"..his agglutinate palm caressing the banisters." [flesh 2]

"Paduk's mother, a flaccid lymphatic woman from the Marshland, had died in childbirth, and soon after this the widower had married a young cripple for whom he had been devising a new type of braces (she survived him, braces and all, and is still limping about somewhere). The boy Paduk had a pasty face and a grey-blue cranium with bumps: his father shaved his head for him personally once a week - some kind of mystic ritual, no doubt."
in Bend Sinister, V. Nabokov