The caller wanted to know if Carol had been with Sally Horner the previous night.
“Yes, I was,” Carol replied.
“And you’re aware who she was with?”
“Yes I am. Why are you asking me this?”
Carol could not grasp what the caller wanted. Without waiting for an answer, she hung up the phone, then picked it up again and dialed Sally’s number. Ella answered.
“Hi, Mrs. Horner. Where’s Sally? Is she up yet?”
Ella began to sob. Then she told Carol that Sally had died in a car accident the night before.
Things grew strange for Carol. She did not react right away to the death of her best friend. She got dressed, left the house, and went straight to the movie theater. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what outfit I wore. But when people wanted to talk to me, I went to the movies.” Later she understood she had gone into shock.
When Carol returned home, Ella called again. She explained in greater detail what had happened to Sally, describing the injuries she’d sustained, or at least what Ella knew of them. Only after hanging up did Carol feel the loss of her friend. “I cried and cried and cried.”
Carol also couldn’t bring herself to ask Ella about a more mundane matter. She and Sally had borrowed each other’s favorite dresses in Wildwood—and Carol’s blue frock was packed in Sally’s bag. It wouldn’t have been right to ask Ella about what happened to her dress, so Carol didn’t.
But Carol told Ella she’d met the boy who’d taken Sally on her final, fatal journey.
Twenty-Two
The Note Card
On the morning of August 19, 1952, as he and Véra were about to begin the long drive back to Ithaca, Vladimir Nabokov opened up a newspaper somewhere near Afton, Wyoming, and chanced upon an Associated Press story. Perhaps the newspaper Nabokov read was the New York Times, which carried the wire report of Sally Horner’s death on page twelve of their early edition. Maybe it was a local daily, which splashed the sensational news on or near the front page. Wherever Nabokov read the report, he took notes on one of his ninety-four surviving Lolita index cards.
The handwritten card reads as follows:
20.viii.52
Woodbine, N.J. –
Sally Horner, 15-year-old Camden, N.J. Girl who spent 21 months as the captive of a middle-aged morals offender a few years ago, was killed in a highway mishap early Monday . . . Sally vanished from her Camden home in 1948 and wasn’t heard from again until 1950 when she told a hararing [sic] story of spending 21 months as the cross-country slave of Frank La Salle, 52.
LaSalle [sic], a mechanic, was arrested in San Jose, Cal . . . he pleaded guilty to (two) charges of kidnaping and was sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison. He was branded a “moral leper” by the sentencing judge.
Here, in this note card, is proof that Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case. It is proof that her story captured his attention and that her real-life ordeal was inspiration for Dolores Haze’s fictional plight. Less clear is whether the wire report Nabokov read in August 1952 was the first time he had heard of the girl, or if he was, like all who had read the news stories in March and April 1950, stunned to realize that she’d only lived two more years after her rescue.
The note card, written on front and back, included a number of strikethroughs that ended up in the text of Lolita itself. Nabokov crossed out “middle-aged morals offender” and “cross-country slave,” both phrases that serve as Humbert Humbert’s justification to Lolita that the “bunkum” they read in the newspapers has no relation to their “father-daughter” relationship. Misspellings dotted the note card. The most notable is “harrowing,” which Nabokov tortured into some alternate, Russified version of the word.
At the top of the note card Nabokov wrote: “in Ench. H. revisited?. . . . in the newspaper?” As Alexander Dolinin explained, Nabokov was referring to “a scene (Chapter 26, Part II) in which Humbert revisits Briceland and in a library browses through a ‘coffin-black volume’ with old files of the local Gazette for August 1947. Humbert is looking for a printed picture of himself ‘as a younger brute’ on his ‘dark way to Lolita’s bed’ in the Enchanted Hunters hotel, and Nabokov evidently thought of making him come across a report of Sally Horner’s death in what the narrator aptly calls the ‘book of doom.’”
