Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №9
...a joke--I have already mentionedthat gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to
near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents
that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic.
Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as
much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir?
Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a
kid. But her general behavior was--? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still?
"Oh, she's a doll," concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a
book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely
furrowing her brow, inquired: "Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really
that good?" She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through
lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought
stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong
substitute. Avoiding Mona'' cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute.
Then Dolly arrived--and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to
their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement
window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound
among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position--a night's move
from the top--always strangely disturbed me.
10
Sometimes . . . Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four,
five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or
three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while
Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil,
lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed
all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my
masculine pride--and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita!
You would give me one look--a gray furry question mark of a look: "Oh no,
not again" (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe
that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in
your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours--how
I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt,
and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back
on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and--"Pulease, leave me alone,
will you," you would say, "for Christ's sake leave me alone." And I would
get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching
in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only
a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.
11
One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me to come over
for a talk. Dolly's last report had been poor, I knew. But instead of
contenting myself with some such plausible explanation of this summons, I
imagined all sort of horrors, and had to fortify myself with a pint of my
"pin" before I could face the interview. Slowly, all Adam's apple and heart,
I went up the steps of the scaffold.
A huge woman, gray-haired, drowsy, with a broad flat nose and small
eyes behind black-rimmed glasses--"Sit down," she said, pointing to an
informal and humiliating hassock, while she perched with ponderous spryness
on the arm of an oak chair. For a moment or two, she peered at me with
smiling curiosity. She had done it at our first meeting, I recalled, but I
could afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into
thought--probably assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed, fold on fold, her
dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a trace of chalk or
something. Then she said, still rubbing, not looking up:
"Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-fashioned
Continental father, aren't you?"
"Why, no," I said, "conservative, perhaps, but not what you would call
old-fashioned."
She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a
let's-get-down-to-business manner, and again fixed her beady eyes upon me.
"Dolly Haze," she said, "is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual
maturing seems to give her trouble."
I bowed slightly. What else could I do?
"She is still shuttling," said Miss Pratt, showing how with her
liver-spotted hands, "between the anal and genital zones of development.
Basically she is a lovely--"
"I beg your pardon," I said, "what zones?"
"That's the old-fashioned European in you!" cried Pratt delivering a
slight tap on my wrist watch and suddenly disclosing her dentures. "All I
mean is that biologic drives--do you smoke?--are not fused in Dolly, do not
fall so to speak into a--into a rounded pattern." Her hands held for a
moment an invisible melon.
"She is attractive, bright though careless" (breathing heavily, without
leaving her perch, the woman took time out to look at the lovely child's
report sheet on the desk at her right). "Her marks are getting worse and
worse. Now I wonder, Mr. Haze--" Again the false meditation.
"Well," she went on with zest, "as for me, I do smoke, and, as dear Dr.
Pierce used to say: I'm not proud of it but I jeest love it." She lit up and
the smoke she exhaled from her nostrils was like a pair of tusks.
"Let me give you a few details, it won't take a moment. Now here let me
see [rummaging among her papers]. She is defiant toward Miss Redcock and
impossibly rude to Miss Cormorant. Now here is one of our special research
reports: Enjoys singing with group in class though mind seems to wander.
Crosses her knees and wags left leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a
two-hundred-forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in
by a number of obviously European polysyllabics. Sighs a good deal in class.
Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last week in November. Sighs a good deal in
class. Chews gum vehemently. Does not bite her nails though if she did, this
would conform better to her general pattern--scientifically speaking, of
course. Menstruation, according to the subject, well established. Belongs at
present to no church organization. By the way, Mr. Haze, her mother was--?
Oh, I see. And you are--? Nobody's business is, I suppose, God's business.
