Lolita, by Vladimir Nabukov
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The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita--full of the feel
of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation
of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I
held her. I marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the
closet, and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her.
There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid
odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert's huge engorged heart. A poignant
chaos was welling within me--but I had to drop those things and hurriedly
regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid's velvety voice calling
me softly from the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping
my automatic thanks with a kindly "you're welcome," good Louise left an
unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand.
"This is a confession. I love you [so the letter began; and for a
distorted moment I mistook its hysterical scrawl for a schoolgirl's
scribble]. Last Sunday in church--bad you, who refused to come to see our
beautiful new windows!--only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord
what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is
no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a
passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.
Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read
this; now you know. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave.
This is a landlady's order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out.
Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty
both ways and don't have an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do
not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once,
now, do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu.
The situation, chиri, is quite simple. Of course, I know with
absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at all to you,
nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you
have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely
garden, even of Lo's noisy ways--but I am nothing to you. Right? Right.
Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my "confession," you
decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for
you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be
a criminal--worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child. You see, chиri.
If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I
won't--and that's why I am able to go on like this), the fact of your
remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you:
as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine
forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.
Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I
know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in
the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon trхs, trхs cher, what a
world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know
how reserved you are, how "British." Your old-world reticence, your sense of
decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal
your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing
open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments
came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he
happened to be twenty years my senior, and--well, let us not gossip about
the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have
ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind.
Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room.
And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe
you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me--if you ever
pray.
C.H."
What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I
remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that awful French). It
was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or
less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita's brother who died at 2 when she
was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say?
Yes. There is just a chance that "the vortex of the toilet" (where the
letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She probably begged me
to make a special fire to consume it.
My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like
a friend's calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I
did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo's room. A full-page
ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed,
between a crooner's mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a
dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He
was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So,
with breakfast for two. The legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a
"conquering hero." The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably
propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bed-fellow was
to get under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had
drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover's face and had put, in block
letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the
resemblance was striking. Under this was another picture, also a colored ad.
A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked
Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo's chase bed, littered
with "comics." The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving black, more or
less rounded, marks on the white. Having convinced myself that Louise had
left, I got into Lo's bed and reread the letter.
Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining
to the business in hand--if I may coin an expression--had not drifted across
my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any
relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear--let me
repeat--that I had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression),
in my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may have been
times--there must have been times, if I know my Humbert--when I had brought
up for detached inspection the idea of marrying a mature widow (say,
Charlotte Haze) with not one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in
order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared
to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an appraiser's
cold eye at Charlotte's coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low
neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. This I
confess under torture. Imaginary torture, perhaps, but all the more
horrible. I wish I might digress and tell you more of the pavor
nocturnus that would rack me at night hideously after a chance term had
struck me in the random readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et
dure (what a Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful,
mysterious, insidious words "trauma," "traumatic event," and "transom." But
my tale is sufficiently incondite already.
After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and
ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned
through clenched teeth and suddenly--Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt
a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips)
like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and
perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother's husband would be
able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day,
every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. "To
hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's
kiss . . ." Well-read Humbert!
Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I
conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make myself bring
her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and
trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now ready to make a further
"statement" (quel mot!) as he turns his conscience inside out and
rips off its innermost lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in
order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as
killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial
sherry or anything like that; but a delicately allied, pharmacopoeial
thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain. Why limit myself to the
modest masked caress I had tried already? Other visions of venery presented
themselves to me swaying and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful
sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter
though the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of Charlotte's
snore, while Lolita hardly breathed in her sleep, as still as a painted
girl-child. "Mother, I swear Kenny never even touched me." "You
either lie, Dolores Haze, or it was an incubus." No, I would not go that
far.
So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed--and the red sun of desire and
decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher,
while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling
glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. Then,
figuratively speaking, I shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was
drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature)
how eventually I might blackmail--no, that it too strong a word--mauvemail
big Haze into letting me consort with the little Haze by gently threatening
the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me from playing
with my legal stepdaughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before
such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the
preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has
been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of
will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the
journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal
of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve
its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.
Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor
Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude.
Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a
winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision that would shatter our
different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at
the camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo
instead, I told her--trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate--that
I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something
was preventing her from giving me her attention. "Gee, that's swell," she
said laughing. "When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup--That put here
has got hold of my sock. Listen--" and she added she guessed she was going
to have loads of fun . . . and I realized as I hung up that a couple of
hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the
image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita's mind. But what did it
matter now? I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after
the wedding had elapsed. "The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on
the grave," as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very
conscientious recorder.
After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too
puritanic, walked to town and bought the richest foods available. I also
bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty
sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would
avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon to
display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert
evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly imagination. She was
well groomed and shapely, this I could say for her, and she was my Lolita's
big sister--this notion, perhaps, I could keep up if only I did not
visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the
coarse pink skin of her neck ("coarse" by comparison with silk and honey)
and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman.
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into
evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple
juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy
myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded
with dandelions, and a cursed dog--I loathe dogs--had defiled the flat
stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed
from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell
over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras!
There are some eructations that sound like cheers--at least, mine did. An
old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor's garbage
receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our
lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore
I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action)
for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I
lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering
in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved
in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down,
down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite's ivied brick house and
high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own
front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored.
The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two
little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically
followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue
(from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other
feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices.
Leslie, old Miss Opposite's gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and
athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented
by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the
prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car--not Charlotte's. The
prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with
little to halt, bright hair--a nymphet, by Pan!--ran back down the street
crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage
of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert's residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy
shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows
snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver
roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman's dog tearing alongside.
There was a smiling pause--and then, with a flutter in my breast, I
witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and
disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale
profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know
whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great
anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo's room. By
sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.
When the bride is a window and the groom is a widower; when the former
has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latter for
hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole damned thing over with
as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my
reader, the wedding is generally a "quiet" affair. The bride may dispense
with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she
carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride's little daughter might
have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but
I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and
therefore agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her
beloved Camp Q.
My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday
life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered that although she
could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle.
Immediately after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the
stimulants, her "nervous, eager chиri--a heroic chиri!--had
some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a
fantastic display of old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me
about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score my
mind was open; I said, instead--paying my tribute to a pious platitude--that
I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also
asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by
inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal
grandfather had been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but
that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she
would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It
was then I knew she was a woman of principle.
Oh, she was very genteel: she said "excuse me" whenever a slight burp
interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope and ahnvelope, and when
talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it
would please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me.
On the day of our wedding a little interview with me appeared in the Society
Column of the Ramsdale Journal, with a photograph of Charlotte, one
eyebrow up and a misprint in her name ("Hazer"). Despite this contretempts,
the publicity warmed the porcelain cockles of her heart--and made my rattles
shake with awful glee. by engaging in church work as well as by getting to
know the better mothers of Lo's schoolmates, Charlotte in the course of
twenty months or so had managed to become if not a prominent, at least an
acceptable citizen, but never before had she come under that thrilling
rubrique, and it was I who put her there, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert (I
threw in the "Edgar" just for the heck of it), "writer and explorer."
McCoo's brother, when taking it down, asked me what I had written. Whatever
I told him came out as "several books on Peacock, Rainbow and other poets."
It was also noted that Charlotte and I had known each other for several
years and that I was a distant relation of her first husband. I hinted I had
had an affair with her thirteen years ago but this was not mentioned in
print. To Charlotte I said that society columns should contain a
shimmer of errors.
