5
In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbour, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I dont mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chumminess. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the naïve charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbour was by far the most dangerous one, a sharp-nosed stock character whose late brother had been attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living-room window, feverishly awaiting my darlings return from school. The odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcet goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a cold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her knees showing pink above her clumsy Wellingtons, a sheepish frightened little smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, which owing perhaps to the pale wintry light looked almost plain, in a rustic, German, mägdlein[181]-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss Easts questions And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor fathers occupation? And where did you live before? Another time the loathsome creature accosted me with a welcoming whine but I evaded her; and a few days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nice mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and curl up in a chair to look through the loads of beautiful books my dear mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full blast till all hours of the night.
I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan, a charwoman and cook of sorts whom I had inherited with the vacuum cleaner from the previous tenants. Dolly got lunch at school, so that this was no trouble, and I had become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner that Mrs. Holigan prepared before leaving. That kindly and harmless woman had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become a great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the feeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that, on the rare occasions where Holigans presence happened to coincide with Los, simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cosy kitchen chat.
I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur[182] would have paid a small fortune to witch.
6
A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed or at least tolerated with relief his company was the spell of absolute security that his ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no special reason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centred and abstract to notice or suspect anything that might lead to a frank question on his part and a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was my good herald. Had he discovered mes goûts[183] and Lolitas status, it would have interested him only in so far as throwing some light on the simplicity of my attitude toward him, which attitude was as free of polite strain as it was of ribald allusions; for despite his colourless mind and dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plastered wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he ambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow! Neighbours pampered him; he knew by name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away from me) and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his backyard, and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs inside in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with amusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the mouldy, rug-adorned walls among the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio he painted a little, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really not more than a garret) with large photographs of pensive Andre Gide, Tchaikovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky (all thighs and fig-leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing professor at a Midwestern university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also an album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighbourhood, and when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout Oui, ils sont gentils[184]. His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-à-brac present, and his own banal toiles[185] (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say Prenez donc une de ces poires. La bonne dame den face men offre plus que je nen peux savourer.[186] Or: Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que jexècre.[187] (Sombre, sad, full of world-weariness.)