Candles Burning (55 page)

“Krast,” he said, letting his accent thicken ridiculously. “You growd tits. No much of 'em but that's about as much as I expected. You gone drink that whole bottle yourself?”

“You ain't changed a bit,” I said, with airy contempt.

He sucked a good mouthful out of the bottle, swished it around like mouthwash and swallowed it.

“That's a lie,” he said. “Now we're orphans, you best be kinder to me.”

“You gone be kinder to me?”

“Maybe.” He fingered the breast pocket of his jacket, withdrew from it a card, and passed it to me.

“Fred Hatfield. Damn,” I said, “I'm getting all warm and gooey.” I tucked the card into the pocket in my dress.

“Daddy set up a dealership to sell Fords to colored people,” Ford said. “That was the last straw for Mamadee. Not that it matters. When somebody wants to kill somebody else, motivation is justification, that's all. So when Auntie offered to help get rid of Daddy and steal his money, Mamadee jumped right on. She should have known Auntie would double-cross her. Evarts and Weems and Mamadee cooked the books on Daddy. They were gone steal him and Mama blind. And did. But those loonies that murdered Daddy, they were tools. Tools for Isobel Mank, who felt about Daddy much as Deirdre Carroll did but was most anxious to control you. What you gone do about her, that old witch Isobel?”

I shrugged. Truly I did not know.

“What happened to all the Dakins?” I asked him out of left field.

He grinned and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “They accepted the kind assistance of Mamadee's agent, Lawyer Weems, to remove to California. I'll send you all the addresses of the ones that are still alive.”

“How do you know her?” I asked.

“Same way you do,” said Ford. “She bought me from Lew Evarts. He took the money and run. She told me right off that she was Mamadee's sister and my closest blood, next to Mama, who run off like the slut she was. She already had custody of you, she said, and you were in someplace for the feebleminded. She put me into the Wire Grass Military 'Cademy. It's outside of Banks, Alabama, about as far from anywhere as you can get and not be dead. It's run by some friends of hers, the Slaters, and it's a lot more like a prison than a school. First-class teachers, though. They'd all been run out other schools for some peccadillo or another, like picking their noses in church or being ex-Nazis or something socially iffy.”

“There were other kids there?”

“Seventy-five, give or take. Juvenile delinquents, basically.” Ford grinned. “I learned as much from my fellow inmates as I did from the faculty.”

“Did you send Mama that letter, the one from Paris?”

“Yeah. I went from Wire Grass to Phillips Exeter, and then I got control of my money and split for France.”

“How did you do that? Get control of the money?”

“Blackmailed Mank. I can connect her with Fennie Verlow, the morning that y'all skedaddled. I hear the Edsel plowing up the driveway and reckoned Mama was in a snit at Mamadee. So I came downstairs and there was ol' Fennie havin' a cozy chat with Tansy. Tansy tucked some cash money away real quick, so I wouldn't see it, but I did. Then Mamadee started squealing for her coffee and toast. A couple hours later, Mamadee had this thing on her neck I couldn't even see to start, and she was going batty. Tansy pretended to find fault with something and ran off, which made me a little suspicious. I poked around the kitchen and found the new butter thrown into the trash with just a little bit gone, enough for Mamadee's toast. It didn't smell like butter. It had a funny medicine smell. After she ran around town buying umbrellas, Mamadee went into her bedroom and didn't come out. I peeked in and by then that thing on her neck was visible, my God it was disgusting. I jammed an umbrella ferrule into the keyhole. Lew Evarts turned up and got the door open. I saw him touch that thing and then it exploded. She flopped around like a fish on a hook and then she was dead. I didn't see Lew Evarts do a thing to stop it. The blood. He just looked disgusted.”

He paused for the cause and then resumed. “Anyway, that isn't the only thing that I've got on Madame Mank. Among other things, she twiddles currency, you know, and a lot of it she forgets to do legally. I'm a hell of a researcher, worse luck for her, and a very good thief”—he rubbed the tips of the fingers of one hand together—“and while I can't hear the way you can, Calley, I mastered the latest techniques in phone tapping at Phillips Exeter. Some of those rich kids come by dishonesty honestly. You ever smoke pot?”