Let us go on with this curious tale. When called upon to enjoy my
promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitterness and
distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity,
to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse daintily running
along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger. Never had I thought that the
rather ridiculous, through rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith
in the wisdom of her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her
harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable, downy-armed child of
twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid
my hands upon her which happened on the threshold of Lolita's room whither
she tremulously backed repeating "no, no, please no."
The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a
contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration--a
radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I
recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when
gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely
admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I
would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady
and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up,
mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making
herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would
manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother. This was the white
stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This
carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at
certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the tinge, if not the texture, of
Lolita's curls. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new
large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest I could get to
Lolita; that at Lolita's age, Lotte had been as desirable a schoolgirl as
her daughter was, and as Lolita's daughter would be some day. I had my wife
unearth from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them,
it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how Lotte had
looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses
graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita's outline,
legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen.
So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows.
And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of
the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my
nightly duty, it was still a nymphet's scent that in despair I tried to pick
up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.
I simply can't tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. At
breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and
Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee
Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo
together), she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped
table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable
tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert's face might twitch with
neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation with the sun and
shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation
was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller
one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now
sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her
eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of
those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and
smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where
pink mountains loom.
Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the
activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with a number of
things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as
if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the
child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by
proxy. With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to "glorify the
home." Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart--since those days when
from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita's course through the house--I had
long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very
ugliness and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in
its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putt-buff-and-snuff
that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God,
but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades,
waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds,
returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a
constant chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in
cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa--the sacred sofa
where a bubble of paradise had once burst in slow motion within me. She
rearranged the furniture--and was pleased when she found, in a household
treatise, that "it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and
their companion lamps." With the authoress of Your Home Is You, she
developed a hatred for little lean chairs and spindle tables. She believed
that a room having a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich wood
paneling was an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine
type was characterized by lighter-looking windows and frailer woodwork. The
novels I had found her reading when I moved in were now replaced by
illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides. From a firm located at 4640
Roosevelt Blvd., Philadelphia, she ordered for our double bed a "damask
covered 312 coil mattress"--although the old one seemed to me resilient and
durable enough for whatever it had to support.
A Midwesterner, as her late husband had also been, she had lived in coy
Ramsdale, the gem of an eastern state, not long enough to know all the nice
people. She knew slightly the jovial dentist who lived in a kind of
ramshackle wooden chateau behind our lawn. She had met at a church tea the
"snooty" wife of the local junk dealer who owned the "colonial" white horror
at the corner of the avenue. Now and then she "visited with" old Miss
Opposite; but the more patrician matrons among those she called upon, or met
at lawn functions, or had telephone chats with--such dainty ladies as Mrs.
Glave, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. McCrystal, Mrs. Knight and others, seldom seemed
to call on my neglected Charlotte. Indeed, the only couple with whom she had
relations of real cordiality, devoid of any arriхre-pensиe or
practical foresight, were the Farlows who had just come back from a business
trip to Chile in time to attend our wedding, with the Chatfields, McCoos,
and a few others (but not Mrs. Junk or the even prouder Mrs. Talbot). John
Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer
in sporting goods, who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was
he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it,
during a walk in the woods one Sunday; he was also what he called with a
smile a part-time lawyer and had handled some of Charlotte's affairs. Jean,
his youngish wife (and first cousin), was a long-limbed girl in harlequin
glasses with two boxer dogs, two pointed breasts and a big red mouth. She
painted--landscapes and portraits--and vividly do I remember praising, over
cocktails, the picture she had made of a niece of hers, little Rosaline
Honeck, a rosy honey in a Girl Scout uniform, beret of green worsted, belt
of green webbing, charming shoulder-long curls--and John removed his pipe
and said it was a pity Dolly (my Dolita) and Rosaline were so critical of
each other at school, but he hoped, and we all hoped, they would get on
better when they returned from their respective camps. We talked of the
school. It had its drawbacks, and it had its virtues. "Of course, too many
of the tradespeople here are Italians," said John, "but on the other hand we
are still spared--" "I wish," interrupted Jean with a laugh, "Dolly and
Rosaline were spending the summer together." Suddenly I imagined Lo
returning from camp--brown, warm, drowsy, drugged--and was ready to weep
with passion and impatience.
A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad
accident is to happen quite soon). I had been always aware of the possessive
streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of
anything in my life that had not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable
curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that
she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them
apostately and totally, thus destroying my past. She made me tell her about
my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a scream; but I also had to
invent, or to pad atrociously, a long series of mistresses for Charlotte's
morbid delectation. To keep her happy, I had to present her with an
illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the
rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle
ratio of races, with one--only one, but as cute as they make
them--chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of
the front row. So I presented my women, and had them smile and sway--the
languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead--as if on
parade in a bordello. The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the
more Mrs. Humbert was pleased with the show.
Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many
confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she
called her "love-life," from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can,
were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but
technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the
same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I
drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was
considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that the good Harold
Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but
otherwise her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would
have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.
Of my Lolita she seldom spoke--more seldom, in fact, than she did of
the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others
adorned our bleak bedroom. In once of her tasteless reveries, she predicted
that the dead infant's soul would return to earth in the form of the child
she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge
to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold's production (Lolita,
with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it
occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Cesarean operation
and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would
give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps--and gorge
the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious
was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the
questionnaires in a fool's book she had (A guide to Your Child's
Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and
Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child's
birthdays. On Lo's twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, nиe Becker, had
underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under "Your Child's
Personality": aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient,
irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and
obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were
cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening.
With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife's mild
nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo's little belongings that had
wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many
hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an
upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had
prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of
Lolita's anklets. And then, her attitude toward my saporous darling's
letters!
"Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out
and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold
here for the last few days. I'm having a time. Love,
Dolly."
"The dumb child," said Mrs. Humbert, "has left out a word before
'time.' That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy
without consulting me."
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake--not as I had thought it was
spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at
the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in
some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday
morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were
making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when
Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean
belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip "in
the ebony" (as John had quipped) at five o'clock in the morning last Sunday.
"The water," I said, "must have been quite cold."
"That is not the point," said the logical doomed dear. "He is
subnormal, you see. And," she continued (in that carefully phrased way of
hers that was beginning to tell on my health), "I have a very definite
feeling our Louise is in love with that moron."
Feeling. "We feel Dolly is not doing as well" etc. (from an old school
report).
The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.
"Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream," pronounced Lady
Hum, lowering her head--shy of that dream--and communing with the tawny
ground. "I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that
German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house."
"No room," I said.
"Come," she said with her quizzical smile, "surely, chиri, you
underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in
Lo's room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It's the
coldest and meanest in the whole house."
"What are you talking about?" I asked, the skin of my cheekbones
tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because my daughter's skin
did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation).
"Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?" queried my wife--in
allusion to her first surrender.
"Hell no," said I. "I just wonder where will you put your daughter when
you get your guest or your maid."
"Ah," said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the "Ah"
simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of
breath. "Little Lo, I'm afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all.
Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict
discipline and some sound religious training. And then--Beardsley College. I
have it all mapped out, you need not worry."
She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her
habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalli's sister who taught at St. Algebra.
The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car
and would catch up with her.
I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional
gesture--the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I
took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was
the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to
the mute expression of my mood.
Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the
situation; and "handle" is the word I want. In the good old days, by merely
twisting fat Valechka's brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a
bicycle) I could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the
sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte
frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion
for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she
had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was the awesome duenna of
my darling, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward
her. The only ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her Lo.
