Vera (33 page)

The smart publisher—Laughlin was one—noticed early on that letters addressed directly to Véra met with responses more quickly; presumably they were spared the charade of the two in-boxes. Other friends adapted quickly to the routine, aware of the dubious authorship even of those letters signed by Nabokov. Roman Grynberg, a highly cultured publisher and businessman whom Vladimir had tutored in Paris and who lent money to the Nabokovs and the Wilsons throughout the 1940s and 1950s, knew how to get results. He dispatched an urgent envelope to Ithaca in March 1949: “
Dear Véra and Volodya, I am writing you both in order to get an answer (Véra to the side: ‘what a tricky man'). I really need answers.”
Wilson simply glided from addressing Véra to addressing Vladimir, moving by the second paragraph of one “Dear Véra” letter to an analysis of “your satire” in “The Vane Sisters.” Where style is signature the closing fillip fooled no one: Véra made
little attempt to sound like her husband on the page, even while he regularly masqueraded as her, a trick that could be accomplished with a little adjectival drainage. The two voices could not be more different; Véra was direct and flinty while her husband was impudent in a deeply humorous way. In no language did she share his verbal velvet on the page. One early routine involved Véra drafting a letter, Vladimir editing it, Véra typing it, Vladimir signing it. Documents that evolved in this fashion generally became more pointed as they materialized. To Harold and Gert Croghan the Nabokovs complained bitterly of the disturbances from the attic apartment. In an early Seneca Street note Vladimir commented, “
I am afraid I must insist that at 11 p.m.—or at 11:30 at the latest—all loud talking, moving of furniture, etc. should cease.” In a later missive, he deplored, in Véra's words, “the unfortunate sonic arrangement of this house.”

Securing her insomniacal husband a decent night's sleep—or the Proustian silence he needed for composing—preoccupied Véra as much as the correspondence.
^*
As she explained, “
unsolicited sounds make him terribly nervous.” The Croghans provided the whipping posts of the first Cornell years. The two lived in terror of their own footfalls; a vacuum cleaner or a Saturday afternoon opera provoked pounding from below. On a number of occasions a grim Véra appeared at the bottom of their stairs for an interrogation. The Croghans felt like “
husband and wife serfs” as they stood before her to be reprimanded. (They were barely on speaking terms with the Nabokovs when Véra asked Gert Croghan if she might accompany her on a Boston trip.) One can only imagine the torments Véra must have suffered on her husband's behalf in all the motel rooms he lent to
Lolita
, with their various acrosonic intrusions. In October 1950, E. B. White appealed to Nabokov—through his wife, Katharine—for information on spiders; he was at work on a first draft of
Charlotte's Web
. Nabokov replied from Cambridge that he could not be of much help, a sentence he claimed that the hotel's plangent heating system had rudely interrupted. Ten days later Véra drove him to lecture in Toronto, where they descended at the best hotel the city had to offer. Vladimir heard only “
slamming doors, shunting trains, the violent waterfall of one's neighbour's toilet.” It was Humbert Humbert who noted that “
There is nothing louder than an American hotel,” but it was Nabokov, for whom nothing was quiet enough, who said it first. “
I have no illusions about hotels in this hemisphere,” he wailed from Toronto's Royal York. They were for drunken salesmen,
“and not for the weary poet (or the weary poet's wife, says Véra).” He had yet to deliver his Chekhov lecture. Véra, on the other hand, had spent the day driving—and part of the evening
fixing a flat tire in the dark, by the side of the road.

Had she not been on hand to complain that her husband was not sleeping, her presence might well have gone unnoticed. From a later Cornell address Véra wrote urgently to the home's owners, on sabbatical in Ann Arbor. Before leaving Ithaca the couple had had their dog put to sleep. His legacy had survived him. “
What can I do? The fleas are bothering my husband,” pleaded Véra, whose skin must have crawled a little too. Even in her kindnesses, she feigned translucence. Probably in 1950, she made an early-morning excursion across Quarry Street to the home of an English department teaching fellow, his wife, and their three-year-old child. Through an upstairs window Frances Sampson saw Mrs. Nabokov approaching the doorstep with a
wooden cart of blocks, presumably once Dmitri's. The delivery was intended for their daughter, playing on the steps. As young faculty the Sampsons were supremely conscious of rank; this felt “as if royalty had just stopped by to bestow a gift on a peasant.” The blocks were discreetly entrusted to the child. The doorbell never rang.

