Latha didn’t have a bookmark for the book so she left it open face down on her seat, and took the toddy up to Mrs. Cardwell.
“If you’re going to read, you’d better read in your room with the door open so you’ll hear me calling,” Mrs. Cardwell said.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Latha said. “Will that be all, ma’am?”
“For now. Leave your door open.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Latha said, and ran downstairs to get her book and take it up to her room.
It took Latha over a week to learn all the things that she was expected to do and not do. In time she learned that all of the other servants in other fine houses around this part of Tennessee were black people, but Mrs. Cardwell did not hire Negroes. Latha never learned if this was because she didn’t like them or because she sympathized with them so much she wouldn’t turn them into servants. The maid named Hope had taken with her a pair of silver candlesticks, and Mrs. Cardwell was furious. She tongue-lashed Rodney, her chauffeur, who had given Hope a ride into town without knowing that she had the candlesticks in her luggage. “Was she putting out for you?” Latha overheard the woman shouting at him. “Do you know how much those candlesticks were worth?” Latha heard the chauffeur trying to argue that he had no idea Hope had taken anything with her.
Rodney was an efficient but sullen chauffeur. He lived in his own room over the garage, and only came into the house when Mrs. Cardwell needed him to perform a handyman’s task, like hanging a picture or fixing the plumbing. He was young and fairly good-looking, although his eyes were rather demonic, as if he were constantly on the look-out for something evil to do. When he wasn’t driving or polishing the limousine, he did all of the yard work, keeping the lawns mowed and the flowers watered and the shrubs trimmed. When it was hot, he would take off his shirt. He had finely developed muscles.
On the rare occasions when Latha found herself alone with him—he took his meals in the kitchen at the same table she did but Sadie the cook was usually present—if Sadie stepped out of the kitchen, he would start flirting with Latha in a very coarse way, saying things like, “Babe, when d’ye aim to sneak up to my room in the middle of the night?” or he would grab his crotch and say, “I got a nice big present fer ye!” Whenever Mrs. Cardwell took Latha with her when they rode into town to do grocery shopping, Rodney would turn those creepy eyes of his on her in the rear-view window, and if he caught her looking back at him he’d pucker up his mouth and smack his lips at her. Once when he had her alone for a moment he said, “You ort to’ve asked Hope what a real loverboy I am.”
On one of the trips into town, Mrs. Cardwell took Latha to a department store and bought her some new clothes and shoes, as well as some cosmetics and cologne. It was much more than she had ever dreamed of buying for herself. This finery was for use only on the trips into town. At work and around the house she always had to wear her maid’s uniform. But whenever she was dressed in her new things to wear into town, Rodney would ogle her and make gestures and, if he caught her away from Mrs. Cardwell, he would say “Gimme a kiss, babe,” or even “We got time for a blow-job in the backseat.”
Once Latha overheard Mrs. Cardwell saying to Rodney, “All you want is to work your will on that poor girl. Do it if you must, but the moment I catch wind of it, you are unemployed. Out of work. Jobless. And unpaid. Is that clear?” Latha heard him grumble, “Yes’m,” but within hours or even minutes he would be after her again.
Latha reflected that if he’d possessed even an ounce of chivalry or just plain old good manners, she might have yielded to his flirtations, because she often felt desirous, but he was so straightforward and tactless and lecherous that he repelled her. She was convinced he never thought of her as a person but just as a starched maid’s dress with a serviceable mannequin inside it. Whenever he got a chance to speak to her out of earshot of Mrs. Cardwell, he would say, “You aint nothing but a cunt.”
Once when he said that, she replied, “You aint nothing but a prick.”
He was shocked for only a moment, and then he said, “Wal, honeybunch, pricks and cunts are meant for only one thing together, and it’s the best thing on earth.” His face was so close to hers that she could smell the tobacco on his breath. Mrs. Cardwell was very strict about allowing no smoking anywhere on her property or in her limousine, but each afternoon when Mrs. Cardwell took her regular nap of one hour, Rodney would sneak out to the woods behind the garage and try to see how many cigarettes he could smoke in one hour. To Latha he claimed that he had smoked fifteen and was on his way to twenty. His thumbs and forefingers were stained yellow.
Latha was on call at all hours seven days a week, but Mrs. Cardwell permitted Rodney to have Saturday evenings off, and to take the limousine into town, provided he did not smoke in it.
Mrs. Cardwell told Latha, “I can only assume he frequents brothels.”
“Ma’am?” said Latha. “I don’t know who they are.”
“Whores,” Mrs. Cardwell said. “There are several establishments in town which provide sensual relief for men who can afford them. My scoundrelly late husband Richard was not above making use of their services. But I am not ashamed to say it, and I did not fault him for it, because it provided me with some relief. And you might consider that if Rodney did not have his whores in town, he would be all the more bothersome toward you.”
