Vera (24 page)

She would have been highly conspicuous on West Eighty-seventh Street. Well before she opened her mouth, no one would have mistaken Véra Nabokov for an
American. Neither of the elder Nabokovs appeared remotely well fed, a look that Véra
wore better than her gaunt husband. (When he arrived at Wellesley College for a guest lecture in March, Vladimir over-heard a cafeteria cook swear, “
We are going to put some fat on the bones of that man,” a promise on which, indirectly, Wellesley made good.
In the eyes of a friend's daughter, Véra looked as if she were about to blow away.) In a long black dress and a long black coat, Véra introduced Dmitri to the
Statue of Liberty, the Fulton Street fishmarket, the Bronx Zoo, the Staten Island Ferry. She was for him a part of those enchantments. In those rounds she looked decidedly foreign, and would the more so the farther she ventured from New York. Nor could Dmitri—despite the “American” in which he
was soon chattering away fluently—be mistaken for a native. Nicholas Nabokov and his second wife dined with the new arrivals at the Russian Tea Room just before Christmas 1940. The more recent Mrs. Nabokov—Nicholas would leave behind four of them, whose activities were routinely conflated with Véra's—remembered Dmitri spectacularly
bundled in fur, a picturesque and decidedly exotic sight. The following summer the seven-year-old left an
indelible impression while exploring the upper reaches of a Stanford amphitheater in shorts resembling lederhosen, a felt hat with a feather jauntily perched on his head. In Berlin and Paris a Russian accent was a Russian accent; in New York it was simply, and distinctly, foreign. The alienation must have been fierce, at a time when America was not yet at war and not yet much concerned with the messy world beyond its shores. As Nabokov reminds us,
“
Stranger
always rhymes with
danger.”

It had never been much in Véra's power to bow to the local mores, and after three migrations she was all the more unwilling to do so. There was generally less suppleness to her persona than to that of her husband, who took to America as he took to most things, with a bantering, inquisitive enthusiasm. Véra's memory of Dmitri and the fur reveals something of her unyielding approach to the New World that winter:

She lamented that this gentleness would be bred out of her son by American schools.

Her husband, a quick-change artist by nature, began almost immediately, consciously and not, to toy with the local idiom. His wardrobe told an interesting tale, especially about a man whose work is so rich in lived illusions. Almost as if in a fable, he met in quick succession a series of individuals who counted among his staunchest supporters in his new world. Chief among them were Harry Levin, then a promising junior instructor in Harvard's English Department, and his Russian wife, Elena, from a liberal background similar to Vladimir's. The young couple had spent their 1939 honeymoon at the Karpoviches' farm, at which time Levin had abandoned his cast-off tweed blazer in a closet. When the Levins were introduced to the
Nabokovs in the fall of 1940, the Nabokovs were returning from Vermont; Vladimir sported the
retired blazer, to whose provenance he remained oblivious.
^*
Over that summer Karpovich had passed on to Vladimir an ultramarine suit of which Nabokov was fond and in which he delivered his 1941 Stanford lectures. Additional hand-me-downs came his way from Serge Koussevitzky. It is not surprising that prior to George Hessen's immigration Nabokov prepped him by advising that he must “
play the real American.” Early on the couple appear to have realized that for Vladimir's professional survival they could not too much align themselves with the Russian community, a decision that would cost them later.

Véra engaged in none of this molting; generally she was less interested in costumes than disguises. Willingly or not, she was engaged in a new game, in a new language, in which the rules were ill defined for newcomers. The possibilities for ridicule were enormous, especially for someone with a heightened sensitivity to propriety, an investment in remaining inconspicuous. At half her age her father had effected a similar transformation: His move from a Yiddish-speaking shtetl to a Petersburg university was a move from the religious to the secular world, from one class to another, but it must have been less traumatic than was his thirty-eight-year-old daughter's in 1940. The “
rapid acculturation and abiding separateness” that was said to describe the life of the St. Petersburg Jew equally well described these first refugee years in America, where so much was possible and at the same time so much was alien. Véra recognized the difficulties inherent in the enterprise. She spoke eloquently about the “
pathetic attempt of a very small and bewildered individual to throw an anchor of his own amidst the incomprehensible, tossing, perhaps frightening element around him,” although when she did so she was speaking of Dmitri on the arrival in America. She seems to have had little interest in reinventing herself, only in inventing an American writer where there had been a gifted Russian one, in seeing that the twice-deposed king with whom she traveled recover his scepter.

In March 1941 Nabokov arrived in Wellesley for a two-week guest lectureship, which he owed indirectly to Karpovich. Véra was in bed with a
crippling case of sciatica, an illness that cost her the newspaper job. In sixteen days Vladimir wrote her no fewer than eight times. Almost immediately he did so with good news: Edward Weeks had bought “Cloud, Castle, Lake” for
The Atlantic
, a deal the two men sealed over breakfast that week. Vladimir solicited his wife's advice as to what he should do next. Was it wiser to attempt something in English, or write a piece in Russian and then translate it?
^*
Even at this delicate moment in his metamorphosis he made light of his predicament, citing an invented text that would be written in 2074 about the linguistic travails of Vladimir Sirin. He reveled in his attempts at deciphering Americans. “
I'll be so bold as to assume that when they say, ‘It will be a tragedy when you go away,' that that is the simplest American politeness,” he asserted. But in confidence he admitted that he was bored and longed to come home; when he feared he could not fill fifty minutes he dragged out his lecture by covering the blackboard with the names of Russian writers. He punctuated his letters with comments clearly aimed at dissipating any jealousy his wife might be harboring. At Véra's end fidelity was doubtless less at issue than were finances.
She failed to place a section of
The Gift
in a Russian anthology in which Vladimir had hoped it might appear; she had no money; she was rapidly piling up debts. Further she was unwell. Lisbet Thompson and one of Nabokov's Columbia students checked on her daily and accompanied Dmitri to the park. The doctor paid regular calls. Vladimir had himself been borrowing money during his trip; he came home via the Chekhov Theatre in Ridgefield, Connecticut, for which he had proposed to work up a stage adaptation of
Don Quixote
, but found on March 28 that he lacked the funds to return to New York. (He lodged in the actors' dorm but
took care to specify that it was the
male
actors' dorm.) Véra might have worried that quixoticism could be contagious when her trainfare-less husband was offered, and rejected, a permanent position in Ridgefield: “
It's true, it is quaint here, but all the trees have been chemically treated, so there probably aren't many butterflies.”