She had been annoyed by Lo's liking me; but my feelings she could not
divine. To Valeria I might have said: "Look here, you fat fool, c'est moi
qui dиcide what is good for Dolores Humbert." To Charlotte, I could not
even say (with ingratiating calm): "Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us
give the child one more chance. Let me be her private tutor for a year or
so. You once told me yourself--" In fact, I could not say anything at all to
Charlotte about the child without giving myself away. Oh, you cannot imagine
(as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who
did not notice the falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of
behavior, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish
at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to keeping Lo
near. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary
life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with
diabolical accuracy of judgment. To break Charlotte's will, I would have to
break her heart. If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I
said: "Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep the matter
quiet, or we part at once," she would have turned as pale as a woman of
clouded glass and slowly replied: "All right, whatever you add or retract,
this is the end." And the end it would be.
Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and
pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking it as avidly as if it
would give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom, a tiny concubine. For a while,
purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables,
under the whooshing pines. In the middle distance, two little maidens in
shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled privy marked "Women."
Gum-chewing Mabel (or Mabel's understudy) laboriously, absentmindedly
straddled a bicycle, and Marion, shaking her hair because of the flies,
settled behind, legs wide apart; and wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged
with the light and shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these
woods! The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert. But how?
No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it.
There was the famous dispatch of a Mme Lacour in Arles, southern France, at
the close of last century. An unidentified bearded six-footer, who, it was
later conjectured, had been the lady's secret lover, walked up to her in a
crowded street, soon after her marriage to Colonel Lacour, and mortally
stabbed her in the back, three times, while the Colonel, a small bulldog of
a man, hung onto the murderer's arm. By a miraculous and beautiful
coincidence, right at the moment when the operator was in the act of
loosening the angry little husband's jaws (while several onlookers were
closing in upon the group), a cranky Italian in the house nearest to the
scene set off by sheer accident some kind of explosive he was tinkering
with, and immediately the street was turned into a pandemonium of smoke,
falling bricks and running people. The explosion hurt no one (except that it
knocked out game Colonel Lacour); but the lady's vengeful lover ran when the
others ran--and lived happily ever after.
Now look what happens when the operator himself plans a perfect
removal.
I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we and a few other
"nice" couples (the Farlows, the Chatfields) bathed was a kind of small
cove; my Charlotte liked it because it was almost "a private beach." The
main bathing facilities (or drowning facilities" as the Ramsdale
Journal had had occasion to say) were in the left (eastern) part of
the hourglass, and could not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the
pines soon gave way to a curve of marshland which turned again into forest
on the opposite side.
I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started.
"Shall we go in?" she asked.
"We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought."
I thought. More than a minute passed.
"All right. Come on."
"Was I on that train?"
"You certainly were."
"I hope so," said Charlotte entering the water. It soon reached the
gooseflesh of her thick thighs; and then, joining her outstretched hands,
shutting her mouth tight, very plain-faced in her black rubber headgear,
charlotte flung herself forward with a great splash.
Slowly we swam out into the shimmer of the lake.
On the opposite bank, at least a thousand paces away (if one cold walk
across water), I could make out the tiny figures of two men working like
beavers on their stretch of shore. I knew exactly who they were: a retired
policeman of Polish descent and the retired plumber who owned most of the
timber on that side of the lake. And I also knew they were engaged in
building, just for the dismal fun of the thing, a wharf. The knocks that
reached us seemed so much bigger than what could be distinguished of those
dwarfs' arms and tools; indeed, one suspected the director of those
acrosonic effects to have been at odds with the puppet-master, especially
since the hefty crack of each diminutive blow lagged behind its visual
version.
The short white-sand strip of "our" beach--from which by now we had
gone a little way to reach deep water--was empty on weekday mornings. There
was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite
side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then
disappeared in the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling
murder, and here was the subtle point: the man of law and the man of water
were just near enough to witness an accident and just far enough not to
observe a crime. They were near enough to hear a distracted bather thrashing
about and bellowing for somebody to come and help him save his drowning
wife; and they were too far to distinguish (if they happened to look too
soon) that the anything but distracted swimmer was finishing to tread his
wife underfoot. I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the
ease of the act, the nicety of the setting! So there was Charlotte swimming
on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre mermaid), but not
without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and
as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you
know--trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the
glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors,
and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap,
and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to drop back, take a
deep breath, then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive
corpse. I say corpse because surprise, panic and inexperience would cause
her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while I would be able to hold
on for at least a full minute, open-eyed under water. The fatal gesture
passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the
contemplated crime. It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer
holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery
twilight. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still holding her
down, and then would dive again as many times as would be necessary, and
only when the curtain came down on her for good, would I permit myself to
yell for help. And when some twenty minutes later the two puppets steadily
growing arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert
Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be
standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the smiling
surface of Hourglass Lake.
Simple, was it not? But what d'ye know, folks--I just could not make
myself do it!
She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of
passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn't! In
silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and
still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the
poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote as
I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any
other day or night, could I make myself put her to death. Oh, I could
visualize myself slapping Valeria's breasts out of alignment, or otherwise
hurting her--and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in
the underbelly and making him say "akh!" and sit down. But I could not kill
Charlotte--especially when things were on the whole not quite as hopeless,
perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that miserable morning. Were I to
catch her by her strong kicking foot; were I to see her amazed look, hear
her awful voice; were I still to go through with the ordeal, her ghost would
haunt me all my life. Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might
have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison
from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class
nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded
palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a
killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the
majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning,
physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are
innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community
to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant
behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the
police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not
rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen,
sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults,
but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet.
Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do
not hate me in your eternal heaven among an eternal alchemy of asphalt and
rubber and metal and stone--but thank God, not water, not water!
Nonetheless it was a very close shave, speaking quite objectively. And
now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable.
We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around,
loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance
to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended
one arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up
and smoked. She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open
smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the bushes
and pines, a stone rolled, then another.
"Those disgusting prying kids," said Charlotte, holding up her big bra
to her breast and turning prone again. "I shall have to speak about that to
Peter Krestovski."
From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean
Farlow marched down with her easel and things.
"You scared us," said Charlotte.
Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment,
spying on nature (spies are generally shot), trying to finish a lakescape,
but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was quite true)--"And
have you ever tried painting, Humbert?" Charlotte, who was a little
jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.
He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the
way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand
morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them
roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between
Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as
attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she
smiled.
"I almost put both of you into my lake," she said. "I even noticed
something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert] had your wrist watch on
in, yes, sir, you had."
"Waterproof," said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.
Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte's gift, then
put back Humbert's hand on the sand, palm up.
"You could see anything that way," remarked Charlotte coquettishly.
Jean sighed. "I once saw," she said, "two children, male and female, at
sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you
about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the
ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely
indecent story about his nephew. It appears--"
"Hullo there," said John's voice.
My habit of being silent when displeased or, more exactly, the cold and
scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her
wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying "Ce qui me rend folle, c'est
que je ne sais ю quoi tu penses quand tu es comme гa." I tried being
silent with Charlotte--and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under
the chin. An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now a
regular "studio," mumbling I had after all a learned opus to write, and
cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home, warbling on the telephone
and writing letters. From my window, through the lacquered shiver of poplar
leaves, I could see her crossing the street and contentedly mailing her
letter to Miss Phalen's sister.
The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed after our last
visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I
can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope--before the ultimate
sunburst.
It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order
and that I might as well use it. If I dared not meddle with my wife's plans
for her daughter (getting warmer and browner every day in the fair weather
of hopeless distance), I could surely devise some general means to assert
myself in a general way that might be later directed toward a particular
occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an opening.
"I have a surprise for you," she said looking at me with fond eyes over
a spoonful of soup. "In the fall we two are going to England."
I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the
cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said:
"I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to
England."
"Why, what's the matter?" she said, looking--with more surprise than I
had counted upon--at my hands (I was involuntarily folding and tearing and
crushing and tearing again the innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set
her somewhat at ease, however.
