Vladimir Nabokov. The Vane Sisters


 © 1959 Copiright by  Vladimir Nabokov


1


     I  might  never  have  heard of Cynthia's death, had I not
run, that night, into D., whom I had also lost track of for the
last four years or so; and I might never have run into D. had I
not got involved in a series of trivial investigations.
     The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of  blizzards,
had  been  part  jewel,  part  mud.  In  the  midst of my usual
afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached  to  the
girls'  college where I taught French literature, I had stopped
to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping  from  the
eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows
on  the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of
the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. The
roof jutted too far out, perhaps, or the angle  of  vision  was
faulty,  or,  again,  I did not chance to be watching the right
icicle when the  right  drop  fell.  There  was  a  rhythm,  an
alternation  in  the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin
trick. It led me  to  inspect  the  corners  of  several  house
blocks,  and  this  brought  me to Kelly Road, and right to the
house where D. used to live when he was instructor here. And as
I looked up at the eaves of the adjacent garage with  its  full
display   of  transparent  stalactites  backed  by  their  blue
silhouettes, I was rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by  the
sight  of  what might be described as the dot of an exclamation
mark leaving its ordinary position to glide down very fast--  a
jot  faster  than  the thaw-drop it raced. This twinned twinkle
was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only
sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and
I walked on  in  a  state  of  raw  awareness  that  seemed  to
transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in
the world's socket.
     Through  peacocked  lashes  I  saw  the  dazzling  diamond
reflection of the low  sun  on  the  round  back  of  a  parked
automobile.  To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had
been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water  in  overlapping
festoons  flowed  down one sloping street and turned gracefully
into another. With  ever  so  slight  a  note  of  meretricious
appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of
brick  and  purple.  I  remarked  for the first time the humble
fluting-- last echoes of grooves on  the  shafts  of  columns--
ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its
lid--  circles  diverging  from a fantastically ancient center.
Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a
bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary  penguins
along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.
     I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into
a delicately  dying  sky,  and finally the sequence of observed
and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to  a
street  so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to
try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the  town.  Night
had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. The
lean  ghost,  the  elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon
some damp snow, had a strange ruddy tinge; this I made  out  to
be  due to the tawny red light of the restaurant sign above the
sidewalk; and it was then--  as  I  loitered  there,  wondering
rather  wearily  if in the course of my return tramp I might be
lucky enough to find the same in neon blue-- it was then that a
car crunched to a standstill near me and D. got out of it  with
an exclamation of feigned pleasure.
     He  was passing, on his way from Albany to Boston, through
the town he had dwelt in before, and more than once in my  life
have  I  felt that stab of vicarious emotion followed by a rush
of personal irritation  against  travelers  who  seem  to  feel
nothing  at all upon revisiting spots that ought to harass them
at every step with wailing and writhing memories. He ushered me
back into the bar that I had just left,  and  after  the  usual
exchange of buoyant platitudes came the inevitable vacuum which
he  filled  with  the random words: "Say, I never thought there
was anything wrong with Cynthia Vane's heart. My  lawyer  tells
me she died last week."

