Lolita, Scrubbed

Part One Now Available in PDF Format

2009-09-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

Chapter 33

2009-09-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments--swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she woke me, sobbing, and I knew then I had been right. Telling her all at once had been better. As the grief pamphlets say: Now the healing could begin.

** End of Part One **

Chapter 32

2009-09-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and the girl continued to go on about her summer romance. I think it gave her a thrill to be able to be so candid with a parent in this way, as her mother had always been jealous of even the smallest of her daughter’s pleasures. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a droll grimace. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an "ugh!" basis: jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust.

Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a "very select" one as she put it. That tent-mate ("quite a derelict character," "half-crazy," but a "swell kid") instructed her in various male manipulations.

"Some of my school bunch, they’re pretty bad, but not as bad as this girl, Elizabeth Talbot. She goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive."

I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as "when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl."

I wanted to know if either mother learned how bad the Talbot girl really was?

"Gosh no," exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest.

I was more interested, however, in breakfast. Still, she continued.

Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the camp's best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo "because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island" (some swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress' son, aged thirteen--and the only human male for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel, while Barbara and the boy kissed and groped behind a bush.

At first, Lo had refused "to try what it was like," but curiosity and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were kissing by turns with the silent, coarse and surly Charlie. Although conceding it was "sort of fun" and "fine for the ego," Lolita held Charlie's mind and manners in the greatest contempt.

By that time it was close to ten. With an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples. We changed and packed. From the corridor came the cooing voices of maids at work, and presently there was a mild attempt to open the door of our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones of potato chips. She tried on a number of outfits. When she was ready at last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf (in which I had slipped quite a few pennies and two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy herself a magazine in the lobby.

"I'll be down in a minute," I said. "And if I were you, my dear, I would not talk to strangers."

Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack; I finished dressing and had the bellboy come up for the bags.

Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid movie magazine. A fellow of my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed overnight to a spurious country-squire atmosphere) was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and stale newspaper. There she sat, skimming along the lines with every now and then a blink: Bill's wife had worshipped him from afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he ate sundaes in Schwab's drugstore, etc. Nothing could have been more childish than her choice in magazines; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious literature; all was as it should be--But with what sickening longing the lecherous fellow whoever he was--come to think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss uncle Gustave—gazed at my daughter. I could have shot him then and there.

Was Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare's place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and bid Lo from her chair. She read to the car.

Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven. My nerves were a-jangle. Her mother was dead and she didn’t know it. Already, I began to suspect the error of my “break it to her slowly” plan, but I pressed on. I tried--unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips--to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel.

As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo's face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit. I asked her what was the matter. "Nothing, you brute," she replied. "Are you worried for your mother?" I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong goal surpassed expectation, it felt like quite the dishonest start. I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt I might never tell her of her mother’s death and somehow put it off forever. In other words, poor Humbert Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she, however, who broke the silence:

"Oh, a squashed squirrel," she said. "What a shame."

"Yes, isn't it?"

"Let us stop at the next gas station," Lo continued. "I want to go to the washroom."

"We shall stop wherever you want," I said. Another poor precedent.

I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.

"You chump," she said, sweetly smiling at me. "You revolting creature. I ought to call the police and tell them you kidnapped me."

Was she joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Some claptrap filled my head, the mystic bonds between mother and daughter, “a daughter just knows,” grasping at straws. The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away. Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my windshield--they do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge. She appeared at last. "Look," she said in that neutral voice that hurt me so, "give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that hospital. What's the number?"

"Get in," I said. "You can't call that number."

"Why?"

"Get in and slam the door."

She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I swung onto the highway. I couldn’t keep it in any longer. She had to know.

"Why can't I call my mother if I want to?"

"Because," I answered, "your mother is dead."

Chapter 31

2009-08-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

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?

Chapter 30

2009-08-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came though the Venetian blind from the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom.

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

2009-08-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 27.2

2009-08-07T08:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 27.1

2009-08-07T08:39:00.002-07:00

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!

Chapter 26

2009-08-07T08:39:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-07T08:38:00.001-07:00

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.

Chapter 24

2009-08-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 23

2009-08-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 22

2009-07-28T09:02:00.002-07:00

I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister's funeral. "Euphemia had never been the same after breaking that hip." As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert's daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year; but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her admittance might be arranged. The fact that Lo would have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of anticipation. It would be the trial period I’d intended to ask Charlotte for. When, in January, the grades were up, the home was happy, and Lo failed to conceal a crush on one of her little classmates, all would be well, and Charlotte would see no need to sick our daughter to the nuns.

For this event I wanted to be fully prepared. I had in fact begun my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision of hers. I had to be sure when the child arrived, that very day, and then day after day, until St. Algebra took her away from me, I would possess the means of putting her through the most rigorous academic regimen possible. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various textbooks, trying them out on Charlotte, a blank slate, academically speaking. The last afternoon lesson I had given her (she thought it was a game of trivia) had so thoroughly exhausted her that she slept for four solid hours, and even then I had to push her, pinch her, prod her to disturb the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing.

Next day, after lunch, I went to see "our" doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science. Nonetheless, I left in full health and great spirits. Steering my wife's car with one finger, I contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after all, lots of charm. The cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly watered. Smoothly, almost silkily, I turned down into our steep little street. Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green. I knew the sun shone because my ignition key was reflected in the windshield; and I knew it was exactly half past three because the nurse who came to massage Miss Opposite every afternoon was tripping down the narrow sidewalk in her white stockings and shoes. As usual, Junk's hysterical setter attacked me as I rolled downhill, and as usual, the local paper was lying on the porch where it had just been hurled by Kenny.

The day before I had ended the regime of aloofness I had imposed upon myself, and now uttered a cheerful homecoming call as I opened the door of the living room. With her ream-white nape and bronze bun to me, wearing the yellow blouse and maroon slacks she had on when I first met her, Charlotte sat at the corner bureau writing a letter. My hand still on the doorknob, I repeated my hearty cry. Her writing hand stopped. She sat still for a moment; then she slowly turned in her chair and rested her elbow on its curved back. Her face, disfigured by her emotion, was not a pretty sight as she stared at my legs and said:

"The Haze woman, the big bitch, the old cat, the obnoxious mamma, the--the old stupid Haze is no longer your dupe. She has--she has . . ."

My fair accuser stopped, swallowing her venom and her tears. She had read the diary. Whatever Humbert Humbert said--or attempted to say--is inessential. She went on:

"You pretended to love me when you despised me. You're a detestable, abominable, fraud. Why didn’t you leave when I told you to? Why stay?"

Again, whatever H.H. murmured may be omitted, I think.

"I told you once I would kill myself if I found you didn’t believe in God,” she said. “Instead I am leaving. Tonight. This is all yours. You'll never see me or that miserable brat again. Get out of this room."

Reader, I did. I went up to the ex-semi-studio. Arms akimbo, I stood for a moment quite still and self-composed, surveying from the threshold the raped little table with its open drawer, a key hanging from the lock, four other household keys on the table top. I walked across the landing into the Humberts' bedroom, and calmly removed my diary from under her pillow into my pocket. Then I started to walk downstairs, but stopped half-way: she was talking on the telephone which happened to be plugged just outside the door of the living room. I wanted to hear what she was saying: she canceled an order for something or other, and returned to the parlor. I rearranged my respiration and went through the hallway to the kitchen. There, I opened a bottle of Scotch. She could never resist Scotch. Then I walked into the dining room and from there, through the half-open door, contemplated Charlotte's broad back.

