent a couple of hours strolling over to the new Bellevue Palace, just half a mile southeast.

One red boat marred the blue mirror (in Casanova’s days there would have been hundreds!). The grebes were there for the winter but the coots had not yet returned.

Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead. Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me.

Mount Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and autumnal reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex Noir, Black Rock.

He felt hot and uncomfortable in silk shirt and gray flannels — one of his older suits that he had chosen because it happened to make him look slimmer; but he should have omitted its tightish waistcoat. Nervous as a boy at his first rendezvous! He wondered what better to hope for — that her presence should be diluted at once by that of other people or that she should manage to be alone, for the first minutes, at least? Did his glasses and short black mustache really make him look younger, as polite whores affirmed?

When he reached at long last the whitewashed and blue-shaded Bellevue (patronized by wealthy Estotilanders, Rheinlanders, and Vinelanders, but not placed in the same superclass as the old, tawny and gilt, huge, sprawling, lovable Trois Cygnes), Van saw with dismay that his watch still lagged far behind 7:00 p.m., the earliest dinner hour in local hotels. So he recrossed the lane and had a double kirsch, with a lump of sugar, in a pub. A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between.

He pushed through the revolving door of the Bellevue, tripped over a gaudy suitcase, and made his entrée at a ridiculous run. The concierge snapped at the unfortunate green-aproned cameriere, who had left the bag there. Yes, they were expecting him in the lounge. A German tourist caught up with him, to apologize, effusively, and not without humor, for the offending object, which, he said, was his.

‘If so,’ remarked Van, ‘you should not allow spas to slap their stickers on your private appendages.’

His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang — and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence.

He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but hardly had he begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents, than an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his ‘humped’ jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succinct sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrit’ usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him.

The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-sœur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. ‘Vasco de Gama, I presume,’ Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for ‘preliminary contact’ those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas — which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses.

Finally Van reached Ada’s husband.

Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather ‘undersight’) Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. ‘Obnimemsya, dorogoy’ (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout’s bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis. As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier’s by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektnïy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau.

We all flocked to the dining room. Van brushed against the past as he shot an arm out to forestall a door-opening waiter, and the past (still fingering his necklace) recompensed him with a sidelong’ Dolores’ glance.

Chance looked after the seating arrangement.

Lemorio’s agents, an elderly couple, unwed but having lived as man and man for a sufficiently long period to warrant a silver-screen anniversary, remained unsplit at table between Yuzlik, who never once spoke to them, and Van, who was being tortured by Dorothy. As to Andrey (who made a thready ‘sign of the cross’ over his un-unbuttonable abdomen before necking in his napkin), he found himself seated between sister and wife. He demanded the ‘cart de van’ (affording the real Van mild amusement), but, being a hard-liquor man, cast only a stunned look at the ‘Swiss White’ page of the wine list before ‘passing the buck’ to Ada who promptly ordered champagne. He was to inform her early next morning that her ‘Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel’no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably sympathetic, in the sense of "fetching," impression),’ The dear fellow’s verbal apparatus consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian common-places of language, but — not liking to speak of himself — he spoke little, especially since his sister’s sonorous soliloquy (lapping at Van’s rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint (‘Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa’), but her reluctant analyst’s attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream volcano) to say: ‘I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I’d like to warn you that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.’

By now Van had more than enough of his mad, but not interestingly mad, convive. He just managed to steady his glass, which a gesture he made to attract Ada’s attention had almost knocked down, and said, without further ado, in what Ada termed afterwards a mordant, ominous and altogether inadmissible tone:

‘Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette’s accounts in several Swiss banks —’ and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. ‘I suggest,’ he added, ‘that if you have no other engagements’ — (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) — ‘you and I go to see Maître Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here — who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh — I mean sign with a sigh — the matter is tedious. All right? All right.’

‘But, Ada,’ clarioned Dora, ‘you forget that tomorrow morning we wanted to visit the Institute of Floral Harmony in the Château Piron!’

‘You’ll do it after tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Tuesday week,’ said Van. ‘I’d gladly drive all three of you to that fascinating lieu de méditation but my fast little Unseretti seats only one passenger, and that business of untraceable deposits is terribly urgent, I think.’

Yuzlik was dying to say something. Van yielded to the well-meaning automaton.

‘I’m delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,’ said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.

The same garbling — and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik’s source of recondite information — occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the ‘best seller’ trellis — mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan ‘charlotte russe’ served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel’s head cook, who hailed from California’s Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada’s when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year’s Eve, 1893, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince’s club); and the other — to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan’s Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon’s politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:

‘Jack Chose’s book is certainly most entertaining — especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album’ — (Yuzlik’s eyes darted aside in specious recollection; whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory) — ‘but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.’

