The Reading Lessons (3 page)

“You want too much,” Loomis said. “Even her stupid hair hurts you.”

Hadley didn’t get miffed like he did when Loomis called him
Crumpette,
on account of his small size, or when he gave Hadley a head-butt for eating the last Jelly Jumble. He understood that Loomis was jealous over the fact that sometimes Hadley wasn’t the same forgotten shadow all the other servants seemed to be. On those rare occasions when Hadley stepped into the full light of day, a yearning inside him burned worse than a million paper cuts. 

Why shouldn’t Lucinda Browning be in love with him? Sure, his skin was black, but wasn’t it white, too? Hadley came from a long line of folks who didn’t mind coloreds. And yes, he worked for Lucinda’s daddy. And yes, he was the son of a cook. But he was the son of a
Heart-of-the-World
salesmen, too. Anyway, he was beginning to think that Lucinda didn’t mind coloreds so long as they had a little extra something mixed in. When he was untangling her hat strings, she’d stood so close, a blonde hair hopped off her head and found a new home on his sleeve. That night, he’d laid his shirt across the foot of his bed and left it there untouched for a week so as to delay losing that small piece of her. Lucinda never stood close enough to drop hair on Loomis Sackett. She would never have even asked Loomis to untangle her in the first place, because Lucinda Browning didn’t know Loomis Sackett was alive. He was just a chair.

“I bet you don’t know what the ‘m’ stands for in those curly letters she always wears on her clothes,” Loomis said to Hadley one day. 

“Do you?” Hadley asked.

“Shoot no. I’m just a servant, same as you.”

The fact that Lucinda’s third initial was information denied to them, made that little “m” seem as delicious to Hadley as a pair of girl bloomers. 

“I’m gonna find out,” Hadley told Loomis. “Just you watch and see. Someday I’m gonna know all about her ‘m.’” 

If Hadley had possessed the wisdom to tell his mama about these new paper-cut-sharp yearnings of his, Mama would have said that paper-cut-sharp yearnings were the handiwork of the devil. Because it happened that Mama was the finest proverb-quoter in the state of Mississippi, she would have said something like:
The shrewd man perceives evil and hides, while simpletons continue on and suffer the penalty. 

Mama collected proverbs like she collected Hadley’s baby teeth, with a flawless memory for where each one had come from, and what had grown up in its place. 

But Hadley didn’t tell Mama about his yearnings, and the handiwork of the devil was just too sweet to resist. 

Could be it was Bath Day that ruined him. There wasn’t a soul in Browning House that wasn’t cranky and full of dread on Wednesdays when Lucinda took her bath. The worst of tantrums were thrown on Wednesdays. No matter how hard everyone tried, Lucinda’s bath water was never quite hot enough. Gaynell, the Upstairs Girl, had her eye blackened one week by a flying bar of Lifebuoy, and Hadley had to be hoisted up on the shoulders of big brown LeJeune in order to retrieve the bath brush that sailed atop a light fixture one grim Wednesday in November. Loomis had a theory that Lucinda Browning was so ice cold that she could chill scalding water with the stir of her toe. 

Because of these tantrums, there was a closet in the back hall so entirely devoted to the storing of pots, one had to step lightly when passing by, lest they wake the dead with all the clank and the clatter. On Bath Day, Hadley would take from the teetering stacks and line the kitchen floor with filled pots for the stove. It was a process, like slop chore, and they could almost do it in their sleep. Mama boiled water until the windows began to drip sweat, then Hadley pulled on the calico mitts that hung on a peg beside the burner and began the first of many tricky journeys upstairs. 

The record was twelve pots—twelve pots!—to heat a bathtub that was piped with hot water. Hadley would carry the steaming water up the back steps, place it outside the bathroom door, and knock once. Gaynell would then retrieve the pot, and Hadley would hear whoops and groans and hollers all the way back to the kitchen.

Most of the time, he was as irritated as everyone else by the process, muttering fantastic insults in his head with each new skin-melting slosh, but there were some things about Bath Day that Hadley never failed to look forward to. Each time he set the pot on the floor outside the bathroom door, for instance, he would tip his heated red face over the water and watch his reflection spread in ring-shaped ripples across the surface, all the while imagining where that water with his face on it was bound to end up. 

