Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

The three of them formed a pretty Arcadian combination as they dropped on the turf under the great weeping cedar, whose aberrant limbs extended an oriental canopy (propped up here and there by crutches made of its own flesh like this book) above two black and one golden-red head as they had above you and me on dark warm nights when we were reckless, happy children.

Van, sprawling supine, sick with memories, put his hands behind his nape and slit his eyes at the Lebanese blue of the sky between the fascicles of the foliage. Lucette fondly admired his long lashes while pitying his tender skin for the inflamed blotches and prickles between neck and jaw where shaving caused the most trouble. Ada, her keepsake profile inclined, her mournful magdalene hair hanging down (in sympathy with the weeping shadows) along her pale arm, sat examining abstractly the yellow throat of a waxy-white helleborine she had picked. She hated him, she adored him. He was brutal, she was defenseless.

Lucette, always playing her part of the clinging, affectionately fussy lassy, placed both palms on Van’s hairy chest and wanted to know why he was cross.

‘I’m not cross with you,’ replied Van at last.

Lucette kissed his hand, then attacked him.

‘Cut it out!’ he said, as she wriggled against his bare thorax. ‘You’re unpleasantly cold, child.’

‘It’s not true, I’m hot,’ she retorted.

‘Cold as two halves of a canned peach. Now, roll off, please.’

‘Why two? Why?’

‘Yes, why,’ growled Ada with a shiver of pleasure, and, leaning over, kissed him on the mouth. He struggled to rise. The two girls were now kissing him alternatively, then kissing each other, then getting busy upon him again — Ada in perilous silence, Lucette with soft squeals of delight. I do not remember what Les Enfants Maudits did or said in Monparnasse’s novelette — they lived in Bryant’s château, I think, and it began with bats flying one by one out of a turret’s œil-de-bœuf into the sunset, but these children (whom the novelettist did not really know — a delicious point) might also have been filmed rather entertainingly had snoopy Kim, the kitchen photo-fiend, possessed the necessary apparatus. One hates to write about those matters, it all comes out so improper, esthetically speaking, in written description, but one cannot help recalling in this ultimate twilight (where minor artistic blunders are fainter than very fugitive bats in an insect-poor wilderness of orange air) that Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest touch, actual or imagined. Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and make, in that ridiculously remote past, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept and dangerous. He shook off his pretty tormentors, and walked away on his hands, a black mask over his carnival nose. Just then, the governess, panting and shouting, arrived on the scene. ‘Mais qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait, ton cousin?’ She kept anxiously asking, as Lucette, shedding the same completely unwarranted tears that Ada had once shed, rushed into the mauve-winged arms.

33

The following day began with a drizzle; but cleared up after lunch. Lucette had her last piano lesson with gloomy Herr Rack. The repetitive tinkle-thump-tinkle reached Van and Ada during a reconnaissance in a second-floor passage. Mlle Larivière was in the garden, Marina had fluttered away to Ladore, and Van suggested they take advantage of Lucette’s being ‘audibly absent’ by taking refuge in an upstairs dressing room.

Lucette’s first tricycle stood there in a corner; a shelf above a cretonne-covered divan held some of the child’s old ‘untouchable’ treasures among which was the battered anthology he had given her four years ago. The door could not be locked, but Van was impatient, and the music would surely endure, as firm as a wall, for at least another twenty minutes. He had buried his mouth in Ada’s nuque, when she stiffened and raised a warning finger. Heavy slow steps were coming up the grand staircase. ‘Send him away,’ she muttered. ‘Chort (hell),’ swore Van, adjusting his clothes, and went out on the landing. Philip Rack was trudging up, Adam’s apple bobbing, ill-shaven, livid, gums exposed, one hand on his chest, the other clutching a roll of pink paper while the music continued to play on its own as if by some mechanical, device.