Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Very funny!” said Ada, and locked herself up in her room.

  38

  In mid-July Uncle Dan took Lucette to Kaluga where she was to stay, with Belle and French, for five days. The Lyaskan Ballet and a German circus were in town, and no child would want to miss the schoolgirls’ field-hockey and swimming matches which old Dan, a child at heart, attended religiously at that time of the year; moreover she had to undergo a series of “tests” at the Tarus Hospital to settle what caused her weight and temperature to fluctuate so abnormally despite her eating so heartily and feeling so well.

  On the Friday afternoon when her father planned to return with her, he also expected to bring a Kaluga lawyer to Ardis where Demon was to come too, an unusual occurrence. The business to be discussed was the sale of some “blue” (peat-bog) land which belonged to both cousins and which both, for different reasons, were anxious to get rid of. As usually happened with Dan’s most carefully worked-out plans, something misfired, the lawyer could not promise to come till late in the evening, and just before Demon arrived, his cousin aerogrammed a message asking Marina to “dine Demon” without waiting for Dan and Miller.

  That kontretan (Marina’s humorous term for a not necessarily nasty surprise) greatly pleased Van. He had seen little of his father that year. He loved him with light-hearted devotion, had worshipped him in boyhood, and respected him staunchly now in his tolerant but better informed youth. Still later a tinge of repulsion (the same repulsion he felt in regard to his own immorality) became admixed to the love and the esteem; but, on the other hand, the older he grew the more firmly he felt that he would give his life for his father, at a moment’s notice, with pride and pleasure, in any circumstance imaginable. When Marina, in the late Eighteen-Nineties, in her miserable dotage, used to ramble on, with embarrassing and disgusting details, about dead Demon’s “crimes,” he felt pity for him and her, but his indifference to Marina and his adoration for his father remained unchanged—to endure thus even now, in the chronologically hardly believable Nineteen-Sixties. No accursed generalizer, with a half-penny mind and dry-fig heart, would be able to explain (and this is my sweetest revenge for all the detractions my life work has met with) the individual vagaries evolved in those and similar matters. No art and no genius would exist without such vagaries, and this is a final pronouncement, damning all clowns and clods.

  When had Demon visited Ardis in recent years? April 23, 1884 (the day Van’s first summer stay there had been suggested, planned, promised). Twice in the summer of 1885 (while Van was climbing mountains in the Western states, and the Veen girls were in Europe). A dinner in 1886, in June or July (where was Van?). In 1887 for a few days in May (Ada was botanizing with a German woman in Estotia or California. Van was whoring in Chose).

  Taking advantage of Larivière’s and Lucette’s absence, Van had long dallied with Ada in the comfortable nursery, and was now hanging from the wrong window, which did not give a clear view of the drive, when he heard the rich purr of his father’s motorcar. He dashed downstairs—the speed of his descent causing the heat of the banisters to burn the palm of his hand in a merry way remindful of similar occasions in his boyhood. There was nobody in the hall. Demon had entered the house from a side gallery and was now settled in the sun-dusted music room, wiping his monocle with a special zamshinka (“shammy”) as he awaited his “prebrandial” brandy (an ancient quip). His hair was dyed a raven black, his teeth were hound-white. His smooth glossy brown face with its trimly clipped black mustache and humid dark eyes beamed at his son, expressing the radiant love which Van reciprocated, and which both vainly tried to camouflage with habitual pleasantry.

  “Hullo, Dad.”

  “Oh, hullo, Van.”

  Très Américain. Schoolyard. There he slams the car door, there he comes through the snow. Always gloves, no overcoat ever. Want to go to the “bathroom,” Father? My land, sweet land.

  “D’you want to go to the ‘bathroom’?” asked Van, with a twinkle.

  “No thanks, I had my bath this morning.” (Quick sigh acknowledging the passage of time: he, too, remembered every detail of those father-and-son dinners at Riverlane, the immediate dutiful offer of the W.C., the hearty masters, the ignoble meal, creamed hash, God save America, embarrassed sons, vulgar fathers, titled Britisher and Greek grandee matching yachts, and yacs, and yoickfests in the Bahamudas. May I transfer inconspicuously this delicious pink-frosted synthesis from my plate to yours, son? “You don’t like it, Dad!” (acting horribly hurt). God save their poor little American tastebuds.

  “Your new car sounds wonderful,” said Van.

  “Doesn’t it? Yes.” (Ask Van about that gornishon—Franco-Russian slang of the meanest grade for a cute kameristochka). “And how is everything, my dear boy? I saw you last the day you returned from Chose. We waste life in separations! We are the fools of fate! Oh let’s spend a month together in Paris or London before the Michaelmas term!”

  Demon shed his monocle and wiped his eyes with the modish lace-frilled handkerchief that lodged in the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. His tear glands were facile in action when no real sorrow made him control himself.

  “You look quite satanically fit, Dad. Especially with that fresh oeillet in your lapel eye. I suppose you have not been much in Manhattan lately—where did you get its last syllable?”

  Homespun pun in the Veenish vein.

