Mr. Browning gave Hadley the same agitated sigh that his daughter had been giving him for years. “Let me spell it out for you, boy. Muggins has never married. Muggins will never marry. He is of the sort who enjoys fraternizing with his hired help. His hired help are all young men of color. Boys, to be exact. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Hadley’s ears warmed.
Mr. Browning smacked the table, rattling ink bottles and tipping over a cup of old feather pens. “Arthur Muggins uses his so-called ‘laborers’ until they get too old, and then he hires new boys to take their place. If his backyard is any indication, old would seem to be about twenty-five. Not a good career move for you, I’m thinking, even if being used in such a way by your employer appeals to you for some odd reason.”
Hadley kept quiet by sticking the tip of his tongue under his molars. It was horrifying to realize that Muggins may, in fact, be after a similar arrangement to the one Hadley already had. He thought back to the backyard on Morning Dew Circle. Indeed, the whole house had been over-flowing with young men such as him.
“Don’t look so down in the mouth now,” Mr. Browning said, re-pointing his beard and smiling cheerily. “I have a solution that I think might serve us all.” He laid a hand on Lucinda’s shoulder. “Miss Browning wishes to hire you as her gardener for her new home on Treebourne Street.”
At first Hadley wasn’t sure who Miss Browning was. Then Miss Browning nudged his ankle with her toe.
Hadley scratched at a scab of dirt on his trousers and tried not to hear the rubbery twist of taffy being stretched between her teeth. “I’d like to make my own way, thank you.”
“Nonsense, boy. There’ll be no peace for you at Muggins, and if you don’t work for Muggins, where will you work? I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how people feel about half-casts. You might consider yourself what my daddy used to call a passer, but, like it or not, your mother is Negro, and you go to the Negro church. Not everyone is as enlightened as we are at Browning House. Most people won’t touch a chromey with a ten foot pole, Arthur Muggins’ pole not withstanding.”
Hadley watched Lucinda lick pastel goo off her thumb.
“Now then, you want your independence, and I don’t blame you. I believe working for my daughter is the perfect compromise. We won’t be losing a faithful employee, and you’ll have your own work away from your mother.”
Lucinda’s toes picked that particular moment to begin scissoring up the inside of Hadley’s calve. Hadley sat up straight in his chair. “I’ve already begun packing,” he said, as if all his belongings couldn’t be thrown in a shoebox in two minutes flat.
Mr. Browning clapped his hands. “Wonderful. We’ll move you over with Lucinda when the time comes.”
Lucinda’s foot made a swift traverse of Hadley’s knee, and when he tried to shift away, her toes followed his leg. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir.”
Mr. Browning sighed spectacularly. “Why ever not?” Lucinda slid the arch of her foot up Hadley’s thigh and pressed her toes firmly between his legs. Hadley inhaled too fast and choked on his spit.
Thanks to Lucinda Browning, Hadley was a man who knew what broom handles tasted like. Even so, he had not been touched so specifically since Lucinda gouged his throat with her tiger tooth. He seriously considered directing Mr. Browning’s attention to Lucinda’s foot under the table. Lucinda smiled around her taffy, confident that he would never do any such directing. In the meantime, she slid her toes and squeezed her toes and walked her toes until Hadley felt as dizzy as a man wearing a winter suit at a summer picnic. She did it so thoroughly that Hadley wasn’t sure he wanted to do anything that would make Lucinda put her foot back in her shoe. It was uncomfortable, truly, but even so, Hadley thought his best revenge might be to let it go on for as long as possible. When he stopped chocking on his spit, he said; “I just don’t know, Mr. Browning.”
Mr. Browning posed some pretty convincing arguments. He offered more money. More holidays. Bigger quarters. He informed Hadley that several of Muggin’s nigs had been found twirling from trees in Moon Woods. Hadley figured Lucinda was working up as much of a sweat as he was, what with all the convincing arguments going on.
“I thought you’d never say yes,” she grumbled when they left the study together five long minutes later.
Hadley had made himself wait until he could stand it no longer before agreeing to move in with Lucinda. By then, he hardly heard his own voice saying okay. He only knew he’d made Lucinda work hard to sway him.
After Mr. Browning shut the door, Hadley yanked Lucinda around the corner into the Rose Bud parlor. Anyone could have heard him: a gossipy maid, Mr. Browning, or his own mother.
Hadley didn’t care. “I want you, Lucinda,” he said, pulling her body against his own. “In the normal way this time. No Dracula stuff. No drinking poison to prove it. If you feel like you can’t marry me, that’s not my fault. I’ll work at your fancy new house like I said I would, but if you want to put your toes in my lap while your daddy is staring me dead in the eye, you damned well better do it in private, too. I ain’t gonna like watching you with Dickie. Only one thing will make it worth my while.” Hadley jabbed a finger at her nose. “That’s the real deal, Lucinda, the deal your daddy can’t make. Now, what do you say?”
Lucinda’s eyes turned wrathfully blue. “Good Lord, Hadley. Who do you think you are?”
Hadley didn’t rightly know who he was. He only knew that he aimed to get something out of all this for himself. If Lucinda wanted to play with him, why shouldn’t he work out a deal that would give him something in return? “I can’t hardly think straight any more, you got me so tied up in knots.”
Lucinda lifted the circle that was his arms and took him off like a soiled dress. “Well now, we need to get you thinking straight again, don’t we, Crump?” She slipped her hand, still sticky with taffy, down the front of his baggy trousers.
One touch was all it took.
Lucinda unfolded her handkerchief and wiped her hand with it. “Don’t try and give me orders, Hadley. It’s ugly and no one likes an ugly boy. I feel sure that old chicken hawk Muggins would back me up on this. There’s only one ‘deal’ dear, and this is it: You play nice, I’ll give the orders, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll both get what we want.”
When she left, he slumped against the rose buds, his knees rubbery as taffy and his heart galloping with a powerful excitement born of fear or joy--he didn’t know which. From her permanent place above the mantle, Mrs. Browning stared at him, chin cocked in a wondering sort of way.
###
On June 1, 1920, Lucinda M. Browning became Mrs. Richard Worth-Holmes Junior and moved into the crown jewel of the new housing track on Treebourne Street, four blocks over from Browning House. The young bride christened her three-story mansion, Wisteria Walk, despite its mud lawn and distinct lack of wisteria. “That’s why I’m bringing you along. Personality.”
As Lucinda’s gardener, Hadley’s first job was to learn all he could about growing wisteria, a subject on which he was about to become a keen expert. He began his new lessons much like he began his reading lessons: with a book.
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.
&n
bsp; --“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-Holme
s 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.
The Reading Lessons Page 8