2
     He  was  still  young,  still  brash,  still shifty, still
married to the gentle, exquisitely pretty woman who  had  never
learned  or suspected anything about his disastrous affair with
Cynthia's hysterical young sister, who in her  turn  had  known
nothing  of  the  interview  I  had  had  with Cynthia when she
suddenly summoned me to Boston to make me swear I would talk to
D. and get him "kicked out" if he did not stop seeing Sybil  at
once--  or  did  not  divorce  his  wife (whom incidentally she
visualized  through  the  prism  of  Sybil's  wild  talk  as  a
termagant and a fright). I had cornered him immediately. He had
said  there  was nothing to worry about-- had made up his mind,
anyway, to give up his college job and move with  his  wife  to
Albany, where he would work in his father's firm; and the whole
matter,  which had threatened to become one of those hopelessly
entangled situations that drag on for  years,  with  peripheral
sets   of  well-meaning  friends  endlessly  discussing  it  in
universal secrecy-- and even founding,  among  themselves,  new
intimacies upon its alien woes-- came to an abrupt end.
     I remember sitting next day at my raised desk in the large
classroom  where a midyear examination in French Lit. was being
held on the eve of Sybil's suicide. She came in on high  heels,
with a suitcase, dumped it in a corner where several other bags
were  stacked, with a single shrug slipped her fur coat off her
thin shoulders, folded it on her bag, and  with  two  or  three
other  girls  stopped  before  my desk to ask when I would mail
them their grades. It would take  me  a  week,  beginning  from
tomorrow,  I said, to read the stuff. I also remember wondering
whether D. had already informed her of  his  decision--  and  I
felt  acutely unhappy about my dutiful little student as during
150 minutes my gaze kept reverting to her, so childishly slight
in close-fitting gray, and kept observing that carefully  waved
dark hair, that small, small-flowered hat with a little hyaline
veil  as  worn  that season, and under it her small face broken
into  a  cubist  pattern  by  scars  due  to  a  skin  disease,
pathetically   masked  by  a  sunlamp  tan  that  hardened  her
features, whose  charm  was  further  impaired  by  her  having
painted everything that could be painted, so that the pale gums
of  her  teeth  between cherry-red chapped lips and the diluted
blue ink of her eyes under darkened lids were the only  visible
openings into her beauty.
     Next    day,    having   arranged   the   ugly   copybooks
alphabetically, I plunged into their chaos of scripts and  came
prematurely  to  Valevsky  and  Vane, whose books I had somehow
misplaced. The first was dressed  up  for  the  occasion  in  a
semblance  of  legibility, but Sybil's work displayed her usual
combination of several demon hands. She had begun in very pale,
very hard pencil which had  conspicuously  embossed  the  black
verso,  but had produced little of permanent value on the upper
side of the  page.  Happily  the  tip  soon  broke,  and  Sybil
continued  in  another, darker lead, gradually lapsing into the
blurred thickness of  what  looked  almost  like  charcoal,  to
which,  by  sucking  the  blunt point, she had contributed some
traces of lipstick. Her work, although even poorer than  I  had
expected,   bore   all   the  signs  of  a  kind  of  desperate
conscientiousness, with  underscores,  transposes,  unnecessary
footnotes, as if she were intent upon rounding up things in the
most  respectable  manner  possible. Then she had borrowed Mary
Valevsky's fountain pen and added: "Cette examain est  finie
ainsi que ma vie. Adieu, jeunes filles! Please, Monsieur
le  Professeur,  contact  ma soeur and tell her that
Death was not better than D minus, but definitely  better  than
Life minus D."
     I  lost  no time in ringing up Cynthia, who told me it was
all over-- had been all over since eight in the  morning--  and
asked  me to bring her the note, and when I did, beamed through
her tears with proud admiration for the  whimsical  use  ("Just
like  her!")  Sybil  had  made  of  an  examination  in  French
literature. In no time she "fixed" two highballs,  while  never
parting with Sybil's notebook-- by now splashed with soda water
and tears-- and went on studying the death message, whereupon I
was impelled to point out to her the grammatical mistakes in it
and  to  explain  the  way  "girl"  is  translated  in American
colleges lest  students  innocently  bandy  around  the  French
equivalent   of  "wench,"  or  worse.  These  rather  tasteless
trivialities pleased Cynthia hugely as she  rose,  with  gasps,
above  the heaving surface of her grief. And then, holding that
limp notebook as if it were a kind  of  passport  to  a  casual
Elysium  (where  pencil  points  do not snap and a dreamy young
beauty with an impeccable complexion winds a lock of  her  hair
on  a  dreamy  forefinger, as she meditates over some celestial
test), Cynthia led me upstairs to a chilly little bedroom, just
to show me, as if I were the  police  or  a  sympathetic  Irish
neighbor, two empty pill bottles and the tumbled bed from which
a tender, inessential body, that D. must have known down to its
last velvet detail, had been already removed.


