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!