Candles Burning (5 page)

Because of the rain, no sun refracted through the prisms in the shop. The ticking shop was empty except for me and Mama and the middle-aged man behind the high schoolmaster's desk that served for a counter. He didn't seem to care one way or the other that Mama and I were in his shop. When Mama had been his only customer for ten minutes, the shop door opened with the ring of the brass bell.

The proprietor smiled and said to the lady coming through the door, “Oh, I'm very glad to see
you
.”

The lady smiled back at him.

I do not remember what she looked like. Well. Sometimes I think I do, but wonder if my memory is trustworthy. Perhaps I have given the lady the face that suited her, or me. I do remember the knife-pleat of her skirt, though not the color or print, and the filmy plastic galoshes she wore over her shoes, which were pumps with low heels. In that era, most women had a pair of those galoshes; Mama did. They were supposed to be see-through so the shoe inside was visible but they never were—shoes visible nor galoshes truly transparent, I mean. Her hands were gloved, as indeed Mama's were, gloves being like hats a commonplace accessory.

And I do remember the way the lady looked at me.

Just once at first, and for only a few seconds. She was looking
at
me. She was not looking at a gawky little girl who was wet and trying not to drip on anything. She was looking at Calliope Carroll Dakin, whoever she was at the age of seven years. She looked at me a moment and then she looked at Mama.

Then she said to the proprietor, “There's a wet little girl standing behind your door, Mr. Rideaux. Does she belong to you?”

“She's mine,” Mama said.

The lady turned abruptly to the proprietor. “I'm looking for a candlestick, Mr. Rideaux.”

The atmosphere of the shop was suddenly very precarious. Anything might happen. Mama picked up the nearest candlestick—just a dollar-and-a-half of cobalt glass—and took it back to the proprietor's desk.

That was when Mama discovered that she no longer had her pocketbook.

Mama was embarrassed, and more. She was flustered. Somehow she had managed to misstep repeatedly. She assured Mr. Rideaux that her handbag was
somewhere,
that she really did have the money for the candlestick (even though she probably did not really want it at all), and pleaded for him to put it aside for her until she came back with the money.

“Did you have your pocketbook with you earlier?” he asked politely, but in an easy tone that suggested he hardly cared much one way or the other.

“I don't remember.”

The strange lady had been moving slowly about, looking at and picking up this candlestick or that, and putting it down and smiling to herself. She paused by a magnificent stuffed macaw that had escaped my notice until she ran her gloved fingers over its scarlet crown and down its back. A parrot in New Orleans, after all, but as dumb as any candlestick. She looked at me again—a clean, swift, prompting look.

“You must have, Mama, because you bought that little cameo pin and I saw you take out your change purse,” I said.

Mama glared at me. I was not supposed to speak in public unless it was to make my manners to someone or to say something nice about her.

“Probably you left it there, last place you were in,” Mr. Rideaux suggested.

“Probably I did,” Mama agreed. “Come on, Calley.”

A look passed between the strange lady and the proprietor.

“Oh, leave the little girl here, she is being an angel,” the proprietor said.

Mama looked at him and then at me. She was trying to decide whether this might be a treat for me, in which case she was not about to allow it. But I looked as wet and miserable and bored as I could, so she relented.

“You hit her if she breaks anything and I'll pay double for it when I get back,” Mama said.

So Mama went out with her umbrella and the satisfaction that Mr. Rideaux knew that she had money enough to pay twice the price of anything he had in his store.

No one else came into the shop. Mr. Rideaux sat at his desk, writing in a ledger. The lady glanced at me. I must have looked like I was about to drop because she made a little noise in her throat that provoked Mr. Rideaux to look at her again.

He pointed his pen at me. “Young lady, go sit yourself down on that little chair over there.”

