Lolita, by Vladimir Nabukov
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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--"
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 pinkish poker
chips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed
with a diabolical glow that had no relations to me whatever.
I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the bare ankles
of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face, then again at her sinful feet.
"You've been out," I said (the sandals were filthy with gravel).
"I just got up," she replied, and added upon intercepting my downward
glance: "Went out for a sec. Wanted to see if you were coming back."
She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself tableward.
What special suspicion could I have? None indeed--but those muddy,
moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanating from her! I said nothing.
I looked at the road meandering so distinctly within the frame of the
window. . . Anybody wishing to betray my trust would have found it a
splendid lookout. With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All
at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny next door. I
stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his
pregnant young wife was not getting into it with her baby and the other,
more or less canceled, child.
"What's the matter, where are you going?" cried Lo from the porch.
I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in
after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her, I tore off
her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I
traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a
madman's fancy.
Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make
presents--presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he
prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he
sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an
elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once
glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes
called for some reason "luizettas" that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere,
and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for
holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it--using it for a totally different
purpose.
In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself
being enmeshed, I had decided--despite Lo's visible annoyance--to spend
another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the
morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind
of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her)
and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the "luizetta" were safe.
There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic:
caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one
ninth of Lolita's length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had
inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily
said in part: "Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well
as on the person." There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or
persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position,
thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is
the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father's central forelimb.
I was now glad I had it with me--and even more glad that I had learned
to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte's
glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an
admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird,
though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof--only a little
iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the
twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a
tiny woodpecker--completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two
sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did
would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. "You like here,"
I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with
a dram of gin.
The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us
further west. The following days were marked by a number of great
thunderstorms--or perhaps, thee was but one single storm which progressed
across country in ponderous frogleaps and which we could not shake off just
as we could not shake off detective Trapp: for it was during those days that
the problem of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite
overshadowed the theme of Lo's lovers.
Queer! I who was jealous of every male we met--queer, how I
misinterpreted the designations of doom. Perhaps I had been lulled by Lo's
modest behavior in winter, and anyway it would have been too foolish even
for a lunatic to suppose another Humbert was avidly following Humbert and
Humbert's nymphet with Jovian fireworks, over the great and ugly plains. I
surmised, donc, that the Red Yak keeping behind us at a discreet
distance mile after mile was operated by a detective whom some busybody had
hired to see what exactly Humbert Humbert was doing with that minor
stepdaughter of his. As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance
and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than
hallucinations. I do not know what she or he, or both had put into my liquor
but one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our cabin, and
I flung it open, and noticed two things--that I was stark naked and that,
white-glistening in the rain-dripping darkness, there stood a man holding
before his face the mask of Jutting Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies.
He emitted a muffled guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the
room, and fell asleep again, and am not sure even to this day that the visit
was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied Trapp's type of
humor, and this might have been a plausible sample. Oh, crude and absolutely
ruthless! Somebody, I imagined, was making money on those masks of popular
monsters and morons. Did I see next morning two urchins rummaging in a
garbage can and trying on Jutting Chin? I wonder. It may all have been a
coincidence--due to atmospheric conditions, I suppose.
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox
memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first
knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us. I do
remember, however, the first time I saw its driver quite clearly. I was
proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing
that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently
the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether. With a
swishing sound a sunburst swept the highway, and needing a pair of new
sunglasses, I pussled up at a filling station. What was happening was a
sickness, a cancer, that could not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact
that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us
at a cafe or bar bearing the idiotic sign: The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful.
Having seen to the needs of my car, I walked into the office to get those
glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing a traveler's
check and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I happened to glance through
a side window, and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an
oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo who was leaning
out of the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread
fingers going up and down as it did when she was very serious and emphatic.
What struck me with sickening force was--how should I put it?--the voluble
familiarity of her way, as if they had known each other--oh, for weeks and
weeks. I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his
convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave
Trapp, a cousin of my father's in Switzerland--same smoothly tanned face,
fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth.
Lolita was studying a road map when I got back into the car.
"What did that man ask you, Lol?"
"Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don't know. He wondered if I had a
map. Lost his way, I guess."
We drove on, and I said:
"Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do
not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not care for the moment;
but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel
yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen
and where you will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to
know exactly what he said to you and what you told him."
She laughed.
"If he's really a cop," she said shrilly but not illogically, "the
worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him,
Dad."
"Did he ask where we were going?"
"Oh, he knows that" (mocking me).
"Anyway," I said, giving up, "I have seen his face now. He is not
pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp."
"Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you--Oh, look, all the nines are
changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid," she continued
unexpectedly, "I used to think they'd stop and go back to nines, if only my
mother agreed to put the car in reverse."
It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her
pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick;
and silently we traveled on, unpursued.
But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug
and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The
traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody
attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red
shadow--as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil
mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like
virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed
shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his
convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk
connected it with out shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his
splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him.
O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed
long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared
slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves
on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted
interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart
of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my
right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.
A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets--at
half-past-four p.m. in a factory town--was the hand of chance that
interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut
off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on,
and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread
crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb.
When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I
returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.
Lola snorted and said: "If he is what you think he is, how silly to
give him the slip."
"I have other notions by now," I said.
"You should--ah--check them by--ah--keeping in touch with him, fahther
deah," said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. "Gee, you
are mean," she added in her ordinary voice.
We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude
of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling
above us.
"I am not a lady and do not like lightning," said Lo, whose dread of
electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.
We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.
"Judging by the terminal figure," I remarked, "Fatface is already
here."
"Your humor," said Lo, "is sidesplitting, deah fahther."
We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two
of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was
merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real
mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.
Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in
the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely,
I must admit--and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer
theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June
evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial
affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading
lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces,
more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbed--seven bemused pubescent
girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the
partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to
represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and
rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember
thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare
Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of
the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely--Orange who kept fidgeting all
the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit
where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.
As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause--a sound my nerves
cannot stand--began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo
toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our
neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is
stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy
daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of
her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all
in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen
that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child,
myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of
the joint authors--a man's tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-like,
black-haired, strikingly tall woman.
"You've again hurt my wrist, you brute," said Lolita in a small voice
as she slipped into her car seat.
"I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling," I
said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the
conversation--to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: "Vivian is
quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda
pop."
"Sometimes," said Lo, "you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is
the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married
and has Negro blood."
"I thought," I said kidding her, "Quilty was an ancient flame of yours,
in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale."
"What?" countered Lo, her features working. "that fat dentist? You must
be confusing me with some other fast little article."
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget
everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their
nymphancy.
With Lo's knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the
Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wace and P.O.
Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short
but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues' gallery. Handsome Bryan
Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion
fair, was wanted for kidnapping. A sad-eyed old gentleman's faux-pas was
mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed
arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should
be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my
book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And
moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen,
wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller.
I forget my letters; as to Dolly's, there was her report and a very
special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its
contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to
mind and drifted toward the newsstand near the exit.
"Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay
quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all
your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow
the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of
my--and the author's--Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as
last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own
modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is
over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother's confinement (our baby, alas, did
not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still
bear traces of the paint.
"We are going to New York after tomorrow, and I guess I can't manage to
wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for
you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With
one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who
you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while
he and Fullbright are around.
"As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit
of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire ю ton amant, Chimхne,
comme le lac est beau car il faut qu'il t'y mиne. Lucky beau! Qu'il
t'y--What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from
your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P.S. Because of one
thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So
better wait till I write you from Europe." (She never did as far as I know.
The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired
today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and
give it here ю titre documentaire. I read it twice.)
I looked up from the letter and was about to--There was no Lo to
behold. While I was engrossed in Mona's witchery, Lo had shrugged her
shoulders and vanished. "Did you happen to see--" I asked of a hunchback
sweeping the floor near the entrance. He had, the old lecherer. He guessed
she had seen a friend and had hurried out. I hurried out too. I stopped--she
had not. I hurried on. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had
gone for ever.
