Parkington

Parkington is a mid-sized American city that functions as the primary commercial and professional center for the region surrounding Ramsdale. Located forty miles from the Haze home, it is the site of John Farlow's office, a major shopping expedition by Humbert Humbert, and a crucial telephone call that sets in motion the final stage of his journey to retrieve Lolita from Camp Q.

Commercial and Professional Hub

John Farlow, a quiet, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods, maintains his office in Parkington, forty miles from Ramsdale. It is from this office that he commutes to the Haze household, and it is to Parkington that he drives for work on weekdays. The city also houses the business district where Humbert Humbert, after learning that Lolita has gone on a hike and will not be available until the next day, devotes an entire afternoon to buying beautiful things for her. He proceeds to the business center of Parkington, where the wet town is like silver-and-glass, and makes a series of crazy purchases prompted by his poignant predilection for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts. He buys swimming suits in dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, and oolala black, as well as sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids, and various pretty articles. The painted girl in black who attends to his needs turns his parental scholarship and precise description into commercial euphemisms such as "petite." A much older woman in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, is oddly impressed by his knowledge of junior fashions, perhaps suspecting he has a midget for mistress. He has great fun with all kinds of shorts and briefs, phantom little Lolitas dancing, falling, daisying all over the counter, and rounds up the deal with some prim cotton pajamas in popular butcher-boy style. He buys an elegant valise, has his purchases put into it, and repairs to the nearest hotel, well pleased with his day.

Gateway to Camp Q

Parkington serves as the critical staging point for Humbert's journey to retrieve Lolita from Camp Q. After a night in the city, during which he achieves only an hour's slumber from which he is aroused by a gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, he attempts to start his car at 9:30 a.m. only to be confronted by a dead battery. Noon is nigh when at last he leaves Parkington. He still has a hundred miles to go to reach the camp, and more than that to the Hazy Hills and Briceland. The city is also the location of the telephone call that reveals Lolita's absence. It is raining hard when Humbert pulls up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork, one prong of which bypasses the city and leads to the highway which crosses the hills to Lake Climax and Camp Q. He flips off the ignition and sits in the car bracing himself for that telephone call, staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood drips upon its argent chains. He drives up to a gasoline station, and when at last the coins have satisfactorily clanked down, Holmes, the camp mistress, informs him that Dolly has gone on a hike in the hills with her group and is expected to return rather late today. Through some freak mechanical flaw, all his coins come tumbling back to him with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost makes him laugh despite the disappointment at having to postpone bliss.