"You are ruining my life and yours," I said quietly. "Let us be civilized people. It is all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put in by mere chance, or rather because they were the opposite of my true feelings. We scholars deal in opposites, doubles. I adore you so I write a book in which I despise you. Is it such a stretch?”

She neither answered nor turned, but went on writing in a scorching scrawl whatever she was writing. A third letter, presumably (two in stamped envelopes were already laid out on the desk). I went back to the kitchen.

I set out two glasses (to St. Algebra? to Lo?) and opened the refrigerator. It roared at me viciously while I removed the ice from its heart. Rewrite. Let her read it again. She will not recall details. Change, forge. Write a fragment and show it to her or leave it lying around. Why do faucets sometimes whine so horribly? A horrible situation, really. The little pillow-shaped blocks of ice emitted rasping, crackling, tortured sounds as the warm water loosened them in their cells. I bumped down the glasses side by side. I poured in the whiskey and a dram of soda. She had tabooed my pin (gin and pineapple juice, my drink, my love). Bark and bang went the icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite space enough for my elbow.

"I have made you a drink," I said.

She did not answer and I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring.

"Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson," said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. "Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you'd better come quick."

I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door and said:

"There's this man saying you've been killed, Charlotte."

But there was no Charlotte in the living room.

Chapter 21

2009-07-28T09:02:00.001-07:00

On the opposite bank, at least a thousand paces away (if one cold walk across water), I could make out the tiny figures of two men working like beavers on their stretch of shore. I knew exactly who they were: a retired policeman of Polish descent and the retired plumber who owned most of the timber on that side of the lake. And I also knew they were engaged in building, just for the dismal fun of the thing, a wharf. The knocks that reached us seemed so much bigger than what could be distinguished of those dwarfs' arms and tools, especially since the hefty crack of each diminutive blow lagged behind its visual version.

The short white-sand strip of "our" beach--from which by now we had gone a little way to reach deep water--was empty on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk confession, “I want to be a father to Lo,” and here was the subtle point: I could not speak. I simply could not. So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know--trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to speak candidly and she would relent.

Simple, was it not? But what d'ye know, folks--I just could not make myself do it!

She swam beside me, a clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn't! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself speak. And suddenly I did not want to—I simply wanted out. I wanted to find a city, bed a young strumpet taking a summer after college to adventure before starting a career. I could be that adventure. I knew in that moment that I never wanted to see Haze again.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex addicts that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a woman, are innocuous, swarthy, active, charming strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, promiscuous behavior, their private acts without society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as soldiers do. We are happy, mild gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of “moral” adults, but ready to give years of life for the love of the hunt. That’s an expression, of course. Poets never kill. I did not leave Charlotte that day or that week as it would seem I was going to. Perhaps I would have, but will never know, for I barely had the chance. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven.

We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended one arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked. She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another.

"Those disgusting prying kids," said Charlotte, holding up her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. "I shall have to speak about that to Peter Krestovski."

From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things.

"You scared us," said Charlotte.

Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature, trying to finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was true)--"And have you ever tried painting, Humbert?" Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming. He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts, showing off her long brown legs. She smiled. I had never noticed how beautiful Jean was until that moment, and wondered if leaving old Charlotte wasn’t a bit rash, if maybe an alternative could be reached that would satisfy all parties.

"I almost put both of you into my lake," she said. "I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing me] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had."

"Waterproof," said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.

Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte's gift, then put back Humbert's hand on the sand, palm up.

"You could see anything that way," remarked Charlotte coquettishly.

Jean sighed. "I once saw," she said, "two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears--"

"Hullo there," said John's voice.

Chapter 20

2009-07-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake--not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.

We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip "in the ebony" (as John had quipped) at five o'clock in the morning last Sunday.

"The water," I said, "must have been quite cold."

"That is not the point," said my logical doomed dear. "He is subnormal, you see. And," she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), "I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron."

I never got used to this American use of “feeling,” as in, "We feel Dolly is not doing as well" etc.

The Humberts walked on, sandaled and robed.

"Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream," pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head--shy of that dream--and communing with the tawny ground. "I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house."

"No room," I said.

"Come," she said with her quizzical smile, "surely, chèri, you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in Lo's room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It's the coldest and meanest in the whole house."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up.

"Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?" queried my wife--in allusion to her first surrender.

"Hell no," said I. "I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid."

"Ah," said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the "Ah" simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. "Little Lo, I'm afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then--Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry."

She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalli's sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her. I wringed my hands. The prospect of a permanent home without Dolores struck me as tedious, unchallenging, unthinkable.

Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the situation. In my troubled first marriage, by merely glancing angrily at her, I could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was the awesome duenna of my darling, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward her. She had been annoyed by Lo's liking me; but my own fatherly feelings I had never made known for fear of fanning the flames of Charlotte’s bizarre jealousy.

To Valeria I might have said: "Look here. It is me who decides what is good for Dolores Humbert." To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating calm): "Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us give the child one more chance. Let me be her tutor for a year or so. You once told me yourself--" In fact, I could not say anything at all. Oh, you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish at once an intonation of disagreement with her mothering. I suspect that the quickest way incur the physical abuse of a woman is to tell her she’s a bad mother.

To break Charlotte's will, I would have to break her heart. If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said: "Either I have my way or we part at once," she would have turned as pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied: "All right, whatever you add or retract, this is the end." And the end it would be.

Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking it as avidly as if it would give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom. For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the whooshing pines. In the middle distance, two little girls came out of a sun-dappled privy marked "Women."

I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we and a few other "nice" couples (the Farlows, the Chatfields) bathed was a kind of small cove; my Charlotte liked it because it was almost "a private beach." The main bathing facilities (or drowning facilities" as the Ramsdale Journal had had occasion to say) were in the left (eastern) part of the hourglass, and could not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the pines soon gave way to a curve of marshland which turned again into forest on the opposite side.

I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started.

"Shall we go in?" she asked.

"We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought."

I thought. More than a minute passed.

"All right. Come on."

"Was I on that train?"

"You certainly were."

"I hope so," said Charlotte entering the water. It soon reached the gooseflesh of her thick thighs; and then, joining her outstretched hands, shutting her mouth tight, very plain-faced in her black rubber headgear, Charlotte flung herself forward with a great splash. Slowly we swam out into the shimmer of the lake.

On the opposite bank, at least a thousand paces away (if one cold walk across water), I could make out the tiny figures of two men working like beavers on their stretch of shore. I knew exactly who they were: a retired policeman of Polish descent and the retired plumber who owned most of the timber on that side of the lake. And I also knew they were engaged in building, just for the dismal fun of the thing, a wharf. The knocks that reached us seemed so much bigger than what could be distinguished of those dwarfs' arms and tools, especially since the hefty crack of each diminutive blow lagged behind its visual version.

The short white-sand strip of "our" beach--from which by now we had gone a little way to reach deep water--was empty on weekday mornings. There was nobody around except those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side, and a dark-red private plane that droned overhead, and then disappeared in the blue. The setting was really perfect for a brisk confession, “I want to be a father to Lo,” and here was the subtle point: I could not speak. I simply could not. So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know--trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to speak candidly and she would relent.

Simple, was it not? But what d'ye know, folks--I just could not make myself do it!

