“Do you think your Daddy would rent me Helen?”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “He’s awful set on starting up with radios over there.”
“Shoot, with you and all your junk out of the way, Flora, he’ll have room to build a Viking ship inside that house.”
Flora laughed. “If we moved my birds into Helen, where would we eat? I don’t think there’s room for birds and a table.”
“We’ll hang the cages from the ceiling. There’s room for that. I don’t know what it is about that place, but it feels special to me. I think we’d cheer it up if we lived there, don’t you?”
Flora fanned her face with her napkin-fan. “I’d live in a cardboard box with you if you asked.”
“You would?”
“Of course. But I like the idea of renting Helen better.”
“Now we just have to convince your Daddy.” Hadley had made some diagrams to help him visualize where everything might go. “The place needs a stove and a sink. A bathroom would be nice, too, I reckon.”
“Daddy’s still sore about losing his peas.”
“If he lets me move in, I’ll grow him all the peas he wants.”
Hadley touched Flora’s shoe with his shoe under the table. The band started playing The Love Nest. “Do you think we should try and dance?”
“Definitely,” Flora said. “It’s not every day a girl gets to go dancing at the Salamander Club.”
Flora was a better dancer than Hadley, but not so good that she lost patience with him. “Ain’t it a beautiful song?” she asked.
“It ought to be our song, Flora. If your Daddy rents us Helen, we should call it the Love Nest instead of Helen. It sounds nicer.”
In a small room, tea set of blue,
There's the ballroom, dream room for two,
Better than a palace with a gilded dome,
Is the love nest you can call home.
Hadley was so happy, he didn’t even notice trouble when it came wiggling up behind him in a low cut dress. “Why don’t you teach her the Twinkle Hesitation?”
Hadley didn’t turn around. He danced them away, as if they might escape, determined to ignore her.
“Hadley?” Flora said, squeezing his fingers and looking at him expectantly. She nodded at the woman behind his shoulder, waiting to be introduced.
Flora was a polite girl, there was no denying that, a kind-hearted girl with a magnolia pinned to the front of her dress and an Alabama spoon tucked away in her pocketbook. She smiled even though she knew full and well that the woman in the red dress was probably the one he danced the Twinkle Hesitation with.
“You must be Flora.” Lucinda said, offering her hand. “I’m Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”
###
Flora gave her napkin a murderous snap. They’d returned to their table before the song was done, and she had yet to stop staring at Lucinda who sat in a Pink Booth polishing off crawfish with a loud and drunken Babe Butternut.
“Why didn’t you tell me? All this talk of being in love, and not once did you mention that the woman you love is the woman you work for. You live in her house, for heaven’s sake.”
“So what?” Hadley said. “You know how I feel about you. You’re the one I love.”
Flora rubbed her nose like she was about to cry. “You never said anything about her being married neither.”
“Come on, Flora. Don’t let this ruin our night.”
She picked up her teaspoon and looked at her upside-down self in the shiny silver. “You never said she was white. Or pretty. Or rich.”
“I didn’t know you wanted the details.”
The waiter put down their plates with such a dramatic flourish right then, Hadley thought Flora’s mind might return to happier things. He smiled at her hopefully over his goose.
“Does she know you were planning to propose to me tonight?” Flora asked.
Hadley reached for her hand across the table, but Flora moved it into her lap. “It’s none of her business,” he said. He followed her sad gaze across the room to where Lucinda was laughing it up like she didn’t have a care in the world. “She has no say in what I do with my life.”
“A lost lover welds more power than a whip,” Flora said, quoting from a magazine article she’d read to him called Ten Sound Reasons for Avoiding a Jilted Man.
“That’s nonsense, Flora.”
“Is it? Look at that red dress.” Flora bit down on lip. “You aren’t really going to marry me, are you?”
“Of course I am,” he growled. He smacked the table with his open hand, and the candle fell in his goose.
“Denial is Passion’s unholy bridegroom,” Flora whispered. “Their dark marriage is eternal.”
It was like eating dinner with Mama.
###
He dropped her off at ten thirty. Without a kiss. It didn’t seem right anymore, even though he’d been planning all week to kiss her. Instead, they held hands awkwardly on the front stoop with Flora standing three steps higher, ready to sprint for the door.
“I won’t tell anyone about Alabama yet,” she said.
“Nothing has changed, Flora.”
Flora’s eyes were glassed with tears. “You should have told me who she was.”
He let loose of her fingers. “It wasn’t meant to be a secret. Anyway, I can’t undo the past.”
“You told me that you loved her, but there’s one more thing I’d like to know. Was it . . . just wishful thinking?” She took hold of his necktie then and pulled until he lifted onto the tips of his toes. “I don’t think I can bear the idea of you working in that house if you had an extramarital affair with Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”
Hearing the word “extramarital” come out of Flora’s sweet mouth was enough to make him regret every poor decision he’d ever made. “I’ll get a different job,” he said.
She stared down at the tie clenched between her fingers.
“Put the spoon up with the others, Flora,” he said.
“We’ll see.” She dropped the tie and turned to go.
“Wait! I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything I wanted to say tonight.”
Flora paused with her hand on the doorknob. “What else is there?”
“The meaning of magnolias.” He turned her back around to face him. “Happiness in marriage. We can have that, Flora. Please hang the spoon up on your spoon rack.”
She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll think about it.”
###
I still quivered in every nerve to think how slight a sinking or slipping of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom . . .
~ Edgar Allen Poe
Hadley expected to find Lucinda waiting in the shadows, ready to hit him with some new bit of monkeyshine meant to keep him by her side. When he found the kitchen empty, he tiptoed into the bedroom and checked behind the curtains, but there was nobody there. He got down on his knees and peeked under the bed. He saw a slipper, a lost comb, and a handful of dust bunnies. He opened the closet door. “A-hah!” he cried when something moved, but it was only a bumped hanger.
With a sigh of relief, he sat on the bed, pulled off his shoes, and chewed himself out for coming up with the bad idea of taking Flora to such a fancy place. He was angry with himself for not coming completely clean about Lucinda, too. He couldn’t think why he hadn’t. Part of him even thought that he had. Part of him thought that it was bad manners to speak about her as much as he did.
When he was done chewing himself out, he kicked off his trousers and carried his pillow into the bathroom and yanked on the light.
There was a bathtub with a white plastic curtain that nobody except Hadley ever used. He kept his bedclothes there. Tonight, the curtain was ripped off its rings, and the bedclothes were in the middle of the floor. Mrs. Worther-Holmes sat on his sheets, rubbing a blanket against her face in a way that made him more nervous than anything she’d ever done.
“How long have you been sleeping in the
bathroom?”
“Goddamn it, Lucinda,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She hugged the blanket against her robe. “All this time, I thought you were listening. We had a deal about that, remember? Or is this your way of being faithful to little Miss Flora Gibbs?”
Hadley squatted on the octagon tiles and looked her in the eye. If he didn’t know better, he’d think those were real tears dripping down her cheeks. His heart beat with both sympathy and revulsion. “Go to bed, Lucinda.”
“I don’t want to,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to go to bed with that big old boar.”
Not for the first time, he wondered if she wasn’t just a little bit crazy. He was gladder than glad that he’d found a nice girl like Flora to love. “You got no cause to be here, Lucinda. ”
She ran a cold hand down his stomach. “What do you want with her? She isn’t as pretty as me. Do you think she’s as pretty as me?” Her fingers found the waistband of his union suit and yanked so hard, he almost fell off his feet. “You love me. You said so.”
Hadley got close enough to smell if she’d been drinking, but Lucinda said alcohol gave her dark circles under her eyes, and she rarely touched the stuff. She smelled like she always smelled. Like his daydreams.
“I’m going to marry her,” Hadley said. He knew it was a mistake to let such words come out, yet saying them was important. He wanted to see that spoon hung up in Flora’s kitchen just as soon as possible. It wasn’t right to keep quiet about a happy thing like love. “I can’t work for you no more.”
