Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №8
...when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking mypoor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange
and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat dark
hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood
crouching and gaping at us, both in blue playsuits, blending with the
mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment--and
within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball
among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was
transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a
raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while
staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestone
children.
Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know
that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I
remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order
one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the
worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast's flanks
pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up,
and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car.
Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a
little blue-black beard, un monsieur trхs bien, in silk shirt and
magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist's husband, was gravely
taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was
well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and
a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me
in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use.
There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre
once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritable
passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high
school year). We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don't
know, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year,
and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of the
newsreels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went with
different main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kinds
were, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, real
singers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proof
sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned, and where, at the
end, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctant
father of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis on
fabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroic
newspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in a
robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased through
sewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give them
less exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced,
blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in Roaring
Gulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrust
through the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashing
mountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, the
timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowie
knife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in the
belly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain that
would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to show
but the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up hero
embracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a small
airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of
popcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his finger
was on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocently
encircled Lo's shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when two
harpies behind us started muttering the queerest things--I do not know if I
understood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentle
hand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me.
Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we were
traversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty miles earlier I
had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley
was a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense,
whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where
entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and
childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic
which prompted a semblance of explanation from me. Enmeshed in her wild
words (swell chance . . . I'd be a sap if I took your opinion seriously . .
. Stinker . . . You can't boss me . . . I despise you . . . and so forth), I
drove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in
continuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put
their spotlight on the car, and told me to pull over. I shushed Lo who was
automatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with malevolent
curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she never
did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a sense, my Lo was even more
scared of the law than I--and when the kind officers pardoned us and
servilely we crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked
limp prostration.
At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will laugh--but
really and truly I somehow never managed to find out quite exactly what the
legal situation was. I do not know it yet. Oh, I have learned a few odds and
ends. Alabama prohibits a guardian from changing the ward's residence
without an order of the court; Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat,
provides that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of any
child under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into play.
Query: is the stepfather of a gaspingly adorable pubescent pet, a stepfather
of only one month's standing, a neurotic widower of mature years and small
but independent means, with the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a few
madhouses behind him, is he to be considered a relative, and thus a natural
guardian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify some
Welfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a petition?), and have a
court's agent investigate meek, fishy me and dangerous Dolores Haze? The
many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consulted
at the public libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyond
darkly insinuating that the state is the super-guardian of minor children.
Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impressive volume
on the legal side of marriage, completely ignored stepfathers with
motherless girls on their hands and knees. My best friend, a social service
monograph(Chicago, 1936), which was dug out for me at great pains form a
dusty storage recess by an innocent old spinster, said "There is no
principle that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive and
enters the fray only when the child's situation becomes conspicuously
perilous." A guardian, I concluded, was appointed only when he expressed his
solemn and formal desire; but months might elapse before he was given notice
to appear at a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantime
the fair demon child was legally left to her own devices which, after all,
was the case of Dolores Haze. Then came the hearing. A few questions from
the bench, a few reassuring answers from the attorney, a smile, a nod, a
light drizzle outside, and the appointment was made. And still I dared not.
Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in yourhole. Courts became extravagantly
active only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedy
guardians, a robbed orphan, a third, still greedier, party. But here all was
in perfect order, and inventory had been made, and her mother's small
property was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy
seemed to be to refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some
Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet?
Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to
give me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean's cancer to do
anything more than what he had promised--namely, to look after Chrlotte's
meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death.
I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and so
could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as the
reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance
nor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional advice
elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate
in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be
snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale
which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a
strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and
foundation.
I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Bearsley College for Women) I
would have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able to
study, such as Woerner's Treatise "On the American Law of Guardianship" and
certain United States Children's Bureau Publications. I also decided that
anything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she
lived. I could persuade her to do so many things--their list might stupefy
a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could
never make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or stories
in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to
her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the
Limberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she was
quite sure she would not fritter away her "vacation" on such highbrow
reading matter.
I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go
to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across
the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a
couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little
Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and
ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of
insanity to the other--from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get
rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had
evaporated--to the thought that with patience and luck might have her
produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita
the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be
dans la force de l'бge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind,
was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard
encore vert--or was it green rot?--bizarre, tender, salivating Dr.
Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a
granddad.
In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father
to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and
reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own
Daughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her
thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially "beautiful"
illustrations, of Andersen's The Little Mermaid. But even at our very
best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo's glance skipping from
the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in
a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or
silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed,
blood-bespattered car with a young woman's shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we
drove on: "that was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to
that jerk in the store"); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself
as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty
locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Would
improvement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl's
day?
