“Or maybe it’ll take all night,” Nina said.
He shook his head. “You aren’t listening to me, Miss Nina.”
She pushed the door shut with her toe. “I can’t quit thinking about that picture on your stomach.”
His eyes darted to the door. “Hold on now, Nina.”
If not for her bum ankle, Nina might have jumped for joy right then and there. “You called me Nina.”
He looked rattled. “I’m sorry. Open that door. You’re gonna get me fired.”
“Why? What are you planning to do?”
“I . . . nothing. It’s wrong to talk like this, Miss Nina. For a million reasons, it’s just plain wrong.”
“Name forty.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “You’re too nice for this, Miss Nina.”
“That’s only one.”
“That one reason is enough.”
Nina took another step toward him. “But you like me, Hadley, I can tell.”
Crump stepped back. “I like all you kids. I always have.”
“You like me best, I know you do.”
They did the step-up/step-back dance again. “Open that door or I’ll scream, Miss Nina.”
“Why do you like me best?”
He reached for the knob with a shaky hand, and Nina laughed at him. “Go ahead and run, Hadley. We both know what will happen. One of these days I’m gonna get a better look at that picture of yours.”
She touched the scar on his throat with her index finger and pulled away with a start. It was almost too hot to touch.
Hadley
Hadley
Hadley grabbed hold of the bedposts and closed his eyes. He shivered as her hair brushed the length of his stomach. How many times had he warned himself to be strong? Playing dumb never worked out for him. He’d tried to keep busy with the new White Flower Garden he’d started under the Silverbell tree, but after all these years, Hadley reckoned he was trained to succumb.
“Quiet now,” she whispered. “We don’t want anyone to hear.”
He sunk his teeth into a corner of pink chenille bedspread, biting so hard, his molars nearly cracked. Hadley had been drawn into some crazy things over the years, but this took the cake. If he were caught in her bed, there’d be no explaining it away.
“Open your eyes,” she said. “I want you to watch while I do it.”
Hadley opened his eyes and sucked the bedspread halfway down his throat. She was kneeling between his legs wearing nothing but a smile.
“Am I beautiful?” she asked.
Her skin was the buttery color of a Francesca rose, the sort that Mama peeled apart and stirred into her Rose Pear soup. Hadley spit out the bedspread. “Delectable.”
She cupped his cheek and gave him a kiss that was soothing and nice, but he was keenly aware that she’d never done anything like this before.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She stuffed the bedspread back in his mouth. “Trust me.”
Hadley’s stomach clenched like a fist as she set to work with a maddening precision. It was all he could do to hold onto the bedposts. He spit out the covers. “God damn!” he cried. “That hurts, Lucinda.”
She’d given her sewing needle a bath in a teacup of rubbing alcohol, then held it over a flame until the silver blackened and glowed. Next came the ink—a grim concoction of coconut oil and ash that she pricked into his skin a full one hundred and seventy times before the awful thing was done. That she finished up the job with a soft sweet kiss hardly made up for the agony.
“There,” she said, as though she’d just given him a most amazing prize. “Now you’ll take me to the grave.”
Hadley was twenty-two when Lucinda did the tattoo they’d read about in Handiwork of the Gods. He was twenty-four when she strangled him while re-inacting Justine. Twenty-eight when she used the riding crop on his skin as a follow-up to Venus Wears Furs. And thirty when she asked him to punch her in the eye like Cora from The Postman Always Rings Twice. He was a thirty-five year old man when Nina put the tip of her finger on his M. The tip of Nina’s finger was the worst. Her touch was more painful than needles. Hadley knew he should stay away from the girl, but he couldn’t.
There was a long spell when Dickie didn’t go out of town, which didn’t help matters none. Lucinda was never interested in him when other people were around, and he couldn’t get two minutes of her time if Dickie was nearby. Meanwhile, her daughter stepped up her attack.