I shook my head regretfully.

He looked at me. “You're gone enjoy college. What's your next move? You gone let Mank pay your way through school, and then work it off for her?”

I was still thinking about it. “How free am I, right now?”

“Free enough to say no. I'll pay your way through college, Calley. I'm a thief but I'm your brother too. Most of the money I've got was Daddy's, or Mamadee's, and we should both be heirs. I'll give you half. Take you to a lawyer today and sign it over.”

The offer stunned me.

“I've got the ransom,” I confessed.

Ford winked at me. “You do have some Carroll in you.”

He watched me take another drink from the bottle and pass it back to him, and fidget, while I turned everything over in my mind.

“You think you can beat Mank at her own game?”

“You did,” I said. “And maybe you'd help.”

Now it was his turn to drink, fidget, glance at the limo, drink again and pass me the bottle.

“I'll be on the outside,” he said, with a surprised unhappiness in his voice. “I gotta think about it. We're talking about your soul, you know.”

Impulsively, I gave him a kiss on the cheek. While he was laughing and wiping it off his cheek, I climbed out of the Corvette.

Doris saw me coming and was outside of the limo opening the door by the time I reached it. I glanced back at Ford, before I folded myself into the rear seat. I thought I saw him give the briefest of nods, and then he threw me a double eagle.

ONE of my ghosts evaporated unexpectedly and with embarrassing ease. In a course on meteorology, taken to fulfill some undergraduate requirement, I discovered that the giant ghost in the fog was myself. Mrs. Mank's headlights had cast my own shadow onto the fog. It's called the Brocken Spectre. I suffered no chagrin. It happened when I was an ignorant little girl in strange circumstances. The discovery did, however, allow me to dismiss the occasional leakage of other memories of weirdness in my childhood as just as likely to be explainable in rational terms.

The ease with which I pick up languages and sciences, everything that I learned working in radio while I went through the various colleges that I attended, I built into a double-barreled career as a translator and radio producer. There were other schools that I attended under Mrs. Mank's sponsorship, schools that don't give degrees to hang on the wall. Under cover of translation and radio production, I have traveled everywhere in this world, gathering and absorbing information useful to Mrs. Mank and her superiors. I was more than a good servant, I was a brilliant one, and as much as I earned, I was never overpaid. I am proudest of the mischief to Mrs. Mank's interests that I was frequently able to trigger without her suspicions ever being raised. Ford and I between us put many a spoke in her wheels. Toward that end, she knew that someone was playing a long game against her, and that she was weakening and would eventually lose.

She believed that I was passing messages to her from her mama, my great-grandmama, Cosima, forgiving her, giving her direction. Ouija-board stuff, really.
Mama, will I go to Hell? Mama, should I buy low and sell high? Mama, should I bet on this politician or that one? Mama, blah, Mama, it wasn't my fault, I've just had to do what I had to do, Mama. Deirdre brought it on herself, Mama, you know she did.
Isobel Mank, who scammed the world, let herself be scammed by Joe Cane Dakin's daughter, with a little assistance from Cosima. It was easy for me to speak in Cosima's voice, of course, but oftentimes I really was telling her something that Cosima told me to tell her.

I had the pleasure of being at Mrs. Mank's bedside when she died seven years ago. Cancer of the lungs had invaded her throat, and she had lost the power of speech. All she could do was caw
“Uhhhk, uhhk!”

“Joe Cane Dakin wants to tell you something,” I told her, as I sat at her bedside.

She didn't look good to start but the sound of his name coming out of my mouth, the first time since she took me away from Santa Rosa Island, made her look a lot worse. Like maybe something was sitting on her bony chest, sucking the breath out of her ravaged lungs.

“Uhk!”
she cawed.

“He says there's a party waiting to start in Hell, and all your friends are waiting. Mamadee and old Weems and Doc Evarts and Tansy and Fennie Verlow and her sister, Merry, and Adele Starret and those two poor loonies you had her bamboozle into killin' him. Fennie and Mamadee won't sit next to each other, for sure, on account of that awkward little bit of Merry's poison Candle Bush that Fennie ground into Mamadee's butter and paid Tansy to put on her toast. But never mind. You're the guest of honor, and the main course.”