She swam beside me, a clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn't! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself speak. And suddenly I did not want to—I simply wanted out. I wanted to find a city, bed a young strumpet taking a summer after college to adventure before starting a career. I could be that adventure. I knew in that moment that I never wanted to see Haze again.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex addicts that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a woman, are innocuous, swarthy, active, charming strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, promiscuous behavior, their private acts without society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as soldiers do. We are happy, mild gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of “moral” adults, but ready to give years of life for the love of the hunt. That’s an expression, of course. Poets never kill. I did not leave Charlotte that day or that week as it would seem I was going to. Perhaps I would have, but will never know, for I barely had the chance. Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not hate me in your eternal heaven.

We sat down on our towels in the thirsty sun. She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply. She extended one arm and groped in the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. She sat up and smoked. She examined her right shoulder. She kissed me heavily with open smoky mouth. Suddenly, down the sand bank behind us, from under the bushes and pines, a stone rolled, then another.

"Those disgusting prying kids," said Charlotte, holding up her big bra to her breast and turning prone again. "I shall have to speak about that to Peter Krestovski."

From the debouchment of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things.

"You scared us," said Charlotte.

Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature, trying to finish a lakescape, but it was no good, she had no talent whatever (which was true)--"And have you ever tried painting, Humbert?" Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming. He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts, showing off her long brown legs. She smiled. I had never noticed how beautiful Jean was until that moment, and wondered if leaving old Charlotte wasn’t a bit rash, if maybe an alternative could be reached that would satisfy all parties.

"I almost put both of you into my lake," she said. "I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing me] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had."

"Waterproof," said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth.

Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte's gift, then put back Humbert's hand on the sand, palm up.

"You could see anything that way," remarked Charlotte coquettishly.

Jean sighed. "I once saw," she said, "two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears--"

"Hullo there," said John's voice.

Chapter 19

2009-07-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). I had been always aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my life that had not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them apostately and totally, thus destroying my past. She made me tell her about my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a scream; but I also had to reduce and compress my long series of mistresses for Charlotte's morbid delectation. To keep her happy, I had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one--only one, but as cute as they make them--chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row. So I presented my women, and had them smile and sway--the languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead--as if on parade in a bordello. The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was pleased with the show.

Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed her love life, from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were similarly generic since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her autobiography was devoid of interests. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.

Of Lolita she seldom spoke--more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In once of her reveries, she predicted that the dead infant's soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold's production (Lolita, I had already grown to regard as my child), I found I was not adverse to the idea. It struck me odd that we had not once discussed the matter in our too-brief courtship.

It was not only that one child was not enough for her, but that she was so horribly dissatisfied with the one she had. Sometimes it seemed that she hated her daughter. What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool's book she had (A Guide to Your Child's Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child's birthdays. On Lo's twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under "Your Child's Personality": aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth.

It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife's mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo's little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. And then, her attitude toward her daughter’s letters!

"Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I'm having a time. Love,
Dolly."

"The dumb child," said Mrs. Humbert, "has left out a word before 'time.' That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me."

Chapter 18

2009-07-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

When the bride is a window and the groom is a widower; when the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the wedding is generally a "quiet" affair. The bride may dispense with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride's little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q.

My so-called passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle. Immediately after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her "nervous, eager lover” had some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score my mind was open; I said, instead--paying my tribute to a pious platitude--that I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of principle.

She was very genteel: she said "excuse me" whenever a slight burp interrupted her flowing speech, called an envelope and ahnvelope, and when talking to her lady-friends referred to me as Mr. Humbert. I thought it would please her if I entered the community trailing some glamour after me. On the day of our wedding a little interview with me appeared in the Society Column of the Ramsdale Journal, with a photograph of Charlotte, one eyebrow up and a misprint in her name ("Hazer").

Despite this embarrassing slip-up, the publicity warmed the porcelain cockles of her heart and, slowly, mine. By engaging in church work as well as by getting to know the better mothers of Lo's schoolmates, Charlotte in the course of twenty months or so had managed to become if not a prominent, at least an acceptable citizen, but never before had she come under that thrilling news column, and it was I who put her there, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert (I threw in the "Edgar" just for the heck of it), "writer and explorer." McCoo's brother, when taking it down, asked me what I had written. Whatever I told him came out as "several books on Peacock, Rainbow and other poets." It was also noted that Charlotte and I had known each other for several years and that I was a distant relation of her first husband. I hinted I had had an affair with her thirteen years ago but this was not mentioned in print. To Charlotte I said that society columns should contain a shimmer of errors.

Let us go on with this curious tale. When called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitterness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some tenderness, even to a pattern of looking up, evenings, from my papers at my new bride and thinking I had made a wise decision. Never had I thought that the sometimes ridiculous, through rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable child of twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid my hands upon her.

The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration--a radiance having something soft about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways). We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage my husbandly duties with relative ease. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that this may not be as exciting as my youthful womanizing, but it was more sane, more adult, and I took pains to get to know this strange woman to whom I had tethered myself. I had my wife unearth from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita's outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. For all their differences, they were kin.

I simply can't tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook, she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. And when at times I felt the old Humbert appear from his curmudgeonly cage, I hid it well. My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect.

Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if by my marrying the mother of a gifted child I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy.

With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to "glorify the home." Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart, I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the putt-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God, but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa--the sofa where I had given Lo her unnecessary-but-diagnostic mathematics lesson. She rearranged the furniture--and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that "it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps." With the authoress of Your Home Is You, she developed a hatred for little lean chairs and spindle tables. She believed that a room having a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich wood paneling was an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine type was characterized by lighter-looking windows and frailer woodwork. The novels I had found her reading when I moved in were now replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides. From a firm located at 4640 Roosevelt Blvd., Philadelphia, she ordered for our double bed a "damask covered 312 coil mattress"--although the old one seemed to me resilient and durable enough for whatever it had to support.

A Midwesterner, as her late husband had also been, she had lived in coy Ramsdale, the gem of an eastern state, not long enough to know all the nice people. She knew slightly the jovial dentist who lived in a kind of ramshackle wooden chateau behind our lawn. She had met at a church tea the "snooty" wife of the local junk dealer who owned the "colonial" white horror at the corner of the avenue. Now and then she "visited with" old Miss Opposite; but the more patrician matrons among those she called upon, or met at lawn functions, or had telephone chats with--such dainty ladies as Mrs. Glave, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. McCrystal, Mrs. Knight and others, seldom seemed to call on my neglected Charlotte.

Indeed, the only couple with whom she had relations of real cordiality, devoid of any ulterior motives or practical foresight, were the Farlows who had just come back from a business trip to Chile in time to attend our wedding, with the Chatfields, McCoos, and a few others (but not Mrs. Junk or the even prouder Mrs. Talbot). John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods, who had an office at Parkington, forty miles away: it was he who got me the cartridges for that Colt and showed me how to use it, during a walk in the woods one Sunday; he was also what he called with a smile a part-time lawyer and had handled some of Charlotte's affairs. Jean, his gorgeous youngish wife (finally, a looker), was a long-limbed girl in harlequin glasses with two boxer dogs, two pointed breasts and a lucious red mouth. She painted--landscapes and portraits--and vividly do I remember praising, over cocktails, the picture she had made of a mountain range with its snowy peaks and the fields below it--and John removed his pipe and said, apropos of nothing, that it was a pity Dolly and Rosaline were so critical of each other at school, but he hoped, and we all hoped, they would get on better when they returned from their respective camps.

