I am trying to describe these things not only to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to parse out the lessons I have learned and hope you, kind readers, may learn through me. The beastly (the grieving, the lies, the murder) and beautiful (fatherhood) 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 law, according to which a man may not murder another, was set forth long ago, and is still preserved, rather tacitly, in the United States. At eighteen, one is tried, rather harshly, as an adult. There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute, blessed by the law, sheds his civility to kill in self-defense against a kidnapper, pedophile, and general ne’er-do-well. And yet when a number of years have passed between crime and punishment, and yet when the word premeditated enters the equation, and yet when the fiend is a beloved cultural figure, and yet, and yet, and yet.
I have but followed nature. I am a lion defending his cub. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Chapter 30
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, having to put up with the ravings of a murderer! Please do not silence this overexcited fool, for I fear my days on this earth are numbered.
Chapter 29
Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, Lo 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 changed into pajamas and wondered what to do next.
Now this was something the intruder had not expected. I was as quiet as could be, yet here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me "Barbara." It took me a moment to realize she was talking in her sleep. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited on the brink: I was resigned to sleeping on the floor, but there was no chance I was going to surrender my pillow to her. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto a narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the pillow further from her head, and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me, displeased. I took the pillow anyway.
Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her single pillow. I settled down at the foot of the bed and lay cold and still on my narrow strip of carpet. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk pulling the blanket a little closer to me, so that it might fall on my shivering side and, if only slightly, warm me. But hardly had I moved it an inch than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I moved her blanket a bit more. Please, reader, laugh all you want: at least smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
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, 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.
Just as I was beginning to nod off, Lo made a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water. 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, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow and was instantly asleep again.
My pillow smelled of hair. Time and again my consciousness folded, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, never for long. If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distant night, it is to underscore the extent to which I was out of my element, and to allude to a far more insomnia-inducing element: that my child’s kidnapper was in that very hotel, himself surely not sleeping but scheming. And I had spoken with him, the louse.
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.
By six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen she had dragged me down to breakfast. Sleep or no, I was up.
Between that time, she had already unburdened herself of her dark camp secret: she had met a boy. She went into the affair with a candid detail (open-mouthed kisses and the like) that I tried, in vain, to avoid. Soon, she was probing into my own awful adolescence.
"You mean," she persisted, now kneeling above me, "you never had a girlfriend when you were a kid?"
"Never," I answered quite truthfully.
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita's presumption. Suffice it to say that in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had tried to utterly and hopelessly deprave, was less corruption than she herself suspected.
Chapter 28
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. I had left Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces, and I was, despite the dreadful circumstances, happy to have a daughter. I felt I was doing well so far. Perhaps a bit overindulgent, but well nonetheless. I only hoped I could keep it up. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place, I still knew that the divide between us was enormous.
Yet divide or no, was my daughter now. I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects.
I drifted to the Men's Room. There, a person in the clerical black--a "hearty party" as they say--checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd's talk, and looked puzzled when I said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward. Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if we decided to stay on. This displeased me. I was aware that this first night would set the tone for the rest of our trip, and I wanted to maintain as many of those oft-shattering boundaries I could.
From a big crowded place called The Hunters' Hall came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little tables and a large one with "refreshments," was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte's manner of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. "What a name for a woman," I said and strolled away. Going back to the lobby, I found there a change: a number of people in floral dresses or black cloth had formed little groups here and there.
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night. Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
"Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie--she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"
"Dead."
"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then."
"We'll be gone too. Good night."
"Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?"
"Not now."
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels--and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell, the weariness of a long day of travel and the first day of fatherhood. I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby. A twittering group hadgathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs, for exercise.
Yet divide or no, was my daughter now. I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects.
I drifted to the Men's Room. There, a person in the clerical black--a "hearty party" as they say--checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd's talk, and looked puzzled when I said Boyd was quite a boy. Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward. Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if we decided to stay on. This displeased me. I was aware that this first night would set the tone for the rest of our trip, and I wanted to maintain as many of those oft-shattering boundaries I could.
From a big crowded place called The Hunters' Hall came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little tables and a large one with "refreshments," was still empty except for a hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte's manner of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. "What a name for a woman," I said and strolled away. Going back to the lobby, I found there a change: a number of people in floral dresses or black cloth had formed little groups here and there.
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night. Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
"Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie--she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"
"Dead."
"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then."
"We'll be gone too. Good night."
"Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?"
"Not now."
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels--and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell, the weariness of a long day of travel and the first day of fatherhood. I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby. A twittering group hadgathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs, for exercise.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Chapter 27.2
The miracle I hankered for did happen after all. A man and a girl, more or less conjoined in a dark car under dripping trees, told us we were in the heart of The Park, but had only to turn left at the next traffic light and there we would be. We did not see any next traffic light--in fact, The Park was black--but soon after falling under the smooth spell of a nicely graded curve, the travelers became aware of a diamond glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared--and there it was, marvelously and inexorably, under spectral trees, at the top of a graveled drive--the pale palace of The Enchanted Hunters.
A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first sight to forbid access; but then, by magic, a formidable convertible, resplendent, rubious in the lighted rain, came into motion--was energetically backed out by a broad-shouldered driver--and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had left. I immediately regretted my haste for I noticed that my predecessor had now taken advantage of a garage-like shelter nearby where there was ample space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow his example.
"Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar daughter squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and hoary attendant in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergy men. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald porcine old man--everybody was old in that old hotel--examined my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled) telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry, he had held the room with the twin beds till half past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and--"The name," I said coldly, "is not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired."
The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo. Whatever doubts the fellow had, they were dispelled by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room, had one, in fact--with a double bed. As to the cot--
"Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?" Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen, everything muted by the screams of my bladder.
"Our double beds are really triple," Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. "One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. However--would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?
"I think it went to the Swoons," said Swine, the initial old clown.