I sat on the very edge of the tapestry seat of the little mahogany chair. My hair, my dress and coat dried while I watched and listened to the wall of clocks telling all their false times. An excitement bloomed in me. I laughed aloud. The clocks had nothing to do with time but were merely instruments, the clicking and ticking of silver and gold and bronze and pinchbeck arrows, a droll and slapstick rhapsody of lies. And the odd music became odder, less chaotic, more complicated; it came to me that a new timepiece had entered the song and transformed it.

Entranced as I was, I saw the lady's mouth quiver and the proprietor's left eyebrow jig as they exchanged looks. I felt their gazes on me from time to time but there was in them no censure or disapproval but contrariwise, a quiet pleasure.

The jangle of the bell on the door broke the spell as Mama opened it. I gasped as if my heart had come to a stop in my chest. And just at that instant, all the clocks on the wall stopped, so that the shop was suddenly as still as the dead old things it sheltered.

“Calley, what do you mean, plopping yourself down on Mr. Rideaux's antique chair?” Mama said.

She marched back to the proprietor's desk.

“Mr. Rideaux, I could not find my pocketbook anywhere, but I will have my husband write you a check for that chair Calley has probably
ruined,
and of course I still want the candlestick.”

Mr. Rideaux smiled at Mama. I did not believe his smile but Mama did.

“The young lady did not ruin that chair. I reserve that chair for wet little girls who come into my shop and I would not sell it for the world. And I am not one bit surprised that you did not find your pocketbook because it was here all the time,” said Mr. Rideaux.

He got up, fingered a key out from the watch pocket of his vest, and used it to open his filing cabinet. From the top drawer of his filing cabinet he pulled out Mama's pocketbook, her brown Hermès Kelly bag.

My view from the chair of Mr. Rideaux had been full. At no time had I seen him find Mama's pocketbook, and at no time did he even get up from his desk, much less unlock the filing cabinet and stick Mama's pocketbook into it. I felt the strange lady's gaze on me. I said nothing, and it came into my mind that I hardly knew how much real time had passed while the clocks had entranced me. It was what Daddy would call a conundrum.

The lady spoke suddenly, making Mama start. “I found it, right over here.”

She pointed to a little petticoat table—five hundred pounds of mahogany and Georgia marble that had been carved and glued and polished in order to support a little mirror, six inches off the floor, so the ladies of the 1850s could check the fall of their crinolines. Mamadee had one, of which she was sinfully proud. Mama and Mamadee often informed me of instances of sinful pride on the part of the other. I myself was so often hell-bound from my sinful pride that I was sinfully proud of it.

Mama smiled and held her pocketbook against her breast and hugged it.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Mama said to the lady.

“I was going to steal it, and your little girl too, but I was afraid I would get caught,” the lady said.

“Who would want Calley?” Mama said.

The lady gave me a warm smile. “Well, wet little girls must be good for
something
.” Then she turned back to the proprietor and said, “You've got so much new stock, Mr. Rideaux, and I'm just not sure
what
I want. I think I'll have to come back one day when it's not raining.”

She left with a tinkle of the little brass bell, and without looking at me again.

“Can you change a fifty?” Mama asked Mr. Rideaux. Before he could answer, Mama cried, “Oh, no wait, I think I have two singles.”

Mr. Rideaux smiled and started to take the bills.

Mama held on to them. “Then all I can buy is this little piece of cobalt?”

“That's all you can buy
today,
” he said, delicately plucking the two bills out of her hand. “But you come back tomorrow, and I promise I won't let you out for under that fifty you're putting back in your purse.”

Mama laughed delicately too, at this proof that Mr. Rideaux knew that she had money. “Then I guess I'll have to come back.”

But of course we never went back.

THE elevator jerked and sighed and thumped to a stop like somebody getting hanged. Mama tiptoed into the Penthouse in her stocking feet, holding her high heels in one hand by their ankle straps. She crept into my room and grabbed my foot under the blanket and shook it.

“Calley, wake up and come unzip me,” she whispered.

