Vladimir Nabokov.
The Vane Sisters
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 habitu 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 adultrons 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 canaps. 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