Vera (32 page)

A fair amount of brute strength was required on her part during the early Cornell years. The initial months were happy ones: Ithaca was gorgeous, lush and green, home even to an occasional butterfly of interest. Véra was a walker; she strolled happily through Collegetown, to Stewart Park; she admired Ithaca's crystalline gorges and waterfalls. Dmitri settled in quickly at Holderness, a relief to his mother. Nabokov's enrollments were low and his schedule far from exhausting. “
This is a genuine tranquil professorship, and not some preposterous Harvard + Wellesley combination,” he announced, a touch prematurely. The Nabokovs fell into the welcoming arms of Morris Bishop and his wife, Alison, who became their only close friends at Cornell. To his sister Vladimir explained the decision to send Dmitri away to school (the “hooligan element” elsewhere, and the language instruction): “
We miss him, and Véra and I live quietly and very, very happily.” He was able to work throughout the winter, finishing the seventh installment of his memoir early in February. One semester later the demands of academic life and of the university began to grate, especially as they appeared disproportionate to the financial rewards. Nabokov had been at Cornell for five months when he wrote the head of the Literature Division that he could not make do on his present salary, an appeal he repeated to a higher authority several months later.
^*
As he lobbied strenuously for a raise he wrote an émigré friend in New York that teaching was, of course,
his last priority. He made no secret of this on campus. Véra did a fair amount of goading, not about his work but about his university commitments. She urged her husband to attend the faculty receptions she would later deny he had ever attended. “
You
must
go,” she advised, insisting when he balked.
^†
On one occasion when he decided his personal honor stood between him and a holiday reception, she went instead. Probably this was Christmas 1951. Marc Szeftel was surprised to find Mrs. Nabokov at the home of a professor whose department's policies were not to her husband's (or her) liking. “
Everything has its limits,” she explained. It
could not have escaped her notice that her husband now held the kind of position for which he had been vying since 1936. She knew it far beneath his abilities, but she also knew it to be necessary.

They dealt with his chafing at the job—and his sense of its slim rewards—differently. Nabokov availed himself of every opportunity to find a better position elsewhere. Before the first Ithaca year was out, he received a fan letter from the wife of a Baltimore professor, who had admired his
New Yorker
pieces. “
I envy you for basking in the mellow climate of Johns Hopkins. The elements here are rough and raw. Is there a Russian department at your college?” replied Vladimir, masquerading as Véra. By 1950 he was sending out confidential feelers to friends at Harvard and Stanford. He made repeated assaults on his superiors, on one occasion rehearsing his arguments in his diary. The distributor of paychecks
braced himself for Nabokov's weekly requests for advances on his salary, an unorthodox request in the academic context. At the same time attempts to involve him further in the development of the curriculum proved futile. When the dean to whom he carried his salary protests inquired if he might assist Szeftel in developing Cornell's Russian Studies program his initial response was quick and blunt: “
I want to warn you that I am a hopelessly poor organizer with no practical sense whatsoever so that my participation in any committee would be, I am afraid, pretty worthless. I am moreover ridiculously absent-minded and unless I am doing some research work of my own, my mind is apt to wander in a most annoying (to others) fashion.” He—or Véra—toned down the response before sending it on to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, but the protests of helplessness kept him as far from academic committees as they did from the steering wheel of a car.

He made equally energetic efforts to have Véra hired as an instructor of Russian. These came to naught, officially because enrollments were too low to justify additions to the staff, unofficially because Véra's Russian “
was deemed ‘too literary' and not ‘contemporary enough.' ” She enjoyed only a brief career as a language instructor. Cornell's language teachers at the time were largely drill instructors, meant to impress set phrases on their students' memories. Véra had
no respect for the system or its practitioners; she griped to the Russian-born Szeftel of the prominent linguist with whom she worked, “
You just wait, Fairbanks … will transform Russian in such a way that soon you and I will cease to understand it!” Some on campus, including Milton Cowan, the head of Cornell's languages empire, credited Véra with having
poisoned her husband's mind against the Division of Modern Languages and linguistics in general, a hostility that makes itself felt in
Pnin
. She did not need to poison Vladimir's mind, already poisoned against Cornell's
approach, but she did voice her dissatisfaction. She may have been quite out-spoken about this. In the first few years in Ithaca she worked in both the German and French Departments, a career on which she offered no comment save to say that she left the German post after several weeks, and that “
the French gave her notice.” When she groused later about Cornell language instruction she employed virtually the same words as does a character in
Pnin
, who may have been taking his words out of her mouth. Both noted that the university “
used whoever was at hand to teach languages provided they kept one lesson ahead of the students.”

She had her work cut out for her propping up the reluctant professor. It could be argued that a man accustomed to a valet has an even greater need for a wife; one friend of the couple, commenting on Vladimir's immense charm, noted that he had a very intimate way of approaching women, as if to enchant them entirely so as to be able to ask if they might
do his laundry. In Véra he had found someone who did not begrudge him the mileage he wrung out of his real and learned helplessness, the special dispensations he was accorded for claiming his hands—the same hands that could nimbly manipulate a butterfly specimen under a microscope—were “limp fools.” She rose to the challenges, as relieved to be obscured in the act of doing so as she was delighted to be of service. Her husband detached himself from various responsibilities; she assumed the responsibilities, but dismissed herself. It snows with conviction in south-central New York State, enough so that a good half hour could be required to liberate a car on a midwinter morning. Or so Nabokov complained, offering up the inconvenience as a primary reason for leaving Cornell. Doing so three times a week had become too difficult for him. Véra was at once more precise—and more diffident—when Boyd described the finger-freezing ordeals. “
Nabokov never scraped snow,” she corrected him, omitting to volunteer who, precisely, had. The stupefied neighbors reported it had been she.

