Lolita, by Vladimir Nabukov
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The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a
skeleton glow came though the Venetian blind from the outside arclights;
these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed
the following situation.
Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side with
her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare
limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a
band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae.
I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kind
of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in a cinematographic
scene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee on
the edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me though the
striped shadows.
Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole
pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had for
object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed,
and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me "Barbara." Barbara,
wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised
motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly
turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I
waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade
parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her
faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my
narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled
up to the south of my stone-cold heels--and Lolita lifted her head and gaped
at me.
As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did
not even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though it
might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug,
it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit
weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old
rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had
been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or
not the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied upon
was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair
amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled
hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a
shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the
rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I
might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; but
hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended,
and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would
explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness.
Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly
sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these
essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try
to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's
even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I
almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of
heartburn (they call those fries "French," grand Dieu!) was added to
my discomfort.
She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to
launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l'Amant
Ridicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had
so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment--or in the
Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The
science of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in
one second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let us
wait.
There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was
supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place--"gracious living"
and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator's gate--some twenty yards
northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left
temple--alternated with the banging and booming of the machine's various
evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately
east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct
my viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would
brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of
good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my
cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and
it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the
wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick,
almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like
a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all
the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the
avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake--a staid,
eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees--degenerated into the
despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.
And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous
Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again,
and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to
bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare
shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped,
muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets
and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed,
within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, her
arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself
from the shadow of my embrace--doing this not consciously, not violently,
not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a
child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same:
Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his
hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.
The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water
which is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk with
radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where
Lolita's old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on
pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat
up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and cold
paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her
long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture that
carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips
against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine
while she drank) and was instantly asleep again.
I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had not
abandoned hope that the first might still consolidate her sleep. I started
to move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait
but incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my
glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred
or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my
thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface
reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again
my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere
of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting
into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.
Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet
halfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me
under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled
dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever.
If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distant
night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and
never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions
though which I crept were the patrimonies of poets--not crime's
prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all
softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt
the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually
be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more
than a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with a
confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a
fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness, dream I lay
in wait.
In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel
night. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and its door banged. A
little after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in several
installments, from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really a
monologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds to listen
(presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and
so no real meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact
intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was already
suffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, one
after the other, and the clattering and whining elevator began to rise and
take down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed,
and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage
Dr. Boyd said "Good morning to you" in a fruity voice, and birds were busy
in the trees, and then Lolita yawned.
Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps
years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by
six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am
going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.
Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep.
I just did not know what to do. Would she be shocked at finding me by her
side, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothes and lock
herself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once to
Ramsdale--to her mother's bedside--back to camp? But my Lo was a sportive
lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that beloved
chortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled over
to my side, and her warm brown hair came against my collarbone. I gave a
mediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair,
and we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some
rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she
had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could
have taught her that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learned
the lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, her
full underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burst
of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear--but
for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of
her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried
again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream
world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she
was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had
played. "You mean you have never--?"--her features twisted into a stare of
disgusted incredulity. "You have never--" she started again. I took time out
by nuzzling her a little. "Lay off, will you," she said with a twangy whine,
hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the
way she considered--and kept doing so for a long time--all caresses except
kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either "romantic slosh" or
"abnormal".)
"You mean," she persisted, now kneeling above me, "you never did it
when you were a kid?"
"Never," I answered quite truthfully.
"Okay," said Lolita, "here is where we start."
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of
Lolita's presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I
perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern
co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly
and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a
youngster's furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes
of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in
an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget
unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids,
she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life
and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange
predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way--at least
while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am
not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those
elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all
the perilous magic of nymphets.
I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you,
veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now
in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you
wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you
fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! had I been a painter, had the
management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and
commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own
making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:
There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in
flame-flower. There would have been nature studies--a tiger pursuing a bird
of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat.
There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as
it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb
a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal
glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have
been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group,
Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have
been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal
dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color,
stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.
I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present
boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of
heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world--nymphet love. The beastly
and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to
fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?
The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry
at twelve, was adopted by the Church, and is still preserved, rather
tacitly, in some of the United States. And fifteen is lawful everywhere.
There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed
by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery
and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. "In such
stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library]
as St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati, girls mature about the end of their
twelfth year." Dolores Haze was born less than three hundred miles from
stimulating Cincinnati. I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful
hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of
her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first
lover.
She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy
bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die
Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was
accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed,
I especially remember one wry face on an "ugh!" basis: jelly-mouth distended
sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation
and tolerance for young frailty.
Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her
tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a "very select" one as
she put it. That tent-mate ("quite a derelict character," "half-crazy," but
a "swell kid") instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo
refused to tell me her name.
"Was it Grace Angel?" I asked.
She shook her head. No, it wasn't it was the daughter of a big shot.
He--
"Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?"
"No, of course not. Her father--"
"Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?"
She swallowed and shook her head--and then did a double take.
"Say, how come you know all those kids?"
I explained.
"Well," she said. "They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but
not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes
now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive."
I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte
used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as "when my daughter
was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl."
I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions?
"Gosh no," exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a
falsely fluttering hand to her chest.
I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience. She had
entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after moving to Ramsdale from the
Middle West. What did she mean by "pretty bad"?
Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years, and Donald
Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the school, had done it with Hazel Smith
in his uncle's garage, and Kenneth Knight--who was the brightest--used to
exhibit himself wherever and whenever he had a chance, and--
"Let us switch to Camp Q," I said. And presently I got the whole story.
Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the
camp's best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo
"because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island" (some
swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning--mark, reader, every
blessed morning--Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or
Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress'
son, aged thirteen--and the only human male for a couple of miles around
(excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who
sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my
reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful
innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and
at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel,
while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush.
At first, Lo had refused "to try what it was like," but curiosity and
camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with
the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex
appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of
contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third nearby lake, a
considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the
booming young factory town of that name. Although conceding it was "sort of
fun" and "fine for the complexion," Lolita, I am glad to say, held Charlie's
mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been
roused by that filthy fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it,
despite the "fun."
