a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling awayto hide her loot. And just as every other day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittinglyTreasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some changesay twenty-four sixtywhich I quietly removed, upon which, next day, 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 which I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her urse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywoodor the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
8
I did my best, your Honr, to tackele the problem of boys. Oh, I used even to read in the Beardsley Star a so-called Column for Teens, to find out how to behave!
A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend. Maybe it is a bit hard for you to realize that now the boys are finding her attractive. To you she is still a little girl. To the boys she’s charming and fun, lovely and gay. They like her. Today you clinch big deals in an exectuvie’s office, but yesterday you were just highschool Jim carrying Jane’s school books. Remember? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes? Don’t you want them to have wholesome fun together?
Wholesome fun? Good Lord!
Why not treat the young fellows as guests in your house? Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?
Welcome, fellow, to this brdello.
If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime. Let her take the brunt of your displeasure in private. And stop making the boys feel she’s the daughter of an old ogre.
First of all the old ogre drew up a list under“absolutely forbidden” and another under “reluctantly allowed.” Absolutely forbidden were dates, single or double or triplethe next step being of course mass orgy. She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends, and there giggle-chat with occasional young males, while I waited in the carat a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially acceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Bo[ys for their annual ball (heavily chaperoned, of course), I might consider the question whether a girl of fourteen can don her first “formal” (a kind of gown that makes thin-armed teen-agers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party a t our house to which she would be allowed to invite her prettier girl friends and the nicer boys she would have met by that time at the Butler dance. But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the housesof schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.”
Lo was enraged by all thiscalled me a lousy crook and worseand I would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the conventional program, the stock pastimes, the“things that are done,” the routie of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in October’s orchard-haze.
Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time leaks with over-elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feeland can now vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feelingthat there was no reason for serious alarm. I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me“overwhelmingly obvious” (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boysfrom the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands” thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up carequally bored my sophisticated young mistress. “All this noise about boys gags me,” she had scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand (Mona is due any minute now), there was the sly quip: “What about Rigger?” (due too).
Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first snowsaw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our porch. She wre her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdothe fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the backand her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love. She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally“doubled up” with laughter by incling one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly likedperhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confessionher trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humorous wistufl submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a deep almost growling undertone when thye blow of fate had actually fallen. Above allsince we are speaking of movement and youthI liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upper lip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun.
On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave-child and the bangles of demeanor she navely affected the winter before in california. Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed a fter asession of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of the plague (and would head, I knew, for master’s gin at the first opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of religious tractswho cared?I saw neighbor what’s his name, I think theyare French or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends, wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor