“Not all carousels have horses with glass eyeballs or real horsehair tails,” Flora told him. “And anyway, I couldn’t ride those other fun-fair merry-go-rounds. We’re really lucky they started having Open Ride.”
On top of the carousel was a blinking sign that read: THE AMAZING FLYING WHIRLIGIG! And under this, in tinier letters: Recommended by Dr. Herman T. Stokes as an aid in circulating the blood. Flora said it wasn’t every day that something that was fun turned out to be good for you.
On their first visit, Hadley had grabbed the brass ring and won a free ride. Flora had looked so proud, you’d think he’d just cured polio. He’d been getting straw dumped on his head when he grabbed for the ring every Sunday since, but Flora was proud of him for trying.
Every Sunday they would ride the carousel then head down to the river to read The Sea Wolf on the blue and white Cake Stand quilt that Flora had made with her Granny Gus. Thanks to Flora, Hadley was having a fine time reading a nice book with a girl for a change. The Sea Wolf had Maud Brewster, of course, and a fair share of profanity, but the hero was a gentleman. Lucinda would have hated Hump’s gentlemanliness. “Jack London is so good, I don’t even miss the romantic stuff,” Hadley told Flora one day while they were spreading out the quilt.
“What do you mean? The Sea Wolf is brimming with romance. There’s nothing more romantic than seeing new places.”
Hadley had never thought of it that way before. When Lucinda talked about romance, she was talking about people tearing off each other’s clothes. He liked the fired-up sparks he saw in Flora’s eyes when she spoke of visiting new places.
“Nothing makes my heart beat faster than taking off for parts unknown,” she said.
Parts unknown.
Hadley mouthed the words silently a couple of times to himself and was surprised to discover how exciting they felt. Somehow, it never occurred to him that he might actually see any parts unknown. He could barely remember Charlottesville anymore, and Millport, where he was born, had been completely erased by the passage of time. But that afternoon, Flora’s quilt felt like a flying carpet. For the first time ever, Hadley didn’t read the words and picture himself as the hero, Hump. He pictured himself as Hadley Crump enjoying a trip to parts unknown.
###
Flora Gibbs was kind, witty, and full of deep thoughts. Hadley was pretty sure he didn’t deserve her friendship. He knew he didn’t deserve to kiss her, seeing how he spent each and every weekday tensed up with longing in The Reading Room.
The things he read with Lucinda were as good as ever. Lucinda might not want him getting stirred up, but that didn’t stop her from giving him scandalous books to read.
I felt myself more than mortal, holding this loveliest of creatures in my arms, flying with her as rapidly as the wind, till I lost sight of every other object; and oh, Wilhelm, I vowed at that moment, that a maiden whom I loved, or for whom I felt the slightest attachment, never, never should waltz with any one else but with me, if I went to perdition for it!
“Do you ever waltz?” Lucinda asked on one such afternoon when Hadley was reading to her about waltzing with a beloved maiden.
“Nope,” Hadley said. He held his thumb on perdition so as not to forget his place.
“That’s a shame,” Lucinda said. “I was hoping you could show me the Twinkle Hesitation.”
“What’s the Twinkle Hesitation?”
“A waltz, dummy.”
Last week, Lucinda had done some showing of her own, demonstrating for Hadley the pleasures of a Silly Little Secret Kiss. Had he only heard about it, Hadley would have imagined that a tongue wiggling around inside his ear would be thoroughly disgusting. Feeling it first hand was an eye-opening experience.
“All right, Hadley, as usual I’ll have to try it out on you. This is purely experimental, you understand? I want to show Dickie a dance that’ll really bug his eyes.”
Hadley shrugged. He didn’t like to think about Lucinda dancing with Dickie, but he wasn’t opposed to serving as a substitute if it meant touching Lucinda.
“Dickie tangos like George Raft,” Lucinda explained, as if Hadley might actually give a fig. “Poppy LaRue over at The Register called his moves ‘positively licentious’ after she caught him in action at the Banana Club last weekend. I think I’ll start you with something slower though, seeing how you’re so green.”