Something else we wanted to know. She was no regular home duties, I
understand. Making a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, he? Well, what else
have we got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles rather
often. A little dreamy. Has private jokes of her own, transposing for
instance the first letters of some of her teachers names. Hair light and
dark brown, lustrous--well [laughing] you are aware of that, I
suppose. Nose unobstructed, feet high-arched, eyes-let me see, I had here
somewhere a still more recent report. Aha, here we are. Miss Gold says
Dolly's tennis form is excellent to superb, even better than Linda Hall's,
but concentration and point-accumulation are just "poor to fair." Miss
Cormorant cannot decide whether Dolly has exceptional emotional control or
none at all. Miss Horn reports she--I mean, Dolly--cannot verbalize her
emotions, while according to Miss Cole Dolly's metabolic efficiency is
superfine. Miss Molar thinks Dolly is myopic and should see a good
ophthalmologist, but Miss Redcock insists that the girl simulates eye-strain
to get away with scholastic incompetence. And to conclude, Mr. Haze, our
researchers are wondering about something really crucial. Now I want to ask
you something. I want to know if your poor wife, or yourself, or anyone else
in the family--I understand she has several aunts and a maternal grandfather
in California?--oh, had!--I'm sorry--well, we all wonder if anybody
in the family has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction.
The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains morbidly
uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in
order to save her ignorance and self-dignity. All right-fourteen. You see,
Mr. Haze, Beardsley School does not believe in bees and blossoms, and storks
and love birds, but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students
for mutually satisfactory mating and successful child rearing. We feel Dolly
could make excellent progress if only she would put her mind to her work.
Miss Cormorant's report is significant in that respect. Dolly is inclined to
be, mildly speaking impudent. But all feel that primo, you should
have your family doctor tell her the facts of life and, secundo, that
you allow her to enjoy the company of her schoolmates' brothers at the
Junior Club or in Dr. Rigger's organization, or in the lovely homes of our
parents."
"She may meet boys at her own lovely home," I said.
"I hope she will," said Pratt buoyantly. "When we questioned her about
her troubles, Dolly refused to discuss the home situation, but we have
spoken to some of her friends and really--well, for example, we insist you
un-veto her nonparticiaption in the dramatic group. You just must allow her
to take part in The Hunted Enchanters. She was such a perfect little
nymph in the try-out, and sometime in spring the author will stay for a few
days at Beardsley College and may attend a rehearsal or two in our new
auditorium. I mean it is all part of the fun of being young and alive and
beautiful. You must understand--"
"I always thought of myself," I said, "as a very understanding father."
"Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but Miss Cormorant thinks, and I am inclined
to agree with her, that Dolly is obsessed by sexual thoughts for which she
finds no outlet, and will tease and martyrize other girls, or even our
younger instructors because they do have innocent dates with boys."
Shrugged my shoulders. A shabby иmigrи.
"Let us put our two heads together, Mr. Haze. What on earth is wrong
with that child?"
"She seems quite normal and happy to me," I said (disaster coming at
last? Was I found out? Had they got some hypnotist?).
"What worries me," said Miss Pratt looking at her watch and starting to
go over the whole subject again, "is that both teachers and schoolmates find
Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey--and everybody wonders why you are
so firmly opposed to all the natural recreations of a normal child."
"Do you mean sex play?" I asked jauntily, in despair, a cornered old
rat.
"Well, I certainly welcome this civilized terminology," said Pratt with
a grin. "But this is not quite the point. Under the auspices of Beardsley
School, dramatics, dances and other natural activities are not technically
sex play, though girls do meet boys, if that is what you object to."
"All right," I said, my hassock exhaling a weary sign. "You win. She
can take part in that play. Provided male parts are taken by female parts."
"I am always fascinated," said Pratt, "by the admirable way
foreigners--or at least naturalized Americans--use our rich language. I'm
sure Miss Gold, who conducts the play group, will be overjoyed. I notice she
is one of the few teachers that seem to like--I mean who seem to find Dolly
manageable. This takes care of general topics, I guess; now comes a special
matter. We are in trouble again."
Pratt paused truculently, then rubbed her index finger under her
nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed a kind of war dance.