Not only had the nomadic years left their mark, but Vladimir, anyway, never considered Cornell a permanent post.
He confessed to a sort of superstition about settling, the idea that the purchase of a home was more or less an invitation for an avalanche to descend.
^*
Carrying the concept of displaced persons to new heights, the couple famously moved from sabbatic house to sabbatic house over the years in Ithaca. Locating their next address and moving their affairs was Véra's responsibility. Generally Vladimir accompanied her on the initial inspections. She made the tour with her
notebook in hand, he with his hands clasped behind his back. Explanations about furnaces, lawn care, security were referred to Véra, as, on one such tour, the laws of kashruth nearly were. “
Oh yes, I know all about keeping kosher,” exclaimed Véra brightly, proceeding to explain how a sullied piece of silverware can be redeemed by plunging it into the earth. Otherwise, especially in the early years, she had little contact either with the faculty or the faculty wives. Neither Nabokov was remotely clubbable, a word Vladimir spelled “club-babble.” Véra belonged to none of the Ithaca “
book clubs, bridge clubs, babble clubs.” She did not even belong to the prestigious Drama Club, an association of
faculty wives which met on Friday evenings so as to relieve its participants of the obligation of entertaining for their husbands.

On Seneca Street, while Véra quieted the world around him, Nabokov wrote the remaining pages of the “
autobiographical thingamabob” he had begun in mid-1948. Late that year Katharine White had written to Harper's president on her author's behalf about a book contract.
^*
She could not speak highly enough of the five pieces
The New Yorker
had published. Nabokov's grasp of the idiosyncracies of English and White's grasp of the idiosyncracies of her author had improved in tandem; the cries the two emitted regularly had given way to a fond dialogue. While White admitted that fireworks still flared occasionally when Vladimir's command of idiomatic usage was questioned,
she testified that working with him was a delight.
^†
Nabokov was encouraged to apply for a fellowship the publisher sponsored, but was not granted the award because it was felt, confidentially, that while the work was of considerable distinction, it was unlikely to attract a considerable audience.
^‡
All the same Harper offered a contract for the book of memoirs, a contract with which the author had enough quibbles to set off
alarm bells in the publisher's office. As an earlier editor had noted, “
If anybody again ever tells me that a White Russian [
sic
] is not capable of reading a contract, I shall have evidence to the contrary.” Nabokov mentioned having being taught by a lawyer friend to read agreements;
all evidence points to that friend having been Véra. (It would have been difficult to find an American lawyer likely to object to the wording of a reprint clause on the grounds that—for example—a war might well be declared on the book's publication day.) After a protracted correspondence, an agreement was signed, in May of 1949.

It was fitting, if inconvenient, that as Nabokov made this foray into the past, the past took a few small steps toward him. As he and Véra ironed out the Harper contract, word came from Geneva that Elena Sikorski had run
into a
familiar-seeming woman at church. She approached her; the woman had taken one look at her and exclaimed, “The eyes of Vladimir!” It was Svetlana, Nabokov's ex-fiancée of 1922. The two had a lovely visit, about which Elena wrote her brother, who exploded. He chastised his sister for having based her sense of the relationship on his youthful verse instead of on the reality, which had more to do with Svetlana's family and their “
amiable feelings for our father's murderer, their bourgeois crudeness in ending the romance, and much else that I will one day tell you.” There was clearly still much pain, still very close to the surface. Even in Pushkin's life Nabokov drew a vivid portrait on this account, squeezing a good deal of passion into an occasional note. Svetlana herself had written him directly in 1948, a letter he had ignored. Nor, relatedly or not, was this outburst the end of Svetlana. Vladimir was still dreaming of her as late as 1967.