"We'll manage somehow," I said. "My wife may join us later--but even then, I suppose, we'll manage."
The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm)--and handed over to the attendant. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a handsome young woman slipped open the elevator door, and the child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and the attendant with the bags.
"Say, it's our house number," said cheerful Lo.
There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right.
I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter. Added another. He withdrew. Click. Alone at last. I departed to the restroom without a word, relieved to have made it without incident.
"Are we going to sleep in one room?" said Lo on my return.
"Now look here," I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet away from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own vain sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror. “Let's settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great affection for you. In your mother's absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be thrown a good deal together. I've asked them to put in a cot. Which I'll use."
"You are crazy," said Lo.
"Why?"
"Because, those cots are tiny. You’d never fit!”
Lo walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom.
I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed.
She said: "Look, let's get something to eat."
It was then that I sprang my surprise.
Oh, what a happy child (or at least, what a talented actress)! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the slowness of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands. Then she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on. I was pleased she was pleased. She hugged me and we left for dinner.
And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front. As we stood waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her curls.
"When did they make you get up at that camp?"
"Half-past--" she stifled another yawn--"six"--yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. "Half-past," she repeated, her throat filling up again. The movie wasn’t happening.
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
"Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?" said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
"Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?"
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.
"Course not," she said with a splutter of mirth. "I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad."
I didn’t yet know to curse his name.
After dinner, the dessert was plunked down--a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie.
She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as she now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling. "Sleepy, huh?" said the attendant who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned daughter. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.
"If I tell you--if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy--head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won't make complaints?"
"Your secret? Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I'll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes."
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs, beginning to suspect that whatever secret she had to tell me was absolutely none of my business. So you see, I was already learning one of those lessons they don’t tell you—didn’t tell me—about parenthood: the complete invasion of all the boundaries you spent your whole life cultivating.
A row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough, seemed at first sight to forbid access; but then, by magic, a formidable convertible, resplendent, rubious in the lighted rain, came into motion--was energetically backed out by a broad-shouldered driver--and we gratefully slipped into the gap it had left. I immediately regretted my haste for I noticed that my predecessor had now taken advantage of a garage-like shelter nearby where there was ample space for another car; but I was too impatient to follow his example.
"Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar daughter squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and hoary attendant in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergy men. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald porcine old man--everybody was old in that old hotel--examined my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled) telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry, he had held the room with the twin beds till half past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and--"The name," I said coldly, "is not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired."
The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo. Whatever doubts the fellow had, they were dispelled by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room, had one, in fact--with a double bed. As to the cot--
"Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?" Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen, everything muted by the screams of my bladder.
"Our double beds are really triple," Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. "One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. However--would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?
"I think it went to the Swoons," said Swine, the initial old clown.
"We'll manage somehow," I said. "My wife may join us later--but even then, I suppose, we'll manage."
The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm)--and handed over to the attendant. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a handsome young woman slipped open the elevator door, and the child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and the attendant with the bags.
"Say, it's our house number," said cheerful Lo.
There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right.
I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter. Added another. He withdrew. Click. Alone at last. I departed to the restroom without a word, relieved to have made it without incident.
"Are we going to sleep in one room?" said Lo on my return.
"Now look here," I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet away from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own vain sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror. “Let's settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great affection for you. In your mother's absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be thrown a good deal together. I've asked them to put in a cot. Which I'll use."
"You are crazy," said Lo.
"Why?"
"Because, those cots are tiny. You’d never fit!”
Lo walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom.
I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed.
She said: "Look, let's get something to eat."
It was then that I sprang my surprise.
Oh, what a happy child (or at least, what a talented actress)! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the slowness of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands. Then she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on. I was pleased she was pleased. She hugged me and we left for dinner.
And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front. As we stood waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her curls.
"When did they make you get up at that camp?"
"Half-past--" she stifled another yawn--"six"--yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. "Half-past," she repeated, her throat filling up again. The movie wasn’t happening.
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
"Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?" said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
"Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?"
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.
"Course not," she said with a splutter of mirth. "I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad."
I didn’t yet know to curse his name.
After dinner, the dessert was plunked down--a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie.
She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as she now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling. "Sleepy, huh?" said the attendant who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned daughter. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.
"If I tell you--if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy--head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won't make complaints?"
"Your secret? Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I'll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes."
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs, beginning to suspect that whatever secret she had to tell me was absolutely none of my business. So you see, I was already learning one of those lessons they don’t tell you—didn’t tell me—about parenthood: the complete invasion of all the boundaries you spent your whole life cultivating.
Chapter 27.1
Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber--from which I was woken by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said. From Parkington I had still a hundred miles to go, and there would be more than that to the Hazy Hills and Briceland. If I had said I would come for Dolly in the afternoon, it was only because my fancy insisted on merciful night falling as soon as possible upon my impatience. But now I foresaw all kinds of misunderstandings and was all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale. However, when at 9.30 a.m. I attempted to start, I was confronted by a dead battery, and noon was nigh when at last I left Parkington.
I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counselors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: "The poor guy looked like his own ghost.")
Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright ". . . and five!"; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall ("nature study"); the framed diploma of the camp's dietitian; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze's behavior for July ("fair to good; keen on swimming and boating"); a sound of trees and birds . . . I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her voice behind me, unsure of how much I would have to console, offer hope, and thus, lie to the child. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. "Hi!" she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much tan camouflaged her rosy rustic features. But no matter, I reasoned: all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphan with shadowy eye-circles a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age. And yet "in a wink," as the Germans say, I saw past her new height and color, and she was my daughter again--in fact, more of my daughter than ever. I let my hand rest on her head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, and because of her childish gait, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food.
In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.
"How's Mother?" she asked dutifully.
“Fair to good,” I told her. I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
"We should be at Briceland by dinner time," I said, "and tomorrow we'll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?"
"Uh-huh."
"Sorry to leave?"
