Dolores Haze and Richard Schiller

Dolores Haze and Richard Schiller's marriage is the novel's final, desolate tableau: a union born not of love but of drift, necessity, and the wreckage of a stolen childhood. It is the relationship that definitively closes the door on Humbert Humbert's fantasies and provides the stage for his last, agonized encounter with the woman Lolita has become. The marriage is less a romantic partnership than a survival pact, and its every detail underscores the tragic gulf between the nymphet of Humbert's memory and the worn, pregnant seventeen-year-old who now calls herself Dolly Schiller.

Identity and Background

Richard F. Schiller, called Dick, is a young, hard-of-hearing mechanic with Arctic blue eyes, black hair, and a ruddy, unshaven chin. He is a veteran of a remote war, a "lamb" of a man whom Lolita describes with affection but without passion. He believes Humbert is her father and that she simply ran away from an upper-class home to wash dishes in a diner. The couple lives in a clapboard shack on Hunter Road in the dismal industrial town of Coalmont, a place of dump and ditch, wormy vegetable gardens, and gray drizzle. Their home is a dollhouse parlor-bedroom with a slanting wooden floor, where a steel ball would roll into the kitchen. Dick works fixing wires, and his friend Bill, a one-armed man, helps with odd jobs. The marriage is, by all accounts, a desperate attempt at normalcy after Lolita's years of captivity and exploitation.

The Marriage and Its Circumstances

By the time Humbert finds her in September 1952, Lolita is frankly and hugely pregnant, her baby due around Christmas. She wears a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers; her once-tanned limbs are pale and goose-fleshed, her cheeks hollowed, her hair heaped up in a new style. She is seventeen years old. The marriage is financially precarious: Dick is promised a job in Alaska, but they lack the money to pay their debts and get out of Coalmont. Lolita's letter to Humbert, which prompts his final visit, is a plea for help: "Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome." The relationship is thus defined by economic desperation, a stark contrast to the lavish road trips and motels of her life with Humbert. When Humbert offers her four thousand dollars, she exclaims with agonized emphasis, "You mean you are giving us four thousand bucks?" The money settles everything; they can leave, start over.

Humbert's Final Visit and the Nature of the Bond

Humbert's visit to Coalmont is the emotional climax of the novel's final section. He arrives intending to kill Dick, but the sight of Lolita—pregnant, worn, but still his Lolita—disarms him. The encounter reveals the true nature of her marriage to Dick: it is a refuge, not a romance. Lolita tells Humbert that Dick knows nothing of her past, that he thinks Humbert is her father, and that she wants to keep it that way. She is protective of this fragile, ordinary life. When Humbert begs her to leave Dick and come with him, she refuses flatly: "No, honey, no." She adds, with a chilling clarity, "I would sooner go back to Cue." This statement reveals that her marriage to Dick, however impoverished and unglamorous, is preferable to both the predatory world of Clare Quilty and the possessive prison of Humbert's love. The relationship with Dick is her chosen, if compromised, path to a kind of freedom.

Ending and Significance

The marriage ends not in divorce or tragedy but in the quiet, grim resolution of Lolita's death in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952, as revealed in the foreword. She dies giving birth to a stillborn girl in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. Dick Schiller is left a widower, his promised Alaska job and new life unfulfilled. The relationship's significance lies in its very ordinariness: it is the only relationship in Lolita's life that is not defined by exploitation or obsession. It is a marriage of two damaged, ordinary people trying to build a life together, and its failure—through poverty, death, and the inescapable shadow of the past—is the novel's final, devastating judgment on the possibility of redemption or happiness for its central victim. Humbert's last words to her, "It would have made all the difference," underscore the tragic finality of her choice and his own irredeemable loss.