The Reading Lessons (32 page)

“I think the time has come, yes.”

That started her laughing again. “What should I say, dear? Hmm? ‘You can’t have a crush on the gardener because the gardener might be your daddy.’ You’re the one who’s so worried about her tender little god damn feelings all the time. What do you think that would do to her?”

“Set her straight.” 

Lucinda snorted and rolled her eyes. 

“At least, she’d know to keep her hands to herself.”

At last, Lucinda looked appropriately queasy. “Jesus, Hadley.”

“It’s one thing to screw up our own lives. I won’t stand for seeing her life ruined too.”

“You know perfectly well that she might not even be your daughter.”

“She’s mine, Lucinda.”

“You can’t ever know that for sure.”

“It doesn’t matter. I would love her no less if I found out for certain she was Dickie’s. But she ain’t Dickie’s.” He handed her Nina’s note. “Read this.”

She held it close to her nose and squinted. 

Dearest Hadley,

I don’t care how old you are or that you have Negro blood. I can see you like me, too. Quit fighting what’s between us and give our love a chance. 

N

“What does this mean, Hadley? ‘I can see you like me, too’. What have you been doing with that girl?”

“I’m doing what I’ve always done, Lucinda: loving her from afar. She’s reading things into it because she wants to, and because she doesn’t know who I am. It’s wrong. We done a lot of wrong things, but this is the wrongest thing of all.”

If he lived a thousand years, he’d never forget the night Lucinda put his hand on her belly and said, “I’m gonna have a baby.”

He was seventeen and he’d just asked Flora Gibbs to be his bride. Lucinda was sitting on his bathroom floor. Hadley was in his underwear. “Is it mine, Lucinda?”

Every little thing in the world depended upon her answer, yet Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.” 

“Maybe? I’m supposed to give up everything for a maybe?” 

“That’s up to you, Hadley, but if you quit working for me, I swear to God, you will never know this baby.”

Some fellows might have liked the thought of that, but Hadley had the hopes and prayers of the Crump bloodlines resting on his shoulders. 

Lucinda started kissing him. Not on the mouth, but any place she could get one in at: his ribs, his knees, his elbows. 

I don’t care! I’ll choose Flora,
he decided.
I have to. I said I’d marry her.

He looked at the round soft swell of Lucinda’s belly. It was in there. A child. A child that belonged to him. A Crump.

Lucinda kissed his hand even as he twisted it away from her lips. “I’ll stay,” he said. “God damn you, I’ll stay. But not for you, Lucinda. For the baby . . . ” Four times. Dickie was all over Lucinda every night. Hadley had only been with her one night. Four times. 

“What do you figure the chances are?” he’d asked her after her stomach got big. He was touching it, and Hadley didn’t get to touch it much. In those days, touching the baby became a longing that rivaled the usual longings. 

“Unless it comes out looking like a straight-up Negro baby, I guess we’ll never know for certain whose it is,” Lucinda said.

“Do you want it to be mine?”

She put her hand over the top of his and pressed it to the child growing under her skin. “Regardless of who did it, she’s yours and mine.” Lucinda always called the baby a girl even before they knew it was Nina. “She’s what came of all those years of waiting. Dickie and I didn’t make a baby any of those other months, did we? This little angel came along to keep you and me together.”

There was many a night when Hadley wished it wasn’t true. Then he’d feel bad. He’d hurry up and whisper to the ceiling that separated him from her, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.” 

Mama had warned him. Lord, his entire heritage had warned him. “There’s a price to be paid if you do things the wrong way.” That’s what Mama said, but he’d been too young at the time to understand the half of it. 

Hadley paid the price every time he was forced to listen to Lucinda making love with Dickie. He watched Dickie put his lips on her stomach and sing
Cheerful Little Earful
at the breakfast table. He listened to Dickie propose names for Hadley’s baby like Pumpkin and Georgie. “I knew a girl named Georgie once, and she was a real firecracker.” Hell, Hadley was made to build the awful crib that Dickie designed on a wrinkled bar napkin in spite of the fact that it was a silly, drunken-looking piece of nonsense. Painted it scarlet red too, just like Dickie wanted, and who ever heard of a scarlet red baby crib? Oh, he paid all right. When Dickie had Hadley haul the heavy rocking horse he’d had as a boy down from the attic so they could use it for Ritzy (his latest choice of names), Hadley was fed up to his ears. “Leave him, Lucinda. Leave him now!” 

