Lolita

Beardsley girl.”
    “Good. I know every name in your group. Alice Adams?”
    “This girl was not in my group.”
    “Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please.”
    “She was not in my school. She is just a town girl in Beardsley.”
    “Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look up all the Browns.”
    “I only know her first name.”
    “Mary or Jane?”
    “No—Dolly, like me.”
    “So that’s the dead end” (the mirror you break your nose against). “Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?”
    “We went to a drugstore.”
    “And you had there—?”
    “Oh, just a couple of Cokes.”
    “Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.”
    “At least, she had. I had a glass of water.”
    “Good. Was it that place there?”
    “Sure.”
    “Good, come on, we’ll grill the soda jerk.”
    “Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down—just around the corner.”
    “Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let’s see.” (Opening a chained telephone book.) “Dignified Funeral Service. No, not yet. Here we are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains—at least in the business section. Well, we will check them all.”
    “Go to hell,” she said.
    “Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.”
    “Okay,” she said. “But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows.”
    “Which? That window there for example?”
    “Yes, that one there, for example.”
    “Oh Lo! Let’s look closer at it.”
    It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet of sorts upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and
intacta
except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
    “Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However”—I went on as we got back in to the car—“I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad, I have our boy friend’s car number.”
    As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges—a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking
la pomme de sa canne
as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state—one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.
    I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.
    And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement,