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.