Despite the photo of Sally with a date, her social life did not open up. She’d had trouble making friends before her abduction; afterward it became even more difficult. Classmates whispered and gossiped about her time with La Salle. Boys, emboldened and entitled, peppered her with unwanted remarks and propositions. As her classmate Carol Taylor—née Carol Starts—remembered, “they looked at her as a total whore.” Emma DiRenzo, whom Sally knew as Emma Annibale, agreed. “She had a little bit of a rough time at first. Not everyone was very nice. I think some people didn’t believe her.”
It didn’t matter to Sally’s classmates that she had been abducted and raped. That she was not a virgin was enough to taint her. Nice girls were supposed to be pure until marriage. “No matter how you looked at it, she was a slut,” Carol said. “That’s the way it was in those days.”
Carol met Sally in eighth-grade homeroom. Carol had street smarts; Sally did, too, but she wanted to close the door on how she got them, and escaped into the land of books. Carol lived two blocks away from the junior high while Sally had a longer daily walk of four to five blocks. Carol came from a large family—she was one of ten siblings, a far cry from Sally’s smaller pool of immediate relatives. Carol had some other friends. Sally had no one but Carol, who didn’t care a whit what anyone else thought of Sally. Carol said she was oblivious about Sally’s supposedly sullied reputation, but it’s as likely Carol chose not to behave the same way as her classmates, and not to judge Sally so harshly. Carol admired Sally’s manners, her love of books, and sophisticated outlook. Sally admired Carol’s freedom. She was as eager to be Carol’s friend as Carol was to be hers.
Sally found refuge in the outdoors. She loved everything about being outside: the sun, swimming, and especially the Jersey Shore. As a little girl, before Frank La Salle kidnapped her, she’d spent many summer weekends at various seaside towns, like Wildwood and Cape May. After her rescue, the beach was a place where she could forget about cruel taunts and pervading despair. The Shore couldn’t solve all of her problems, but at least it provided space for her to feel happiness.
In the summer of 1952, Sally was looking forward to starting Woodrow Wilson High School. At fifteen, she looked far older than her years. She wanted to make more friends and find a boyfriend.
Then, one weekend in the middle of August, she took another trip to Wildwood.
Twenty
Lolita Progresses
The Nabokovs couldn’t afford to road-trip across America during the summer of 1950, but the next summer Vladimir and Véra left Ithaca in June, at the end of Cornell’s spring semester. Vladimir had turned in his grades for his European fiction class, and they gave up the lease on the house on East Seneca Street, their home the last three years, having found cheaper accommodations for the fall.
By the time Véra turned their aging Oldsmobile off U.S. Highway 36 at St. Francis, Kansas, on June 30, the pattern was set: hunt for butterflies for as many hours as a given day allowed, depending on their stamina and the weather. On rainier days—which dominated the trip—or when fatigue set in, usually in afternoons, Nabokov worked on the manuscript he was still calling The Kingdom by the Sea.
Nabokov worked in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile, away from the noise coming through the motel room walls and insulated from the floods and storms that curtailed his exercises in lepidoptery. Dmitri, now seventeen, joined his parents in Telluride, Colorado—he was coming from Harvard, where he’d finished up his first year—and took over the driving duties, too. The family wended their way through the Rockies, Wyoming, and West Yellowstone, Montana, before returning to Ithaca at the end of August.
Weeks of butterfly-hunting in the Rockies, often shirtless with his chest exposed to the sun, had little immediate effect upon Nabokov’s health. The accumulated exposure didn’t cause any issue until he returned to Cornell, when a nasty case of sunstroke finally hit, confining him to bed for two solid weeks. “Silly situation… to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn,” Nabokov noted in his diary. “High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.”
The Nabokovs changed their itinerary for the summer of 1952. They began their journey in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather than Ithaca, because Vladimir had taken up a teaching post at Harvard for the spring semester (he was on sabbatical from Cornell). A mitigating factor in moving back to the Cambridge area was to be closer to Dmitri, continuing his studies at Harvard.
Vladimir, Véra, and Dmitri, driving the same Oldsmobile as in earlier years, landed in Laramie, Wyoming, at the end of June, about ten days after departing Cambridge. They stayed in the state hunting butterflies all along the Continental Divide. They traveled through Medicine Bow National Forest (“using the abominable local road”) to Riverside in time for the Fourth of July (where “some noisy festival is underway”) and, by early August, arrived in Afton.
All the while Nabokov continued to scribble down notes on index card after index card, adding to the novel that had bedeviled him for so long. He had spent the previous year sharpening his observations of quotidian matters. He noted down all sorts of minutiae, the better to portray the American prepubescent girl at the heart of his novel with greater accuracy. Nabokov recorded heights and weights, average age of first menstruation, attitude changes, even the “proper method of inserting an enema tip into a rectum.”
He also jotted down teen magazine slang—which is why phrases like “It’s a sketch” or “She was loads of fun” appear in Lolita and sound right, not tin-eared. To create the character of Miss Pratt, the Beardsley school head, Nabokov interviewed a real school principal under the guise of having a (fictional) daughter who wanted to enroll.
But he did not make as much progress on Lolita as he wished while wandering along the Continental Divide. The academic year had exhausted Nabokov more than he realized. He saved most of his energy to scour for blues, including a successful sighting of Vanessa cardui. In due course it was time for the Nabokovs to return east. Dmitri had gone back to Cambridge earlier, leaving his parents to travel by themselves along two-lane highways. The couple likely needed two weeks to make the 1,850-plus-mile trip back to Ithaca. They reached the town, and another new rental home, on September 1, 1952.
By that time, Nabokov had read a new story about Sally Horner, one that would change the direction of Lolita so much it’s surprising to think the novel could have existed without it.
Twenty-One
Weekend in Wildwood
Carol Taylor no longer remembers why she and Sally decided to go down to Wildwood that summer weekend in 1952. It was mid-August in Camden, a time of relentless heat and humidity. Nobody had air-conditioning, and heading to the Jersey Shore was an easy way to find some relief.
Carol and Sally were both working summer jobs as waitresses at the Sun Ray drugstore in nearby Haddonfield. They were best friends. They were fifteen. They were just a few weeks away from their first freshman class at Woodrow Wilson High. Why not head down to Wildwood for a quick getaway?