“There’s Rodney,” Sadie said, “you can have him.”
“I don’t want him,” Latha said.
“Me neither,” said Sadie.
Latha read all of the books by David Grayson in the library, and then started on a set by a Frenchman named Marcel Proust. She picked at random Within a Budding Grove because she liked the sound of the title, and she tried for a week to read it but just could not get interested in it. It was nicely written, but the sentences were just too long and complicated and sometimes a single paragraph went on for pages and pages. It was like trying to run or to swim or to make love non-stop. She looked around the library in despair and wondered if most all of those books bound so prettily in leather and cloth were as hard to read as this Proust fellow.
One of her many jobs was to dust the books, a complicated business, and she wondered why it was necessary since no one but herself was interested in them. Mrs. Cardwell spent her time crocheting, or knitting, or embroidering, or painting china. Sometimes she went out in the yard to show Rodney where to plant things and where to weed. Latha thought of offering to weed but she didn’t want to work with Rodney and she really had her hands full with her house chores. Dusting the library books was an all-day job.
One day when Mrs. Cardwell had Rodney drive her to visit some relatives in town, Latha was pulling out each book of a four-volume set called The Romance of Moths, by William Potter. It had never occurred to her that there was anything romantic about moths, at least not the ones she remembered in Stay More, who liked to commit suicide on the coal oil lamps. She opened Volume One and saw that the title on the title page was The Romance of Lust. She looked at the spine again, and detected that someone had hand-lettered “Moths” on a piece of leather that was pasted over the word “Lust”. That was true of each of the four volumes. She riffled through the pages and was amazed to discover that there were many pictures of naked women—photographs, etchings, drawings, paintings. In Volume Two there were many pictures of naked women with naked men in passionate embrace. When she pulled out Volume Three, she heard a latch click and the whole section of bookcase swung out like a door. Behind it was a cabinet with bookshelves that contained many volumes she had not seen before, with titles like My Secret Life, The Illustrated Piero Aretino, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, and Pretty Little Games for Young Ladies and Gentlemen with Good Old English Sports and Pastimes. She opened the latter and saw that it contained ten plates by an artist named Thomas Rowlandson depicting several lascivious goings-on between men and women.
All the books were dusty, and Latha wondered if she ought to dust them, but decided she wasn’t supposed to know of their existence, and she could only assume that neither did Mrs. Cardwell. There were drawers in the cabinet, and Latha pulled out each of these to discover oriental comic strip art depicting Japanese women and men with enormous dingers making furious love, and piles of magazines with titles like La Vie Parisienne and The Pearl, each issue devoted to the pleasures of the flesh. On the spot Latha learned new words for the old sexual language, such as calling the penis “his love dart.” She also discovered an oddity: verbal descriptions of the act of love are more exciting than graphic depictions of it, although there were all manner of the latter, in drawers full of French postcards, etchings, drawings and little eight-page booklets that were like comic strips in which intercourse and fellatio were caricatured. Latha reflected that Richard Cardwell must have had a real obsession, and she wished she had known him. There were pictures and portraits of him around the house, and he was a very handsome and dashing gentleman. Who would have guessed that this was how he spent his time in the library?
After a couple of hours, Latha realized that she was seeping with desire. Her panties were soaked. If Rodney had been around, she could have gone out and thrown herself into his arms. But she could not stop reading and looking. It was the most amazing day she’d ever lived, and she would not know another day like it during the seven dull years she spent at Lombardy Alley.
Chapter twenty-six
Although there were many spells during those seven years when Mrs. Cardwell was so ill that she had to be confined to her bed for days at a stretch, leaving Latha with plenty of freedom to spend all her time in the library when she wasn’t nursing or feeding the woman, Latha was never again able to open the secret cabinet and bookshelf, because she could not reduplicate the sequence of movements of volumes of The Romance of Moths (Lust) which had caused the latch to open the first time. She was sure that simply removing Volume Three had done it, but as many times as she tried it she could never get it to happen again. She even removed all the books from that shelf, and pried around for a crevice or some device that caused the secret bookshelf to open, but the pleasure trove remained hidden from her for all of those years. She had to content herself (if that is the way to put it) with the four volumes of The Romance of Lust, which she read cover to cover more than once, except for Volume Four, which was devoted to acts that caused pain or degradation. Volume Three was devoted to acts that involved the mouths of the partners, and had a frontispiece of a man standing with a woman upside down wrapping her legs around his neck with his tongue licking her genitals while her mouth encased his dinger. There were also vivid written descriptions of the ecstasies that partners could give each other with their mouths and tongues, and once again Latha concluded that words are better than pictures.
