The Reading Lessons (11 page)

From page 222 of
Odessa Sheffield’s Helpful Guide to New Gardeners

Wisteria sinensis
: These deciduous vines are huge, aggressive, and likely to cause severe upset if ingested. The wise gardener will commit himself to keeping all growth in careful bounds. 

It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it, (for its position was immediately over my own,) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterwards the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear, but more in wonder.

--“The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allen Poe 

While Browning House was being wired for electricity and looking forward to its first plug-in toaster, banners were popping up all over town declaring war on a way of life that had served the Crump line well for as long as anyone could remember:
Worther-Holmes Homes—Bringing Modernity to the Old South. 

Dickie and Lucinda took these words to heart and began assembling what they called a
fully-mechanized
home. “Thank goodness for Daddy Dick,” Lucinda said of her new father-in-law. “He’s brought the sophistication of New York City to small town living at long last.” 

The goal of a
Worther-Holmes Home
was to make families less dependent on the shifty habits of household servants by supplying a host of clever new appliances to do the work in their place. Mechanical servants, the ads were calling them, and just about everyone Hadley knew was afraid of being replaced by one.

Wisteria Walk was staffed to the gills with mechanical servants, the lot of which desperately fascinated Hadley, who nonetheless preferred brooms to the bulky electric sweeper that filled the utility closet. Lucinda’s fully-mechanized house had a washing machine for washing clothes, a percolator for brewing coffee, an electric refrigerator to electrically chill all the food, and a vast supply of peculiar-looking flat irons, vibrators, and manglers for the ironing of ones’ clothing. This meant that you could cancel the ice man. You could cancel the laundress too because the downstairs maid could do the washing
and
the ironing along with all the cleaning. Because Dickie had a fondness for automobiles, there was no need for a livery man. He preferrred to drive himself and did not employ a driver. This, in fact, was to become one of Hadley’s duties. He was to learn to drive for the purpose of chaurferring Lucinda around town. 

“We’ve got the vote now, for pete’s sake,” Lucinda said. “Women don’t have time to keep after a household full of servants.”

Times were changing, that much was clear. Lucinda had a tub in her bathroom big enough for six people to swim in. Even the bedrooms were cluttered with mechanical servants. Curling irons. Heating pads. Radio. And the most touted modernization of all—the
ventalation
system. Daddy Dick promised that a
Worther-Holmes Home
would always be the perfect temperture. 

“You can sleep naked in any season,” Lucinda bragged to all her friends. “Imagine! No more nightgowns or bedclothes to wash. It’s the height of luxury and thoroughly practical, too.” 

In olden times, jobs were plentiful for people like Hadley when newlweds were setting up house. These days, instead of having a Lemon or a Flavia around, Wisteria Walk had a hand-held iron that heated up at the press of a button. It had a girl called Quindora to press the button, and appliances enough that Tilly, the cook, could feed both the family and the help and still have time to spare. There was no Loomis Sackett, no Cuffy, and no Miss Missy. The natural gossip of maids was replaced by buzzers, motors, and electic doorbells that chimed
ding dong.
Hadley liked to fiddle with circuitry as much as the next man but the place didn’t feel quite right. Lights weren’t meant to turn on clear across the room by a switch. It was confusing. 

Dickie and Lucinda loved everything, though, and they would flip lights on and off a hundred times in a row for the pure joy of doing it. Lucinda searched for new hair styles in magazines so she could use her hair iron, and Dickie was fond of plugging things in. To hear them talk, one would think Wisteria Walk was Heaven on Earth.

“It smells like a waste of money to me,” Mama said during her first visit to the house. She stomped into the “turret” room with a shopping bag over her arm, thoroughly unimpressed by the perfect temperature or the lack of shifty servants. “Hadley, Hadley, Hadley,” she said, her voice echoing up to the tip top of the breast-shaped dome that was the turret room’s crowning glory. “I don’t see how you can live with her like this.”

“I been doing it for half my days, Mama,” Hadley pointed out.

The dome had a big pink nipple in the middle that Lucinda insisted was a wisteria bloom. Hadley was willing to admit that he still had a lot to learn, but it seemed to him that wisteria was not normally so anatomical in shape. He couldn’t understand why everyone pretended that the thing on the ceiling was a flower when it was clearly a nipple. Blossom or bosom, he felt doomed for the rest of his life to think of nipples whenever he saw flowers in bloom, and to think of blooms when he saw nipples. 

“You’re a grown man now,” Mama said. “You don’t have to live with her anymore. And why in hell is there a nipple on the ceiling?”

“It’s a nice house, Mama,” Hadley said. And it was. If you could tear yourself away from that ceiling.

“He keeps
guns
,” Mama said. “I may not know what a person uses a
heating pad
for, but I know what a gun is for. There’s a whole big case of ‘em downstairs and another rack in the study.” 

Hadley thought Dickie’s gun collection was a thing of wonder. He’d offered to clean them just to get a closer look. There was a Browning left over from the war, a Springfield for skeet shooting, and a Big Medicine gun that was once the property of President Theodore Roosevelt before Daddy Dick got his hands on it. Hadley’s favorite gun of the day was a Maxim mg08 machine gun, and it was a real doozy. 

“Dickie is a gun man,” Hadley told Mama. 

That’s how Dickie referred to himself.
I’m a gun man, Crump,
he’d said as Hadley set to work on the Springfield with rod and bore solvent and a gigantic case of excitement.
See that you handle my baby with care or I’ll have to put a bullet in you.
 

“I don’t like it,” Mama said. She reached for a Bible quote without missing a beat. “The mouth of the adulteress is a deep pit; he with whom the Lord is angry will fall into it.”

Hadley had ignored a great many proverbs over the years, and he was prepared to ignore this one as well. “I wanna show you something, Mama.” He took her out to the backyard where a clothesline clipped with lace tablecloths had been tied between two poles. 

Mama rapped on the wall under the kitchen window with her umbrella handle. “Place doesn’t even have brick walls.”

“They’re cement,” Hadley said.

She kicked a dirt clod. “Where’s the lawn?”

“It’s being delivered by the U.S. Golf Association on Tuesday. This time next week, you’ll be standing on grass as velvety as a golf course.”

“For mercy sake,” she said. “What’s wrong with making the gardener grow the grass?”

Hadley got down on his knees. “Have a look at this, Mama,” he said, and he ran his fingers through the only clump of green to be found on all of Treebourne Street. “They’re four-leaf clovers, the whole big patch of them.” Hadley had spent an hour searching for three leaf clovers one morning to no avail. “Have you ever heard of a whole patch of four-leaf clovers before? Surely that must mean something good?”

“Not necessarily,” Mama said, shifting her shopping bag to the opposite arm. “Anything so strange is just as likely to be bad.”

“Pick one, Mama. I’ve got ten pressed in the
Song of Solomon
even as we speak.”

“Maybe you ought to read that Bible instead of pressing weeds in it,” she suggested. 

Hadley tucked one behind her ear. “Come on. You haven’t seen where
I
live yet.” 

The gardener’s quarters were a far cry more deluxe than the canning closet Hadley had shared with his mother at Browning House. For the first time in his life, he had “things”. He had a bookshelf with three books:
Young Folks Cyclopedia of Common Things
,
America Bible Society Holy Bible
, and
Odessa Sheffield’s Helpful Guide to New Gardeners.
He had a night table for his jar. He had a drawer for his Phoetus gifts. He even had his own door to the bathroom. The kitchen had a door to the same bathroom, but he could lock it when he was in there so it felt almost like his own.

Mama tapped her toe on the Serapi rug that had been ordered all the way from Persia. “It’s shameful,” she said. “No ordinary
servant lives this way.”

