Enduring (33 page)

Each Christmas, Mrs. Cardwell gave Latha a raise, and since she spent very little of her salary, having nothing to spend it on, in time Latha’s savings were sizeable. One time when Mrs. Cardwell was feeling well enough to “entertain,” and invited several ladies to a “luncheon,” Latha was serving tea to one of the women when the lady whispered to Latha, “Don’t you realize she is the richest woman for six counties around? Why, she could afford a whole houseful of servants if she wanted them!”

“No, ma’am,” Latha whispered back to her. “I didn’t know that, but it’s not any of my concern.”

In time, Latha decided she had saved more than enough money to pay for a trip back to Stay More, and she decided to quit her job. But when she told Mrs. Cardwell, choosing a bad time to do so because Mrs. Cardwell had taken down with lumbago and could hardly move, Mrs. Cardwell asked her to sit down beside her bed, and then she brought forth from a drawer in her bedside table a newspaper. “This is an issue of the
Tennessean
, the Nashville newspaper, which appeared a few days before I found you in the ditch.”

There was a not-very-good photograph of Latha, the kind you see on Wanted posters, above a headline which said, “Escapee from Arkansas Asylum” and a sub-headline, “Still at Large.” The story said that she was the only person ever to escape from the maximum security ward of the state asylum for lunatics. Latha read every word of the story, although she was conscious of the woman watching her. The story said that she was “probably not dangerous,” but a reward was being offered for information about her “means of escape.”

“How did you escape?” Mrs. Cardwell asked.

“I honestly don’t know, ma’am,” Latha said.

“Well, you are still wanted, and if you were to leave me, you might easily be caught.”

“So I have to spend the rest of my life here, ma’am?” Latha asked, her heart in her throat.

“No, there is something called a ‘statute of limitations,’ which means that there is a time limit on how long you can be held responsible.”

Every year at Christmastime when Mrs. Cardwell gave her a raise, Latha would ask if the statue of limitations had run out yet. To the best of her knowledge, during her years as Mrs. Cardwell’s maidservant, she had never said or done anything that would have given anyone cause for thinking her crazy, but Mrs. Cardwell whenever she was dissatisfied with some detail of Latha’s maintenance of the household would make a remark like, “We have a fine mental hospital in Nashville, you know.”

Having discovered that the best way to prevent herself from becoming a nymphomaniac was simply to avoid reading
The Romance of Lust
, Latha realized that the best way to handle her excruciating homesickness was simply to avoid any thoughts of Stay More. Still, sometimes in the summer when the night air was filled with lightning bugs and the fragrances of all the blooming things, she could not help wishing she were back home. One day she decided to write to Doc Swain, addressing it simply to Dr. Colvin U Swain, Stay More, Ark. And she wrote:

Dear Colvin,

I know you may be surprised to hear from me. I don’t know where else to turn. Aren’t you my cousin? My mother is a Swain. I can’t write to her because most of my problems are her fault.

You may know that I spent some years in Little Rock at the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, committed there by my sister Mandy, who wanted to become the mother of my illegitimate baby.

Are you all right? Happy? Still curing all the sick people in Stay More? How is everyone?

I have been perishing for some news of my dear home town. I was still living with my sister Mandy when the news came that our father had bad pneumonia and that you had treated him without being paid for it. I know it wasn’t your fault that he died. If you will tell me how much he owed you, I will send you the money.

Several years ago I regained my sanity (if I ever was insane to begin with) and discovered that I was no longer in the lunatic asylum but in Nashville, Tennessee. I have no memory of how I got there or how I escaped from the state hospital, so maybe I was a little crazy after all. There might have been some news in the papers that I escaped.

But anyway, here I am, working as a housemaid in a fancy mansion, probably better than any job I could find anywhere around Stay More. It isn’t enough to keep me from getting homesick—and I don’t mean the house I grew up in but the town itself.

I know you’re a busy doctor, but if you could find a moment to send me a postcard, it would be something from Stay More that I could hold in my hands and my heart.

Yours,
Latha

She was a little nervous, putting it in an envelope with her return address on it. But she didn’t think Doc Swain would tell on her, to the authorities or whoever. One of her many daily tasks was to walk down to the highway where the mailbox was. Rodney had long ago offered to drive her, but she told him it was the only exercise she got.

Usually there would be no mail other than the
Tennessean
newspaper or some business from Mrs. Cardwell’s lawyer or banker. Every day for two weeks after mailing her letter to Doc Swain, Latha would quicken her step with anticipation as she approached the mailbox. On the return to the house, she would walk slowly with her head down.

One day, however, she got an answer.

Dear Latha,

Knock me down with a feather. I haven’t been so surprised since the time that Granny Price came back from the dead.

But speaking of the dead, I regret to have to be the one to tell you that your mother passed on in January. She was my second cousin, and they buried her at the Church of Christ cemetery over at Demijohn. Neither one of your sisters came for the funeral, but we didn’t try too awful hard to get in touch with either of them. What she had was apoplexy. I treated her for it but couldn’t cure it.

You don’t owe me for that, and you don’t owe me for when the pneumonia took away your dad. Even if you weren’t kinfolks, I could never charge you a cent for anything. I just wish you’d been able to stay in Stay More to have your baby, so I could have delivered it.

It’s a sin to Moses the way your mother sent you off to Little Rock. And it’s worse than all Moses’ sins put together the way your sister got you put away in the state hospital just so she could have your baby. Every doctor of my acquaintance knows it’s not a state “hospital” but a state zoo. When we heard that you had escaped, we said that they ought to erect some kind of statue in your honor.