"I'm a frank person," she said, "but conventions are conventions, and I
find it difficult . . . Let me put it this way . . . The Walkers, who live
in what we call around here the Duke's Manor, you know the great gray house
on the hill--they send their two girls to our school, and we have the niece
of President Moore with us, a really gracious child, not to speak of a
number of other prominent children. Well, under the circumstances, it is
rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses words which you
as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand. Perhaps it
might be better--Would you like me to have Dolly come up here right away to
discuss things? No? You see--oh well, let's have it out. Dolly has written a
most obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican
for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Miss Redcock,
who is getting married in June, distributed among the girls, and we thought
she should stay after hours--another half hour at least. But if you like--"
"No," I said, "I don't want to interfere with rules. I shall talk to
her later. I shall thrash it out."
"Do," said the woman rising from her chair arm. "And perhaps we can get
together again soon, and if things do not improve we might have Dr. Cutler
analyze her."
Should I marry Pratt and strangle her?
". . .And perhaps your family doctor might like to examine her
physically--just a routine check-up. She is in Mushroom--the last classroom
along that passage."
Beardsley School, it may be explained, copied a famous girls school in
England by having "traditional" nicknames for its various classrooms:
Mushroom, Room-In 8, B-Room, Room-BA and so on. Mushroom was smelly, with a
sepia print of Reynolds' "Age of Innocence" above the chalkboard, and
several rows of clumsy-looking pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was
reading the chapter on "Dialogue" in Baker's Dramatic Technique, and
all was very quiet, and there was another girl with a very naked,
porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading
too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl
around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly just behind that neck and that
hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the
permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky,
chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no
doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take
advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.
12
Around Christmas she caught a bad chill and was examined by a friend of
Miss Lester, a Dr. Ilse Tristramson (hi, Ilse, you were a dear,
uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very gently). She diagnosed
bronchitis, patted Lo on the back (all its bloom erect because of the fever)
and put her to bed for a week or longer. At first she "ran a temperature" in
American parlance, and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of
unexpected delights--Venus febriculosa--though it was a very languid Lolita
that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace. And as soon as she was
well again, I threw a Party with Boys.
Perhaps I had drunk a little too much in preparation for the ordeal.
Perhaps I made a fool of myself. The girls had decorated and plugged in a
small fir tree--German custom, except that colored bulbs had superseded wax
candles. Records were chosen and fed into my landlord's phonograph. Chic
Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I
retired to my study upstairs--and then every ten or twenty minutes I would
come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick up ostensibly my
pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the newspaper; and with every new
visit these simple actions became harder to perform, and I was reminded of
the dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a
room in the Ramsdale house where Little Carmen was on.
The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one did not
come at all, and one of the boys brought his cousin Roy, so there was a
superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all the steps, and the other
fellows could hardly dance at all, and most of the evening was spent in
messing up the kitchen, and then endlessly jabbering about what card game to
play, and sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the
living room, with all windows open, and played a word game which Opal could
not be made to understand, while Mona and Roy, a lean handsome lad, drank
ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting on the table and dangling their legs, and
hotly discussing Predestination and the Law of Averages. After they had all
gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all four
limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaustion and swore it
was the most revolting bunch of boys she had ever seen. I bought her a new
tennis racket for that remark.
January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of
the townspeople had ever seen such weather. Other presents came
tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her a bicycle, the doe-like and
altogether charming machine already mentioned--and added to this a
History of Modern American Painting: her bicycle manner, I mean her
approach to it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded
me supreme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a
failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee's hay was
the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not
understand why I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh
or Frederick Waugh awful.