We talked of the school. It had its drawbacks, and it had its virtues. "Of course, too many of the tradespeople here are Italians," said John, "but on the other hand we are still spared--" "I wish," interrupted Jean with a laugh, sparing us her husband’s charming xenophobia, "Dolly and Rosaline were spending the summer together." Suddenly I imagined Lo returning from camp and hoped that she would take well to the enormous adjustment to Humbert-as-father. I’d read enough sob adoption fictions—“You’re not my father,” she wailed into the night—to know it could be difficult. I never imagined I’d have to go through it alone.

Chapter 17

2009-07-20T10:08:00.001-07:00

Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining to the business in hand--if I may coin an expression--had not drifted across my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear--let me repeat--that I had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression), in my dimness of thought. There may have been times--there must have been times--when I had brought up for detached inspection the idea of marrying a mature widow (say, Charlotte Haze) who has already started a family (Lo), to swoop in, love and be loved, to “fix everything.” I am even prepared to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an appraiser's cold eye at Charlotte's coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. Maybe, in a certain dim light, light, I could almost love—well—become attracted—well, hmm. But love, romance, were these even necessary? Were they productive?

After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly--Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the good her mother's husband would be able to do poor Lolita. I would instruct and edify her three times a day, every day. She would be a scholar in no time and I would be responsible. Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. I might even grow to like it.

Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now ready to make a further statement as he turns his conscience inside out and rips off its innermost lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte for her husband’s money, but it did briefly occur to me that the subsidization of my scholarly pursuits could indeed be very good for my career. So Humbert the gold-miner schemed and dreamed--and the red sun of rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of scholars, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam in an apple orchard.

And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an annoyance. That journal of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now. Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude.

Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision that would shatter our different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at the camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo instead, I told her--trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate--that I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something was preventing her from giving me her attention. "Gee, that's swell," she said laughing. "When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup--That pup here has got hold of my sock. Listen--" and she added she guessed she was going to have loads of fun . . . and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the image of the horrid, tacky kumbaya of a summer that she had described in protest. But what did it matter whether she would like it? She would learn, become stronger for it, and we would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after the wedding had elapsed.

After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too healthy, walked to town and bought the richest foods available. I also bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon to display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert evoked Charlotte as seen in the peep-show of a manly imagination. She was well groomed and shapely, this I could say for her: heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse pink skin of her neck: a handsome woman.

The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog--I loathe dogs--had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin was dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Red zebras! There are some belches that sound like cheers--at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor's garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite's ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored.

The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices. Leslie, old Miss Opposite's gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic woman, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car--not Charlotte's. The older of the two little girls ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert's residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman's dog tearing alongside.

There was a smiling pause--and then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo's room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.

Chapter 16

2009-07-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

A poignant chaos was welling within me. Without Lo, the house felt silent and dull, and I knew I had to plan my own summer escape quickly, lest Haze rope me in for hot months of empty talk on the veranda. But I had to drop those things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid's velvety voice calling me softly from the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping my automatic thanks with a kindly "you're welcome," good Louise left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my hand. Hardly knowing where I was going, I retreated into Lo’s room (the coolest at that time of day) and closed the door behind me.

"This is a confession. I love you [so the letter began in a hysterical scrawl]. Last Sunday in church--bad you, who refused to come to see our beautiful new windows!--only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.

Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, dear monsieur, you have read this; now you know. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave. This is a landlady's order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out. Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don't have an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once, now, do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu.

The situation, darling, is quite simple. Of course, I know with absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at all to you, nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely garden, even of Lo's noisy ways--but I am nothing to you. Right? Right. Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my "confession," you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal--worse than a murderer. You see, chèri. If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I won't--and that's why I am able to go on like this), the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.

Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, my very, very dear, what a world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved you are, how "British." Your old-world reticence, your sense of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he happened to be twenty years my senior, and--well, let us not gossip about the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me--if you ever pray.
C.H."

What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including her limited French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage too personal to include, concerning Lolita's brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say? Yes. There is just a chance that "the vortex of the toilet" is my own contribution. She probably begged me to make a special fire to consume it.

My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend's calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo’s room. A full-page ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a crooner's mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So, with breakfast for two. Was this my fate? The legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a "conquering hero." The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bed-fellow was to get under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Under this was another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright I would later murder was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo's bed, littered with comics. The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving black, more or less rounded, marks on the white. I sat on Lo’s bed reread the letter.

Chapter 15

2009-07-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

Next day they drove downtown to buy things needed for the camp: any wearable purchase worked wonders with Lo. She seemed her usual sarcastic self at dinner. Immediately afterwards, she went up to her room to plunge into the comic books acquired for rainy days at Camp Q (they were so thoroughly sampled by Thursday that she left them behind). I too retired to my lair, and wrote letters. My plan now was to take a seaside vacation and then, when school began, resume my existence in the Haze household. This way, I could avoid giving Haze any more ideas about my “real reason” for sending Lo away.

On Tuesday they went shopping again, and I was asked to answer the phone if the camp mistress rang up during their absence. She did; and a month or so later we had occasion to recall our pleasant chat. That Tuesday, Lo had her dinner in her room. She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had happened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she had one of those frail complexions that after a good cry get all blurred and inflamed. There was, however, more to it than I thought. As we sat in the darkness of the verandah, Haze, with a dreary laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole camp idea "and now," added Haze, "the child throws a fit; pretext: you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her we would exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too cute night things that she bullied me into buying for her. You see, she sees herself as a starlet; I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely kid. This, I guess, is at the root of our troubles."

On Wednesday I managed to intercept Lo for a few seconds: I said something meant to be friendly and funny but she only emitted a snort without looking at me. "Doublecrosser," she said. “You don’t know it yet,” I told her, “but this is to be far more educational a summer than you could hope to have with your mother and me.” She scoffed: I’d lost her at “educational.” She did not condescend to have dinner with Hum and mum: washed her hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q.

Things improved a bit before Dolores left. Haze was to drive her to the camp in the early morning. Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the window. Under the poplars, the car was already running. On the sidewalk, Louise stood shading her eyes with her hand, as if the little traveler were already riding into the low morning sun. The gesture proved to be premature. "Hurry up!" shouted Haze. Lolita, who was half in and about to slam the car door, wind down the glass, wave to Louise and the poplars (whom and which she was never to see again), interrupted the motion of fate: she looked up--and dashed back into the house (Haze furiously calling after her). A moment later I heard her running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. My daughter, I though, my darling!

Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, and then she gave me a short, tight hug and clattered downstairs. The car door was slammed--was re-slammed--and driver Haze at the violent wheel, rubber-red lips writhing in angry, inaudible speech, swung the car away, while unnoticed by them or Louise, old Miss Opposite, an invalid, feebly but rhythmically waved from her vined verandah.

Chapter 14

2009-07-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

I had lunch in town. The house was still empty when I strolled back. I spent the afternoon working.

I felt proud of myself. I had introduced myself as teacher and father figure without exasperating the girl. What I began to picture was not she, but my own creation, another, brilliant Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance. Perhaps the next lesson would be on the ancient Greeks, or an unbiased perspective on her own nation’s cheery imperialism. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence.

No Lolita came home--she had gone with the Chatfields to a movie. The table was laid with more elegance than usual: candlelight, if you please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs. Haze gently touched the silver on both sides of her plate as if touching piano keys, and smiled down on her empty plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped I liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman's magazine). She hoped I liked the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs. Chatfield was a lovely person. Phyllis, her daughter, was leaving tomorrow for a three-week summer camp.

