Pnin (17 page)

By ten o’clock, Pnin’s Punch and Betty’s scotch were causing some of the guests to talk louder than they thought they did. A carmine flush had spread over one side of Mrs. Thayer’s neck, under the little blue star of her left earring, and, sitting very straight, she regaled her host with an account of the feud between two of her co-workers at the library. It was a simple office story, but her changes of tone from Miss Shrill to Mr. Basso, and the consciousness of the soiree going on so nicely, made Pnin bend his head and guffaw ecstatically behind his hand. Roy Thayer was weakly twinkling to himself as he looked into his punch, down his gray porous nose, and politely listened to Joan Clements who, when she was a little high as she was now, had a fetching way of rapidly blinking, or even completely closing her black-lashed blue eyes, and of interrupting her sentences, to punctuate a clause or gather new momentum, by deep hawing pants: “But don’t you think—haw—that what he is trying to do—haw—practically in all his novels—haw—is—haw—to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?” Betty remained her controlled little self, and expertly looked after the refreshments. In the bay end of the room, Clements kept morosely
revolving the slow globe as Hagen, carefully avoiding the traditional intonations he would have used in more congenial surroundings, told him and grinning Thomas the latest story about Mrs. Idelson, communicated by Mrs. Blorenge to Mrs. Hagen. Pnin came up with a plate of nougat.

“This is not quite for your chaste ears, Timofey,” said Hagen to Pnin, who always confessed he never could see the point of any “scabrous anecdote.” “However—”

Clements moved away to rejoin the ladies. Hagen began to retell the story, and Thomas began to re-grin. Pnin waved a hand at the raconteur in a Russian disgusted “oh-go-on-with-you” gesture and said:

“I have heard quite the same anecdote thirty-five years ago in Odessa, and even then I could not understand what is comical in it.”

At a still later stage of the party, certain rearrangements had again taken place. In a corner of the davenport, bored Clements was flipping through an album of
Flemish Masterpieces
that Victor had been given by his mother and had left with Pnin. Joan sat on a footstool, at her husband’s knee, a plate of grapes in the lap of her wide skirt, wondering when would it be time to go without hurting Timofey’s feelings. The others were listening to Hagen discussing modern education:

“You may laugh,” he said, casting a sharp glance at Clements—who shook his head, denying the charge, and then passed the album to Joan, pointing out something in it that had suddenly provoked his glee.

“You may laugh, but I affirm that the only way to escape from the morass—just a drop, Timofey: that will do—is to lock up the student in a soundproof cell and eliminate the lecture room.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Joan to her husband under her breath, handing the album back to him.

“I am glad you agree, Joan,” continued Hagen. “However, I have been called an
enfant terrible
for expounding this theory, and perhaps you will not go on agreeing so easily when you hear me out. Phonograph records on every possible subject will be at the isolated student’s disposal …”

“But the personality of the lecturer,” said Margaret Thayer. “Surely that counts for something.”

“It does not!” shouted Hagen. “That is the tragedy! Who, for example, wants him”—he pointed to radiant Pnin—“who wants his personality? Nobody! They will reject Timofey’s wonderful personality without a quaver. The world wants a machine, not a Timofey.”

“One could have Timofey televised,” said Clements.

“Oh, I would love that,” said Joan, beaming at her host, and Betty nodded vigorously. Pnin bowed deeply to them with an “I-am-disarmed” spreading of both hands.

“And what do
you
think of my controversial plan?” asked Hagen of Thomas.

“I can tell you what Tom thinks,” said Clements, still contemplating the same picture in the book that lay open on his knees. “Tom thinks that the best method of teaching anything is to rely on discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss for fifty minutes something that neither their teacher nor they know. Now, for the last
three months,” he went on, without any logical transition, “I have been looking for this picture, and here it is. The publisher of my new book on the Philosophy of Gesture wants a portrait of me, and Joan and I knew we had seen somewhere a stunning likeness by an Old Master but could not even recall his period. Well, here it is, here it is. The only retouching needed would be the addition of a sport shirt and the deletion of this warrior’s hand.”

“I must really protest,” began Thomas.

Clements passed the open book to Margaret Thayer, and she burst out laughing.