13
By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street with yellow and green
and pink, Lolita was irrevocably stage-struck. Pratt, whom I chanced to
notice one Sunday lunching with some people at Walton Inn, caught my eye
from afar and went through the motion of sympathetically and discreetly
clapping her hands while Lo was not looking. I detest the theatre as being a
primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of
stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual injections of
genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a closeted reader
automatically pumps out of the stuff. Being much occupied at the time with
my own literary labors, I did not bother to read the complete text of The
Enchanted Hunters, the playlet in which Dolores Haze was assigned the
part of a farmer's daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or
Diana, or something, and who, having got hold of a book on hypnotism,
plunges a number of lost hunters into various entertaining trances before
falling in her turn under the spell of a vagabond poet (Mona Dahl). That
much I gleaned from bits of crumpled and poorly typed script that Lo sowed
all over the house. The coincidence of the title with the name of an
unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way: I wearily thought I had
better not bring it to my own enchantress's notice, lest a brazen accusation
of mawkishness hurt me even more than her failure to notice it for herself
had done. I assumed the playlet was just another, practically anonymous,
version of some banal legend. Nothing prevented one, of course, from
supposing that in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had
been immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the
second-rate muralist he had hired, and that subsequently the hotel's name
had suggested the play's title. But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind
I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole
matter much though really, supposed that mural, name and title had all been
derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien
unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence
I was under the impression (all this quite casually, you understand, quite
outside my orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the
type of whimsy for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times,
such as Hansel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping
Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor's New Clothes by Maurice
Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer--all this to be found in any Plays for
School Actors or Let's Have a Play! In other words, I did not
know--and would not have cared, if I did --that actually The Enchanted
Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition which
had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a
highbrow group in New York. To me--inasmuch as I could judge from my
charmer's part--it seemed to be a pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with
echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet British dreamers.
The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters, of which one was a banker,
another a plumber, a third a policeman, a fourth an undertaker, a fifth an
underwriter, a sixth an escaped convict (you see the possibilities!), went
through a complete change of mind in Dolly's Dell, and remembered their real
lives only as dreams or nightmares from which little Diana had aroused them;
but a seventh Hunter (in a green cap, the fool) was a Young Poet, and
he insisted, much to Diana's annoyance, that she and the entertainment
provided (dancing nymphs, and elves, and monsters) were his, the Poet's,
invention. I understand that finally, in utter disgust at his cocksureness,
barefooted Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm
behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggart she was not a poet's
fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass--and a last-minute kiss was to
enforce the play's profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge
in love. I considered it wiser not to criticize the thing in front of Lo:
she was so healthily engrossed in "problems of expression," and so
charmingly did she put her narrow Florentine hands together, batting her
eyelashes and pleading with me not to come to rehearsals as some ridiculous
parents did because she wanted to dazzle me with a perfect First Night--and
because I was, anyway, always butting in and saying the wrong thing, and
cramping her style in the presence of other people.
There was one very special rehearsal . . . my heart, my heart . . .
there was one day in May marked by a lot of gay flurry--it all rolled past,
beyond my ken, immune to my memory, and when I saw Lo next, in the late
afternoon, balancing on her bike, pressing the palm of her hand to the damp
bark of a young birch tree on the edge of our lawn, I was so struck by the
radiant tenderness of her smile that for an instant I believed all our
troubles gone. "Can you remember," she said, "what was the name of that
hotel, you know [nose pucketed], come on, you know--with those white
columns and the marble swan in the lobby? Oh, you know [noisy exhalation of
breath]--the hotel where you raped me. Okay, skip it. I mean, was it [almost
in a whisper] The Enchanted Hunters? Oh, it was? [musingly] Was it?"--and
with a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and tore
uphill, to the end of the street, and then rode back, feet at rest on
stopped pedals, posture relaxed, one hand dreaming in her print-flowered
lap.