Then, as she stared at me in horror, her eyes like bloody boiled eggs in their swollen sockets, I did her a kindness that closed out any “debt” that she might have imagined that I owed her; I emptied a syringe of morphine into a paper cup and pumped a bubble of air into her veins. It was as merciful a death as anyone might ask. The morphine did not go to waste either. I passed it to someone in pain who couldn't afford it.

Mrs. Mank left me everything—she didn't mean to do it, but she had no one else to leave it to and she wasn't taking it with her, so I made sure the will in her safety deposit named me explicitly.

The house in Brookline is the only one that I have kept. Appleyard lives there and will die there; I have promised him. It was Appleyard who saw to my sexual education. We have been friends ever since. Throughout my life, sex has been the servant of friendship, convenience, and sometimes commerce, and less trouble than it ever was for Mama. While I think of myself as heterosexual, the tenderest lover that I have known was a woman, and she was not the only woman whom I ever knew that way. My taste in men was firmly fixed by Grady Driver: sweet and not too bright. I have never been in love, whatever that means, and trust I never shall be. I have never married, or had a child, and never will now.

My spare time since Mrs. Mank's passing has largely been devoted to the dispersal of her estate to charitable causes, libraries and disaster relief and so on. I particularly enjoy giving to the Carter Foundation because of its attention to Africa. Mrs. Mank once remarked to me that AIDS was going to wipe out the population of Africa, and
entre nous,
the depopulation of that continent would be all to the good. She loathed charity almost as much as she did nonwhites. I have amused myself enormously doing with her money exactly what she would have hated done.

I did see Grady again, when he tracked me down by means of the simple expediency of asking Miz Verlow where in creation I was. On my return one winter day to Mrs. Mank's house in Brookline, my first year at Wellesley, I found him sleeping on the porch with the pair of mastiffs who were supposed to safeguard the place, and me, from what I did not know. Not Grady, in any case. Mrs. Mank was away, as was Appleyard. Price and the maids were off for the weekend.

With the place to ourselves, Grady and I drank Mrs. Mank's Moët et Chandon and smoked the high-quality bud that my generous allowance from Mrs. Mank afforded me. Grady's most interesting news was that another child had come to live with Miz Verlow at Merrymeeting.

Fennie Verlow in person, whom I had never seen at Merrymeeting in my time there, had arrived one day with a little boy of five she called Michael. The child wore a sailor suit, which delighted Cleonie, causing her ever after to refer to him as Michael the Sailorman. How it was that Michael came to live at Merrymeeting, Grady, who had been summoned to unclog a sink, could not say but he met Michael sitting on the closed commode in the bathroom in question.

Michael had cut off most of his hair, it seems, with a pair of shears he had found in an old shoebox that he found at the back of a crookedy little closet in his room, the one that had been mine. With all those swatches of hair available, Michael had attempted to tape swatches of his hair on the crumbling old paper dolls also contained in the shoebox. When the project was finished, Michael then tried to flush his handiwork down the sink, causing it to clog.

Michael's curiosity was unsated; he wanted to watch Grady unclog the sink.

While Grady did so, Miz Verlow, having just been informed by Cleonie of what Michael had done, came into the bathroom to scold Michael.

“Paper dolls,” Miz Verlow said scornfully. “Girls play with paper dolls. I cannot abide girls.”

“You're a girl,” Michael pointed out.

“Little girls,” Miz Verlow clarified.

“You sound mean,” said Michael. “I don't care if you like girls or not. I don't like you.”

Flustered, Miz Verlow protested, “I am not mean.”

“Sound it,” Michael said. “Who died and made you God?”

Grady and I agreed the child must have heard the phrase from a grown-up; he was too young to have thought it up himself.

Michael became feverish later that day and what was left of his hair fell out. It grew back in but it wasn't the same, Grady told me. It was reddish-blond and thick as fur.