During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three), he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called ‘the face’ — a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count). Ada on the other hand could not help her dark eyes from turning to him every other moment, as if, with each glance, she regained her balance; but when the company went back to the lounge and finished their coffee there, difficulties of focalization began to beset Van, whose points de repère disastrously decreased after the three cinematists had left.

ANDREY: Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopïtno (it cannot fail to interest him).

ADA (as if coming out of a trance): O chyom tï (you were saying something)?

ANDREY: Ya govoryu, razskazhi emu pro tvoyo zhit’yo bït’yo (I was saying, tell him about your daily life, your habitual existence). Avos’ zaglyanet k nam (maybe he’d look us up).

ADA: Ostav’, chto tam interesnago (what’s so interesting about it)?

DASHA (turning to Ivan): Don’t listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men’she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). Nashi sel’skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows) — eto tselaya kollektsiya predmetov modernoy skul’pturï i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do.

IVAN (to Andrey): I know nothing about farming but thanks all the same.

IVAN (not quite knowing what to add): Yes, I would certainly like to see your machinery some day. Those things always remind me of long-necked prehistoric monsters, sort of grazing here and there, you know, or just brooding over the sorrows of extinction — but perhaps I’m thinking of excavators —

DOROTHY: Andrey’s machinery is anything but prehistoric! (laughs cheerlessly).

ANDREY: Slovom, milosti prosim (anyway, you are most welcome). Budete zharit’ verhom s kuzinoy (you’ll have a rollicking time riding on horseback with your cousin).

IVAN (to Ada): Half-past nine tomorrow morning won’t be too early for you? I’m at the Trois Cygnes. I’ll come to fetch you in my tiny car — not on horseback (smiles like a corpse at Andrey).

DASHA: Dovol’no skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada’s visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I’m sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva.

The madhouse babble reverted to Lucette’s bank accounts, Ivan Dementievich explained that she had been mislaying one checkbook after another, and nobody knew exactly in how many different banks she had dumped considerable amounts of money. Presently, Andrey who now looked like the livid Yukonsk mayor after opening the Catkin Week Fair or fighting a Forest Fire with a new type of extinguisher, grunted out of his chair, excused himself for going to bed so early, and shook hands with Van as if they were parting forever (which, indeed, they were). Van remained with the two ladies in the cold and deserted lounge where a thrifty subtraction of faraday-light had imperceptibly taken place.

‘How did you like my brother?’ asked Dorothy. ‘On redchayshiy chelovek (he’s, a most rare human being). I can’t tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks — as I think you also did — no, no, do not negate it! — because, as I have always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense’ (that cheerless smile again). ‘Ada is certainly a "perfect beauty," a real muirninochka — even when she winces like that — but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics — right, Professor? — in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.’

‘Drop her a curtsey,’ gloomily remarked Van to Ada.

‘Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her’ — (opening her palm in the wake of Ada’s retreating hand). ‘I’ve shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we’ve had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we’ve gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I’ve always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium — you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille? — our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other — that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?’

‘I don’t attend school any longer,’ said Van, stifling a yawn; ‘and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to "explain" anything, I merely describe.’

‘Still, you cannot deny that certain insights —’

It went on and on like that for more than an hour and Van’s clenched jaws began to ache. Finally, Ada got up, and Dorothy followed suit but continued to speak standing:

‘Tomorrow dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski is coming to dinner, a delightful old spinster, who lives in a villa above Valvey. Terriblement grande dame et tout ça. Elle aime taquiner Andryusha en disant qu’un simple cultivateur comme lui n’aurait pas dû épouser la fille d’une actrice et d’un marchand de tableaux. Would you care to join us — Jean?’

Jean replied: ‘Alas, no, dear Daria Andrevna: Je dois "surveiller les kilos." Besides, I have a business dinner tomorrow.’

‘At least’ — (smiling) — ‘you could call me Dasha.’

‘I do it for Andrey,’ explained Ada, ‘actually the grand’ dame in question is a vulgar old skunk.’

‘Ada!’ uttered Dasha with a look of gentle reproof.

Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada glanced at Van — and he — no fool in amorous strategy — refrained to comment on her ‘forgetting’ her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair. He did not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token, awaited her planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing that in a moment she would say to her accursed companion (by now revising, no doubt, her views on the ‘beau ténébreux’) as the lift’s eye turned red under a quick thumb: ‘Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!’ — and instantly flitting back, like Vere’s Ninon, she would be in his arms.

Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening.

‘We’ll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake up, don’t bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose —’ and, with the burning sap brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached the sky!) she danced three fingers on his wet lips — and escaped.

‘Wipe your neck!’ he called after her in a rapid whisper (who, and wherein this tale, in this life, had also attempted a whispered cry?)

