Pnin (16 page)

On the day of his party, as he was finishing a late lunch in Frieze Hall, Wynn, or his double, neither of whom had ever appeared there before, suddenly sat down beside him and said:

“I have long wanted to ask you something—you teach Russian, don’t you? Last summer I was reading a magazine article on birds—”

(“Vin! This is Vin!” said Pnin to himself, and forthwith perceived a decisive course of action).

“—well, the author of that article—I don’t remember his name, I think it was a Russian one—mentioned that in the Skoff region, I hope I pronounce it right, a local cake is baked in the form of a bird. Basically, of course, the symbol is phallic, but I was wondering if you knew of such a custom?”

It was then that the brilliant idea flashed in Pnin’s mind.

“Sir, I am at your service,” he said with a note of exultation quivering in his throat—for he now saw his way to pin down definitely the personality of at least the initial Wynn who liked birds. “Yes, sir. I know all about those
zhavoronki
, those
alouettes
, those—we must consult a dictionary for the English name. So I take the opportunity to extend a cordial invitation to you to
visit me this evening. Half past eight, postmeridian. A little house-heating soiree, nothing more. Bring also your spouse—or perhaps you are a Bachelor of Hearts?”

(Oh, punster Pnin!)

His interlocutor said he was not married. He would love to come. What was the address?

“It is nine hundred ninety nine, Todd Rodd, very simple! At the very very end of the rodd, where it unites with Cleef Ahvnue. A leetle breek house and a beeg blahk cleef.”

That afternoon Pnin could hardly wait to start culinary operations. He began them soon after five and only interrupted them to don, for the reception of his guests, a sybaritic smoking jacket of blue silk, with tasseled belt and satin lapels, won at an émigré charity bazaar in Paris twenty years ago—how the time flies! This jacket he wore with a pair of old tuxedo trousers, likewise of European origin. Peering at himself in the cracked mirror of the medicine chest, he put on his heavy tortoise-shell reading glasses, from under the saddle of which his Russian potato nose smoothly bulged. He bared his synthetic teeth. He inspected his cheeks and chin to see if his morning shave still held. It did. With finger and thumb he grasped a long nostril hair, plucked it out after a second hard tug, and sneezed lustily, an “Ah!” of well-being rounding out the explosion.

At half past seven Betty arrived to help with final arrangements. Betty now taught English and History at Isola High School. She had not changed since the days when she was a buxom graduate student. Her pink-rimmed myopic gray eyes peered at you with the same
ingenuous sympathy. She wore the same Gretchen-like coil of thick hair around her head. There was the same scar on her soft throat. But an engagement ring with a diminutive diamond had appeared on her plump hand, and this she displayed with coy pride to Pnin, who vaguely experienced a twinge of sadness. He reflected that there was a time he might have courted her—would have done so, in fact, had she not had a servant maid’s mind, which had remained unaltered too. She could still relate a long story on a “she said-I said-she said” basis. Nothing on earth could make her disbelieve in the wisdom and wit of her favorite woman’s magazine. She still had the curious trick—shared by two or three other small-town young women within Pnin’s limited ken—of giving you a delayed little tap on the sleeve in acknowledgment of, rather than in retaliation for, any remark reminding her of some minor lapse: you would say, “Betty, you forgot to return that book,” or “I thought, Betty, you said you would never marry,” and before she actually answered, there it would come, that demure gesture, retracted at the very moment her stubby fingers came into contact with your wrist.

“He is a biochemist and is now in Pittsburgh,” said Betty as she helped Pnin to arrange buttered slices of French bread around a pot of glossy-gray fresh caviar and to rinse three large bunches of grapes. There was also a large plate of cold cuts, real German pumpernickel, and a dish of very special vinaigrette, where shrimps hobnobbed with pickles and peas, and some miniature sausages in tomato sauce, and hot
pirozhki
(mushroom tarts, meat tarts, cabbage tarts), and four kinds of nuts, and various interesting Oriental sweets. Drinks were to be represented by whisky (Betty’s contribution),
ryabinovka
(a rowanberry liqueur), brandy-and-grenadine cocktails, and of course Pnin’s Punch, a heady mixture of chilled Chateau Yquem, grapefruit juice, and maraschino, which the solemn host had already started to stir in a large bowl of brilliant aquamarine glass with a decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads.

