Of my Lolita she seldom spoke – more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Caesarean operation[106] and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps – and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fool’s book she had (A Guide to Your Child’s Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her child’s birthdays. On Lo’s twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under ‘Your Child’s Personality’: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolita’s anklets. And then, her attitude towards my saporous darling’s letters!
Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and rewritten again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. I’m having a time. Love.
‘The dumb child,’ said Mrs. Humbert, ‘has left out a word before “time”. That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.’
20
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake – not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip ‘in the ebony[107]’ (as John had quipped) at five o’clock in the morning last Sunday.
‘The water,’ I said, ‘must have been quite cold.’
‘That is not the point,’ said the logical doomed dear. ‘He is subnormal, you see. And,’ she continued (in that carefully phrased way of hers that was beginning to tell on my health), ‘I have a very definite feeling our Louise is in love with that moron.’
Feeling. ‘We feel Dolly is not doing as well’, etc. (from an old school report).
The Humberts walked on, sandalled and robed.
‘Do you know, Hum: I have one most ambitious dream,’ pronounced Lady Hum, lowering her head – shy of that dream – and communing with the tawny ground. ‘I would love to get hold of a real trained servant maid like that German girl the Talbots spoke of; and have her live in the house.’
‘No room,’ I said.
‘Come,’ she said with her quizzical smile, ‘surely, chéri, you underestimate the possibilities of the Humbert home. We would put her in Lo’s room. I intended to make a guestroom of that hole anyway. It’s the coldest and meanest in the whole house.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, the skin of my cheekbones tensing up (this I take the trouble to note only because my daughter’s skin did the same when she felt that way: disbelief, disgust, irritation).
‘Are you bothered by Romantic Associations?’ queried my wife – in allusion to her first surrender.
‘Hell no,’ said I. ‘I just wonder where will you put your daughter when you get your guest or your maid.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Humbert, dreaming, smiling, drawing out the ‘Ah’ simultaneously with the raise of one eyebrow and a soft exhalation of breath. ‘Little Lo, I’m afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. Little Lo goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training. And then – Beardsley College. I have it all mapped out, you need not worry.’
She went on to say that she, Mrs. Humbert, would have to overcome her habitual sloth and write to Miss Phalen’s sister who taught at St. Algebra. The dazzling lake emerged. I said I had forgotten my sunglasses in the car and would catch up with her.
I had always thought that wringing one’s hands was a fictional gesture – the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture (‘look, Lord, at these chains!’) that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood.
Had Charlotte been Valeria, I would have known how to handle the situation; and ‘handle’ is the word I want. In the good old days, by merely twisting fat Valechka’s brittle wrist (the one she had fallen upon from a bicycle) I could make her change her mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regard to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland American Charlotte frightened me. My lighthearted dream of controlling her through her passion for me was all wrong. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. I had toadied to her when she was the awesome duenna of my darling, and a grovelling something still persisted in my attitude toward her. The only ace I held was her ignorance of my monstrous love for her Lo. She had been annoyed by Lo’s liking me; but my feelings she could not divine. To Valeria I might have said: ‘Look here, you fat fool, c’est moi qui décide[108] what is good for Dolores Humbert.’ To Charlotte, I could not even say (with ingratiating calm): ‘Excuse me, my dear, I disagree. Let us give the child one more chance. Let me be her private tutor for a year or so. You once told me yourself – ’ In fact, I could not say anything at all to Charlotte about the child without giving myself away. Oh, you cannot imagine (as I had never imagined) what these women of principle are! Charlotte, who did not notice the falsity of all the everyday conventions and rules of behaviour, and foods, and books, and people she doted upon, would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to keeping Lo near me. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment. To break Charlotte’s will, I would have to break her heart. If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too. If I said: ‘Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep the matter quiet, or we part at once’, she would have turned as pale as a woman of clouded glass and slowly replied: ‘All right, whatever you add or retract, this is the end.’ And the end it would be.
Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking it as avidly as if it could give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom, a tiny concubine. For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the wooshing pines. In the middle distance, two little maidens