That night, in a post-Moët dream, he sat on the talc of a tropical beach full of sun-baskers, and one moment was rubbing the red, irritated shaft of a writhing boy, and the next was looking through dark glasses at the symmetrical shading on either side of a shining spine with fainter shading between the ribs belonging to Lucette or Ada sitting on a towel at some distance from him. Presently, she turned and lay prone, and she, too, wore sunglasses, and neither he nor she could perceive the exact direction of each other’s gaze through the black amber, yet he knew by the dimple of a faint smile that she was looking at his (it had been his all the time) raw scarlet. Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: ‘It’s one of the Vane sisters,’ and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname, and plucked out the wax plugs, and, in a marvelous act of rehabilitation and link-up, the breakfast table clanked from the corridor across the threshold of the adjacent room, and, already munching and honey-crumbed, Ada entered his bedchamber. It was only a quarter to eight!

‘Smart girl!’ said Van; ‘but first of all I must go to the petit endroit (W.C.).’

That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor — in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus.

‘I shall walk you home... we have just returned from a conference with the Luzon bankers and I’m walking you back to your hotel from mine’ — this was the phrase consacrée that Van invariably uttered to inform the fates of the situation. One little precaution they took from the start was to strictly avoid equivocal exposure on their lakeside balcony which was visible to every yellow or mauve flowerhead on the platbands of the promenade.

They used a back exit to leave the hotel.

A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ — if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (‘mulberry tree!’ snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon.

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’

‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des jontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — 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 himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal.

He was still calm and confident; after carefully studying Dorothy’s hysterical report, he still believed that nothing threatened their destiny; that at best Andrey would die right now, sparing Ada the bother of a divorce; and that at worst the man would be packed off to a mountain sanatorium in a novel to linger there through a few last pages of epilogical mopping up far away from the reality of their united lives. Friday morning, at nine o’clock — as bespoken on the eve — he drove over to the Bellevue, with the pleasant plan of motoring to Sorcière to show her the house.

At night a thunderstorm had rather patly broken the back of the miraculous summer. Even more patly the sudden onset of her flow had curtailed yesterday’s caresses. It was raining when he slammed the door of his car, hitched up his velveteen slacks, and, stepping across puddles, passed between an ambulance and a large black Yak, waiting one behind the other before the hotel. All the wings of the Yak were spread open, two bellboys had started to pile in luggage under the chauffeur’s supervision, and various parts of the old hackney car were responding with discreet creaks to the grunts of the loaders.

He suddenly became aware of the rain’s reptile cold on his balding head and was about to enter the glass revolvo, when it produced Ada, somewhat in the manner of those carved-wood barometers whose doors yield either a male puppet or a female one. Her attire — that mackintosh over a high-necked dress, the fichu on her upswept hair, the crocodile bag slung across her shoulder — formed a faintly old-fashioned and even provincial ensemble. ‘On her there was no face,’ as Russians say to describe an expression of utter dejection.

She led him around the hotel to an ugly rotunda, out of the miserable drizzle, and there she attempted to embrace him but he evaded her lips. She was leaving in a few minutes. Heroic, helpless Andrey had been brought back to the hotel in an ambulance. Dorothy had managed to obtain three seats on the Geneva-Phoenix plane. The two cars were taking him, her and the heroic sister straight to the helpless airport.

She asked for a handkerchief, and he pulled out a blue one from his windjacket pocket, but her tears had started to roll and she shaded her eyes, while he stood before her with outstretched hand.

‘Part of the act?’ he inquired coldly.

She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish ‘merci,’ blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.

She could not tell her husband while he was ill. Van would have to wait until Andrey was sufficiently well to bear the news and that might take some time. Of course, she would have to do everything to have him completely cured, there was a wondermaker in Arizona —

‘Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him,’ said Van.

‘And to think,’ cried Ada with a kind of square shake of stiff hands as if dropping a lid or a tray, ‘to think that he dutifully concealed everything! Oh, of course, I can’t leave him now!’

‘Yes, the old story — the flute player whose impotence has to be treated, the reckless ensign who may never return from a distant war!’

‘Ne ricane pas!’ exclaimed Ada. ‘The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?’

As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.

‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’

‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’

‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’

‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).

‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’

‘Ach, perestagne!’

‘— et le phalène.’

‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’

‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’

‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’

There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.

‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.

For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.

‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears.

Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline’s skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range —

Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four — say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway’s bullet struck the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot — that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly — a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller.

So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question.

Steadily but very slowly Andrey’s condition kept deteriorating. During his last two or three years of idle existence on various articulated couches, whose every plane could be altered in hundreds of ways, he lost the power of speech, though still able to nod or shake his head, frown in concentration, or faintly smile when inhaling the smell of food (the origin, indeed, of our first beatitudes). He died one spring night, alone in a hospital room, and that same summer (1922) his widow donated her collections to a National Park museum and traveled by air to Switzerland for an ‘exploratory interview’ with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen.