8

I did my best, your Honour, to tackle 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 executive’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 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 bordello.

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 triple – the 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 car at a discreet distance; and I promised her that if her group were invited by a socially accceptable group in Butler’s Academy for Boys 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 teenagers look like flamingoes). Moreover, I promised her to throw a party at 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 houses of 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 this – called me a lousy crook and worse – and 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 programme, the stock pastimes, the ‘things that are done’, the routine 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 contact 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 feel – and can now vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feeling – that 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 favourite expression with my Aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys – from the perspiring nincompoop whom ‘holding hands’ thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car – equally 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 snow – saw her home; from the parlour window I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favourite hair-do – the fringe in front and the swirl at the side and the natural curls at the back – and 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 inclining one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backwards a couple of steps, and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly liked – perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confession – her trick of sighing ‘oh dear!’ in humorous wistful submission to fate, or emitting a long ‘no-o’ in a deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all – since we are speaking of movement and youth – I 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 upperlip 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 demeanour she naively 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 after a session 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 tracts – who cared? – I saw neighbour what’s his name, I think they are 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 well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be seen with his daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and wait for a ‘table for two’ still filthy with your predecessor’s crumbs). Seen on weekdays, around 1 p.m., saluting with dignity Argus-eyed East while manoeuvring the car out of the garage and around the damned evergreens, and down on to the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking across the campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also taught Bible at Beardsley School). ‘Somebody told me her mother was a celebrated actress killed in an aeroplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I presume. Is that so? I see. How sad.’ (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket, in the wake of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a goat. Shovelling the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious haste (even taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my schoolgirl daughter into the house. Taking Dolly to the dentist – pretty nurse beaming at her – old magazines – ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in town, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced, becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.’s musical little girl on her father’s right, and the musical little boy of Professor W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Providence) on Monsieur G. G.’s left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is extinguished. Brightly pyjamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly’s bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after all, saying don’t be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court. Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of Dolly’s: ‘First time I’ve seen a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir – except in movies, of course.’