Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach,though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of graywater, so many delights had already been granted me by my travelingcompanion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, orwhatnot, far from being the impulse of the subconscious, had become therational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, andarranged things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlanticside was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick damp sky, muddywaves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-fact mist--what could befurther removed from the crisp charm, the sapphire occasion and rosycontingency of my Riviera romance? A couple of semitropical beaches on theGulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beastiesand swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach, facing thephantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some rather perverse privacy in a kind ofcave whence you could hear the shrikes of a lot of girl scouts taking theirfirst surf bath on a separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; butthe fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lowas all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had aslittle desire for her as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned readers may perkup if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of sympathetic seasidesomewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation hadoccurred much earlier: at the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze,alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared tome, golden and brown,kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious,dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (although therewas nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood.). So much for those special sensations, influence, if not actuallybrought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry. Consequently, I turnedaway--I headed my Lolita away--from beaches which were either too bleak whenlone, or too populous when ablaze. However, in recollection, I suppose, ofmy hopeless hauntings of public parks in Europe, I was still keenlyinterested in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitableplaygrounds in the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here,too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must now register (as Igently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dreadthat ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic,tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful,heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung,innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages andexhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clippedand kissed on the trim turf of old-would mountainsides, on the innerspringmoss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks,and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds ofAmerica the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the mostancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart'sbuttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prickhis knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle ofpotential snakes--que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons!--while thecrablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, togartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline,where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded allalong a purly moutain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romanticspot, a hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. Theslope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earnedbreather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew.Beneath the lap-robe I had spread fo Lo, dryflowers crepitated softly.Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper talus and a tangleof shrugs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and manalike. Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up incagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us. It was then that we came close to detection than ever before, and nowonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for rural amours. I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in myarms;--a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that hadbecome so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in amoment of blind impatient passion, and thee she was sprawling and sobbing,and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and theatrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that Iknow now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss;and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking mypoor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strangeand beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat darkhair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stoodcrouching and gaping at us, both in blue playsuits, blending with themountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment--andwithin the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushballamong the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which wastransformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with araven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, whilestaring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovely carved bluestonechildren. Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I knowthat I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and Iremember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured orderone gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in theworst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast's flankspulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up,and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car.Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with alittle blue-black beard, un monsieur trхs bien, in silk shirt andmagenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist's husband, was gravelytaking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It waswell over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch anda skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at mein language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use. There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatreonce, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritablepassion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second highschool year). We took in, voluptuously and indiscriminately, oh, I don'tknow, one hundred and fifty or two hundred programs during that one year,and during some of the denser periods of movie-going we saw many of thenewsreels up to half-a-dozen times since the same weekly one went withdifferent main pictures and pursued us from town to town. Her favorite kindswere, in this order: musicals, underworlders, westerners. In the first, realsingers and dancers had unreal stage careers in an essentially grief-proofsphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned, and where, at theend, white-haired, dewy-eyed, technically deathless, the initially reluctantfather of a show-crazy girl always finished by applauding her apotheosis onfabulous Broadway. The underworld was a world apart: there, heroicnewspapermen were tortured, telephone bills ran to billions, and, in arobust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship, villains were chased throughsewers and store-houses by pathologically fearless cops (I was to give themless exercise). Finally there was the mahogany landscape, the florid-faced,blue-eyed roughriders, the prim pretty schoolteacher arriving in RoaringGulch, the rearing horse, the spectacular stampede, the pistol thrustthrough the shivered windowpane, the stupendous fist fight, the crashingmountain of dusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used as a weapon, thetimely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the dropped bowieknife, the grunt, the sweet crash of fist against chin, the kick in thebelly, the flying tackle; and immediately after a plethora of pain thatwould have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now), nothing to showbut the rather becoming bruise on the bronzed cheek of the warmed-up heroembracing his gorgeous frontier bride. I remember one matinee in a smallairless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath ofpopcorn. The moon was yellow above the neckerchiefed crooner, and his fingerwas on his strumstring, and his foot was on a pine log, and I had innocentlyencircled Lo's shoulder and approached my jawbone to her temple, when twoharpies behind us started muttering the queerest things--I do not know if Iunderstood aright, but what I thought I did, made me withdraw my gentlehand, and of course the rest of the show was fog to me. Another jolt I remember is connected with a little burg we weretraversing at night, during our return journey. Some twenty miles earlier Ihad happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsleywas a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense,whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers whereentreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity andchildish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logicwhich prompted a semblance of explanation from me. Enmeshed in her wildwords (swell chance . . . I'd be a sap if I took your opinion seriously . .. Stinker . . . You can't boss me . . . I despise you . . . and so forth), Idrove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace incontinuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen puttheir spotlight on the car, and told me to pull over. I shushed Lo who wasautomatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with malevolentcuriosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she neverdid at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a sense, my Lo was even morescared of the law than I--and when the kind officers pardoned us andservilely we crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimickedlimp prostration. At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will laugh--butreally and truly I somehow never managed to find out quite exactly what thelegal situation was. I do not know it yet. Oh, I have learned a few odds andends. Alabama prohibits a guardian from changing the ward's residencewithout an order of the court; Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat,provides that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of anychild under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into play.Query: is the stepfather of a gaspingly adorable pubescent pet, a stepfatherof only one month's standing, a neurotic widower of mature years and smallbut independent means, with the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a fewmadhouses behind him, is he to be considered a relative, and thus a naturalguardian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify someWelfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a petition?), and have acourt's agent investigate meek, fishy me and dangerous Dolores Haze? Themany books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consultedat the public libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyonddarkly insinuating that the state is the super-guardian of minor children.Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impressive volumeon the legal side of marriage, completely ignored stepfathers withmotherless girls on their hands and knees. My best friend, a social servicemonograph(Chicago, 1936), which was dug out for me at great pains form adusty storage recess by an innocent old spinster, said "There is noprinciple that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive andenters the fray only when the child's situation becomes conspicuouslyperilous." A guardian, I concluded, was appointed only when he expressed hissolemn and formal desire; but months might elapse before he was given noticeto appear at a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantimethe fair demon child was legally left to her own devices which, after all,was the case of Dolores Haze. Then came the hearing. A few questions fromthe bench, a few reassuring answers from the attorney, a smile, a nod, alight drizzle outside, and the appointment was made. And still I dared not.Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in yourhole. Courts became extravagantlyactive only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedyguardians, a robbed orphan, a third, still greedier, party. But here all wasin perfect order, and inventory had been made, and her mother's smallproperty was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policyseemed to be to refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, someHumane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet? Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able togive me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean's cancer to doanything more than what he had promised--namely, to look after Chrlotte'smeager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death.I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and socould not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as thereader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorancenor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional adviceelsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fatein any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would besnatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental talewhich vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come astrip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock andfoundation. I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Bearsley College for Women) Iwould have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able tostudy, such as Woerner's Treatise "On the American Law of Guardianship" andcertain United States Children's Bureau Publications. I also decided thatanything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which shelived. I could persuade her to do so many things--their list might stupefya professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I couldnever make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or storiesin magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked toher of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of theLimberlost or the Arabian Nights, or Little Women, she wasquite sure she would not fritter away her "vacation" on such highbrowreading matter. I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her goto that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling acrossthe Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for acouple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my littleCreole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands andganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole ofinsanity to the other--from the thought that around 1950 I would have to getrid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage hadevaporated--to the thought that with patience and luck might have herproduce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolitathe Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still bedans la force de l'бge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind,was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillardencore vert--or was it green rot?--bizarre, tender, salivating Dr.Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being agranddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as fatherto Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read andreread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your OwnDaughter, which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for herthirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially "beautiful"illustrations, of Andersen's The Little Mermaid. But even at our verybest moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo's glance skipping fromthe window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal ina crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, orsilently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed,blood-bespattered car with a young woman's shoe in the ditch (Lo, as wedrove on: "that was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe tothat jerk in the store"); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myselfas implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guiltylocomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation? Wouldimprovement be forthcoming with a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl'sday? In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of therebeing a comparatively sedate school for girls located there, but also by thepresence of the women's college. In my desire to get myself casи, toattach myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blendwith, I thought of a man I knew in the department of French at BeardsleyCollege; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and hadattempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention ofdoing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions,there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thickcalves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe,the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buriedalive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, aspresently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, whyold Gaston Godin's company would be particularly safe. Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under thestrain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper motor courts; but everynow and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious duderanch, to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended onsightseeing and Lo's clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a stillvigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and majorrepairs. In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among thepapers which the authorities have so kindly allowed me to use for thepurpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me computethe following. During that extravagant year 1947-1948, August to August,lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and repairs,1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days ofactual motion (we covered about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days ofinterpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000dollars, or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surelyforgotten a number of items. And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with thesatisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliacgarland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to herstature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We hadreally seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking that our long journey hadonly defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy,enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than acollection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs inthe night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.4
