4When, through decorations of light and shade, we drove to 14 ThayerStreet, a grave little lad met us with the keys and a note from Gaston whohad rented the house for us. My Lo, without granting her new surroundingsone glance, unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and laydown on the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in the sameprecise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the netheranatomy of a lamp table. I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita upsomewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence withvague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the placebore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 distant): it wasthe same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull greendrill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a moreconsistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. Mystudy turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor toceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (onsabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College. I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, withlunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium, would, while cultivating allthose young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as well.Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, hadwarned me that the institution might turn out to be one of those where girlsare taught, as he put it with a foreigner's love for such things: "not tospell very well, but to smell very well." I don't think they achieved eventhat. At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of mychild's "nice blue eyes" (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that"French genius" (a genius! Gaston!)--and then, having turned Dolly over to aMiss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement andsaid: "We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our studentsbecome bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe whichnobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. Whatwe are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This iswhy we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We areconfronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter anage group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean asmuch to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, meanto you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me.Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life whichconsists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores,malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, andeven hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove ofsome of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructivedirections. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face thesunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, weare more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with duerespect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicatefreely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty oldbooks. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like agynecologist feeling a tumor. We thing, Dr. Humburg, in organissmal andorganizational terms. We have done away with the mass or irrelevant topicsthat have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, informer days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they willneed in managing their lives and--as the cynic might add--the lives of theirhusbands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of a star isimportant, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may beeven more important to the budding housewife. You say that all you expect achild to obtain from school is a sound education. But what do we mean byeducation? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon; I mean,you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclopedia and he or shewould know as much as or more than a school could offer. Dr. Hummer, do yourealize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of lessvital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?--to repeat a pun that I heard theBeardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the other day. We live notonly in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Wrds withoutexperience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care forGreece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?" This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intelligent ladieswho had been connected with the school, and they affirmed that the girls didquite a bit of sound reading and that the "communication" line was more orless ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financiallyremunerative modern touch, though actually it remained as prim as a prawn. Another reason attracting me to that particular school may seem funnyto some readers, but it was very important to me, for that is the way I ammade. Across our street, exactly in front of our house, there was, Inoticed, a gap of weedy wasteland, with some colorful bushes and a pile ofbricks and a few scattered planks, and the foam of shabby mauve and chromeautumn roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmerysection of School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and immediatelybeyond that, the playground of the school Apart from the psychologicalcomfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly's dayadjacent to mine, I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have indistinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, thestatistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girlchildren playing around Dolly during recess; unfortunately, on the veryfirst day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down thegap, and in no time a construction of tawny wood maliciously arose beyondthat fence utterly blocking my magic vista; and as soon as they had erecteda sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd builderssuspended their work and never appeared again.5In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, andgolden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiablefine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of myrelations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, whomight have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak tome once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered hiscar, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if theseverbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate tosound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precludedany evolution toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit ofscrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained twoprofessors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedlyfeminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation withme was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and thenaоve charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the mostdangerous one, a sharp-nosed stock character whose late brother had beenattached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. Iremember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living room window,feverishly awaiting my darling's return from school. The odious spinster,trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcetgoodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, acold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the rawweather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her kneesshowing pink above her clumsy wellingtons, a sheepish frightened littlesmile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, which--owing perhaps to thepale wintry light--looked almost plain, in a rustic, German,mдgdlein-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East'squestions "And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father'soccupation? And where did you love before?" Another time the loathsomecreature accosted me with a welcoming whine--but I evaded her; and a fewdays later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nicemixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday andcurl up in a chair to look through the "loads of beautiful books my dearmother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at fullblast till all hours of the night." I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman andcook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum cleaner from the previoustenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I hadbecome adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinnerthat Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harmless womanhad, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become agreat expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by thefeeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that, on the rareoccasions where Holigan's presence happened to coincide with Lo's, simple Lomight succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat. Ioften felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and any moment somethin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded windowto obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur wouldhave paid a small fortune to watch.6A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed--or at leasttolerated with relief--his company was the spell of absolute security thathis ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no specialreason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centered and abstract tonotice or suspect anything that might lead to a frank question on his partand a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was mygood herald. Had he discovered mes goшts and Lolita's status, itwould have interested him only insofar as throwing some light on thesimplicity of my attitude towards him, which attitude was as free ofpolite strain as it was of ribald allusions; for despite his colorless mindand dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than theburghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelortapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conicalpear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plasteredwisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and heambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stoutlegs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; hisEnglish was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be asupremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knewby name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away fromme)and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard,and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about thehouse, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueursinside--in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, withamusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned walls amongthe camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio--he painted alittle, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really notmore than a garret) with large photographs of pensive Andrи Gide,Tchaоkovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky(all thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wingprofessor at a Midwesten university) and Marcel Proust. All these poorpeople seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also analbum with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, andwhen I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gastonwould purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout "Oui, ils sontgentils." His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental andartistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (theconventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometricaldesigns of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowlor veined vase, he would say "Prenez donc une de ces poires. La bonnedame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer." Or:"Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs quej'exхcre." (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.) For obvious reasons, I preferred myhouse to his for the games of chesswe had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol ashe sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it werea corpse. Wheezing he would mediate for ten minutes--then make a losingmove. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi!With a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it whichmade his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with adeep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself. Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo's barefeet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs; but Gaston'soutgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of thosenaked rhythms--and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on astraight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two, and onlywhen she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, andflexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on hertoes--only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheeka if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidableQueen. Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board--and it wasevery time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on hispieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith releaseher limp fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into hischair to topple into the trap I had laid for him. One day around Christmas,after I had not seen him for a fortnight or so, he asked me "Et toutesvos fillettes, elles vont bien?" from which it became evident tome that he had multiplied my unique Lolita by the number of sartorialcategories his downcast moody eye had glimpsed during a whole series of herappearances: blue jeans, a skirt, shorts, a quilted robe. I am loath to dwell so long on the poor fellow (sadly enough, a yearlater, during a voyage to Europe, from which he did not return, he gotinvolved in a sale histoire, in Napes of all places!). I would havehardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such aqueer bearing on my case. I need him for my defense. There he was devoid ofany talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glumrepulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life,triumphantly ignorant of the English language--there he was in priggish NewEngland, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young--oh, having agrand time and fooling everybody; and here was I.7I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite dropin Lolita's morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had neveramounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I wasweak, I was not wise, my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With thehuman element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture onlyincreased; and of this she took advantage. Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basicobligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era--andwent up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generousarrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of smallpresents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under themoon--although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or evena whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badlysome item of juvenile amusement. She was, however, not easy to deal with.Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--perday; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power todeny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters withoutwhich I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because ofthe very nature of love's languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing themagic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during oneschoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and evenfour bucks! O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joynoisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like somesonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in themargin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coinsin her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless shegave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every otherday I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visitdrugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughterin between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then Iwould burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with thepainted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just mademyself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books(fittingly--Treasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behindWhistler's Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and somechange--say twenty-four sixty--which I quietly removed, upon which, nextday, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief.Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place whichI never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drasticallyby having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate inthe school's theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that shemight ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. Ibelieve the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fiftydollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood--or thefoul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with thewind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and thebarmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
