19
A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). I had been always aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my life that had not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them apostately and totally, thus destroying my past. She made me tell her about my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a scream; but I also had to invent, or to pad atrociously, a long series of mistresses for Charlottes morbid delectation. To keep her happy, I had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one only one, but as cute as they make them chocolate-coloured round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row. So I presented my women, and had them smile and sway the languorous blonde, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead as if on parade in a bordello. The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was pleased with the show.
Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she called her love-life, from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her autobiography was as devoid of interest as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets.
Of my Lolita she seldom spoke more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infants soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harolds production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Caesarean operation[106] and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.
Oh, she simply hated her daughter! What I thought especially vicious was that she had gone out of her way to answer with great diligence the questionnaires in a fools book she had (A Guide to Your Childs Development), published in Chicago. The rigmarole went year by year, and Mom was supposed to fill out a kind of inventory at each of her childs birthdays. On Los twelfth, January 1, 1947, Charlotte Haze, née Becker, had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under Your Childs Personality: aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, co-operative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening. With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wifes mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Los little belongings that had wandered to various parts of the house to freeze there like so many hypnotized bunnies. Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach (the result of my trying to improve on her sauces) had prevented me from accompanying her to church, I deceived her with one of Lolitas anklets. And then, her attitude towards my saporous darlings letters!
Dear Mummy and Hummy,
Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy. I [crossed out and rewritten again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. It has been cold here for the last few days. Im having a time. Love.
The dumb child, said Mrs. Humbert, has left out a word before time. That sweater was all-wool, and I wish you would not send her candy without consulting me.
20
There was a woodlake (Hourglass Lake not as I had thought it was spelled) a few miles from Ramsdale, and there was one week of great heat at the end of July when we drove there daily. I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim there together, one tropical Tuesday morning.
We had left the car in a parking area not far from the road and were making our way down a path cut through the pine forest to the lake, when Charlotte remarked that Jean Farlow, in quest of rare light effects (Jean belonged to the old school of painting), had seen Leslie taking a dip in the ebony[107] (as John had quipped) at five oclock in the morning last Sunday.