It was always the same daydream: because he was the one with a brain and his reflection was just a wavy, see-through thing, Hadley would convince his reflection to trade places with him. In this way, he was able to slip past the closed door into the whirling clouds of Lucinda’s bathroom and be poured into the tub. Meanwhile, his tricked reflection would have no choice but to go down for more water. 

Hadley could think of worse things than heating up Lucinda Browning’s ice-cold bones. 

In any case, the baths were a part of their lives now and life rolled along, week after week, in much the same way, with Mama sizing up cling peach cans for water-hauling potential and Hadley saving up any long buttercup-colored strands of hair that happen to fall on his person. Tantrums and Kewpies and redeye gravy filled up the years. And then one day, everything changed. 

Lucinda was twelve years old when she broke her leg during a rousing performance of the shim-sham. As a result, the shim-sham was, in part, responsible for a world of trouble in the life of young Hadley Crump.

One afternoon, in a moment of boredom, the bed-ridden girl announced that she was going to teach the servant children how to read. 

“I shall begin with Hadley Crump,” she said.

The following Monday, Hadley was pulled from egg-pickling and stood up half-dressed on a stool in the necessary. Mama scrubbed until he was sore, squeezed him into tight shoes, and sent him off to Lucinda’s room, wetting his hair with a licked thumb as he went. 

“Be nice to Miss Lucinda,” she instructed. 

It was funny she said that.

“I already learnt how to read,” he told Lucinda, picking at a loose thread on the corner of her blanket. A lesser boy would have faked illiteracy, but Hadley always bumbled lies and anyway, it didn’t occur to him to be anything but honest. 

By now he’d been at Browning House long enough to develop a taste for Lucinda’s snide ways. Loomis called her
Miss Fancy Pants
and
Bratty Patty
and sometimes
The White Tornado
, but Hadley would rather get a slug from Lucinda than a kiss from any other girl. 

“She’s too tall for a pipsqueak like you,” Loomis tried to tell him, at which time Hadley pointed out that he was exactly mouth-high to
The White Tornado’s
bosom. “No wonder you can’t see straight,” Loomis said. 

Now the girl wanted to watch him stutter through some baby primer like a complete imbecile. If only he could! “My Mama teached me with her Bible.”

“Thank heavens,” Lucinda said. “I hate giving lessons.”

“What are we gonna do then?” Hadley asked, praying she wouldn’t send him away.

“Well,” said Lucinda, “if you’ll promise to stop looking at me like you’re about to pee your britches, I might just let you join my club.”

“Club?” Hadley repeated with an unhappy shudder, for he did not know how to play bridge, or quilt, or dance cotillions, and these were the only clubs he could think of.

“It’s a secret club. That means you can’t tell anyone about it. Understand?”

“Does it have a name?”

“Of course, silly boy.
Readers of Violent Indefensible Lust and Evil.
”

“That’s too long to remember,” Hadley said.

“
V.I.L.E
. for short, you dummy. Anyway, it’s not like we’re going to have stationary. Now go and prize up that floorboard over by the window that has my boot on top of it.”

Under the floorboard was a little cranny the size of two books. Hadley was five minutes wiggling them out. 

“Finally,” Lucinda said, snatching the books from his fingers. “I didn’t think I was going get my hands on these until my leg improved.” She held up one of the books. “Ever read this?” 

Curly-Q letters spelled out the words
Anna Karenina
.

Lucinda laughed. “Of course you haven’t. No decent woman would let her son look at such a thing.”

“Why not?” Hadley asked, scratching at the curls his mama had spit down. 

“Read this part here.” Lucinda instructed. She tapped one of the pages.

Hadley read in a careful way, trying his best to sound schooled. Having nothing but the Bible to read, he was better with
impenitent
or
Amalekite
or
collop
than he was with non-Christian words.

And as the murderer, with fury, and, as it were, with passion, falls on the body, and drags it, and hacks at it—so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses.

“Filthy, isn’t it?” Lucinda sniggered.