Each Christmas, Mrs. Cardwell gave Latha a raise, and since she spent very little of her salary, having nothing to spend it on, in time Latha’s savings were sizeable. One time when Mrs. Cardwell was feeling well enough to “entertain,” and invited several ladies to a “luncheon,” Latha was serving tea to one of the women when the lady whispered to Latha, “Don’t you realize she is the richest woman for six counties around? Why, she could afford a whole houseful of servants if she wanted them!”
“No, ma’am,” Latha whispered back to her. “I didn’t know that, but it’s not any of my concern.”
In time, Latha decided she had saved more than enough money to pay for a trip back to Stay More, and she decided to quit her job. But when she told Mrs. Cardwell, choosing a bad time to do so because Mrs. Cardwell had taken down with lumbago and could hardly move, Mrs. Cardwell asked her to sit down beside her bed, and then she brought forth from a drawer in her bedside table a newspaper. “This is an issue of the Tennessean, the Nashville newspaper, which appeared a few days before I found you in the ditch.”
There was a not-very-good photograph of Latha, the kind you see on Wanted posters, above a headline which said, “Escapee from Arkansas Asylum” and a sub-headline, “Still at Large.” The story said that she was the only person ever to escape from the maximum security ward of the state asylum for lunatics. Latha read every word of the story, although she was conscious of the woman watching her. The story said that she was “probably not dangerous,” but a reward was being offered for information about her “means of escape.”
“How did you escape?” Mrs. Cardwell asked.
“I honestly don’t know, ma’am,” Latha said.
“Well, you are still wanted, and if you were to leave me, you might easily be caught.”
“So I have to spend the rest of my life here, ma’am?” Latha asked, her heart in her throat.
“No, there is something called a ‘statute of limitations,’ which means that there is a time limit on how long you can be held responsible.”
Every year at Christmastime when Mrs. Cardwell gave her a raise, Latha would ask if the statue of limitations had run out yet. To the best of her knowledge, during her years as Mrs. Cardwell’s maidservant, she had never said or done anything that would have given anyone cause for thinking her crazy, but Mrs. Cardwell whenever she was dissatisfied with some detail of Latha’s maintenance of the household would make a remark like, “We have a fine mental hospital in Nashville, you know.”
Having discovered that the best way to prevent herself from becoming a nymphomaniac was simply to avoid reading The Rom
ance of Lust, Latha realized that the best way to handle her excruciating homesickness was simply to avoid any thoughts of Stay More. Still, sometimes in the summer when the night air was filled with lightning bugs and the fragrances of all the blooming things, she could not help wishing she were back home. One day she decided to write to Doc Swain, addressing it simply to Dr. Colvin U Swain, Stay More, Ark. And she wrote:
Dear Colvin,
I know you may be surprised to hear from me. I don’t know where else to turn. Aren’t you my cousin? My mother is a Swain. I can’t write to her because most of my problems are her fault.
You may know that I spent some years in Little Rock at the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, committed there by my sister Mandy, who wanted to become the mother of my illegitimate baby.
Are you all right? Happy? Still curing all the sick people in Stay More? How is everyone?
I have been perishing for some news of my dear home town. I was still living with my sister Mandy when the news came that our father had bad pneumonia and that you had treated him without being paid for it. I know it wasn’t your fault that he died. If you will tell me how much he owed you, I will send you the money.
Several years ago I regained my sanity (if I ever was insane to begin with) and discovered that I was no longer in the lunatic asylum but in Nashville, Tennessee. I have no memory of how I got there or how I escaped from the state hospital, so maybe I was a little crazy after all. There might have been some news in the papers that I escaped.
But anyway, here I am, working as a housemaid in a fancy mansion, probably better than any job I could find anywhere around Stay More. It isn’t enough to keep me from getting homesick—and I don’t mean the house I grew up in but the town itself.
I know you’re a busy doctor, but if you could find a moment to send me a postcard, it would be something from Stay More that I could hold in my hands and my heart.
Yours,
Latha
She was a little nervous, putting it in an envelope with her return address on it. But she didn’t think Doc Swain would tell on her, to the authorities or whoever. One of her many daily tasks was to walk down to the highway where the mailbox was. Rodney had long ago offered to drive her, but she told him it was the only exercise she got.
Usually there would be no mail other than the Tennessean newspaper or some business from Mrs. Cardwell’s lawyer or banker. Every day for two weeks after mailing her letter to Doc Swain, Latha would quicken her step with anticipation as she approached the mailbox. On the return to the house, she would walk slowly with her head down.
One day, however, she got an answer.
Dear Latha,
Knock me down with a feather. I haven’t been so surprised since the time that Granny Price came back from the dead.
But speaking of the dead, I regret to have to be the one to tell you that your mother passed on in January. She was my second cousin, and they buried her at the Church of Christ cemetery over at Demijohn. Neither one of your sisters came for the funeral, but we didn’t try too awful hard to get in touch with either of them. What she had was apoplexy. I treated her for it but couldn’t cure it.