And suddenly I had a perfect idea, far better than any lesson I could impart on the girl in tiny doses—Lo would go to camp, too. At first, Charlotte was reticent. Never having gone to a camp herself, she did not know what went on there. Neither did I, but I was positive it would be a much more revelatory experience than lying out on the veranda each day. At camp, she would learn respect, sportsmanship, perhaps even find an opportunity to showcase her voice in a talent show. I would miss the girl, to be certain, if for no other reason than the buffer she provided between myself and Haze, yet I think it was that very buffer that Charlotte considered when she relented to my idea. Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday, stay there after Phyllis had left, until school began.

Suddenly, my toothache returned. Must have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.

Charlotte visited me in my room later, trying to help. "We have," said Haze, "an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him 'brace' her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, as you said, a summer camp is so much healthier, and--well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma's lipstick and go into tantrums at the least provocation. And it won't be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes--you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things--health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility towards other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?"

I saw what the woman was up to, already plotting for the weeks ahead with the gentleman tenant all to herself. “Nurse that tooth,” I replied.

Chapter 13

2009-07-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be as bright as the weatherman had predicted. When putting the breakfast things back on the chair outside my room for my good landlady to remove at her convenience, I gleaned the following situation by listening from the landing across which I had softly crept to the banisters in my old bedroom slippers--the only old things about me.

There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned that her daughter "was running a temperature." Mrs. Haze informed her daughter that the picnic would have to be postponed. Little Haze informed big Haze that, if so, she would not go with her to church. Mother said very well and left.

I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-earlobed, still in my white pajamas with the cornflower blue (not the lilac) design on the back; I now wiped off the soap, perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped on a purple silk dressing gown, and, humming, went down the stairs.

I want all tutors and educators to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how precise, the whole event is. So let us get started.

Educator: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Classroom: sunlit living room. Materials: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze had taken his wife on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place). Lo was not shod for church and her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph.

She sat down on the sofa next to me and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it--it made a cupped polished plot. Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.

"Give it back," she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms, but I withheld. “Lo,” I said. “If you have eleven apples and I steal five, how many apples do you have?” “Give it,” she repeated, adding, “We’re on long division now.” I admit it had not occurred to me that her dreadful country school would have taken her any further than the simplest mathematics, but I also believed it was important to stay the course when dealing with a child and to not cede power to them in these situations. “This should be easy, then,” I said. She rolled her eyes and said, “Six, geez Louise,” and I produced her apple.

She grasped it and bit into it, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of an American child, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away and caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. It had been a short lesson, but useful in attaining a broad sense of the girl’s learning—not as bad as I had supposed, at least in the one discipline.

Satisfied, I returned my attention to the magazine and recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular--O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen. Then Lo stole and corrected the tune I had been mutilating. And so without trying, I learned of her musical aptitude, and made a note to relay my discovery to her mother, who would no doubt be more jealous than happy. I soon rejoined the song, repeating the chance words after her--barmen, alarmin', my charmin', my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen--as one talking and laughing in his sleep.

Immediately afterward she rolled off the sofa and jumped to her feet--to her foot, rather--in order to attend to the formidably loud telephone that may have been ringing for ages as far as I knew. There she stood and blinked as she listened or spoke (to her mother who was telling her to come to lunch with her at the Chatfileds--neither Lo nor Hum knew yet what busybody Haze was plotting), she kept tapping the edge of the table with the slipper she held in her hand.

She was still at the telephone, haggling with her mother (wanted to be fetched by car) when, singing louder and louder, I swept up the stairs and set a deluge of steaming water roaring into the tub. At this point I may as well give the words of that song hit in full--to the best of my recollection at least--I don't think I ever had it right. Here goes:

O my Carmen, my Carmen!
Something, something those something nights,
And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen--
And, O my charmin', our dreadful fights.
And the something town where so gaily, arm in
Arm, we went, and our final row,
And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,
The gun I am holding now.

Something like that. Now where was I?

Chapter 12

2009-07-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seem from them that for all the chronicler’s inventiveness, the days remained daily the same. For almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. Why at the time it never occurred to me to go to the lake by myself, I don’t know. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman, who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo's deriving some pleasure from me than of Lo growing up civilized. Despite her bacon-stealing and adolescent whining, Lo was far more interesting than her stale mother. Lo was an original.

We did go to the lake, finally. It would have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton was to come too, and that Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger would converse sedately in the seminude, far from prying eyes.

Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze's family, come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr Humbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmly supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had Lo under her buzzard wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale, and Haze found herself unrequitedly smitten, her tenant too polite or meek to make his lack of intentions known.

Chapter 11.2

2009-07-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, as my room was the stuffiest in the house. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping--to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without having been called--Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a belle-lettrist's inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics of my slowly-progressing book. As she bent her brown curs over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in an awkward imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying the piece of paper she held. I was just about to give her a rudimentary explanation of the work that I do—“You see, Lo, respectable adults earn their living”—when the house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise's voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale.

Sunday. House was quiet, Humbert was productive. Dolores and her mother off to the Hamiltons--a birthday party or something.

Monday. Rainy morning, gray and soft. My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. But where is my prey? Nowhere to be found, all in the city where I left them. I keep waiting for one of Haze’s friends to have a smidgen of charm with which to tempt me, but no, not one, though that does not stop them all from trying. How much more country living until they look appetizing, and on that day, shall I take one to bed or kill myself?

I satisfy with morbidity while in the kitchen Lolita is banging the refrigerator door and screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). Now it is my turn to be the fly, her lover in word if never in deed. And then comes Lolita's chuckle through my half-open door "Don't tell Mother but I've eaten all your bacon." Gone when I scuttle out of my room to reprimand her. My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Quite a pair, these two.

Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks. Look out, lakecombers.

Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. "Choose your favorite seduction," she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car.

"Hurry up," she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when Lolita's sharp voice came from the parlor window: "You! Where are you going? I'm coming too! Wait!" "Ignore her," yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. I stepped out—"This is intolerable," began Haze—and Lo scrambled into the backseat, shivering with glee. Haze sideglanced at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out, forgetting that she was the one who had such powers. "And behold," said Lo (not for the first time) as the car leapt forward. "It is intolerable," said Haze, violently getting into second, "that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath." It was all true, but a day alone with Haze? No thank you.

The girl and I fell silent all the way to the store. The wings of the driver's Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile. I have nothing else to report, save that the lady decided to keep Humbert's Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.

Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child's pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school:

Chatfield, Phyllis
Haze, Dolores
McCoo, Virginia
Windmuller, Louise
So On
So Forth

I imagined so well the rest of the colorful classroom around Lo: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard terror; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella; Ralph, who bullies and steals. And even as I took part in this rainy-day game, I also imagined their mothers, at least one of which I might meet at one of those insufferable parent-teacher evenings (or the teacher herself!), who would say, “So you’re the reason for Lo’s improving grades,” and would invite me to a private celebration in her bedroom. Yes, even as a tutor, Humbert the lion was on the prowl, getting ahead of himself, while Lo sat in her classroom, lost, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, mediocre, potential unrealized.

Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Something to break the monotony. Idle and idiotic fancies!

Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated Dolores for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder--and plunge with a local strumpet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant sunbather.

