Chapter 13

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?