“She looks just like you,” Susan said, and Sally burst into tears.
TELEPHONES ARE A recurring motif in Lolita. The incessant ringing of the “machina telephonica and its sudden god” interrupts the narrative, as Humbert Humbert’s psyche begins to fissure—the monster underneath waging war with the amiable surface personality he presents to the world. Telephones are also the means through which Humbert discovers Charlotte’s accidental death, since he is too preoccupied with fixing her a drink to notice that she has left the house.
With Charlotte permanently out of the picture, he goes to pick up Dolores at Camp Q to break the news of her mother’s death in his own special way—“all a-jitter lest delay might give her the opportunity of some idle telephone call to Ramsdale.” After he picks her up, he takes Dolores to the Enchanted Hunters hotel, where he rapes her for the first time. The following morning, the telephone plays a pivotal role in binding the older man and girl together. Humbert had told Dolores that he was taking her to Charlotte, who he said was in the hospital in Lepingville. At a rest stop, Dolores asks: “Give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in the hospital. What’s the number?”
Humbert says, “You can’t call that number.”
“Why?” cries Dolores. “Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”
“Because,” he says, “your mother is dead.”
It is the news that totally breaks Lolita and puts her in Humbert Humbert’s power. He knows it, too: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
From there Humbert and Dolores begin their road trip, a journey that would take them thousands of miles across the United States. Deep into their trip, Humbert’s paranoia grows as he suspects Dolores has confided the truth about him to Mona, a school friend suspicious of the relationship between the so-called father and daughter: “the stealthy thought… that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose [Humbert] without getting penalized herself.”
Dolores’s first escape, after she yells “unprintable things” and accuses Humbert of murdering her mother and violating her, occurs as the phone rings and she breaks free of his grip on her wrist (in part echoing La Salle’s grip upon Sally’s arm at the Camden five-and-dime). That escape lasts only a few hours, and Humbert finds her “some ten paces away, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us).”
After that, Dolores asserts her will as to where they should go next. And then, though the reader is not privy to it, she makes a final, mysterious call, presumably to Clare Quilty, to help her escape. Telephones, Humbert concludes, “happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.” For Dolores, telephones are the means for her to find freedom from the abuser who has engulfed her life—just as a telephone call was for Sally Horner.
Sixteen
After the Rescue
Though Frank La Salle was in jail, it wasn’t clear which law enforcement agency would have jurisdiction over him. There were the outstanding warrants for kidnapping and abduction from Camden County. But because La Salle had transported Sally across several states, it became a federal case. La Salle was charged with violating the Mann Act, for “allegedly taking the girl across state lines for immoral purposes.”
On the morning of March 22, Camden County prosecutor Mitchell Cohen spoke with the San Jose police, including Sheriff Hornbuckle. After the thirty-minute call, he told reporters in Camden that he would convene a grand jury to indict La Salle on the outstanding warrants, and start extradition proceedings immediately.
La Salle seemed ready to fight his extradition to Camden, but Cohen was undeterred. “Regardless of what La Salle says he will do about returning here, I am taking no chances,” Cohen said. “I will start formal proceedings at once and get him back here as soon as possible.” But the prosecutor had to wait on New Jersey governor Alfred Driscoll’s approval, and there was a delay because Driscoll was out of town on a business trip.
That afternoon, in California, Commissioner Marshall Hall presided over La Salle’s arraignment on the Mann Act charges. He set a $10,000 bond and scheduled a hearing for the following morning. La Salle retained Manny Gomez as his attorney, while Frank Hennessy was the federal prosecutor.
The hearing began at 10:30 A.M. on March 23. There Hennessy revealed that La Salle’s birth name was Frank La Plante; if true, then at various points during Sally’s captivity, she’d attended school using the first name of La Salle’s biological daughter and his own real last name.
When police officers attempted to lead Sally into the courtroom, she resisted at first, frantic at the thought of seeing La Salle: “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she cried.
May Smothers, a juvenile court matron, had accompanied the girl to court, and calmed her down. Sally finally entered the courtroom clutching Smothers’s hand. She took a seat only four feet away from La Salle and stole furtive glances at him throughout the proceedings, looking away whenever she came close to breaking down. La Salle stared at her, impassive, saying nothing.
When Sally began her testimony, Commissioner Hall asked, “Are you afraid of anything? Is there anything you want?”
“I want to go home!”
“He can’t hurt you,” said Hall.
And so, once more, Sally described her ordeal, starting with the Camden five-and-dime and ending with the San Jose trailer park. She told the court how La Salle had forced her to have sex with him, the abuse only ending in Dallas. La Salle told his story again, too, continuing to insist that he was Sally’s real father.
Commissioner Hall affirmed the $10,000 bond, and ordered La Salle transferred to the county jail in San Francisco.
The hearing also decided La Salle’s jurisdictional fate. Hennessy told the court that the federal charges would eventually be dropped because the New Jersey state kidnapping charges took precedence. But for the time being, La Salle would sit tight. Even if he raised the full $10,000 bond, federal authorities “were confident they could hold [La Salle] on other charges until he could be extradited,” reported the Courier-Post.
Sally returned to the San Jose detention center. At first, she was so anxious about La Salle possibly going free that she could hardly eat. Matron Smothers told the papers that Sally also “fretted a lot about whether her folks would want her after what happened.” Sally was kept apart from the other detained juveniles because, an unnamed sheriff’s official told the Courier-Post, “We have some pretty hardened kids here and we don’t want Sally to come in contact with them.”
Over the next few days, Sally grew more secure in the detention center. Matron Smothers took her shopping for new clothes, because in her estimation, Sally’s old ones did not measure up: “The clothes she had at the [trailer park] were neat but shabby and very inadequate.” Smothers said that Sally had also stopped worrying about whether her family would welcome her back. “All she’s thinking about is getting home and what she’ll do when she gets there.”
The detention center felt “responsible for Sally’s well-being until New Jersey’s authorities arrive to take her home,” said an unnamed sheriff’s official. “We’ve had a number of offers from people in San Jose to take care of Sally until she’s ready to go home, but we are positive no harm can come to her where she is now.”