“My, what a lovely thing!” cried Betty.

Pnin eyed the bowl with pleased surprise as if seeing it for the first time. It was, he said, a present from Victor. Yes, how was he, how did he like St. Bart’s? He liked it so-so. He had passed the beginning of the summer in California with his mother, then had worked two months at a Yosemite hotel. A
what
? A hotel in the Californian mountains. Well, he had returned to his school and had suddenly sent this.

By some tender coincidence the bowl had come on the very day Pnin had counted the chairs and started to plan this party. It had come enclosed in a box within another box inside a third one, and wrapped up in an extravagant mass of excelsior and paper that had spread all over the kitchen like a carnival storm. The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient’s mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.

A musical tinkle reverberated through the small house, and the Clementses entered with a bottle of French champagne and a cluster of dahlias.

Dark-blue-eyed, long-lashed, bob-haired Joan wore an old black silk dress that was smarter than anything other faculty wives could devise, and it was always a pleasure to watch good old bald Tim Pnin bend slightly to touch with his lips the light hand that Joan, alone of all the Waindell ladies, knew how to raise to exactly the right level for a Russian gentleman to kiss. Laurence, fatter than ever, dressed in nice gray flannels, sank into the easy chair and immediately grabbed the first book at hand, which happened to be an English-Russian and Russian-English pocket dictionary. Holding his glasses in one hand, he looked away, trying to recall something he had always wished to check but now could not remember, and his attitude accentuated his striking resemblance, somewhat
en jeune
, to Jan van Eyck’s ample-jowled, fluff-haloed Canon van der Paele, seized by a fit of abstraction in the presence of the puzzled Virgin to whom a super, rigged up as St. George, is directing the good Canon’s attention. Everything was there—the knotty temple, the sad, musing gaze, the folds and furrows of facial flesh, the thin Ups, and even the wart on the left cheek.

Hardly had the Clementses settled down than Betty let in the man interested in bird-shaped cakes. Pnin was about to say “Professor Vin” but Joan—rather unfortunately, perhaps—interrupted the introduction with “Oh, we know Thomas! Who does not know Tom?” Tim
Pnin returned to the kitchen, and Betty handed around some Bulgarian cigarettes.

“I thought, Thomas,” remarked Clements, crossing his fat legs, “you were out in Havana interviewing palm-climbing fishermen?”

“Well, I’ll be on my way after midyears,” said Professor Thomas. “Of course, most of the actual field work has been done already by others.”

“Still, it was nice to get that grant, wasn’t it?”

“In our branch,” replied Thomas with perfect composure, “we have to undertake many difficult journeys. In fact, I may push on to the Windward Islands. If,” he added with a hollow laugh, “Senator McCarthy does not crack down on foreign travel.”

“He received a grant of ten thousand dollars,” said Joan to Betty, whose face dropped a curtsy as she made that special grimace consisting of a slow half-bow and tensing of chin and lower Hp that automatically conveys, on the part of Bettys, a respectful, congratulatory, and slightly awed recognition of such grand things as dining with one’s boss, being in
Who’s Who
, or meeting a duchess.

The Thayers, who came in a new station wagon, presented their host with an elegant box of mints. Dr. Hagen, who came on foot, triumphantly held aloft a bottle of vodka.

“Good evening, good evening, good evening,” said hearty Hagen.

“Dr. Hagen,” said Thomas as he shook hands with him. “I hope the Senator did not see you walking about with that stuff.”

The good Doctor had perceptibly aged since last year but was as sturdy and square-shaped as ever with his
well-padded shoulders, square chin, square nostrils, leonine glabella, and rectangular brush of grizzled hair that had something topiary about it. He wore a black suit over a white nylon shirt, and a black tie with a red thunderbolt streaking down it. Mrs. Hagen had been prevented from coming, at the very last moment, by a dreadful migraine, alas.