It seemed a matter of practicality at this point. If little Ritzy was made to ride that giant clunker of a rocking horse, she’d crack her skull in two.

Lucinda just smiled and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” 

Hadley said a prayer that Lucinda would give birth to the brownest baby anyone had ever seen. 

When it was time for the child to come, Lucinda decided against a midwife. She was a member of a group called the
National Twilight Sleep Association
whose aim it was to create a more perfect motherhood. Instead of doing things at home the regular old way, Dickie took Lucinda to the hospital for a
restful
birth. 

While Lucinda rested and gave birth in a twilight sleep, she contracted a terrible infection. A week later, the doctor informed her there would be no more children. Lucinda said this was just as well and named her new whiter-than-white baby “Nina Anna Worther-Holmes”. 

“The Anna is your part,” she told Hadley the first time he held the baby. By then, Nina Anna was a month old. It seemed only right to Hadley that his part should be in the middle. “And look,” Lucinda said. “God gave her your sulky eyes.”

If the baby’s sulky eyes weren’t enough to resolve the question, when Hadley opened the shades on the morning of Nina Anna’s first birthday, it seemed certain God was out to settle the matter once and for all. 

According to
A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening
, young wisteria plants could take up to fifteen years to bloom, yet at Wisteria Walk, every white wooden trellis exploded in a celebration of purple-pink that no other birthday gift could match. Nevermind that his affair with wisteria was a love/hate relationship, Hadley had always believed in the secret meaning of flowers. In order to get Wisteria plants to take off, a man was expected to toil relentlessly for years without seeing a single thing bloom. On June 3, 1922, less than three years after Hadley put down roots, the flowers spoke. 

Now his Nina Anna was seventeen, and he was scratching his head, trying to come up with a way to get the girl to stop making eyes at him for all the wrong reasons. 

“I know how we can put an end to this foolishness,” Lucinda brightly declared.

“Thank goodness for that. I’m about at my wit’s end.” 

“It’s easy, Hadley. All we have to do is get her to hate you.” 

Lucinda was serious as a heart attack, which only made her suggestion all the more painful. “Why don’t you just beat my brains in with a brick,” Hadley said. “That would hurt me a hundred times less.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to leave then. I can’t tell her you might be her daddy. My whole life would collapse.”

“And mine won’t if I have to leave her?”

“Don’t forget, dear, you’d be leaving me, too. I’m tired of playing second fiddle to that girl.”

Now that was funny!

 “Nina says the same of you.”

“Well, you can’t leave us, Hadley, so you got no other choice.”

“Yes I do,” Hadley said. “I’m gonna find myself a woman.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Nina sees I’ve got a woman, she’ll have to leave me alone.”

Lucinda was wearing the sort of scowl that foreshadowed broken lamps. “You wouldn’t use a woman like that,” she said.

“After all I’ve done in order to be with Nina, do you really think I’d let anything stop me now?”

“Flora Gibbs wouldn’t take you back, even if she is an old maid librarian.”

“No,” Hadley said. “Not Flora. Never mind. I should have thought of this weeks ago. Nina thinks I don’t have anyone. She thinks I’m lonely as sin. She’s right on both accounts.”

“Well!” Lucinda said. “I didn’t realize your were such a sorry case, Hadley Crump.”

“Well I am,” he said.

 “How about a parting gift before you move along?”

“I thought you said he’d be back soon?”

“Shut up.” For the second time that afternoon, the dress came off. “There’s been entirely too much talking going on here today.”

###

“What’s going on here?” Dickie demanded. 

Lucinda looked like Fanny Hill after a night of selling her virginity on the streets. Her hair was pointing one way and her dress the other. Hadley barely got his trousers up before Dickie, who was known to break all varieties of locks, shattered the lock on the Reading Room door. 

“Jesus, Dickie,” Lucinda grunted. “There’s no body here but Hadley.”

“And why is
he
here?” Dickie wanted to know.

“Why do you think?” Lucinda said. “We were discussing the new floor.”

“With the door locked?”

