Candles Burning (22 page)

“They're all Yankees,” Miz Verlow whispered to Mama.

It was the only perfect, the only right, the only sufficient thing for Merry Verlow to have said.

Merry Verlow's clientele were none of them wealthy but they were comfortable. Their reasons for spending weeks or months on this beach were various and of no import to Mama or, at that point in my young life, to me. I was far more interested in the beach than I was in Miz Verlow's guests. They were merely a collection of grown-ups I did not know. What would make them bearable to her was they could not bring back tales to anyone we knew, or so Mama came quickly to believe.

With as charming a smile as I ever saw on her face, Mama took the seat at the head of the table. She settled instantaneously upon the role of hostess, with all its subtle implication of ownership.

Mama addressed the table in general. “I am so pleased to be able to join you all for breakfast.”

The breakfasters murmured a polite chorus of welcome.

One of them asked Miz Verlow whether the newspapers had arrived yet.

Miz Verlow threw her hands up in mock dismay. “Not yet! I expect the printer doesn't know we're waiting on him!”

The guests chuckled amiably.

Having claimed the chair at the head of the dining room table, Mama directed the conversation at that first breakfast and every subsequent meal that she took with the guests.

I had not an inkling where I was supposed to sit. I looked to Miz Verlow for direction. She prodded me toward the maid who in turn shooed me ahead of her through a swinging door into a butler's panty and onward into the kitchen.

Another colored woman, floured to her elbow dimples, was kneading dough. The two women exchanged a glance. A white-floured forefinger pointed me to a small table in a corner. I took it for granted that it was where the maids ate their own meals.

My experience had been that nearly all colored people, except the very old, tended to be terse in the presence of whites. Small white children often seemed to be exempted from that caution, and so I knew that colored people were more talkative among themselves. After a few exchanges, I had heard enough from both of the women who worked for Miz Verlow to realize that their speech was as terse and even more opaque than that of the colored people in Alabama and Louisiana. The syntax, accent, diction, cadence and even timbre—words that I did not know at the time, though I grasped their sense—those aspects of their speech were different to my ear, in significant as well as subtle ways. I do not wish to depict a well-developed subdialect as ignorance or stupidity—that is, I loathe the thought of portraying them as characters from
Amos and Andy
. My seven-year-old sense of their speech is an unsatisfactory compromise.

“Sit,” said the cook, as she indicated the table. But she reached out as I passed her and pinched my upper arm. “Scrawny,” she murmured to the maid. “Not a decent broth in it.”

The maid smothered a laugh in her palms. Then she put a breakfast down in front of me: grapefruit juice, a hobo egg—a hard-fried egg—broken bits of bacon and a sausage patty on the plate. I wondered how they knew that a hard-fried hobo is my favorite kind of egg. The egg in its frame of toast was right out of the iron spider; the breakfast meat had come off of plates returned to the kitchen, too cooled or unwanted for the guests. I was a little bit too young and too hungry to be insulted. I didn't look up again until it was all inside me.

The maid came back from the dining room, carrying a tray heaped with dishes cleared from the table. Once she put it down, she took a mug from a cupboard, spooned in an eye-opening quantity of sugar, poured in coffee and then topped the mug with a thick layer of cream. And to my astonishment, she set it down in front of me. While in the past I had stolen sips of coffee from the abandoned cups of adults, never before had I been given any coffee just for myself, let alone a rich feast of a cup.

From the backstairs, Miz Verlow came into the kitchen with another tray, from a single breakfast. Somebody had had breakfast in his or her room, if not in bed. Perhaps Merry Verlow herself. The sounds of the house were too new to me to be sure of the numbers of residents in the house.

“Calley, this is Perdita,” Miz Verlow told me with a nod to the cook.

Perdita's mouth twitched in the briefest of smiles.

Miz Verlow nodded toward the maid, “Calley, this is Cleonie.”

“Clee-owny,” I repeated.

Cleonie gave me a nod as she lowered the tray to a counter next to a sink.

