Vera (26 page)

The bulk of the summer of 1942 was spent at the Karpoviches', a vacation Véra
enjoyed less than she had the previous stay. Almost certainly the cause was a falling-out with Tatiana Karpovich over how to discipline the boisterous Dmitri. The youngest Nabokov that year composed a story about a mother who “
was so kind that when she had to spank her child she gave him some laughing-gas first,” a tale which does a fair job of conveying Véra and Vladimir's attitude toward parental discipline, one which caused some dismay among their friends. Véra left Vermont early, and alone, to hunt for an apartment in Cambridge. She was
under strict instructions to find one
with a room in which her husband could work undisturbed, which she did, renting a third-floor apartment in a large brick building on Craigie Circle, a twenty-minute walk from the museum. For one hundred dollars she acquired the furniture of the previous tenant, a professor with execrable taste. The
cramped headquarters proved the Nabokovs' longest-lived American address; with Véra and Dmitri sharing a narrow, twin-bedded room so that Vladimir could write at night in the room next door, they would remain at Craigie Circle until mid-1948. Mary McCarthy was a long time in recovering from the décor when she visited; others remembered only Vladimir's bed,
strewn with index cards.
Isabel Stephens, a neighbor and Wellesley colleague, was led to believe that he littered the floor with his cards, which Véra collected and put in order for him. (She did find her day's typing on the floor when she woke in the morning.) While in Cambridge Véra learned that Anna Feigin had arrived safely in Baltimore, with her brother, Ilya. Both Nabokovs were distraught to find that the Hessens had not sailed on the same ship; they left France finally at the end of the year. “
Now this gigantic stone has rolled off of my chest, with its tiny swastika, and it is easier to breathe,” Vladimir wrote, welcoming them.

In the spring Véra had typed her husband's curriculum vitae and a list of eight topics on which he could speak; financial necessity made him a traveling lecturer that winter. He set off early in October 1942 for two months of speaking engagements that took him from Georgia to Minnesota. This made Véra a de facto curator of Lepidoptera at the MCZ. From the South her husband instructed her which butterflies to pin into the sliding glass cases, and in which order. “
Good Girl,” he applauded from the train to Atlanta, “for doing so many trays.” While all in Cambridge appeared on an even keel, his trip was one rich in the Pninian moment with which his life—especially his life apart from Véra—was so rich. He had long vaunted his absentmindedness, his ineptitude, the “
dilly-dallying [which] has always been my specialty.”
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His encounter with the American South was enhanced by the adventure of the renegade cufflinks (a replacement set materialized out of thin air and was affixed to his overstarched cuffs by a well-meaning female guest, decidedly “
not the best-looking of them”); the case of the wrong lecture in the jacket pocket; the case of the mistaken identity. (After a long wait for his ride to campus, he realized that the college had been “
expecting a gentleman with Dostoyevsky's beard, Stalin's mustache, Chekhov's pince-nez, and Tolstoy's tunic,” a gentleman who was no other than himself.)

All of this information was transmitted to Cambridge in daily dispatches, to which Véra responded with equal frequency. Nabokov challenged his wife to determine telepathically which paintings hung on his hotel room wall; he wrote of his delight in their shared life. He hastened to banish any specters of jealousy that might be arising at her end. Lounging on his bed, naked, he assured her that he missed her on all counts. Intermittently he was putting the finishing touches on the Gogol biography—he promised Laughlin that it would take him ten days to dictate the thing to Véra—even while he battled the impulse to write in Russian. From Cambridge Véra sent him a partially completed form he might submit to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship. She suggested that he write Agnes Perkins and Amy Kelly at Wellesley, to remind them how much he would like to return to some kind of position there, an appeal that would bear fruit the following spring. Nabokov's tour as a traveling salesman in literature proved the couple's last long separation; they would never again be apart for more than a matter of days.

When he returned to Cambridge on December 12, Vladimir found Véra in Mount Auburn Hospital with pneumonia. She stayed for several weeks, into the new year. To her husband's relief, Anna Feigin was at the apartment, sleeping on what was euphemistically termed the sunporch. Were it not for his wife's cousin, Vladimir felt, he and Dmitri
would have disappeared completely. As a result of the illness the typing of the Gogol book did not begin until nearly mid-January, however. “
She still cannot manage more than five pages per day,” Vladimir wrote Laughlin apologetically of his wife, “but this rate will improve steadily.” Progress on the manuscript was slower than expected, as—doubtless relatedly—was the recovery. More than typing appears to have been at issue: By March only 130 pages were ready, which indicates a certain amount of rewriting. For Véra the scene must have been reminiscent of
Invitation to a Beheading
, which she had also typed while convalescing, on a different keyboard. There was every reason in the world why Vladimir, congratulating his publisher on his upcoming nuptials, should have written that year of marriage: “
It is a very pleasant state as far as my own experience goes.”

We do not know if—frail as she was, well-acquainted with her husband as she was—the woman who “
presided as adviser and judge over” Nabokov's first fictions offered comment on the Gogol pages as she typed. Other early readers did. Neither Karpovich nor Wilson approved entirely of one of the most eccentric biographies ever written, a book that begins with the death and ends with the birth of its subject, visiting every one of its author's pet peeves along the way. Laughlin asked if Nabokov could not see his way to
supplying the plots of Gogol's works; the author responded not by doing so but by writing Laughlin's admonishment into the book. In the slim volume Nabokov takes issue not only with the existing translations but with
Roget's Thesaurus
as well; he manages to include a subtle plug for one of his own future works. Is it truly necessary, pleaded Karpovich, for you to gr
ind every one of your personal axes at Gogol's expense? Wilson thought his Russian friend
overindulged in puns; the cleverness threatened to overwhelm the book. Véra had the advantage of knowing her husband better than did either Wilson or Karpovich; he was not capable of holding up a mirror to Gogol that did not include
his own reflection as well. Above all the biography amounted to a primer on reading Nabokov. Véra also had some experience of the matters of which he spoke. “
Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange,” Nabokov declares of his subject. To Laughlin he explained that the real plots hid always behind the visible plots. Twenty years later Véra advised a friend mystified by a young relative's behavior: “
Artists are unusual people, and their reactions may sometimes appear disappointing. Most of the time the truth is different from the way things look.”