14
Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and dramatics,
I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons with a Miss Emperor (as we French
scholars may conveniently call her) to whose blue-shuttered little white
house a mile or so beyond Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One
Friday night toward the end of May (and a week or so after the very special
rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study, where I was
in the act of mopping up Gustave's--I mean Gaston's--king's side, rang and
Miss Emperor asked if Lo was coming next Tuesday because she had missed last
Tuesday's and today's lessons. I said she would by all means--and went on
with the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now
impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through
the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed
it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent,
he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls,
and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with
his pudgily bunched fingers--dying to take that juicy queen and not
daring--and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not
teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving
a draw. He finished his brandy and presently lumbered away, quite satisfied
with this result (mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai jamais revu et quoiqu'il
y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permiettez-moi de vous
dire que je vous serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes
fillettes vous saluent). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table,
consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to
meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity. She remained singularly
unruffled when confronted with my discovery, and said d'un petit air
faussement contrit that she knew she was a very wicked kid, but simply
had not been able to resist the enchantment, and had used up those music
hours--O Reader, My Reader!--in a nearby public park rehearsing the magic
forest scene with Mona. I said "fine"--and stalked to the telephone. Mona's
mother answered: "Oh yes, she's in" and retreated with a mother's neutral
laugh of polite pleasure to shout off stage "Roy calling!" and the very next
moment Mona rustled up, and forthwith, in a low monotonous not untender
voice started berating Roy for something he had said or done and I
interrupted her, and presently Mona was saying in her humbles, sexiest
contralto, "yes, sir," "surely, sir" "I am alone to blame, sir, in this
unfortunate business," (what elocution! what poise!) "honest, I feel very
bad about it"--and so on and so forth as those little harlots say.
So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my heart. Lo was
now in the living room, in her favorite overstuffed chair. As she sprawled
there, biting at a hangnail an mocking me with her heartless vaporous eyes,
and all the time rocking a stool upon which she had placed the heel of an
outstretched shoeless foot, I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm
how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had this
happened during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely that was an
exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my incandescent anger. The fog
of all lust had been swept away leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity.
Oh, she had changed! Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy
highschool girl who applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an
unwashed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what pustulate
epidermis comes in contact with her skin. Its smooth tender bloom had been
so lovely in former days, so bright with tears, when I used to roll, in
play, her tousled head on my knee. A coarse flush had now replaced that
innocent fluorescence. What was locally known as a "rabbit cold" had painted
with flaming pink the edges of her contemptuous nostrils. As in terror I
lowered my gaze, it mechanically slid along the underside of her tensely
stretched bare thigh--how polished and muscular her legs had grown! She kept
her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray and slightly bloodshot, fixed upon me,
and I saw the stealthy thought showing through them that perhaps after all
Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose me without getting
penalized herself. How wrong I was. How mad I was! Everything about her was
of the same exasperating impenetrable order--the strength of her shapely
legs, the dirty sole of her white sock, the thick sweater she wore despite
the closeness of the room, her wenchy smell, and especially the dead end of
her face with its strange flush and freshly made-up lips. Some of the red
had left stains on her front teeth, and I was struck by a ghastly
recollection--the evoked image not of Monique, but of another young
prostitute in a bell-house, ages ago, who had been snapped up by somebody
else before I had time to decide whether her mere youth warranted my risking
some appalling disease, and who had just such flushed prominent
pommettes and a dead maman, and big front teeth, and a bit of
dingy red ribbon in her country-brown hair.
"Well, speak," said Lo. "Was the corroboration satisfactory?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "Perfect. yes. And I do not doubt you two made it
up. As a matter of fact, I do not doubt you have told her everything about
us."
"Oh, yeah?"
I controlled my breath and said: "Dolores, this must stop right away. I
am ready to yank you out of Beardsley and lock you up you know where, but
this must stop. I am ready to take you away the time it takes to pack a
suitcase. This must stop or else anything may happen."
"Anything may happen, huh?"
I snatched away the stool she was rocking with her heel and her foot
fell with a thud on the floor.
"Hey," she cried, "take it easy."