"The matter is quite simple," I replied. "Even in the most harmonious
of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken by the female
partner. There are certain things that the husband is there to decide. I can
well imagine the thrill that you, a healthy American gal, must experience at
crossing the Atlantic on the same ocean liner with Lady Bumble--or Sam
Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not that
you and I would make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency when portrayed
looking--you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling my envious admiration--at
the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they
are called. But I happen to be allergic to Europe, including merry old
England. As you well know, I have nothing but very sad associations with the
Old and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change the
situation."
"My darling," said Charlotte. "I really--"
"No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental. I am
concerned with a general trend. When you wanted me to spend my afternoons
sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became
a bronzed glamour boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and,
well, an educator. When you lead me to bridge and bourbon with the charming
Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate your home, I
do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide--when you decide all
kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say,
disagreement--but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore
the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am
not cross. I am not cross at all. Don't do that. But I am one half of this
household, and have a small but distinct voice."
She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and was slowly, but
very vehemently, shaking her head and clawing at my trousers. She said she
had never realized. She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise
had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or
she would die.
This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told her
quietly that it was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but of changing
one's ways; and I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of
time, aloof and moody, working at my book--or at least pretending to work.
The "studio bed" in my former room had long been converted into the
sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte had warned me since the very
beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into a
regular "writer's den." A couple of days after the British Incident, I was
sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume in my
lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in. How
different were her movements from those of my Lolita, when she used
to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in
nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her
shirt unfastened. Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness
of little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a trickle of shy life ran that
tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French doctor once told my
father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same
"voice."
So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between us. I had
pretended to fall asleep the night before, and the night before that, as
soon as we had gone to bed, and had risen at dawn.
Tenderly, she inquired if she were not "interrupting."
"Not at the moment," I said, turning volume C of the Girls'
Encyclopedia around to examine a picture printed "bottom-edge" as
printers say.
Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a
drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table was ugly, no doubt, but
it had done nothing to her.
"I have always wanted to ask you," she said (businesslike, not
coquettish), "why is this thing locked up? Do you want it in this room? It's
so abominably uncouth."
"Leave it alone," I said. I was Camping in Scandinavia.
"Is there a key?"
"Hidden."
"Oh, Hum . . . "
"Locked up love letters."
She gave me one of those wounded-doe looks that irritated me so much,
and then, not quite knowing if I was serious, or how to keep up the
conversation, stood for several slow pages (Campus, Canada, Candid Camera,
Candy) peering at the window pane rather than through it, drumming upon it
with sharp almond-and-rose fingernails.
Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to my chair and
sank down, tweedily, weightily, on its arm, inundating me with the perfume
my first wife had used. "Would his lordship like to spend the fall
here?" she asked, pointing with her little finger at an autumn view
in a conservative Eastern State. "Why?" (very distinctly and slowly). She
shrugged. (Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time. Open
season. Conditional reflex on her part.)
"I think I know where that is," she said, still pointing. "There is a
hotel I remember, Enchanted Hunters, quaint, isn't it? And the food is a
dream. And nobody bothers anybody."
She rubbed her cheek against my temple. Valeria soon got over that.
"Is there anything special you would like for dinner, dear? John and
Jean will drop in later."
I answered with a grunt. She kissed me on my underlip, and, brightly
saying she would bake a cake (a tradition subsisted from my lodging days
that I adored her cakes), left me to my idleness.
Carefully putting down the open book where she had sat (it attempted to
send forth a rotation of waves, but an inserted pencil stopped the pages), I
checked the hiding place of the key: rather self-consciously it lay under
the old expensive safety razor I had used before she bought me a much better
and cheaper one. Was it the perfect hiding place--there, under the razor, in
the groove of its velvet-lined case? The case lay in a small trunk where I
kept various business papers. Could I improve upon this? Remarkable how
difficult it is to conceal things--especially when one's wife keeps
monkeying with the furniture.
I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail
brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady wrote she had just
returned to St. Algebra from her sister's funeral. "Euphemia had never been
the same after breaking that hip." As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert's
daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year;
but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and
Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her admittance might be
arranged.
Next day, after lunch, I went to see "our" doctor, a friendly fellow
whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs
adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science.
The fact that Lo would have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of
anticipation. For this event I wanted to be fully prepared. I had in fact
begun my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision of
hers. I had to be sure when my lovely child arrived, that very night, and
then night after night, until St. Algebra took her away from me, I would
possess the means of putting two creatures to sleep so thoroughly that
neither sound nor touch should rouse them. Throughout most of July I had
been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on
Charlotte, a great taker of pills. The last dose I had given her (she
thought it was a tablet of mild bromides--to anoint her nerves) had knocked
her out for four solid hours. I had put the radio at full blast. I had
blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight. I had pushed her, pinched
her, prodded her--and nothing had disturbed the rhythm of her calm and
powerful breathing. However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss
her, she had awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely
escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get something still safer. At
first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last
prescription was no match for my insomnia. He suggested I try again, and for
a moment diverted my attention by showing me photographs of his family. He
had a fascinating child of Dolly's age; but I saw through his tricks and
insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant. He suggested I play golf,
but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, "would really work";
and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded
with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the
market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm
if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to
die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. I love to fool doctors,
and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the pills with a skeptical shrug.
Incidentally, I had had to be careful with him. Once, in another connection,
a stupid lapse on my part made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought
I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or
anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I
had once done some research among the insane for a novel. But no matter; the
old rogue certainly had a sweet girleen.
I left in great spirits. Steering my wife's car with one finger, I
contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after all, lots of charm. The
cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly watered. Smoothly, almost
silkily, I turned down into our steep little street. Everything was somehow
so right that day. So blue and green. I knew the sun shone because my
ignition key was reflected in the windshield; and I knew it was exactly half
past three because the nurse who came to massage Miss Opposite every
afternoon was tripping down the narrow sidewalk in her white stockings and
shoes. As usual, Junk's hysterical setter attacked me as I rolled downhill,
and as usual, the local paper was lying on the porch where it had just been
hurled by Kenny.
The day before I had ended the regime of aloofness I had imposed upon
myself, and now uttered a cheerful homecoming call as I opened the door of
the living room. With her ream-white nape and bronze bun to me, wearing the
yellow blouse and maroon slacks she had on when I first met her, Charlotte
sat at the corner bureau writing a letter. My hand still on the doorknob, I
repeated my hearty cry. Her writing hand stopped. She sat still for a
moment; then she slowly turned in her chair and rested her elbow on its
curved back. Her face, disfigured by her emotion, was not a pretty sight as
she stared at my legs and said:
"The Haze woman, the big bitch, the old cat, the obnoxious mamma,
the--the old stupid Haze is no longer your dupe. She has--she has . . ."
My fair accuser stopped, swallowing her venom and her tears. Whatever
Humbert Humbert said--or attempted to say--is inessential. She went on:
"You're a monster. You're a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If
you come near--I'll scream out the window. Get back!"
Again, whatever H.H. murmured may be omitted, I think.
"I am leaving tonight. This is all yours. Only you'll never, never see
that miserable brat again. Get out of this room."
Reader, I did. I went up to the ex-semi-studio. Arms akimbo, I stood
for a moment quite still and self-composed, surveying from the threshold the
raped little table with its open drawer, a key hanging from the lock, four
other household keys on the table top. I walked across the landing into the
Humberts' bedroom, and calmly removed my diary from under her pillow into my
pocket. Then I started to walk downstairs, but stopped half-way: she was
talking on the telephone which happened to be plugged just outside the door
of the living room. I wanted to hear what she was saying: she canceled an
order for something or other, and returned to the parlor. I rearranged my
respiration and went through the hallway to the kitchen. There, I opened a
bottle of Scotch. She could never resist Scotch. Then I walked into the
dining room and from there, through the half-open door, contemplated
Charlotte's broad back.