  “I offered myself en effet a trip to Akapulkovo,” answered Demon, needlessly and unwillingly recollecting (with that special concussion of instant detail that also plagued his children) a violet-and-black-striped fish in a bowl, a similarly striped couch, the subtropical sun bringing out the veins of an onyx ashtray astray on the stone floor, a batch of old, orange-juice-stained Povesa (playboy) magazines, the jewels he had brought, the phonograph singing in a dreamy girl’s voice “Petit nègre, au champ qui fleuronne” and the admirable abdomen of a very expensive, and very faithless, and altogether adorable young Créole.

  “Did what’s-her-name go with you?”

  “Well, my boy, frankly, the nomenclature is getting more and more confused every year. Let us speak of plainer things. Where are the drinks? They were promised me by a passing angel.”

  (Passing angel?)

  Van pulled a green bell-cord which sent a melodious message pantryward and caused the old-fashioned, bronze-framed little aquarium, with its lone convict cichlid, to bubble antiphonally in a corner of the music room (an eerie, perhaps self-aerating reaction, which only Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy, understood). “Should he ring her up after dinner,” wondered Demon. What time would it be there? Not much use, bad for the heart.

  “I don’t know if you know,” said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. “Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.”

  “Capital,” said Demon.

  “Marina and Ada should be down in a minute—ce sera un dîner à quatre.”

  “Capital,” he repeated. “You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow—and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice—or, rather, it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes—like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism—for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too—my aunt Kitty, who married the banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.”

  Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:

  “A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.”

  “You are a fantastically charming boy,” said Demon, shedding another sweet-water tear. He pressed to his cheek Van’s strong shap
ely hand. Van kissed his father’s hairy fist which was already holding a not yet visible glass of liquor. Despite the manly impact of their Irishness, all Veens who had Russian blood revealed much tenderness in ritual overflows of affection while remaining somewhat inept in its verbal expression.

  “I say,” exclaimed Demon, “what’s happened—your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious” (muttering:) “Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long …” (switching to a gipsy chant:) “You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man” (reverting to his ordinary voice:) “What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!”

  “Mascodagama,” whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.

  “Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me—you like Ardis Hall?”

  “I adore it,” said Van. “It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.”

  “Hopeless? I wonder. I know Dan wants to leave it to Lucile, but Dan is greedy, and my affairs are such that I can satisfy great greed. When I was your age I thought that the sweetest word in the language rhymes with ‘billiard,’ and now I know I was right. If you’re really keen, son, on having this property, I might try to buy it. I can exert a certain pressure upon my Marina. She sighs like a hassock when you sit upon her, so to speak. Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries. Pull that cord again. Yes, maybe Dan could be made to sell.”

  “That’s very black of you, Dad,” said pleased Van, using a slang phrase he had learned from his tender young nurse, Ruby, who was born in the Mississippi region where most magistrates, public benefactors, high priests of various so-called “denominations,” and other honorable and generous men, had the dark or darkish skin of their West-African ancestors, who had been the first navigators to reach the Gulf of Mexico.

  “I wonder,” Demon mused. “It would cost hardly more than a couple of millions minus what Cousin Dan owes me, minus also the Ladore pastures, which are utterly mucked up and should be got rid of gradually, if the local squires don’t blow up that new kerosene distillery, the stïd i sram (shame) of our county. I am not particularly fond of Ardis, but I have nothing against it, though I detest its environs. Ladore Town has become very honky-tonky, and the gaming is not what it used to be. You have all sorts of rather odd neighbors. Poor Lord Erminin is practically insane. At the races, the other day, I was talking to a woman I preyed upon years ago, oh long before Moses de Vere cuckolded her husband in my absence and shot him dead in my presence—an epigram you’ve heard before, no doubt from these very lips—”

  (The next thing will be “paternal repetitiousness.”)

  “—but a good son should put up with a little paternal repetitiousness—Well, she tells me her boy and Ada see a lot of each other, et cetera. Is that true?”

  “Not really,” said Van. “They meet now and then—at the usual parties. Both like horses, and races, but that’s all. There is no et cetera, that’s out of the question.”

  “Good! Ah, the portentous footfall is approaching, I hear. Prascovie de Prey has the worst fault of a snob: overstatement. Bonsoir, Bouteillan. You look as ruddy as your native vine—but we are not getting any younger, as the amerlocks say, and that pretty messenger of mine must have been waylaid by some younger and more fortunate suitor.”

  “Proshu, papochka (please, Dad),” murmured Van, who always feared that his father’s recondite jests might offend a menial—while sinning himself by being sometimes too curt.

  But—to use a hoary narrational turn—the old Frenchman knew his former master too well to be bothered by gentlemanly humor. His hand still tingled nicely from slapping Blanche’s compact young bottom for having garbled Mr. Veen’s simple request and broken a flower vase. After placing his tray on a low table he retreated a few steps, his fingers remaining curved in the tray-carrying position, and only then acknowledged Demon’s welcome with a fond bow. Was Monsieur’s health always good? Indeed it was.

  “I’ll want,” said Demon, “a bottle of your Château Latour d’Estoc for dinner”; and when the butler, having removed en passant a crumpled little handkerchief from the piano top, had left the room with another salute: “How do you get along with Ada? She’s what—almost sixteen now? Very musical and romantic?”

