Vera (28 page)

None of the reports from Europe lessened Vladimir's deep-seated revulsion
for anti-Semitism, a prejudice to which he was more sensitive than his wife. Véra took the slurs in stride, or at least on a rational level; Vladimir was always ready to
call a duel. He had a sophisticated radar for the faintest glimmer of prejudice, as much out of deference to the ideals of his liberal father as to his Jewish wife. Since the arrival in America he had been fascinated by the hotels that advertised “restricted colonies” or “exclusive clientele” in the pages of
The New Yorker
. No manifestation of anti-Semitism was too small to irk him. He leveled
charges of racism even against Alexandra Tolstoy, to whom he and his family owed so much. The miserable summer of 1946, spent in Bristol, New Hampshire, to which the Nabokovs traveled by taxi, was memorable for one such episode.
The accommodations were not promising; the lake was filthy, the resort backed on to a highway, the butterflies were poor. Fried-clam fumes from the local Howard Johnson's wafted across the area. After sitting down in a local restaurant the Nabokovs noticed a sign, “We welcome strictly Christian clientele.” Vladimir wasted no time. “
And what would happen if little old bearded Jesus Christ drove up, in an old Ford, with his mother (black scarf, Polish accent)? That, and other questions, so intrigued me that I took apart the restaurant's manager, leaving him and those present in an indescribable tizzy,” he recounted afterward. He had just finished
Bend Sinister
and was said by his doctors to be suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result; it is doubtful that the reaction would have been different at a more tranquil time.

Véra did no such jostling on her own behalf; her elbows were reserved for her husband. These were years when she more often hid behind him than he behind her, a configuration that gradually reversed itself. During the Wellesley years she was a picture of good-natured grace, or at least was to those who saw her. The Nabokovs socialized little during these years, counting among their friends Amy Kelly and Agnes Perkins, both older women.
^*
Those who knew Véra well—Phyllis Smith, Vladimir's much-liked assistant at the museum; Isabel Stephens, his car-pool colleague; Sylvia Berkman, who helped him to smooth his prose—assumed her to be terribly lonely. Lonely she may have been but sentimental she was not: “
We had a few close ties with 2 or 3 old ladies at Wellesley—dead now” was how she later described some of these intimates. She felt that their
work precluded any social life in Cambridge.

According to a little investigation the FBI conducted in 1948, the Nabokovs had virtually no contact with their neighbors, though there was endless Craigie Circle speculation about them.
^*
For his sister in Geneva, Vladimir drew a picture of the morning routine in Cambridge in the fall of 1945, much of it centered on getting Dmitri out the door for his 8:40 bus: “
Véra and I watch through the window … and see him striding toward the corner, a lanky, little boy, in a grey uniform with a reddish jockey's cap and a green bag (for books) slung over his shoulder.” At 9:30 he headed off himself, with his Véra-supplied thermos of milk and his two sandwiches. Sylvia Berkman was invited in for dinner from time to time on the Wellesley afternoons, and sensed Véra was very grateful for the company. “
She had so little companionship” was how she, the closest of the Wellesley friends, phrased it.
Isabel Stephens assumed she must be downright miserable. Elena Levin, arguably the friend with the most in common with Véra during the American years, saw things differently. “
She was much too busy—and much too proud—to be lonely. She would have been happy to have been on a desert island with Vladimir.”

Certainly her time was much in demand. In 1945 she made some inquiries into printing
The Gift
privately; it is telling that neither she nor Vladimir thought of her translating the novel in the 1940s. She could not yet “
slice, chop, twist, volley, smash, kill, drive, half-volley, lob and place perfectly every word,” as her husband described the ideal translator's abilities. When an editor like Edward Weeks of
The Atlantic
called, he spoke with Véra about which poems her husband should like to publish. After the war, when the French agent who had handled Nabokov's works in Paris visited Cambridge, it fell to Véra to present her with the Gogol book and talk up the collection of short stories that followed. For a translator-friend in Italy she painstakingly recopied Vladimir's plays, all drafts save one having been lost in the war. Nicholas Nabokov hired his cousin to translate a piece of Pushkin's he had set to music; Véra reviewed the voice part with Vladimir, who fit his work to Nicholas's composition. When Vladimir needed the word for the black accordion-like partitions that separate train cars, he called the Stephenses. They were of no help. He called Berkman, who was equally mystified. In the end Véra headed off to Harvard's Widener Library, where she consulted every available book on railroads. She could find no word for the partitions, which appear in
Speak, Memory
as “
intervestibular connecting curtains.” By January 1946 she was, against her will, in charge of Vladimir's
correspondence. In this she brought upon herself the curse of the conscientious; her husband's dilatoriness weighed not on his mind but on hers. To this she combined the curse of the capable. Hundreds of letters went out beginning with apologies. The choice was either a letter from her or no letter at all. By 1949 she felt that there were not enough hours in a day for the correspondence. She was at the time walking the Dutch translator through the hidden meanings in
Bend Sinister
, levels of meaning which—she could have been describing herself—were not to enter his text, but which he would need to penetrate in order to do the novel justice.
^*