In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of there
being a comparatively sedate school for girls located there, but also by the
presence of the women's college. In my desire to get myself casи, to
attach myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blend
with, I thought of a man I knew in the department of French at Beardsley
College; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and had
attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention of
doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions,
there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick
calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe,
the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried
alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as
presently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why
old Gaston Godin's company would be particularly safe.
Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under the
strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper motor courts; but every
now and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude
ranch, to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on
sightseeing and Lo's clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a still
vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and major
repairs. In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the
papers which the authorities have so kindly allowed me to use for the
purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute
the following. During that extravagant year 1947-1948, August to August,
lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and repairs,
1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days of
actual motion (we covered about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days of
interpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000
dollars, or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surely
forgotten a number of items.
And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the
satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac
garland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to her
stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had
really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking that our long journey had
only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy,
enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a
collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in
the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.
4
When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove to 14 Thayer
Street, a grave little lad met us with the keys and a note from Gaston who
had rented the house for us. My Lo, without granting her new surroundings
one glance, unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay
down on the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in the same
precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the nether
anatomy of a lamp table.
I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up
somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence with
vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place
bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 distant): it was
the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green
drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more
consistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My
study turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor to
ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on
sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College.
I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, with
lunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium, would, while cultivating all
those young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as well.
Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had
warned me that the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls
are taught, as he put it with a foreigner's love for such things: "not to
spell very well, but to smell very well." I don't think they achieved even
that.
At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my
child's "nice blue eyes" (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that
"French genius" (a genius! Gaston!)--and then, having turned Dolly over to a
Miss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and
said:
"We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students
become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which
nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What
we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is
why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are
confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an
age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as
much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean
to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me.
Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which
consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores,
malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and
even hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of
some of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructive
directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the
sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we
are more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with due
respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate
freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old
books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a
gynecologist feeling a tumor. We thing, Dr. Humburg, in organissmal and
organizational terms. We have done away with the mass or irrelevant topics
that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in
former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will
need in managing their lives and--as the cynic might add--the lives of their
husbands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of a star is
important, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may be
even more important to the budding housewife. You say that all you expect a
child to obtain from school is a sound education. But what do we mean by
education? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon; I mean,
you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclopedia and he or she
would know as much as or more than a school could offer. Dr. Hummer, do you
realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less
vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?--to repeat a pun that I heard the
Beardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the other day. We live not
only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Wrds without
experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for
Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?"
This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intelligent ladies
who had been connected with the school, and they affirmed that the girls did
quite a bit of sound reading and that the "communication" line was more or
less ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially
remunerative modern touch, though actually it remained as prim as a prawn.
Another reason attracting me to that particular school may seem funny
to some readers, but it was very important to me, for that is the way I am
made. Across our street, exactly in front of our house, there was, I
noticed, a gap of weedy wasteland, with some colorful bushes and a pile of
bricks and a few scattered planks, and the foam of shabby mauve and chrome
autumn roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmery
section of School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and immediately
beyond that, the playground of the school Apart from the psychological
comfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly's day
adjacent to mine, I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have in
distinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, the
statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl
children playing around Dolly during recess; unfortunately, on the very
first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down the
gap, and in no time a construction of tawny wood maliciously arose beyond
that fence utterly blocking my magic vista; and as soon as they had erected
a sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd builders
suspended their work and never appeared again.
5
In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and
golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable
fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my
relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who
might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to
me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his
car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if these
verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to
sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded
any evolution toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit of
scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two
professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly
feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with
me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the
naоve charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most
dangerous one, a sharp-nosed stock character whose late brother had been
attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I
remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living room window,
feverishly awaiting my darling's return from school. The odious spinster,
trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcet
goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a
cold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw
weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her knees
showing pink above her clumsy wellingtons, a sheepish frightened little
smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, which--owing perhaps to the
pale wintry light--looked almost plain, in a rustic, German,
mдgdlein-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East's
questions "And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father's
occupation? And where did you love before?" Another time the loathsome
creature accosted me with a welcoming whine--but I evaded her; and a few
days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nice
mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and
curl up in a chair to look through the "loads of beautiful books my dear
mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full
blast till all hours of the night."
I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman and
cook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum cleaner from the previous
tenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I had
become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner
that Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harmless woman
had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become a
great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the
feeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that, on the rare
occasions where Holigan's presence happened to coincide with Lo's, simple Lo
might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat. I
often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and any moment some
thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window
to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would
have paid a small fortune to watch.