By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense
of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day,
crept over me and hummed within my temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her
narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms
akimbo, feet (in new slippers with pussy-fur tops) wide apart, and through a
forechanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From the corridor
came the cooing voices of colored maids at work, and presently there was a
mild attempt to open the door of our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and
take a much-needed soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones
of potato chips. She tried on a two-piece navy wool, then a sleeveless
blouse with a swirly clathrate skirt, but the first was too tight and the
second too ample, and when I begged her to hurry up (the situation was
beginning to frighten me), Lo viciously sent those nice presents of mine
hurtling into a corner, and put on yesterday's dress. When she was ready at
last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf (in which I had
slipped quite a few pennies and two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy
herself a magazine in the lobby.
"I'll be down in a minute," I said. "And if I were you, my dear, I
would not talk to strangers."
Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack; but I was
forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was she up to something
downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned
nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an
ex-convict's saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores. Then I finished
dressing and had the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.
Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an
overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid movie magazine. A fellow of
my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed overnight to a spurious
country-squire atmosphere) was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and
stale newspaper. She wore her professional white socks and saddle oxfords,
and that bright print frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded
lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There she
sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed, and her pale eyes skimming along the
lines with every now and then a blink. Bill's wife had worshipped him from
afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the
famous young actor as he ate sundaes in Schwab's drugstore. Nothing could
have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish
spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted, or the
unconscious movement of her tongue exploring a touch of rosy rash around her
swollen lips; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an
energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious
literature; nothing could be more innocent than the part in that glossy
brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could be more
naive--But what sickening envy the lecherous fellow whoever he was--come to
think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss uncle Gustave, also a great
admirer of le dиcouvert--would have experienced had he known that
every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her
body--the body of some immortal demon disguised as a female child.
Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He
was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare's place? He
would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read
to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few
blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to
eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little
Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a
squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves
were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her
shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had
Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked
with a smile. "Look," said Lo making a weeping grimace, "let us get off the
subject." I then tried--also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my
lips--to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my
patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of
Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in
itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook
in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and
what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the
movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert Feel. It was
something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as
if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of
pain flitted across Lo's face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she
settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my
benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. "Nothing, you brute,"
she replied. "You what?" I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland.
Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This
was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a
heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times
that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had
surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark--and
plunged into a nightmare. I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let
me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the
writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable
nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing through that her
mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a
nice country road where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert
Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving
toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the
bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she,
however, who broke the silence:
"Oh, a squashed squirrel," she said. "What a shame."
"Yes, isn't it?" (eager, hopeful Hum).
"Let us stop at the next gas station," Lo continued. "I want to go to
the washroom."
"We shall stop wherever you want," I said. And then as a lovely,
lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage
were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny
road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I
suggested we might perhaps--
"Drive on," my Lo cried shrilly.
"Righto. Take it easy." (Down, poor beast, down.)
I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.
"You chump," she said, sweetly smiling at me. "You revolting creature.
I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me. I ought to call
the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man."
Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly
words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started
complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something
inside her. The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some
little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again
my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the
filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away.
Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my
windshield--they do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to
soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge.
She appeared at last. "Look," she said in that neutral voice that hurt
me so, "give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that
hospital. What's the number?"
"Get in," I said. "You can't call that number."
"Why?"
"Get in and slam the door."
She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I
swung onto the highway.
"Why can't I call my mother if I want to?"
"Because," I answered, "your mother is dead."
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments--swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To
any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional
Motel--clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument,
reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing
suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each
containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement
was even intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be
attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room
into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that
such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates
or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder,
and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a
prison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a
morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania
and rain.
We came to know--nous connшmes, to use a Flaubertian
intonation--the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the
brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the
Automobile Association describes as "shaded" or "spacious" or "landscaped"
grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its
golden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain
whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other
gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except "good beds"),
and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (". . . well, I
could give you . . .") turned down.
Nous connшmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of
their repetitious names--all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest
Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza
Courts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the
write-up, such as "Children welcome, pets allowed" (You are welcome,
you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an
endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely
non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn
instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your
neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary
complement in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had
instructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were
unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage,
beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices under
glass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will often see riders coming
down Main Street on their way back from a romantic moonlight ride.
"Often at 3 a.m.," sneered unromantic Lo).
Nous connшmes the various types of motor court operators, the
reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the
males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the
females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid
night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria
in one desperate scream.
We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones,
old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables in
depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photographs of the
landlady's children in all their instars. But I did surrender, now and then,
to Lo's predilection for "real" hotels. She would pick out in the book,
while I petted her in the parked car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed,
mysterious side-road, some highly recommended lake lodge which offered all
sorts of things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them, such as
congenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues--but which in my
mind conjured up odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweatshirts
and an ember-red cheek pressing against hers, while poor Dr. Humbert,
embracing nothing but two masculine knees, would cold-humor his piles on the
damp turf. Most empty to her, too, were those "Colonial" Inns, which apart
from "gracious atmosphere" and picture windows, promised "unlimited
quantities of M-m-m food." Treasured recollections of my father's palatial
hotel sometimes led me to seek for its like in the strange country we
traveled through. I was soon discouraged; but Lo kept following the scent of
rich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such
roadside signs as Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free. On the other
hand, I shudder when recalling that soi-disant "high-class" resort in
a Midwestern state, which advertised "raid-the-icebox" midnight snacks and,
intrigued by my accent, wanted to know my dead wife's and dead mother's
maiden names. A two-days' stay there cost me a hundred and twenty-four
dollars! And do you remember, Miranda, that other "ultrasmart" robbers' den
with complimentary morning coffee and circulating ice water, and no children
under sixteen (no Lolitas, of course)?
Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts which
became our habitual haunts, she would set the electric fan a-whirr, or
induce me to drop a quarter into the radio, or she would read all the signs
and inquire with a whine why she could not go riding up some advertised
trail or swimming in that local pool of warm mineral water. Most often, in
the slouching, bored way she cultivated, Lo would fall prostrate and
abominably desirable into a red springchair or a green chaise longue, or a
steamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and canopy, or a sling chair,
or any other lawn chair under a garden umbrella on the patio, and it would
take hours of blandishments, threats and promises to make her lend me for a
few seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room before
undertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy.
