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sick but not critically. Would Mr. Haze, I mean, Mr. Humbert, care to meet
the camp counselors? Or look at the cabins where the girls live? Each
dedicated to a Disney creature? Or visit the Lodge? Or should Charlie be
sent over to fetch her? The girls were just finishing fixing the Dining Room
for a dance. (And perhaps afterwards she would say to somebody or other:
"The poor guy looked like his own ghost.")
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Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful
detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a
drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly
spreading a banknote over it with a bright ". . . and five!"; photographs of
girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to
the wall ("nature study"); the framed diploma of the camp's dietitian; my
trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly
Haze's behavior for July ("fair to good; keen on swimming and boating"); a
sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart . . . I was standing with my
back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heart
her respiration and voice behind me. She arrived dragging and bumping her
heavy suitcase. "Hi!" she said, and stood still, looking at me with sly,
glad eyes, her soft lips parted in a slightly foolish but wonderfully
endearing smile.
She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face
was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a
month: her cheeks looked hollowed and too much lentigo camouflaged her rosy
rustic features; and that first impression (a very narrow human interval
between two tiger heartbeats) carried the clear implication that all widower
Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking
though sun-colored little orphan au yeux battus (and even those
plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a
healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among
whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty
little Magdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But "in a wink," as
the Germans say, the angelic line of conduct was erased, and I overtook my
prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again--in
fact, more of my Lolita than ever. I let my hand rest on her warm auburn
head and took up her bag. She was all rose and honey, dressed in her
brightest gingham, with a pattern of little red apples, and her arms and
legs were of a deep golden brown, with scratches like tiny dotted lines of
coagulated rubies, and the ribbed cuffs of her white socks were turned down
at the remembered level, and because of her childish gait, or because I had
memorized her as always wearing heelless shoes, her saddle oxfords looked
somehow too large and too high-heeled for her. Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp
Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. In the hot car
she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee; then,
her mouth working violently on a piece of chewing gum, she rapidly cranked
down the window on her side and settled back again. We sped through the
striped and speckled forest.
"How's Mother?" she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway,
something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around
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for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of
Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century
and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and
wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p.m.
"We should be at Briceland by dinner time," I said, "and tomorrow we'll
visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the
camp?"
"Uh-huh."
"Sorry to leave?"
"Un-un."
"Talk, Lo--don't grunt. Tell me something."
"What thing, Dad?" (she let the word expand with ironic deliberation).
"Any old thing."
"Okay, if I call you that?" (eyes slit at the road).
"Quite."
"It's a sketch, you know. When did you fall for my mummy?"
"Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such
as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship."
"Bah!" said the cynical nymphet.
Shallow lull in the dialogue, filled with some landscape.
"Look, Lo, at all those cows on that hillside."
"I think I'll vomit if I look at a cow again."
"You know, I missed you terribly, Lo."
"I did not. Fact I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you, but it
does not matter one bit, because you've stopped caring for me, anyway. You
drive much faster than my mummy, mister."
I slowed down from a blind seventy to a purblind fifty.
"Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo?"
"Well, you haven't kissed me yet, have you?"
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