  “We are close friends,” said Van (who had carefully prepared his answer to a question he had expected to come in one form or another). “We have really more things in common than, for instance, ordinary lovers or cousins or siblings. I mean, we are really inseparable. We read a lot, she is spectacularly self-educated, thanks to her granddad’s library. She knows the names of all the flowers and finches in the neighborhood. She is altogether a very amusing girl.”

  “Van …,” began Demon, but stopped—as he had begun and stopped a number of times before in the course of the last years. Some day it would have to be said, but this was not the right moment. He inserted his monocle and examined the bottles: “By the way, son, do you crave any of these aperitifs? My father allowed me Lilletovka and that Illinois Brat—awful bilge, antranou svadi, as Marina would say. I suspect your uncle has a cache behind the solanders in his study and keeps there a finer whisky than this usque ad Russkum. Well, let us have the cognac, as planned, unless you are a filius aquae?”

  (No pun intended, but one gets carried away and goofs.)

  “Oh, I prefer claret. I’ll concentrate (nalyagu) on the Latour later on. No, I’m certainly no T-totaler, and besides the Ardis tap water is not recommended!”

  “I must warn Marina,” said Demon after a gum-rinse and a slow swallow, “that her husband should stop swilling tittery, and stick to French and Califrench wines—after that little stroke he had. I met him in town recently, near Mad Avenue, saw him walking toward me quite normally, but then as he caught sight of me, a block away, the clockwork began slowing down and he stopped—oh, helplessly!—before he reached me. That’s hardly normal. Okay. Let our sweethearts never meet, as we used to say, up at Chose. Only Yukonians think cognac is bad for the liver, because they have nothing but vodka. Well, I’m glad you get along so well with Ada. That’s fine. A moment ago, in that gallery, I ran into a remarkably pretty soubrette. She never once raised her lashes and answered in French when I—Please, my boy, move that screen a little, that’s right, the stab of a sunset, especially from under a thunderhead, is not for my poor eyes. Or poor ventricles. Do you like the type, Van—the bowed little head, the bare neck, the high heels, the trot, the wiggle, you do, don’t you?”

  “Well, sir—”

  (Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent.)

  “—Well, I’m resting after my torrid affair, in London, with my tango-partner whom you saw me dance with when you flew over for that last show—remember?”

  “Indeed, I do. Curious, you calling it that.”

  “I think, sir, you’ve had enough brandy.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Demon, wrestling with a subtle question which only the ineptitude of a kindred conjecture had crowded out of Marina’s mind, granted it could have entered by some back door; for ineptitude is always synonymous with multitude, and nothing is fuller than an empty mind.

  “Naturally,” continued Demon, “there is a good deal to be said for a restful summer in the country …”

  “Open-air life and all that,” said Van.

  “It is incredible that a young boy should control his father’s liquor intake,” remarked Demon, pouring himself a fourth shallow. “On the other hand,” he went on, nursing the thin-stemmed, gold-rimmed cup, “open-air life may be pretty bleak without a summer romance, and not many decent girls haunt the neighborhood, I agree. There was that lovely Erminin girl, une petite juive très aristocratique, but I understand she’s engaged. By the way, the de Prey woman tells me her son has enlisted and will soon be taking part in that deplorable b
usiness abroad which our country should have ignored. I wonder if he leaves any rivals behind?”

  “Goodness no,” replied honest Van. “Ada is a serious young lady. She has no beaux—except me, ça va seins durs. Now who, who, who, Dad, who said that for ‘sans dire’?”

  “Oh! King Wing! When I wanted to know how he liked his French wife. Well, that’s fine news about Ada. She likes horses, you say?”

  “She likes,” said Van, “what all our belles like—balls, orchids, and The Cherry Orchard.”

  Here Ada herself came running into the room. Yes-yes-yes-yes, here I come. Beaming!

  Old Demon, iridescent wings humped, half rose but sank back again, enveloping Ada with one arm, holding his glass in the other hand, kissing the girl in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than an uncle’s fervor. “Gosh,” she exclaimed (with an outbreak of nursery slang that affected Van with even more umilenie, attendrissement, melting ravishment, than his father seemed to experience). “How lovely to see you! Clawing your way through the clouds! Swooping down on Tamara’s castle!”

  (Lermontov paraphrased by Lowden).

  “The last time I enjoyed you,” said Demon “was in April when you wore a raincoat with a white and black scarf and simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist. Dr. Pearlman has married his receptionist, you’ll be glad to know. Now to business, my darling. I accept your dress” (the sleeveless black sheath), “I tolerate your romantic hairdo, I don’t care much for your pumps na bo su no gu (on bare feet), your Beau Masque perfume—passe encore, but, my precious, I abhor and reject your livid lipstick. It may be the fashion in good old Ladore. It is not done in Man or London.”

  “Ladno (Okay),” said Ada and, baring her big teeth, fiercely rubbed her lips with a tiny handkerchief produced from her bosom.

  “That’s also provincial. You should carry a black silk purse. And now I’ll show what a diviner I am: your dream is to be a concert pianist!”