The Reading Lessons (34 page)

When Hadley got home, there was a note under his front door. 

Who’s the Negro lady?

Hadley smiled and sat down to write his first note to Nina Worther-Holmes. He no longer favored recipe cards for such work. Instead, he used the pad of paper Tilly had given him that advertised for Omo Washing Powder. Underneath the words
OMO ADDS BRIGHTNESS TO WHITENESS
, Hadley wrote:
Just a friend.

“Friend?!” Nina screeched the next morning after Hadley had been summoned from the wild flower patch to drive Nina into Hartsville. No sooner had he slid behind the driver’s wheel when the girl started railing at him. “You don’t have any
friends,
Hadley. In all the years you’ve been with us, I’ve never known you to have a single friend.” 

She sat in the backseat, stiff as a china doll, twisting a pair of gloves in her hand. Every time she said the word
friend,
she slapped the gloves against her palm.

Hadley planned to get through the tirade by staying professional. He steered the Phantom toward Hartsville, even though it was obvious that their destination was of no real consequence. 

“If you’ll excuse me for saying so, Miss Nina, what I do on my day off is my own business.” 

“There’s just one thing I’d like to know, Mr. Crump: What does this new
friend
of yours have that I don’t have?” Her glove cracked extra loud again against the cup of her hand.

Hadley kept his eyes on the road. “For one thing, she’s a woman. A divorcee, if you catch my meaning?”

“Being course will not dissuade me from the subject at hand.”

“What will?” he asked.

“Nothing. You ought to know that by now. Anyway, I don’t believe for one second that you actually care about this so-called
friend
of yours.”

“You like to think you know me, Miss Nina, but you don’t. You don’t know anything about me.”

They locked eyes in the rectangle of the rear view mirror. Nina smiled. “I know you peek in my room at night. I’ve seen you do it a million times.”

Hadley was always careful to use his Negro Servant voice when speaking to Nina and the boys. A Negro Servant voice, as every Negro servant knows, has a distinctly chipper ring that requires a small spurious smile to be effective. Gone were the days when a servant must remain silent around family and guests, but a cheery unschooled way of speaking was always appreciated and practically a tool of the trade. When it came to Nina, Hadley sometimes found himself straying from his side of the species. This would never do. 

He strapped on his best lackey grin. “It’s my job to check the house before I go to bed.”

“You’re the gardener, Hadley. What are you checking for? Grub worms?”

“I like to make sure the house is secure, that’s all.”

“Why can’t you admit that you care for me?” she said. “Is it because I’m white? I think of you as white, you know. You look white.” 

A tiger-colored cat sprung in front of the car, and Hadley swerved a little more than necessary to miss it. Nina sat so rigid, she barely moved.

“Is it because I’m younger?” Nina asked. “My friend Ludie Waits is married to a man older than you and everyone says they’re a perfect match. Why do you fight it, Hadley? Every time you look at me, I see something extra in your eyes.” 

Hadley made the mistake of looking at her in the mirror again. 

“There!” she said. “There it is now!” 

He pulled off the road and twisted in his seat to face her. “I’m gonna have to quit working for your family if you keep this up, Miss Nina. Is that what you want?”

“Would you love me then?” 

There was no more glove-slapping by this point. Only big fat glistening tears. In that awful moment, those teary eyes were worse than the eyes of Flora Gibbs, and Flora Gibbs’ eyes haunted him like indigestion.

Hadley wanted to take Nina by the shoulders and scream,
But I do love you! I love you more than anything!

“No,” he said. “No matter how old you are or who I work for, I can’t never be what you want me to be.”

Nina covered her face with her hands. “You are the worst thing to ever happen to me, Hadley Crump.”

Every word was a knife in his heart, a pain that took him back to Flora Gibbs. 

The last time he’d seen Flora, it was three in the morning in a middle of a rainstorm. 

“What are you doing?” she asked when she found him on her porch. 

It was the same night he’d taken her to the Salamander Club to celebrate her birthday. The same night Lucinda told him about the baby. 

“Your swing needs a new chain,” he said. He was already half-way through the job.

Flora came out in Mr. Gibb’s bathrobe, holding her hands tucked up under her armpits. “It’s the middle of the night. Can’t this wait?”