"First of all you go upstairs," I cried in my turn,--and simultaneously
grabbed at her and pulled her up. From that moment, I stopped restraining my
voice, and we continued yelling at each other, and she said, unprintable
things. She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at me, inflating
her cheeks and producing a diabolical plopping sound. She said I had
attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother's roomer. She
said she was sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would sleep with
the very first fellow who asked her and I could do nothing about it. I said
she was to go upstairs and show me all her hiding places. It was a strident
and hateful scene. I held her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and
twisting it this way and that, surreptitiously trying to find a weak point
so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite
hard and in fact hurt her rather badly for which I hope my heart may rot,
and once or twice she jerked her arm so violently that I feared her wrist
might snap, and all the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes
where could anger and hot tears struggled, and our voices were drowning the
telephone, and when I grew aware of its ringing she instantly escaped.
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina
telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east
window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully
down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England
spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type
of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable
literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and
prurient Miss East--or to explode her incognito, Miss Fenton Lebone--had
been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she
strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.
". . . This racket . . . lacks all sense of . . . " quacked the
receiver, "we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically . . . "
I apologized for my daughter's friends being so loud. Young people, you
know--and cradled the next quack and a half.
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip
through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark--hub of the bicycle
wheel--moved, shivered, and she was gone.
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop
downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged
fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I
cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street,
without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was
promenading Miss Favian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over.
Walk three steps and runt three. A tepid rain started to drum on the
chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron
railing, a blurred youth held and kissed--no, not her, mistake. My talons
still tingling, I flew on.
Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a
private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in
front of the first drugstore, I saw--with what melody of relief!--Lolita's
fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed,
pulled, and entered. Look out! some ten paces away Lolita, though the glass
of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube,
confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her
treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish.
"Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly. "A great decision has
been made. But first buy me a drink, dad."
She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the
coke, add the cherry syrup--and my heart was bursting with love-ache. That
childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We
always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the
concoction.
J'ai toujours admirи l'oeuvre du sublime dublinois. And in the
meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.
"Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the
darkly glistening sidewalk, "look, I've decided something. I want to leave
school I hate that school I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find
another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we'll
go wherever I want, won't we?"
I nodded. My Lolita.
"I choose? C'est entendu?" she asked wobbling a little beside
me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.
"Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked."
(A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)
She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashioned,
leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.
Miss Lester's finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for a waddling
old dog qui prenait son temps.
Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree.
"I am drenched," she declared at the top of her voice. "Are you glad?
To hell with the play! See what I mean?"
An invisible hag's claw slammed down an upper-floor window.
In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her
sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised
one knee:
"Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight."
It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the
ability--a most singular case, I presume--of shedding torrents of tears
throughout the other tempest.
15
The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves ground,
and a number of other repairs and improvements were paid for by not very
mechanically-minded but prudent papa Humbert, so that the late Mrs.
Humbert's car was in respectable shape when ready to undertake a new
journey.
We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley School, that we
would be back as soon as my Hollywood engagement came to an end (inventive
Humbert was to be, I hinted, chief consultant in the production of a film
dealing with "existentialism," still a hot thing at the time). Actually I
was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border--I
was braver now than last year--and there deciding what to do with my little
concubine who was now sixty inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. We had
dug out our tour books and maps. She had traced our route with immense zest.
Was it thanks to those theatricals that she had now outgrown her juvenile
jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality? I experienced
the queer lightness of dreams that pale but warm Sunday morning when we
abandoned Professor Chem's puzzled house and sped along Main Street toward
the four-lane highway. My Love's striped, black-and-white cotton frock,
jauntry blue with the large beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet,
which gemmed her throat: a spring rain gift from me. We passed the New
Hotel, and she laughed. "A penny for your thoughts," I said and she
stretched out her palm at once, but at that moment I had to apply the breaks
rather abruptly at a red light. As we pulled up, another car came to a
gliding stop alongside, and a very striking looking, athletically lean young
woman (where had I seen her?) with a high complexion and shoulder-length
brilliant bronze hair, greeted Lo with a ringing "Hi!"--and then, addressing
me, effusively, edusively (placed!), stressing certain words, said: "What a
shame to was to tear Dolly away from the play--you should have
heard the author raving about her after that rehearsal--"
"Green light, you dope," said Lo under her breath, and simultaneously,
waving in bright adieu a bangled arm, Joan of Arc (in a performance we saw
at the local theatre) violently outdistanced us to swerve into Campus
Avenue.