There! It was done. Her irises burned so fiery hot, it was like putting your face down on a gas jet, but so be it. Let her explode, he thought. Let her call Dickie down here and tell him what I did to her against the wall of his house. He can just go on and pound me to a nub! At least I was brave enough to tell her . . .
But Lucinda didn’t call Dickie down. Instead, she ran her fingernail along the inside of his thigh, snagging his new “patented for durability” underwear until Hadley smacked her hand away.
“You can’t stop me from marrying her, Lucinda.”
Lucinda squeezed the tiger tooth in her fist until it punctured the heel of her palm. Red drops splashed on the octagons. “That’s where you’re wrong, dear.”
Part II
Nina
From PAGE 3B of the Beattie’s Bluff Examiner, June 3, 1932:
FREAK CRASH TUMBLES DICTATOR
Late Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Winchell P. Lovette of Number 9 Tullip Hill Road, lost control of her husband’s new Studebaker Dictator, running it into a tree in the 400 block of Archway Boulevard and Treebourne Street. According to witnesses, injuries occurred when Mr. Lovette put his fist through the living room window after being informed of the damage done to the automobile he had saved ten years to buy. Asked how she managed to lose control on such a nice clear day, Mrs. Lovette indicated she had become distracted by a particularly fine display of wisteria growing in a neighborhood lawn. Said Mrs. Winchell P. Lovette of Tullip Hill Road, “When I saw all that wild beauty, my head got to swimming and I drove into a tree.”
Nina first came across the books in the window seat when she was eleven years old. Oh, what a memorable day that was. Thanks to the Timpone cousins’ hopeless lack of imagination, she was dragging her way through the world’s most humdrum game of hide-n-seek ever played when she happened upon the discovery. As all the really worthwhile hiding spots had been squeezed into long ago, she desperately wedged behind the aquarium and butted the library ladder. The ladder toppled sideways, crashed down on the window seat and made the lid hop up. And what a surprise that was!
Nina and the cousins had hidden in the curtains next to the window seat some five thousand times before, and Nina had once stretched out on top of the window seat and lined up the cushions head to toe across herself, but the Timpones had noticed the lumpiness and immediately jumped on her face, and the mud turtle in her pocket had been smooshed. It was also popular to hide under the table next to the window seat and doodle on the baseboard, as this was the safest of all vandalism. Anyone too big to fit underneath would never have the chance to see the crime. Usually a crayon was used for the job, but some gutsy soul had eschewed tradition and scratched the word STRAP with a dime long before Nina came along. In spite of all this poking about, no one had ever discovered that the window seat actually opened.
When Nina bumped the lid with the ladder, she knew she’d stumbled on something significant. She flipped it open, fully expecting to unearth the rotting body of the twin sister she never knew she had, or a suitcase full of stolen money. The books were a disappointment.
Nina couldn’t imagine what could possibly be interesting about a collection of books hidden in a room that was crammed floor to ceiling with books. Still, something told her that this was an important discovery, and instead of hiding in the best place in the whole wide world, she locked the door to the Reading Room and hauled the books out on the floor. Sure enough, inside the first volume, Nina came face to penis with the most confusing picture she’d ever laid eyes on.
“Hmm,” said Nina. She turned the page sideways. She turned it upside down. She snapped the book shut and returned it to the pile. Were there spicy pictures in all the books?
One of the volumes she picked up was called Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and it had words instead of pictures. Nina fanned the pages, picked one at random, and began to read.
. . . as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction. 'Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously.
No sooner had she gotten to the juiciest part, when Rich Rich jiggled the knob. “No fair locking the door!” he griped, and he proceeded to hammer his fist until the hinges were set to bend.
“Nina’s not in here,” Nina called, impersonating her mother perfectly.
“Open the dim-damn door, Nina. I found you.”
Still impersonating Mother, Nina said, “Richard Luciano Ignazio Timpone! Did I hear you say ‘dim-damn’?”
