Humbert receives letter from Lolita

Humbert Humbert receives a letter from Dolores Haze, now married and pregnant as Dolly Schiller, which reopens his wound and sets him on a final journey to confront her and her abductor.

The Letter's Arrival and Content

In late September 1952, while living in a New York flat with Rita, Humbert retrieves his mail from the entrance hall letterbox. Among the letters is one from Dolores Haze, postmarked September 18, 1952, and addressed from "General Delivery, Coalmont" — a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. The letter begins "Dear Dad" and announces that she is married, pregnant, and expecting the baby around Christmas. She writes that her husband, Dick, is promised a job in Alaska in his specialized corner of the mechanical field, but they lack the funds to pay their debts and get out of their current town, which she describes as so smoggy that "you can't see the morons for the smog." She asks Humbert to send a check — three or four hundred dollars or even less — and suggests he might sell her old things. She withholds her home address, explaining that Dick must not know about their correspondence and that Humbert may still be mad at her. She signs the letter "Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)."

Humbert's Immediate Reaction

Humbert reads the letter while Rita is still asleep, smiling in her sleep. He kisses her on the brow and leaves her forever, taping a note of tender adieu to her navel so she might find it. He takes his automatic pistol — his "little black chum" — and drives alone to a secluded spot, where he hangs an old gray sweater on a branch and rehearses the murder of Richard F. Schiller by shooting the sweater. The trigger feels stiff, and he wonders if he should oil it, but decides he has no time to spare. He reloads the pistol and continues his journey.

The Journey to Coalmont

Humbert drives through the night, resting for only a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room a few miles before reaching Coalmont. He makes himself especially handsome and smart for the confrontation, bathing, shaving his face and chest, selecting a silk shirt and clean drawers, and putting on transparent taupe socks. He brings with him a waistcoat with nacreous buttons and a pale cashmere tie. Despite his preparations, he is unable to hold his breakfast, but dismisses this as a trivial contretemps. He steps into a telephone booth in Coalmont and rings up the only Schiller listed in the directory — Paul, Furniture — who tells him that Richard is the son of a cousin and gives an address on Killer Street.

The Discovery of Lolita's New Life

At 10 Killer Street, a tenement house, Humbert interviews dejected old people and two long-haired, strawberry-blond, grubby nymphets. He learns that Dick Schiller had moved when he married, and nobody knows his new address. A voice from an open manhole directs him to a grocery store, where a woman's voice from a wooden abyss in the floor cries out: "Hunter Road, last house." Hunter Road lies miles away in a dismal district of dump, ditch, wormy vegetable gardens, shacks, gray drizzle, red mud, and smoking stacks. Humbert stops at the last house — a clapboard shack — and sits in his old car for several minutes, his pulse fluctuating wildly between 40 and 100 beats per minute. A nondescript cur comes out from behind the house and woofs at him good-naturedly. When Dolly Schiller opens the door, Humbert sees she is frankly and hugely pregnant, a couple of inches taller, wearing pink-rimmed glasses, a new heaped-up hairdo, and a brown sleeveless cotton dress with sloppy felt slippers. Her freckled cheeks are hollowed, her bare shins and arms have lost all their tan, and the little hairs show. He cannot kill her — he loves her at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.