"Un-un."
"Talk, Lo--don't grunt. Tell me something."
"What thing, Dad?" She used the word without my asking her to. I beamed at her.
"Any old thing."
"Okay, if I call you that?"
"More than okay."
"When did you fall for my mummy?"
"Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship."
"Bah!" said the girl, cynically.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
"Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside."
"I think I'll vomit if I look at a cow again."
"You know, we missed you terribly, Lo.” A white lie for her spiteful mummy. “The house wasn’t the same without you.”
"I doubt it. You two forgot all about me, I bet. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister."
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
"Why do you think we have ceased caring for you, Lo?"
"She didn’t send me a thing, and all you sent was candy."
A highway patrol car pulled me over. Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:
“Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?"
"Why, no."
"We didn't," said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, "but are you sure it was blue, because--"
The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.
We drove on.
"The fruithead!" remarked Lo. "He should have nabbed you."
"Why me for heaven's sake?"
"Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty. No, don't slow down, you, dull bulb. He's gone now." Only minutes away from camp, and the abuse had begun.
"We have still quite a stretch," I said, "and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl."
"That light was red,” said Lo comfortably. “I've never seen such driving."
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
"Say, wouldn't Mother be absolutely mad if she found out you let me have all the dessert I wanted?"
"What makes you think I’ll let you?” I said. “Remember, I’m no longer just your tenant.”
"But you will let me, won’t you?"
"Not all you want. Some, within reason, if you behave. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don't you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?"
"You talk like a book, Dad."
"What have you been up to?"
"Are you easily shocked?"
"Would I have reason to be?”
"Well--I joined in all the activities that were offered."
"Then?"
"I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact."
I wondered if she already suspected there was more wrong with her mother than I was telling her, if her sarcasm was a coping mechanism.
"Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet."
"We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group."
"I know you’re joking, Lo, but you’ve an excellent singing voice, and I hope camp gave you an occasion to develop it.”
"The Girl Scout's motto," said Lo rhapsodically, "is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as--well, never mind what. My duty is--to be useful. I am a friend to animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed."
"Now I do hope that's all, you witty child."
"Yep. That's all. No--wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn't that terrific?"
"Well, that's better."
"We washed zillions of dishes. 'Zillions' you know is schoolmarm's slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother says--Now let me see--what was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun."
"Sounds like it.”
"And that’s it. Except for one little thing, something I simply can't tell you without blushing all over."
"Perhaps you’d better not, then."
"If you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?"
"Heap, of course. Until recently, that is, what with her illness. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo."
"Stop at that candy bar, will you," said Lo.
In retrospect, then would have been an ideal time to assert my newfound fatherly authority and rattle off the names of any number of healthy alternatives she was welcome to enjoy. I did not. Sitting on a high stool, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity.
"How much cash do you have?" I asked.
"Not a cent," she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the empty inside of her money purse.
"This is a matter that will be mended in due time," I said. "Are you coming?"
"Say, I wonder if they have a washroom."
"You are not going there," I said firmly. "It is sure to be a vile place. Do come on."
She was on the whole an obedient girl. We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down again.
"Well, there are worse dads out there," said Lolita in a delayed soft voice, with a sort of sigh.
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity sops and imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets. The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.
"Oh, I want to see that picture. Let's go right after dinner. Oh, let's!"
"We might," chanted Humbert--knowing perfectly well that by nine, the child would be exhausted from travel.
"Easy!" cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in front of us, its backside carbuncles pulsating, stopped at a crossing.
You see, by this point I had worked up a debilitating need to use the facilities, but was also unwilling to stop off anywhere but the most sanitary of public restrooms. If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the Haze jalopy with its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes; but the passers-by I applied to for directions were either strangers themselves or asked with a frown "Enchanted what?" as if I were a madman; or else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and strictly local clues (. . . then bear south after you hit the court-house. . .) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails had already digested the sweetmeat, was looking forward to a big meal and had begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long become used to a kind of secondary fate pettily interfering with the boss's generous magnificent plan--to grind and grope through the avenues of Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet faced.
In later months I could laugh at my inexperience when recalling the obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated upon that particular inn with its fancy name; for all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and becameas transparent as boxes of glass!
I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where a green-shirted, redheaded impish lad stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude; was laconically directed by him to an office in a stucco cottage; in a dying state, had to endure for several minutes the inquisitive commiseration of the camp mistress, a worn out female with rusty hair. Dolly she said was all packed and ready to go. She knew her mother was sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet the camp counselors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other: "The poor guy looked like his own ghost.")
Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright ". . . and five!"; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall ("nature study"); the framed diploma of the camp's dietitian; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze's behavior for July ("fair to good; keen on swimming and boating"); a sound of trees and birds . . . I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her voice behind me, unsure of how much I would have to console, offer hope, and thus, lie to the child. She arrived dragging and bumping her heavy suitcase. "Hi!" she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly, glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much tan camouflaged her rosy rustic features. But no matter, I reasoned: all widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphan with shadowy eye-circles a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age. And yet "in a wink," as the Germans say, I saw past her new height and color, and she was my daughter again--in fact, more of my daughter than ever. I let my hand rest on her head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her brightest gingham, and because of her childish gait, her saddle oxfords looked somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food.
In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her knee; then, her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the striped and speckled forest.
"How's Mother?" she asked dutifully.
“Fair to good,” I told her. I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
"We should be at Briceland by dinner time," I said, "and tomorrow we'll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?"
"Uh-huh."
"Sorry to leave?"
"Un-un."
"Talk, Lo--don't grunt. Tell me something."
"What thing, Dad?" She used the word without my asking her to. I beamed at her.
"Any old thing."
"Okay, if I call you that?"
"More than okay."
"When did you fall for my mummy?"
"Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship."
"Bah!" said the girl, cynically.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
"Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside."
"I think I'll vomit if I look at a cow again."