3

     It was four or five months after her sister's death that I
began  seeing  Cynthia  fairly often. By the time I had come to
New York for some vacational research in the Public Library she
had also moved to that city, where  for  some  odd  reason  (in
vague  connection,  I  presume,  with artistic motives) she had
taken what people, immune to gooseflesh, term  a  "cold  water"
flat,  down in the scale of the city's transverse streets. What
attracted me was neither her ways, which I thought  repulsively
vivacious, nor her looks, which other men thought striking. She
had  wide-spaced  eyes very much like her sister's, of a frank,
frightened blue with dark points in a radial  arrangement.  The
interval between her thick black eyebrows was always shiny, and
shiny  too  were the fleshy volutes of her nostrils. The coarse
texture of her epiderm looked almost  masculine,  and,  in  the
stark  lamplight  of her studio, you could see the pores of her
thirty-two-year-old face fairly gaping at you like something in
an aquarium. She used cosmetics with as much zest as her little
sister had, but with  an  additional  slovenliness  that  would
result  in  her  big front teeth getting some of the rouge. She
was handsomely dark, wore a not too tasteless mixture of fairly
smart heterogeneous things, and had a  so-called  good  figure;
but  all  of  her was curiously frowzy, after a way I obscurely
associated  with  left-wing   enthusiasms   in   politics   and
"advanced" banalities in art, although, actually, she cared for
neither.  Her coily hairdo, on a part-and-bun basis, might have
looked  feral  and  bizarre  had   it   not   been   thoroughly
domesticated  by  its  own  soft  unkemptness at the vulnerable
nape. Her fingernails were gaudily painted,  but  badly  bitten
and not clean. Her lovers were a silent young photographer with
a  sudden  laugh and two older men, brothers, who owned a small
printing establishment across the street. I wondered  at  their
tastes   whenever  I  glimpsed,  with  a  secret  shudder,  the
higgledy-piggledy striation of  black  hairs  that  showed  all
along  her  pale  shins through the nylon of her stockings with
the scientific distinctness of a  preparation  flattened  under
glass;  or  when  I  felt,  at her every movement, the dullish,
stalish, not particularly  conspicuous  but  all-pervading  and
depressing  emanation  that her seldom bathed flesh spread from
under weary perfumes and creams.
     Her  father  had  gambled  away  the  greater  part  of  a
comfortable fortune, and her mother's first husband had been of
Slav  origin,  but  otherwise  Cynthia Vane belonged to a good,
respectable family. For aught we know, it may have gone back to
kings  and  soothsayers  in  the  mists  of  ultimate  islands.
Transferred  to  a  newer  world,  to  a  landscape  of doomed,
splendid deciduous trees, her ancestry presented, in one of its
first phases, a white churchfill of  farmers  against  a  black
thunderhead,  and then an imposing array of townsmen engaged in
mercantile pursuits, as well as a number of learned  men,  such
as  Dr. Jonathan Vane, the gaunt bore (1780-1839), who perished
in the conflagration of the steamer Lexington to  become
later  an  habituи  of  Cynthia's  tilling table. I have always
wished to stand genealogy on its  head,  and  here  I  have  an
opportunity  to  do  so, for it is the last scion, Cynthia, and
Cynthia alone, who will remain of any importance  in  the  Vane
dynasty.  I  am alluding of course to her artistic gift, to her
delightful, gay, but not  very  popular  paintings,  which  the
friends  of her friends bought at long intervals-- and I dearly
should like to know where they  went  after  her  death,  those
honest  and  poetical pictures that illumined her living room--
the wonderfully detailed images  of  metallic  things,  and  my
favorite,  Seen  Through  a  Windshield--  a  windshield
partly covered with rime, with a  brilliant  trickle  (from  an
imaginary car roof) across its transparent part and, through it
all,  the  sapphire  flame of the sky and a green-and-white fir
tree.


