Vera (31 page)

Nearly all of the characters for which Nabokov is best remembered—Lolita and Humbert, Pnin, Shade and Kinbote, the Vladimir Nabokov of
Speak, Memory
—were born or partially bred in Ithaca. The same is true of the character he was to create for and with his wife, and by which she was in large part to be remembered.
^*
She would return the compliment later, constructing a persona who was neither Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, nor V. Sirin, nor Professor Nabokov, nor the author of
Lolita
, but “VN,” a monument unto itself, the supreme designation in a lifetime of anagrammatic Pseudonyms. The real life of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov—or someone who conducted her correspondence as Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, a formula Véra arrived at only gradually—begins on the other side of that obliging window on East State Street. It began as do all American lives, with driving lessons.

Within days of the arrival in Ithaca, Véra found her way to Burton Jacoby, a colorful and enterprising mechanic at the W. T. Pritchard Garage. Jacoby offered driving instruction, a sideline that allowed him an occasional
commission on the sale of a car. By mid-July Véra was the proud owner of a beige 1940 Plymouth, a four-door sedan that was by all accounts nearing the end of its useful life when she purchased it, on the installment plan. Behind the wheel she proved a quick study: Jacoby found her an outstanding pupil, “
always so kind and gracious.” He was not alone in commending her new talent; Vladimir announced in September that Véra had
bought a car and learned to drive in a remarkably short time. Self-interest may have brightened his admiration: Cornell's sumptuous campus sits at the top of a steep hill, cut through with gorges and streams and waterfalls. Its scenery is spectacular, but the grade can be steep. On their arrival in hilly Ithaca it had been decided that a car would be a necessity, despite the excellent public buses. “
One of us had better learn to drive,” went the thinking; Vladimir appears to have been relieved that it was not he. Véra knew her husband's peccadilloes as well as his capabilities—when he provided an address it was almost guaranteed to be an approximate
or an obsolete one—and she continued to
worry about his health through the fall. She had looked into driving instruction in New York; she appears to have been eager to take the wheel.

Over the course of the first year in Ithaca, Véra nonetheless encouraged Vladimir in a few halfhearted attempts to master this American sport. “
It's not very hard,” she assured him. Practically speaking they would both need to drive if they were to head west on a long trip together. The task of teaching Nabokov fell to one of his students, a highly articulate senior named Dick Keegan, whom he immediately befriended, either for his own considerable charms or for those of his gray Dodge coupe. Keegan discovered that driving was not difficult for Nabokov. It was virtually impossible for him. He had very little interest in focusing on the road; he insisted that he was terrified of sliding behind the wheel.
He distrusted cars, unsurprising in a man who claimed to be intimidated by electrical pencil sharpeners but odd all the same for the author of the most original road novel ever written.
Keegan noticed that even in the passenger seat his student professor had a tendency to forget he had requested a destination as soon as he was delivered to it. This did not prevent Nabokov from announcing annually, long after the move from Ithaca, that this year, at last, he planned to learn to drive. He never did.
^*

By choice and by default, Véra became the designated driver. For a variety of reasons the task was not simple. As Nabokov described it just after the beginning of the fall semester, Véra “
carts around her non-driving but advice-giving
husband.” He wondered mischievously why she resented his sitting at her side, offering up various suggestions at street corners; he seemed only dimly aware that marriages have foundered on less. Having spent a disappointing year at St. Mark's, fourteen-year-old Dmitri was enrolled in the Holderness School for the fall of 1948. As a new driver, Véra felt uneasy making the four-hundred-mile trip to and from Plymouth, New Hampshire, alone. She also felt uneasy leaving Dmitri, whose absences weighed heavily on both parents. Burton Jacoby accompanied her so as to share the driving; Vladimir stayed home. For the next few summers intermittently successful attempts were made to recruit a friend or a student to join the family on its western excursions. Accustomed to advertisements for himself, Nabokov's students grew accustomed to his advertisements for
a pinch-hitting driver. In June 1949, at the end of his junior year, Richard Buxbaum accompanied the family to
Salt Lake City, where Vladimir had been invited to lecture at a writers' conference. The trip got off to a terrifying start. In western New York State Véra drove into the dead-man's lane in the middle of the highway to pass, but found herself facing a truck carrying a combine, the chute of which extended into the lane. Buxbaum reflexively reached for the steering wheel; the vehicles missed each other by a matter of inches. Chilled, Véra pulled over. She suggested quietly that it might be better if Buxbaum drove.
^*