AP story of Sally Horner’s death transcribed onto a note card by Vladimir Nabokov.
Nabokov decided against this approach. Instead, he seeded Sally Horner’s abduction story throughout the entire Lolita narrative, making it a tantalizing thread for readers to discover on their own—though the vast majority never did.
AN ALTERNATE THEORY of the ending of Lolita pops up in Nabokovian circles from time to time. It contends that Dolores Haze, rather than meeting and marrying Dick Schiller, becoming pregnant, and then dying in childbirth before she is eighteen, actually died at the age of fourteen and a half. Her short, tragic adult life is in fact Humbert Humbert’s delusion, a projected fantasy in order to create some sort of romanticized ending for the girl he defiled.
In this version, rather than bearing responsibility for her death, Humbert can indulge in the illusion that—at least for a short time—Dolores found her way to a kind of happiness. By extension, he can remold their rapist-victim power dynamic into real love. Humbert can convince himself he did not want Dolores because she fit the nymphet type born out of his childhood obsession with Annabel Leigh, but that he pursued the girl out of some special regard for her as a human being.
If that theory is true—Nabokov certainly never confirmed or denied—Humbert’s final visit to Ramsdale carries an extra sharpness. Just before Nabokov invokes Sally Horner and Frank La Salle in a parenthetical aside, the reliable means through which he conveys true meaning to the reader, he has Humbert Humbert walking through Ramsdale, reminiscing about his first, fateful glimpse of Dolores Haze. Humbert strolls by his old house and spies a “For Sale” sign with a black velvet hair ribbon attached. Just then, “a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten” passes him, looking at him with “wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes.”
She could be a composite of Lolita and Sally, her eyes the same color as Sally’s, more or less. Humbert says, “I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes.”
Here, so late in Lolita, Humbert has his moment of reckoning. He understands, briefly, “what he might really look like in the eyes of his eternal jury: children and their protectors.” The glib charm, all of the smooth veneer, is stripped away in an instant. Humbert reveals himself as the monster he knows he is. And by killing Clare Quilty for taking Dolores away from him—in his mind, taking away what was rightfully his— Humbert Humbert loses his last vestige of morality.
Dolinin takes a charitable view of Nabokov’s treatment of Sally Horner in Lolita, claiming that the number of references, including the architecture of the novel’s second half, does not obscure the real girl. Rather, he writes, “[Nabokov] wanted us to remember and pity the poor girl whose stolen childhood and untimely death helped to give birth to his (not Humbert Humbert’s) Lolita—the genuine heroine of the novel hidden behind the narrator’s self-indulgent verbosity.”
This sense of pity Dolinin speaks of emerges in Humbert’s final meeting with Dolores. She is married, pregnant, and seventeen, with “adult, rope-veined narrow hands.” She has aged out of his perverse desires, and he finally understands, through the use of the parenthetical, how much he defiled and violated her, how much damage he has caused:
“. . . in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this ca
n be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy . . . palliative of articulate art.”
Humbert’s epiphany is in keeping with Véra’s diary note only days after the American publication of Lolita in 1958. She was ecstatic about the largely positive press and fast sales of the novel, but was unnerved by what critics weren’t saying. “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along.”
It is to Nabokov’s credit that something of the true character of Dolores—her messy, complicated, childish self—emerges out of the haze of his narrator’s perverse pedestal-placing. She is no “charming brat lifted from an ordinary existence only by the special brand of love.” She excels at tennis; she is free with sharp comebacks (“You talk like a book, Dad”); and when she seizes the opportunity to break away from Humbert and run off with Clare Quilty, she does so in order to survive. Any fate is better than staying with her stepfather.
Never mind that she will, later, run from Quilty’s desire to embroil her in pornography with multiple people. Never mind that Dolores will “settle” for Dick Schiller and a life of domesticity and motherhood that is, sadly, cut short. She still has the freedom and the autonomy to make these choices for herself, a freedom she never had while under Humbert Humbert’s power.