A combination of naоvetи and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue
silks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating
brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom,
intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and
what is called goofing off--a kind of diffused clowning which she thought
was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a
disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey
fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth--these were the
obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels
I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still
hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names
like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, and
sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various
candies were to my palate. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any
advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen
Land--Starasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you're
wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you
shouldn't." If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop--we had to
visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus
candy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by their
trochaic lilt. If some cafи sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was
automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it
was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object
of every foul poster. And she attempted--unsuccessfully-to patronize only
those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon
the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.
In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system of
monetary bribes which was to work such havoc with my nerves and her morals
somewhat later. I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent
concubine in submission and passable temper. A few years before, she had
spent a rainy summer under Miss Phalen's bleary eye in a dilapidated
Appalachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze or other in the
dead past. It still stood among its rank acres of golden rod on the edge of
a flowerless forest, at the end of a permanently muddy road, twenty miles
from the nearest hamlet. Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, the
solitude, the soggy old pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with an
energy of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half-revealed
tongue. And it was there that I warned her she would dwell with me in exile
for months and years if need be, studying under me French and Latin, unless
her "present attitude" changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you!
A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at my
driving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of temper by turning in
the middle of a highway with the implication that I was about to take her
straight to that dark and dismal abode. The farther, however, we traveled
away from it west, the less tangible that menace became, and I had to adopt
other methods of persuasion.
Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the
deepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our concourse, I was
clever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation in
keeping our relations secret, that it should become a second nature with
her, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasure
she might seek.
"Come and kiss your old man," I would say, "and drop that moody
nonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream male [the reader will
notice what pains I took to speak Lo's tongue], you swooned to records of
the number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: "Of my what? Speak
English"]. That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Humbert.
But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dream
daughter.
"My chхre Dolorиs ! I want to protect you, dear, from all the
horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways, and alas,
comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woods
during the bluest of summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay your
guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianship
before long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal
terminology, terminology that accepts as rational the term 'lewd and
lascivious cohabitation.' I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking
indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the
therapist--a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction. I am your
daddum, Lo. Look, I've a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling,
what it says. I quote: the normal girl--normal, mark you--the normal girl is
usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the
forerunner of the desired elusive male ('elusive' is good, by Polonius!).
The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived)
will encourage a companionship between father and daughter,
realizing--excuse the corny style--that the girl forms her ideals of romance
and of men from her association with her father. Now, what association does
this cheery book mean--and recommend? I quote again: Among Sicilians sexual
relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of
course, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked
upon with disapproval by the society of which she is part. I'm a great
admirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people,
Lo, and great lovers. But let's not digress. Only the other day we read in
the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded
guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old
girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever these are. Dolores
darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to
consider yourself my cross-country slave, and I deplore the Mann Act as
lending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics
take against tight-zippered Philistines. I am your father, and I am
speaking English, and I love you.
"Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having
impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you
complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us suppose
they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to
know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree
sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is ten years.
So, I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan?
Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public
Welfare--which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the
Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away
your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don't know if you
have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible
and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy
neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more
or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile
detention home, or one of those admirable girls' protectories where you knit
things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go
there, Lolita--my Lolita, this Lolita will leave plainer
words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized,
my pet, c'est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here,
my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no,
allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the
situation, this is the choice. Don't you think that under the circumstances
Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?"
By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a
certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a
child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that
background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in
keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had
to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to
look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a
shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and
collapsed. The object in view might be anything--a lighthouse in Virginia, a
natural cave in Arkansas converted to a cafи, a collection of guns and
violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in
Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local
museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever--but it had to be
there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would
feign gagging as soon as we got to it.
By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my
best for hours on end to give her the impression of "going places," of
rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have
never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us,
across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those
long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance
floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my
calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which
I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the
delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a
paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside
had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused
recognition because of those painted oilclothes which were imported from
America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European
nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic
green views they depicted--opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the
dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of
greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities
became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them.
Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow
suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm,
peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray
cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced
trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a
wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into
misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral
swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon,
pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer,
and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green
corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance
toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of
humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper
cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A
great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by
toilet signs--Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's; while
lost in an artist's dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the
gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant
hill scrambling out--scarred but still untamed--from the wilderness of
agriculture that was trying to swallow it.
At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant
Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little
sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the
heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks
would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a
furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote
car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang
for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as we
pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush"
appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red
bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading
into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady
gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking
pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along
the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows,
immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across
all human rules of traffic.
My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary
we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid
that chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our
route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then
meandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu'on
appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there,
veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not
too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, and
have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes,
almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check these
recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through
southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north
through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost
reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad
lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo's
strident remonstrations, little Lo's birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog
producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out
in the college town of Beardsley.
Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only
the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist
traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far
from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard,
twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d'йtre (these French
clichиs are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from
kiss to kiss.
Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke that Magnolia
Garden in a southern state which cost me four bucks and which, according to
the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons: because John
Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world's
fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker's Guide had marked it with a star;
and finally, because . . . O, Reader, My Reader, guess! . . . because
children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will "walk starry-eyed
and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can
influence a life." "Not mine," said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench
with the fillings of two Sunday papers in her lovely lap.
We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside
restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head (dark trace of long tear
at inner canthus), "humorous" picture post cards of the posterior "Kurort"
type, impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of
celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several
horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the
ignoble counter; and all the way to the expensive place with the subdued
lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters (ex-convicts or
college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, the sable eyebrows of her
male of the moment, and an orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets.
We inspected the world's largest stalagmite in a cave where three
southeastern states have a family reunion; admission by age; adults one
dollar, pubescents sixty cents. A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle
of Blue Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby, Lo a
dime, very reasonable. The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log
cabin where Lincoln was born. A boulder, with a plaque, in memory of the
author of "Trees" (by now we are in Poplar Cove, N.C., reached by what my
kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour book angrily calls "a very narrow
road, poorly maintained," to which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe). From
a hired motor-boat operated by an elderly, but still repulsively handsome
White Russian, a baron they said (Lo's palms were damp, the little fool),
who had known in California good old Maximovich and Valeria, we could
distinguish the inaccessible "millionaires' colony" on an island, somewhere
off the Georgia coast. We inspected further: a collection of European hotel
picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort,
where with a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of my father's
Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the retouched palm trees.
