23

All went well until Mlle Larivière decided to stay in bed for five days: she had sprained her back on a merry-go-round at the Vintage Fair, which, besides, she needed as the setting for a story she had begun (about a town mayor’s strangling a small girl called Rockette), and knew by experience that nothing kept up the itch of inspiration so well as la chaleur du lit. During that period, the second upstairs maid, French, whose moods and looks did not match the sweet temper and limpid grace of Blanche, was supposed to look after Lucette, and Lucette did her best to avoid the lazy servant’s surveillance in favor of her cousin’s and sister’s company. The ominous words: “Well, if Master Van lets you come,” or “Yes, I’m sure Miss Ada won’t mind your mushroom-picking with her,” became something of a knell in regard to love’s freedom.

While the comfortably resting lady was describing the bank of a brook where little Rockette liked to frolic, Ada sat reading on a similar bank, wistfully glancing from time to time at an inviting clump of evergreens (that had frequently sheltered our lovers) and at brown-torsoed, barefooted Van, in turned-up dungarees, who was searching for his wristwatch that he thought he had dropped among the forget-me-nots (but which Ada, he forgot, was wearing). Lucette had abandoned her skipping rope to squat on the brink of the brook and float a fetus-sized rubber doll. Every now and then she squeezed out of it a fascinating squirt of water through a little hole that Ada had had the bad taste to perforate for her in the slippery orange-red toy. With the sudden impatience of inanimate things, the doll managed to get swept away by the current. Van shed his pants under a willow and retrieved the fugitive. Ada, after considering the situation for a moment, shut her book and said to Lucette, whom usually it was not hard to enchant, that she, Ada, felt she was quickly turning into a dragon, that the scales had begun to turn green, that now she was a dragon and that Lucette must be tied to a tree with the skipping rope so that Van might save her just in time. For some reason, Lucette balked at the notion but physical strength prevailed. Van and Ada left the angry captive firmly attached to a willow trunk, and, “prancing” to feign swift escape and pursuit, disappeared for a few precious minutes in the dark grove of conifers. Writhing Lucette had somehow torn off one of the red knobbed grips of the rope and seemed to have almost disentangled herself when dragon and knight, prancing, returned.

She complained to her governess who, completely misconstruing the whole matter (which could also be said of her new composition), summoned Van and from her screened bed, through a reek of embrocation and sweat, told him to refrain from turning Lucette’s head by making of her a fairy-tale damsel in distress.

On the following day Ada informed her mother that Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her governess liked it or not. “Horosho,” said Marina (while getting ready to receive a neighbor and his protégé, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina style), “but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had been since the eighteenth century), and don’t let her stay in it longer than ten or twelve minutes.”

“Beautiful idea,” said Van as he helped Ada to heat the tank, fill the old battered bath and warm a couple of towels.

Despite her being only in her ninth year and rather underdeveloped, Lucette had not escaped the delusive pubescence of red-haired little girls. Her armpits showed a slight stipple of bright floss and her chub was dusted with copper.

The liquid prison was now ready and an alarm clock given a full quarter of an hour to live.

“Let her soak first, you’ll soap her afterwards,” said Van feverishly.

“Yes, yes, yes,” cried Ada.

“I’m Van,” said Lucette, standing in the tub with the mulberry soap between her legs and protruding her shiny tummy.

“You’ll turn into a boy if you do that,” said Ada sternly, “and that won’t be very amusing.”

Warily, the little girl started to sink her buttocks in the water.

“Too hot,” she said, “much too horribly hot!”

“It’ll cool,” said Ada, “plop down and relax. Here’s your doll.”

“Come on, Ada, for goodness’ sake, let her soak,” repeated Van.

“And remember,” said Ada, “don’t you dare get out of this nice warm water until the bell rings or you’ll die, because that’s what Krolik said. I’ll be back to lather you, but don’t call me; we have to count the linen and sort out Van’s hankies.”

The two elder children, having locked the door of the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle, which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf, when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking on the door: Mlle Larivière wanted some hot water too.

They tried all sorts of other tricks.

Once, for example, when Lucette had made of herself a particular nuisance, her nose running, her hand clutching at Van’s all the time, her whimpering attachment to his company turning into a veritable obsession, Van mustered all his persuasive skill, charm, eloquence, and said with conspiratory undertones: “Look, my dear. This brown book is one of my most treasured possessions. I had a special pocket made for it in my school jacket. Numberless fights have been fought over it with wicked boys who wanted to steal it. What we have here” (turning the pages reverently) “is no less than a collection of the most beautiful and famous short poems in the English language. This tiny one, for example, was composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called ‘Peter and Margaret.’ Now you have, say” (turning to Ada in solemn consultation), “forty minutes” (“Give her a full hour, she can’t even memorize Mironton, mirontaine”)—“all right, a full hour to learn these eight lines by heart. You and I” (whispering) “are going to prove to your nasty arrogant sister that stupid little Lucette can do anything. If” (lightly brushing her bobbed hair with his lips), “if, my sweet, you can recite it and confound Ada by not making one single slip—you must be careful about the ‘here-there’ and the ‘this-that,’ and every other detail—if you can do it then I shall give you this valuable book for keeps.” (“Let her try the one about finding a feather and seeing Peacock plain,” said Ada drily—“it’s a bit harder.”) “No, no, she and I have already chosen that little ballad. All right. Now go in here” (opening a door) “and don’t come out until I call you. Otherwise, you’ll forfeit the reward, and will regret the loss all your life.”

“Oh, Van, how lovely of you,” said Lucette, slowly entering her room, with her bemused eyes scanning the fascinating flyleaf, his name on it, his bold flourish, and his own wonderful drawings in ink—a black aster (evolved from a blot), a doric column (disguising a more ribald design), a delicate leafless tree (as seen from a classroom window), and several profiles of boys (Cheshcat, Zogdog, Fancytart, and Ada-like Van himself).

Van hastened to join Ada in the attic. At that moment he felt quite proud of his stratagem. He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, “just in case,” wrote:

“I kept for years—it must be in my Ardis nursery—the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling: time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on: