According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), Uncle Dan bequeathed to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess,’ Uncle Dan’s last mistress whom he had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ out of his poor body) a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter:
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He [Demon] spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
In Scylla and Charybdis, Episode 9 of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mocker mentions Shakespeare’s second-best bed that he left to his wife, Anne Hathaway:
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
— Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
— He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
— It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.
— Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled on.
— Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling. Let me think.
In the same conversation at the library Stephen Dedalus mentions carrotty Bess (Queen Elizabeth):
— And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.
I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.
Mingere is Latin for “to urinate.” Just before Ada entered the room, Demon asks Van if he can use his W.C. It must have been an urinary catheter that Uncle Dan bequeathed to Bess.
A little later Stephen mentions Saint Thomas's opinion about incest:
— Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
Van and Ada are brother and sister. Van's and Ada's father, Demon Veen finds out that his children are lovers because of Uncle Dan's death.
"Old Nobodaddy" mentioned by Stephen is a reference to William Blake's poem To Nobodaddy:
Why art thou silent & invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye?
Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy works & laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
Thy wily serpent's jaws?
Or is it because Secrecy
Gains females' loud applause?
Ada merrily claps her hands when she learns that Van is sterile:
What laughs, what tears, what sticky kisses, what a tumult of multitudinous plans! And what safety, what freedom of love! Two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor, had both given our hero exactly the same reason, unmentionable in a family chronicle, for considering him absolutely sterile despite his prowesses. Amused by the Hecatean diagnose, Van underwent certain tests, and although pooh-poohing the symptom as coincidental, all the doctors agreed that Van Veen might be a doughty and durable lover but could never hope for an offspring. How merrily little Ada clapped her hands! (2.6)
Nobodaddy is nobody's father. Nobody's father, Van does not suspect that Ada and Andrey Vinelander (who marries Ada after Demon forces Van to give her up) have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the Editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.