At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a dream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air--one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of the dream agent.

Saturday. After lunch I was reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes: she had crept up from behind. She uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing my recumbent position. The book like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs. Haze strolled up and said indulgently: "Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations.” As if all of a sudden this was a house of discipline. “How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn't it divine in the sun [no question mark either]." And with a sign of feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo's voice came from the house haughtily: "Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you." The look Haze gave her daughter was a fierce reminder of what seemed to be the house’s only rule—don’t bother Mother. It’s anarchy, I tell you. Boring, lazy anarchy.

Chapter 11.1

2009-07-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, in oblique type, in its upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years go and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.

I remember the thing so exactly because I, unlike so many others, actually read and re-read my journal entries. Of course, I’ve taken the trouble to edit out anything I deem irrelevant (all my fears, doubts, etc. regarding my scholarly work). What remains is Charlotte and Lo, in all their dueling glory:

May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of "abdominal flu" (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off covers most of June.

Thursday. Very warm day. From the bathroom window saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, far too much for such a hot day. I suspect she’s using her wardrobe to irk her mother. Every movement she made in the dappled sun hinted at rebellion, a cry for boundaries. After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet--then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip--and chuck them at a can. Ping. “I bet you can't a second time,” I said, bonding with the girl, taking an interest, “you can't hit it--oh, marvelous.”

I was baking out there, turning lobster-red before her eyes, but no matter, a trust was forming. "The McCoo girl?” she prattled on. “Ginny McCoo? Oh, she's a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio." Ping. Out of the lawn, Mrs. Haze, complete with camera, grew up like a fakir's fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing--sad eyes up, glad eyes down--had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat blinking on the steps, Humbert the Red.

Friday. Saw Dolores going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. I’m infinitely moved by the little one's slangy speech, by her harsh high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. "I must go now, kiddo."

Saturday. I know it is madness to keep this journal; only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script, I myself cannot make heads or tails of yesterday’s entry. Today Charlotte, a friend of hers, and Dolores sun-bathed again on the piazza. Of course, I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read, but I my disapproval would have prevented me from making my entrance with any semblance of casualness. I’m beginning to notice a pattern in this household in which sunbathing is mistaken for a full-time job. How could these women waste their lives on piazzas when there is so much work to do? Suffice to say, my womanizing has, thus far, not become an issue in the Haze household, though I can hardly credit my own self-control.

Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most gentle week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before D. and C. arrived, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. I found myself disappointed that D.’s mother was always around, for I finding it harder to establish a fatherly rapport with young D. when her mother is around. C. is, it pains me to say, much denser than her daughter. Likely assuming I was in want of time alone with her mother, D. had already retreated to her mat and lay down on her stomach. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. As I looked on, I felt that my perception of her would need to be properly reflected upon so as not to assume an intelligence behind the girl’s sharp eyes that was, in fact, not there. Is this the case of the child appearing to shine brighter only in contrast to her dim mum? Time will tell.

Monday. I spend my doleful days in the dumps. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into rain, and Lo made a scene.

Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., I knew, was somewhere quite near. I came across her in her mother's bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. The girl’s mother should make her wash her hair once in a while. I might say her hair is auburn, but after a good scrub, she could be goldilocks for all I know.

Perhaps the hair serves as an apt metaphor for the girl’s twofold nature -- this mixture in Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures. Charlotte, with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through her tenth cigarette of the evening, has commented on this very phenomenon.

She was spiteful, said Charlotte, at the age of one when she used to throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor mother should keep picking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest, said Haze. All she wanted from life was to be one day a strutting and prancing baton twirler or a jitterbug. Her grades were poor, but she was better adjusted in her new school than in Pisky (Pisky was the Haze home town in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house was her late mother-in-law's. They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years ago). "Why was she unhappy there?" "Oh," said Haze, "poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid: boys twisting one's arm, banging into one with loads of books, pulling one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt. Of course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates. Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant. Struck Viola, an Italian schoolmate, in the seat with a fountain pen. Know what I would like? If you, monsieur, happened to be still here in the fall, I'd ask you to help her with her homework--you seem to know everything, geography, mathematics, French." It was as if she had read my mind. "Oh, everything," answered monsieur. "That means," said Haze quickly, "you'll be here!"

I wanted to commit to stay on, but I was wary of Haze, so I just grunted and stretched my limbs nonconcomitantly (the right word) and presently went up to my room. The woman, however, was evidently not prepared to call it a day. I was already lying upon my cold bed when I heard my indefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper through it--just to make sure, she said, I was through with the Glance and Gulp magazine I had borrowed the other day. From her room Lo yelled she had it. We are quite a lending library in this house.

Friday. I shall probably take ill again if I stay any longer in this house, under the strain of the temptation to throttle silly Haze for her motherly negligence. I exaggerate, but barely.

Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder (mark the "if"), the urge should be something more than the kind of thing that happened to me with Valeria. Only a spell of insanity could ever give me the simple energy to be a brute. Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For instance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed.

At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty." Instantly Lo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over, and bounced out of the dining room. There, I could not stop myself from reprimanding Haze. “Children are confused enough at her age,” I said. “Their whims and crushes are fickle maybe, but not to be mocked. Girls often fall for their fathers”—and her eyes widened here, likely mishearing in favor of her own nuptial whims—“just before meeting their first boy and forgetting him entirely.” "Would it bore you very much," quoth Haze, "to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?"

Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row.

She had not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun.

[The second part of Chapter 11 coming Monday. I'm splitting the longer chapters to keep posts from getting too long. -G.K.]

Chapter 10

2009-07-01T09:08:00.000-07:00

Upon signing out, I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake. My work had begun to interest me again--I mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle's posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum. One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded fine.

I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in detail the child I would coach in French and the wife I would caress in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife's, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze's had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful chauffeur.

The aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. Living and working among strangers? I could live and work anywhere. I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of romantic sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo's cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but inane suggestion.

Speaking of sharp turns: we almost ran over a meddlesome suburban dog (one of those who lie in wait for cars) as we swerved into Lawn Street. A little further, the Haze house, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray than white--the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower. I tipped the chauffeur and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What could I do? I pressed the bell button.

A maid let me in--and left me standing on the mat while she rushed back to the kitchen where something was burning that ought not to burn.

The front hall was graced with door chimes, a white-eyed wooden thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh's "Arlèsienne." A door ajar to the right afforded a glimpse of a living room, with some more Mexican trash in a corner cabinet and a striped sofa along the wall. There was a staircase at the end of the hallway, and as I stood mopping my brow (only now did I realize how hot it had been outdoors) and staring, to stare at something, at an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest, there came from the upper landing the contralto voice of Mrs. Haze, who leaning over the banisters inquired melodiously, "Is that Monsieur Humbert?" A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition. Presently, the lady herself--sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order--came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette.

The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, it seemed to me, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well.

But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called "functional modern furniture" and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left--into "my" room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above the bed Renè Prinet's "Kreutzer Sonata." And she called that servant maid's room a "semi-studio"! Let's get out of here at once, I firmly said to myself as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed.

Old-world politeness, however, obliged me to go on with the ordeal. We crossed the landing to the right side of the house (where "I and Lo have our rooms"--Lo being presumably the maid), and the lodger-lover could hardly conceal a shudder when he, a very fastidious male, was granted a preview of the only bathroom, a tiny oblong between the landing and "Lo's" room, with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark of a hair inside); and there were the expected coils of the rubber snake, and its complement--a pinkish cozy, coyly covering the toilet lid.

