The Reading Lessons (22 page)

If only Lucinda didn’t love Dickie. But she did. 

If only Hadley could find a way to be happy with what she gave him. His life was a happy vacation compared with most fellows he knew. Loomis would have told him he ought to be in pig-heaven over the electric fan alone. 

“What do you care where I’ve been, Lucinda?” 

“Oh I care, darling. You know I do.” 

If only Hadley weren’t so love-sick, what a high time they might have shared together in the Log Cabin Room today. What difference did it make if she loved him? What would it change if she did? 

“You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve decided not to fire you, dear.” She tapped her ashes in the sink. “In fact, let’s just pretend like today never happened.” 

“Where’s your husband?” Hadley asked.

“Snoring off gin slings in the tub. Everyone’s asleep. Except you. Except me.” She pitched the cigarette in the dishpan. 

How many times now had he imagined them drawing together in this same way in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, unable to breath, unable to keep their hands off each other? Now it was real, and they were alone, and the only thing he could see was the next fifty years of his life spent sneaking around, waiting for his chance, sacrificing everything he cared about in order to spend a few stolen moments with Lucinda. 

“This is what we do best,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

“But I don’t love you any more, Lucinda.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You loved me madly six hours ago. A heart doesn’t change so fast as that.”

“You ruined it,” he said. “I might not have changed my heart as yet but give me a few days.”

“Come on, Hadley, let me make it up to you by doing something nice.” She tickled him with her hair. 

Tell me you love me,
he thought.
That’s all I need to hear.

“I’ll make you so happy, I swear to God.” She took a deep breath.

Just say it.

“Okay Hadley, I’m just going to say it.” She took another deep breath. “I’m willing to put my mouth on you.” With that, she shoved him in a chair, dropped to her knees, and pushed his legs apart. “I know you want me worse than air.”

“I do,” he said. Even now, she was everything to him. She was kneeling at his feet!
His
feet. She must love him!

“You’ll see, Hadley,” she whispered as she opened the top of his trousers. “Some things are better than love.”

Hadley couldn’t help himself. It was against the law for a man to slap the lady he worked for, but Hadley didn’t think about that until after he did it. After he did it, he remembered about that fellow who got locked up for two years just for saying, “I ought to slap you,” to a white woman.
ATTALA NEGRO DOES THE UNTHINKABLE
, the newspaper headline read that day. Well, Hadley had done plenty of unthinkable things with Lucinda over the years, but he’d never slapped her. He wondered what she would say to the police if she called them.
Well you see, Officer, I was just unbuttoning this here nigger’s pants when he hauled off and smacked me across the face.” 

For a split second, Hadley thought it might be worth two years in the cooler just to hear Lucinda say those words. 

But no! Lucinda deserved a slap. “You can’t keep me leashed up like this no more. Lord knows, I don’t have much pride, but I honestly thought there was something meaningful going on between us.” He stood up. “If I didn’t love you just a little bit still, I’d have waited another ten minutes to say that.” 

Lucinda held her cheek with one hand and his pants leg with the other. “Don’t ruin things, Hadley. This might not be what you set out to get, but it’s better than nothing at all.”

“No it’s not.” He shook his leg free. “I’m done with you, Lucinda.” And by God, he meant it. “If you ain’t going to fire me or call the police, I reckon I’ll go on and plant your flowers same as I always have, but I don’t want you to kiss me no more, and I don’t want you to touch me. I got no intention of spending the next fifty years sneaking around after you.” A geranium splotch in the shape of his hand bloomed on her pale skin, but Hadley couldn’t feel bad about that. “I got my own life to lead,” he said. 

And by God, he meant it.