She cornered him in the Reading Room, of all places, and asked him to read Arabian Nights while she sat with her newly healed ankle stretched out on the widow seat, watching his every move in a way that tied his intestines in a thousand knots. It scared him how much she could be like Lucinda.
“You need to find a nice boy and settle down,” he told her.
“I’ve already found one,” she said, and, to his horror, she came and knelt at his feet. She would have put her hand on his knee, too, if he hadn’t blocked it with his elbow.
“You need to get married and do things right, Miss Nina.”
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” she asked.
He hated when she called him Hadley. “Wasn’t meant to be, I reckon.”
“Don’t you think I’d make a good wife?”
“Sure,” he told her. “A lot of boys are going to fall in love with you.”
She frowned at that. “No they won’t. No one’s ever interested in me after they get a look at Mother.”
The way she said it made his skin prickle, like she knew about him and Lucinda. “Let me tell you something, Miss Nina: you’re a lot nicer than your mother. Smarter, too. Don’t you never forget that.”
She put her hand on his knee after all, challenging him with her eyes. “I want you, Hadley.”
Bearing such things was like swallowing knives. He stood up. “That ain’t never gonna happen, Miss Nina, do you hear me?” Her eyes filled up with tears, but he didn’t let that stop him. “And here’s something else that’s real important: you wait until you’re married for that. That’s what nice girls do.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be nice,” she hollered so loud, he could already feel how bad it was going to hurt when Dickie broke his nose.
“Please, Miss Nina. Your daddy will call the police if he hears you talking to me like this.”
She looked at him with those pretty brown eyes and ran from the room like her heart was breaking. Hadley couldn’t stand it. He found an old piece of violet writing paper and scratched down a note.
We have to talk, Lucinda.
“Make it fast,” she said as she undid her dress. “He’s with Daddy Dick at The Banana Club, but that won’t tie him up for long.”
Hadley waited until she was down to her slip. “I just want to talk.”
She snapped her fingers impatiently. “Hurry, will you? Jesus, Hadley, we don’t have all day.”
“It’s Nina.”
She crossed her arms. “Lord have mercy. Sometimes I think you’re more obsessed with that girl than you are with me.”
“She’s trying to seduce me, Lucinda.”
He expected shock. Horror even. Anything but the nutty laughter that followed. “Dream on. You’re old enough to be her father.”
He grabbed her arm. “This isn’t a joke, Lucinda. If you were paying one bit of attention, you’d know I’m not dreaming. Heaven knows, she’s about as subtle as you are.”
Lucinda wrenched her arm free and stepped back into her dress. “What do you expect me to do, Hadley? Tell her the truth?”
“I think the time has come, yes.”
That started her laughing again. “What should I say, dear? Hmm? ‘You can’t have a crush on the gardener because the gardener might be your daddy.’ You’re the one who’s so worried about her tender little god damn feelings all the time. What do you think that would do to her?”
“Set her straight.”
Lucinda snorted and rolled her eyes.
“At least, she’d kno
w to keep her hands to herself.”
At last, Lucinda looked appropriately queasy. “Jesus, Hadley.”
“It’s one thing to screw up our own lives. I won’t stand for seeing her life ruined too.”
“You know perfectly well that she might not even be your daughter.”
“She’s mine, Lucinda.”
“You can’t ever know that for sure.”
“It doesn’t matter. I would love her no less if I found out for certain she was Dickie’s. But she ain’t Dickie’s.” He handed her Nina’s note. “Read this.”
She held it close to her nose and squinted.
Dearest Hadley,
I don’t care how old you are or that you have Negro blood. I can see you like me, too. Quit fighting what’s between us and give our love a chance.
N
“What does this mean, Hadley? ‘I can see you like me, too’. What have you been doing with that girl?”
“I’m doing what I’ve always done, Lucinda: loving her from afar. She’s reading things into it because she wants to, and because she doesn’t know who I am. It’s wrong. We done a lot of wrong things, but this is the wrongest thing of all.”
If he lived a thousand years, he’d never forget the night Lucinda put his hand on her belly and said, “I’m gonna have a baby.”