4

     Cynthia had  a  feeling  that  her  dead  sister  was  not
altogether  pleased  with  her-- had discovered by now that she
and I had conspired to break her romance; and so, in  order  to
disarm  her  shade, Cynthia reverted to a rather primitive type
of sacrificial offering (tinged,  however,  with  something  of
Sybil's  humor), and began to send to D.'s business address, at
deliberately  unfixed  dates,  such  trifles  as  snapshots  of
Sybil's  tomb  in  a poor light; cuttings of her own hair which
was indistinguishable from Sybil's; a New England sectional map
with an inked-in cross, midway between  two  chaste  towns,  to
mark  the  spot  where  D. and Sybil had stopped on October the
twenty-third, in broad daylight, at a lenient motel, in a  pink
and brown forest; and, twice, a stuffed skunk.
     Being  as  a conversationalist more voluble than explicit,
she never could describe in full  the  theory  of  intervenient
auras  that  she  had  somehow evolved. Fundamentally there was
nothing particularly new  about  her  private  creed  since  it
presupposed  a fairly conventional hereafter, a silent solarium
of immortal souls (spliced with mortal antecedents) whose  main
recreation  consisted  of  periodical  hoverings  over the dear
quick. The interesting point was a curious practical twist that
Cynthia gave to her tame metaphysics. She  was  sure  that  her
existence  was  influenced by all sorts of dead friends each of
whom took turns in directing her fate much as  if  she  were  a
stray  kitten  which  a  schoolgirl  in passing gathers up, and
presses to her cheek, and carefully puts down again, near  some
suburban  hedge--  to be stroked presently by another transient
hand or carried off to a world  of  doors  by  some  hospitable
lady.
     For  a  few  hours,  or  for  several  days  in a row, and
sometimes recurrently, in an irregular series,  for  months  or
years,  anything that happened to Cynthia, after a given person
had died, would be, she said, in the manner and  mood  of  that
person.  The  event might be extraordinary, changing the course
of one's life; or it might be a string of minute incidents just
sufficiently clear to stand out in relief against  one's  usual
day  and  then shading off into still vaguer trivia as the aura
gradually faded. The influence might be good or bad;  the  main
thing  was  that  its  source  could be identified. It was like
walking through a person's soul, she said.  I  tried  to  argue
that she might not always be able to determine the exact source
since  not  everybody  has  a recognizable soul; that there are
anonymous letters and Christmas presents  which  anybody  might
send; that, in fact, what Cynthia called "a usual day" might be
itself  a  weak  solution  of mixed auras or simply the routine
shift of a humdrum guardian angel. And what about God?  Did  or
did  not  people  who  would  resent any omnipotent dictator on
earth look forward to one in heaven? And wars? What a  dreadful
idea--  dead  soldiers  still  fighting  with  living  ones, or
phantom armies trying to get at each other through the lives of
crippled old men.
     But Cynthia was  above  generalities  as  she  was  beyond
logic.   "Ah,  that's  Paul,"  she  would  say  when  the  soup
spitefully boiled over, or: "I guess good Betty Brown is  dead"
when  she  won a beautiful and very welcome vacuum cleaner in a
charity  lottery.   And,   with   Jamesian   meanderings   that
exasperated  my  French  mind, she would go back to a time when
Betty and Paul had not yet departed, and tell me of the showers
of well-meant,  but  odd  and  quite  unacceptable,  bounties--
beginning  with  an  old purse that contained a check for three
dollars which she picked up  in  the  street  and,  of  course,
returned  (to  the  aforesaid  Betty  Brown-- this is where she
first comes in-- a decrepit colored woman hardly able to walk),
and ending with an insulting proposal from an old beau of  hers
(this  is  where Paul comes in) to paint "straight" pictures of
his house and family for a  reasonable  remuneration--  all  of
which followed upon the demise of a certain Mrs. Page, a kindly
but  petty  old  party  who  had  pestered  her  with  bits  of
matter-of-fact advice since Cynthia had been a child.
     Sybil's personality, she said, had a rainbow edge as if  a
little  out  of focus. She said that had I known Sybil better I
would have at once understood how Sybil-like was  the  aura  of
minor  events  which,  in  spells, had suffused her, Cynthia's,
existence after Sybil's suicide. Ever since they had lost their
mother they had intended to give up their Boston home and  move
to  New  York,  where  Cynthia's paintings, they thought, would
have a chance to be more widely admired; but the old  home  had
clung  to  them  with  all  its  plush  tentacles.  Dead Sybil,
however, had proceeded to separate the house from its view--  a
thing  that affects fatally the sense of home. Right across the
narrow street a building project  had  come  into  loud,  ugly,
scaffolded  life.  A pair of familiar poplars died that spring,
turning to blond skeletons.  Workmen  came  and  broke  up  the
warm-colored  lovely  old  sidewalk  that  had a special violet
sheen on wet April days and had  echoed  so  memorably  to  the
morning  footsteps of museum-bound Mr. Lever, who upon retiring
from business at sixty had devoted a full quarter of a  century
exclusively to the study of snails.
     Speaking  of  old men, one should add that sometimes these
posthumous auspices and interventions were  in  the  nature  of
parody.  Cynthia  had  been on friendly terms with an eccentric
librarian called Porlock who in the last  years  of  his  dusty
life  had  been  engaged  in examining old books for miraculous
misprints such as the substitution of / for the second h
in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for
the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the  freak
itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like
a  flower;  and  Cynthia,  a  much  more  perverse  amateur  of
misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns,  logogriphs,  and
so  on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the
light of the example  she  cited  struck  me  as  statistically
insane.  Anyway, she said, on the third day after his death she
was reading a magazine and had just  come  across  a  quotation
from  an  imperishable  poem  (that  she,  with  other gullible
readers, believed to have been really composed in a dream) when
it dawned upon her that "Alph"' was a prophetic sequence of the
initial letters of Anna Livia Plurabelle (another sacred  river
running  through,  or  rather  around, yet another fake dream),
while the additional h  modestly  stood,  as  a  private
signpost,  for the word that had so hypnotized Mr. Porlock. And
I wish I could recollect that novel or  short  story  (by  some
contemporary  writer,  I  believe)  in  which,  unknown  to its
author, the first letters of the words in  its  last  paragraph
formed,  as  deciphered  by  Cynthia,  a  message from his dead
mother.