Lucinda put a record on the phonograph. It was Franz Lahar’s Waltz Entrancing, she said. Very romantic, she said. Hadley only cared that he got to hold Lucinda’s hand. The stylus rasped across the shellac, and a lusty soprano crackled to life.
Other than the Silly Little Secret Kiss, Hadley had not been allowed anywhere near Lucinda since the day he busted the window seat. Holding her close after all this time made him feel like he was about to catch fire.
Lately, he might just as well have been called the Library Book Reader as the gardener, reading had become such a big part of his job. To combat the effects that these library books often had on him, he tried to think of other things when reading about love and sex. He’d put together elaborate lists of possible subjects ahead of time so he would be prepared. Brown stomach worms should be a good thing to think about, he’d tell himself. Or the basic steps involved in unplugging a toilet. As a result, he’d dressed many a rabbit in his mind even as a woman undressed in black print. The naked woman, however, always chased off the dead rabbit without much trouble. The truth of the matter was, being a decent man meant all the world to Hadley when Lucinda wasn’t around and nothing at all when she was. On this day, he’d planned to think about bad meat.
Lucinda stepped closer.
At seventeen, Hadley was still shorter than Lucinda, but his nose came up even with her lips. A tip of the head would bring them mouth to mouth.
Lucinda spoke to his nose. “Watch my feet. I’m going to start you off with the Venetian.”
The woman on the record sounded more like a peeled coyote than a song bird to Hadley. He preferred Marion Harris or Irene Day. They played Alice Blue Gown every night on KDKA, and Hadley always stopped what he was doing and listened and maybe even tapped his toe. He was not a fan of Lucinda’s operetta. When he bungled the steps, he blamed it on the awful music.
“George Raft, you’re not,” Lucinda said, but she looked like she was enjoying herself. “One two three. One two three. That’s it, honey. Now you be the boy, and I’ll be the girl.” She put her hand on Hadley’s shoulder and tickled him under his collar. “Smile, sweetie. Dancing is supposed to be fun.”
Hadley would have taken brain surgery less seriously. Dancing didn’t seem at all natural to him, though he could see why folks invented it. What better excuse could a man find to hold a woman in public? Or in private.
“That’s fine. Just fine.” They moved back and forth across the floor, their fingers locked like two pieces of the same puzzle, and for a few paralyzing moments, Hadley pictured how different things might have been if Lucinda belonged to him.
He could see their house and their garden, their children (all one color or the other), their big shaggy dog (big and shaggy and all one color or the other), and their reading room, which was simple and nice and a good deal less resembling of a breast. And in this other, much improved reading room, there were no hidden shelves or window seats because there was no need to hide the books. It was all for them, and they could read what they wanted when they wanted. Hadley was still a gardener in this imaginary life, but he gardened for someone else. Everything he grew for Lucinda, he grew for the fun of it. Of course, he could never afford to keep her in Kewpie Dolls and maids, but there were those rare occasions, like this one, when they became just a boy and a girl, locking fingers and dancing, and he couldn’t believe Lucinda would let Kewpie Dolls come between them.
She would ruin the moment any time now, that was a given. Somehow, it would all be shattered, as though she sensed how good it could be if only nothing else mattered. When he stepped on her foot again, he was sure that would be the end o
f it. She would get mad and stomp on his toes and call him an idiot. But Lucinda didn’t do any of those things. She tipped her head back and laughed like a child. And when he ran her into a shelf and The Breaking Point bounced out on the floor, she just said, “Who put that bookcase there?” and kicked the book under the sofa. Still, he knew the moment was coming when she’d lose her cool or Dickie would come home or there would be an apocalypse. Just when he was getting ready to end the suspense and declare waltzing dumb, Lucinda did the Twinkle Hesitation.
“The Twinkle Hesitation offers the best opportunity to get a feel for your partner,” Lucinda said. She slid her hand south along his spine and cupped his rear end with her hand. “Not a whole lot to feel, is there?” she said, but she didn’t take her hand away. Rather, she mapped out the region real good. They froze in the center of the floor, locked in a dancing pose.
