Candles Burning (21 page)

“Oh look, Calley!” Mama pointed at the yellow light that suddenly glowed in the same upstairs window as before. “Fennie's sister is going to put me back in my old room!”

The front door stood ajar across the weathered planks of the deep verandah. A white-haired woman peered out at us from the doorway. It was she who had called to me from the open doorway of the house on the very edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

Where the waves had been silent so I would be able to hear her voice.

“Stamp your feet,” the woman instructed.

Mama pounded up and down on the floor mat, shaking the sand loose from her bare feet.

I had never seen Mama obey so short and sharp a command—and one from a stranger too—with such immediacy and willingness. I stamped my feet like a little echo.

“I'm Roberta Carroll Dakin,” Mama said, trying to peer over the woman's shoulder into the interior of the house. “You must be Calley's friend Fennie's sister.”

“I am Merry Verlow.” The woman placed a gentle emphasis on the
am
.

“You call her Miz Verlow.” Mama swatted the back of my head lightly.

As if I didn't know that “Miz” was how you addressed all women, single or married.

“Welcome to Merrymeeting.”

Mama started. “Merrymeeting?”

Miz Verlow gestured inclusively. “My home.”

Mama was in a kind of distracted daze as she looked all around, but she shook it off, to say archly, “I am very happy that you are not a Dakin.”

“I confess I have only heard of the Dakins, through Fennie, of course,” Miz Verlow said, “who is related to them somehow. You are the first one I have actually met and I must say I am pleasantly surprised.”

The derogation of Daddy's relatives, especially by someone who had never met any of them, went over very well with Mama. “Well, you would not be so pleasantly surprised if you met any of the others, because I am not a bit like the rest of them. I am by birth a Carroll, after all.”

“Oh?” Miz Verlow said. “Do come inside. I expect your feet are just about to take leave of your ankles, walk off this verandah, and dig a grave for themselves in the sand.” She stopped as I started past her. “Calley, just shuck those tennis shoes right here.”

In the reflection of a mirror above a deal table in the hallway, I saw the glisten of a tear on Mama's face. What caused that tear was something that Mama had expected but had no right to expect—that in Merry Verlow's house, she would find the same furniture, the same runners, the same faded lithographs, the same crack in the newel post that Mama remembered in her grandmama's house. But she was far too exhausted to try to reconcile the existence of a duplication here, almost one hundred and fifty miles away on the Gulf of Mexico, of her grandmama's house, long since reduced to ashes in Banks, Alabama.

But all she said was, “What is that noise?”

“The waves on the shore.” Miz Verlow was amused. “It is high tide.”

Mama moved almost blindly toward the stairway. I was embarrassed, for we were guests of Miz Verlow and Miz Verlow hadn't invited us to go upstairs. Mama had not spoken one word of thanks for Miz Verlow's hospitality.

I must have looked stricken, for Miz Verlow playfully flicked one of my ponytails.

“Miz Dakin,” she said to Mama, “I'll trouble you to leave me the keys to your vehicle. It has to be moved first thing in the morning, to open the road.”

Mama stopped, fumbled in her bag, and then dropped the keys into Miz Verlow's outstretched palm.

“Are the candles all snuffed?” Mama asked vaguely.

“I see to it myself every night,” Miz Verlow answered.

Mama reached for the banister and began to ascend the stairs, as slowly and ceremonially as a bride processing down the aisle. As if there were a bridegroom waiting for her.

Miz Verlow nodded toward Mama. “Go help your mama undress, child.”

“But—”

“She knows which room is hers. Tonight and for the time being, you will sleep with her.”

“Thank you, but—”

“Your bags from Elba are in the room. I have put everything away. Your mama will know where to find things. The two of you will be sharing the bathroom at the end of the hall with two other guests. I always leave a light on.”

I blurted, “I like the sound of the waves.”

Miz Verlow smiled. “Sometimes it seems as if that's all you can hear, and sometimes you can hardly hear them at all.”

She turned off the light in the foyer.

