‘I could not,’ said Van, ‘the rat was rotting away in a hospital bed.’
‘I meant the real Tapper,’ cried Lucette (who was making a complete mess of her visit), ‘not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his impotence.’
‘Driblets,’ said Van.
‘Not necessarily his,’ said Lucette. ‘His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book’ (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) ‘and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you — Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ said Van.
Pause (about fifteen minutes to go to the end of the act).
‘At the age often,’ said Lucette to say something, ‘I was at the Vieux-Rose Stopchin stage, but our (using, that day, that year, the unexpected, thronal, authorial, jocular, technically loose, forbidden, possessive plural in speaking of her to him) sister had read at that age, in three languages, many more books than I did at twelve. However! After an appalling illness in California, I recouped myself: the Pioneers vanquished the Pyogenes. I’m not showing off but do you happen to know a great favorite of mine: Herodas?’
‘Oh yes,’ answered Van negligently. ‘A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar. Yes, great stuff. Blinding blend of subtility and brilliant coarseness. You read it, dear, in the literal French translation with the Greek en regard — didn’t you? — but a friend of mine here showed me a scrap of new-found text, which you could not have seen, about two children, a brother and sister, who did it so often that they finally died in each other’s limbs, and could not be separated — it just stretched and stretched, and snapped back in place every time the perplexed parents let go. It is all very obscene, and very tragic, and terribly funny.’
‘No, I don’t know that passage,’ said Lucette. ‘But Van, why are you —’
‘Hay fever, hay fever!’ cried Van, searching five pockets at once for a handkerchief. Her stare of compassion and the fruitless search caused such a swell of grief that he preferred to stomp out of the room, snatching the letter, dropping it, picking it up, and retreating to the farthest room (redolent of her Degrasse) to read it in one gulp.
‘O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many military-looking desert plants especially various species of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and "oil wells" (whatever they are-our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall ever love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine). A.’
Van took a clean handkerchief from a tidy pile in a drawer, an action he analogized at once by plucking a leaf from a writing pad. It is wonderful how helpful such repetitive rhythms on the part of coincidental (white, rectangular) objects can be at such chaotic moments. He wrote a short aerogram and returned to the parlor. There he found Lucette putting on her fur coat, and five uncouth scholars, whom his idiot valet had ushered in, standing in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of the coming winter’s fashions. Bernard Rattner, a heavily bespectacled black-haired, red-cheeked thick-set young man greeted Van with affable relief.
‘Good Log!’ exclaimed Van, ‘I had understood we were to meet at your uncle’s place.’
With a quick gesture he centrifuged them to waiting-room chairs, and despite his pretty cousin’s protests (‘It’s a twenty minute’s walk; don’t accompany me’) campophoned for his car. Then he clattered, in Lucette’s wake, down the cataract of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please, children not katrakatra (Marina).
‘I also know,’ said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, ‘who he is.’
She pointed to the inscription ‘Voltemand Hall’ on the brow of the building from which they now emerged.
Van gave her a quick glance — but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet.
They passed through a dark archway, and as they came out into the colored air of a delicate sunset, he stopped her and gave her the note he had written. It told Ada to charter a plane and be at his Manhattan flat any time tomorrow morning. He would leave Kingston around midnight by car. He still hoped the Ladore dorophone would be in working order before his departure. Le château que baignait le Dorophone. Anyway, he assumed the aerogram would reach her in a couple of hours. Lucette said ‘uhn-uhn,’ it would first fly to Mont-Dore — sorry, Ladore — and if marked ‘urgent’ would arrive at sunrise by dazzled messenger, galloping east on the postmaster’s fleabitten nag, because on Sundays you could not use motorcycles, old local law, l’ivresse de la vitesse, conceptions dominicales; but even so, she would have ample time to pack, find the box of Dutch crayons Lucette wanted her to bring if she came, and be in time for breakfast in Cordula’s recent bedroom. Neither half-sibling was at her or his best that day.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘let’s-fix the date of your visit. Her letter changes my schedule. Let’s have dinner at Ursus next weekend. I’ll get in touch with you.’
‘I knew it was hopeless,’ she said, looking away. ‘I did my best. I imitated all her shtuchki (little stunts). I’m a better actress than she but that’s not enough, I know. Go back now, they are getting dreadfully drunk on your cognac.’
He thrust his hands into the warm vulvas of her mole-soft sleeves and held her for a moment on the inside by her thin bare elbows, looking down with meditative desire at her painted lips.
‘Un baiser, un seul!’ she pleaded.
‘You promise not to open your mouth? Not to melt? not to flutter and flick?’
‘I won’t, I swear!’
He hesitated. ‘No,’ said Van, ‘it is a mad temptation but I must not succumb. I could not live through another disaster, another sister, even one-half of a sister.’
‘Takoe otchayanie (such despair)!’ moaned Lucette, wrapping herself closely in the coat she had opened instinctively to receive him.
‘Might it console you to know that I expect only torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?’
She shook her head.
‘That my admiration for you is painfully strong?’
‘I want Van,’ she cried, ‘and not intangible admiration —’
‘Intangible? You goose. You may gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly, with the knuckles of your gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can’t kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.’