In later years I have often wondered why she did not go forever
that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new summer clothes in my
locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some general plan? Was it simply
because, all things considered, I might as well be used to convey her to
Elphinstone--the secret terminus, anyway? I only know I was quite certain
she had left me for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling
the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting
Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep
talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe.
The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between
a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 a.m.
mountain time. The street was charming it into beauty, was one of those
fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a
general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an
intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were,
through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Cafe,
Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, Western Union, Cleaners,
Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a
detective; in love with a black-mailer. Took advantage of my utter
helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should
talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in
the parked car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back
to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious
sarcasm--un ricanement--that I was crazy to suspect her, that she
would turn up any minute.
She did.
I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve
with a timid and imbecile smile.
"Get into the car," I said.
She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless
thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her duplicity.
Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of
hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I became aware she
was telling me that she had met a former girl friend.
"Yes? Whom?"
"A Beardsley girl."
"Good. I now every name in your group. Alice Adams?"
"The girl was not in my group."
"Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please."
"She was not in my school She is just a town girl in Beardsley."
"Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We'll look up all
the Browns."
"I only know her first name."
"Mary or Jane?"
"No--Dolly, like me."
"So that's the dead end" (the mirror you break your nose against).
"Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes.
What did the two Dollys do?"
"We went to a drugstore."
"And you had there--?"
"Oh, just a couple of Cokes."
"Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know."
"At least, she had. I had a glass of water."
"Good. Was it that place there?"
"Sure."
"Good, come on, we'll grill the soda jerk."
"Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down--just around
the corner."
"Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let's see." (Opening a
chained telephone book.) "Dignified Funeral Service. NO, not yet. Here we
are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin's Pharmacy. And two more.
That's all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains--at least in the
business section. Well, we will check them all."
"Go to hell," she said.
"Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere."
"Okay," she said. "But you're not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not
have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows."
"Which? That window there for example?"
"Yes, that one there, for example."
"Oh Lo! Let's look closer at it."
It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning
a carpet upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just
worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its
comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it
had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of
Lolita's size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a
much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intact except for the
lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man
crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three
slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and
seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
"Look, Lo," I said quietly. "Look well. Is not that a rather good
symbol of something or other? However"--I went on as we got back into the
car--"I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove
compartment), on this pad I have our boy friend's car number."
As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind
were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheater
of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the
central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its
extreme edges--a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which
in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because
otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded
scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my
manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced
upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had
been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried
shuttle smear of a pencil's rubber end, and with parts of numbers
obliterated or reconstructed in a child's hand, presented a tangle of barbed
wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state--one adjacent
to the state Beardsley was in.
I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove
out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and,
mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the
current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I
turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its
litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of
surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that
caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement,
groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet
night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her
long-toed feet, I immolated myself . . . But it was all of no avail. both
doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.
In a street of Wace, on its outskirts . . . Oh, I am quite sure it was
not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red
Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or
five loud young people of several sexes--but I said nothing. After Wace a
totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis
with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and
then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and
was still with us, in this or that rented car.
A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched
from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages
specializing in "stage-automobile" operations, but I never could discover
the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus,
beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon
Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then
he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint
shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle
distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile
he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in
agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as
Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's French Gray . . .
The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little
mustache and open shirt--or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders--led me
to a profound study of all cars on the road--behind, before, alongside,
coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist's
automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the
recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog's head
protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor's tudor sedan crowded with
suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the
Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female
passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to
the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up . .
. The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and
rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view
of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and
concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden,
as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart's pangs, we were slithering
from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us.
"You got a flat, mister," said cheerful Lo.
I pulled up--near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on
the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its
tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards
behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my
chance. I started to walk towards him--with the brilliant idea of asking him
for a jack through I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a
stone--and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck
loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me--and immediately after, I heard
it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back--and saw my own car
gently creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the
engine was certainly running--though I remembered I had cut it but had not
applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space of throb-time that
it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last,
it dawned upon me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample
time to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the door open, I was
goddamn sure she had started the car to prevent me from walking up to Trapp.