"So what?" said Lo, squinting at the bronzed owner of an expensive car who
had followed us into the Hobby House. Relics of the cotton era. A forest in
Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work
of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my
long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood.
Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour
book, "may [I liked the "may"] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who
will {I liked the "will" even better] tap-dance for pennies" (what fun),
while "its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with
visitors" (naughty). Collections of frontier lore. Ante-bellum homes with
iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie
ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the
fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way,
and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing. The Menninger
Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it. A patch of
beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy
with creeping white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the
Old Oregon Trail; and Abiliene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something
Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties
never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill;
south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and
sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing
from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of
neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen;
pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words"
(blasи Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant
lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up,
their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush;
oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a
rich rug of lucerne at its foot.
Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and
the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow;
down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was
snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit.
Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various
items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear
Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain.
Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12 free, Lo
a young captive. A collection of a local lady's homemade sculptures, closed
on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. Conception Park, in a
town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere,
hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim
flowers. Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill
was colorfully hanged seventy years ago. Fish hatcheries. Cliff dwellings.
The mummy of a child (Florentine Bea's Indian contemporary). Our twentieth
Hell's Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that
tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my
groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away
the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue
view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying
it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless
whisper--"Look, the McCrystals, please, let's talk to them, please"--let's
talk to them, reader!--"please! I'll do anything you want, oh, please. .
."). Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American
Refrigerator Transit Company. Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal
pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty
million years ago, when I was a child. A lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an
active Adam's apple, ogling Lo and her orange-brown bare midriff, which I
kissed five minutes later, Jack. Winter in the desert, spring in the
foothills, almonds in bloom. Reno, a dreary town in Nevada, with a nightlife
said to be "cosmopolitan and mature." A winery in California, with a church
built in the shape of a wine barrel. Death Valley. Scotty's Castle. Works of
Art collected by one Rogers over a period of years. The ugly villas of
handsome actresses. R. L. Stevenson's footprint on an extinct volcano.
Mission Dolores: good title for book. Surf-carved sandstone festoons. A man
having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park.
Blue, blue Crater Lake. A fish hatchery in Idaho and the State Penitentiary.
Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows
of bubbling mud--symbols of my passion. A herd of antelopes in a wildlife
refuge. Our hundredth cavern, adults one dollar, Lolita fifty cents. A
chateau built by a French marquess in N.D. The Corn Palace in S.D.; and the
huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite. The Bearded Woman read
our jingle and now she is no longer single. A zoo in Indiana where a large
troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus'
flagship. Billions of dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every
window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore. Fat gulls on
big stones as seen from the ferry City of Cheboygan, whose brown
woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the
aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer.
Lincoln's home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture
that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings.
We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at
Lacework Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on
Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street
and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles,
because the tickets to some studio or other were sold out; at a motel called
Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my
Lolita, and where she asked, ю propos de rien, how long did I think
we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together and
never behaving like ordinary people? On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner
of W. Washington, facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun
Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely mixed,
with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor
Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in
Nebraska, on Main Street, near the First National Bank, established 1889,
with a view of a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond
that the white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner of
Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name.
We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo
pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest
soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki's
viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing
to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with
brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the
college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly
as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his
sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the
clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud
shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs
to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.
"Let's take him," Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees together in a
way she had, as some particularly disgusting pollex, some man of my
age and shoulder breadth, with the face ю claques of unemployed
actor, walked backwards, practically in the path of our car.
Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo! Owing perhaps
to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish
appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel
pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued
pools, into fits of concupiscence which might have tickled my pride, had it
not incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and
I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some
amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and
watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this
very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a
perfect love song of wisecracks.
When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particularly
violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness of my lulled heart allow
her--indulgent Hum!--to visit the rose garden or children's library across
the street with a motor court neighbor's plain little Mary and Mary's
eight-year-old brother, Lo would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary
trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling,
golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The reader may
well imagine what I answered my pet when--rather uncertainly, I admit--she
would ask me if she could go with Carl and Al here to the roller-skating
rink.
I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let her go to
one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if I accompanied her,
since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. We wrangled out a
compromise: I remained in the car, among other (empty) cars with their noses
to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in
pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the
wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most
of the other girls did. I kept counting the revolutions of the rolling
crowd--and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was
together with three hoodlums whom I had heard analyze a moment before the
girl skaters from the outside--and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who
had arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans and slacks.
At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or California, a
policeman's cousin would peer with such intensity at us that my poor heart
wobbled. "Any honey?" he would inquire, and every time my sweet fool
giggled. I still have, vibrating all along my optic nerve, visions of Lo on
horseback, a link in the chain of a guided trip along a bridle trail: Lo
bobbing at a walking pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous
red-necked dude-rancher behind; and I behind him, hating his fat
flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a slow truck
on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, I would see her floating away
from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a
glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting
for her, for her.
In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way,
anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of
children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling
and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel
Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my
vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave
school--always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so
easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other
people's whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me
while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green
boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun.
As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and wherever
possible the use of swimming pools with other girl-children. She adored
brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would
settle down in the rich post-meridian shade after my own demure dip, and
there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or
nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped,
bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants
and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I marvel that she
was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of
the mourning doves, and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my
sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious
chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment;
and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that
any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so
two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes
blended in the air--once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the
daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time--mais je
divague.
Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid
jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn away for a
moment--to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our cabin was at last
ready after the morning change of linen--and Lo and Behold, upon returning,
I would find the former, les yeux perdus, dipping and kicking her
long-toed feet in the water on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on
either side of her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet
beauty and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure to
cause to se tordre--oh Baudelaire!--in recurrent dreams for months to
come.
