Candles Burning (54 page)

The brandy had loosened her tongue. I didn't want to interrupt her.

“Your grandmama had only her looks. Beautiful women are as common as sin, of course. Because the world so overvalues beauty in a woman, the beautiful woman often becomes an empty shell. I myself,” she added, “am not beautiful.”

I wondered if she meant the face that she presently wore, with its strong resemblance to that of the current Queen of England, or the one with which she had been born. Had she changed her face for strategic purposes or because she hated her original one?

“I have a particular talent, and that is to be able to recognize and use the talents the rest of the populace would gladly smother in infancy.” She nodded toward me significantly.

She may have wanted me to thank her. I didn't.

She drank a little of her brandy and continued. “Your mama received only Deirdre's and Cosima's useless beauty. It brought her only grief, I can assure you.”

“Speak ill of the dead,” I said.

“If I wish.” She pursed her lips. “Your mama's sisters had talents. Deirdre tried to kill them. She was enraged to be afflicted with them, the sort of people that she had fled in her marriage to ‘Captain' Carroll.” Mrs. Mank said “Captain” roguishly, mocking Mamadee. “Cosima saved them from her. Alas, your mama undid Cosima's best efforts. When she was in her teens and Deirdre was becoming jealous of her looks, she ran away to Cosima.”

“It's a fairy tale,” I said. “ ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all.' ”

Mrs. Mank smiled sourly. “Of course it is. Once in Cosima's house, your mama could not abide living with her own sisters, those ugly but talented young women. Did she mean to burn the house down and everyone in it except herself? Ask Cosima sometime, will you? Or your mama, if you can. It hardly matters. Faith and Hope were lost, and so was Cosima.”

For a moment she sat silent, brooding. “I wanted to hate Cosima. I was never very successful at it. I had my jealousy, for I had neither Deirdre's beauty, nor talent of the kind that Cosima and your aunts had. Mine are talents far more common in the world. Jack Dexter's talents.”

Her features sagged with dissatisfaction.

“Yes, I am Deirdre's sister. Your great-aunt.” She looked at me with suddenly wide-open eyes. “I'm half-pissed,” she said.

I laughed. “It's been fascinating.”

She laughed as if she had been clever. “I bet. Look, I've been a fairy godmother to you. I expect some return on my outlay. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded as if in the affirmative. I needed her in order to get to Tallassee for Mama's interment.

I drank her brandy, and let her think that she was ringmaster.

THE flight was direct, from a private terminal at Logan to the little airport at Tallassee. Firsts for me, to fly, to fly on a jet, to fly on a chartered jet—I remembered the train from New Orleans to Montgomery, and it came to me that I would not run out of firsts until my death, and that would be a first too. Mrs. Mank slept the whole way, because she did not want to talk to me, but also because she was hungover. She took a pill of some kind and offered me one, but I declined. Her lips pursed at the realization that my head was stronger than hers.

The wardrobe she had provided me was short on black, so I wore a boxy Courreges stewardessy cobalt-blue dress that went only halfway to my knees. I was barelegged, but my shoes were black, black flats because Mrs. Mank said tall girls had to wear flats and she had picked them out and paid for them. One day, I promised myself, I would buy my own shoes, and own a pair of stiletto heels in black. My copper-penny wig covered the stubble of my new hair. Both my black beret and the pin that held it to the wig were borrowed, volunteered by Mrs. Mank from her own wardrobe. The beret bore the label of Elsa Schiaparelli, and for that reason alone, I accepted the loan of it. Wig and hat felt like two hats, but I didn't intend to make a habit of wearing the combination.

A car and hired driver awaited us. It was a black Cadillac, and the driver was a woman. She was a thin woman, the worn-out Southern kind, with huge eyes and sun-damaged complexion, bad teeth and cigarette-stained fingers. She did not have an ounce of flesh to spare, no chest, no fanny, and her hair had been burnt to rusty wire by harsh home perms and dye-jobs.

The first thing that she did was to introduce herself as Doris, and then express her condolences for the late Mrs. Dakin. Hers was a lunger's voice, breathy and harsh.

I wondered how Doris knew Mama's name. Surely Ford had not put it in any of the local newspapers. Perhaps Mrs. Mank had included the information with the address of the cemetery that was our destination.

Doris's eyes in the rearview mirror were curious but only for brief seconds; she drove skillfully, and never hesitated as to our route.

Mrs. Mank glanced at the Rolex on her wrist and said, “We're going to be a little late.”

Doris stepped down on the accelerator. She did her best, but the country roads could not be driven as if they were highways, not safely.

The Promised Land shocked me, so closely did it match my memory. Its resemblance to a used-car junkyard was deeply disheartening. Someone had left a dusty Corvette at the verge of the road into the cemetery.

“Stay here, please,” I asked Mrs. Mank.

She rolled down the windows and sat back. “Have it your way.” From her purse, she took a flask.

Doris held the door for me.

“I'll just wait with Missus,” she told me, with a flicker of her gaze toward Mrs. Mank. It was as if she didn't want to say Mrs. Mank's name.

I looked for a crow. Not only were there no crows, there were no birds at all, and in Alabama, I recalled, there were always birds in the sky.

A casket waited on a mechanical frame in an open grave. There were no flowers. Nearby stood a big black funeral hack, its rear door open. Two men sat inside the hack, in the front seat, with the windows rolled down, and cigarette smoke whisping out. A white man in a black suit leaned against the body of the hack, smoking a cigarette. He wore a black fedora. He did not need to remove his sunglasses for me to recognize him.