5

     I am sorry to say that not content  with  these  ingenious
fancies  Cynthia showed a ridiculous fondness for spiritualism.
I refused to accompany her to sittings in  which  paid  mediums
took part: I knew too much about that from other sources. I did
consent,  however, to attend little farces rigged up by Cynthia
and her two poker-faced gentlemen friends of the printing shop.
They were podgy, polite, and rather eerie old  fellows,  but  I
satisfied  myself  that  they  possessed  considerable  wit and
culture. We sat down at a light  little  table,  and  crackling
tremors  started  almost as soon as we laid our fingertips upon
it. I was treated to an assortment of ghosts  that  rapped  out
their   reports  most  readily  though  refusing  to  elucidate
anything that I did not quite catch. Oscar Wilde came in and in
rapid garbled French,  with  the  usual  anglicisms,  obscurely
accused  Cynthia's dead parents of what appeared in my jottings
as  "plagiatisme."  A  brisk  spirit   contributed   the
unsolicited  information  that  he, John Moore, and his brother
Bill had been coal miners in Colorado and had  perished  in  an
avalanche  at "Crested Beauty" in January 1883. Frederic Myers,
an old hand at the game, hammered out a piece of  verse  (oddly
resembling  Cynthia's  own  fugitive productions) which in part
reads in my notes:


     What is this-- a conjuror's rabbit,
     Or aflawy but genuine gleam--
     Which can check the perilous habit
     And dispel the dolorous dream?

