Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Not only in ear-trumpet age — in what Van called their dot-dot-dotage — but even more so in their adolescence (summer, 1888), did they seek a scholarly excitement in establishing the past evolution (summer, 1884) of their love, the initial stages of its revelations, the freak discrepancies in gappy chronographies. She had kept only a few — mainly botanical and entomological — pages of her diary, because on rereading it she had found its tone false and finical; he had destroyed his entirely because of its clumsy, schoolboyish style combined with heedless, and false, cynicism. Thus they had to rely on oral tradition, on the mutual correction of common memories. ‘And do you remember, a tï pomnish’, et te souviens-tu’

(invariably with that implied codetta of ‘and,’ introducing the bead to be threaded in the torn necklace) became with them, in their intense talks, the standard device for beginning every other sentence. Calendar dates were debated, sequences sifted and shifted, sentimental notes compared, hesitations and resolutions passionately analyzed. If their recollections now and then did not tally, this was often owing to sexual differences rather than to individual temperament. Both were diverted by life’s young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time. Ada tended to see those initial stages as an extremely gradual and diffuse growth, possibly unnatural, probably unique, but wholly delightful in its smooth unfolding which precluded any brutish impulses or shocks of shame. Van’s memory could not help picking out specific episodes branded forever with abrupt and poignant, and sometimes regrettable, physical thrills. She had the impression that the insatiable delectations she arrived at, without having expected or summoned them, were experienced by Van only by the time she attained them: that is, after weeks of cumulative caresses; her first physiological reactions to them she demurely dismissed as related to childish practices which she had indulged in before and which had little to do with the glory and tang of individual happiness. Van, on the contrary, not only could tabulate every informal spasm he had hidden from her before they became lovers, but stressed philosophic and moral distinctions between the shattering force of self-abuse and the overwhelming softness of avowed and shared love.

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor. Ada saw herself there as a wonder-eyed waif with a bedraggled nosegay; Van saw himself as a nasty young satyr with clumsy hooves and an ambiguous flue pipe. ‘But I was only twelve,’ Ada would cry when some indelicate detail was brought up. ‘I was in my fifteenth year,’ sadly said Van.

And did the young lady recall, he asked, producing metaphorically some notes from his pocket, the very first time she guessed that her shy young ‘cousin’ (their official relationship) was physically excited in her presence, though decently swathed in layers of linen and wool and not in contact with the young lady?

She said, frankly no, she did not — indeed, could not — because at eleven, despite trying numberless times to unlock with every key in the house the cabinet in which Walter Daniel Veen kept ‘Jap. & Ind. erot. prints’ as seen distinctly labeled through the glazed door (the key to which Van found for her in a twinkle — taped to the back of the pediment), she had still been rather hazy about the way human beings mated. She was very observant, of course, and had closely examined various insects in copula,

but at the period discussed clear examples of mammalian maleness had rarely come to her notice and had remained unconnected with any idea or possibility of sexual function (such as for example the time she had contemplated the soft-looking beige beak of the Negro janitor’s boy who sometimes urinated in the girls’ water closet at her first school in 1883).

Two other phenomena that she had observed even earlier proved ridiculously misleading. She must have been about nine when that elderly gentleman, an eminent painter whom she could not and would not name, came several times to dinner at Ardis Hall. Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind — fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts —

‘I know exactly,’ interrupted Van angrily, ‘whom you mean, and would like to place on record that even if his delicious talent is in disfavor today, Paul J. Gigment had every right to paint schoolgirls and poolgirls from any side he pleased. Proceed.’