Vera (40 page)

Her anticommunism was rabid and instinctive. Milton Cowan believed the source of her disdain (and by extension her husband's) for the Languages Division to be her misinterpretation of Gordon Fairbanks's classroom readings. In his course materials for intermediate-level Russian Fairbanks included a copy of the USSR constitution, with which he contrasted Soviet ideals and reality. Where he saw instruction Véra saw only propaganda; in her take-no-prisoners approach, she found the reprinting of the document an affront. (In truth her scorn seems to have been directed at Fairbanks for simpler reasons. When Field noted that Fairbanks spoke little Russian, Véra corrected him. In her opinion Fairbanks did not speak
any
Russian.) She had no bones to pick with McCarthy's agenda, found every reason to believe Alger Hiss to be lying. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s most vivid recollection of Véra was an impassioned defense of McCarthy she made at Schlesinger's Cambridge home, probably during the spring of 1953. To her mind intellectual freedom paled in light of the Communist threat. Her explanation, her support of McCarthy's overblown tactics, virtually amounted to a plea.

Even after McCarthy had fallen from favor—even after 1954, when he had been discredited—she continued to believe his overreacting preferable to what she viewed as American complacency. Her fervor on the subject resulted in a spirited exchange with Mark Vishniak, a former law professor, the Secretary General of the Constituent Assembly of 1918, and a
Contemporary Annals
editor who since 1946 had consulted on Russian affairs for
Time
. Anna Feigin, then living not far from Vishniak in New York, had written her cousin that the editor had referred to Véra as “a McCarthy fan.” Véra was disturbed by the notion, evidently more by the fact that she was being spoken about in New York than by Vishniak's assessment of her politics. She wrote that she had laughed to hear herself described as a fan, prattle someone of Vishniak's stature could not possibly take seriously. But Vishniak could be forgiven his appraisal when Véra continued:

Generally she held that firm measures were the only kind the Communists understood, an attitude that would astound academic friends later. In 1955 her concern remained the source of the rumor, however. “After all,” she wrote Vishniak, “in certain American circles right now to be ‘for McCarthy' is considered significantly more serious a crime than passing military secrets to Soviet agents.” She worried that the allegation against her had not been as innocent as it seemed.

Vishniak was as much surprised to hear from Véra as he was by the contents of her letter. He knew her only slightly; the remark had been made in a casual conversation. He felt that she was making a mountain out of a molehill—further proof that he knew Véra Nabokov only slightly. Surely, he suggested in reply, there was some middle ground? She would not, after all, say he was a Bolshevik, and
he
found McCarthy—whose behavior he considered unconscionable—a major figure. His influence was not to be underestimated. Twenty years her elder, Vishniak had lived through the same events
as had Véra. His position was interesting:
He reminded her that inconsequential figures often turned out to be just the opposite. He warned against whitewashing the reckless McCarthy, as against labeling all those who opposed him Bolsheviks. Véra was unmoved by the argument—“
I continue to consider him [McCarthy] an episodical figure and the real threat to be those horrible agents that have entrenched themselves in various institutions, even in the most secret ones,” she wrote—but was yet more bitter about Vishniak's refusal to divulge his sources. She had no intention of reconsidering her views, even while she felt she had been slandered.

What an émigré like Vishniak would have realized but few others did was that for Véra principles, not people, came first. In the McCarthy exchange the two adopted a sort of dueling code. At a certain point Vishniak asked for her formal acknowledgment that the “incident” was now over. Grudgingly and coyly, Véra complied. “Enough: Really
was
there an incident?” she rejoined. No habit was more to inform the combative next decade than her stubborn, procrustean dedication to principle.
^*
In this respect she outdistanced her husband, for whom personal honor remained always of the greatest importance, but who limited his engagement with the world to the world of literature. For Véra
principle informed all. It could even vitiate truth. The Nabokovs believed that the émigré critic Marc Slonim received monthly checks from the Soviets. Véra always denied categorically that she and Slonim were related. (The rest of the family disagreed.) A 1967 vacation to France was canceled when de Gaulle withdrew militarily from NATO. One Ithaca car dealer severely underestimated the wrath of Véra Nabokov crossed. When Véra went to pick up the new Buick she had ordered, probably in 1957, she did so with her check already written. The dealer who announced to his lovely-looking client that a few additional costs had crept into the transaction watched helplessly as she
tore her check into small pieces and headed out the door. The Buick Special was purchased elsewhere, at her price.