     Finally,  with  a great crash and all kinds of shudderings
and jiglike movements on the part of  the  table,  Leo  Tolstoy
visited  our little group and, when asked to identic himself by
specific traits of terrene habitation, launched upon a  complex
description of what seemed to be some Russian type of architec­
tural woodwork ("figures on boards--  man,  horse,  cock,  man,
horse, cock"), all of which was difficult to take down, hard to
understand, and impossible to verify.
     I attended two or three other  sittings  which  were  even
sillier  but  I  must  confess  that  I  preferred the childish
entertainment they afforded and the cider we drank  (Podgy  and
Pudgy were teetotalers) to Cynthia's awful house parties.
     She  gave  them at the Wheelers' nice flat next door-- the
sort of arrangement dear to her centrifugal nature,  but  then,
of  course,  her own living room always looked like a dirty old
palette.  Following  a  barbaric,  unhygienic,  and  adultиrons
custom,  the  guests'  coats,  still  warm  on the inside, were
carried by quiet, baldish Bob Wheeler into the  sanctity  of  a
tidy bedroom and heaped on the conjugal bed. It was also he who
poured  out  the  drinks, which were passed around by the young
photographer while Cynthia and Mrs. Wheeler took  care  of  the
canapиs.  A  late  arrival  had  the impression of lots of loud
people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space  between
two  mirrors  gorged  with  reflections.  Because,  I  suppose,
Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room,  the  women  she
used  to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their
precarious forties; some of them would bring from their  homes,
in  dark  taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however,
they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me  the
ability  sociable  weekend  revelers  have of finding almost at
once, by a purely empiric but very  precise  method,  a  common
denominator  of  drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks
before descending, all together, to the next  level.  The  rich
friendliness  of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones,
while the fixed inward look of amiably tight  men  was  like  a
sacrilegious  parody  of pregnancy. Although some of the guests
were connected in one way or another with the arts,  there  was
no  inspired  talk,  no  wreathed,  elbow-propped heads, and of
course no flute girls. From some vantage point  where  she  had
been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with
one  or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a
film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered
plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the  other  the
athletic  leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced,
on  a   pearl-gray   sofa,   between   two   flushed,   happily
disintegrating ladies.
     At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous
gaiety.  Corcoran  or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other
wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a  corner  to
confront  her  with  a  grinning imbroglio of private jokes and
rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss  of  her  head,  she
would  break  away.  And still later there would be flurries of
intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare  fleshy
arm  flung  around  another  woman's  husband (he standing very
upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a  sudden  rush  of
flirtations anger, of clumsy pursuit-- and the quiet half-smile
of  Bob  Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in
the shade of chairs.
     After one last party of  that  sort,  I  wrote  Cynthia  a
perfectly harmless and, on the whole, well-meant note, in which
I  poked  a  little  Latin  fun  at  some of her guests. I also
apologized for not having touched her whiskey, saying that as a
Frenchman I preferred the grape to the grain. A few days  later
I  met  her  on  the steps of the Public Library, in the broken
sun, under a  weak  cloudburst,  opening  her  amber  umbrella,
struggling  with  a  couple  of  armpitted  books  (of  which I
relieved her for a moment), Footfalls  on  the  Boundary  of
Another  World  by  Robert  Dale  Owen,  and  something  on
"Spiritualism  and  Christianity";  when,  suddenly,  with   no
provocation  on  my  part,  she  blazed  out  at me with vulgar
vehemence, using poisonous words, saying-- through  pear-shaped
drops  of  sparse  rain--  that I was a prig and a snob; that I
only saw the gestures and disguises of  people;  that  Corcoran
had  rescued  from drowning, in two different oceans, two men--
by an irrelevant coincidence both called Corcoran; that romping
and screeching loan Winter had a little  girl  doomed  to  grow
completely  blind  in a few months; and that the woman in green
with the frecided chest whom I had snubbed in some way or other
had written a national best-seller in 1932. Strange Cynthia!  I
had been told she could be thunderously rude to people whom she
liked  and  respected;  one  had,  however,  to  draw  the line
somewhere and since I had  by  then  sufficiently  studied  her
interesting  auras  and  other  odds and ids, I decided to stop
seeing her altogether.