6
A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed--or at least
tolerated with relief--his company was the spell of absolute security that
his ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no special
reason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centered and abstract to
notice or suspect anything that might lead to a frank question on his part
and a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was my
good herald. Had he discovered mes goшts and Lolita's status, it
would have interested him only insofar as throwing some light on the
simplicity of my attitude towards him, which attitude was as free of
polite strain as it was of ribald allusions; for despite his colorless mind
and dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the
burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor
tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical
pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plastered
wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he
ambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout
legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his
English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a
supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knew
by name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away from
me)and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard,
and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the
house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs
inside--in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with
amusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned walls among
the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio--he painted a
little, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really not
more than a garret) with large photographs of pensive Andrи Gide,
Tchaоkovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky
(all thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing
professor at a Midwesten university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor
people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also an
album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and
when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston
would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout "Oui, ils sont
gentils." His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and
artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the
conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical
designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl
or veined vase, he would say "Prenez donc une de ces poires. La bonne
dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer." Or:
"Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que
j'exхcre." (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.)
For obvious reasons, I preferred myhouse to his for the games of chess
we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol as
he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were
a corpse. Wheezing he would mediate for ten minutes--then make a losing
move. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi!
With a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which
made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a
deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself.
Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo's bare
feet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs; but Gaston's
outgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of those
naked rhythms--and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a
straight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two, and only
when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and
flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her
toes--only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek
a if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable
Queen.
Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board--and it was
every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on his
pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith release
her limp fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into his
chair to topple into the trap I had laid for him. One day around Christmas,
after I had not seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me "Et toutes
vos fillettes, elles vont bien?" from which it became evident to
me that he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorial
categories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole series of her
appearances: blue jeans, a skirt, shorts, a quilted robe.
I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a year
later, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not return, he got
involved in a sale histoire, in Napes of all places!). I would have
hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a
queer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There he was devoid of
any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum
repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life,
triumphantly ignorant of the English language--there he was in priggish New
England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young--oh, having a
grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I.
7
I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop
in Lolita's morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had never
amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I was
weak, I was not wise, my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the
human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only
increased; and of this she took advantage.
Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic
obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era--and
went up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous
arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small
presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the
moon--although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even
a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly
some item of juvenile amusement. She was, however, not easy to deal with.
Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--per
day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to
deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without
which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of
the very nature of love's languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the
magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during one
schoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even
four bucks! O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy
noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some
sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the
margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins
in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she
gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other
day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit
drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter
in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I
would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the
painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made
myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books
(fittingly--Treasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behind
Whistler's Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some
change--say twenty-four sixty--which I quietly removed, upon which, next
day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief.
Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which
I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically
by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in
the school's theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she
might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I
believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty
dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood--or the
foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the
wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the
barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
8
I did my best, your Honor, to tackele the problem of boys. Oh, I used
even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out
how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don't frighten away daughter's friend. Maybe it
is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her
attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she's charming
and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an
executive's office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying
Jane's school books. Remember? Don't you want your daughter, now that her
turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes?
Don't you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the
admiration and company of boys she likes? Don't you want them to have
wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not
make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at
ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this bordello.
If she breaks the rules don't explode out loud in front of her
partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And
stop making the boys feel she's the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under "absolutely forbidden"
and another under "reluctantly allowed." Absolutely forbidden were dates,
single or double or triple--the next step being of course mass orgy. She
might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with
occasional young males, while I waited in the car at a discreet distance;
and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable
group in Butler's Academy for Bo[ys for their annual ball (heavily
chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of
fourteen can don her first "formal" (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed
teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party
a t our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl
friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler
dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would
never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck
in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge
out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if "only
discussing his relations with a friend of mine."
Lo was enraged by all this--called me a lousy crook and worse--and I
would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest
relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific
satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the
conventional program, the stock pastimes, the "things that are done," the
routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child,
especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most
mythopoeic nymphet in October's orchard-haze.
Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the
course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper
contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I
controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time
leaks with over-elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of
course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine
fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel--and can now vouchsafe
for the accuracy of my feeling--that there was no reason for serious alarm.
I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young
throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the
background; but because it was to me "overwhelmingly obvious" (a favorite
expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys--from
the perspiring nincompoop whom "holding hands" thrills, to the
self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car--equally bored my
sophisticated young mistress. "All this noise about boys gags me," she had
scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona's hand (Mona
is due any minute now), there was the sly quip: "What about Rigger?" (due
too).
Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company.
There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first
snow--saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our
porch. She wre her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small
brown cap on my favorite hairdo--the fringe in front and the swirl at the
sides and the natural curls at the back--and her damp-dark moccasins and
white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to
her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time:
she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward,
cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series
all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a
restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to
walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love.
She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite
adolescent way of showing one is literally "doubled up" with laughter by
inclining one's head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless
merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and
walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly
liked--perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable
confession--her trick of sighing "oh dear!" in humorous wistful submission
to fate, or emitting a long "no-o" in a deep almost growling undertone when
the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all--since we are speaking of
movement and youth--I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on
her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily,
then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and
then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a
magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side
of her upper lip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale
shade and sun.