Véra spent a certain amount of time researching the gunsmiths of Paris and the history of firearms during the sabbatical spring of 1953. “
We spent two months in Cambridge—or rather Widener,” Vladimir reported, speaking for the couple, who were delighted again to be living a stone's throw from
Dmitri's dormitory. The curling linoleum was exchanged for a hotel room; work on the
Onegin
commentaries continued, with Véra serving as research assistant. She unearthed details on nineteenth-century firearms and powder-packing methods; to her fell the task of finding out what time the sun rose on the morning of Onegin and Lenski's duel. (She also attempted a March reunion with the much-loved Tomsky, who journeyed to the Ambassador Hotel by taxi one afternoon. Véra set out tea for his escorts and a dish of
cut-up liver for the gutter cat, who promptly vanished under a sofa.) In mid-April, she drove Vladimir at an easy pace to Portal, Arizona. The two rented a tiny cottage in the foothills of the southeastern corner of the state, surrounded by blossoming cacti, sixty miles from civilization. Vladimir made the trip “
on the verge of a breakdown,” so debilitated was he from the five-hour days in Widener. He was at work on
Lolita
, which he was composing so furiously that his hand was cramped by evening.

Véra's more vulnerable side was revealed in Arizona that spring. At dusk one May evening the couple were walking near their back porch when Vladimir stopped his wife in her tracks; directly in front of her lay
a fat rattlesnake. She had nearly stepped on it. With a length of pipe he dealt the creature a powerful blow; the snake still managed to spit at him when he bent down to make sure it was dead. “
St. George-Vladimir is saving his trophy: a seven-piece rattle,” Véra reported, with admiration for her husband's quick-witted courage. The name stuck for some time. Her affection for the desert did not survive the intruder. “
Moreover, Vladimir killed a few days ago a fairsized rattle snake a few feet from our doorstep (we are saving its 7 rattles), and that settled everything so far as I am concerned,” she declared, before the Nabokovs packed and headed twelve hundred miles north, to Oregon. They found refuge in the “
mellow academic townlet” of Ashland, in a modest hillside house surrounded by flowers. The destination was not chosen arbitrarily: Dmitri had a summer job at a construction site in the area, the collecting was new to Vladimir, and Humbert needed the additional miles. In this scenic spot Timofey Pavlovich Pnin was born, if he did not exist already.

Véra spent July and August typing
Lolita
from her husband's dictation, as the manuscript neared its final form. She mailed the first chapter of
Pnin
to
The New Yorker
on July 26; she collaborated on a Russian version of
Conclusive Evidence
, work she later claimed she had no memory of having accomplished. It was a vastly productive summer and a happy one; Véra
far preferred the green of Ashland, and the lush garden of roses, to the desert. Dmitri was in residence, which delighted his mother more than did his job. He and his dump truck had already managed to roll over once. When he was rescued from the cab, he was found hanging upside down in the driver's seat.
Surviving their son's brushes with danger had become a staple of the Nabokovs' lives; Véra had moaned that she did not think she would ever get used to his mountaineering, and never did. Dmitri would recognize hints of the distress his ascents caused his parents in “Lance,” his father's last short story. The echoes are fairly loud: In a 1940 letter, Nabokov had referred to his bicycle-riding son as “Lance”; a boisterous, adventure-loving Lance Boke turns up as well in
Pnin
, having borrowed one of Dmitri's prep school misdemeanors, as the fictional Lance borrows Dmitri's sinewy size. Nor did Vladimir venture far for his physical description of Mrs. Boke, she of the feigned cheerfulness, who produces a familiar, blurred effect: that “
of melting light on one side of her misty hair.” (There was a price to pay for Dmitri's having been so hugely brave, as Véra had acknowledged in her notes for
Speak, Memory:
The much-cossetted child turned out to be a daredevil. The concerns of 1953 only increased when he bought his first MG. They multiplied again, in the early 1960s, when he began to race in a Triumph TR 3A, modified for competition.
^*
By the time he took up
offshore racing his mother was beside herself.) Both parents spent the spring and the summer of 1953 worrying ceaselessly about him. After many years Véra took the tribulations in stride, or at least as a given: “
A parent's job is to worry,” she sighed later. But the criteria for her emotional health remained unchanged. “
We like it much better here than in Arizona,” she wrote her sister-in-law, from Oregon, “…  the main thing is Volodya is writing well.”