6

     The night D. informed me of  Cynthia's  death  I  returned
after  eleven  to  the  two-story house I shared, in horizontal
section, with an emeritus professor's widow. Upon reaching  the
porch  I  looked  with  the apprehension of solitude at the two
kinds of darkness in the two rows of windows: the  darkness  of
absence and the darkness of sleep.
     I  could  do  something  about  the  first  but  could not
duplicate the second. My bed gave me no sense  of  safety;  its
springs   only   made   my   nerves   bounce.  I  plunged  into
Shakespeare's sonnets-- and found myself  idiotically  checking
the  first  letters  of the lines to see what sacramental words
they might form. I got FATE (LXX), ATOM (CXX), and, twice, TAFT
(LXXXVIII, CXXXI). Every now and then I would glance around  to
see how the objects in my room were behaving. It was strange to
think that if bombs began to fall I would feel little more than
a  gambler's  excitement  (and  a  great deal of earthy relief)
whereas  my  heart  would  burst  if  a  certain   suspiciously
tense-looking little bottle on yonder shelf moved a fraction of
an inch to one side. The silence, too, was suspiciously compact
as if deliberately forming a black backdrop for the nerve flash
caused  by  any  small sound of unknown origin. All traffic was
dead. In vain did I pray for the groan of a  truck  up  Perkins
Street.  The  woman  above  who  used  to drive me crazy by the
booming thuds occasioned by what seemed monstrous feet of stone
(actually, in diurnal life, she  was  a  small  dumpy  creature
resembling  a  mummified  guinea  pig)  would  have  earned  my
blessings had she now trudged to her bathroom.  I  put  out  my
light  and  cleared  my  throat  several  times  so  as  to  be
responsible for at least that sound. I thumbed a  mental
ride  with  a very remote automobile but it dropped me before I
had a chance to doze off. Presently a crackle (due, I hoped, to
a discarded and crushed sheet of paper  opening  like  a  mean,
stubborn  night  flower)  started and stopped in the wastepaper
basket, and my bed table responded  with  a  little  click.  It
would  have been just like Cynthia to put on right then a cheap
poltergeist show.
     I decided to fight Cynthia.  I  reviewed  in  thought  the
modern   era  of  raps  and  apparitions,  beginning  with  the
knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, New  York,  and
ending  with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Massachusetts; I
evoked the ankle bones and other anatomical  castanets  of  the
Fox  sisters  (as  described  by the sages of the University of
Buffalo); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate  adolescent
in  bleak  Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances
as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling  and
accordions   floating   to   the   strains   of  sacred  music;
professional impostors  regurgitating  moist  cheesecloth;  Mr.
Duncan,  a  lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if
he would submit to a search, excused himself on the  ground  of
soiled   underwear;   old  Alfred  Russel  Wallace,  the  naive
naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form  with  bare
feet  and  unperforated  earlobes  before  him,  at  a  private
pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just
seen asleep, in her curtained corner,  all  dressed  in  black,
wearing  laced-up  boots and earrings; two other investigators,
small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely
clinging with arms and  legs  about  Eusapia,  a  large,  plump
elderly  female  reeking  of  garlic, who still managed to fool
them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by
charming young Margery's "control"  not  to  get  lost  in  the
bathrobe's  lining  but to follow up the left stocking until he
reached the bare thigh-- upon the warm skin of which he felt  a
"teleplastic"  mass  that appeared to the touch uncommonly like
cold, uncooked liver.


7

     I was appealing to flesh, and the corruption of flesh,  to
refute  and defeat the possible persistence of discarnate life.
Alas, these conjurations only enhanced  my  fear  of  Cynthia's
phantom.  Atavistic  peace  came  with dawn, and when I slipped
into sleep the sun through the tawny window shades penetrated a
dream that somehow was full of Cynthia.
     This  was  disappointing.  Secure  in  the   fortress   of
daylight,  I  said  to  myself that I had expected more. She, a
painter of glass-bright minutiae-- and now so vague! I  lay  in
bed,  thinking  my  dream  over  and  listening to the sparrows
outside: Who knows, if recorded and then  run  backward,  those
bird  sounds  might not become human speech, voiced words, just
as the latter become a twitter when reversed? I set  myself  to
reread  my dream-- backward, diagonally, up, down-- trying hard
to unravel something Cynthia-like in it, something strange  and
suggestive that must be there.
     I  could  isolate,  consciously, little. Everything seemed
blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible.  Her  inept
acrostics,  maudlin  evasions, theopathies-- every recollection
formed  ripples  of  mysterious  meaning.   Everything   seemed
yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

                                                           1951
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