I sat up and knuckled my eyes as if I had been asleep, though the only time my eyes had been closed since she and Daddy went out was just before she reached my room. The more I tried not to think about the strange time in the shop that ticked, the more it troubled me. It was a relief to have Mama back. Putting on my glasses and grabbing Betsy Cane McCall from under my pillow, I hopped out of bed and followed Mama to the big bedroom and its dressing room.

Mama had gone out in a strapless copper taffeta with an iridescent peach half-skirt. She dropped her heels on the carpet and simultaneously reached for one of her earrings. I watched her replace her jewelry in its velvet-lined boxes. She tipped her chin toward the vanity bench. When I knelt on it, she backed up to me so I could reach the hidden zipper running down the back of the dress to her waist. Another one, meant to prevent any stress on the waistline or hip, ran down from under one armpit past the waist about six inches. She could have done that one herself but she turned sideways with her arm up, so I did it. The taffeta slipped in a luxuriant rustle to the carpet; she stepped daintily out of it.

I zipped the dress onto its padded hanger and returned it to the rod in the closet. “Where's Daddy?”

Mama shucked her half-slip over her head, flung it aside, and turned to the vanity to light a Kool. “Having a last drink and cigar with the boys.”

I watched her unhook her silk stockings from her garters. Mama loved her silk stockings.

“Hands and nails,” she said.

I held out my hands.

“Calley, have you been shucking oysters while I was out? Get some cream onto those claws.”

Obediently, I rubbed some of her cold cream into my hands.

Mama sat down at the vanity to raise one foot while I slipped the stockings off as I had been taught, rolling them carefully from top to toe. I tucked them into her lingerie bag.

When she had unpainted her face and was nearly finished putting on her skin food, I asked for something. “Mama, come sleep with me tonight. Please.”

She looked at me hard. “Why?”

“I just want you to.”

“You do not just want me to, Calliope Dakin. You have always got a reason for asking a favor.”

“I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?”

I shrugged.

“A great big girl like you. Scared. You are a crazy girl. I am gone be one of those poor women saddled with a mental case for a child for the rest of my life.”

“Please, Mama.”

She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. I could not bring myself to look at another clock face just yet.

“I go to bed in here, your daddy will come bumbling in and wake me up.”

After grinding out her cigarette in the ashtray, she followed me to my room.

There she dropped wearily onto my bed. “Get down at the foot and rub my feet. They are killing me.” The foot of the bed, she meant.

Mama often wanted me to rub her feet. Mama would lie down with her head on the pillow and I would huddle at the end of the bed, cradling her feet and rubbing them. And if I rubbed her feet long enough, she would fall asleep in my bed. I loved sleeping with Mama. I wasn't ready to stop being a little girl yet. The sound of her heartbeat was my best lullaby.

I paused once when her eyes were closed and she hadn't said anything for a long while, but she spoke right up: “Keep on it, Calley, or I might as well go on back to my own bed and wait there for your philandering father.”

But when I stopped again later, Mama did not speak. I collected Betsy Cane McCall from the floor where I had dropped her, crawled back up to the head of the bed, turned my pillow over to get the cool side, and fell into a sweaty doze. I didn't feel as if I were asleep. Instead, I was trapped in the panicky darkness beneath the surface of sleep. The darkness was a sea of keening and lamentations and loss. I was under that dark water again, the rain spattering desperately against the glass. I was breathing that woe and misery, my mouth, my ears, my eyes stinging with its bitterness.

Some time later Mama shook me awake. She was out of bed, evidently having checked the bedroom she shared with Daddy.

“It's one o'clock, Calley, and your daddy is not back. He's drinking, or else he has run off with some New Orleans floozy with Negro blood in her veins.”

Having heard similar speculations from her on other occasions when Daddy was late, and not really understanding them, I took her remarks indifferently.

She slipped back into the bed and I snugged up to her. We went back to sleep.

I woke up before Mama, about seven o'clock, and wiggled out of bed to run to the bathroom.

Mama yanked the covers tight over herself so I could not get back in under them.