"Who was it exactly? Vermont or Rumpelmeyer?"
"No--Edusa Gold--the gal who coaches us."
"I was not referring to her. Who exactly concocted that play?"
"Oh! Yes, of course. Some old woman, Clare Something, I guess. There
was quite a crowd of them there."
"So she complimented you?"
"Complimented my eye--she kissed me on my pure brow"--and my darling
emitted that new yelp of merriment which--perhaps in connection with her
theatrical mannerisms--she had lately begun to affect.
"You are a funny creature, Lolita," I said--or some such words.
"Naturally, I am overjoyed you gave up that absurd stage business. But what
is curious is that you dropped the whole thing only a week before its
natural climax. Oh, Lolita, you should be careful of those surrenders of
yours. I remember you gave up Ramsdale for camp, and camp for a joyride, and
I could list other abrupt changes in your disposition. You must be careful.
There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere. You
should try to be a little nicer to me, Lolita. You should also watch your
diet. The tour of your thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen and a
half inches. More might be fatal (I was kidding, of course). We are now
setting out on a long happy journey. I remember--"
16
I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America
that had "Appalachian Mountains" boldly running from Alabama up to New
Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned--Tennessee, the Virginias,
Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my
imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious
diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard иmigrи in his
bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under
the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a
smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. Farewell, Appalachia! Leaving
it, we crossed Ohio, the three states beginning with "I," and Nebraska--ah,
that first whiff of the West! We traveled very leisurely, having more than a
week to reach Wace, Continental Divide, where she passionately desired to
see he Ceremonial Dances marking the seasonal opening of Magic Cave, and at
least three weeks to reach Elphinstone, gem of a western State where she
yearned to climb Red Rock from which a mature screen star had recently
jumped to her death after a drunken row with her gigolo.
Again we were welcomed to wary motels by means of inscriptions that
read:
"We wish you feel at home while here. All equipment was
carefully checked upon your arrival. Your license number is on record here.
Use hot water sparingly. We reserve the right to eject without notice any
objectionable person. Do not throw waste material of any kind in the
toilet bowl. Thank you. Call again. The Management. P.S. We consider our
guests the Finest People of the World."
In these frightening places we paid ten for twins, flies queued outside
at the screenless door and successfully scrambled in, the ashes of our
predecessors still lingered in the ashtrays, a woman's hair lay on the
pillow, one heard one's neighbor hanging his coat in his closet, the hangers
were ingeniously fixed to their bars by coils of wire so as to thwart theft,
and, in crowning insult, the pictures above the twin beds were identical
twins. I also noticed that commercial fashion was changing. There was a
tendency for cabins to fuse and gradually form the caravansary, and, lo (she
was not interested but the reader may be), a second story was added, and a
lobby grew in, and cars were removed to a communal garage, and the motel
reverted to the good old hotel.
I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for
him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the
making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you
have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French
detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not
McFate's way--even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure
indications.
For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one
occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap of our
journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get
into contact with, a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas
station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and
escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had
bent to watch the mechanic's manipulations, hid her for a moment from my
sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my benign head though
strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that
toilets--as also telephones--happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the
points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful
objects--it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in
another--carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special
significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's
heart always break.
Well--my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the
pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced--when the growing volume of her
absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first
time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at
those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring
rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveler's field of vision: that
green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those
bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four,
five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of
their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window
of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the
rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of
wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film
living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite
outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte's
last sob incongruously vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering
athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She
had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche
in the next block. They said there they were proud of their home-clean
restrooms. These prepaid postcards, they said, had been provided for your
comments. No postcards. No soap. Nothing. No comments.