She had not recovered her health on his return, and was in great pain throughout April, when it seemed the California trip might have to be canceled on her account. Nabokov had been pleased with the visit to Wellesley and Wellesley had been no less pleased with him; in mid-May he received an invitation to join the faculty for a one-year appointment, at a salary of three thousand dollars. He was to be “
an interdepartmental visitor,” a title that—with its overtones of outer space—seemed perfectly to describe his situation. It was neither a permanent position nor a munificent sum, but the Wellesley offer allowed the Nabokovs to set out for California with the future a little less undecided than it had been. Véra was evidently well enough to pack
up the apartment on Eighty-seventh Street and pile into a car—along with the dictionary, the typewriter, Dmitri, three butterfly nets, and Dorothy Leuthold, pupil and chauffeur—for two weeks. It would be another year before her frustration with their state of affairs would seep into her correspondence. Bitterly she remarked in mid-1942, “
Yes, Russia is
en vogue
right now, but as far as a position is concerned, that hasn't helped my husband yet.” (Vladimir vented the same frustration at the same time but in radically different terms: “
Funny—to know Russian better than any living person—in America at least,—and more English than any Russian in America,—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job. I am getting rather jittery about next year.”) Later she alluded to grave difficulties in getting reestablished. Despite the overt stalwartness, her chagrin with their hand-to-mouth existence, with the familiar set of uncertainties in an unfamiliar world, plainly exacted a toll. In the 1950s she privately attributed her departure from the newspaper position to “
illness which resulted from all the migrations and anxieties.”

She caught some of her first American butterflies that summer, as Leuthold chauffeured the family to California, from motor court to motor court, through Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, a trip Véra hugely enjoyed. Some of this collecting she did in a knee-length black dress with a lace collar, a garment she could hardly have purchased with this kind of expedition in mind. She still looked unwell, her skin more ashen than translucent, her cheeks sunken. On a crystalline morning in early June, on the
south rim of the Grand Canyon, both Nabokovs triumphed lepidopterologically, each in his own way. Vladimir set off with Dorothy Leuthold down a mule trail, where after a short walk he netted two specimens of what he recognized to be an undocumented
Neonympha
. When he returned to the Pontiac, where Véra and Dmitri were attempting to warm themselves, he discovered “
that right beside the car Véra had herself caught two specimens, sluggish with the cold, with nothing but her fingers.” Nabokov named his capture after Leuthold; he commemorated his success in “A Discovery,” a poem that appeared in
The New Yorker
in 1943. Véra's parallel find went undocumented. A certain competitiveness crept into their collecting, for which the passion was primarily Vladimir's. “
I've had wonderful luck. I've gotten many things he didn't get,” Véra interrupted her husband to tell his first biographer. “And I once saw a butterfly that he wanted very much, and he
wouldn't believe me, that I had seen it,” she continued. “Yes, that's right, that's right,” agreed Nabokov. “And on the side of the path you saw snakes actually jumping into the air.” She entered into the collecting, which would occupy a fair portion of the remainder of her American summers, with enthusiasm, and spoke of her finds with pride.
^*
(When her husband was not there to pique her modesty, she was more retiring on the subject. After fifty years of collecting she demurred, “
I am not a trained lepidopterist. All I know about butterflies I have learned from my husband.”) If anyone was to acknowledge the cost of these expeditions it was not to be Véra. “
I bungled my family's vacation but got what I wanted,” Vladimir reported, after a summer detour to Telluride, Colorado.

The Nabokovs very quickly took the measure of America, “
a cultured country of endless variety,” as Vladimir initially described it. America would be longer in taking theirs. In the first weeks a New York City barber sized up his client in a glance, pronouncing him an Englishman, a recent arrival, and a journalist. Flabbergasted, Nabokov asked how the barber had arrived at his conclusions. “
Because you have an English accent, you haven't yet had time to remove your European shoes, and you have the high forehead and the face of a newspaperman.” “You're a real Sherlock Holmes,” conceded Vladimir, to which the sleuth with the shears replied, “Who's Sherlock Holmes?” During the cross-country excursion Véra took Dmitri for a haircut and heard a less assertive investigator west of the Mississippi ask her seven-year-old son where he made his home. “
I don't have a home,” replied the child, who had lived at twenty-one addresses in the previous three years. “Where do you live then?” inquired the astonished barber. “In little houses by the road,” Dmitri replied, a comment by which his mother was charmed. As Dmitri sees, looking back, “
It was a real drifter's life.”