He pitched his cigarette butt past the coffin and into the open grave.

“Let's get this gone,” Ford said in a bored drawl.

The two men, the undertaker and the driver, got out of the front seat of the hack and assumed respectful postures next to it.

Ford hitched the hem of his suit jacket, which was silk and hand-tailored, and drew a small, thick book from a rear pocket. The jacket fell perfectly back into line.

He pushed his hat back on his forehead. He let the book fall open.

He did not look at it but intoned, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to lay to rest the sorry remains of the late not very beloved Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, relic of Joe Cane Dakin, the larger proportion of him moldering already just to my left. If you examine his stone—beg pardon, there is no stone, as Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin never got around to having one placed there. Let none of us doubt that she had a more pressing need, if she ever did recall that she had yet to perform this widow's duty, perhaps for cigarettes, or silk stockings, or makeup, that week. Allow me to substitute mere words:

Ford took a mocking bow.

“To the task at hand.”

He looked down at the casket. He spread his hands upon the polished wood of the top.

“Mama,” he said. “Blame me. I had your bloated carcass drug here all the way from Pass Christian. I bought this here plot next to Daddy, just for you. Now your fine Carroll bones gone spend eternity right next to his Dakin bones. Most of 'em, I mean. Mama, I spent the last decade of my life thinking up the things I was gone say to you. But now we're here, I ain't wasting my breath.”

He tipped his chin heavenward and closed his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses reverently.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he said mournfully, and then laughed. “Let's go get drunk.”

“I'd like to sing a hymn,” I said.

He tore off his hat and cast it roughly to the ground.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew you could not by-god-and-sonny-jesus keep that huge flapping mouth of yours shut.”

Ignoring him, I sang, in my own tuneless voice.

 
“Okay,” said Ford. “Now shut up and let's go get drunk.”

“I want a few minutes with Daddy.”

Ford rolled his eyes. “He's deader than she is, Dumbo.”

But he waited. And he removed his hat.

I stepped sideways to the sunken place that he had indicated was Daddy's grave. I felt nothing, no emanation, certainly, and no sense of peace.

“He's not here,” I said.

“What I said.” Ford smoothed his hair and stuck his hat back on his head, the same way, tipped jauntily back. “Better go tell Saint Peter.”

Ignoring Ford, I started back toward the Cadillac. I was going to tell Mrs. Mank that I meant to go have a drink with Ford, possibly even get drunk, and she could go back to Massachusetts, but I didn't bother to tell Ford. He was full enough of himself already.

He strolled along behind me, though.

Doris stood next to the sedan, her eyes bigger than ever at what she had heard and witnessed. She opened the passenger door at my approach.

Ford stepped between me and the open door.

“You,” he said to Mrs. Mank, in a mocking tone.

She flinched.

“That's right,” he said. “Why don't you just get yourself out of this here Cadillac and dig yourself a hole in an unconsecrated ditch somewhere and pull the dirt in on yourself and die, Auntie? I won't help you either. I won't even throw the dirt on your face, old woman.”

She snarled, but seemed unable to speak a word.

“She wants to make a confession, first,” I said.

Mrs. Mank looked from me to Ford and back again. Her jaw twitched violently, nearly dislocating itself. At last she got it in gear.

“I am
owed
Calley. I knew it the minute that I saw her in that shop in New Orleans face-to-face. Deirdre promised me. Her stupidity cost me those two girls, Faith and Hope. The two of them weren't half of Calley, of course, not that Deirdre would admit it. She thought she was going to get Joe Cane Dakin's money too. Fennie sorted her out for me. You should thank me for that, boy. You two have no complaint against me. Old Cosima was charcoal before you were born. What could she do for you but interfere?”

Ford slammed the door hard enough to make the automobile shake.

Inside, Mrs. Mank hit the door lock.
Clunk
. Cadillac door locks always clunked.

“Let's go get drunk,” he said. “I had all this I can take.”

“What about her?”

“What about her?” he said irritably.

He strode toward the Corvette and with a glance back at Mrs. Mank's purpling face, I followed him. I guessed that I didn't have to tell her anything. I didn't have to account to her.

Ford did not open the car door for me. He went over the one on the driver's side, of course, rather than open it for himself. I did the same thing on the passenger side, no doubt showing my underpants to Doris, Mrs. Mank, the undertaker and his man. Those two fellows had yet to begin lowering the casket. They were standing there gawking, and who could blame them?

Sinking into the bucket seat, I unpinned the beret and took it off. I tucked it under my fanny.

Ford watched me quizzically.

“It's a Schiaparelli,” I said.

He chortled. “Oh, Mama, you hear that?”

He drove just the way I expected he would, like an idiot. It was highly enjoyable, and I whooped and hollered and laughed along with him.

We came to a roistering stop outside a cement block road-house. It was properly low in every way, as a Southern bar should be, on account of drinking and everything associated with it is so sinful. The least a body could do was sin in as squalid a place as could be found.

We didn't actually stay. Ford bought a bottle of Wild Turkey from the old blind man behind the bar and we carried it away to his Corvette. A black limousine waited in the parking lot not far from it. Doris waved at me from behind the wheel. The windows were up, no doubt with the air-conditioning keeping Mrs. Mank cool, and so she was not visible to us.

“Is this against the law?” I asked Ford.

“Hope so,” he said, throwing the cap away.

Handing me the bottle first was an unexpected, gentlemanly gesture that might have brought tears to my eyes, if Ford were anyone else but Ford.