"You know, we missed you terribly, Lo.” A white lie for her spiteful mummy. “The house wasn’t the same without you.”
"I doubt it. You two forgot all about me, I bet. You drive much faster than my mummy, mister."
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
"Why do you think we have ceased caring for you, Lo?"
"She didn’t send me a thing, and all you sent was candy."
A highway patrol car pulled me over. Florid and beetle-browed, its driver stared at me:
“Happen to see a blue sedan, same make as yours, pass you before the junction?"
"Why, no."
"We didn't," said Lo, eagerly leaning across me, "but are you sure it was blue, because--"
The cop (what shadow of us was he after?) gave the little colleen his best smile and went into a U-turn.
We drove on.
"The fruithead!" remarked Lo. "He should have nabbed you."
"Why me for heaven's sake?"
"Well, the speed in this bum state is fifty. No, don't slow down, you, dull bulb. He's gone now." Only minutes away from camp, and the abuse had begun.
"We have still quite a stretch," I said, "and I want to get there before dark. So be a good girl."
"That light was red,” said Lo comfortably. “I've never seen such driving."
We rolled silently through a silent townlet.
"Say, wouldn't Mother be absolutely mad if she found out you let me have all the dessert I wanted?"
"What makes you think I’ll let you?” I said. “Remember, I’m no longer just your tenant.”
"But you will let me, won’t you?"
"Not all you want. Some, within reason, if you behave. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don't you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?"
"You talk like a book, Dad."
"What have you been up to?"
"Are you easily shocked?"
"Would I have reason to be?”
"Well--I joined in all the activities that were offered."
"Then?"
"I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact."
I wondered if she already suspected there was more wrong with her mother than I was telling her, if her sarcasm was a coping mechanism.
"Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet."
"We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group."
"I know you’re joking, Lo, but you’ve an excellent singing voice, and I hope camp gave you an occasion to develop it.”
"The Girl Scout's motto," said Lo rhapsodically, "is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as--well, never mind what. My duty is--to be useful. I am a friend to animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed."
"Now I do hope that's all, you witty child."
"Yep. That's all. No--wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn't that terrific?"
"Well, that's better."
"We washed zillions of dishes. 'Zillions' you know is schoolmarm's slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother says--Now let me see--what was it? I know we made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun."
"Sounds like it.”
"And that’s it. Except for one little thing, something I simply can't tell you without blushing all over."
"Perhaps you’d better not, then."
"If you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?"
"Heap, of course. Until recently, that is, what with her illness. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo."
"Stop at that candy bar, will you," said Lo.
In retrospect, then would have been an ideal time to assert my newfound fatherly authority and rattle off the names of any number of healthy alternatives she was welcome to enjoy. I did not. Sitting on a high stool, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity.
"How much cash do you have?" I asked.
"Not a cent," she said sadly, lifting her eyebrows, showing me the empty inside of her money purse.
"This is a matter that will be mended in due time," I said. "Are you coming?"
"Say, I wonder if they have a washroom."
"You are not going there," I said firmly. "It is sure to be a vile place. Do come on."
She was on the whole an obedient girl. We drove under a gloomy sky, up a winding road, then down again.
"Well, there are worse dads out there," said Lolita in a delayed soft voice, with a sort of sigh.
Dusk was beginning to saturate pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity sops and imported shade trees, when we drove through the weakly lighted streets. The air, despite a steady drizzle beading it, was warm and green, and a queue of people, mainly children and old men, had already formed before the box office of a movie house, dripping with jewel-fires.
"Oh, I want to see that picture. Let's go right after dinner. Oh, let's!"
"We might," chanted Humbert--knowing perfectly well that by nine, the child would be exhausted from travel.
"Easy!" cried Lo, lurching forward, as an accursed truck in front of us, its backside carbuncles pulsating, stopped at a crossing.
You see, by this point I had worked up a debilitating need to use the facilities, but was also unwilling to stop off anywhere but the most sanitary of public restrooms. If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the Haze jalopy with its ineffectual wipers and whimsical brakes; but the passers-by I applied to for directions were either strangers themselves or asked with a frown "Enchanted what?" as if I were a madman; or else they went into such complicated explanations, with geometrical gestures, geographical generalities and strictly local clues (. . . then bear south after you hit the court-house. . .) that I could not help losing my way in the maze of their well-meaning gibberish. Lo, whose lovely prismatic entrails had already digested the sweetmeat, was looking forward to a big meal and had begun to fidget. As to me, although I had long become used to a kind of secondary fate pettily interfering with the boss's generous magnificent plan--to grind and grope through the avenues of Briceland was perhaps the most exasperating ordeal I had yet faced.
In later months I could laugh at my inexperience when recalling the obstinate boyish way in which I had concentrated upon that particular inn with its fancy name; for all along our route countless motor courts proclaimed their vacancy in neon lights, ready to accommodate salesmen, escaped convicts, impotents, family groups, as well as the most corrupt and vigorous couples. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and becameas transparent as boxes of glass!
Chapter 26
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. The pain is immense. Heart, head--everything.
Chapter 25
One might suppose that with all that unpleasantness receding in my rear-view mirror, I would have mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of deserved relief. Well, not at all! Instead of basking in the beams of smiling Freedom, I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. For instance: might it not surprise people that Lo was so consistently debarred from attending festive and funeral functions in her immediate family? I was absolutely convinced that her poor heart couldn’t take it—to be whisked away from camp and thrown amongst the polite dark-dressed gawkers.
Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm of Coincidence that had reached out to remove an innocent woman, might Coincidence not hand Lo a premature note of commiseration, thus ruining my chances of sparing her grief? True, the accident had been reported only by the Ramsdale Journal--not by the Parkington Recorder or the Herald, Camp Q being in another state, and local deaths having no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly Haze had been informed already, and that at the very time I was on my way to fetch her, she was being driven to Ramsdale by friends unknown to me.