Pnin served the cocktails “or better to say flamingo tails—specially for ornithologists,” as he slyly quipped.

“Thank you!” chanted Mrs. Thayer, as she received her glass, raising her linear eyebrows, on that bright note of genteel inquiry which is meant to combine the notions of surprise, unworthiness, and pleasure. An attractive, prim, pink-faced lady of forty or so, with pearly dentures and wavy goldenized hair, she was the provincial cousin of the smart, relaxed Joan Clements, who had been all over the world, even in Turkey and Egypt, and was married to the most original and least liked scholar on the Waindell campus. A good word should be also put in at this point for Margaret Thayer’s husband, Roy, a mournful and mute member of the Department of English, which, except for its ebullient chairman, Cockerell, was an aerie of hypochondriacs. Outwardly, Roy was an obvious figure. If you drew a pair of old brown loafers, two beige elbow patches, a black pipe, and two baggy eyes under heavy eyebrows, the rest was easy to fill out. Somewhere in the middle distance hung an obscure liver ailment, and somewhere in the background there was Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Roy’s particular field, an overgrazed pasture, with the trickle of a brook and a clump of initialed trees; a barbed-wire arrangement on either side of this field separated it from Professor Stowe’s domain, the
preceding century, where the lambs were whiter, the turf softer, the rill purlier, and from Dr. Shapiro’s early nineteenth century, with its glen mists, sea fogs, and imported grapes. Roy Thayer avoided talking of his subject, avoided, in fact, talking of any subject, had squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work dealing with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters, and kept a detailed diary, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the greatest literary achievement of our time—and for all I know, Roy Thayer, you might be right.

When everybody was comfortably lapping and lauding the cocktails, Professor Pnin sat down on the wheezy hassock near his newest friend and said:

“I have to report, sir, on the skylark,
zhavoronok
in Russian, about which you made me the honor to interrogate me. Take this with you to your home. I have here tapped on the typewriting machine a condensed account with bibliography. I think we will now transport ourselves to the other room where a supper
à la fourchette
is, I think, awaiting us.”

Presently, guests with full plates drifted back into the parlor. The punch was brought in.

“Gracious, Timofey, where on earth did you get that perfectly divine bowl!” exclaimed Joan.

“Victor presented it to me.”

“But where did he
get
it?”

“Antiquaire store in Cranton, I think.”

“Gosh, it must have cost a fortune.”

“One dollar? Ten dollars? Less maybe?”

“Ten dollars—nonsense! Two hundred, I should say.
Look
at it! Look at this writhing pattern. You know, you should show it to the Cockerells. They know everything about old glass. In fact, they have a Lake Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation of this.”

Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when she was a child, she imagined Cinderella’s glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon Professor Pnin remarked that,
primo
, he would like everybody to say if contents were as good as container, and,
secundo
, that Cendrillon’s shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur—
vair
, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words,
verre
being more evocative than
vair
which, he submitted, came not from
varius
, variegated, but from
veveritsa
, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say
sizïly
, columbine, shade—from
columba
, Latin for “pigeon,” as somebody here well knows—so you see, Mrs. Fire, you were, in general, correct.”

“The contents are fine,” said Laurence Clements.

“This beverage is certainly delicious,” said Margaret Thayer.

(“I always thought ‘columbine’ was some sort of flower,” said Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced.)

The respective ages of several children were then passed in review. Victor would be fifteen soon. Eileen, the granddaughter of Mrs. Thayer’s eldest sister, was five. Isabel was twenty-three and greatly enjoying a secretarial job in New York. Dr. Hagen’s daughter was twenty-four, and about to return from Europe, where she had spent a wonderful summer touring Bavaria and
Switzerland with a very gracious old lady, Dorianna Karen, famous movie star of the twenties.

The telephone rang. Somebody wanted to talk to Mrs. Sheppard. With a precision quite unusual for him in such matters, unpredictable Pnin not only rattled off the woman’s new address and telephone number, but also supplied those of her eldest son.