“Mama says this house was her grandmama's, in Banks, Alabama. Then she said it burned down.”

“You are just seven, child. Have you ever heard that we see through a glass darkly?”

“Yes, I have.” I remembered the windows at the train depot. “Mama said that she was happy in her grandmama's house.”

“Roberta Carroll Dakin happy? That's a sight you and I and the angels in Heaven would like to live to see.”

Maybe Miz Verlow knew everything.

Or maybe Miz Verlow was just giving back nonsense for nonsense to a little girl who was up past her bedtime, disoriented by a long ride and her mother's bizarre declarations.

We reached the landing, where a diamond-shaped window with a border of squares of stained glass looked out toward the endless moon-colored highway of beach. Beyond it, the Gulf of Mexico rolled as black and depthless as the sky in which the waxing moon still rode.

“ ‘I see the moon,' ” Miz Verlow whispered next to me, “ ‘and the moon sees me.' ”

Mama called my name softly from somewhere above.

“I have her, Miz Dakin,” Miz Verlow called back just as softly. “She will be up in a few minutes. I want to give her something for your feet.”

“Oh, that would be so nice.” A door closed softly.

I still watched the view from the landing. “Is Miz Fennie Verlow coming?”

“What do you think?”

I shook my head in the negative.

“Where do little girls get it into their heads that they are supposed to be happy? There are other things that are so much more important for little girls.”

How she got from her sister Fennie's absence to my expectations of happiness, I had no idea. I did not realize what an odd thing she had said until years later. But I knew that she did not mean all little girls. She meant Calliope Dakin and no one else.

“Like saying the right things,” I ventured.

“That's right.”

“And taking care of Mama.”

“So is that.”

“And not asking so many questions.”

Miz Verlow flicked my ponytail again. “Roberta Carroll Dakin has got one smart little girl.”

I shook my head no. “Mama doesn't think I'm smart.”

“The opinion of Roberta Carroll Dakin doesn't mean one hoot in hell to me or to my sister, Fennie.”

She showed me the bathroom and put out a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a washrag and a hand towel. She gave me a jar of scented cream for Mama's feet and left me with a casual good night.

I brushed my teeth earnestly, more earnestly than usual, and washed my face and neck and ears with care. Miz Verlow must see that I was a proper child, fastidious and obedient, lest I be the cause of her sending us away. I thought of Ford, stuck back there, in Alabama with Mamadee. Later I understood that it was less his choice than it appeared. But just then, he was as gone as Daddy was. I wondered if I would miss him as I missed Daddy. Probably not, I concluded.

At the foot of Mama's bed, I sat rubbing the cream into her feet by candlelight. Gently I daubed away the grains of sand that had lodged in her toenails. The sand had scratched the red polish, so it looked as if she had tiptoed in blood. I tried to make out the shapes of the room's furnishings, wondering what colors would show by day in the draperies, the carpet, the upholstery, the paper on the walls, the pictures hanging there.

The ocean outside never stopped its sighing. I listened to a voice that sounded—or seemed to sound—beneath the waves. It might have been singing, or it might have been asking questions. My eyes began to close and I shook my head, to keep from falling asleep.

From within the house, I heard other sounds: Merry Verlow's step in the hall, an interior door being opened and closed—Miz Verlow going to bed. But we were not alone with Merry Verlow in this house. I detected the even breathing of sleepers, a faint cough, snores, the creak of bedsprings as someone shifted, a whisper of sheeting, a plumping of a feather pillow. I did not recognize any of them as characteristic of the people I knew.

Ida Mae Oakes bent over me and murmured in my ears, both at the same time, a magic she could do; her slow-sung lullaby was the rolling
shush
and
slosh
of the surf upon the sands. I was oh so very tired.

“You can stop,” Mama finally whispered. She pinched the flame on the candle. “Come up here and put your head on my shoulder.”

I set aside the jar of cream and crept up beside Mama in the bed. The hard lump of Betsy McCall in my overall pocket pinched me. I slipped her out and under the pillow.