“I must protest, Laurence,” said Tom. “A relaxed discussion in an atmosphere of broad generalizations is a more realistic approach to education than the old-fashioned formal lecture.”

“Sure, sure,” said Clements.

Joan scrambled up to her feet and covered her glass with her narrow palm when Pnin offered to replenish it. Mrs. Thayer looked at her wrist watch, and then at her husband. A soft yawn distended Laurence’s mouth. Betty asked Thomas if he knew a man called Fogelman, an expert in bats, who lived in Santa Clara, Cuba. Hagen asked for a glass of water or beer. Whom does he remind me of? thought Pnin suddenly. Eric Wind? Why? They are quite different physically.

The setting of the final scene was the hallway. Hagen could not find the cane he had come with (it had fallen behind a trunk in the closet).

“And I think I left my purse where I was sitting,” said
Mrs. Thayer, pushing her pensive husband ever so slightly toward the living room.

Pnin and Clements, in last-minute discourse, stood on either side of the living-room doorway, like two well-fed caryatides, and drew in their abdomens to let the silent Thayer pass. In the middle of the room Professor Thomas and Miss Bliss—he with his hands behind his back and rising up every now and then on his toes, she holding a tray—were standing and talking of Cuba, where a cousin of Betty’s fiancé had lived for quite a while, Betty understood. Thayer blundered from chair to chair, and found himself with a white bag, not knowing really where he picked it up, his mind being occupied by the adumbrations of lines he was to write down later in the night:

Meanwhile Pnin asked Joan Clements and Margaret Thayer if they would care to see how he had embellished the upstairs rooms. The idea enchanted them. He led the way. His so-called
kabinet
now looked very cozy, its scratched floor snugly covered with the more or less Pakistan rug which he had once acquired for his office and had recently removed in drastic silence from under the feet of the surprised Falternfels. A tartan lap robe, under which Pnin had crossed the ocean from Europe in 1940, and some endemic cushions disguised the unremovable bed. The pink shelves, which he had found supporting several generations of children’s books—from
Tom the Bootblack, or the Road to Success
by Horatio Alger, Jr., 1889, through
Rolf in the Woods
by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1911, to a 1928 edition of
Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia
in ten volumes with foggy little photographs—were now loaded with three hundred sixty-five items from the Waindell College Library.

“And to think I have stamped all these,” sighed Mrs. Thayer, rolling her eyes in mock dismay.

“Some stamped Mrs. Miller,” said Pnin, a stickler for historical truth.

What struck the visitors most in the bedroom was a large folding screen that cut off the fourposter bed from insidious drafts, and the view from the row of small windows: a dark rock wall rising abruptly some fifty feet away, with a stretch of pale starry sky above the black growth of its crest. On the back lawn, across the reflection of a window, Laurence strolled into the shadows.

“At last you are really comfortable,” said Joan.

“And you know what I will say to you,” replied Pnin in a confidential undertone vibrating with triumph. “Tomorrow morning, under the curtain of mysteree, I will see a gentleman who is wanting to help me to buy this house!”

They came down again. Roy handed his wife Betty’s bag. Herman found his cane. Margaret’s bag was sought. Laurence reappeared.

“Good-by, good-by, Professor Vin!” sang out Pnin, his cheeks ruddy and round in the lamplight of the porch.

(Still in the hallway, Betty and Margaret Thayer admired proud Dr. Hagens walking stick, recently sent him from Germany, a gnarled cudgel, with a donkey’s head for knob. The head could move one ear. The
cane had belonged to Dr. Hagens Bavarian grandfather, a country clergyman. The mechanism of the other ear had broken down in 1914, according to a note the pastor had left. Hagen carried it, he said, in defense against a certain Alsatian in Greenlawn Lane. American dogs were not used to pedestrians. He always preferred walking to driving. The ear could not be repaired. At least, in Waindell.)

“Now I wonder why he called me that,” said T. W. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology, to Laurence and Joan Clements as they walked through blue darkness toward four cars parked under the elms on the other side of the road.

“Our friend,” answered Clements, “employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John.”

“Still I find it a little disturbing,” said Thomas.