“Lucinda,” he whispered. “Do you ever get the feeling that what’s between us is sick?” He expected the words to unleash a world of pain, but Lucinda only held him as though they still danced.
“We aren’t your ordinary dime novel lovers. We’re a thousand times more daring than that.”
“Daring?” Hadley said. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. “You mean because you rub my ass, and I kiss yours? We’ve never dared make love in all this time. How goddamned daring is that?”
“Some things are more exciting than making love, Hadley. Believe me, it’s one of the most boring things I’ve ever done.”
“I gotta think you’re doing it wrong.”
“And what would you know about lovemaking?”
He dropped her hand. “I have ears, don’t I?”
“Lord, I hope so,” Lucinda cackled. “It’s the only thing about lovemaking that gets my heart racing.”
“What’s that suppose to mean?”
“Come on, Hadley. You know me. I’d have put you in a room out back and built myself a Kewpie Doll Parlor off the kitchen if I thought you’d just sleep through it.”
Hadley was used to being surprised by Lucinda, but this took the cake. He shook and shook his head. “You’re killing me, Lucinda.”
Lucinda laughed. “Am I? Next time you hear me with that big boar of mine, you’ll know what I’m thinking. What will you be thinking, Hadley?”
The record spun to an end, gasping as the needle searched for the groove that would make it sing again. Round and round it went, gasping at nothing. “I’ll be thinking what I always think: that it should be me up there.”
Lucinda took his hand once more and pressed it against her cheek. “Here’s something for you to dream about, darling: When I touch him tonight, I’ll think about touching you. Will you think about me when you touch your little girl from the park?”
“I don’t touch anyone, Lucinda.”
She lifted his face between her hands so she could look him in the eye. “Is that the honest truth?”
“Only myself.”
She fanned her face with her magnolia pink fingernails. “All right, enough is enough. How does next Monday sound?”
“For what?”
She took the record off. “Dickie leaves for Baton Rouge in the morning. I was thinking of giving Tilly and Tapley the evening free.” She shut the cabinet with her hip. “We could be alone.”
“Alone?” They were alone now. They’d been alone a thousand times.
“The house will be all ours. For the whole night.”
He waited for the walls to come down. He looked at the floor, expecting it to swallow him whole. “I swear to God, Lucinda, I’ll jump off the roof if you’re making this up.”
“Well,” she said. “We can’t have you killing yourself now, can we? That would cause a scandal.” She fingered her hair like she always did, smoothed her dress, and checked her earrings. “I need to run along to my Duty to Dependent Races tea, but I want you to remember something: Should you hear any sighing from me up there tonight, you’ll know it’s because I know you’re nearby.”
That night, Hadley listened to the noises with new interest. Suddenly they didn’t seem so horrible. Suddenly those noises became the most thrilling thing he’d ever not been a part of. His heart leapt with every hop. His ears fought to understand every sound. And when Hadley heard Lucinda sigh, Hadley sighed, too.
###
On Sunday, Mama informed Hadley that he was looking particularly imbecilic. He’d bought her a peppermint ice cream from the hokey-pokey man, but Mama flat out refused to be distracted.
“It’s Mrs. Lucinda, isn’t it?” she said, letting her ice cream melt away in a trail of pink drips. “You can try to hide it if you want to, but your mouth wants to smile.” She reached out and wiped the traitorous orifice with her paper napkin. “There’s only one reason I can think of for you to hide a smile from me, and her name is Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”
“Don’t ruin it, Mama,” Hadley said. “Can’t I just be happy?”
“What about that librarian with the apple slice ears?” Ants were gathering at her shoes.
“Eat your ice cream, will you? I paid good money for that.”
He remembered a time when they actually had better things to talk about than his sorry excuse for a love life. For a while, they’d toyed with the idea of going into the lavender jelly business together. Mama had been offered twenty dollars for her recipe after the owner of the Burlington Hotel tried it on some lamb at Mr. Browning’s dinner table. Mama being Mama, she’d declined to sell her secrets, so Mr. Lizenbee purchased five jars at two dollars a piece and vowed to return for more. Of course, Mr. Browning kept the money since the jelly had been made on his dime, but Mama had it in her head that lavender jelly might make them rich if they could find a way to produce it on the side.