I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in
common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be
hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of
very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer,
with a harem of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now
and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would
put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the
ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power made me
recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish
the great Gobbert! Until she began taking those lessons, I thought she would
never learn the game. On this or that hotel court I would drill Lo, and try
to relive the days when in a hot gale, a daze of dust, and queer lassitude,
I fed ball after ball to gay, innocent, elegant Annabel (gleam of bracelet,
pleated white skirt, black velvet hair band). With every word of persistent
advice I would only augment Lo's sullen fury. To our games, oddly enough,
she preferred--at least, before we reached California--formless pat ball
approximations--more ball hunting than actual play--with a wispy, weak,
wonderfully pretty in an ange gauche way coeval. A helpful spectator,
I would go up to that other child, and inhale her faint musky fragrance as I
touched her forearm and held her knobby wrist, and push this way or that her
cool thigh to show her the back-hand stance. In the meantime, Lo, bending
forward, would let her sunny-brown curls hang forward as she stuck her
racket, like a cripple's stick, into the ground and emitted a tremendous ugh
of disgust at my intrusion. I would leave them to their game and look on,
comparing their bodies in motion, a silk scarf round my throat; this was in
south Arizona, I think--and the days had a lazy lining warmth, and awkward
Lo would slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of
a serve into the net, and show the wet glistening young down of her armpit
as she brandished her racket in despair, and her even more insipid partner
would dutifully rush out after every ball, and retrieve none; but both were
enjoying themselves beautifully, and in clear ringing tones kept the exact
score of their ineptitudes all the time.
One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from the
hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came back with two tall glasses of
pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden void within my chest made
me stop as I saw that the tennis court was deserted. I stooped to set down
the glasses on a bench and for some reason, with a kind of icy vividness,
saw Charlotte's face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white
shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path in the company
of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I sprang after them, but as I
was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if
life's course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in
shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with
their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball.
I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did
everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time. How charming it
was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few
accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her
right hand holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser
nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was
all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that
oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the
movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered,
damp-smelling sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would
hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her turn the
repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms,
and step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still
unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last
finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy,
dark-haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep
into Lo's hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around
the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a
quick connection before dinner.
"Whose cat has scratched poor you?" A full-blown fleshy handsome woman
of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive might ask me at
the "lodge," during a table d'hote dinner followed by dancing promised to
Lo. This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people
as possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as
many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.
She would be, figuratively speaking wagging her tiny tail, her whole
behind in fact as little bitches do--while some grinning stranger accosted
us and began a bright conversation with a comparative study of license
plates. "Long way from home!" Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about
me, would suggest her going to a movie with their children. We had some
close shaves. The waterfall nuisance pursued me of course in all our
caravansaries. But I never realized how wafery their wall substance was
until one evening, after I had loved too loudly, a neighbor's masculine
cough filled the pause as clearly as mine would have done; and next morning
as I was having breakfast at the milk bar (Lo was a late sleeper, and I
liked to bring her a pot of hot coffee in bed), my neighbor of the eve, an
elderly fool wearing plain glasses on his long virtuous nose and a
convention badge on his lapel, somehow managed to rig up a conversation with
me, in the course of which he inquired, if my missus was like his missus a
rather reluctant get-upper when not on the farm; and had not the hideous
danger I was skirting almost suffocated me, I might have enjoyed the odd
look of surprise on his thin-lipped weather-beaten face when I dryly
answered, as I slithered off my stool, that I was thank God a widower.
How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until
she had done her morning duty. And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a
passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending to all the wants of
my little auburn brunette's body! My only grudge against nature was that I
could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young
matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs,
her comely twin kidneys. On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky
closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against
my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical
kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper,
as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a
shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.
Her eyes would follow the adventures of her favorite strip characters: there
was one well-drawn sloppy bobby-soxer, with high cheekbones and angular
gestures, that I was not above enjoying myself; she studied the photographic
results of head-on collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time,
and circumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures of naked-thighed
beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photographs of local
brides, some in full wedding apparel, holding bouquets and wearing glasses.
A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or explore her
tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in her fist (Charlotte's method)
and then would turn to the column Let's Explore Your Mind.
"Let's explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if children
obeyed a few don'ts? Don't play around public toilets. Don't take candy or
rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car."
". . . and the brand of the candy," I volunteered.
She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was
a good day, mark, O reader!
"If you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to read--"
"We," I quip-quoted, "medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle--"
"If," she repeated, "you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to
read and write--this is what the guy means, isn't it, you dope--=scratch the
number somehow on the roadside."
"With your little claws, Lolita."
She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash
curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to
me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain
repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident "what d'you
think you are doing?" was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to
offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To
think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would--invariably, with
icy precision--plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel
than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a
moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly,
I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin
that I did not manage to be happy. Readeer must understand that in the
possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it
were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth
comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that
bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite
our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made,
and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all,
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the
color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
The able psychiatrist who studies my case--and whom by now Dr. Humbert
has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination--is no doubt
anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at
last, the "gratification" of a lifetime urge, and release from the
"subconscious" obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial
little Miss Lee.
Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach,
though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of gray
water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling
companion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or
whatnot, far from being the impulse of the subconscious, had become the
rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and
arranged things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic
side was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick damp sky, muddy
waves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-fact mist--what could be
further removed from the crisp charm, the sapphire occasion and rosy
contingency of my Riviera romance? A couple of semitropical beaches on the
Gulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties
and swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach, facing the
phantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some rather perverse privacy in a kind of
cave whence you could hear the shrikes of a lot of girl scouts taking their
first surf bath on a separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but
the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo
was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as
little desire for her as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned readers may perk
up if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of sympathetic seaside
somewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation had
occurred much earlier: at the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze,
alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared tome, golden and brown,
kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious,
dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (although there
was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood.).
So much for those special sensations, influence, if not actually
brought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry. Consequently, I turned
away--I headed my Lolita away--from beaches which were either too bleak when
lone, or too populous when ablaze. However, in recollection, I suppose, of
my hopeless hauntings of public parks in Europe, I was still keenly
interested in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitable
playgrounds in the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here,
too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must now register (as I
gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread
that ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic,
tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful,
heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung,
innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and
exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped
and kissed on the trim turf of old-would mountainsides, on the innerspring
moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks,
and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of
America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most
ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's
buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick
his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of
potential snakes--que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons!--while the
crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to
gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.