He was seventeen and he’d just asked Flora Gibbs to be his bride. Lucinda was sitting on his bathroom floor. Hadley was in his underwear. “Is it mine, Lucinda?”
Every little thing in the world depended upon her answer, yet Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Maybe? I’m supposed to give up everything for a maybe?”
“That’s up to you, Hadley, but if you quit working for me, I swear to God, you will never know this baby.”
Some fellows might have liked the thought of that, but Hadley had the hopes and prayers of the Crump bloodlines resting on his shoulders.
Lucinda started kissing him. Not on the mouth, but any place she could get one in at: his ribs, his knees, his elbows.
I don’t care! I’ll choose Flora, he decided. I have to. I said I’d marry her.
He looked at the round soft swell of Lucinda’s belly. It was in there. A child. A child that belonged to him. A Crump.
Lucinda kissed his hand even as he twisted it away from her lips. “I’ll stay,” he said. “God damn you, I’ll stay. But not for you, Lucinda. For the baby . . . ” Four times. Dickie was all over Lucinda every night. Hadley had only been with her one night. Four times.
“What do you figure the chances are?” he’d asked her after her stomach got big. He was touching it, and Hadley didn’t get to touch it much. In those days, touching the baby became a longing that rivaled the usual longings.
“Unless it comes out looking like a straight-up Negro baby, I guess we’ll never know for certain whose it is,” Lucinda said.
“Do you want it to be mine?”
She put her hand over the top of his and pressed it to the child growing under her skin. “Regardless of who did it, she’s yours and mine.” Lucinda always called the baby a girl even before they knew it was Nina. “She’s what came of all those years of waiting. Dickie and I didn’t make a baby any of those other months, did we? This little angel came along to keep you and me together.”
There was many a night when Hadley wished it wasn’t true. Then he’d feel bad. He’d hurry up and whisper to the ceiling that separated him from her, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”
Mama had warned him. Lord, his entire heritage had warned him. “There’s a price to be paid if you do things the wrong way.” That’s what Mama said, but he’d been too young at the time to understand the half of it.
Hadley paid the price every time he was forced to listen to Lucinda making love with Dickie. He watched Dickie put his lips on her stomach and sing Cheerful Little Earful at the breakfast table. He listened to Dickie propose names for Hadley’s baby like Pumpkin and Georgie. “I knew a girl named Georgie once, and she was a real firecracker.” Hell, Hadley was made to build the awful crib that Dickie designed on a wrinkled bar napkin in spite of the fact that it was a silly, drunken-looking piece of nonsense. Painted it scarlet red too, just like Dickie wanted, and who ever heard of a scarlet red baby crib? Oh, he paid all right. When Dickie had Hadley haul the heavy rocking horse he’d had as a boy down from the attic so they could use it for Ritzy (his latest choice of names), Hadley was fed up to his ears. “Leave him, Lucinda. Leave him now!”
It seemed a matter of practicality at this point. If little Ritzy was made to ride that giant clunker of a rocking horse, she’d crack her skull in two.
Lucinda just smiled and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Hadley said a prayer that Lucinda would give birth to the brownest baby anyone had ever seen.
When it was time for the child to come, Lucinda decided against a midwife. She was a member of a group called the National Twilight Sleep Association whose aim it was to create a more perfect motherhood. Instead of doing things at home the regular old way, Dickie took Lucinda to the hospital for a restful birth.
While Lucinda rested and gave birth in a twilight sleep, she contracted a terrible infection. A week later, the doctor informed her there would be no more children. Lucinda said this was just as well and named her new whiter-than-white baby “Nina Anna Worther-Holmes”.
“The Anna is your part,” she told Hadley the first time he held the baby. By then, Nina Anna was a month old. It seemed only right to Hadley that his part should be in the middle. “And look,” Lucinda said. “God gave her your sulky eyes.”