That day or the next, after a tedious drive through a land of food
crops, we reached a pleasant little burg and put up at Chestnut Court--nice
cabins, damp green grounds, apple trees, an old swing--and a tremendous
sunset which the tried child ignored. She had wanted to go through Kasbeam
because it was only thirty miles north from her home town but on the
following morning I found her quite listless, with no desire to see again
the sidewalk where she had played hopscotch some five years before. For
obvious reasons I had rather dreaded that side trip, even though we had
agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way--to remain in the car
and not look up old friends. My relief at her abandoning the project was
spoiled by the thought that had she felt I were totally against the
nostalgic possibilities of Pisky, as I had been last year, she would not
have given up so easily. On my mentioning this with a sigh, she sighed too
and complained of being out of sorts. She wanted to remain in bed till
teatime at least, with lots of magazines, and then if she felt better she
suggested we just continue westward. I must say she was very sweet and
languid, and craved for fresh fruits, and I decided to go and fetch her a
toothsome picnic lunch in Kasbeam. Our cabin stood on the timbered crest of
a hill, and from our window you could see the road winding down, and then
running as straight as a hair parting between two rows of chestnut trees,
towards the pretty town, which looked singularly distinct and toylike in the
pure morning distance. One could make out an elf-like girl on an insect-like
bicycle, and a dog, a bit too large proportionately, all as clear as those
pilgrims and mules winding up wax-pale roads in old paintings with blue
hills and red little people. I have the European urge to use my feet when a
drive can be dispensed with, so I leisurely walked down, eventually meeting
the cyclist--a plain plump girl with pigtails, followed by a huge St.
Bernard dog with orbits like pansies. In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a
very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at
every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses
on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded
newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to
realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray
lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last
thirty years.
I had a cup of hot flavorless coffee, bought a bunch of bananas for my
monkey, and spent another ten minutes or so in a delicatessen store. At
least an hour and a half must have elapsed when this homeward-bound little
pilgrim appeared on the winding road leading to Chestnut Castle.
The girl I had seen on my way to town was now loaded with linen and
engaged in helping a misshapen man whose big head and coarse features
reminded me of the "Bertoldo" character in low Italian comedy. They were
cleaning the cabins of which there was a dozen or so on Chestnut Crest, all
pleasantly spaced amid the copious verdure. It was noon, and most of them,
with a final bang of their screen doors, had already got rid of their
occupants. A very elderly, almost mummy-like couple in a very new model were
in the act of creeping out of one of the contiguous garages; from another a
red hood protruded in somewhat cod-piece fashion; and nearer to our cabin, a
strong and handsome young man with a shock of black hair and blue eyes was
putting a portable refrigerator into a station wagon. For some reason he
gave me a sheepish grin as I passed. On the grass expanse opposite, in the
many-limbed shade of luxuriant trees, the familiar St. Bernard dog was
guarding his mistress' bicycle, and nearby a young woman, far gone in the
family way, had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently,
while a jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by
trying to push or pull the swing board; he finally succeeded in getting
himself knocked down by it, and bawled loudly as he lay supine on the grass
while his mother continued to smile gently at neither of her present
children. I recall so clearly these minutiae probably because I was to
check my impressions so thoroughly only a few minutes later; and besides,
something in me had been on guard ever since that awful night in Beardsley.
I now refused to be diverted by the feeling of well-being that my walk had
engendered--by the young summer breeze that enveloped the nape of my neck,
the giving crunch of the damn gravel, the juice tidbit. I had sucked out at
last from a hollowy tooth, and even the comfortable weight of my provisions
which the general condition of my heart should not have allowed me to carry;
but even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly, and I
felt adolori d'amoureuse langueur, to quote dear old Ronsard, as I
reached the cottage where I had left my Dolores.
To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge of the
bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she could not quite
place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather
than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated
me. She had not washed; yet her mouth was freshly though smudgily painted,
and her broad teeth glistened like wine-tinged ivory, or pink...