“Calley's gone help you wash up the dishes, Cleonie. You teach her the proper way.”

Silently, Cleonie drew a step stool up to the sink. I climbed onto it.

“Her crystals fuss,” Cleonie instructed me. “Then her silver. Drain out, fill up. Nex her plates, bowls, cups, sarvin' dish. Drain out, fill up. Her mixin' dish, cook pot, pan. Dry ever piece so it dowen spot nor rust none.”

Cleonie shook Ivory flakes into the freshet of hot water from the faucet into the sink. She looked around. Miz Verlow was gone.

“Chile, them hears make a harring green. You fly wit 'em?”

“Clone-nee June Huggins's blaveration make ma hears hurt,” Perdita scolded. “You talks too much. Mo' you talk, less you git done. Leave her chile be.”

Cleonie carefully lowered a glass into the soapy water. “Better not break a one these glasses. They be her real crystals.” She turned to Perdita. “Who payn for what she break? Or is it come out a ma pay?”

Perdita sniffed and flung the dough to the board as if it were Cleonie's question. “Howse I to known? Ax Miz Verlow.”

Cleonie looked at me critically. “You a glass buster ever I seed one.” She handed me a clean rag. “Lemme see you do.”

Cautiously I fished the glass from the sink. The heat of the water turned my hand bright red but I bore it wordlessly.

“Hot water be's the onliest thing to wash proper.”

I swabbed the glass and rinsed it. She took it from me and wiped it dry with a sacking towel. She held it up to the light. Then she lowered it and looked at me solemnly through the bottom of the glass.

I was able to look out the window over the sink. To my surprise and pleasure, the Edsel was parked there, with some other vehicles. One of them was a '56 Ford Country Squire. A silver coupe of a make unknown to me and with a Maryland plate sat idling within sight. Miz Verlow stood next to it, bent to the open driver's side window. The driver was a woman, or at least wearing a woman's hat, a high-style fedora, at an angle that shaded her face.

“Good-bye,” Miz Verlow said, stepping back.

The woman behind the wheel lifted a gloved hand in a small wave and then the sedan drew away.

Miz Verlow watched it go and then turned and went into the house through some door that I could not see from where I stood.

A few minutes later, Miz Verlow emerged into the same area outside the kitchen window from another part of the house. She had wound a handkerchief around her head and changed from skirt and blouse to coveralls rather like the ones mechanics wear. As I washed the glasses, she began to unload the Edsel onto a handcart. The ease with which she lifted the heavier cases and bags revealed an unexpected physical strength.

There were a lot of dishes to wash and dry and a lot of luggage to unload. Miz Verlow disappeared from time to time with the loaded handcart. I could hear its wheels rumbling up a ramp beyond my vision, but which had to be fairly near at hand. A door would open, the reverberation of the wheels changed, and the handcart's burden would be unloaded inside the house. Somewhere nearby there was another staircase, a backstairs for Cleonie and Perdita and Miz Verlow.

My hands became redder and then wrinkly, as if the skin were too sodden to stay stuck on. I was frankly tired by the time I finished and did not much care if Miz Verlow magically folded up the Edsel, loaded it onto the handcart, and made
it
disappear into the house.

When Cleonie left the kitchen, I heard her on the backstairs. Then, behind her step, the sound of bundles of linen came thumping down from above through a chute to an unseen bin.

Miz Verlow returned, restored to ordinary dress of skirt and blouse. The handkerchief was gone. I noticed then, for the first time, that her hair was not white, as had been my earliest impression, but white-blonde, like Jean Harlow's. It was not marcelled, like Fennie's. Rather she wore it coiled in braids around her head. Fine wisps escaped the braids to make a barely perceptible halo. Miz Verlow's skin, though, was not that of an old woman, nor was her bearing. I had little interest in her age at the time, but if asked, I would have reckoned her casually as neither as young as my mother nor as old as Mamadee.

