The original of Laura

CHAPTER TWO

Her grandfather, the painter Lev Linde, emigrated in 1920 from Moscow to New York with his wife Eva and his son Adam. He also brought over a large collection of his landscapes, either unsold or loaned to him by kind friends and ignorant institutions — pictures that were said to be the glory of Russia, the pride of the people. How many times art albums had reproduced those meticulous masterpieces-clearings in pine woods, with a bear cub or two, and brown brooks between thawing snow-banks, and the vastness of purple heaths!

Native "decadents" had been calling them "calendar tripe" for the last three decades; yet Linde had always had an army of stout admirers; mighty few of them turned up at his exhibitions in America. Very soon a number of inconsolable oils found themselves being shipped back to Moscow, while another batch moped in rented flats before trouping up to the attic or creeping down to the market stall. What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion invading his once famous pictures such as "April in Yalta" or "The Old Bridge"? Let us not dwell on the choice of the wrong place of exile. Let us not linger at that pitiful bedside. His son Adam Lind (he dropped the last letter on the tacit advice of a misprint in a catalogue) was more successful. By the age of thirty he had become a fashionable photographer. He married the ballerina Lanskaya, a delightful dancer, though with something fragile and gauche about her that kept her teetering on a narrow ledge between benevolent recognition and the rave reviews of nonentities. Her first lovers belonged mostly to the Union of Property Movers, simple fellows of Polish extraction; but Flora was probably Adam's daughter. Three years after her birth Adam discovered that the boy he loved had strangled another, unattainable, boy whom he loved even more. Adam Lind had always had an inclination for trick photography and this time, before shooting himself in a Montecarlo hotel (on the night, sad to relate, of his wife's very real success in Piker's "Narcisse et Narcette"), he geared and focused his camera in a corner of the drawing room so as to record the event from different angles. These automatic pictures of his last moments and of a table's lion-paws did not come out too well; but his widow easily sold them for the price of a flat in Paris to the local magazine Pitch which specialized in soccer and diabolical faits-divers. With her little daughter, an English governess, a Russian nanny and a cosmopolitan lover, she settled in Paris, then moved to Florence, sojourned in London and returned to France. Her art was not strong enough to survive the loss of good looks as well as a certain worsening flaw in her pretty but too prominent right omoplate, and by the age of forty or so we find her reduced to giving dancing lessons at a not quite first-rate school in Paris. Her glamorous lovers were now replaced by an elderly but still vigorous Englishman who sought abroad a refuge from taxes and a convenient place to conduct his not quite legal transactions in the traffic of wines. He was what used to be termed a charmeur. His name, no doubt assumed, was Hubert H. Hubert. Flora, a lovely child, as she said herself with a slight shake (dreamy? incredulous?) of her head every time she spoke of those prepubescent years, had a gray home life marked by ill health and boredom. Only some very expensive, super-Oriental doctor with long gentle fingers could have analyzed her nightly dreams of erotic torture in so-called "labs," major and minor laboratories with red curtains. She did not remember her father and rather disliked her mother. She was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly "prowled" (rodait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerizing her, enveloping her, so to speak in some sticky invisible substance and coming closer and closer no matter what way she turned. For instance she did not dart-to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and "pushing" old male.

He told her stories about his sad life, he told her about his daughter who was just like her, same age — twelve — same eyelashes — darker than the dark blue of the iris, same hair, blondish or rather palomino, and so silky — if he could be allowed to stroke it, or l'effleurer des lèvres, like this, that's all, thank you. Poor Daisy had been crushed to death by a backing lorry on a country road — short cut home from school — through a muddy construction site — abominable tragedy — her mother died of a broken heart. Mr. Hubert sat on Flora's bed and nodded his bald head acknowledging all the offences of life, and wiped his eyes with a violet handkerchief which turned orange — a little parlor trick — when he stuffed it back into his heart-pocket, and continued to nod as he tried to adjust his thick outsole to a pattern of the carpet. He looked now like a not too successful conjuror paid to tell fairytales to a sleepy child at bedtime, but he sat a little too close. Flora wore a nightgown with short sleeves copied from that of the Montglas de Sancerre girl, a very sweet and deprived schoolmate, who taught her where to kick an enterprising gentleman. A week or so later Flora happened to be laid up with a chest cold. The mercury went up to 38!in the late afternoon and she complained of a dull buzz in the temples. Mrs. find cursed the old housemaid for buying asparagus instead of Aspirin and hurried to the pharmacy herself. Mr. Hubert had brought his pet a thoughtful present: a miniature chess set ("she knew the moves") with tickly-looking little holes bored in the squares to admit and grip the red and white pieces; the pin-sized pawns penetrated easily, but the slightly larger noblemen had to be forced in with an enervating joggle. 'I he pharmacy was perhaps closed and she had to go to the one next to the church or else she had met some friend of hers in the street and would never return. A fourtold smell — tobacco, sweat, rum and bad teeth — emanated from poor old harmless Mr. Hubert, it was all very pathetic. His fat porous nose with red nostrils full of hair nearly touched her bare throat as he helped to prop the pillows behind her shoulders, and the muddy road was again, was for ever a short cut between her and school, between school and death, with Daisy's bicycle wobbling in the indelible fog. She, too, had "known the moves," and had loved the en passant trick as one loves a new toy, but it cropped up so seldom, though he tried to prepare those magic positions where the ghost of a pawn can be captured on the square it has crossed. Fever, however, turns games of skill into the stuff of nightmares. After a few minutes of play Flora grew tired of it, put a rook in her mouth, ejected it, clowning dully. She pushed the board away and Mr. Hubert carefully removed it to the chair that supported the lea things. Then, with a father's sudden concern, he said "I'm afraid you are chilly, my love," and plunging a hand under the bedclothes from his vantage point at the footboard, he felt her shins. Flora uttered a yelp and then a few screams. Freeing themselves from the tumbled sheets her pedaling legs hit him in the crotch. As he lurched aside, the teapot, a saucer of raspberry jam, and several tiny chessmen joined in the silly fray. Mrs. Lind who had just returned and was sampling some grapes she had bought, heard the screams and the crash and arrived at a dancer's run. She soothed the absolutely furious, deeply insulted Mr. Hubert before scolding her daughter. He was a dear man, and his life lay in ruins all around him. He wanted to marry her, saying she was the image of the young actress who had been his wife, and indeed to judge by the photographs she, Madame Lanskaya, did resemble poor Daisy's mother. There is little to add about the incidental, but not unattractive Mr. Hubert H. Hubert. He lodged for another happy year in that cosy house and died of a stroke in a hotel lift after a business dinner. Going up, one would like to surmise.