He ripped the old chain down with a clatter. “No.”

Rain poured off the gutters, forming a cage around the porch.

“I see.”

Hadley hooked the new chain in place and tried not to look at her. “I brought that, too,” he said, motioning to the leather mail organizer he’d got as a Phoetus gift the year before. “It’s for your mail.” 

Tears pooled in Flora’s eyes, and even though he tried not to see them, he saw them. He would see them forever and ever. “I’ve got something for you, too,” she whispered. “Wait here.” 

A minute later, she returned with the spoon. 

Taking back Alabama was the hardest thing he’d ever lived through, until Nina asked him for his love.

###

“I don’t know about you, Hadley, but I ain’t had a good roll in the hay in quite some time.” Vassie nudged him with her knee and blew a smoke ring at the moon. “We’ve had a lot of laughs, you and me, and I like all the funny stuff you know about flowers. Mama’s keeping the ziggaboos til noon tomorrow. I ain’t gonna expect an engagement ring if you stay the night with me.” 

It was their fifth date, and Hadley had gone out on a limb and taken Vaseline to see
Devil’s Island
at the Starlite Negrotorium. In the six years the picture palace had been open, he’d kept away for fear he might run into a certain painful person from his past. In fact, he’d given up quite a few modernities for this reason, but Vassie had a way of making him want to do things he would never ordinarily want to do. When she said she’d like to see a movie, Hadley was sure he’d be looking over his shoulder all night long for Flora, but once they settled on the bench and the lights went down and the picture came up, he completely forgot all his cares. It was a wonderful evening and, like most of their dates, he walked her back to the big lilac foursquare on Mayhew Lane where a wooden sign painted by her oldest son advertised Darratu in the front window. 

Seeing how it was a house of boys, the lilac had surprised him the first time he saw it. Vassie told him that she and the kids had painted it a week after she gave her husband the boot. She wanted her cologne water business to take off, and she figured a
lady color
would stir up attention. And it had. The place stood out on Mayhew like a pearl button in a bed of slag. Vassie’s husband, Peach, had inherited money when they were first married, and they’d use it to purchase a home. The judge in Divorce Court awarded the lilac house to Vassie after hearing all she’d suffered at the hands of Peach Jenkins, which was just as well since she hadn’t seen or heard from him since. Sitting on the front stoop under the stars, you couldn’t hardly see the busted window young Armstrong had cracked with his slingshot when he was hunting birds, or even spot the eggplant-colored dormer that came to be after the lilac paint ran out. In the dark, it was pretty as a dollhouse.

This evening when they sat on the stoop, Vassie put her head on his shoulder, started humming
Mood Indigo
, and lit up a reefer. 

Mr. Shithead sometimes ran low on cash, she said, so he gave her a lumpy envelope of cigarettes instead. He always came through with the money in a day or so. Vassie stashed her “bonuses” in a Saltine box and smoked them sparingly. Hadley didn’t even do cigars and almost never touched a drop of hooch, but when she passed him the cigarette, he was curious to see what it would be like.

Smoking on Vassie’s front steps, he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d spelled him with her magic cologne water. Smoking hop surely wasn’t his thing, and he didn’t go to movies in blackie town, either, yet here he was, his heart pounding, his bones knocked loose, and his head floating like a helium balloon. For some reason, his helium head greatly tickled him. When she asked if he wanted to stay the night, he opened his mouth, fully expecting a lie to pop out about how he had to get home and fix something. 

“Okay,” popped out instead.

 “Okay?” she said. “Okay what?”

“Okay, what you said about staying the night.”

Vassie shrugged her shoulders. “Only if you want to.”

“Are you chickening out?”

“I’m not too good at this. I was married to the same man for ten years, and I almost never go anyplace with anyone older than this here pair of shoes.”

Smoking made Hadley laugh louder than normal. “So you
do
want an engagement ring?”

“Hell no. I ain’t too keen on marriage right now, thank you very much.”

It was a relief to realize that Vassie was uncomfortable, too.

“I mean, I’ve been with some men in my time, Hadley. Maybe even ten or twelve.”

“Oh.”

She slid her fingers through his hair. “In any case, I think I might know how to handle a school boy like you.”

Hadley dropped the cigarette and crushed it with his shoe. “Show me.”