“He probably mistook you for somebody else,” said Clements. “And for all I know you
may
be somebody else.”

Before they had crossed the street they were overtaken by Dr. Hagen. Professor Thomas, still looking puzzled, took his leave.

“Well,” said Hagen.

It was a fair fall night, velvet below, steel above.

Joan asked:

“You’re sure you don’t want us to give you a lift?”

“It’s a ten-minute walk. And a walk is a must on such a wonderful night.”

The three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.

“And all these are worlds,” said Hagen.

“Or else,” said Clements with a yawn, “a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.”

From the lighted porch came Pnin’s rich laughter as he finished recounting to the Thayers and Betty Bliss how he, too, had once retrieved the wrong reticule.

“Come, my fluorescent corpse, let’s be moving,” said Joan. “It was so nice to see you, Herman. Give my love to Irmgard. What a delightful party. I have never seen Timofey so happy.”

“Yes, thank you,” answered Hagen absent-mindedly.

“You should have seen his face,” said Joan, “when he told us he was going to talk to a real-estate man tomorrow about buying that dream house.”

“He did? You’re sure he said that?” Hagen asked sharply.

“Quite sure,” said Joan. “And if anybody needs a house, it is certainly Timofey.”

“Well, good night,” said Hagen. “Glad you could come. Good night.”

He waited for them to reach their car, hesitated, and then marched back to the lighted porch, where, standing as on a stage, Pnin was shaking hands a second or third time with the Thayers and Betty.

(“I would never,” said Joan, as she backed the car and worked on the wheel, “but
never
have allowed my child to go abroad with that old Lesbian.” “Careful,” said Laurence, “he may be drunk but he is not out of earshot.”)

“I shall not forgive you,” said Betty to her merry host, “for not letting me do the dishes.”

“I’ll help him,” said Hagen, ascending the porch steps
and thumping upon them with his cane. “You, children, run along now.”

There was a final round of handshakes, and the Thayers and Betty left.

“First,” said Hagen, as he and Pnin re-entered the living room, “I guess I’ll have a last cup of wine with you.”

“Perfect. Perfect!” cried Pnin. “Let us finish my
cruchon
.”

They made themselves comfortable, and Dr. Hagen said:

“You are a wonderful host, Timofey. This is a very delightful moment. My grandfather used to say that a glass of good wine should be always sipped and savored as if it were the last one before the execution. I wonder what you put into this punch. I also wonder if, as our charming Joan affirms, you are really contemplating buying this house?”

“Not contemplating—peeping a little at possibilities,” replied Pnin with a gurgling laugh.

“I question the wisdom of it,” continued Hagen, nursing his goblet.

“Naturally, I am expecting that I will get tenure at last,” said Pnin rather slyly. “I am now Assistant Professor nine years. Years run. Soon I will be Assistant Emeritus. Hagen, why are you silent?”

“You place me in a very embarrassing position, Timofey. I hoped you would not raise this particular question.”

“I do not raise the question. I say that I only expect—oh, not next year, but example given, at hundredth an
niversary of Liberation of Serfs—Waindell will make me Associate.”

“Well, you see, my dear friend, I must tell you a sad secret. It is not official yet, and you must promise not to mention it to anyone.”

“I swear,” said Pnin, raising his hand.

“You cannot but know,” continued Hagen, “with what loving care I built our great department. I, too, am no longer young. You say, Timofey, you have been here for nine years. But I have been giving my all for
twenty-nine
years to this university! My modest all. As my friend, Dr. Kraft, wrote me the other day: you, Herman Hagen, have done alone more for Germany in America than all our missions have done in Germany for America. And what happens now? I have nursed this Falternfels, this dragon, in my bosom, and he has now worked himself into a key position. I spare you the details of the intrigue!”

“Yes,” said Pnin with a sigh, “intrigue is horrible, horrible. But, on the other side, honest work will always prove its advantage. You and I will give next year some splendid new courses which I have planned long ago. On Tyranny. On the Boot. On Nicholas the First. On all the precursors of modern atrocity. Hagen, when we speak of injustice, we forget Armenian massacres, tortures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa.… The history of man is the history of pain!”