Still more disquieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin, had taken no steps toward becoming the legal guardian of his dead wife's daughter (twelve years and seven months old). Would I ever dare take those steps? To call attention to our unique situation? I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined the mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law. My twin concerns--losing Lo and having Lo learn of Charlotte’s death in any way but the most gradual and painless one—plagued me the whole ride over. I see now that my elaborate ceremony of revelation was kin to the slow ripping of the band-aid, but at the time I was overwhelmed with guilt and grief and was not thinking clearly.
My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major operation at an invented hospital, and then keep moving with my sleepy daughter from inn to inn while her mother got worse and worse and finally died, what psychologists call progressive desensitization. But as I traveled campward my anxiety grew. I could not bear to think I might not find Lolita there--or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for some family friend: not the Farlows, thank God--she hardly knew them--but might there not be other people I had not reckoned with?
Finally, I decided to make the long-distance call I had simulated so well a few days before. It was raining hard when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork, one prong of which bypassed the city and led to the highway which crossed the hills to Lake Clement and Camp Q. I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains. No wonder that stopping beside those nightmare cripples is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station. A surprise awaited me when at last the coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice was allowed to answer mine.
Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone Monday (this was Wednesday) on a hike in the hills with her group and was expected to return rather late today. Would I care to come tomorrow, and what was exactly--Without going into details, I said that her mother was hospitalized, that the situation was grave, that the child should not be told it was grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow afternoon. The two voices parted in an explosion of warmth and good will, and through some freak mechanical flaw all my coins came tumbling back to me with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost made me laugh despite the disappointment at having to postpone our reunion. One wonders if this sudden discharge, this spasmodic refund, was not correlated somehow, in the mind of McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before ever learning of it as I did now.
What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo that might soften the blow of the initial bad news. Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days, and with what at abhorrent sense of fashion he made those purchases: skirts, etc. Oh Lolita, you were too good at masking your disappointment in poor Humbert’s hopeless choices. “Did you have something special in mind?” they asked. “Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about playsuits? Slips?” I was in over my head.
One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric entry made by her mother on Lo's twelfth birthday (the reader remembers that Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there; but since she had no doubt grown somewhat in the last seven months, I thought I could safely accept most of those January measurements.
Apart from those, I could of course visualize Lolita with decent lucidity, and I was not surprised to discover later that my computation had been more or less correct. Having moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids. The painted girl in black who attended to all these poignant needs of mine turned parental scholarship and precise description into commercial euphemisms, such as "petite." Another, much older woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be oddly impressed by even the rudimentary lingo of junior fashions I had picked up from the painted girl; perhaps I had a midget for mistress; so, when shown a skirt with "cute" pockets in front, I intentionally put a naive male question and was rewarded by a smiling demonstration of the way the zipper worked in the back of the skirt. These are the concessions a scholar must make from time to time—he must hide his sharp memory behind a veneer of masculine cluelessness.
There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large stores where according to ads a career girl can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Life-size plastic figures of snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, pleased with the distraction shopping afforded me.
Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters with Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo's camp. I sent a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering cod I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake--the "g" at the end--which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine.
And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the difficult series of conversations before me! Oh miserly Hamburg! I deliberated with myself over the boxful of sleeping pills I’d bought from a roadside pharmacy, whether to rout the monster of insomnia with one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told. I restrained myself for fear of succumbing to another debilitating addiction.
Or another thing: granted it was the long hairy arm of Coincidence that had reached out to remove an innocent woman, might Coincidence not hand Lo a premature note of commiseration, thus ruining my chances of sparing her grief? True, the accident had been reported only by the Ramsdale Journal--not by the Parkington Recorder or the Herald, Camp Q being in another state, and local deaths having no federal news interest; but I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly Haze had been informed already, and that at the very time I was on my way to fetch her, she was being driven to Ramsdale by friends unknown to me.
Still more disquieting than all these conjectures and worries, was the fact that Humbert Humbert, a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin, had taken no steps toward becoming the legal guardian of his dead wife's daughter (twelve years and seven months old). Would I ever dare take those steps? To call attention to our unique situation? I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined the mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law. My twin concerns--losing Lo and having Lo learn of Charlotte’s death in any way but the most gradual and painless one—plagued me the whole ride over. I see now that my elaborate ceremony of revelation was kin to the slow ripping of the band-aid, but at the time I was overwhelmed with guilt and grief and was not thinking clearly.
My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major operation at an invented hospital, and then keep moving with my sleepy daughter from inn to inn while her mother got worse and worse and finally died, what psychologists call progressive desensitization. But as I traveled campward my anxiety grew. I could not bear to think I might not find Lolita there--or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for some family friend: not the Farlows, thank God--she hardly knew them--but might there not be other people I had not reckoned with?
Finally, I decided to make the long-distance call I had simulated so well a few days before. It was raining hard when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork, one prong of which bypassed the city and led to the highway which crossed the hills to Lake Clement and Camp Q. I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains. No wonder that stopping beside those nightmare cripples is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station. A surprise awaited me when at last the coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice was allowed to answer mine.
Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone Monday (this was Wednesday) on a hike in the hills with her group and was expected to return rather late today. Would I care to come tomorrow, and what was exactly--Without going into details, I said that her mother was hospitalized, that the situation was grave, that the child should not be told it was grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow afternoon. The two voices parted in an explosion of warmth and good will, and through some freak mechanical flaw all my coins came tumbling back to me with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost made me laugh despite the disappointment at having to postpone our reunion. One wonders if this sudden discharge, this spasmodic refund, was not correlated somehow, in the mind of McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before ever learning of it as I did now.
What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo that might soften the blow of the initial bad news. Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days, and with what at abhorrent sense of fashion he made those purchases: skirts, etc. Oh Lolita, you were too good at masking your disappointment in poor Humbert’s hopeless choices. “Did you have something special in mind?” they asked. “Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about playsuits? Slips?” I was in over my head.