I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline,
where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded all
along a purly moutain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romantic
spot, a hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. The
slope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned
breather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew.
Beneath the lap-robe I had spread fo Lo, dryflowers crepitated softly.
Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper talus and a tangle
of shrugs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and man
alike. Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in
cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.
It was then that we came close to detection than ever before, and no
wonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for rural amours.
I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my
arms;--a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had
become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!
I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a
moment of blind impatient passion, and thee she was sprawling and sobbing,
and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the
atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I
know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss;
and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my
poor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange
and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat dark
hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood
crouching and gaping at us, both in blue playsuits, blending with the
mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment--and
within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball
among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was
transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a
raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while
staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestone
children.
Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know
that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I
remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order
one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the
worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast's flanks
pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up,
and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car.
Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a
little blue-black beard, un monsieur trхs bien, in silk shirt and
magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist's husband, was gravely
taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was
well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and
a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me
in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.
There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre
once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritable
passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high
school year). We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don't
know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year,
and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the
newsreels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with
different main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kinds
were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real
singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof
sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned, and where, at the
end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant
father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on
fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic
newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a
robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through
sewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them
less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced,
blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring
Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust
through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing
mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the
timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie
knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the
belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that
would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show
but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero
embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small
airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of
popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger
was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocently
encircled Lo's shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two
harpies behind us started muttering the queerest things--I do not know if I
understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle
hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.
Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we were
traversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty miles earlier I
had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley
was a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense,
whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where
entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and
childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic
which prompted a semblance of explanation from me. Enmeshed in her wild
words (swell chance . . . I'd be a sap if I took your opinion seriously . .
. Stinker . . . You can't boss me . . . I despise you . . . and so forth), I
drove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in
continuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put
their spotlight on the car, and told me to pull over. I shushed Lo who was
automatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with malevolent
curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she never
did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a sense, my Lo was even more
scared of the law than I--and when the kind officers pardoned us and
servilely we crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked
limp prostration.
At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will laugh--but
really and truly I somehow never managed to find out quite exactly what the
legal situation was. I do not know it yet. Oh, I have learned a few odds and
ends. Alabama prohibits a guardian from changing the ward's residence
without an order of the court; Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat,
provides that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of any
child under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into play.
Query: is the stepfather of a gaspingly adorable pubescent pet, a stepfather
of only one month's standing, a neurotic widower of mature years and small
but independent means, with the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a few
madhouses behind him, is he to be considered a relative, and thus a natural
guardian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify some
Welfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a petition?), and have a
court's agent investigate meek, fishy me and dangerous Dolores Haze? The
many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consulted
at the public libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyond
darkly insinuating that the state is the super-guardian of minor children.
Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impressive volume
on the legal side of marriage, completely ignored stepfathers with
motherless girls on their hands and knees. My best friend, a social service
monograph(Chicago, 1936), which was dug out for me at great pains form a
dusty storage recess by an innocent old spinster, said "There is no
principle that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive and
enters the fray only when the child's situation becomes conspicuously
perilous." A guardian, I concluded, was appointed only when he expressed his
solemn and formal desire; but months might elapse before he was given notice
to appear at a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantime
the fair demon child was legally left to her own devices which, after all,
was the case of Dolores Haze. Then came the hearing. A few questions from
the bench, a few reassuring answers from the attorney, a smile, a nod, a
light drizzle outside, and the appointment was made. And still I dared not.
Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in yourhole. Courts became extravagantly
active only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedy
guardians, a robbed orphan, a third, still greedier, party. But here all was
in perfect order, and inventory had been made, and her mother's small
property was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy
seemed to be to refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some
Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet?
Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to
give me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean's cancer to do
anything more than what he had promised--namely, to look after Chrlotte's
meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death.
I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and so
could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as the
reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance
nor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional advice
elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate
in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be
snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale
which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a
strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and
foundation.
I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Bearsley College for Women) I
would have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able to
study, such as Woerner's Treatise "On the American Law of Guardianship" and
certain United States Children's Bureau Publications. I also decided that
anything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she
lived. I could persuade her to do so many things--their list might stupefy
a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could
never make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or stories
in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to
her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the
Limberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she was
quite sure she would not fritter away her "vacation" on such highbrow
reading matter.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go
to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across
the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a
couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little
Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and
ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of
insanity to the other--from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get
rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had
evaporated--to the thought that with patience and luck might have her
produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita
the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be
dans la force de l'бge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind,
was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard
encore vert--or was it green rot?--bizarre, tender, salivating Dr.
Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a
granddad.
In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father
to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and
reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own
Daughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her
thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially "beautiful"
illustrations, of Andersen's The Little Mermaid. But even at our very
best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo's glance skipping from
the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in
a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or
silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed,
blood-bespattered car with a young woman's shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we
drove on: "that was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to
that jerk in the store"); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself
as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty
locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would
improvement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl's
day?
In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of there
being a comparatively sedate school for girls located there, but also by the
presence of the women's college. In my desire to get myself casи, to
attach myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blend
with, I thought of a man I knew in the department of French at Beardsley
College; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and had
attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention of
doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions,
there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick
calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe,
the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried
alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as
presently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why
old Gaston Godin's company would be particularly safe.
Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under the
strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper motor courts; but every
now and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude
ranch, to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on
sightseeing and Lo's clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a still
vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and major
repairs. In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the
papers which the authorities have so kindly allowed me to use for the
purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute
the following. During that extravagant year 1947-1948, August to August,
lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and repairs,
1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days of
actual motion (we covered about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days of
interpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000
dollars, or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surely
forgotten a number of items.
And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the
satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac
garland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to her
stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had
really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking that our long journey had
only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy,
enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a
collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in
the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.
When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove to 14 Thayer
Street, a grave little lad met us with the keys and a note from Gaston who
had rented the house for us. My Lo, without granting her new surroundings
one glance, unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay
down on the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in the same
precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the nether
anatomy of a lamp table.
I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up
somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence with
vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place
bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 distant): it was
the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green
drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more
consistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My
study turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor to
ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on
sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College.
I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, with
lunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium, would, while cultivating all
those young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as well.
Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had
warned me that the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls
are taught, as he put it with a foreigner's love for such things: "not to
spell very well, but to smell very well." I don't think they achieved even
that.
At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my
child's "nice blue eyes" (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that
"French genius" (a genius! Gaston!)--and then, having turned Dolly over to a
Miss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and
said:
"We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students
become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which
nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What
we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is
why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are
confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an
age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as
much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean
to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me.
Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which
consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores,
malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and
even hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of
some of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructive
directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the
sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we
are more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with due
respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate
freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old
books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a
gynecologist feeling a tumor. We thing, Dr. Humburg, in organissmal and
organizational terms. We have done away with the mass or irrelevant topics
that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in
former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will
need in managing their lives and--as the cynic might add--the lives of their
husbands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of a star is
important, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may be
even more important to the budding housewife. You say that all you expect a
child to obtain from school is a sound education. But what do we mean by
education? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon; I mean,
you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclopedia and he or she
would know as much as or more than a school could offer. Dr. Hummer, do you
realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less
vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?--to repeat a pun that I heard the
Beardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the other day. We live not
only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Wrds without
experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for
Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?"
This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intelligent ladies
who had been connected with the school, and they affirmed that the girls did
quite a bit of sound reading and that the "communication" line was more or
less ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially
remunerative modern touch, though actually it remained as prim as a prawn.
Another reason attracting me to that particular school may seem funny
to some readers, but it was very important to me, for that is the way I am
made. Across our street, exactly in front of our house, there was, I
noticed, a gap of weedy wasteland, with some colorful bushes and a pile of
bricks and a few scattered planks, and the foam of shabby mauve and chrome
autumn roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmery
section of School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and immediately
beyond that, the playground of the school Apart from the psychological
comfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly's day
adjacent to mine, I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have in
distinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, the
statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl
children playing around Dolly during recess; unfortunately, on the very
first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down the
gap, and in no time a construction of tawny wood maliciously arose beyond
that fence utterly blocking my magic vista; and as soon as they had erected
a sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd builders
suspended their work and never appeared again.
In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and
golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable
fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my
relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who
might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to
me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his
car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if these
verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to
sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded
any evolution toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit of
scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two
professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly
feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with
me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the
naоve charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most
dangerous one, a sharp-nosed stock character whose late brother had been
attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I
remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living room window,
feverishly awaiting my darling's return from school. The odious spinster,
trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcet
goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a
cold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw
weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her knees
showing pink above her clumsy wellingtons, a sheepish frightened little
smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, which--owing perhaps to the
pale wintry light--looked almost plain, in a rustic, German,
mдgdlein-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East's
questions "And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father's
occupation? And where did you love before?" Another time the loathsome
creature accosted me with a welcoming whine--but I evaded her; and a few
days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nice
mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and
curl up in a chair to look through the "loads of beautiful books my dear
mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full
blast till all hours of the night."
I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman and
cook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum cleaner from the previous
tenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I had
become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner
that Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harmless woman
had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become a
great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the
feeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that, on the rare
occasions where Holigan's presence happened to coincide with Lo's, simple Lo
might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat. I
often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and any moment some
thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window
to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would
have paid a small fortune to watch.
A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed--or at least
tolerated with relief--his company was the spell of absolute security that
his ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no special
reason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centered and abstract to
notice or suspect anything that might lead to a frank question on his part
and a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was my
good herald. Had he discovered mes goшts and Lolita's status, it
would have interested him only insofar as throwing some light on the
simplicity of my attitude towards him, which attitude was as free of
polite strain as it was of ribald allusions; for despite his colorless mind
and dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the
burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor
tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical
pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plastered
wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he
ambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout
legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his
English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a
supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knew
by name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away from
me)and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard,
and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the
house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs
inside--in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with
amusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned walls among
the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio--he painted a
little, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really not
more than a garret) with large photographs of pensive Andrи Gide,
Tchaоkovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky
(all thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing
professor at a Midwesten university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor
people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also an
album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and
when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston
would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout "Oui, ils sont
gentils." His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and
artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the
conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical
designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl
or veined vase, he would say "Prenez donc une de ces poires. La bonne
dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer." Or:
"Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que
j'exхcre." (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.)
For obvious reasons, I preferred myhouse to his for the games of chess
we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol as
he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were
a corpse. Wheezing he would mediate for ten minutes--then make a losing
move. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi!
With a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which
made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a
deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself.
Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo's bare
feet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs; but Gaston's
outgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of those
naked rhythms--and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a
straight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two, and only
when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and
flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her
toes--only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek
a if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable
Queen.
Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board--and it was
every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on his
pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith release
her limp fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into his
chair to topple into the trap I had laid for him. One day around Christmas,
after I had not seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me "Et toutes
vos fillettes, elles vont bien?" from which it became evident to
me that he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorial
categories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole series of her
appearances: blue jeans, a skirt, shorts, a quilted robe.
I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a year
later, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not return, he got
involved in a sale histoire, in Napes of all places!). I would have
hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a
queer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There he was devoid of
any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum
repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life,
triumphantly ignorant of the English language--there he was in priggish New
England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young--oh, having a
grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I.
I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop
in Lolita's morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had never
amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I was
weak, I was not wise, my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the
human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only
increased; and of this she took advantage.
Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic
obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era--and
went up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous
arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small
presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the
moon--although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even
a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly
some item of juvenile amusement. She was, however, not easy to deal with.
Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--per
day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to
deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without
which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of
the very nature of love's languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the
magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during one
schoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even
four bucks! O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy
noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some
sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the
margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins
in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she
gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other
day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit
drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter
in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I
would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the
painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made
myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books
(fittingly--Treasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behind
Whistler's Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some
change--say twenty-four sixty--which I quietly removed, upon which, next
day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief.
Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which
I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically
by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in
the school's theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she
might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I
believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty
dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood--or the
foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the
wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the
barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
I did my best, your Honor, to tackele the problem of boys. Oh, I used
even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out
how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don't frighten away daughter's friend. Maybe it
is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her
attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she's charming
and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an
executive's office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying
Jane's school books. Remember? Don't you want your daughter, now that her
turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes?