"I see you are not too favorably impressed," said the lady letting her hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she combined a cool forwardness--the overflow of what I think is called "poise"--with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of speech. "This is not a neat household, I confess," the doomed ear continued, "but I assure you [she looked at my lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show you the garden" (the last more brightly, with a kind of winsome toss of the voice).

Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house--the side where also the dining room and the parlor were (under "my" room, on the left, there was nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the maid, a plump youngish woman, said, as she took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the door leading to the back porch: "I'll go now, Mrs. Haze." "Yes, Louise," answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. "I'll settle with you Friday."

We passed on to a small pantry and entered the dining room, parallel to the parlor we had already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory grunt, Mrs. Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I groped for the timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze though the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery--the piazza, so lush and extraordinary, the most beautiful part of the house saved for last. I could not stop myself from musing, “On a porch like this, work would not feel like work at all.”

And then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my dear Lolita peering at me over dark glasses. I felt then a stab of paternal affection for the child like none I had felt before. Everything about her, from her unruly chestnut head of hair to the polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest to the twinkling smirk her sunglasses could not hide, pointed to a kind of transparent insolence that the only child of a single parent is bound to adopt for her own survival. I felt pity, yes, but purpose as well.

I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece of bad acting on the part of a madman with a thirst for murder and, really, I don’t care. All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, I felt such a surge of protective love for the child that I would have killed for her, even then, before we had met.

"That was my Lo," Charlotte said, "and these are my lilies."

"Yes," I said, "They are beautiful."

Chapter 9

2009-06-29T06:12:00.000-07:00

Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of boredom and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. On the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New York to complete my comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of work daily.

As I look back on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating insomnias. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to pick up beautiful women in Central Park, and how complexly compelled and repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful flu sent me to a hospital for more than a year; I went back to my work--only to be hospitalized again.

Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a "recorder of psychic reactions." With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnson--who was soon flown back. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales' Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographer--an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work--maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox.

We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies--the Reader's Digest, an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite of or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected vegetation as willow scrub and lichens; permeated, and, I suppose, cleansed by a whistling gale; seated on a boulder under a completely translucent sky (through which, however, nothing of importance showed), I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo women with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked much less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Shaved legs do not occur in polar regions.

I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins, and for a time tried to jot down what I fondly thought were "reactions" (I noticed, for instance, that dreams under the midnight sun tended to be highly colored, and this my friend the photographer confirmed). I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters, such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food-fantasies, hobbies, choice of radio programs, changes in outlook and so forth. Everybody got so fed up with this that I soon dropped the project completely, and only toward the end of my twenty months of cold labor (as one of the botanists jocosely put it) concocted a perfectly spurious report that the reader will find published in he Annals of Adult Psychophysics for 1945 or 1946, as well as in the issue of Arctic Explorations devoted to that particular expedition; which, in conclusion, was not really concerned with Victoria Island copper or anything like that, as I learned later from my genial doctor; for the nature of its real purpose was what is termed "hush-hush," and so let me add merely that whatever it was, that purpose was admirably achieved.

The reader will regret to learn that soon after my return to civilization I had another bout with influenza. I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at that particular very expensive hospital. The life of the patient and the life of the scholar are perfectly identical: lounging, thinking, fighting boredom, inviting distraction. I had my papers brought to me, began working twelve-hour days free of distraction, and did not leave the hospital until a nosy nurse discovered I had made a full recovery.

Chapter 8

2009-06-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified vegetable soup, what really attracted me to Valeria was her air of innocence. She gave it not because she had divined something about my desire to be the man in the relationship, it was just her style--and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was in no place to judge. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, showed a generous amount of enthusiasm for the world, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.

After a brief ceremony at the town hall, I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear a maid’s outfit that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of a charity ball. Am I disclosing too much? I had some fun that nuptial night and, in spite of her claimed lack of experience, Valeria did too. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; presently, instead of a young sexy wife, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba. Or that was how it felt sometimes.

This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her best asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir newspaper, so full of gossip and lies, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her intellect very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the cook and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American engraving--a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds.

The peaceful times burst. In the summer of 1939 my American uncle died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me. I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too: moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort. During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my Valeria was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character I had imagined her to be. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her husband's solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the French police headquarters, and other formalities, that had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris.

We were coming out of some office building one morning, with her papers almost in order, when Valeria, as she waddled by my side, began to shake her head vigorously without saying a word. I let her go on for a while and then asked if she thought she had something inside. She answered, "There is another man in my life."

Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up, as a vulgarian might have done, was immoral, though I confess it was a temptation. I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness for Mme Humbert, but because, in my machismic fury, I felt that matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover's name. I repeated my question; but she kept up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing plans for an immediate divorce. "But who is it?" I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver.

He pulled up at a small cafè and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after all those years I still see him quite clearly--a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of them plying that fool's trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

I put an end to this gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack up her few belongings immediately, upon which the platitudinous colonel gallantly offered to carry them into the car. Reverting to his professional state, he drove the Humberts to their residence and all the way Valeria talked, and Humbert the Terrible entertained the fantasy of killing her or her lover, or both, all the while knowing he would kill neither. I thought of the one time I had handled an automatic belonging to a fellow student in college. I’d had an aversion to the cold piece of death, which I later learned to tolerate if not overcome. Valechka (as the colonel called her) had very vulnerable ears, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her audibly as soon as we were alone.

But we never were. Valechka--by now shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up--started to fill anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton, and, the more I watched the pitiable mess who was in her last minutes wifedom, unnecessary. I cannot say the man behaved insolently or anything like that; on the contrary, he displayed, as a small sideshow in the theatricals I had been inveigled in, a discreet old-world civility, punctuating his movements with all sorts of mispronounced apologies, and turning away tactfully when Valechka took down with a flourish her pink panties from the clothesline above the tub. But he seemed to be all over the place at once, the scoundrel, agreeing his frame with the anatomy of the flat, reading in my chair my newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette, counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom, helping his moll to wrap up the electric fan her father had given her, and carrying streetward her luggage. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the windowsill, dying of hate and boredom.

At last both were out of the quivering apartment--the vibration of the door I had slammed after them still rang in my every nerve, a poor substitute for the backhand slap I was supposed to give her, according to the rules of the movies. Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not. I went out into the void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife's departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box.

But no matter. In due time, I was avenged. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich nèe Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds.

I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to bear fruit. I hope they will be illustrated with photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer's favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N.Y., G.W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children's Encyclopedia (useless), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who's Who in the Limelight--actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:

Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Woman in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Tomato, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You.

Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Tomato, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets.

Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows].

How the look of my dear daughter’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, readers, I have only words to play with.

Chapter 7

2009-06-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

My father died. I was devastated, but I had no money to attend the funeral. Only two weeks after his passing did my birthright (nothing very grand--the Mirana had been sold long before) arrive in the mail.

I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous womanizing, at least to keep those distressing drives under control. My striking if somewhat brutal good looks allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess; his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs.

Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite my misfortunes, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me to find women, of no effort of my own, toppling, ripe, into my lap. This was the problem marriage was to solve. Had I not been so impatient to fulfill this get-moral-quick scheme, I might have easily found, among the many crazed beauties who batted lashes my grim face, creatures far more fascinating than Valeria. My choice, however, was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise for the bachelor lifestyle to which I’d become accustomed. All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.