Dickie had graduated from M.U., but that didn’t make him bright. Lucinda had been duping the man for a long time now. She said, “Damn it, Hadley, I told you to fix that knob last week. Guido was stuck in here for a half hour on Saturday.”

Dickie looked around the room and sniffed.
He’s gonna rip my head off,
Hadley thought.
 

Dickie squinted at Hadley. “Naw,” he said, speaking as if he were in the middle of a conversation with himself. 

Hadley had long suspected that Dickie’s dumbness stemmed from his trusting nature. Dickie trusted that he lived in a world where women like Lucinda would never allow half-breed-gardeners like Hadley to lay a finger on them. If Dickie believed they were discussing flooring with the door locked, this was only because it was easier for him to believe than the notion that his wife would let Hadley touch her. 

We could be naked and he’d refuse to think the worst,
Hadley thought. But then Dickie cracked his knuckles a mere two inches from Hadley’s nose. “Fix the door, Crump. I’ve got my eye on things, don’t think I don’t.”

It was a warning.

In twenty years they’d never come close to getting caught by Dickie. Tilly, yes. Tilly might not have graduated from M.U., but that didn’t make her dim. When Narcissa first started in the kitchen, Tilly said, “Don’t you smile at this one now. I jest got her learnt on canning.”

“What do you mean?” Hadley said.

“I sees the way she watches you.”

“Narcissa?”

“Don’t act the fool with me,” she said, facing him down with her pecan leaf. “Ain’t no body likes
reading
so much as Missus Worther-Holmes. Iffin’ she fires Narcissa, I’m gonna start hiding burrs in your trousers to remind you to keep ‘em on.”

Dickie tucked a wild curl behind Lucinda’s ear and stalked out of the Reading Room.

I need a woman,
Hadley thought.

A woman would set things right in so many ways, and Hadley was sure he wouldn’t be using her. On the contrary, he’d be the most grateful man alive. Lucinda could be jealous as a demon, but this time she would have to go along with it. 

Maybe this’ll turn out to be a good thing,
he thought.
Maybe Dickie won’t have to kill me after all.
 

That only left the question of who. Who would want him after all these years? 

Hadley was thirty-five years old, and he’d hardly kissed anyone other than Lucinda. He hadn’t wooed a girl since he was seventeen and things had ended badly that time around. He couldn’t so much as think of Flora without breaking out in a rash.

As he ran through the short list of possible dinner dates in his head, Hadley realized that he didn’t know any women. To make matters worse, he didn’t know the first thing about them. He only knew about Lucinda, and he was pretty sure she didn’t represent the gender particularly well. He’d let her carve him up pretty bad over the years, too. Hadley had the body of a man who’d decided long ago that he wasn’t going to need it for anything except Lucinda Worther-Holmes. The thought of explaining himself to someone new was enough to make celibacy look like the only alternative to what he already had. 

Over the years, he’d developed a rather uneasy relationship with pain. As far as he could figure, something got wrecked in his brain when he let Lucinda drink his blood. The damage was permanent. It was entirely possible he might want things that only Lucinda knew how to give. 

Nope. Much as he liked the idea of finding a woman to love, that was completely out of the question. Hadley reckoned he’d best settle for finding someone who would have coffee with him and
look,
to Nina, like a girlfriend. 

###

“Hells bells,” Lucinda said the day after Hadley found himself a date. “Just because Nina doesn’t know the first thing about men, doesn’t mean she’s going to buy a femme fatale called Vaseline Jenkins. No one is that dumb.” 

How she’d found out about the hostess from the
Dinner Bell
was anybody’s guess. “What’s wrong with her name?” Hadley said. “I think it’s pretty.”

 “Pretty?” At that particular moment, he was trailing Lucinda out the door of Warson’s Department, and she came to the sort of grinding halt that would have had an untrained man spilling boxes everywhere. Not Hadley. Hadley had a talent for managing enormous amounts of crap. His all-time record was five hat boxes, one pair of jersey gloves, one Hudson seal wrap, and four pairs of shoes. “Why not just call her Diaper Rash?”

 “I think she’s called Vassie.”

 “And did you make whoopee with Mrs. Diaper Rash Jenkins after your dinner date?” Lucinda wanted to know.