“These quarters are standard in all the Worther-Holmes homes. You ought to find a position with one of the young families, Mama. Sit on that bed. It’s like sleeping on a cloud.”

What Hadley didn’t tell her was that, cloud or no cloud, he almost never slept. He couldn’t make peace with all the noise. 

Mama dropped her shopping bag on the bed, took out a square of purple flannel, and began to unfold it. 

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Smartweed.” She sprinkled a handful on his blankets. “It clears the head.” 

Mama had come prepared. She tied a catseye shell to the window sash and placed a bag of lucky legumes under his pillow. 

“That should do you for now.” There was one last thing in the bottom of the bag. She handed him a box. “Happy homecoming.” 

The box was too big to be a potion or a bar of lucky soap. “You didn’t have to get me a present,” he said. 

“I didn’t get you a present. Quaker Oats give it to me for spending two dollars on oatmeal at the store yesterday.”

The box had the words
Little Top Hat
printed in red and black letters across the lid. Inside was a big aluminum head. “It’s one of them Jolly Nigger banks that’s gotten so popular lately,” Mama said. “When you drop a coin in the slot, the eyes wiggle. Try it.” She handed him a penny. 

Sure enough, when Hadley dropped the penny in, Little Top Hat’s eyes wiggled merrily. “Thanks, Mama.” He put his new bank on the night table next to his Whoops Jar.

Mama touched the WHOOPS on his jar with a shaky brown finger. “What are you doing here, Hadley?”

###

Lucinda’s bedroom was above his own, and every night it was always the same: hop hop hop hop hop, until a man wanted to sign himself into the nuthouse. Sticking your fingers in your ears didn’t make the hops go away. Neither did humming. He’d tried cotton and he’d tried wrapping his head with a pillow. He’d damned near smothered himself with the pillow. Nothing worked. 

At first, Dickie was the hardest to stomach. He sounded like a xylophone, only instead of making music, his notes were an ascending scale of pig-grunts that started low and rose in range. The last key, inevitably, sounded broken. Hadley came to look forward to that last broken key. He liked to think that Lucinda did, too.

Thankfully, Lucinda didn’t make such passionate sounds. She laughed a lot. She said things Hadley couldn’t understand. One minute, he would be diving under his pillow in an effort not to hear, the next he would be sitting up straight in bed straining to make out the words she was saying. This, in its self, was its own form of insanity. Ultimately, her whispers proved worse than his grunts.

On his tenth night in the new house, Hadley heard three words that planted themselves in his head like a case of schizophrenia. Dickie said:
God, your mouth!

Hadley was more jealous of those words than all the broken notes put together. He worried that Lucinda was using her mouth to drink Dickie’s blood. He got down on his knees next to his big new bed and began to pray out loud. “Dear God, please don’t let her do that to anyone but me.” 

It seemed likely that God would send him straight to hell for making such a sinful request, yet he couldn’t help but get down on his knees every night and whisper the same prayer. “Let that be mine alone,” he’d pray. “Don’t let her drink his blood.”

Some mornings, Hadley would pretend to tighten a loose screw just so he could stand on a stool over the breakfast table and squint down the inside of Dickie’s shirt collar. Every time he handed Dickie the newspaper, he made the man reach so he could check for bite marks under his sleeve. Eventually, Hadley focused on two things: the rapidness of the xylophone and the controlled sound of Lucinda’s voice during an abandoned act of passion. Hadley wanted to give Lucinda something a good deal less rapid. Hadley wanted to make Dickie’s wife lose control.

###

Over the course of the first few weeks, Hadley put in a cutting garden and learned to drive Dickie’s car. When the turf-breeders brought the new lawn, he made sure the four-leaf clovers didn’t get covered over with bent grass. From sun up to sun down, Hadley arranged pavers, prepped soil, and dropped root balls into holes. His muscles got sore, then hard. His skin got red, then brown. He worked his heart out every single day, and he waited. He waited for Lucinda to make good on the deal he thought they’d struck in the Rose Bud Parlor.