There were times, not often, when Latha did not know whether this was a blessing or a damnation. She reflected upon the fact that there were actual houses where such prostitutes received men, but she had never heard of the equivalent for women. Weren’t there any men for hire anywhere? She considered asking Mrs. Caldwell, but she had the impression the woman would prefer not to give thought to the matter of carnal desires. One day she did ask Sadie the cook. Sadie was just a plump, plain country woman, a good cook. She slept in a small room behind the kitchen. When Rodney wasn’t around, Latha came right out and asked her, “Sadie, what does a girl who wants some loving do to get it hereabouts?”
“There’s Rodney,” Sadie said, “you can have him.”
“I don’t want him,” Latha said.
“Me neither,” said Sadie.
Latha read all of the books by David Grayson in the library, and then started on a set by a Frenchman named Marcel Proust. She picked at random Within a Budding Grove because she liked the sound of the title, and she tried for a week to read it but just could not get interested in it. It was nicely written, but the sentences were just too long and complicated and sometimes a single paragraph went on for pages and pages. It was like trying to run or to swim or to make love non-stop. She looked around the library in despair and wondered if most all of those books bound so prettily in leather and cloth were as hard to read as this Proust fellow.
One of her many jobs was to dust the books, a complicated business, and she wondered why it was necessary since no one but herself was interested in them. Mrs. Cardwell spent her time crocheting, or knitting, or embroidering, or painting china. Sometimes she went out in the yard to show Rodney where to plant things and where to weed. Latha thought of offering to weed but she didn’t want to work with Rodney and she really had her hands full with her house chores. Dusting the library books was an all-day job.
One day when Mrs. Cardwell had Rodney drive her to visit some relatives in town, Latha was pulling out each book of a four-volume set called The Romance of Moths, by William Potter. It had never occurred to her that there was anything romantic about moths, at least not the ones she remembered in Stay More, who liked to commit suicide on the coal oil lamps. She opened Volume One and saw that the title on the title page was The Romance of Lust. She looked at the spine again, and detected that someone had hand-lettered “Moths” on a piece of leather that was pasted over the word “Lust”. That was true of each of the four volumes. She riffled through the pages and was amazed to discover that there were many pictures of naked women—photographs, etchings, drawings, paintings. In Volume Two there were many pictures of naked women with naked
men in passionate embrace. When she pulled out Volume Three, she heard a latch click and the whole section of bookcase swung out like a door. Behind it was a cabinet with bookshelves that contained many volumes she had not seen before, with titles like My Secret Life, The Illustrated Piero Aretino, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, and Pretty Little Games for Young Ladies and Gentlemen with Good Old English Sports and Pastimes. She opened the latter and saw that it contained ten plates by an artist named Thomas Rowlandson depicting several lascivious goings-on between men and women.
All the books were dusty, and Latha wondered if she ought to dust them, but decided she wasn’t supposed to know of their existence, and she could only assume that neither did Mrs. Cardwell. There were drawers in the cabinet, and Latha pulled out each of these to discover oriental comic strip art depicting Japanese women and men with enormous dingers making furious love, and piles of magazines with titles like La Vie Parisienne and The Pearl, each issue devoted to the pleasures of the flesh. On the spot Latha learned new words for the old sexual language, such as calling the penis “his love dart.” She also discovered an oddity: verbal descriptions of the act of love are more exciting than graphic depictions of it, although there were all manner of the latter, in drawers full of French postcards, etchings, drawings and little eight-page booklets that were like comic strips in which intercourse and fellatio were caricatured. Latha reflected that Richard Cardwell must have had a real obsession, and she wished she had known him. There were pictures and portraits of him around the house, and he was a very handsome and dashing gentleman. Who would have guessed that this was how he spent his time in the library?
After a couple of hours, Latha realized that she was seeping with desire. Her panties were soaked. If Rodney had been around, she could have gone out and thrown herself into his arms. But she could not stop reading and looking. It was the most amazing day she’d ever lived, and she would not know another day like it during the seven dull years she spent at Lombardy Alley.
Chapter twenty-six
Although there were many spells during those seven years when Mrs. Cardwell was so ill that she had to be confined to her bed for days at a stretch, leaving Latha with plenty of freedom to spend all her time in the library when she wasn’t nursing or feeding the woman, Latha was never again able to open the secret cabinet and bookshelf, because she could not reduplicate the sequence of movements of volumes of The Romance of Moths (Lust) which had caused the latch to open the first time. She was sure that simply removing Volume Three had done it, but as many times as she tried it she could never get it to happen again. She even removed all the books from that shelf, and pried around for a crevice or some device that caused the secret bookshelf to open, but the pleasure trove remained hidden from her for all of those years. She had to content herself (if that is the way to put it) with the four volumes of The Romance of Lust, which she read cover to cover more than once, except for Volume Four, which was devoted to acts that caused pain or degradation. Volume Three was devoted to acts that involved the mouths of the partners, and had a frontispiece of a man standing with a woman upside down wrapping her legs around his neck with his tongue licking her genitals while her mouth encased his dinger. There were also vivid written descriptions of the ecstasies that partners could give each other with their mouths and tongues, and once again Latha concluded that words are better than pictures.
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.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 68