You don’t owe me for that, and you don’t owe me for when the pneumonia took away your dad. Even if you weren’t kinfolks, I could never charge you a cent for anything. I just wish you’d been able to stay in Stay More to have your baby, so I could have delivered it.
It’s a sin to Moses the way your mother sent you off to Little Rock. And it’s worse than all Moses’ sins put together the way your sister got you put away in the state hospital just so she could have your baby. Every doctor of my acquaintance knows it’s not a state “hospital” but a state zoo. When we heard that you had escaped, we said that they ought to erect some kind of statue in your honor.
For a good two weeks after your escape, there were state policemen and detectives snooping around Stay More, convinced that this was where you were. I don’t know if you realize that you were the only “patient” ever to escape from that particular ward, and they were frustrated because they didn’t know how you had done it. Nobody could even imagine how you did it…unless you had some help.
I hope you are healthy and still optimistic that you can come home again someday. This world is filled with sorrow, and I’ve had more than my full share of it, but I won’t tell you about any of it, because I suspect yours is greater than mine, and because I’ve learned the only way to deal with mine is when I get out of bed in the morning and remind myself of all the things I still have to do.
But I am not real busy. Most of my patients have died or gone to California—I don’t know which is worse. Stay More keeps on getting smaller and I don’t know when it will stop. Nothing really interesting happens around here, and I think all of us are lonesome. I long ago gave up any thoughts of moving to a large town because, like you, I know in my bones that Stay More is the only place on earth for me.
Affectionately yours,
Colvin
One day Mrs. Cardwell asked her, “Why are you smiling all the time these days?” and when Latha said Oh, it was nothing, Mrs. Cardwell persisted and wondered if Latha had started fooling around with Rodney. Latha shook her head, and once again Mrs. Cardwell said, “If he ever touches you, you just tell me.”
But Rodney no longer even flirted with her. She liked to think that he had not lost all his desire for her but had simply realized that she was not easy at all. Once, the first time Mrs. Cardwell had become bedridden with one of her ailments, Rodney had taken advantage of it to neglect his duties and he had made a renewed effort to seduce Latha, becoming increasingly foul-mouthed and offensive until, after a particularly nasty thing he said to her, she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could. For a long moment she thought he was going to hit her, but he just grumbled, “Do that again, sister, and I’ll throw ye down and rape ye not once but till the cows come home.”
Despite her revulsion toward him, he was still the only man in her world, and there were many times when she would be in her room and look out the window to watch Rodney working in the yard, usually with his shirt off and all his muscles tanned and mighty, with sweat running over them. She would watch him pushing the lawnmower or trimming the hedges or planting a rose bush, and she would start having fantasies about having him on top of her, or herself on top of him, and their hips pounding together and thrusting and squeezing.
She took to leaving her door unlocked at night, and often lay in bed thinking he might sneak into her room and instead of using his coarse words and ugly phrases, simply take her in silence. This went on for so many months that she finally gave up on the idea that it would happen and began to try to summon her nerve to sneak out to the garage and up to his room. But the nerve wasn’t there. One night, finally, he actually did come into her room, and she knew it was him, and reached out for him eagerly. But instead of embracing her, he put both his hands on her breasts and squeezed as hard as he could. She screamed, and it woke Mrs. Cardwell, who came into the room, but not before Rodney had ducked under the bed.
“Good Lord!” Mrs. Cardwell said. “I thought you were being killed.”
“I just had an awful nightmare,” she said, and Mrs. Cardwell returned to her own room.
“Thanks, babe,” Rodney said, when he came out from under the bed. “You’re mighty damn lucky you didn’t tell on me. But why’d you holler so? Don’t you like for me to feel them big titties?” and he reached for her breasts again, but she slapped his hands away. “Why’d you leave your door unlocked?” he asked. “You wanta fuck, don’t you? You’re hot for it, aint ye? I kin tell. I kin smell it on ye.”
“Get out!” she snarled as loud as she could without being overheard by Mrs. Cardwell.
He went, and for a long time never bothered her again. When her employer was ill, she would give Latha a shopping list, and Latha would collect another one from Sadie the cook, and Rodney would drive her into town to the butcher’s and baker’s and a grocery store. He never tried to
touch her again, but he did not abandon the subject. He talked about his life’s ambition, which was to save up enough of his salary to buy a little farm out in the country and raise some chickens and pigs. But he spent all of his salary, he said, at the “whorehouse” in town, and if only he didn’t have to do that he might be able to save some money. She felt sympathy for his loss of money, but would not take the hint. She did have a great curiosity about the life of the prostitutes; her memory of that Nashville hotel room was vaguer than ever. She asked Rodney how much the women earned and he said it depended on how long he stayed and how many different things he wanted to do. A hand job was cheapest. The most expensive was up the ass. Few of the women would kiss. They would kiss pricks and nipples and assholes but never mouths.
Enduring Page 26