On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I
had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave-child and the
bangles of demeanor she naоvely affected the winter before in california.
Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which
the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in
the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session of
adoration and despair in Lolita's cold bedroom, I used to review the
concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed
before the mind's red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic,
probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his
daughter off to school I watched him greet with his slow smile and
pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of
the plague (and would head, I knew, for master's gin at the first
opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of religious
tracts--who cared?--I saw neighbor what's his name, I think they are French
or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather
gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends,
wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be
seen with his daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its
violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and
wait for a "table for two" still filthy with your predecessor's crumbs).
Seen on weekdays, around one p.m. , saluting with dignity Argus-eyed East
while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around the damned
evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to
clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young
women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking
across the campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also
taught Bible in Beardsley School). "Somebody told me her mother was a
celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I
presume. Is that so? I see. How sad." (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly
pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket, in the wake
of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a
goat. Shoveling the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white
muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious haste (even
taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my school-girl daughter into the
house. Taking Dolly to the dentist--pretty nurse beaming at her--old
magazines--ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in town,
Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental
knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced,
becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.'s musical
little girl on her father's right, and the musical little boy of Professor
W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Providence) on Monsieur G. G.'s
left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is
extinguished. Brightly pajamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly's
bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached
lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after
all, saying don't be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court.
Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of Dolly's: "First time I've seen
a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir--except in movies, of course."
9
Her girlfriends, whom I looked forward to meet, proved on the whole
disappointing. There was Opal Something, and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman,
and Eva Rosen, and Mona Dahl (save one, all these names are approximations,
of course). Opal was a bashful, formless, bespectacled, bepimpled creature
who doted on Dolly who bullied her. With Linda Hall the school tennis
champion, Dolly played singles at least twice a week: I suspect Linda was a
true nymphet, but for some unknown reason she did not come--was perhaps not
allowed to come--to our house; so I recall her only as a flash of natural
sunshine on an indoor court. Of the rest, none had any claims to nymphetry
except Eva Rosen. Avis ws a plump lateral child with hairy legs, while Mona,
though handsome in a coarse sensual way and only a year older than my aging
mistress, had obviously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been
one. Eva Rosen, a displaced little person from France, was on the other hand
a good example of a not strikingly beautiful child revealing to the
perspicacious amateur some of the basic elements of nymphet charm, such as a
perfect pubescent figure and lingering eyes and high cheekbones. Her glossy
copper hair had Lolita's silkiness, and the features of her delicate
milky-white face with pink lips and silverfish eyelashes were less foxy than
those of her likes--the great clan of intra-racial redheads; nor did she
sport their green uniform but wore, as I remember her, a lot of black or
cherry dark--a very smart black pullover, for instance, and high-heeled
black shoes, and garnet-red fingernail polish. I spoke French to her (much
to Lo's disgust). The child's tonalities were still admirably pure, but for
school words and play words she resorted to current American and then a
slight Brooklyn accent would crop up in her speech, which was amusing in a
little Parisian who went to a select New England school with phoney British
aspirations. Unfortunately, despite "that French kid's uncle" being "a
millionaire," Lo dropped Eva for some reason before I had had time to enjoy
in my modest way her fragrant presence in the Humbert open house. The reader
knows what importance I attached to having a bevy of page girls, consolation
prize nymphets, around my Lolita. For a while, I endeavored to interest my
senses in Mona Dahl who was a good deal around, especially during the spring
term when Lo and she got so enthusiastic about dramatics. I have often
wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze had imparted to
Mona while blurting out to me by urgent and well-paid request various really
incredible details concerning an affair that Mona had had with a marine at
the seaside. It was characteristic of Lo that she chose for her closest chum
that elegant, cold, lascivious, experienced young female whom I once heard
(misheard, Lo swore) cheerfully say in the hallway to Lo--who had remarked
that her (Lo's) sweater was of virgin wool: "The only thing about you that
is, kiddo . . ." She had a curiously husky voice, artificially waved dull
dark hair, earrings, amber-brown prominent eyes and luscious lips. Lo said
teachers had remonstrated with her on her loading herself with so much
costume jewelry. Her hands trembled. She was burdened with a 150 I.Q. And I
also knew she had a tremendous chocolate-brown mole on he womanish back
which I inspected the night Lo and she had worn low-cut pastel-colored,
vaporous dresses for a dance at the Butler Academy.
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all
over the keyboard of that school year. In the meeting my attempts to find
out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had
gone to play tennis at Linda's country club had telephoned she might be a
full half hour late, and so, would I entertain Mona who was coming to
practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the
modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and
staring at me with perhaps--could I be mistaken?--a faint gleam of
crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: "Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is
not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a
crush on the Reverend Rigger." (This was ...