Not all of the editorial help went to her husband. In 1950 Harvard University Press published Amy Kelly's scholarly biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which went on to become a surprise bestseller. Véra is thanked in the acknowledgments. She managed always to read copiously, mostly fiction in the 1940s. More often than not
she was disappointed, returning her books to the Cambridge public library without finishing them. To a friend in Italy she
strongly recommended F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, especially
Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby
, and
The Crack-Up
. (Wilson was very likely responsible for fostering this taste, although he was less successful introducing Véra to Faulkner, whose work was lost on her.) She was a great fan of
Evelyn Waugh, whose novels she thought splendid, especially
A Handful of Dust, Scoop
, and
Vile Bodies
. She spoke highly of Laura Hobson's
Gentleman's Agreement
, although she noted disapprovingly that the work, which was generating much excitement, was
un roman à thèse
. Assiduously she reviewed Dmitri's schoolwork, helping him with his Latin, coaching him on both sides of the Roosevelt/Dewey debate, reading him Gogol and Poe. Both Nabokovs consulted with Wilson about reading lists for Dmitri, who Wilson thought would be much enamored of Twain. Véra's reaction to the idea shocked Wilson in 1946, and would have shocked him all the more were he to have remembered it a decade later. “
She won't let her 14-year-old son [Dmitri was 12] read
Tom Sawyer
, because she thinks it is an immoral book that teaches bad behavior and suggests to little boys the idea of taking an interest in little girls too young,” he marveled.

Véra's life was made no more agreeable when Vladimir determined to give up his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit in the summer of 1945. On few subjects was he as comic—or as nostalgic—as on this one. In his suffering he took to following a colleague around the museum so as to inhale his scent; he
came as close as he could to embracing the man, who smelled divine. He waxed rhapsodic on the glories of his former habit, as he was still doing thirty years later. And yet he would not allow himself to touch the packet of Old Golds he kept in the bedside table in case of emergency. “We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender,” he vowed, but he
felt wretched, especially when, at virtually the same time, Harold Ross was so bold as to edit him at
The New Yorker
. “
Nothing like it has ever happened to me in my life,” he growled to Wilson, who managed to call off the pencils but could do nothing about the nicotine withdrawal. Nabokov's personal calvary coincided with a case of chicken pox for Dmitri; Véra must have been beside herself. She had had a dress rehearsal for this double torture the previous summer, when Vladimir had been hospitalized with a serious case of food poisoning in Cambridge while she was in New York with Dmitri, whose appendix was being removed. Acknowledging a certain protectiveness on his wife's part, Nabokov had appealed to Wilson to alert Véra without allowing her to rush back to Cambridge. He knew the unanswered telephone would
torment her.
^*

The arrangement—Véra serving as Vladimir's first lieutenant, as Sylvia Berkman described it—was not without its lapses. Nabokov traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, in March of 1947 to deliver a talk to a woman's club there. (He still could not afford to turn down extracurricular work, although he did not sell himself short either. Véra had begun to alert editors soliciting reviews that their rates were unacceptable to her husband. “
In fact he does not remember having ever been offered anything so absurd as $5 for a review,” she castigated one such offender.) In Providence Vladimir did Pnin one better; he delivered the wrong lecture. Mrs. Pnin assumed responsibility for the misunderstanding: “
I am afraid, I am the one to blame: at the time we made the original arrangement I was sick and omitted writing down your selection of the subject,” Véra explained to the club's president, who registered a sharp complaint. (The subject had been chosen by Vladimir and clearly indicated in the club's letter confirming the talk.) Her husband would be willing to return to Providence to deliver the expected lecture at no charge. Still, prompted either by an inner sense of justice or by an external voice, Véra could not help adding: “He also thinks that to some extent you got even with him by misspelling his name on your program.”