If the baby’s sulky eyes weren’t enough to resolve the question, when Hadley opened the shades on the morning of Nina Anna’s first birthday, it seemed certain God was out to settle the matter once and for all.
According to A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, young wisteria plants could take up to fifteen years to bloom, yet at Wisteria Walk, every white wooden trellis exploded in a celebration of purple-pink that no other birthday gift could match. Nevermind that his affair with wisteria was a love/hate relationship, Hadley had always believed in the secret meaning of flowers. In order to get Wisteria plants to take off, a man was expected to toil relentlessly for years without seeing a single thing bloom. On June 3, 1922, less than three years after Hadley put down roots, the flowers spoke.
Now his Nina Anna was seventeen, and he was scratching his head, trying to come up with a way to get the girl to stop making eyes at him for all the wrong reasons.
“I know how we can put an end to this foolishness,” Lucinda brightly declared.
“Thank goodness for that. I’m about at my wit’s end.”
“It’s easy, Hadley. All we have to do is get her to hate you.”
Lucinda was serious as a heart attack, which only made her suggestion all the more painful. “Why don’t you just beat my brains in with a brick,” Hadley said. “That would hurt me a hundred times less.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to leave then. I can’t tell her you might be her daddy. My whole life would collapse.”
“And mine won’t if I have to leave her?”
“Don’t forget, dear, you’d be leaving me, too. I’m tired of playing second fiddle to that girl.”
Now that was funny!
“Nina says the same of you.”
“Well, you can’t leave us, Hadley, so you got no other choice.”
“Yes I do,” Hadley said. “I’m gonna find myself a woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“If Nina sees I’ve got a woman, she’ll have to leave me alone.”
Lucinda was wearing the sort of scowl that foreshadowed broken lamps. “You wouldn’t use a woman like that,” she said.
“After all I’ve done in order to be with Nina, do you really think I’d let anything stop me now?”
“Flora Gibbs wouldn’t take you back, even if she is an old maid librarian.”
“No,” H
adley said. “Not Flora. Never mind. I should have thought of this weeks ago. Nina thinks I don’t have anyone. She thinks I’m lonely as sin. She’s right on both accounts.”
“Well!” Lucinda said. “I didn’t realize your were such a sorry case, Hadley Crump.”
“Well I am,” he said.
“How about a parting gift before you move along?”
“I thought you said he’d be back soon?”
“Shut up.” For the second time that afternoon, the dress came off. “There’s been entirely too much talking going on here today.”
###
“What’s going on here?” Dickie demanded.
Lucinda looked like Fanny Hill after a night of selling her virginity on the streets. Her hair was pointing one way and her dress the other. Hadley barely got his trousers up before Dickie, who was known to break all varieties of locks, shattered the lock on the Reading Room door.
“Jesus, Dickie,” Lucinda grunted. “There’s no body here but Hadley.”
“And why is he here?” Dickie wanted to know.
“Why do you think?” Lucinda said. “We were discussing the new floor.”
“With the door locked?”
Dickie had graduated from M.U., but that didn’t make him bright. Lucinda had been duping the man for a long time now. She said, “Damn it, Hadley, I told you to fix that knob last week. Guido was stuck in here for a half hour on Saturday.”
Dickie looked around the room and sniffed. He’s gonna rip my head off, Hadley thought.
Dickie squinted at Hadley. “Naw,” he said, speaking as if he were in the middle of a conversation with himself.
Hadley had long suspected that Dickie’s dumbness stemmed from his trusting nature. Dickie trusted that he lived in a world where women like Lucinda would never allow half-breed-gardeners like Hadley to lay a finger on them. If Dickie believed they were discussing flooring with the door locked, this was only because it was easier for him to believe than the notion that his wife would let Hadley touch her.
We could be naked and he’d refuse to think the worst, Hadley thought. But then Dickie cracked his knuckles a mere two inches from Hadley’s nose. “Fix the door, Crump. I’ve got my eye on things, don’t think I don’t.”
The Reading Lessons Page 24