For a good two weeks after your escape, there were state policemen and detectives snooping around Stay More, convinced that this was where you were. I don’t know if you realize that you were the only “patient” ever to escape from that particular ward, and they were frustrated because they didn’t know how you had done it. Nobody could even imagine how you did it…unless you had some help.

I hope you are healthy and still optimistic that you can come home again someday. This world is filled with sorrow, and I’ve had more than my full share of it, but I won’t tell you about any of it, because I suspect yours is greater than mine, and because I’ve learned the only way to deal with mine is when I get out of bed in the morning and remind myself of all the things I still have to do.

But I am not real busy. Most of my patients have died or gone to California—I don’t know which is worse. Stay More keeps on getting smaller and I don’t know when it will stop. Nothing really interesting happens around here, and I think all of us are lonesome. I long ago gave up any thoughts of moving to a large town because, like you, I know in my bones that Stay More is the only place on earth for me.

Affectionately yours,
Colvin

One day Mrs. Cardwell asked her, “Why are you smiling all the time these days?” and when Latha said Oh, it was nothing, Mrs. Cardwell persisted and wondered if Latha had started fooling around with Rodney. Latha shook her head, and once again Mrs. Cardwell said, “If he ever touches you, you just tell me.”

But Rodney no longer even flirted with her. She liked to think that he had not lost all his desire for her but had simply realized that she was not easy at all. Once, the first time Mrs. Cardwell had become bedridden with one of her ailments, Rodney had taken advantage of it to neglect his duties and he had made a renewed effort to seduce Latha, becoming increasingly foul-mouthed and offensive until, after a particularly nasty thing he said to her, she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could. For a long moment she thought he was going to hit her, but he just grumbled, “Do that again, sister, and I’ll throw ye down and rape ye not once but till the cows come home.”

Despite her revulsion toward him, he was still the only man in her world, and there were many times when she would be in her room and look out the window to watch Rodney working in the yard, usually with his shirt off and all his muscles tanned and mighty, with sweat running over them. She would watch him pushing the lawnmower or trimming the hedges or planting a rose bush, and she would start having fantasies about having him on top of her, or herself on top of him, and their hips pounding together and thrusting and squeezing.

She took to leaving her door unlocked at night, and often lay in bed thinking he might sneak into her room and instead of using his coarse words and ugly phrases, simply take her in silence. This went on for so many months that she finally gave up on the idea that it would happen and began to try to summon her nerve to sneak out to the garage and up to his room. But the nerve wasn’t there. One night, finally, he actually did come into her room, and she knew it was him, and reached out for him eagerly. But instead of embracing her, he put both his hands on her breasts and squeezed as hard as he could. She screamed, and it woke Mrs. Cardwell, who came into the room, but not before Rodney had ducked under the bed.

“Good Lord!” Mrs. Cardwell said. “I thought you were being killed.”

“I just had an awful nightmare,” she said, and Mrs. Cardwell returned to her own room.

“Thanks, babe,” Rodney said, when he came out from under the bed. “You’re mighty damn lucky you didn’t tell on me. But why’d you holler so? Don’t you like for me to feel them big titties?” and he reached for her breasts again, but she slapped his hands away. “Why’d you leave your door unlocked?” he asked. “You wanta fuck, don’t you? You’re hot for it, aint ye? I kin tell. I kin smell it on ye.”

“Get out!” she snarled as loud as she could without being overheard by Mrs. Cardwell.

He went, and for a long time never bothered her again. When her employer was ill, she would give Latha a shopping list, and Latha would collect another one from Sadie the cook, and Rodney would drive her into town to the butcher’s and baker’s and a grocery store. He never tried to touch her again, but he did not abandon the subject. He talked about his life’s ambition, which was to save up enough of his salary to buy a little farm out in the country and raise some chickens and pigs. But he spent all of his salary, he said, at the “whorehouse” in town, and if only he didn’t have to do that he might be able to save some money. She felt sympathy for his loss of money, but would not take the hint. She did have a great curiosity about the life of the prostitutes; her memory of that Nashville hotel room was vaguer than ever. She asked Rodney how much the women earned and he said it depended on how long he stayed and how many different things he wanted to do. A hand job was cheapest. The most expensive was up the ass. Few of the women would kiss. They would kiss pricks and nipples and assholes but never mouths.

As long as she was having fantasies, Latha went right ahead and had several good long fantasies about being a prostitute. Could she do it with a dozen different men in one night? Rodney said he had no idea how many customers the women serviced, but he imagined it was a plenty. Prostitution would pay a lot more than what she was making as a maidservant. And she would meet a lot of men.

More than these fantasies, though, she liked to escape into the various worlds of the many books in the library, not
The Romance of Lust
, but all the others that were readable. She read the whole set of a British author named Anthony Trollope, and then another full set by George Meredith. She read all that had been published by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. She read all six of the Jane Austens. She read Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair. In her years at Lombardy Alley she read nearly everything.

One Christmas Mrs. Cardwell was too ill to do any shopping, so she gave Latha her very best dress, but Latha refused to take it. The woman was so ill that Latha was required to give her injections of morphine. The woman said that the “statute of limitations” would expire in the springtime, and Latha would be free to go then. But Mrs. Cardwell said she hoped to die before Latha left.

Rodney had used up all his savings to frequent the whorehouses in town. Then he tried to borrow money from Latha, but spring was coming and she could only think that she would need every penny she had to get back to Stay More…although she had no idea what she would do for a living once she got back there. Rodney pestered her for a loan of money worse than he had pestered her for sex. But she refused. Then she began to reflect that soon she might never see him again, and she wondered if she should make herself available to him as a kind of farewell. This thought excited her, and allowed her to begin to flirt with him. He was at first surprised, but then he flirted with her in return and made so bold, one day, one afternoon on the lawn, as to say to her, “You really do want some jazz, don’t ye?”