One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric entry made by her mother on Lo's twelfth birthday (the reader remembers that Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there; but since she had no doubt grown somewhat in the last seven months, I thought I could safely accept most of those January measurements.
Apart from those, I could of course visualize Lolita with decent lucidity, and I was not surprised to discover later that my computation had been more or less correct. Having moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids. The painted girl in black who attended to all these poignant needs of mine turned parental scholarship and precise description into commercial euphemisms, such as "petite." Another, much older woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be oddly impressed by even the rudimentary lingo of junior fashions I had picked up from the painted girl; perhaps I had a midget for mistress; so, when shown a skirt with "cute" pockets in front, I intentionally put a naive male question and was rewarded by a smiling demonstration of the way the zipper worked in the back of the skirt. These are the concessions a scholar must make from time to time—he must hide his sharp memory behind a veneer of masculine cluelessness.
There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large stores where according to ads a career girl can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Life-size plastic figures of snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, pleased with the distraction shopping afforded me.
Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters with Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo's camp. I sent a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering cod I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake--the "g" at the end--which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine.
And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the difficult series of conversations before me! Oh miserly Hamburg! I deliberated with myself over the boxful of sleeping pills I’d bought from a roadside pharmacy, whether to rout the monster of insomnia with one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told. I restrained myself for fear of succumbing to another debilitating addiction.
Chapter 24
The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. For unknown adventures I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before. It felt like it had been years. The shades--thrifty, practical bamboo shades--were already down. The house must seem pretty bare after that. A raindrop fell on my knuckles. I went back into the house for something or other while John was putting my bags into the car, and then a funny thing happened.
I do not know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar "sending" effect that the writer's good looks--pseudo-Celtic, attractively apelike, boyishly manly--had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book. There may be more to it in the present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind's eye if my story is to be properly understood. Charlotte had loved me with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say. Jean Farlow, who was thirty-one and beautiful and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking for me. She was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with a burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps, and when she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed perfect teeth.
She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts with ballet slippers, drank any strong liquor in any amount, had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted, as the reader knows, lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at thirty-three, and was exceedingly attractive to me. We could not have known then how doomed she was, but her mortality charged and colored the scene. Judge then of my delight when a few seconds before I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with her always trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her bright blue eyes, and glued herself to my lips.
"Take care of yourself," she said, "kiss your daughter for me."
A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added:
"Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again." (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in time-space or soul-time, know that I, impossibly, hope the same.)
And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted.
I do not know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar "sending" effect that the writer's good looks--pseudo-Celtic, attractively apelike, boyishly manly--had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book. There may be more to it in the present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind's eye if my story is to be properly understood. Charlotte had loved me with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say. Jean Farlow, who was thirty-one and beautiful and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking for me. She was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with a burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps, and when she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed perfect teeth.
She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts with ballet slippers, drank any strong liquor in any amount, had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted, as the reader knows, lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at thirty-three, and was exceedingly attractive to me. We could not have known then how doomed she was, but her mortality charged and colored the scene. Judge then of my delight when a few seconds before I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with her always trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her bright blue eyes, and glued herself to my lips.
"Take care of yourself," she said, "kiss your daughter for me."
A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added:
"Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again." (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in time-space or soul-time, know that I, impossibly, hope the same.)
And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted.
Chapter 23
I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite's sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turn of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed--double-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie--lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.'s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porch--where the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to group--from a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses.
At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he lay was not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite's lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. I’ll never know what they said, but I didn’t want Charlotte’s last communications to be of a vitriol she soon would have gotten over. My grief, then, was doubled with the half-false belief that her husband thought her a fool.
Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. I neither wept nor raved. I staggered a bit, that I did; but opened my mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and preparation of what remained of my dear Charlotte. The sun was still a blinding red when I was put to bed in Lo’s room by gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean; who, to be near, retired to the Humberts' bedroom for the night.
I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte's simple death, have to be noted.
My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that ". . . and you had better find it because I cannot buy . . . " came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte's intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky. Other tatters and shreds obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of "Reformatory for Young Ladies." Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as ". . . after a year of separation we may . . . " ". . . oh, my dearest, oh my . . . " ". . . worse than if it had been a woman you kept . . ." ". . . or, maybe, I shall die . . ." But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte's head.
That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends' company. The dear people were afraid I might commit suicide if left alone, and since no other friends were available (Miss Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy building a new house miles away, and the Chatfields had been recently called to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie and Louise were commissioned to keep me company under the pretense of helping me to sort out and pack a multitude of orphaned things.
In a particularly maudlin moment, I showed the kind and credulous Farlows a little photograph of Charlotte I had found among her affairs. From a boulder she smiled through blown hair. I then concocted a lie, on the spot, with little thought for its meaning or consequences. The photo, I said, had been taken in April 1934, a memorable spring. While on a business visit to the States, I had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met--and had a mad love affair. I was married, alas, and she was engaged to Haze, but after I returned to Europe, we corresponded through a friend, now dead. Jean whispered she had heard some rumors and looked at the snapshot, and, still looking, handed it to John, and John removed his pipe and looked at lovely and fast Charlotte Becker, and handed it back to me. Then they left for a few hours, and I was confronted with the subconscious reason for my lie: I didn’t want Dolores to be taken from me. She was, in the spiritual sense, my child.
Hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called--and I tried to make the interview as brief as was consistent with neither hurting his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Part of me knew I had nothing to fear, as I had been neither the dog in the road nor the man behind the wheel, but it had been my careless words that had driven Charlotte into that street, and my guilt, I assumed, was as plain to see as my grief. Yes, I would devote all my life to the child's welfare. Here, incidentally, was a little cross that Charlotte Becker had given me when we were both young. I had a female cousin, a respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school for Dolly.