"You are ruining my life and yours," I said quietly. "Let us be
civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte.
The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put
in by mere chance. Just because they came handy. Think it over. I shall
bring you a drink."
She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a scorching
scrawl whatever she was writing. A third letter, presumably (two in stamped
envelopes were already laid out on the desk). I went back to the kitchen.
I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the
refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its
heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall details. Change,
forge. Write a fragment and show it to her or leave it lying around. Why do
faucets sometimes whine so horribly? A horrible situation, really. The
little pillow-shaped blocks of ice--pillows for polar teddy bear,
Lo--emitted rasping, crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened
them in their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side. I poured in the
whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin. Bark and bang went the
icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke
through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite space enough
for my elbow.
"I have made you a drink," I said.
She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses on the
sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring.
"Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson," said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip
at dawn. "Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you'd better come quick."
I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and
still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door and said:
"There's this man saying you've been killed, Charlotte."
But there was no Charlotte in the living room.
I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a
peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite's
sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had
dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like
wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right
of this car, on the trim turn of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a
white mustache, well-dressed--double-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted
bow-tie--lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I
have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words;
their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp
unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.'s nurse running
with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened
porch--where the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be
imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the
Junk setter walking from group to group--from a bunch of neighbors already
collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the
car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the
lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise
shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of
the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to
their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two
blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale,
Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had
just watered on the green bank where he lay--a banked banker so to
speak--was not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically
recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that
the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with
disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of
Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the
Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the
mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite's lawn. These were picked up and
handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them
by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket.
Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took
over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor
raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but he opened his mouth only to
impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary
in connection with the identification, examination and disposal of a dead
woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and
blood. The sun was still a blinding red when he was put to bed in Dolly's
room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean; who, to be near,
retired to the Humberts' bedroom for the night; which, for all I know, they
may not have spent as innocently as the solemnity of the occasion required.
I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the
pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the funeral
itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But a few incidents
pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte's simple death, have
to be noted.
My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as
the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the
fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to
be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that ". . . and you had better
find it because I cannot buy . . . " came from a letter to Lo; and other
fragments seemed to point to Charlotte's intention of fleeing with Lo to
Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious
lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such strong
talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another
boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its
methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the
nickname of "Reformatory for Young Ladies." Finally, the third epistle was
obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as ". . . after a year of
separation we may . . . " ". . . oh, my dearest, oh my . . . " ". . . worse
than if it had been a woman you kept . . ." ". . . or, maybe, I shall die .
. ." But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments
of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as
their elements had been in poor Charlotte's head.
That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and
so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends' company. The dear people
were afraid I might commit suicide if left alone, and since no other friends
were available (Miss Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy
building a new house miles away, and the Chatfields had been recently called
to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie and Louise were
commissioned to keep me company under the pretense of helping me to sort out
and pack a multitude of orphaned things. In a moment of superb inspiration I
showed the kind and credulous Farlows (we were waiting for Leslie to come
for his paid tryst with Louise) a little photograph of Charlotte I had found
among her affairs. From a boulder she smiled through blown hair. It had been
taken in April 1934, a memorable spring. While on a business visit to the
States, I had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met--and had
a mad love affair. I was married, alas, and she was engaged to Haze, but
after I returned to Europe, we corresponded through a friend, now dead. Jean
whispered she had heard some rumors and looked at the snapshot, and, still
looking, handed it to John, and John removed his pipe and looked at lovely
and fast Charlotte Becker, and handed it back to me. Then they left for a
few hours. Happy Louise was gurgling and scolding her swain in the basement.
Hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called--and I
tried to make the interview as brief as was consistent with neither hurting
his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Yes, I would devote all my life to the
child's welfare. Here, incidentally, was a little cross that Charlotte
Becker had given me when we were both young. I had a female cousin, a
respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school
for Dolly. Oh, what a crafty Humbert!
For the benefit of Leslie and Louise who might (and did) report it to
John and Jean I made a tremendously loud and beautifully enacted
long-distance call and simulated a conversation with Shirley Holmes. When
John and Jean returned, I completely took them in by telling them, in a
deliberately wild and confused mutter, that Lo had gone with the
intermediate group on a five-day hike and could not be reached.
"Good Lord," said Jean, "what shall we do?"
John said it was perfectly simple--he would get the Climax police to
find the hikers--it would not take them an hour. In fact, he knew the
country and--
"Look," he continued, "why don' I drive there right now, and you may
sleep with Jean"--(he did not really add that but Jean supported his offer
so passionately that it might be implied).
I broke down. I pleaded with John to let things remain the way they
were. I said I could not bear to have the child all around me, sobbing,
clinging to me, she was so high-strung, the experience might react on her
future, psychiatrists have analyzed such cases. There was a sudden pause.
"Well, you are the doctor," said John a little bluntly. "But after all
I was Charlotte's friend and adviser. One would like to know what you are
going to do about the child anyway."
"John," cried Jean, "she is his child, not Harold Haze's. Don't you
understand? Humbert is Dolly's real father."
"I see," said John. "I am sorry. Yes. I see. I did not realize that. It
simplifies matters, of course. And whatever you feel is right."
The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate
daughter immediately after the funeral, and would do his best to give her a
good time in totally different surroundings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or
California--granted, of course, he lived.
So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the
hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows removed me to
their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that
was helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost.
Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away.
Naturally, at first, when Charlotte had just been eliminated and I
re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two
whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared, and topped them with a pint or two of my
"pin," and went to the bathroom to get away from neighbors and friends,
there was but one thing in my mind and pulse--namely, the awareness that a
few hours hence, warm, brown--haired, and mine, mine, mine, Lolita would be
in my arms, shedding tears that I would kiss away faster than they could
well. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, John Farlow
tenderly tapped to inquire if I was okay--and I immediately realized it
would be madness on my part to have her in the house with all those
busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed,
unpredictable Lo herself might--who knows?--show some foolish distrust of
me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like--and gone would be the
magic prize at the very instant of triumph.
Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor--friend Beale, the fellow
who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and solemn, looking like a kind of assistant
executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small black eyes, thickly rimmed
glasses and conspicuous nostrils, he was ushered in by John who then left
us, closing the door upon us, with the utmost tact. Suavely saying he had
twins in my stepdaughter's class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large
diagram he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter would have
put it, "a beaut," with all kinds of impressive arrows and dotted lines in
varicolored inks. Mrs. H.H.'s trajectory was illustrated at several points
by a series of those little outline figures--doll-like wee career girl or
WAC--used in statistics as visual aids. Very clearly and conclusively, this
route came into contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two
consecutive swerves--one which the Beale car made to avoid the Junk dog (dog
not shown), and the second, a kind of exaggerated continuation of the first,
meant to avert the tragedy. A very black cross indicated the spot where the
trim little outline figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I
looked for some similar mark to denote the place on the embankment where my
visitor's huge wax father had reclined, but there was none. That gentleman,
however, had signed the document as a witness underneath the name of Leslie
Tomson, Miss Opposite and a few other people.
With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point
to another, Frederick demonstrated his absolute innocence and the
recklessness of my wife: while he was in the act of avoiding the dog,
she slipped on the freshly watered asphalt and plunged forward
whereas she should have flung herself not forward but backward (Fred showed
how by a jerk of his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his
fault, and the inquest upheld my view.