Don't you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the
admiration and company of boys she likes? Don't you want them to have
wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not
make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at
ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules don't explode out loud in front of her
partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And
stop making the boys feel she's the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under "absolutely forbidden"
and another under "reluctantly allowed." Absolutely forbidden were dates,
single or double or triple--the next step being of course mass orgy. She
might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with
occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance;
and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable
group in Butler's Academy for Bo[ys for their annual ball (heavily
chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of
fourteen can don her first "formal" (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed
teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party
a t our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl
friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler
dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would
never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck
in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge
out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if "only
discussing his relations with a friend of mine."
Lo was enraged by all this--called me a lousy crook and worse--and I
would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest
relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific
satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the
conventional program, the stock pastimes, the "things that are done," the
routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child,
especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most
mythopoeic nymphet in October's orchard-haze.
Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the
course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper
contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I
controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time
leaks with over-elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of
course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine
fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel--and can now vouchsafe
for the accuracy of my feeling--that there was no reason for serious alarm.
I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young
throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the
background; but because it was to me "overwhelmingly obvious" (a favorite
expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys--from
the perspiring nincompoop whom "holding hands" thrills, to the
self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car--equally bored my
sophisticated young mistress. "All this noise about boys gags me," she had
scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona's hand (Mona
is due any minute now), there was the sly quip: "What about Rigger?" (due
too).
Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company.
There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first
snow--saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our
porch. She wre her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small
brown cap on my favorite hairdo--the fringe in front and the swirl at the
sides and the natural curls at the back--and her damp-dark moccasins and
white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to
her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time:
she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward,
cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series
all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a
restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to
walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love.
She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite
adolescent way of showing one is literally "doubled up" with laughter by
inclining one's head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless
merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and
walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly
liked--perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable
confession--her trick of sighing "oh dear!" in humorous wistful submission
to fate, or emitting a long "no-o" in a deep almost growling undertone when
the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all--since we are speaking of
movement and youth--I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on
her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily,
then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and
then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a
magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side
of her upper lip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale
shade and sun.
On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I
had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave-child and the
bangles of demeanor she naоvely affected the winter before in california.
Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which
the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in
the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session of
adoration and despair in Lolita's cold bedroom, I used to review the
concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed
before the mind's red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic,
probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his
daughter off to school I watched him greet with his slow smile and
pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of
the plague (and would head, I knew, for master's gin at the first
opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of religious
tracts--who cared?--I saw neighbor what's his name, I think they are French
or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather
gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends,
wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be
seen with his daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its
violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and
wait for a "table for two" still filthy with your predecessor's crumbs).
Seen on weekdays, around one p.m. , saluting with dignity Argus-eyed East
while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around the damned
evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to
clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young
women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking
across the campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also
taught Bible in Beardsley School). "Somebody told me her mother was a
celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I
presume. Is that so? I see. How sad." (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly
pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket, in the wake
of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a
goat. Shoveling the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white
muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious haste (even
taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my school-girl daughter into the
house. Taking Dolly to the dentist--pretty nurse beaming at her--old
magazines--ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in town,
Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental
knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced,
becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.'s musical
little girl on her father's right, and the musical little boy of Professor
W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Providence) on Monsieur G. G.'s
left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is
extinguished. Brightly pajamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly's
bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached
lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after
all, saying don't be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court.
Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of Dolly's: "First time I've seen
a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir--except in movies, of course."
Her girlfriends, whom I looked forward to meet, proved on the whole
disappointing. There was Opal Something, and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman,
and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations,
of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature
who doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school tennis
champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a
true nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not come--was perhaps not
allowed to come--to our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural
sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry
except Eva Rosen. Avis ws a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona,
though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging
mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been
one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand
a good example of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the
perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as a
perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy
copper hair had Lolita's silkiness, and the features of her delicate
milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy than
those of her likes--the great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she
sport their green uniform but wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or
cherry dark--a very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled
black shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much
to Lo's disgust). The child's tonalities were still admirably pure, but for
school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a
slight Brooklyn accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a
little Parisian who went to a select New England school with phoney British
aspirations. Unfortunately, despite "that French kid's uncle" being "a
millionaire," Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy
in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader
knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation
prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my
senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the spring
term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often
wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze had imparted to
Mona while blurting out to me by urgent and well-paid request various really
incredible details concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine at
the seaside. It was characteristic of Lo that she chose for her closest chum
that elegant, cold, lascivious, experienced young female whom I once heard
(misheard, Lo swore) cheerfully say in the hallway to Lo--who had remarked
that her (Lo's) sweater was of virgin wool: "The only thing about you that
is, kiddo . . ." She had a curiously husky voice, artificially waved dull
dark hair, earrings, amber-brown prominent eyes and luscious lips. Lo said
teachers had remonstrated with her on her loading herself with so much
costume jewelry. Her hands trembled. She was burdened with a 150 I.Q. And I
also knew she had a tremendous chocolate-brown mole on he womanish back
which I inspected the night Lo and she had worn low-cut pastel-colored,
vaporous dresses for a dance at the Butler Academy.
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all
over the keyboard of that school year. In the meeting my attempts to find
out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had
gone to play tennis at Linda's country club had telephoned she might be a
full half hour late, and so, would I entertain Mona who was coming to
practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the
modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and
staring at me with perhaps--could I be mistaken?--a faint gleam of
crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: "Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is
not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a
crush on the Reverend Rigger." (This was a joke--I have already mentioned
that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to
near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents
that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic.
Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as
much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir?
Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a
kid. But her general behavior was--? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still?
"Oh, she's a doll," concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a
book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely
furrowing her brow, inquired: "Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really
that good?" She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through
lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought
stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong
substitute. Avoiding Mona'' cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute.
Then Dolly arrived--and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to
their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement
window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound
among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position--a night's move
from the top--always strangely disturbed me.
Sometimes . . . Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride--and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look--a gray furry question mark of a look: "Oh no, not again" (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours--how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and--"Pulease, leave me alone, will you," you would say, "for Christ's sake leave me alone." And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.