I tuned my ears to Ida Mae's 
coming from the Gulf. Another note intruded.

“I hear somebody in the next room, Mama,” I whispered. “I hear someone moving around and talking to someone. I hear wings.”

“Of course you do, silly girl. It's your great-grandmama. She can never get to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and she keeps everybody else in the house awake doing it.”

HAVING slept in my clothes, my overalls and Daddy's shirt, I woke up feeling grubby, piratical, and oddly naked. Light and unbound. No keys pricked the base of my throat with their small, sharp teeth, no silk string hung on my neck.

Breakfast noises and smells evoked an instant, almost painful explosion of hunger. We had not eaten since lunch in Elba the previous day.

Going to the nearest window, I slipped between the draperies and the windowpane. The mysteries of the previous night were resolved neatly into an ordinary pale early morning, lightly shadowed by the low angle of the rising sun. By daylight, I could see the dune between the wide bleached swathe of beach and the house. The beautiful shore. The sound of the Gulf had not ceased in the night.

I went to Mama to nudge her gently.

“Mama, smell the breakfast!”

She opened one eye reluctantly, wrinkled her nose, and then sat up for a languorous stretch and yawn.

“Lord what a fine smell that is. Coffee. Bacon.” She breathed deeper. “And I smell the saltwater too.” She sounded almost happy.

She cast off the bedclothes, took her robe and bathroom things and hurried down the hall.

Though I had washed my face and brushed my teeth before bed, I had forgotten the rubber bands in my hair. Consequently, the bands and my hair were interwoven into a witch's nest.

When Mama came back from the bathroom and saw me gingerly tugging one strand at a time, she grabbed me and about scalped me tearing the bands out. I gritted my teeth. Wincing and wailing would only make it worse. She dragged a comb through my hair. It felt as if she were yanking out what was left of it. But there was enough left to tie up again, with the old rubber bands cleared of strays.

Then she put on some clothes—a simple white blouse, dark trousers, and sandals. She did the pageboy with the barrettes and lipstick, and was all ready for a Loretta Young entrance.

We followed our noses down the stairs into the foyer through which we had entered the previous night. It too was revealed in daylight to be an everyday room. My tennies were still there, just inside the door, all shaken out and ready to wear. I slipped into them and caught up with Mama.

Mama did not seem disoriented. She might have been following her nose, or perhaps the house was as familiar to her as she had said. She made straight for a wide doorway that had not been there the previous night. Among the sounds I had heard earlier had been the slide of pocket doors back into the walls. It must have been those.

Mama halted in the doorway. “Who are these
people
?”

I peeked past her. Several strangers were breakfasting at the long mahogany table, where a colored woman in a maid's uniform waited upon them. The breakfasters all paused in their fast breaking and their conversations to smile at us welcomingly.

From behind us, Fennie's sister emerged at Mama's shoulder.

“Miz Verlow, these people aren't
Dakins,
are they?”

“They're my guests.”

“Your guests . . .” Mama's voice faltered. She took a deep breath and murmured through gritted teeth, “Your
paying
guests, you mean . . .”

“Of course.”

The idea that a relative, even one connected to us as distantly and obscurely as Merry Verlow, might rent out the rooms of her home to strangers was humiliating to Mama—much worse than being suspected of conspiring to commit the brutal murder of one's husband. Letting rooms was the first wretched public admission of financial need. Of all the delusions that furnished Mama's world, the belief that the entire world was awaiting eagerly—nay, plotting—her downfall from the decayed social structure she was born to rule was the most ridiculous. But I was only seven and as much as I had come to distrust Mama, and to feel unloved by her, I had too little knowledge of the world not to feel as she did—threatened by forces just beyond my grasp.

We had nowhere else to go. Despite her horror and dismay, Mama was waiting for Merry Verlow to come up with some reason we should remain. I despaired. What could Miz Verlow possibly say that would relieve Mama of the humiliation and disgrace that she thought it her duty to feel and display?