Breathing violently though jet-black tense nostrils, he shook his head
and my hand; then, with an air of perfect savoir vivre and
gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home expenses. He
expected me to refuse his offer. With a drunken sob of gratitude I accepted
it. This took him aback. Slowly, incredulously, he repeated what he had
said. I thanked him again, even more profusely than before.
In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a
moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had
palpated the very flesh of fate--and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and
monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument.
Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery
pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I
could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a
fool--or such an intuitive genius--to preserve that journal, fluids produced
by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her
dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have
happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its
alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the
weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate's formal
handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of
my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury--I wept.
The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden
onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white
church tower when I looked around me for the last time. For unknown
adventures I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten
weeks before. The shades--thrifty, practical bamboo shades--were already
down. On porches or in the house their rich textures lend modern drama. The
house of heaven must seem pretty bare after that. A raindrop fell on my
knuckles. I went back into the house for something or other while John was
putting my bags into the car, and then a funny thing happened. I do not know
if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar "sending"
effect that the writer's good looks--pseudo-Celtic, attractively simian,
boyishly manly--had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such
announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once
in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a
professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a
dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the
character crops up in the course of the book. There may be more to it in the
present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind's eye if my
story is to be properly understood. Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert's charm
as she did to hiccuppy music; adult Lotte loved me with a mature, possessive
passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say. Jean Farlow,
who was thirty-one and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a
strong liking for me. She was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with
a burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps, and when
she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed large dull teeth and pale
gums.
She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts
with ballet slippers, drank any strong liquor in any amount, had had two
miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted, as the reader knows,
lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at
thirty-three, and was hopelessly unattractive to me. Judge then of my alarm
when a few seconds before I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with
her always trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her
bright blue eyes, attempted, unsuccessfully, to glue herself to my lips.
"Take care of yourself," she said, "kiss your daughter for me."
A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added:
"Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see
each other again" (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in minus time-space or
plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included).
And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the
sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the
approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was
confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and
writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the
laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black
lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.
One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a prospect of
delirious and unlimited delights before me, I would have mentally sunk back,
heaving a sigh of delicious relief. Eh bien, pas du tout! Instead of
basking in the beams of smiling Chance, I was obsessed by all sorts of
purely ethical doubts and fears. For instance: might it not surprise people
that Lo was so consistently debarred from attending festive and funeral
functions in her immediate family? You remember--we had not had her at our
wedding. Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm of Coincidence
that had reached out to remove an innocent woman, might Coincidence not
ignore in a heathen moment what its twin lamb had done and hand Lo a
premature note of commiseration? True, the accident had been reported only
by the Ramsdale Journal--not by the Parkington Recorder or the
Climax Herald, Camp Q being in another state, and local deaths having
no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly
Haze had been informed already, and that at the very time I was on my way to
fetch her, she was being driven to Ramsdale by friends unknown to me. Still
more disquieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that
Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin,
had taken no steps toward becoming the legal guardian of his dead wife's
daughter (twelve years and seven months old). Would I ever dare take those
steps? I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined my nudity hemmed in
by mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law.
My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q,
tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major operation at an invented
hospital, and then keep moving with my sleepy nymphet from inn to inn while
her mother got better and better and finally died. But as I traveled
campward my anxiety grew. I could not bear to think I might not find Lolita
there--or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for some family
friend: not the Farlows, thank God--she hardly knew them--but might there
not be other people I had not reckoned with? Finally, I decided to make the
long-distance call I had simulated so well a few days before. It was raining
hard when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork,
one prong of which bypassed the city and led to the highway which crossed
the hills to Lake Climax and Camp Q. I flipped off the ignition and for
quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and
staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous
thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of
its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon
its argent chains. No wonder that stopping beside those nightmare cripples
is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station. A surprise awaited me when at
last the coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice was allowed to
answer mine.
Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone Monday (this
was Wednesday) on a hike in the hills with her group and was expected to
return rather late today. Would I care to come tomorrow, and what was
exactly--Without going into details, I said that her mother was
hospitalized, that the situation was grave, that the child should not be
told it was grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow
afternoon. The two voices parted in an explosion of warmth and good will,
and through some freak mechanical flaw all my coins came tumbling back to me
with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost made me laugh despite the
disappointment at having to postpone bliss. One wonders if this sudden
discharge, this spasmodic refund, was not correlated somehow, in the mind of
McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before ever learning
of it as I did now.
What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted
the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the wet town was like
silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo. Goodness, what crazy
purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those
days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves,
soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you
are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would
not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I have something
special in mind? coaxing voices asked me. Swimming suits? We have them in
all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black.
What about playsuits? Slips? No slips. Lo and I loathed slips.
One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric entry made by
her mother on Lo's twelfth birthday (the reader remembers that
Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure
motives of envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there; but
since the nymphet had no doubt grown somewhat in the last seven months, I
thought I could safely accept most of those January measurements: hip girth,
twenty-nine inches; thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus), seventeen;
calf girth and neck circumference, eleven; chest circumference,
twenty-seven; upper arm girth, eight; waist, twenty-three; stature,
fifty-seven inches; weight, seventy-eight pounds; figure, linear;
intelligence quotient, 121; vermiform appendix present, thank God.
Apart from measurements, I could of course visualize Lolita with
hallucinational lucidity; and nursing as I did a tingle on my breastbone at
the exact spot her silky top had come level once or twice with my heart; and
feeling as I did her warm weight in my lap (so that, in a sense, I was
always "with Lolita" as a woman is "with child"), I was not surprised to
discover later that my computation had been more or less correct. Having
moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that
I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed
kid for crushed kids. The painted girl in black who attended to all these
poignant needs of mine turned parental scholarship and precise description
into commercial euphemisms, such as "petite." Another, much older
woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be oddly
impressed by my knowledge of junior fashions; perhaps I had a midget for
mistress; so, when shown a skirt with "cute" pockets in front, I
intentionally put a naive male question and was rewarded by a smiling
demonstration of the way the zipper worked in the back of the skirt. I had
next great fun with all kinds of shorts and briefs--phantom little Lolitas
dancing, falling, daisying all over the counter. We rounded up the deal with
some prim cotton pajamas in popular butcher-boy style. Humbert, the popular
butcher.
There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large
stores where according to ads a career girl can get a complete desk-to-date
wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey
will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Life-size plastic
figures of snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted,
faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that
rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium. I
sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that
escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the
belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into
transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it,
and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day.
Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious
shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The
Enchanted Hunters with Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my
liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town
of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo's camp. I could have telephoned but
fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy croaks of broken
English, I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the
next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was! How some
of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the
wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and
small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll
mistake--the "g" at the end--which eventually came through may have been a
telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine.
And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the philer
I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he
deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the
monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules?
There were forty of them, all told--forty nights with a frail little sleeper
at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to
sleep? Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic
planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I
am so tired of being cynical.
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head--everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.
Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber--from
which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a
small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the
morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive
at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred
miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and
Briceland. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was
only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible
upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was
all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle
telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 a.m. I attempted to start,
I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left
Parkington.
I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine
grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes
in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco
cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive
commiseration of the camp mistress, a sluttish worn out female with rusty
hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was
sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet
the camp counselors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each
dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be
sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room
for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other:
"The poor guy looked like his own ghost.")
Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful
detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a
drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly
spreading a banknote over it with a bright ". . . and five!"; photographs of
girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to
the wall ("nature study"); the framed diploma of the camp's dietitian; my
trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly
Haze's behavior for July ("fair to good; keen on swimming and boating"); a
sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart . . . I was standing with my
back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heart
her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her
heavy suitcase. "Hi!" she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly,
glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully
endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face
was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a
month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy
rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval
between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower
Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking
though sun-colored little orphan au yeux battus (and even those
plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a
healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among
whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty
little Magdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But "in a wink," as
the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my
prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again--in
fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn
head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her
brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and
legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of
coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down
at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had
memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked
somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp
Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car
she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then,
her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked
down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the
striped and speckled forest.