Hadley was to be in charge of growing the flowers. He’d already bought the seeds. Mama put in a request to use the summer kitchen on her day off. She planned to trade mustard pickles for lemons. The company name was settled as well. After weeks of bickering and scratching their heads, they looked for flowers to inspire them. “What’s the book have to say about lavender?”
Hadley ran his finger down the ‘L”s. “Larch, Larkspur, Laurel, here it is. Lavender. Lavender was one of the holy herbs used to prepare the essence in the Song of Solomon. In the language of flowers it means love.”
“That’s it! Love Jelly. We’ll drop a little bud in every jar to fill each bite with love.”
“Sounds kind of dirty, don’t you think?” Hadley said.
“I think it’s pretty.”
Now it seemed like Mama didn’t even remember about Love Jelly, and Hadley almost always forgot to bring along his flower book so they could search for deeper meaning on the road of life. Whereas, they used to jump around like lunatics and try to grab a falling leaf in midair to protect themselves against catching cold, or spend whole entire mornings arguing about which songs God liked best, the praises or the sorrows (Mama thought the sorrows), the only arguments they had now were about things that were none of Mama’s concern.
She said, “I loved a man once who didn’t love me. It was lonelier than being alone.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Hadley said. “Lucinda isn’t Slip.”
In her own strange way, Lucinda loved him, he was about eighty-nine percent sure of that. It was “society’s” fault they couldn’t be together. Hadley knew this because he often over-heard the radio broadcasts from Pittsburgh that Lucinda listened to during supper. There was one particular fellow at KDKA who used that word all the time, mostly with respect to the ills of society, which, it turns out, there were a great many.
Society was eating all the wrong foods, the man on the radio said. They were drinking spirits on the sly. too. Crime was rampant . . . boot-legging, swindling, racketeering. And if you didn’t believe the fellow at KDKA, all you had to do was listen to the advertisements to know that this was the gospel truth. Society was losing its hair at an alarming rate. So much so, that some of the world’s leading hair experts
had been called in to develop an astounding new bald-reducing tonic. Society had warts, too, and itchy skin, and more corns on their feet than ever before. According to the radio, some people were still living in the Dark ages and had yet to purchase a Sunbeam Toaster or the new Silex Automated Juicer. Things were a real mess. And if itchy skin was such a national problem, was it any wonder that true love was not allowed to prevail in today’s broken society?
“Lucinda was forced to marry Dickie,” Hadley said. “If she could, she’d be with me.”
“I don’t know, Hadley. You’re a handsome boy. I think Miss Lucinda just wants to have her cake and eat it, too.”
“You’re dripping.”
“You should be getting married and starting a life that doesn’t involve her. Soon you’ll be eighteen. I know you don’t believe this, honey, but life flies by so very fast. Before you know it, you’ll be an old man.”
“Isn’t that all the more reason to be with the person you love?”
Mama closed her eyes and a tear leaked out. “It’s wrong. Don’t you see how wrong it is?”
“I don’t care.”
The next day was Monday. Hadley couldn’t think about anything except that.
###
For the first time, Flora’s chipper chit-chat wore badly on his nerves. Hadley could hardly take how sweet she was being. He looked around, hoping to find an escape.
A banner had been strung up across the bandstand. APPEARING TODAY: PEANUT JONES AND THE DIXIE DANDIES – Brought to you by the fine makers of Pall Mall and the Southern Chapter of the Anti-Horse Theft Association. “Damn!” he muttered. He’d completely forgotten about the concert.
Flora was telling a story about how her father had stumbled across several cases of canned peas that fell off a truck in the middle of their street. “And the good news is, we’ll be set for peas until the end of time . . . ”
Hadley couldn’t listen to another cheery word. “I don’t think I should see you anymore,” he blurted.
Flora’s cheeks lost all their flame and, for one instant, it was like the sun had been snuffed out. “Have I done something wrong?”
The Reading Lessons Page 13