These choices are likely why Véra rated Dolores so highly in the diary entry, and why Nabokov himself ranked Lolita second (after Pnin) of all the characters he ever created that he admired most as a person.
Twenty-Three
“A Darn Nice Girl”
On August 21, 1952, three days after the car accident that killed Sally Horner, the Vineland Daily Journal published a front-page interview with Edward Baker. He said he was “bewildered by publicity” over Sally’s death. “I’d never met Sally before. She didn’t tell me if she had ever been to Wildwood before, but I got the impression this was probably the first time she’d ever visited the place.” Baker said he frequented the resort town “just about every weekend.” On Friday, August 15, he left early from Kimble’s, the glass plant where he worked as an apprentice machinist. He met Sally the next day, as well as “a whole bunch of other fellows and girls I met down there . . . Sally and I hung around with them most of the time.”
He insisted news accounts of the car accident were wrong. “The fellow who owned the truck I hit [Benson] said he was on the shoulder of the road. But I certainly wasn’t on the shoulder, and my skidmarks will prove it. The fellow behind me, even with the benefit of my lights, didn’t see the truck, and he crashed into it also.” Baker said that what saved his life was the fact that he had both of his hands on the steering wheel, which broke in the collision.
Three days of coast-to-coast news stories had rattled Baker’s nerves, and he wanted to set the record straight about what happened between him and Sally. “She seemed like a nice girl. Some of the stories that followed the accident sounded as though we were making a sinful weekend of it. We didn’t do anything wrong. . . . We weren’t ‘fooling around’ in the car, or anything. If we had been, she probably wouldn’t have been killed and I might have been.”
Baker was even more flabbergasted by the revelations of Sally’s past ordeal. “Nobody had any idea this girl was the one who had been kidnapped four years ago. How should we remember?” Never mind that Sally’s rescue was reported nationwide, as well as on the front page of the Daily Journal.
He was still grappling with how young Sally really was. “She told me she was 17 years old. She may have had a birth certificate with her saying she was 21, but I never saw it. Who asks to see birth certificates when you go out with a girl?”
The Daily Journal also spoke to Baker’s mother, Marie Young. She’d received a call from her son not long after the accident. “He said he wished it was him that was killed instead of that innocent girl. He was pretty broken up.” He’d told his mother how nice a girl she was, and how he admired her commitment to going to church on Sundays, even down in Wildwood. He would never get past that “she got killed because she wanted him to take her into Vineland.”
Both Baker and his mother had added reasons to defend themselves. After he was treated at Burdette Tomlin Hospital in Cape May for the injuries he sustained in the car accident, police arrested and charged him with reckless homicide. Baker was freed on a thousand dollars’ bail—his stepfather, James Young, put up the money—on August 20. A news account sympathetic to Baker, stressing his lack of culpability in the accident, might help his case.
But a strike against him was that the crash leading to Sally’s death was not Baker’s first car accident. Only the year before, Baker was driving the car, which belonged to his mother, Marie Young, in Newfield, four miles north of Vineland. He hit another car while running a red light. Then, too, Baker’s injuries were not life-threatening. Neither were those of Marie, sitting in the passenger seat.
SALLY HORNER’S FUNERAL was held on August 22, four days after her death. More than three hundred people crowded into the Frank J. Leonard Funeral Home at 1451 Broadway to pay their respects. Many floral arrangements sent by well-wishers flanked Sally’s casket.
The burial was a more private affair. Only a handful of family members, including Ella, Susan, Al, and some aunts and cousins, drove out to Emleys Hill Cemetery in Cream Ridge, where Sally’s remains were interred in the Goff family plot.
For Carol Starts, the funeral was awful. She sat by herself in a corner pew. Ella and Susan requested the casket be open at first, for those who wished to pay their last respects to Sally. “I wanted to see her so badly. Then I did, and it nearly broke me in half,” Carol recalled. When she could no longer stand the proceedings, Carol fled the service and went home.