Her trick proved useless, however, for even while I was puruing her he had
made an energetic U-turn and was gone. I rested for a while. Lo asked wasn't
I going to thank her--the car had started to move by itself and--Getting no
answer, she immersed herself in a study of the map. I got out again and
commenced the "ordeal of the orb," as Charlotte used to say. Perhaps, I was
losing my mind.
We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and useless dip, we
went up and up. On a steep grade I found myself behind the gigantic truck
that had overtaken us. It was now groaning up a winding road and was
impossible to pass. Out of its front part a small oblong of smooth
silver--the inner wrapping of chewing gum--escaped and flew back into our
windshield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might
end by murdering somebody. In fact--said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering
Humbert--it might be quite clever to prepare things--to transfer the weapon
from box to pocket--so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of
insanity when it does come.
By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to
cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not been merely a matter of
learning the answers to such questions as what is the basic conflict in
"Hedda Gabler," or where are the climaxes in "Love Under the Lindens," or
analyze the prevailing mood of "Cherry Orchard"; it was really a matter of
learning to betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual
simulation that I had so often seen her go through in our Beardsley parlor
when I would observe her from some strategic point while she, like a
hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated
version of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of
hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young
stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling
crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her
sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed
sheet suggesting:
Tactile drill. Imagine Yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong
ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot
potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a
flashlight.
Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of
brad, india rubber, a friend's aching temple, a sample of velvet, a rose
petal.
You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa
Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping stranger, your father.
But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in
the dreamy performance of her enchantments and duties! On certain
adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her dance for me with the
promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps
of hers were more like those of a football cheerleader than like the
languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of
her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that her tennis
game produced in me--the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very
brink of unearthly order and splendor.
Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than ever, with her
apricot-colored limbs, in her sub-teen tennis togs! Winged gentlemen! No
hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that
Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the
white wide little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the
white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end
behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable
apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones,
and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket
had cost me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I
would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my
pain and despair!
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before
going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or
pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the
score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at
home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young
creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it
was the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart
in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her
aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and
the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile
and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an
absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis--without any
utilitarian results. As Edusa's sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young
coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching
Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): "Dolly has a
magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?"
Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very
first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of
beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at
the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop
and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot,
pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up
with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of
the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of
falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.
It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical
purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to
return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop.
That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments,
immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan today with frustration.
They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead
volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she
had been trained, my pet, to patter up at once to the net on her nimble,
vivid, white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her forehand and
backhand drives: they were mirror images of one another--my very loins still
tingle with those pistol reports repeated by crisp echoes and Electra's
cries. One of the pearls of Dolly's game was a short half-volley that Ned
Litam had taught her in California.
She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis; yet I insist
that had not something within her been broken by me--not that I realized it
then!--she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win,
and would have become a real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under
her arm, in Wimbledon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning
professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her
gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert.
There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game--unless
one considered her cheerful indifference toward its outcome as the feint of
a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an
innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a
second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to
poke and cut his way to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered the
one thousand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with
wonderful ease, once she had entered into the rhythm of a rally and as long
as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt attack, or sudden change of
tactics on her adversary's part, left her helpless. At match point, her
second serve, which--rather typically--was even stronger and more stylish
than her first (for she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners
have), would strike vibrantly the hard-cord of the net--and ricochet out of
court. The polished gem of her dropshot was snapped up and put away by an
opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a crooked paddle. Her dramatic
drives and lovely volleys would candidly fall at his feet. Over and over
again she would land an easy one into the net--and merrily mimic dismay by
drooping in a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were
her grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me and my
old-fashioned lifting drive.
I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my
chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water
with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated
bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.
Similarly, the initial tennis coaching I had inflicted on Lolita--prior to
the revelations that came to her through the great Californian's
lessons--remained in my mind as oppressive and distressful memories--not
only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly irritated by every
suggestion of mine--but because the precious symmetry of the court instead
of reflecting the harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the
clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now things were
different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of Champion,
Colorado, on that admirable court at the foot of seep stone stairs leading
up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the night, I felt I could rest from
the nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her
soul, of her essential grace.
