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the only bathroom, a tiny oblong between the landing and "Lo's" room, with
limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark of a hair
inside); and there were the expected coils of the rubber snake, and its
complement--a pinkish cozy, coyly covering the toilet lid.
"I see you are not too favorably impressed," said the lady letting her
hand rest for a moment upon my sleeve: she combined a cool forwardness--the
overflow of what I think is called "poise"--with a shyness and sadness that
caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the
intonation of a professor of "speech." "This is not a neat household, I
confess," the doomed ear continued, "but I assure you [she looked at my
lips], you will be very comfortable, very comfortable, indeed. Let me show
you the garden" (the last more brightly, with a kind of winsome toss of the
voice).
Reluctantly I followed her downstairs again; then through the kitchen
at the end of the hall, on the right side of the house--the side where also
the dining room and the parlor were (under "my" room, on the left, there was
nothing but a garage). In the kitchen, the Negro maid, a plump youngish
woman, said, as she took her large glossy black purse from the knob of the
door leading to the back porch: "I'll go now, Mrs. Haze." "Yes, Louise,"
answered Mrs. Haze with a sigh. "I'll settle with you Friday." We passed on
to a small pantry and entered the dining room, parallel to the parlor we had
already admired. I noticed a white sock on the floor. With a deprecatory
grunt, Mrs. Haze stooped without stopping and threw it into a closet next to
the pantry. We cursorily inspected a mahogany table with a fruit vase in the
middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum. I
groped for the timetable I had in my pocket and surreptitiously fished it
out to look as soon as possible for a train. I was still walking behind Mrs.
Haze though the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of
greenery--"the piazza," sang out my leader, and then, without the least
warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of
sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera
love peering at me over dark glasses.
It was the same child--the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same
silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black
kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the
gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.
And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost,
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kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the
king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.
With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the
nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound
mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the
crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts--that last mad immortal
day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years I had lived since then,
tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash,
that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the
sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes
blinking over those stern dark spectacles--the little Herr Doktor who was to
cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great
big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to
suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the
features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this
nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her
prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal
consequence of that "princedom by the sea" in my tortured past. Everything
between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false
rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them.
I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece
of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit
vert. Au fond, �a m'est bien �gal. All I know is that while the
Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees
were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like
sand, and--
"That was my Lo," she said, "and these are my lilies."
"Yes," I said, "yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful."
11
Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather,
with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner.
I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if
it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years go and what
we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief
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