Ten minutes later, they were in bed inside the lilac house, and Hadley reached over and turned off the bedroom lamp. 

Vassie turned on the lamp. “I want to see you,” she said. “You been real fun to look at so far.”

That’ll change,
Hadley thought. Vassie was down to her birthday suit, and he still had on everything except his shirt. When she made a move for his trousers, he covered her fingers with his own to stop her.

“You timid, Hadley? I bet you’ve gotten a lot a tail in your time, a sweet ‘ole sugar lump like you?”

“Nope.” 

It felt strange being in her bed. Strange but also nice. Hadley almost never got a chance to make love in a bed. The room was filled with the rosey scent of her
Queen for an Hour
bath salts, and she sat on his legs looking at him like he was Jesus come to save her soul. Hadley reached up and loosened the pins in her hair and slid the hairnet off. A thousand corkscrew curls sprung free and trembled past her shoulders. 

“Beautiful,” he sighed.

“I know one thing,” she said. “You can’t be half as sweet as you look.” With those words, she unbuttoned the top of his trousers.

“Lord have mercy!” 

Hadley switched off the lamp.

Vaseline switched on the lamp. 

There was a bottle of Thunderbird on the nightstand, and she poured herself a shot. She poured him one, too. “What is
that
?” she asked, waving at his tattoo.

“A souvenir,” Hadley said.

“Yeah? I got a few of them, too, only mine are called stretch marks. Mary, Jesus and Joseph! That’s weird.”

Hadley sat up and pulled on his shirt. “This was a bad idea.”

“Aw, now. Don’t be so skittish, honey. We all got our quirks.”

Hadley buttoned up his shirt. “I got a lot of quirks, Vassie.”

Vassie unbuttoned his shirt. “Show me.” 

Six hours later, he was in bed, and Hadley reached over and turned on the lamp. 

The clock read 4 a.m. “Are you nuts?” he asked. 

“I miss you badly. Do you miss me?” 

He pulled Lucinda’s hand out of his pants. He hadn’t been home but an hour or so, and he wasn’t expecting to see Lucinda. “Dickie is gonna blow my brains out if he catches you in here.” 

In the seventeen years since Hadley had moved into his own house, Lucinda had never visited him in the middle of the night. They’d agreed to play it safe before the first brick was ever laid. It was one thing to sneak off to a room they both had business in. Lucinda had no business in Hadley’s house. Steering clear of his bed was the one and only rule they’d come up with in a relationship that thrived on breaking rules. 

“Has Diaper Rash Jenkins been touching you? Is that why you’re not interested?”

“Your husband is asleep next door,” he snapped. “How’s that for a reason?” 

“I don’t care about that fat pig,” she said. She pulled the sorriest face Hadley had ever seen, sticking her lip out like she was twelve years old. “I’m jealous, Hadley. I can’t stand the thought of you being with another woman.”

Hadley closed the bedroom window for fear someone might hear her snivling. Honesty from Lucinda was harder to take than scheming and conniving. “What do you expect me to do, Lucinda? Nina has made it all but impossible for me to stay here.”

She put his hand on her cheek and pressed it into her skin with the fan of her fingers. If Hadley didn’t know better, he would have thought she looked like a woman with a broken heart. “Do you have feelings for Vaseline Jenkins?”

He loathed when she called Vassie
Diaper Rash,
yet he wished she would call her Diaper Rash now. He knew how to fight with Lucinda. He didn’t think he liked fighting with her, but seeing her tender made his stomach sick. “Come on, Lucinda. Get out of here before you get us both killed.”

“I can’t.” A tear trailed down the back of his hand, followed by another. “Hold me, Hadley. Please, just hold me.”

He tore his hand away from her face and balled it in a fist. It was wrong of her to come in his house and try to ruin the first chance he’d had in years of finding something good in his life. He wanted to throttle her for being so selfish. There were dark, seething moments when he hated her more than he loved her, and this was one of those dark, seething moments.

“Please, Hadley.” She pulled his arms around her and sobbed against his chest. 

Hadley grit his teeth and held her like a bag of feed. He wished he was a boa constrictor so he could squeeze the life out of her. He wished Dickie would break through the front door and shoot her full of holes.