She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep, feeding
me deep skimming balls--all so rhythmically coordinated and overt as to
reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging stroll--crack players will
understand what I mean. My rather heavily cut serve that I had been taught
by my father who had learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his
and great champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really tried
to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention
that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly?
That she was only fourteen?
An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.
Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about eight years
my junior, and an indolent dark girl with a moody mouth and hard eyes, about
two years Lolita's senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common with dutiful
tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and they carried them not as
if they were the natural and comfortable extensions of certain specialized
muscles, but hammers or blunderbusses or whimbles, or my own dreadful
cumbersome sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my precious
coat, on a bench adjacent to the court, they fell to admiring very vocally a
rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently helped me to foster and
uphold--until there occurred a syncope in the series causing her to gasp as
her overhead smash went out of court, whereupon she melted into winsome
merriment, my golden pet.
I felt thirsty by then, and walked to the drinking fountain; there Red
approached me and in all humility suggested a mixed double. "I am Bill
Mead," he said. "And that's Fay Page, actress. Maffy On Say"--he added
(pointing with his ridiculously hooded racket at polished Fay who was
already talking to Dolly). I was about to reply "Sorry, but--" (for I hate
to have my filly involved in the chops and jabs of cheap bunglers), when a
remarkably melodious cry diverted my attention: a bellboy was tripping down
the steps from the hotel to our court and making me signs. I was wanted, if
you please, on an urgent long distance call--so urgent in fact that the line
was being held for me. Certainly. I got into my coat (inside pocket heavy
with pistol) and told Lo I would be back in a minute. She was picking up a
ball--in the continental foot-racket way which was one of the few nice
things I had taught her,--and smiled--she smiled at me!
An awful calm kept my heart afloat as I followed the boy up to the
hotel. This, to use an American term, in which discovery, retribution,
torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive
nutshell, was it. I had left her in mediocre hands, but it hardly
mattered now. I would fight, of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy
everything than surrender her. Yes, quite a climb.
At the desk, dignified, Roman-nosed man, with, I suggest, a very
obscure past that might reward investigation, handed me a message in his own
hand. The line had not been held after all. The note said:
"Mr. Humbert. The head of Birdsley (sic!) School called. Summer
residence--Birdsley 2-8282. Please call back immediately. Highly important."
I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and four about twenty
minutes tussled with space-spooks. A quartet of propositions gradually
became audible: soprano, there was no such number in Beardsley; alto, Miss
Pratt was on her way to England; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned;
bass, they could not have done so, since nobody knew I was, that particular
day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman took the trouble to
find out if there had been a long distance call. There had been none. A fake
call from some local dial was not excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet.
After a visit to the purling men's room and a stiff drink at the bar, I
started on my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below, on
the tennis court which seemed the size of a school child's ill-wiped slate,
golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved like a fair angel among three
horrible Boschian cripples. One of these, her partner, while changing sides,
jocosely slapped her on her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably
round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary
flurry--he saw me, and throwing away his racket--mine--scuttled up the
slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in a would-be comical imitation of
rudimentary wings, as he climbed, blow-legged, to the street, where his gray
car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came
down, the remaining trio were collecting and sorting out the balls.
"Mr. Mead, who was that person?"
Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads.
That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn't he,
Dolly?
Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before
returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley half-smothered in
fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe
sobs and plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for
clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping
me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome--assorted
people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and
Fay were both weak with laughter--we had come at the end of their private
joke. It did not really matter.
Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming,
apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its routine
pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and
spend the rest of the afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day.
Lolita!