One thing she did not do on East Seneca Street was clean house. She finally got her cleaning woman, in the form of a gentle, boyishly good-looking junior who lived in the basement apartment next door, a barberry hedge away. On his landlady's recommendation, Robert Ruebman was hired for the job, at eighty-five cents an hour. On Tuesday afternoons
the eighteen-year-old English major dusted and vacuumed and cleaned bathrooms, a routine that was interrupted by the snack Véra provided for him. Along with the open-faced ham sandwich, the milk and cookies, she offered occasional advertisements for her husband's courses. She did not feel he could afford to miss them. Ruebman would mow the lawn, polish the car, seal the floorboards,
clean the boarder's room, cash a check at the Triangle Bookstore. Véra appears to have been very fond of him; he found her crisp but delightful, if, instinctively, as foreign as did the rest of the neighbors. Spontaneously, and for no particular reason, he asked in German if he could do anything else on his way out one afternoon.
“Sonst noch was?”
Véra repeated, and laughed, and said “No.”

At Cornell generally she dealt with her husband's hesitations as she had with the driving. “
If he had office hours, he kept them secret,” recalled one student.
The few who delved further into the mystery found Véra, or both Nabokovs, at the office. His mind was still on the unfinished page. So was hers, but the concern manifested itself differently. Increasingly the marriage evolved into a tale of two marriages, a port for him, a career for her. Her capability was matched only by his capacity for ignoring everything that did not concern his own work. In early 1950 it was more than broadly hinted to Nabokov that his requests for a salary adjustment might fall on more sympathetic ears if he would consent to teach the European Literature class he had wriggled out of earlier. Against his will and with Véra's help, he braced himself for the course for which he would be best remembered, Literature 311–312, which he began teaching in September 1950. Still he railed against his wages, complaining that he earned less than a constable or the
chief of a fire brigade.
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His enchantment with Cornell hardly increased when he learned that, for a constable's wages, he was teaching in a fictitious department. After two years in Ithaca and having adorned his letterhead appropriately, he discovered that he could not be chairman of the Russian Department for the simple reason that that department was a figment of his imagination. (Cornell was under the impression—one the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences stiffly shared with Nabokov in May 1950—that they had in their employ an associate professor of Russian, a member of the Literature Division.) Partially because of this little contretemps, in the spring of 1951 he was transferred for administrative purposes to the Department of Romance Literature, headed by the ebullient, highly cultivated Morris Bishop. He taught no courses in the department, where he was
essentially parked because there was no place for him elsewhere, and because Bishop was delighted to have him. Afterward faculty decisions concerning Nabokov were taken with “
a touch of almost amused generosity.” In short the cossetting continued, which
is another way of saying that the petulance paid off.
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The citizens of Ithaca could only have been relieved he was not driving on their streets.
^†
The faculty could only have been relieved to have seen little of him at their meetings. After sitting in on a visiting scholar's French Literature course in 1949, he could barely contain his obloquy.
He assured Keegan and his classmate Joyce Brothers that they had earned their degrees simply by
enduring
Professor Wolfe's lectures. At the end of the semester he marched into the dean's office and insisted that all the grades be raised by 30 points. On further thought, everyone in the course should receive a 100—minus five points for having been so dim-witted as to have sat through the class for an entire semester.

“
It is fine that you are liking it up there, and I have heard from a number of Cornell people that you two are an enormous success,” Laughlin wrote Véra in the fall of 1948. In this case, the truth was in the pronouns. Being Professor Nabokov was not a game Vladimir could have played, as he played it in Ithaca, alone. With varying degrees of resentment, family members grew accustomed to hearing from Vladimir via Véra. For a good decade her letters to her sister-in-law began with apologies that, yet again, she was in charge of answering Elena's missive. (At the end of the decade she had not stopped writing, but she had stopped apologizing.) Often this put Véra in the uncomfortable position of having to protest her husband's love for his sister, something that only a letter in his own hand could have decisively proved. In Russian Véra attempted to explain the correspondence-by-proxy to the patient Elena:

Zinaida Shakhovskoy, who had so often championed the Nabokovs in Europe, was less indulgent of this habit than was Elena Sikorski. After the first Cornell semester Véra thanked Shakhovskoy for her letter. Among a number of other points, Vladimir had wanted to say “
1) that he was very glad to get your letter, that he lost it (together with the address) while moving … 2) that he is asking me to reply to you, since he is afraid that by the time he gets a free minute, your letter will again sail irretrievably into the folders of ‘unanswered letters.' ” The correspondence was one of the first after the war, which had been immensely difficult for the Shakhovskoy family; especially after the years of assistance, a letter from Nabokov's wife was not what Zinaida considered a proper response. Her sister Natalie, to whom the Nabokovs owed so many kindnesses in the New World, displayed more humor about the same routine. “
Volodya has still never written me a letter in his life,” she complained to Véra. Was he hoarding his autograph? If that was the case she promised to return the letter upon reading it. “That disgusting lazybones,” she teased. “Verochka, all hope is on you.”