For the benefit of Leslie and Louise who might (and did) report it to John and Jean I made a tremendously loud and beautifully enacted long-distance call and simulated a conversation with Shirley Holmes. I was absolutely unprepared to break the news to Lo, and in my grief, I nearly believed I could spare her from it indefinitely. When John and Jean returned, I completely took them in by telling them, in a deliberately wild and confused mutter, that Lo had gone with the intermediate group on a five-day hike and could not be reached.
"Good Lord," said Jean, "what shall we do?"
John said it was perfectly simple--he would get the Climax police to find the hikers--it would not take them an hour. In fact, he knew the country and--
"Look," he continued, "why don' I drive there right now, and you stay here and sleep with Jean"--(He did not really add that but Jean supported his offer so passionately that it might be implied. It is also possible that I heard what I wanted to hear.)
I broke down. I pleaded with John to let things remain the way they were. I said I could not bear to have the child all around me, sobbing, clinging to me, she was so high-strung, the experience might react on her future, psychiatrists have analyzed such cases. There was a sudden pause.
"Well, you are the doctor," said John a little bluntly. "But after all I was Charlotte's friend and adviser. One would like to know what you are going to do about the child anyway."
"John," cried Jean, "she is his child, not Harold Haze's. Don't you understand? Humbert is Dolly's real father."
"I see," said John. "I am sorry. Yes. I see. I did not realize that. It simplifies matters, of course. And whatever you feel is right."
The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral, and would do his best to give her a good time in totally different surroundings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or California.
So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that was helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost.
Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away. At first, when Charlotte had just been taken and I re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared, and topped them with a pint or two of my pin, and went to the bathroom to get away from neighbors and friends, there was but one thing on my mind—grief. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, I must confess that already creeping into my consciousness was the relief of one who has been deferring a difficult decision only to find that fate has made it for him. Leaving Charlotte would have involved, on her part, tears, threats, appeals, and finally begging, the messy parts of this life I have no stomach for, and my status as a divorcee would not have helped my career a bit. As a widower, I was free to be wounded, victimized, brave, available, and desired. I wanted to be a father to Lo, true, but I also wanted to enjoy my newfound freedoms as a widower. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, John Farlow tenderly tapped to inquire if I was okay--and I immediately realized it would be madness on my part to have her in the house with all those busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed, unpredictable Lo herself might--who knows?--show some foolish distrust of me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like--and gone would be her chance at a stable family life, her suddenly whisked away to foster care and the abuses almost guaranteed therein.
Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor--friend Beale, the fellow who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and solemn, looking like a kind of assistant executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small black eyes, thickly rimmed glasses and conspicuous nostrils, he was ushered in by John who then left us, closing the door upon us, with the utmost tact. Suavely saying he had twins in my stepdaughter's class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large diagram he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter would have put it, "a beaut," with all kinds of impressive arrows and dotted lines in varicolored inks. Mrs. H.H.'s trajectory was illustrated at several points by a series of those little outline figures--doll-like wee career girl or WAC--used in statistics as visual aids. Very clearly and conclusively, this route came into contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two consecutive swerves--one which the Beale car made to avoid the Junk dog (dog not shown), and the second, a kind of exaggerated continuation of the first, meant to avert the tragedy. A very black cross indicated the spot where the trim little outline figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I looked for some similar mark to denote the place on the embankment where my visitor's huge wax father had reclined, but there was none. That gentleman, however, had signed the document as a witness underneath the name of Leslie Tomson, Miss Opposite and a few other people.
With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point to another, Frederick demonstrated his absolute innocence and the recklessness of my wife: while he was in the act of avoiding the dog, she slipped on the freshly watered asphalt and plunged forward whereas she should have flung herself not forward but backward (Fred showed how by a jerk of his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his fault, and the inquest upheld my view.
Breathing violently though jet-black tense nostrils, he shook his head and my hand; then, with an air of perfect savoir vivre and gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home expenses. He expected me to refuse his offer. With a drunken sob of gratitude I accepted it. He had, after all, killed my wife. This took him aback. Slowly, incredulously, he repeated what he had said. I thanked him again, even more profusely than before.
In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate--and its padded shoulder. A sad mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Fate's formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury--I wept.
At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he lay was not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite's lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. I’ll never know what they said, but I didn’t want Charlotte’s last communications to be of a vitriol she soon would have gotten over. My grief, then, was doubled with the half-false belief that her husband thought her a fool.
Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. I neither wept nor raved. I staggered a bit, that I did; but opened my mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and preparation of what remained of my dear Charlotte. The sun was still a blinding red when I was put to bed in Lo’s room by gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean; who, to be near, retired to the Humberts' bedroom for the night.
I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte's simple death, have to be noted.
My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that ". . . and you had better find it because I cannot buy . . . " came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte's intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky. Other tatters and shreds obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of "Reformatory for Young Ladies." Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as ". . . after a year of separation we may . . . " ". . . oh, my dearest, oh my . . . " ". . . worse than if it had been a woman you kept . . ." ". . . or, maybe, I shall die . . ." But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte's head.
That day John had to see a customer, and Jean had to feed her dogs, and so I was to be deprived temporarily of my friends' company. The dear people were afraid I might commit suicide if left alone, and since no other friends were available (Miss Opposite was incommunicado, the McCoos were busy building a new house miles away, and the Chatfields had been recently called to Maine by some family trouble of their own), Leslie and Louise were commissioned to keep me company under the pretense of helping me to sort out and pack a multitude of orphaned things.