There was silence then, which seemed encouraging, but then Nina had to go and push her luck. “Go and sit on your bed until I bring the hairbrush.” The hairbrush being the equivalent of a belt.
“Oh farts,” Rich Rich said. “I know it’s you, Nina, and I’m gonna go tell the Stinkberry that you locked the door.” He clomped away like Paul Revere, shouting his tattletale news.
Whew, Nina thought, alone at last.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Lady Chatterly’s Lover was nothing like the other books on The Reading Room shelves. Nina was a collector of words, so she was practically a professional when it came to understanding anything that was rare, fancy, or the least bit indecent. It was her habit to pick out two or three new words each week and use them as she saw fit. She printed them in straight columns in her Fibber McGee and Molly notebook, keeping careful track of dates, any unusual reactions that might accompany the usage, and the consequences, if relevant. Piss ant, for example, was spoken on Oct 1, 1932 so the entry looked like this:
PISS ANT. 10/01/32.
Lifebuoy instead of macaroni for dinner.
Just looking at the words in Lady Chatterly’s Lover made Nina taste soap. It might be a challenge to find an appropriate situation to make use of the phrase erect passivity, but Nina wasn’t one to back away from a challenge. She liked frenzy, too, and was immediately in a frenzy to use the word frenzy.
The next book, Of Mice and Men, showed promise as well. For one thing, it used the words son of a bitch plain as day, and that had to mean something good.
Luckily, Nina was just about the craftiest girl she knew. She straightened up the pillows on the seat and buried Lady Chatterly in the art box that had been left lying in the middle of the floor since the completion of her postage stamp-size rendition of the Lord’s Supper several weeks before. She then un-locked the door and stepped behind the curtains.
By the time Ric
h Rich came back with Miss Dinkleberry, Nina had succeeded in making him look like the little liar he so often was. Rich Rich marched up to the curtains and whipped them back. “You locked the door,” he grunted.
“Did not,” Nina said.
“Did too!” he shouted.
“That’s enough,” Miss Dinkleberry said, for she avoided confrontation at all cost, often times to the advantage of her young charges. “How about a nice game of Neck & Neck?” she suggested. “I think we’re Hiding-Seeked out.”
###
Due to its delicate content, Nina was forced to read Lady Chatterly’s Lover by flashlight after everyone else was asleep. Huddled within the daisy-printed cave of her blankets, she pondered the same question night after night: Who put the dirty books in the window seat?
The most obvious guess would be Father, since he was a man, yet Nina couldn’t quite believe it of him. Although her father did have a fondness for saying son of a bitch, it was almost impossible for Nina to imagine that he’d ever heard of things like orgasmic satisfaction. Nina had known him all her life and felt as if she could safely say that he would not be interested in anything so exciting as that. If he’d heard of it, he probably coughed and buried his head in the funnies like he did whenever Rich Rich cussed. Anyway, Nina had never seen Father read anything but the funnies.
No, Father was a gun man, not a book man. Nina had been hunting with him since she was five, and she knew what made him tick. Father was only patient when crouching in buck vine with his finger on a trigger. He liked the speed of a bullet. He liked to eat what he shot, too, but he ate it rare—rare didn’t taste better, but he could never hold out for well done. Nina couldn’t see her Father having the attention span for Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Nope, Nina decided. Just because Father liked saying son of a bitch didn’t mean he gave a tinker’s damn about orgasmic satisfaction.
Nina’s favorite answer to the question was Miss Dinkleberry. It would be the most fun if it turned out that their old maid governess was hiding dirty books in secret places around the house. If the books were Miss Dinkleberry’s, Nina would have to tell Rich Rich and Guido about it immediately. No one could appreciate the irony of such a development more than her two cousins. It had been her experience though that people who hid things were generally jittery, and she was one hundred percent certain that the Stinkberry had looked just as wooden as ever when Rich Rich found her hiding in the curtains by the window seat. Disappointing as it was, Nina scratched the governess off the suspect list.
The Reading Lessons Page 20