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.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Chapter 24
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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Chapter 22
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Chapter 19
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."
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."
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Chapter 18
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.
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.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Chapter 17
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.
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.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Chapter 16
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.
"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.
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