But the image of the rattlesnake—news of which made its way into every summer correspondence—clearly burned before her eyes. It unsettled her as armbands and goose-stepping did not. She would always recall that rattler, a herd of cattle, a slumbering bear, with undimmed
horror.
^†
Snakes remained for her among the greatest of depredations; she declared later that all would be well in the world if only there were
no snakes in the neighborhood, no Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Relatedly, when Dmitri offered his mother an old American revolver the following spring she readily accepted, trading it at the local gun shop for a Browning .38 caliber. Dmitri was not surprised: “
She liked guns. She always liked guns.” She had been keen on acquiring a weapon, and was delighted by the opportunity to do so. In December
1955, she applied for a license to carry a pistol. Four members of the Cornell community vouched for her good character and testified to her ability to wield a firearm in a careful and reasonable manner. The Ithaca undersheriff took a full set of fingerprints. While there were generally not many fifty-three-year-old housewives in Tompkins County filing pistol applications, Véra was surely the only one in history to supply as her reason for doing so: “
For protection while travelling in isolated parts of the country in the course of entomological research.” The humor of that line may have been lost on her but other implications were not: She indicated that Russia was her country of birth, but stipulated that she had emigrated in 1920. The Browning was a gun she would have had difficulty firing, and which she appears never to have fired. But the automatic that never went off hung heavily over the scenes that followed, especially when it was bound up with Véra's ubiquitousness, her ferocity, her exoticism, her politics—and the explosion that was about to detonate over Ithaca when the contents of a different shoebox were revealed.

Had she been left to her own devices, Véra probably would have owned the .38 for years without anyone in Ithaca outside the county clerk's office being any the wiser. But the handgun had a habit of making an appearance, at Vladimir's urging. Jean-Jacques Demorest dined with the Nabokovs one evening, along with the Literature Department's chairman, Joseph Mazzeo.
After the meal Vladimir suggested that his wife furnish the weapon; perhaps their visitors could be persuaded to fix the thing. Véra made a trip upstairs, producing the instrument from a handbag. It seemed she had not pulled the slide back forcefully enough and a cartridge had jammed. The visitors were dumbfounded, and unable to offer any assistance with the mechanism, with which they were unfamiliar. On this or another occasion—Mazzeo saw the Browning more than once—Véra explained that she had acquired the pistol so as to protect Vladimir from rattlers when he was collecting butterflies, an image that, at both ends of the zoological spectrum, fairly summed up the relationship to many.
Nestled in the glove compartment of the car, the Browning traveled across the West with the Nabokovs. Jason Epstein became
Pnin's
publisher years later and was also treated to a viewing of the gun. His wife very nearly fainted on the spot. The weapon was produced as an explanation for why Véra—then living in an isolated home a little bit in the Ithaca woods—was not frightened; the effect was much the opposite. Barbara Epstein left with the impression that Véra felt there were Indians outside, that the Nabokovs were at all times under siege. The conclusion was correct although the Browning had little to do with it. But word of it spread on campus, where it was said that Mrs. Nabokov was traveling to class with a handgun,
where it was rumored that the couple slept with a pistol under their mattress, in the event the Bolsheviks came for them. (Epstein concluded that Véra carried the weapon—Sibyl Shade should have taken note—to guard against the likely campus assassin. Recalling the setup in the Goldwin Smith classroom, he concluded: “She really had him covered.”) The point was that the accessory required little stretch of the imagination, given Véra's persona. Elena Levin never saw the weapon but was
wholly unsurprised to hear of its existence.