* PART TWO *1It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. Toany other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the FunctionalMotel--clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument,reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousingsuspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, eachcontaining a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangementwas even intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could beattained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or roominto two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities thatsuch honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping matesor a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder,and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, aprison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create amorning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvaniaand rain. We came to know--nous connшmes, to use a Flaubertianintonation--the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, thebrick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of theAutomobile Association describes as "shaded" or "spacious" or "landscaped"grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by itsgolden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plainwhitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some othergloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except "good beds"),and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (". . . well, Icould give you . . .") turned down. Nous connшmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements oftheir repetitious names--all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, HillcrestCourts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park PlazaCourts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts. There was sometimes a special line in thewrite-up, such as "Children welcome, pets allowed" (You are welcome,you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with anendless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitelynon-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turninstantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether yourneighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessarycomplement in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels hadinstructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels wereunhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage,beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices underglass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will often see riders comingdown Main Street on their way back from a romantic moonlight ride."Often at 3 a.m.," sneered unromantic Lo). Nous connшmes the various types of motor court operators, thereformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among themales; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among thefemales. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humidnight with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteriain one desperate scream. We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones,old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables indepressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photographs of thelandlady's children in all their instars. But I did surrender, now and then,to Lo's predilection for "real" hotels. She would pick out in the book,while I petted her in the parked car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed,mysterious side-road, some highly recommended lake lodge which offered allsorts of things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them, such ascongenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues--but which in mymind conjured up odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweatshirtsand an ember-red cheek pressing against hers, while poor Dr. Humbert,embracing nothing but two masculine knees, would cold-humor his piles on thedamp turf. Most empty to her, too, were those "Colonial" Inns, which apartfrom "gracious atmosphere" and picture windows, promised "unlimitedquantities of M-m-m food." Treasured recollections of my father's palatialhotel sometimes led me to seek for its like in the strange country wetraveled through. I was soon discouraged; but Lo kept following the scent ofrich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from suchroadside signs as Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free. On the otherhand, I shudder when recalling that soi-disant "high-class" resort ina Midwestern state, which advertised "raid-the-icebox" midnight snacks and,intrigued by my accent, wanted to know my dead wife's and dead mother'smaiden names. A two-days' stay there cost me a hundred and twenty-fourdollars! And do you remember, Miranda, that other "ultrasmart" robbers' denwith complimentary morning coffee and circulating ice water, and no childrenunder sixteen (no Lolitas, of course)? Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts whichbecame our habitual haunts, she would set the electric fan a-whirr, orinduce me to drop a quarter into the radio, or she would read all the signsand inquire with a whine why she could not go riding up some advertisedtrail or swimming in that local pool of warm mineral water. Most often, inthe slouching, bored way she cultivated, Lo would fall prostrate andabominably desirable into a red springchair or a green chaise longue, or asteamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and canopy, or a sling chair,or any other lawn chair under a garden umbrella on the patio, and it wouldtake hours of blandishments, threats and promises to make her lend me for afew seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room beforeundertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy. A combination of naоvetи and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of bluesilks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperatingbrat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom,intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, andwhat is called goofing off--a kind of diffused clowning which she thoughtwas tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be adisgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooeyfudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth--these were theobvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickelsI fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I stillhear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with nameslike Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, andsentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her variouscandies were to my palate. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, anyadvertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or ScreenLand--Starasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you'rewearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says youshouldn't." If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop--we had tovisit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactuscandy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by theirtrochaic lilt. If some cafи sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she wasautomatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She itwas to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and objectof every foul poster. And she attempted--unsuccessfully-to patronize onlythose restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended uponthe cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads. In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system ofmonetary bribes which was to work such havoc with my nerves and her moralssomewhat later. I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescentconcubine in submission and passable temper. A few years before, she hadspent a rainy summer under Miss Phalen's bleary eye in a dilapidatedAppalachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze or other in thedead past. It still stood among its rank acres of golden rod on the edge ofa flowerless forest, at the end of a permanently muddy road, twenty milesfrom the nearest hamlet. Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, thesolitude, the soggy old pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with anenergy of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half-revealedtongue. And it was there that I warned her she would dwell with me in exilefor months and years if need be, studying under me French and Latin, unlessher "present attitude" changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you! A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at mydriving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of temper by turning inthe middle of a highway with the implication that I was about to take herstraight to that dark and dismal abode. The farther, however, we traveledaway from it west, the less tangible that menace became, and I had to adoptother methods of persuasion. Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with thedeepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our concourse, I wasclever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation inkeeping our relations secret, that it should become a second nature withher, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasureshe might seek. "Come and kiss your old man," I would say, "and drop that moodynonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream male [the reader willnotice what pains I took to speak Lo's tongue], you swooned to records ofthe number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: "Of my what? SpeakEnglish"]. That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Humbert.But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dreamdaughter. "My chхre Dolorиs ! I want to protect you, dear, from all thehorrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways, and alas,comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woodsduring the bluest of summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay yourguardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianshipbefore long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legalterminology, terminology that accepts as rational the term 'lewd andlascivious cohabitation.' I am not a criminal sexual psychopath takingindecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am thetherapist--a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction. I am yourdaddum, Lo. Look, I've a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling,what it says. I quote: the normal girl--normal, mark you--the normal girl isusually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him theforerunner of the desired elusive male ('elusive' is good, by Polonius!).The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived)will encourage a companionship between father and daughter,realizing--excuse the corny style--that the girl forms her ideals of romanceand of men from her association with her father. Now, what association doesthis cheery book mean--and recommend? I quote again: Among Sicilians sexualrelations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter ofcourse, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not lookedupon with disapproval by the society of which she is part. I'm a greatadmirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people,Lo, and great lovers. But let's not digress. Only the other day we read inthe newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleadedguilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-oldgirl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever these are. Doloresdarling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you toconsider yourself my cross-country slave, and I deplore the Mann Act aslending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semanticstake against tight-zippered Philistines. I am your father, and I amspeaking English, and I love you. "Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of havingimpaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if youcomplain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us supposethey believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one toknow her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degreesodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is ten years.So, I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan?Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of PublicWelfare--which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of theMiss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take awayyour lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don't know if youhave ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigibleand delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happyneglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all moreor less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juveniledetention home, or one of those admirable girls' protectories where you knitthings, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will gothere, Lolita--my Lolita, this Lolita will leave plainerwords, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized,my pet, c'est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here,my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no,allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is thesituation, this is the choice. Don't you think that under the circumstancesDolores Haze had better stick to her old man?" By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite acertain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent achild as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish thatbackground of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful inkeeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I hadto devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her tolook forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of ashaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged andcollapsed. The object in view might be anything--a lighthouse in Virginia, anatural cave in Arkansas converted to a cafи, a collection of guns andviolins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes inLouisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the localmuseum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever--but it had to bethere, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo wouldfeign gagging as soon as we got to it. By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did mybest for hours on end to give her the impression of "going places," ofrolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I havenever seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us,across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed thoselong highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dancefloors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented mycalling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; whichI myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to thedelicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By aparadox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countrysidehad at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amusedrecognition because of those painted oilclothes which were imported fromAmerica in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-Europeannurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rusticgreen views they depicted--opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, thedull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills ofgreenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticitiesbecame stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them.Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slowsuffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm,peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-graycloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spacedtrees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above awilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely intomisty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutralswoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon,pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer,and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh greencorn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advancetoward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit ofhumanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened papercups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. Agreat user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed bytoilet signs--Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's; whilelost in an artist's dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of thegasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distanthill scrambling out--scarred but still untamed--from the wilderness ofagriculture that was trying to swallow it. At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giantChristmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated littlesedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to theheat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheekswould hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be afurnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remotecar changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hangfor a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as wepushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush"appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then redbluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun gradinginto blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steadygale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimickingpale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all alongthe highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows,immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting acrossall human rules of traffic. My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerarywe followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoidthat chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), ourroute began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, thenmeandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu'onappelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there,veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is nottoo clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, andhave at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes,almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check theserecollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled throughsouthern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned norththrough the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almostreached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and badlands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo'sstrident remonstrations, little Lo's birthplace, in a corn, coal and hogproducing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering outin the college town of Beardsley.