Parking was never her strong suit. Early in the 1948 fall semester the couple moved from their summer lodgings to a handsome home with a beautifully groomed lawn on
East Seneca Street. In the newly refurbished attic apartment lived a law student and his young wife, who may have had some idea of Mrs. Nabokov's confidence behind the wheel when Véra asked if Gert Croghan might accompany her on a Boston trip. This did not prepare Harold Croghan for the sight that greeted him when he looked out his third-floor window one sunny afternoon that winter. The house stood on a steep double lot at the corner of Quarry and Seneca streets; Véra had managed to maneuver the Plymouth into an awkward position on the hill, essentially blocking all four corners of the intersection. He watched the curious scene for a few minutes before making his way downstairs. “
Why don't you call the police?” he suggested, refusing Véra's invitation to take the wheel. Twenty-four-year-old Croghan had been a Marine platoon commander; he did not
habitually shy from a challenge. Neither did he think it within even his powers to liberate the Plymouth from its position. “It would have taken a helicopter,” he remembers. The lateral parking device Véra had invented in Berlin would have come in handy now; this was one predicament she seems to have anticipated.
A neighbor on East Seneca Street recalls Véra pulling up at the foot of the hill, which could be terrifyingly slippery in winter. In his estimation, “It looked like an uneasy truce between her and the car.”

Generally however, she drove too well, which is to say with a liberal interpretation of the speed limit. “
And pray, find me a Russian who does not care for fast driving?” Gogol reminds us, not to be contradicted by Véra Nabokov. At least one Massachusetts policeman observed as much when Véra chauffeured her husband to Boston for extensive dental work at the end of the 1950 spring semester. Vladimir quipped that they returned to Ithaca “
minus my teeth and the Massachusetts part of her license.” “She did not stop when a policeman in a car signaled to her and then he followed us for ten minutes and finally, at 70 miles per hour, crowded us to the curb,” he elaborated to Wilson, who probably had an easier time than the officer believing why this distinguished-looking white-haired woman had led a high-speed chase to a screeching conclusion:
She had not understood the policeman wanted her to stop. This was one thing Burton Jacoby had not thought to teach her. She was a supremely law-abiding citizen in general—Dmitri's leisurely approach to his traffic violations would disturb her greatly—but the speed limit did prove immoderately low. Her husband enjoyed teasing her about this. He was always happy to pronounce his wife a demon driver.

Did she enjoy the driving, or was she again the victim of her own competence? Regularly she solicited advice about cars from friends; she engaged in a fair amount of automotive window-shopping. For one very brief moment she cast herself as a car salesman, attempting to assist Dmitri in selling an Italian specialty car to one of her husband's publishers. “
Iso-Rivolta is not a sports car but a very elegant sedan. It has a marvelous American motor in combination with a beautiful Italian carrosserie, and the smoothest run I have ever seen,” she wrote glowingly. In her seventies, she
asserted proudly that she was the family driver. A visitor found that in her eighties she lit up when he mentioned the cross-country excursions. “
I
loved
driving the car,” she told him, a smile spreading across her face. Her husband boasted that in the course of the Cornell years his wife had driven him more than 150,000 miles, all over North America; in one letter she became “
my heroic wife who drove me through the floods and storms of Kansas” for the sake of a butterfly specimen. Véra took a slightly different view of this heroism, or at
least did when writing to an old friend in 1962: “
I have upwards of 200,000 miles under my belt, but each time I get behind the wheel I hand my soul over to God.”