Chapter 6

2009-06-22T06:08:00.000-07:00

A propos: I have often wondered what became of those lovers later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the rapturous evenings I stole from them did not affect their future? Is it vanity to assume I had possessed them, that they never forgot? All right, all right, I know. Your answer is yes. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with their fate? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim young woman passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round face French women so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her body. I saw her each night for a week, and on the seventh, Monique asked me up to her room.

When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "That isn’t nice, is it," and went to the wash-basin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were bigger than many; in fact, I do not hesitate to say that among the twenty or so women I bedded in those days, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any lady before, and my last vision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that I find seldom associated with any event in my humiliating, sordid, taciturn love life. She looked tremendously pleased with my skills as a lover and she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.

As I left Monique’s apartment, I was robbed for the first time in my life. (It was, however, not to be the last time. That privilege went to Quilty alone, and I don’t mind telling you, he paid dearly for it.) As I passed a dimly lit street, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provenãal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, stood in her doorway and urgently ushered me inside. I considered walking on, but feared she might need my help. The woman took me to what was apparently her own home, and there, after explosively and inexplicably kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at most fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. It began to dawn on me that I had been tricked into a den of the worst kind of debauchery, and the realization nearly made me vomit.

When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess' torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded money. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to the girl--for that was her stellar name--who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

I was so thoroughly horrified by the ordeal that I never again ventured to Monique’s apartment or anywhere near it. And so another woman was scorned by Humbert—not by his own devising, of course, but intentional scorn is rarely the charge against womanizers. We wish no harm. We wish nothing at all.

Chapter 5

2009-06-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like morning snow storms of used tissue paper. While a college student, in London and Paris, my studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry; but a peculiar exhaustion set in and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates.

A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey" was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon a “Short History of English Poetry” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties--and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job--teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where children ignited my own long-term hopes for fatherhood, but, alas, with no suitable mother in sight.

I still thought often of Annabel, occasionally musing that we had, in our summer of love, been the same age as these pale girls in the schools I visited, with their matted lashes and vacant faces. These children could not conjugate verbs—could they feel passion as I had for Annabel on that enchanted island of time? Even today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful love of my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained open forever.

No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of my existence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of women; inwardly, I was consumed by a hell. The human females I was allowed to date were but palliative agents. All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my desires quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. While a voice like my father’s said, “Have fun,” a voice like Sybil’s said, “At what cost?” One moment I was ashamed and frightened for the way I was using and disposing of women, another recklessly optimistic. I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that it was the most natural thing in the world, being moved to distraction by women.

But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. So life went. A shipwreck. An atoll. How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, women strolled freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen, and how quickly they noticed me when I was ready to make myself known. Intelligence, wit, are these not the mating dances of our day? Does the scholar not bury himself in books at the prospect of future successes and, thus, encounters?

Once a perfect beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and righten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. I spoke, she smiled, and so began a three-week affair before I tossed her out of my home without emotion or explanation. I could list a great number of these diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.

Chapter 4

2009-06-17T05:50:00.001-07:00

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began? Every day, people lose loved ones and every day people suffer for it, but not how I suffered. The sympathy with which I had looked upon baby animals, I now turned upon myself. When I try to analyze my own self-absorption, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way, the death of Annabel led me to Charlotte, and then, of course, to Lolita.

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Coincidence?

Chapter 3

2009-06-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

Then I met Annabel, that certain initial young lady I mentioned earlier. Annabel was, like me, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago. That’s aging for you. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors. The latter kind is a young man’s game, unbecoming of a father figure or anyone over, say, thirty-five.

Let me therefore limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and I respected them as I did all her friends. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Thin-haired brown Mr. Leigh and ample, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were molded the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and class, and I doubt if much genius should be assigned to our interest in competitive tennis, the ocean, books and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. A fine job I’ve made of it—caught after a single murder! This is not to imply that these boyhood wishes had anything to do with my adult actions; it was a common enough phase.

All at once Annabel and I were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of first love so overtook us that we were inseparable, linked at the hands and lips. The only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the beach. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to be together. Sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips.

Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolate pudding, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our summer together. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of passionate kisses. Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. For many years, I tortured myself with the notion that she and I would have been together, married, grown old and died in each others’ arms, while secretly hoping that someone would come along reignite the passion I had for Annabel my first, lost love; no one did.

Chapter 2

2009-06-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a pasta salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube river in his veins. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels, and silk. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak lightning accident when I was three, and I don’t remember much of her, except for in a warm pocket in my heart.

My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had disgracefully taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. So you see, I have my father to thank for my own womanizing tendencies, both his example and his genes. I was extremely fond of Sybil, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. We mourned her vigorously. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Miserables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike.

Chapter 1

2009-06-10T06:15:00.002-07:00

Lolita, a light in my life, the daughter of my wife. My friend, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: a slippery trip for the tip of my tongue, tough and rewarding, like our friendship, and fun to say, even in anger. Try it: Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. “You can’t go to school in one sock!” I said, fondly. She was Lola as well. They called her Dolly at school. A little infantile, that name. She was Dolores on the birth certificate. But in my heart she was always Lolita.

Did I ever think of fathering kids myself? I did, indeed I did. In point of fact, I might have had a daughter the old-fashioned way had I not lost the love of my youth, a certain initial young lady. We made such plans in our princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. (You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.) But if that first love had worked out, why, I’d probably never have met Lolita or her poor sweet mother, I’d certainly never have gone on the road trip, or any of the other riotous happenings I plan to disclose in this thorny tangled whopper of a tale.

But it’s all true, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I promise you that. Exhibit number one: my heart. I may have been a beast at times, to Lolita, to her mother, certainly to Quilty, but as for the fullness in my heart, well—even the seraphs would envy that.

Part One

2009-06-10T06:15:00.001-07:00

Foreward

2009-06-08T06:17:00.001-07:00

Lolita, or the Confession of an Unlikely Killer, such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it discusses. "Humbert Humbert," their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client's will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of Lolita for print. Mr. Clark's decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work ("Eye for an Eye?") wherein bizarre cases of parental and pseudo-parental revenge had been discussed.

My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite "H.H."'s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author's bizarre nickname is his own invention; and, of course, this mask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the readers will perceive for themselves) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to "H.H."'s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to come under my reading lamp.

For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," or "Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and violent business" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, "Louise," is by now a college sophomore, "Mona Dahl" is a student in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.

This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "violent;" and many a great work of art of course often uncovers a corpse or two. I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is has briefly (though murder is always so relentlessly brief—it is a well-trod irony that our life’s most significant moments are just that, moments, while boredom stretches on endlessly) given in to a rage that clearly prohibits. And yet what parent (or adopted parent) would not at least entertain the idea of such a revenge upon a daughter’s abductor. In “H.H.”’s account, the reader is met with a disturbing mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A defensive honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from his sin of vengeance. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a compassion for his adopted daughter that makes us entranced with the book while questioning its author!

As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic among retirees, housewives, and prospective adoptive parents. Even children will be drawn in for the promise of blood, but addicted for the purity of the parent-child relationship found within. I predict that Lolita will be remembered as a gold standard among tales of selfless love and selfless revenge, all the less resistible because it is true. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the vengeful maniac--these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils as well as the way to redemption. Lolita should make all of us--parents, social workers, educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.
Widworth, Mass