In a particularly maudlin moment, I showed the kind and credulous Farlows a little photograph of Charlotte I had found among her affairs. From a boulder she smiled through blown hair. I then concocted a lie, on the spot, with little thought for its meaning or consequences. The photo, I said, had been taken in April 1934, a memorable spring. While on a business visit to the States, I had had occasion to spend several months in Pisky. We met--and had a mad love affair. I was married, alas, and she was engaged to Haze, but after I returned to Europe, we corresponded through a friend, now dead. Jean whispered she had heard some rumors and looked at the snapshot, and, still looking, handed it to John, and John removed his pipe and looked at lovely and fast Charlotte Becker, and handed it back to me. Then they left for a few hours, and I was confronted with the subconscious reason for my lie: I didn’t want Dolores to be taken from me. She was, in the spiritual sense, my child.
Hardly had the Farlows gone than a blue-chinned cleric called--and I tried to make the interview as brief as was consistent with neither hurting his feelings nor arousing his doubts. Part of me knew I had nothing to fear, as I had been neither the dog in the road nor the man behind the wheel, but it had been my careless words that had driven Charlotte into that street, and my guilt, I assumed, was as plain to see as my grief. Yes, I would devote all my life to the child's welfare. Here, incidentally, was a little cross that Charlotte Becker had given me when we were both young. I had a female cousin, a respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school for Dolly.
For the benefit of Leslie and Louise who might (and did) report it to John and Jean I made a tremendously loud and beautifully enacted long-distance call and simulated a conversation with Shirley Holmes. I was absolutely unprepared to break the news to Lo, and in my grief, I nearly believed I could spare her from it indefinitely. When John and Jean returned, I completely took them in by telling them, in a deliberately wild and confused mutter, that Lo had gone with the intermediate group on a five-day hike and could not be reached.
"Good Lord," said Jean, "what shall we do?"
John said it was perfectly simple--he would get the Climax police to find the hikers--it would not take them an hour. In fact, he knew the country and--
"Look," he continued, "why don' I drive there right now, and you stay here and sleep with Jean"--(He did not really add that but Jean supported his offer so passionately that it might be implied. It is also possible that I heard what I wanted to hear.)
I broke down. I pleaded with John to let things remain the way they were. I said I could not bear to have the child all around me, sobbing, clinging to me, she was so high-strung, the experience might react on her future, psychiatrists have analyzed such cases. There was a sudden pause.
"Well, you are the doctor," said John a little bluntly. "But after all I was Charlotte's friend and adviser. One would like to know what you are going to do about the child anyway."
"John," cried Jean, "she is his child, not Harold Haze's. Don't you understand? Humbert is Dolly's real father."
"I see," said John. "I am sorry. Yes. I see. I did not realize that. It simplifies matters, of course. And whatever you feel is right."
The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral, and would do his best to give her a good time in totally different surroundings, perhaps a trip to New Mexico or California.
So artistically did I impersonate the calm of ultimate despair, the hush before some crazy outburst, that the perfect Farlows removed me to their house. They had a good cellar, as cellars go in this country; and that was helpful, for I feared insomnia and a ghost.
Now I must explain my reasons for keeping Dolores away. At first, when Charlotte had just been taken and I re-entered the house a free father, and gulped down the two whiskey-and-sodas I had prepared, and topped them with a pint or two of my pin, and went to the bathroom to get away from neighbors and friends, there was but one thing on my mind—grief. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, I must confess that already creeping into my consciousness was the relief of one who has been deferring a difficult decision only to find that fate has made it for him. Leaving Charlotte would have involved, on her part, tears, threats, appeals, and finally begging, the messy parts of this life I have no stomach for, and my status as a divorcee would not have helped my career a bit. As a widower, I was free to be wounded, victimized, brave, available, and desired. I wanted to be a father to Lo, true, but I also wanted to enjoy my newfound freedoms as a widower. But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, John Farlow tenderly tapped to inquire if I was okay--and I immediately realized it would be madness on my part to have her in the house with all those busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me. Indeed, unpredictable Lo herself might--who knows?--show some foolish distrust of me, a sudden repugnance, vague fear and the like--and gone would be her chance at a stable family life, her suddenly whisked away to foster care and the abuses almost guaranteed therein.
Speaking of busybodies, I had another visitor--friend Beale, the fellow who eliminated my wife. Stodgy and solemn, looking like a kind of assistant executioner, with his bulldog jowls, small black eyes, thickly rimmed glasses and conspicuous nostrils, he was ushered in by John who then left us, closing the door upon us, with the utmost tact. Suavely saying he had twins in my stepdaughter's class, my grotesque visitor unrolled a large diagram he had made of the accident. It was, as my stepdaughter would have put it, "a beaut," with all kinds of impressive arrows and dotted lines in varicolored inks. Mrs. H.H.'s trajectory was illustrated at several points by a series of those little outline figures--doll-like wee career girl or WAC--used in statistics as visual aids. Very clearly and conclusively, this route came into contact with a boldly traced sinuous line representing two consecutive swerves--one which the Beale car made to avoid the Junk dog (dog not shown), and the second, a kind of exaggerated continuation of the first, meant to avert the tragedy. A very black cross indicated the spot where the trim little outline figure had at last come to rest on the sidewalk. I looked for some similar mark to denote the place on the embankment where my visitor's huge wax father had reclined, but there was none. That gentleman, however, had signed the document as a witness underneath the name of Leslie Tomson, Miss Opposite and a few other people.
With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point to another, Frederick demonstrated his absolute innocence and the recklessness of my wife: while he was in the act of avoiding the dog, she slipped on the freshly watered asphalt and plunged forward whereas she should have flung herself not forward but backward (Fred showed how by a jerk of his padded shoulder). I said it was certainly not his fault, and the inquest upheld my view.
Breathing violently though jet-black tense nostrils, he shook his head and my hand; then, with an air of perfect savoir vivre and gentlemanly generosity, he offered to pay the funeral-home expenses. He expected me to refuse his offer. With a drunken sob of gratitude I accepted it. He had, after all, killed my wife. This took him aback. Slowly, incredulously, he repeated what he had said. I thanked him again, even more profusely than before.
In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate--and its padded shoulder. A sad mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Fate's formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury--I wept.
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