Though she wore lipstick, she was otherwise barefaced. Mama having made me aware of jewelry, I noticed that Miz Verlow wore a gold band and solitaire on the third finger of her right hand. She never spoke of a husband, dead, departed or divorced, and I never saw any photographs of her with any man who might pass for a spouse. Now, of course, I can imagine many reasons why an unmarried woman might wear the signifiers of marriage. Back then I merely expected that sometime or other, a Mr. Verlow would make an appearance. Too young to have fully grasped the conventions, I did not yet understand that Merry Verlow was far more likely to share a last name, a maiden name, with her sister, Fennie, than that they had somehow married men with the same last name.

Miz Verlow came through the butler's pantry, making a brief inspection of the crystal and china now returned to their cupboards.

“Did Miss Calliope Dakin do a proper job?” she asked Perdita.

Perdita looked at me impassively. “She done.”

“Good.” Miz Verlow's hand went to a pocket at the seam of her skirt and when she opened her palm, there was a nickel in it. “You best save it, Calley. Anything you break, you have to pay for.”

I looked at the nickel. Then I shook my head.

“You best save it for me.”

Miz Verlow studied my face. Then she pocketed the nickel.

“We will have an account between us. Let's go find your mama.”

Miz Verlow stopped in the foyer to pick up a bundle of copies of the local newspaper from just inside the door. They were tied into a fat roll with a piece of string. Miz Verlow slipped the knot and shook them out. Black ink stained half the front page. It was an extraordinarily ugly black, that ink, and I had an immediate revulsion to it. None of the guests wanted to touch them either, so those papers would remain unread.

Mama had taken coffee on the verandah with some of the other guests, and then, with fewer of them, begun a social cigarette break. It was a fair day, warming gently from the cool of the early morning, and there was much admiring of the view of sand and sea going on among them.

Miz Verlow placed the newspapers on a convenient wicker table and apologized to the guests, with the observation that something disastrous must have occurred at the newspaper's printer.

Ordinarily, not all her guests were interested in seeing a newspaper, particularly a local one. Most of Miz Verlow's clientele wanted to get away from the rest of the world for at least a time.

The same inkblot problem with the newspaper occurred several days running. Then the printer apparently cured it. Some weeks later it occurred again but only on one day.

When I was rummaging through all the ephemera having to do with Daddy's murder, I finally saw those papers without blotches. What the ink obscured, of course, were the accounts of the trial in New Orleans of the two murderesses and their subsequent sentencing.

The very first paper also reported that no evidence had been found to link the widow Dakin to the crime. She was not in attendance at the trial and could not be reached for comment. The paper also reported a strange coincidence. But we were to learn of that event through quite another channel and at another time. The last blotched paper reported the strange deaths of Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks.

At the time, I paid next to no attention. Mama never was a newspaper reader—not of respectable ones anyway, and not even the tabloids, at the time—and I was too young to care about any part of a newspaper aside from the funny pages. And for all I knew then, the local newspaper was often late and ink-blotched into an unreadable condition.

“Miz Dakin,” Merry Verlow said softly. “May I have a word?”

Smiling graciously, Mama butted her cigarette in an ashtray and followed Miz Verlow back inside, where I was waiting.

“Did Calley break something? You just go right ahead and hit her.”

“I have not found that hitting children improves them,” Miz Verlow said, “and I know that it does not improve me.”

That brought Mama up short. She had taken Miz Verlow, who had given her back her own bedroom and put a light in it for her, for an acolyte. Now Miz Verlow was making declarations.

Miz Verlow went on. “I have put some gasoline in your vehicle and brought it to the back of the house. As a matter of convenience, it is my practice to ask guests to leave their car keys with me, as our parking space is so limited and vehicles may have to be moved. I have taken the liberty of unpacking your vehicle and sending your luggage to your room. You may store anything you wish in the attic, which is locked, of course. You need only ask for the key should you desire to retrieve anything that you choose to store at anytime. If you would like to go up now and see to its disposition—”

Mama's mouth was set in a straight line that meant nobody was putting anything over on her. “I believe I'll do just that.”

She started upstairs.

“Go out and play, Calley,” Miz Verlow said, without looking at me.