Carol stayed away from school for an entire week after Sally’s death. “I couldn’t handle it. This was the most heavy-duty thing I had ever gone through.” Carol’s first experience of deep loss would mark her for the rest of her life. As she grew older and friends began to die, Carol tended to grieve in an open and wild manner that puzzled those around her. “I would hear, ‘but they were just a friend.’ I would hear that about Sally. That we should be moving right along. I wasn’t willing to move right along. I wanted to grieve. And when I finally came out of shock, I did.”
FRANK LA SALLE made his presence known to Sally Horner’s family one final time. On the morning of her funeral, they discovered he had sent a spray of flowers. The Panaros insisted they not be displayed.
THE FIRST COURT HEARING stemming from the accident that killed Sally Horner took place on Tuesday, August 26. It lasted more than two and a half hours. A full record of the proceeding does not exist, but the surviving court docket reported that Baker pleaded not guilty to a count of careless driving and that Judge Thomas Sears found him not guilty of the charge.
New Jersey state law enforcement was not about to let Baker go so easily, and what followed was a complicated series of charges, court hearings, and verdicts. Prosecutors even charged Baker for “operating a car with illegal equipment”—specifically, unapproved headlight shields. Police told the Vineland Daily Journal that Baker’s headlights “were partially obscured by a device he had purchased and attached to other lights.”
The most serious charge came from the Cape May grand jury. On September 3, 1952, they indicted Baker for the “reckless killing by auto” of Sally Horner, stating that he had acted “carelessly and heedlessly, in wilful and wanton disregard of the rights and safety of others . . . and against the peace of this State, the Government, and dignity of the same.”
The following week, on September 10, Baker pleaded not guilty to that charge in front of Judge Harry Tanenbaum. Carol was called to testify to her friendship with Sally, as well as the whole business with the fake identification cards. Her memory of the experience was hazy, but she had vivid recall of Baker’s attitude.
“He was very arrogant,” Car
ol told me. “He would make these weird remarks, like how the courtroom was only thirty feet long instead of being a hundred feet as it was supposed to. I didn’t understand what he meant and still don’t.” She was still so worked up about his comment about the courtroom size that she mentioned it to me three times in one conversation. It demonstrated, to her, Baker’s inability to take the hearing seriously: “He snickered a great deal. Acting stupid.” Her reaction to him was visceral: “I hated him because he was driving and had the accident that killed my best friend.”
Perhaps Carol was also upset by the court’s decision, delayed until January 15, 1953. Judge Tenenbaum threw out the charge against Baker for reckless killing by auto—the sketchy court records did not give a reason—and also found Baker not guilty of the unapproved headlight shields count.
But Baker’s legal troubles were not done. He faced a cluster of civil actions, too. As with the criminal court proceedings, the surviving civil court documents are light on detail and full of unresolved gaps. But both the Cape May County Gazette and the Camden Courier-Post reported important details on the complicated joint lawsuits.
All five complaints were heard together the week of May 21, 1953. Dominick Caprioni, who owned the car right behind Baker’s on the night Sally Horner died, sued Jacob Benson, owner of the parked truck that both Baker and Caprioni crashed into. Caprioni also sued Baker and his mother, Marie Young, since she owned the Ford Baker was driving, seeking $13,300 in damages in his lawsuits. Benson sued Baker and Caprioni without asking for any money, while Baker and Young in turn sued Benson for $52,500. Lastly—and the civil action that matters most—Ella Horner sued Baker, Young, and Benson for $50,000.
The byzantine nature of the lawsuits, heard by Superior Court judge Elmer B. Woods, may explain why there was a mistrial on the first day, after someone observed a juror talking to one of the witnesses during the noon recess. A new hearing lasted two days before ending in an abrupt settlement on May 28, 1953. It’s not clear how much each of the plaintiffs (some of whom were also doubling as defendants) received.
The Real Lolita Page 14