The appeals Véra had advised to Professors Kelly and Perkins paid off in the winter of 1943, when Vladimir was invited back to Wellesley to teach two noncredit courses in Russian. (There was sad irony in the fact that his deliverance came courtesy of the pro-Soviet sympathies that began to blossom all over America.) Again his title reflected his irregular status: According to the September 1944 faculty questionnaire that Véra completed for him, he was now “Extracurricular Instructor in Russian.”
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In the simple disguise of a language professor he traveled from Cambridge to Wellesley, by wartime car pool, for semiweekly meetings of his courses. The commitment required more of his time than he had anticipated, not because of his enchantment with his students but because of his disenchantment with the teaching tools at hand. He could not help but blaze his own trail. “
I invent my own phonetics and rules for I am just created in such a way that I am utterly incapable of taking advantage of the work of others, no matter how substantive that work might be,” he explained. His “real life” was located not at Wellesley, and not even with his literature—he felt as if the person who had been writing in
English under his name was but a construct, “
as if it's not myself in fact who composes”—but at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So disassociated was he from Professor Nabokov that he told a student interviewer he would laugh to hear himself lecture.

“
Wars pass, bugs stay,” Vladimir announced that winter, making no question of his priorities, much less where the Wellesley classes fit in the scheme of things. He took the museum work altogether seriously, spreading, pinning, and labeling specimens for the collection, focusing on his favorite “Blues” of the Lycaenidae family, for which he had devised a novel taxonomy. He maintained his reputation as an original even at the highly original MCZ, where he was generally regarded as a gifted amateur, not only because of his lack of a graduate degree. This could not have disturbed the man who had written his mother from the other Cambridge more than twenty years earlier: “
I love to play the eccentric.”
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He was no less quick to report on his follies than were his colleagues, one of whom noticed that his
hallway greetings boomed in inverse proportion to how clearly Vladimir recognized the person he was addressing. In 1944 he acquired an assistant who would become a trusted friend, seventeen-year-old Phyllis Smith, then a Simmons College freshman. Nabokov delighted in sharing with her the tales of his American mishaps, the misunderstandings that seemed to accrue to someone unfamiliar with the local mores. His recurrent question seemed to be “
Is this really the way they do things in America?,” the implication, “Do you think this as absurd as we do?” So much of his and Véra's experience had been that of his characters: breaking out. Now for the first and only time they struggled with getting in.

Despite the butterflies, Nabokov finished writing—and Véra finished typing—the Gogol manuscript in May. That spring Véra began to submit her husband's work to magazines, as she had done in Europe, a sign that she felt more confident of her English (or of that of her husband, who had just received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships). She had by this time also assumed her husband's correspondence with publishers, Laughlin chief among them. Hearing of their interest in the American West, the independently wealthy Laughlin invited the Nabokovs for a summer stay at his ski lodge in Alta, Utah. It proved a restorative vacation, though Véra was disappointed by the weather; a cold wind seemed to howl constantly through the
Wasatch Range canyon. (For someone born in St. Petersburg she was uncommonly sensitive to cold. Her husband was sturdier, but quick to conclude that America's climatic conditions were “
not quite normal.”) Nor was she won over by Laughlin or his wife, which may explain why the publisher remembered her primarily for her
glacial charms. In Alta as later, Laughlin sensed that Véra feared he might somehow lead her husband astray. Her concern proved misdirected, but well-founded: She was visibly unenthusiastic when Vladimir proposed to their host that they climb to the top of 13,000-foot Lone Peak in search of a rare butterfly. After an eight-hour ascent, the two nearly perished on the way down, as they slipped through a steep snow-field at the
edge of a cliff, over which Nabokov nearly lost his publisher. They were due back at the lodge at four; at six Véra called the sheriff's office, which sent out a car. A sheriff returned with the men several hours later. There were no histrionics on their return. Vladimir seemed more rattled by his wife's
systematically defeating him at Chinese checkers, to which the two devoted a good deal of time over the summer.

Despite himself, Vladimir made a new friend in July, on a mountain road outside of Alta. Leaving his overheated truck behind, a coal-dusted young man hailed Nabokov, who should by 1943 have learned not to judge anyone by his attire. He glowered silently at the truck driver but did not stop. John Downey was unwilling to be shaken off so easily and pursued the lepidopterist with a volley of questions. Pointing to the left and right with his net, Nabokov administered an ambulatory Latin exam before he was willing to believe that the seventeen-year-old shared his highly recondite passion. When Downey passed with flying colors, the older man stopped in his tracks. “Vladimir Nabokov,” he offered, extending his hand. A few years later Downey's wife and Véra joined their husbands for a collecting trip, just before the erstwhile truck driver began his master's in entomology. Véra applied a little litmus test of her own. “Tell me, Norine,” she asked Mrs. Downey, over a picnic table near Salt Lake City, “does your husband understand my husband's work?” “I'm sure he does, because he uses it all the time,” responded Norine Downey, referring to the lepidopterological papers. “That's good, because many people don't,” sighed Véra, referring to the fiction.