"Lo! Lola! Lolita!" I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun,
with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my call and its tell-tale
hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it
would have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon
shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I
found her at last--she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she
was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was
losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red
ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and
then would bounce away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not
swim with my heart in that state, but who cared--and there she was, and
there was I, in my robe--and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in
the pattern of her motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red
bathing briefs and bra, struck me . . . there was an ecstasy, a madness
about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed
puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my
chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some
distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my
thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in
Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the
peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel
around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in
the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own
nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round
head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a
symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with
bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting
with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded
shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown
face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was the reflection
of my daughter's countenance--the same beatitude and grimace but made
hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he
was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of
gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and
missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedaling
in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and
then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes
and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a
tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards
a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very
good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned
more than once, who used to counteract his "sprees" (he drank beer with
milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting--tottering and grunting on
a lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped
from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the
towel on his name walked back with false insouciance to the pool. And as if
the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring
the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks
are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started to say something,
and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and
vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.
I saw Lolita's eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than
frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father was having a
fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony
of gin. And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later
years no doctor believed).
The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone,
turned out to belong to the glossily browned pine-log kind that Lolita used
to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how
different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After
all--well, really . . . After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly
clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars
were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence
and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part
of my brain--and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman
or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and
otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I
remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of
the "Birdsley" telephone call . . . But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had
dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with
the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably
unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics
told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me.
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly
prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last
lap--two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or
zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped,
splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the
take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was
newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high
valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California,
to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas.
Josи Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the
Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in
which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would
dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the
distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy
abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed
loves, and lungs, rely.
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor
court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a
Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish.
I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still
twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a
little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the
cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook
of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt,
to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper
in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill.
Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally,
then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after
laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the
intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made
sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of
temperature--even exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip
of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an
examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen
that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her
brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained
of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae--and I thought of
poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of
intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. "You are lucky it
happened here," she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the
district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be,
despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkжnig in pursuit,
thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and
guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom
Mrs. Haus had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose
learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it
was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu,
curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all
of which sounded like the "ague" of the ancients. I wondered if I should
mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a
minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but
knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if
necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter's
age as "practically sixteen." While I was not looking, my child was taken
away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a
"welcome" mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up
constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to
tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as
we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and
very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black
eyes--of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd,
a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it
for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new
solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square
and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up
at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute
montagne where at the moment Mary's father, lonely Joseph Lore was
dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas--que sais-je!--or seducing a ewe.
Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in
times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt
fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the
motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way.
Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what
looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school
playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the
pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the
motel, where millions of so-called "millers," a kind of insect, were
swarming around the neon contours of "No Vacancy"; and, when, at 3 a.m.,
after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to
fix a man's despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of
chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special
French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to
assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was
separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was
somehow the development of a theme--that it had the same taste and tone as
the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during
our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or
hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital--and Aurora
had hardly "warmed her hands," as the pickers of lavender way in the country
of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again,
knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like
the darling she was to some "serum" (sparrow's sperm or dugong's dung), she
was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be
"skipping" again.
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply
engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all
hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will
know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books
that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning's Dramatic Works, The
history of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of
the Rockies, the Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis by Helen Wills, who had
won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was
staggering up to the door of my daughter's thirteen-dollar-a day private
room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an
unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it
with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot
back into the room--probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the
tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and
bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves
gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly
slept at all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a
yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained
something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it--nothing
at all, save a phony armorial design with "Ponderosa Lodge" in green
letters; thereupon I performed a chassи-croisи with Mary, who was in
the act of bustling out again--wonderful how fast they move and how little
they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put
back, uncrumpled.
"You better not touch," she said, nodding directionally. "Could burn
your fingers."
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
"Je croyais que c'иtait un bill--not a billet doux."
Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: "Bonjour, mon petit."
"Dolores," said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the
plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel
blanket as she blinked: "Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters
from my boy friend. It's me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross
she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours."
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted,
hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverleat, lay
innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper
napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
"what gruesome funeral flowers," she said. "Thanks all the same. But do
you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody."
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and
garlic, with the Desert News, which her fair patient eagerly
accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
"My sister Ann," said Marry (topping information with afterthought),
"works at the Ponderosa place."
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m'aimes
plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as
hopeless as ever--and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting
in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and
say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental
Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her
fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse
whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins
into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting
room--all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy
father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between
Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were
rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that "snow" and "joy juice").