She had clearly already acquainted herself with an area with which she would become expert, with what her husband termed in
Bend Sinister
the
“
devices of shadography.” Hers was not a visible role, but it was a vast one. As if in acknowledgment, she began to swell to New World proportions. America had a curious, Carrollian effect on both Nabokovs: Within weeks of his last cigarette, Vladimir had gained forty pounds. The Wellesley girls were astounded by the transformation. By December 1945 the 124-pound émigré weighed in at just under 200 pounds, a mark he soon exceeded. Véra noted he somehow even
grew taller in the process. As she reported disapprovingly: “
Volodya is always bumping into the furniture because he cannot remember his new dimensions. He claims that ‘his belly is all in bruises.' ” He was clearly a very good deal heavier than she would have liked. She too grew to new dimensions, though not yet to her full stature. On July 12, 1945, two months after the Germans surrendered and a month before the Japanese were to do so, the couple submitted to their American citizenship tests in Boston. They had dutifully memorized the Bill of Rights; Amy Kelly and Mikhail Karpovich went along as witnesses. It was easy enough to explain how blond, 106-pound Véra Nabokoff became on her naturalization certificate gray, 120-pound Véra Nabokov. For once something was gained in translation as well: On her Parisian papers she had been 5 feet 6 inches tall. By some quirk of calculation she was 5 foot 10 by the time the American formalities were over. Meanwhile Dmitri grew and grew, and at twelve was just under six feet tall. (With good reason, Nabokov remembered Craigie Circle as the “
shrunken dwarf apartment.”) “When he and Véra walk along the street she seems tiny,” Vladimir observed. At the same time she began to loom larger and larger. She must have felt like Alice, attempting to introduce herself to the Caterpillar: “
At least I know who I
was
when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” There was every reason in the world why Amy Kelly should fervently congratulate the couple on having been “
literally born again to a new life of happiness and prosperity.”

Nabokov had been brought to Wellesley to serve in a “
generally inspirational capacity.” That he did, but not entirely as the administration had intended. “
I spent most of my time studying French, Russian,
and
Mr. Nabokov,” remembered one student. “
I know I always used to put on mascara when I went to his class,” recalled a second. He was as much a subject of fascination to the college girls as were the MCZ specimens to him; in 1945 you could make quite an impression in Wellesley, Massachusetts, by kissing hands. “We
were all madly in love with him,” a third alumna reported. For many of the girls he was the first European; he tallied perfectly with the romantic conception of the Continental, bohemian artist. Best of all, he seemed fragile, in dire need of
being taken care of. For all of his charm and erudition he appeared—and often was—lost. The college paper reported that the first meeting of the fall 1946 Russian Literature class was delayed by ten minutes, while the students waited eagerly for their professor to arrive. At last “
they noticed a face peering through the window frantically demanding, ‘Where does one get in this place?' ” If the girls were not yet entirely aware of how heterodox were their professor's opinions, they recognized immediately that there was something unorthodox about his person. “
He was the only man I'd seen in my life who wore pastel shirts, pink shirts,” observed a student. He made a practice of annihilating translators.
^*
He announced that he had heard from another faculty member that it was time to give exams.
Could he trouble the class to memorize a poem, as proof of their effort?
Merrily he informed an attractive blonde he intended to use her in a book one day. He seemed terrifically miscast as a Russian instructor; he talked openly about the fact that he was not a good teacher. Everything about him spoke of another world, a distant realm of Old World sophistication and erudition, a world—far from the seas of Peter Pan collars and saddle shoes and bobby sox—that occasionally followed him to class. One day in a classroom under the eaves at Green Hall a butterfly flew in the open window. Nabokov stopped short, nimbly caught the creature by the wings between his thumb and index finger, mumbled its Latin name, then, slouching his way toward the window, set the insect free and returned to the lesson.