Hadley looked around the little house on Dixon Street and realized he’d never been in a house where people weren’t paid to keep things clean. It was all he could do not to dust stuff off with his elbow when Flora gave him the tour. Books and magazines stood on top of the icebox and along the windowsills. The wastebasket overflowed with empty cans of Those Good Peas. There were several sacks on the floor that were also filled with Those Good Peas. Outside of two little circles the size of dinner plates, the kitchen table had been entirely devoted to unopened mail. “Watch your head,” Flora advised. Hadley narrowly avoided garroting himself, ducking just in time to miss the jungle of electrical cords winding over head. Sunflower seeds rolled under the soles of his shoes as he went from room to room, being introduced to the birds. 

“Hello there, Mr. Peeps,” Hadley said. “Hello Tootsie. Hello Feather Brain.” Really, he could barely concentrate on the birds. When Flora wasn’t looking, he emptied his glass of lemonade on a poor thirsty ponytail palm in the corner.

On the sun porch, a naked dress dummy was the only thing left standing amid an explosion of sewing fabric. A paint can blocked the entryway with a hardened brush stuck to the lid, its red, twisted bristles making Hadley think of head wounds. 

Flora’s untidy habits struck him as both discomfiting and spectacular. He couldn’t imagine inviting company over with so much junk stacked up everywhere, yet it felt wildly bold. Lucinda’s entire house had been crafted to impress. She even chose book titles with an eye for how important they sounded. With her awful red walls and pea-can towers, Flora didn’t appear to give a care. This concept was so new and so strange to Hadley, he might just as well have been dropped on his head in front of the pyramids.

He’d brought a
Dainty Bess
wrapped in Cellucotton that he’d picked for the occasion. 

“Did you grow this?” Flora asked as she buried her nose in the ruffly bloom. “I can’t imagine growing anything that smells as pretty as this.”

“I picked it for you because pink roses mean Thank You in the language of flowers.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“I most certainly do. I’d have stepped in front of a truck the other day if you hadn’t calmed me down.”

“Well, we’re even now,” she said, and she put the rose in a blue bud vase and stood it on top of a three year old issue of
Opportunity
magazine. 

Mr. Gibbs ate a pile of peas and a slice of pie off the same little yellow plate at the cluttered kitchen table. “Flora tells me you paint houses for a living?” he said. He waved his piecrust as he spoke, sending a snowstorm of flakes fluttering down on the mail. 

Hadley had been afraid of meeting Flora’s father and, sure enough, the man had suspicious eyebrows. He stared at Hadley when he shook his hand like there was something hanging out of his nose. Hadley wondered if Mr. Gibbs was seeing a white man or a Negro standing in his kitchen. 

It was a funny thing, what people saw. He’d jumped in the white line at the post office once when the Negro line snaked out the door. Nobody gave him a second look. At church, however, he was always black. Every so often, someone sensed that he didn’t belong; a perceptive soul in the form of a nosey five year old would twist around in his seat to stare at Hadley.
How come they let that white boy into church, Mama?
And then there was that nurse who sent him packing when he tried to visit Mr. Jessup, the butcher, after he broke his hip. She was sorry she couldn’t let anyone with dark skin in, she said. Mostly Hadley slipped by. The “knowers” were out there, however, and the “knowers” had the power to ruin everything in his life. If Mr. Gibbs was a knower, Hadley would never see Flora again. They’d probably make him quit the library, too. For a split second, Hadley felt certain that Mr. Gibbs could see he wasn’t altogether Negro. 

But then the man just smiled and offered Hadley a chair, and his eyebrows looked a lot less distressing. 

“Hadley does handy work and gardening for Mr. Worther-Holmes,” Flora explained as they ate their pie.

“Junior, actually,” Hadley added. 

“Fancy people, those Worther-Holmes,” Mr. Gibbs said. “I seen their houses around town. Not much character if you ask me, but I guess some people like ‘em well enough.”

“They do sell a great many, sir.”

“How’s that pie?”

Hadley smiled at Flora. “I ain’t never tasted pie like this before.” Mama was the Beethoven of Boston Brown Bread, but she couldn’t flute crust half so well as this perfect specimen of piehood on the table in front of him.

“Flora gets her expertise from the Johnson branch of the family,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Not everyone masters piecrust, you know. My grandmother’s was so hard, we regularly broke forks when we ate it.”

Flora wiped her mouth with the corner of her napkin. “If you’re done, there’s something over here I was hoping to show you.” She led him to a wooden rack that hung in the hall by the back door. “Look, it’s that palm tree spoon I told you about.”

Hadley had never seen such tiny cutlery before.

“Do you wanna hold it?” Flora asked.

“Yes please.” He rubbed his finger over the miniature fronds. “Do you ever eat with it?”

“No,” Flora said. “It just hangs here on display.”

“If I had a little palm tree spoon, I’d eat applesauce with it,” Hadley said. There were six spoons in all on Flora’s wooden spoon rack. “Have you really been to all these places?”

“All but Florida. I save my money and buy a bus ticket whenever I get up enough for a trip.”

“I’ve never been any farther than Columbus,” he told her.

 “But Hadley, you must go farther! You must see the world, even if you only travel twenty miles away. Things are different everywhere, but they’re the same, too. It’s exciting and comforting at the exact same time.”

Hadley admired the fire he saw in those bookmark-black eyes. “Maybe I’ll save my money and go to Alabama,” he said. “There’s an azalea that grows by the Cahaba river that you can’t find no place else in the world. It’s shaped like a funnel and smells like lemons, and I’d dearly like to smell that azelea for myself.”

“Do it, Hadley. You’ll never regret it.”

Flora’s father shuffled up behind them, working a mouthful of peas in his jaw. “You saw the porch, I reckon? Kinda makes you want to put a bullet in your head, don’t it?”

Hadley thought it peculiar that the man should care so much about Flora’s paint-job, given the state of the rest of the house. “I’m off on Sundays, Mr. Gibbs. I could paint your porch for you, if you like?”

“But not red,” Mr. Gibbs said. “I don’t know what Flora was thinking when she painted it red.”

“Daddy likes blue,” Flora said.

“Bird egg blue,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Could you paint it bird egg blue?”

Hadley stood in the Gibbs’s cluttered kitchen tingling from head to toe and feeling like a man with something special to offer for the first time in his life. “I’ll mix up some bird-egg blue this week,” he promised.

“Say, Flora,” Mr. Gibbs said. “If this goes well, maybe we’ll have to let him take a crack at Helen.”

“Whose Helen?” Hadley asked. 

Flora led him to the backyard and pointed to a small building made of quarry rock. “Helen lives
there
?” Hadley asked, his mind instantly flooded with images of a disfigured sister crouching in rags on a cement floor. 

“No one lives there. It used to be slave quarters before the war. Daddy stores his buckets and rakes inside, but the place is in real need of repair.” 

Hadley walked around the perimeter, jiggling and kicking things. He jumped on the back of an over-turned wheelbarrow, and looked at the roof. “The angles at the lintel are rusted through, and the anchorage has come loose. That’s not an easy fix.”

“You mean, you can’t just paint it bird-egg blue and make it all better?” Flora said with a crooked grin. 

“I could put together a support of some kind and fix those mortar joints. It’s a fine little building otherwise.” He patted a yellow stone. “So who is Helen anyway?”

“You’re looking at her. Here, give me your hand.” She put his palm against the front door, and Hadley could feel the carved letters under his skin. 

Helen. 

“That word is all we know about this old place. It’s referred to as
Old Slave Quarters
on the plot
.
Dixon Mansion used to stand right over there, but it burned to the ground a long time ago. People started buying little pieces of the land and putting up houses like ours. The man who sold my daddy the property called this place a guesthouse, but we’ve never had the nerve to put anyone in here. We worry enough about the rakes as it is.” 

With his affinity for carved words, Hadley felt a warm spot for the old building right off and was instantly compelled to save it. “Imagine if these old walls could talk, Flora. Wonder what’d they’d say?”