Most of the benevolent female characters in Nabokov are women we barely see; inside or outside the parentheses, quickly, efficiently, and often in childbirth, they die. They fail to materialize even in the works that bear their name. The faithless, treacherous, obtuse women claim their roles front and center; the literature is full of simperers, sirens, underaged, willing, and unwilling sexpots. After a crowded adolescence and early adulthood, the life was full of one smartly but simply dressed wife, whose feelings about sex will never be known to us but whose sense of propriety, of loyalty, of honesty, informed every aspect of her existence. In the early days she was a nearly spectral presence: She was everywhere present and yet nowhere—even to the offending flea—visible. In
Speak, Memory
she accomplishes a parallel feat. Pages of the book are dedicated to early courtships and erotic attachments. Véra is named only in the index, a section of the book we are informed will “please the discerning.” (And that was added to a later version.) She is more evident there than in the text, a disappearing act she would manage to reprise with her husband's biographers. In 1949, while at work on what were to become the last pages of the memoir, Nabokov notified Katharine White that the chapter in progress was to be
addressed to Véra, in the second person.
^*
We are in fact aware that someone else is in the room with us as early as Chapter 6, when incongruously—and not again for another sixty-six pages—he addresses an offstage “you” to whom we have not been introduced.
^†
The identity of that person becomes obvious only in the last chapter of the work,
although we are never formally introduced. (In the memoir's 1951 incarnation we do learn—later, and in the context of Nabokov's early romantic history—that 1925 was “
the year I married my present wife,” an odd locution. She never amounts to anything more specific than “my dear.”)
^*
She has no voice of her own. Nabokov speaks for her (“we shall never forget, you and I”), and to her (“you know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the prampusher's knack”), and through her (“you questioned the right of a place to call itself a forest when it was so full of refuse”), and about her (“You always considered abominably trite, and not devoid of a particular Philistine flavor, the notion that small boys, in order to be delightful, should hate to wash and love to kill”). But Véra never speaks. In fact the only part of her that so much as appears in her husband's memoir are her delicate hands, in which Dmitri's perfect newborn fingernails are displayed, his plump baby hands warmed. The sense that she was eternally on hand, looking over the author's shoulder—as the author is in so many of his works on hand, looking over his characters' shoulders—was the sense that she projected at Cornell, where she was so often to be described as “hovering.” And like the shadow at Cornell, the “you” of
Speak, Memory
, the other half of that conspicuous “we,” cannot be unseen once sighted; the flavor of that first intrusive “you” leaks out all over the two hundred pages that follow.

Most of all with
Speak, Memory
Véra was equal parts aide-de-camp and aide-mémoire, setting down her memories of Dmitri's childhood for her husband.
^†
Fittingly, insofar as the chapter addressed to her amounts to a tribute, it is a tribute to Véra and Vladimir's mutual creativity, to the birth and early childhood of Dmitri, to the couple's joint couvade. This, too, is love of a kind. Nothing could have better agreed with Véra—who only once, when forcefully pushed, admitted she might be lurking in her husband's texts—than this oblique and semi-anonymous salute. (Another woman might have felt excluded; the other women in Nabokov's life had in common their urge to proclaim their place in his work.
On reading the first half of
Lolita
, Irina Guadanini reported that it was all about her and America.) Even the more direct expression of love in an early version of the memoir's last chapter is toned down. The tender and much palpated love of which we read was at an earlier stage “
this exquisite, this inexpressibly pathetic throb of mortality (the
consciousness of my love for my son, for you).” Not everyone would understand love to be a shared illusion as the Nabokovs understood the term. For some Véra's incorporeal presence raised suspicions. This was love not as delusion but as magic act; at Cornell there was no question as to who was doing the conjuring. Nor is there in
Speak, Memory
. “
In the hush of pure memory” the magician has a coconspirator, a famulus who—at a critical juncture, their most cherished creation between them—knows precisely when to be silent. That reticence too speaks volumes. As doubtless did Nabokov's dedication page: For the first time since
Mary
, he dedicated a published volume, again to his wife. This time he cited her by name.