She genuinely did enjoy the drama of the open road, the visual thrill of the moving landscape, the moments of high adventure. Vladimir recorded a number of her casual roadside comments in his diary, offering a sense of what it was like to be in a car with Véra: “
My Oldsmobile gobbles up the miles like a fakir does fire. Oh look over there, that tree is squatting on all fours.” “The little flames of the autos are like one candle lighting another in the dusk.” “Oh, the sunlight! I can see the ignition key reflected in the window again,” she exulted, an observation that found its way directly into
Lolita
. (For that novel
she compiled an inventory of services to which a car submits at a tune-up, with which to send Humbert and Lolita back on the road, from Beardsley.) With zest she described having picked their way west amid thunderstorms and tornadoes, “
and a few ‘dust devils' which are unpleasant little
tourbillons
of sand which are supposed occasionally to ‘flip a few cars over.' ” She recalled an “
apocaliptic [sic] traffic jam” in Houston. The two-week drive to Mount Carmel, Utah, proved particularly rich in adventure. “
The most exciting thing was when this young hooligan fired a cobblestone into our windshield. We were sprayed with glass dust, and the hole as the size of a fist, but the cobblestone fortunately hit below eye level and fell to my feet. The state trooper took a photo of the cobblestone, the broken windshield and of Volodya sitting behind the glass but said there was nothing he could do, because the offender was a minor,” she reported animatedly, after an unscheduled stop in Missouri, where a new windshield was installed. Her capacity for dramatics could be aroused by these physical adventures where it was more often dampened elsewhere. Having dropped Dmitri off in New Hampshire after the 1950 Thanksgiving vacation, the Nabokovs drove most of the way toward Ithaca without incident. They then headed “
through the grey wall of a storm, sometimes hydroplaning or fishtailing because it was so slippery,” Vladimir wrote the Hessens. “There was a moment when I said to Véra, ‘You're going to drive off into the ditch,' and she didn't reply.” In the margin Véra took issue not with the backseat driving but with her husband's choice of words. “It wasn't a ditch,” she clarified, “but a terrible ravine.”

The chauffeuring around Ithaca was less theatrical, at least to the Nabokovs. To nearly everyone else it offered some degree of spectacle. At first grudgingly and soon with good humor, Dick Keegan provided much of Nabokov's transportation for the first academic year. Véra was busy settling into the Seneca Street house, a four-bedroom home she and Vladimir found uncomfortably large, even with the series of boarders they took in. For two
trimesters of the 1948–49 academic year, she also taught high school French at the Cascadilla School, a private school on the edge of campus. Keegan understood that Véra might not have proved as willing as was he to transport Vladimir
to the liquor store; on several occasions she cornered her husband's driver to ask if he had taken him to buy cigarettes, which, indeed, Keegan had. Nabokov was still chain-smoking, intermittently. Véra took over at the wheel after the spring of 1949, when Keegan had graduated, when she was more confident of her abilities, and when the couple rented a series of homes farther afield than East Seneca Street. The chauffeuring put her on campus more than she had been before. And so the archetypal symbol of independence—in succession a Plymouth, an Oldsmobile, a used Buick Special, a new Buick—was to involve her more closely yet in her husband's work. Rarely was Vladimir seen on campus without Véra; rarely was Véra sighted at the grocery store without Vladimir. “
Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two,” a former student and future critic remembered. The attention-getting part was the distribution of labor. More than a few heads turned when, in the supermarket parking lot, Véra set her bagged groceries down in the snow while she shuffled for her keys, then loaded the trunk. In the car her husband sat
immobile, oblivious. A similar routine was observed during a move, when Nabokov made his way into a new home carrying a chess set and a small lamp. Véra followed with two bulky suitcases. The intrepid Russian woman with the queenly carriage and the halo of white hair who made heads turn all over campus soon developed a reputation for waiting on her husband hand and foot.

Generally it was a flawless performance. A student who escaped a few minutes' of a heavy snowstorm by cutting through Goldwin Smith Hall, where Nabokov kept his office and usually lectured, noted one occasion on which it was not. Inside the doors at one end of the building stood Vladimir, tapping his foot. At the other end of the north-south corridor, at the far set of doors, stood a patient Véra, a pair of her
husband's galoshes in hand. On a snowy day outside of
Pale Fire's
Parthenocissus Hall the poet John Shade waits for Mrs. Shade to fetch him. “
Wives, Mr. Shade, are forgetful,” Kinbote reminds Shade, luring him into his car. This one was not: Véra rarely kept her husband waiting, if only for the good reason that she was customarily with him in the first place. And when he got home it was she who kept track of his responsibilities. Keegan admired her ability to order the details of both of their lives. “
Did you grade the papers you got last Tuesday?” she asked her husband on one occasion, after Keegan had delivered him from campus. Nabokov admitted that he had not. “Well, I did some of them for you,” Véra conceded. On a similar occasion she asserted, “Vladimir sometimes forgets
things, but we're like a good rugby team. We don't have much practice, so we just use brute strength.”