My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the
mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling plotting sky.
"My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes), "we shall
leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."
"Incidentally, I want all my clothes," said the gitanilla, humping up
her knees and turning to another page.
". . . Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying
here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.
I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive
botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush of the room, to
identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly
sounded somewhere in the passage.
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were
lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a
hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However--likewise for reasons
of show--regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the
wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary
Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating
through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at
her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze
reminded me to bring her next morning . . . She did not remember where the
various things she wanted were . . . "Bring me," she cried (out of sight
already, door on the move, closing, closed), "the new gray suitcase and
Mother's trunk"; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying
nit he motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could
do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags
over with the widow's beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo
displaying her treasures to Mary . . . No doubt, I was a little
delirious--and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a
solid, for when I looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw
Dolly's beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the
graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow
perched on the saddle--but it was the landlady's bike, and smiling a little,
and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed,
and lay as quiet as a saint--
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine--
--which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed,
and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the
firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five
minutes to two p.m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the
half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on
its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better
and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as
now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars--had been blown through a wall overseas;
but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish,
hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either
because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a
sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the
one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated
sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a
naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on
the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs
while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious . . . reclining
against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get
into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch
amorously.
"Okey-dokey," big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling,
carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever
was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing
gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone.
Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was
fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr.
Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for
everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly's bill in cash, and
told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at
Grandpa's ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was
spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and
red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier
to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of
which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a
unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one
gravel--groaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself
telestically--and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating
owner--that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the
gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and
losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room,
trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and
clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at
my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been
sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue,
and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: "Now, who
is nevrotic, I ask?"--and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with
seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan
lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware
of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me
out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my
Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark
thought stood out and this was: "Freedom for the moment is everything." One
false move--and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I
simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he
thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in
tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily
diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish
that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly
good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I
still had my gun, and was still a free man--free to trace the fugitive, free
to destroy my brother.
A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where,
to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been scheduled to appear for the
first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before
Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom
made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the
rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places,
all of them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along
which the fiend's spoor should be sought; and to this I devoted myself,
after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly
radiating roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone.
Imagine me, reader , with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation,
my inherent sense of the comme il faut, imagine me masking the frenzy
of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual
pretext to flip through the hotel register: "Oh," I would say, "I am almost
positive that I stayed here once--let me look up the entries for
mid-June--no, I see I'm wrong after all--what a very quaint name for a home
town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much." Or: "I had a customer staying here--I
mislaid his address--may I . . .?" And every once in a while, especially if
the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male,
personal inspection of the books was denied me.
I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to
Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342
hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations
between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend
("N. Petit, Larousse, Ill."); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully
so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least
fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk--but that was a futile
quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good
will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300
or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering
fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else--he was quite capable of
that--he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well
furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at
the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita's pillow. In some
instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block;
not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two
bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure
from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and
marking laps and stops with her lipstick!
I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had
planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel
office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human
ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy
connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to
inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold,
that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had
checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked
formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One
moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton,
she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of
falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not
know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to
waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of
the moon. "He is your brother," she whispered at last. I plucked the bill
out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran
away. This taught me to rely on myself alone. No detective could discover
the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of
course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he
might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a
richer and more personal shot of color than strictly necessary, or by
revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which
revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly
enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite
skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always
leaving me with the sportive hope--if I may use such a term in speaking of
betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate--that he might give himself away
next time. He never did--though coming damn close to it. We all admire the
spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in
the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert
wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I
should know.
The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his
personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his
genre, his type of humor--at its best at leat--the tone of his brain, had
affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were
definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. he was versed in
logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine
handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter
how he slanted them, his very peculiar t's, w's and l's. Quelquepart Island
was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which
fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a
repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.