"How's Mother?" she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway,
something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around
for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of
Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century
and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and
wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
"We should be at Briceland by dinner time," I said, "and tomorrow we'll
visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the
camp?"
"Uh-huh."
"Sorry to leave?"
"Un-un."
"Talk, Lo--don't grunt. Tell me something."
"What thing, Dad?" (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).
"Any old thing."
"Okay, if I call you that?" (eyes slit at the road).
"Quite."
"It's a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?"
"Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such
as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship."
"Bah!" said the cynical nymphet.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
"Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside."
"I think I'll vomit if I look at a cow again."
"You know, I missed you terribly, Lo."
"I did not. Fact I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it
does not matter one bit, because you've stopped caring for me, anyway. You
drive much faster than my mummy, mister."
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
"Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?"
"Well, you haven't kissed me yet, have you?"
Inly dying, inly moaning, I glimpsed a reasonably wide shoulder of road
ahead, and bumped and wobbled into the weeds. Remember she is only a child,
remember she is only--
Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed
into my arms. Not daring, not daring let myself go--not even daring let
myself realize that this (sweet wetness and trembling fire) was the
beginning of the ineffable life which, ably assisted by fate, I had finally
willed into being--not daring really kiss her, I touched her hot, opening
lips with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious; but she, with an
impatient wriggle, pressed her mouth to mine so hard that I felt her big
front teeth and shared in the peppermint taste of her saliva. I knew, of
course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery
in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance, and since (as the
psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and rules
of such girlish games are fluid, or at least too childishly subtle for the
senior partner to grasp--I was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and
cause her to start back in revulsion and terror. And, as above all I was
agonizingly anxious to smuggle her into the hermetic seclusion of The
Enchanted Hunters, and we had still eighty miles to go, blessed intuition
broke our embrace--a split second before a highway patrol car drew up
alongside.
Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:
"Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the
junction?"
"Why, no."
"We didn't," said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, her innocent hand on
my legs, "but are you sure it was blue, because--"
The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his
best smile and went into a U-turn.
We drove on.
"The fruithead!" remarked Lo. "He should have nabbed you."
"Why me for heaven's sake?"
"Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty, and--No, don't slow down,
you, dull bulb. He's gone now."
"We have still quite a stretch," I said, "and I want to get there
before dark. So be a good girl."
"Bad, bad girl," said Lo comfortably. "Juvenile delickwent, but frank
and fetching. That light was red. I've never seen such driving."
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
"Say, wouldn't Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were
lovers?"
"Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way."
"But we are lovers, aren't we?"
"Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don't
you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?"
"You talk like a book, Dad."
"What have you been up to? I insist you tell me."
"Are you easily shocked?"
"No. Go on."
"Let us turn into a secluded lane and I'll tell you."
"Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?"
"Well--I joined in all the activities that were offered."
"Ensuite?"
"Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to
develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact."
"Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet."
"We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under
the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with
the voice of the group."
"Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the
swear words. Anything else?"
"The Girl Scout's motto," said Lo rhapsodically, "is also mine. I fill
my life with worthwhile deeds such as--well, never mind what. My duty is--to
be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That
was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought,
word and deed."
"Now I do hope that's all, you witty child."
"Yep. That's all. No--wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn't
that terrific?"
"Well, that's better."
"We washed zillions of dishes. 'Zillions' you know is schoolmarm's
slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother
says--Now let me see--what was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what
fun."
"C'est bien tout?"
"C'est. Except for one little thing, something I simply can't
tell you without blushing all over."
"Will you tell it me later?"
"If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in
your old room or in a heap with Mother?"
"Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation,
Lo."
"Stop at that candy bar, will you," said Lo.
Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown
forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with
synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy
in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with
carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted
Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched
the stuff with her usual alacrity.
"How much cash do you have?" I asked.
"Not a cent," she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the
empty inside of her money purse.
"This is a matter that will be mended in due time," I rejoined archly.
"Are you coming?"
"Say, I wonder if they have a washroom."
"you are not going there," I said Firmly. "It is sure to be a vile
place. Do come on."
She was on the whole an obedient little girl and I kissed her in the
neck when we got back into the car.
"Don't do that," she said looking at me with unfeigned surprise.
"Don't drool on me. You dirty man."
She rubbed the spot against her raised shoulder.
"Sorry," I murmured. "I'm rather fond of you, that's all."
We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down again.
"Well, I'm also sort of fond of you," said Lolita in a delayed soft
voice, with a sort of sigh, and sort of settled closer to me.
(Oh, my Lolita, we shall never get there!)
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony
colonial architecture, curiosity sops and imported shade trees, when we
drove through the weakly lighted streets in search of the Enchanted Hunters.
The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a
queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the
box office of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.
"Oh, I want to see that picture. Let's go right after dinner. Oh,
let's!"
"We might," chanted Humbert--knowing perfectly well, the sly tumescent
devil, that by nine, when his show began, she would be dead in his
arms.
"Easy!" cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in front of
us, its backside carbuncles pulsating, stopped at a crossing.
If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the
very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the Haze jalopy with
its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes; but the passers-by I applied to
for directions were either strangers themselves or asked with a frown
"Enchanted what?" as if I were a madman; or else they went into such
complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical
generalities and strictly local clues (. . . then bear south after you hit
the court-house. . .) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of
their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails had
already digested the sweetmeat, was looking forward to a big meal and had
begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long become used to a kind of
secondary fate (McFate's inept secretary, so to speak) pettily interfering
with the boss's generous magnificent plan--to grind and grope through the
avenues of Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet
faced. In later months I could laugh at my inexperience when recalling the
obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated upon that particular inn
with its fancy name; for all along our route countless motor courts
proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen,
escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and
vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights,
what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable
highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became
as transparent as boxes of glass!
The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. A man and a girl, more
or less conjoined in a dark car under dripping trees, told us we were in the
heart of The Park, but had only to turn left at the next traffic light and
there we would be. We did not see any next traffic light--in fact, The Park
was as black as the sins it concealed--but soon after falling under the
smooth spell of a nicely graded curve, the travelers became aware of a
diamond glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared--and there
it was, marvelously and inexorably, under spectral trees, at the top of a
graveled drive--the pale palace of The Enchanted Hunters.
A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first sight to
forbid access; but then, by magic, a formidable convertible, resplendent,
rubious in the lighted rain, came into motion--was energetically backed out
by a broad-shouldered driver--and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had
left. I immediately regretted my haste for I noticed that my predecessor had
now taken advantage of a garage-like shelter nearby where there was ample
space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow his example.
"Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling squinting at the stucco
as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a childish hand tweaked
loose the frock-fold that had struck in the peach-cleft--to quote Robert
Browning. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged
and played on white pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked
and hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly
into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergy men. Lolita sank down
on her haunches to caress a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker
spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand--as who would not, my
heart--while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a
bald porcine old man--everybody was old in that old hotel--examined my
features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled) telegram,
wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and
finally said he was very sorry, he had held the room with the twin beds till
half past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had
clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and--"The name," I said coldly, "is
not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will
do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired."
The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo--still squatting,
listening in profile, lips parted, to what the dog's mistress, an ancient
lady swathed in violet veils, was telling her from the depths of a cretonne
easy chair.
Whatever doubts the obscene fellow had, they were dispelled by that
blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room, had one, in
fact--with a double bed. As to the cot--
"Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?" Potts, also pink and bald, with
white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be
done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen. Impatient
Humbert!
