Chapter 11.1

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.]