“Is it?”

“Yes, you little nimrod. Anna Karenina is a married woman, and she isn’t married to the man who is murdering her with kisses. This is disgraceful, Hadley.”

“Should I put it back?”

“Not on your life. We’re going to read every unsavory word of it, and there’s going to be a test, too.”

“But I already told you, I read just fine.”

Lucinda, perhaps the world’s most accomplished sigher, sighed expertly. “Looks like I’ll have to teach you a thing or two. We’re going to read until Daddy fetches you back to work, then I’m going to let you borrow a book
. The Age of Innocence
. I want you to search through it tonight and find me the naughtiest passage you can come up with. Now hand me
Through the Looking Glass
over there.”

Lucinda put
Anna Karenina
inside a book called
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
. Then she fit the little monocle she fancied into position over her right eye and began to read to Hadley. Mostly it seemed boring, but he enjoyed the way she said the words as if she was telling him a secret. 

When it was time to go, she instructed him to hide
The Age of Innocence
down the front of his trousers until he could put it somewhere safe. This turned out to be an unnecessary and highly awkward precaution since Hadley’s mama didn’t have any idea that the book was evil. When she caught him looking at it under the covers, she said, “It was nice of Miss Lucinda to let you borrow a book.” 

Mama thought it impolite to turn down reading lessons from a Browning, even if you were already a reader. She was pleased as a tick on a fat man that Hadley was going to have a real book to look at. 

The way she smiled at
The Age of Innocence
tied his guts in a hundred and one knots of guilt, but the story seemed harmless enough. It was two in the morning before Hadley stumbled on something lurid. 

The next afternoon he read his naughty passage to Lucinda.

He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearth-rug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.

“Hmm,” Lucinda said, wrapping her finger with the chain of the tiger tooth necklace her daddy had recently brought her from India. “Where are the forbidden caresses?”

“Archer kissed her
shoe
,” Hadley said. “I would never kiss a lady’s crummy old shoe. He must really like her a lot to do that.”

Lucinda looked at him as if he had two heads. Then she grinned. “Hadley Crump, you dirty boy! For a downstairs domestic, you’re really rather brilliant.”

Encouraged by his brilliance, Hadley began staying up late, searching for the right thing to bring to Club. His mama gave him a stack of recipe cards that had been stained when the kitchen ceiling sprung a leak. Hadley would fill the cards with the lines he copied for Lucinda. 

From the kitchen of:

La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita-Dante

By Victor Marie Hugo

When he came to himself, he flung himself on the bed, rolling on it and pressing frenzied kisses on the pillow, which still bore the imprint of her head. Here he lay for some minutes, motionless as the dead, then rose, panting, crazed, and fell to beating his head against the wall with the appalling regularity of the stroke of a clock and the resolution of a man determined to break his skull.

It was glorious! Better still, Lucinda wasn’t the least afraid to read whole stunning paragraphs on the topic of marital relations. She seemed to enjoy it. If Hadley should have to say something embarrassing like
bust
or
naked,
he would clam up or stutter or say it real soft. Not Lucinda. Once, he whispered the words
long milky thigh
into her ear rather than suffering through the twitchy trial of saying them out loud. But Lucinda didn’t balk at thighs or nakedness. Hadley began to think that there was nothing the girl wouldn’t say. It became his life’s goal to test this theory. He studied her reaction to each dirty word like a scientist studies bacteria. Slang or profane, cuss or sacrilege, Lucinda’s boldness was awe-inspiring.

Even after her leg healed, Lucinda allowed Hadley to continue meeting with her under the pretext of reading lessons. It was not unusual that he would find a slip of violet paper on a dirty plate with something Lucinda had copied for him. He came to look forward to Lucinda’s notes almost as much as the club meetings. 

“You’re just another charity,” Loomis said of the
lessons
. “When rich people spend time with people like us they call it
civic duty.” 

Hadley wanted to whip out one of Lucinda’s notes and read it to Loomis in the worst possible way. Instead, he blurted out something entirely different. “I know what the ‘m’ stands for.”

Loomis gave him a dubious look and picked at a scab on his forehead. “Hell you do.”