His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a
tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my scholarship. I am sufficiently
proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all; and I
daresay I missed some elements in that cryprogrammic paper chase. What a
shiver of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when, among the plain
innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conundrum would ejaculate
in my face! I noticed that whenever he felt his enigmas were becoming too
recondite, even for such a solver as I, he would lure me back with an easy
one. "Arsхne Lupin" was obvious to a Frenchman who remembered the detective
stories of his youth; and one hardly had to be a Coleridgian to appreciate
the trite poke of "A. Person, Porlock, England." In horrible taste but
basically suggestive of a cultured man--not a policeman, not a common good,
not a lewd salesman--were such assumed names as "Arthur Rainbow"--plainly
the travestied author of Le Bateau Bleu--let me laugh a little too,
gentlemen--and "Morris Schmetterling," of L'Oiseau Ivre fame
(touchи, reader!). The silly but funny "D. Orgon, Elmira, NY," was
from Moliхre, of course, and because I had quite recently tried to interest
Lolita in a famous 18th-century play, I welcomed as an old friend "Harry
Bumper, Sheridan, Wyo." An ordinary encyclopedia informed me who the
peculiar looking "Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH" was; and any good Freudian,
with a German name and some interest in religious prostitution, should
recognize at a glance the implication of "Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss." So far
so good. That sort of fun was shoddy but on the whole impersonal and thus
innocuous. Among entries that arrested my attention as undoubtable clues
per se but baffled me in respect to their finer points I do not care
to mention many since I feel I am groping in a border-land mist with verbal
phantoms turning, perhaps, into living vacationists. Who was "Johnny
Randall, Ramble, Ohio"? Or was he a real person who just happened to write a
hand similar to "N.S. Aristoff, Catagela, NY"? What was the sting in
"Catagela"? And what about "James Mavor Morell, Hoaxton, England"?
"Aristophanes," "hoax"--fine, but what was I missing?
There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused
me especially painful palpitations when I came across it. Such things as "G.
Trapp, Geneva, NY." was the sign of treachery on Lolita's part. "Aubrey
Beardsley, Quelquepart Island" suggested more lucidly than the garbled
telephone message had that the starting point of the affair should be looked
for in the East. "Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa." insinuated that my Carmen
had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel,
forsooth, was "Will Brown, Dolores, Colo." The gruesome "Harold Haze,
Tombstone, Arizona" (which at another time would have appealed to my sense
of humor) implied a familiarity with the girl's past that in nightmare
fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the
family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte's, maybe a redresser of wrongs
("Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev."). But the most penetrating bodkin was the
anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge "Ted Hunter, Cane,
NH."
The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and
Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers omit to check if guests'
cars are accurately listed. References--incompletely or incorrectly
indicated--to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and
Elphinstone were of course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a
shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted,
but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as "WS 1564" and "SH
1616," and "Q32888" or "CU88322") which however were so cunningly contrived
as to never reveal a common denominator.
It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to
accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor car system, his
successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some
hotel office the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for
the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and
unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown
motorists traveling along unknown routes?
By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing
recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length, a complete image
had formed in my mind; and through the--always risky--process of elimination
I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration
and torpid memory could give it.
Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old
gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular
male teachers t Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on
the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic
lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had
wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont,
had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to
that particular lecturer as a brilliant garгon; but that was all;
memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover.
On the day fixed for the execution, I walked though the sleet across
the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I
learned that the fellow's name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister),
that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the
"Museum" where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the
auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple
Ramble. As I waited there, in the prostatic discomfort, drunk,
sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it suddenly
occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid.
There was not one chance in a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was
hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. He could not be
the villain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time and my
wits. He and she were in California and not here at all.
Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white statues; a
door-not the one I had been staring at--opened briskly, and amid a bevy of
women students a baldish head and two bright brown eyes bobbed, advanced.
He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a lawn party
at Beardsley School. How was my delightful tennis-playing daughter? He had
another class. He would be seeing me.
Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved: through
an advertisement in one of Lo's magazines I dared to get in touch with a
private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely to give him some idea of the
method adopted by the fiend, I acquainted him with the kind of names
and addresses I had collected. He demanded a goodish deposit and for two
years--two years, reader!--that imbecile busied himself with checking those
nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations with him when he
turned up one day with the triumphant information that an eighty-year-old
Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores, Colo.