"Our double beds are really triple," Potts cozily said tucking me and
my kid in. "One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours
sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [my
static]. However--would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?
"I think it went to the Swoons," said Swine, the initial old clown.
"We'll manage somehow," I said. "My wife may join us later--but even
then, I suppose, we'll manage."
The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear
hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street,
Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is
about to palm)--and handed over to Uncle tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she
would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on
Charlotte's grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door,
and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and
crayfish Tom with the bags.
Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.
"Say, it's our house number," said cheerful Lo.
There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet
door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed
there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two
bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose
chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right.
I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but
thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter. Added
another. He withdrew. Click. Enfin seuls.
"Are we going to sleep in one room?" said Lo, her features
working in that dynamic way they did--not cross or disgusted (though plain
on the brink of it) but just dynamic--when she wanted to load a question
with violent significance.
"I've asked them to put in a cot. Which I'll use if you like."
"You are crazy," said Lo.
"Why, my darling?"
"Because, my dahrling, when dahrling Mother finds out she'll divorce
you and strangle me."
Just dynamic. Not really taking the matter too seriously.
"Now look here," I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet away
from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at
her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and
pleased closet-door mirror.
"Look here, Lo. Let's settle this once for all. For all practical
purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness for you. In
your mother's absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich,
and while we travel, we shall be obliged--we shall be thrown a good deal
together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind--how
shall I say--a kind--"
"The word is incest," said Lo--and walked into the closet, walked out
again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after
carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another
mistake, retired to the bathroom.
I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed, checked
the pill vial in my coat pocket, unlocked the--
She drifted out. I tried to embrace her: casually, a bit of controlled
tenderness before dinner.
She said: "Look, let's cut out the kissing game and get something to
eat."
It was then that I sprang my surprise.
Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if
stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that
distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I
wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the
same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled
feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked
through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a
flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and
quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as
if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible
bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood
waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried
it on.
Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me
with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes--for all the
world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets
imitate--while we moan and die.
"What's the katter with misses?" I muttered (word-control gone) into
her hair.
"If you must know," she said, "you do it the wrong way."
"Show, wight ray."
"All in good time," responded the spoonerette.
Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kizelans, dementissima. Elevator
clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi
adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil
quidquam; but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some
dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the treasure box.
From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into
normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing, drumming, retaining my
breath, my Lolita's "oo's" and "gee's" of girlish delight.
She had used the soap only because it was sample soap.
"Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am."
And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father
walking in front (nota bene: never behind, she is not a lady). As we stood
(now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned
without restraint and shook her curls.
"When did they make you get up at that camp?"
"Half-past--" she stifled another yawn--"six"--yawn in full with a
shiver of all her frame. "Half-past," she repeated, her throat filling up
again.
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It
was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted
hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of
pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen,
and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining
room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were,
happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
"Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?" said Lo in a soft
voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at
the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
"Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?"
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her
dancing glass.
"Course not," she said with a splutter of mirth. "I meant the writer
fellow in the Dromes ad."
Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!
When the dessert was plunked down--a huge wedge of cherry pie for the
young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she
expeditiously added to her pie--I produced a small vial containing Papa's
Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and
monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of
that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all
seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself
that the last diner had left, removed the stopped, and with the utmost
deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed
before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and
swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial
with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty's Sleep.
"Blue!" she exclaimed. "Violet blue. What are they made of?"
"Summer skies," I said, "and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of
emperors."
"No, seriously--please."
"Oh, just purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want
to try one?"
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a
long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister
was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to
tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume--oh,
how fast the magic potion worked!--and had been active in other ways too.
The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we
watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator,
she leaned against me, faintly smiling--wouldn't you like me to tell
you--half closing her dark-lidded eyes. "Sleepy, huh?" said Uncle Tom who
was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as
two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail,
tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our
room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking
in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.
"If I tell you--if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so
sleepy--head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won't make complaints?"
"Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I'll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give
you ten minutes."
"Oh, I've been such a disgusting girl," she went on, shaking her hair,
removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. "Lemme tell you--"
"Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed--for goodness sake, to bed."
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit
of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my
Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her
foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of
her thigh up to the crotch of her panties--she had always been singularly
absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was
the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in--after satisfying myself
that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of
carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and
formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few
minutes--say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle
Gustave used to say--I would let myself into that "342" and find my nymphet,
my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my
happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a
deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit
key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the
hemisphere,--indeed, the globe--that very same night.
Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory
innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her
purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely
anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto-even
if that "purity" (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had
been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt
homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned,
old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first
met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of "normal
child" had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its
fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlightened era by little
slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they
used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals
did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft
between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old
link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed
nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in
psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After
all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time
and place--even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American
schoolchildren--I still was under the impression that whatever went on among
those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment.
Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me
by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what
twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most
of them are--but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a
dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the "latency" period of girlhood.
Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection
to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss,
bewildered shadows conferred--and not to have heeded them, this is what I
regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had
already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel,
and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child
that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy
impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs
made to me by something in Lolita--the real child Lolita or some haggard
angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from
the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in
my pocket, she was mine. In the course of evocations and schemes to which I
had dedicated so many insomnias, I had gradually eliminated all the
superfluous blur, and by stacking level upon level of translucent vision,
had evolved a final picture. Naked, except for one sock and her charm
bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her--so I
foreglimpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her
honey-brown body, with the white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit
patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy
lamplight, a little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock. The cold key
with its warm wooden addendum was in my pocket.
I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for
the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure--even when the
velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon--that some rival devil or
influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph. In common
parlance, I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place
full of perspiring philistines and period objects.
I drifted to the Men's Room. There, a person in the clerical black--a
"hearty party" comme on dit--checking with the assistance of Vienna,
if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd's talk, and
looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy.
Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive
finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward.
Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite
sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she
had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if
we decided to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters' Hall
came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another
room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little
tables and a large one with "refreshments," was still empty except for a
hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte's manner
of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if
so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. "What a name for a woman," I said
and strolled away.
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. I would give her till
half-past-nine. Going back to the lobby, I found there a change: a number of
people in floral dresses or black cloth had formed little groups here and
there, and some elfish chance offered me the sight of a delightful child of
Lolita's age, in Lolita's type of frock, but pure white, and there was a
white ribbon in her black hair. She was not pretty, but she was a nymphet,
and her ivory pale legs and lily neck formed for one memorable moment a most
pleasurable antiphony (in terms of spinal music) to my desire for Lolita,
brown and pink, flushed and fouled. The pale child noticed my gaze (which
was really quite casual and debonair), and being ridiculously
self-conscious, lost countenance completely, rolling her eyes and putting
the back of her hand to her cheek, and pulling at the hem of her skirt, and
finally turning her thin mobile shoulder blades to me in specious chat with
her cow-like mother.
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at
the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black
night, full of ripple and stir. All I would do--all I would dare do--would
amount to such a trifle . . . Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next
to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could
not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off,
then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was
about to move away when his voice addressed me:
"Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie--she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"
"Dead."
"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow.
That dreadful crowd will be gone by then."
"We'll be gone too. Good night."
"Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot
of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?"
"Not now."
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was,
the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those
permanent guests of old hotels--and his white rocker. Nobody said anything
and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer
cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to
have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell. If a violin string
can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display
any hurry. As I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one
corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash--and beaming Dr. Braddock,
two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably
the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and
the enchanted cleric, were immortalized--insofar as the texture and print of
small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had
gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire
escape. One could still--but the key was already in the lock, and then I was
in the room.