Dear Matt,

At the risk of committing the almost unforgivable faux-pas of quoting one's self, here is something I sent to the List  five years ago on this question:


Q. Explain to me again, how do we know that Shade has a mistress?

R. Shade tells us that "Aunt Maud lived to hear the next babe cry." Kinbote correctly points out that this can hardly refer to Hazel but by implication this "next babe," born in her later years, must be a blood relative of Maud's. The only people capable of engendering a child who would be related to the elderly Maud are Shade and Hazel. Since there is no apparent (sorry) child who fits this description in Shade's poem, he or she seemingly no longer exists or has moved out of Shade's orbit and certainly has not been recognized as a legitimate child or, in the unlikely event that Hazel is the parent, grandchild.

I went looking for a child fitting these parameters, and found that Shade had put him and his mother in Canto II as the "other love" of a widower at IPH and her son who died together in a head-on collision on a wild March night. This child has a mother who is not Hazel, so by deduction Shade must be the father. The mother, the blonde in a black leotard, was a student of Shade's and she is said to "haunt Lit 202." This turns out to be literally true, since "the other love," "die Mutter mit ihrem Kind" and the blonde in a "ballerina black" leotard all refer to the same person, a former student  who committed suicide taking her child with her in an automobile "accident."

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