Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  “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.

  Six

  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 rea
ch 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.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I had to go.”

  “That’s what comes of drinking water in the night. Be quiet now and let me sleep.”

  I went to check the master bedroom of the suite. The big bed was just as the chambermaid had left it, turned down for expected occupants, and unused.

  It was my turn to shake Mama’s shoulder. “Daddy’s still not here.”

  She rolled toward me a little and lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes narrowed. She flung off the covers and jumped up.

  “Joe Cane Dakin,” she said, “you are a dead man!”

  When she stalked off to the master bedroom, I decided it was time for Ford to wake up. I gooched Ford in the nape of his neck with two fingers. He rolled over with a pillow clutched in one hand and hurled it at me. I batted it away.

  “Daddy’s been out all night. Drinking or run off with a Negro floozy, Mama says.”

  “That’s hooey, Dumbo.” Ford flopped back on his bed and closed his eyes.

  I went looking for Mama again and found her in the dressing room.

  “He was in a wreck, I just know it,” Mama whispered, with a quick tearful glance at me.

  She disappeared into the bathroom. The pipes clanked and the water crashed in the shower directly to the tiles, unimpeded by Mama’s body, as she ran it until it was really hot. I sat at the vanity and moved things around, but I did not use any of her makeup. I knew better, right down to the knuckles on which she would use the spine of a comb if I messed with any of it. In the bathroom, Mama stepped into the shower.

  She came out all pink and soft and shooed me off the vanity bench, where she sat down to do her face. I studied her the way I did most mornings when she was putting on her face. The intensity of her concentration fascinated me as much as what she did. In the middle of it, she came to a sudden stop, her mascara wand in her hand. She stared at herself.

  “I’m gone be old,” she said, “and nobody’s gone care what happens to me.”

  “I will!”

  Her expression went from bleak self-pity to irritation and she made scatting motions with her hands.

  I was in my room, pulling up my underpants, when the doorbell chimed. I ran to get the door.

  Ford glanced out of his door and informed me what I already knew perfectly well: that I was in my underpants. It occurred to me that when I was fully dressed, I could still be said to be in my underpants, but Ford closed his door before I could advance the argument.

  It was only the maid bringing the tray with the coffee and brioche that Mama needed to face the day. I recognized the maid as the one from the previous morning. A disconcerted look came over her when she beheld me half-naked. Realizing that I was embarrassing her, I went into reverse, backing toward Mama’s room.

  “Please leave it on the table,” I told her, as if I were Mama, and the instant I did so, I realized how ludicrous I was, a seven-year-old girl in her underpants instructing a chambermaid as if I was a grown-up lady.

  I retreated to Mama’s dressing room to tell that her coffee and brioche had arrived. She was particularly fond of the brioche, for which the Hotel Pontchartrain was as famous as it was for its Mile-High Pie.

  She was still at the vanity, angrily smoking a Kool. I reckoned when Daddy finally showed up, he was gone be in for it.

  “Mama.”

  “Calley, stop parading around naked this minute and make yourself decent!”

  “I’m not naked—” I began.

  She slapped me.

  I would not give her the satisfaction of making me cry, especially not over a little slap. She turned back to the mirror.

  I marched back to my room, ready to give Betsy Cane McCall a whipping that she would never forget.

  Betsy Cane McCall was sitting on top of a pink envelope, on one of the pillows of my unmade bed. With a mother who wore Schiaparelli pink and Schiaparelli Shocking perfume, I knew tasteful pink and tasteful scent from—as Mama and Mamadee would put it—vulgar. The pink of that envelope could
not be more vulgar. The paper itself reeked with a scent that was even worse. It crossed my mind that it was another Valentine, maybe from Daddy. Or Ford might have made me a joke one, something that would be hurtful or spring something nasty in my face. The envelope was unaddressed and unsealed. Inside was a sheet of matching paper. It was printed in green ink and read:

  Seven

  JUDY was Judy DeLucca, the chambermaid who brought the breakfast tray up to the room that morning. She was twenty-two, with brown eyes and brown hair. Her nose tilted to the left as if somebody right-handed had given her a very hard slap.

  Janice was Janice Hicks, twenty-seven years of age, brown eyes and brown hair. Her whole face looked flat because her cheeks were fat and stuck out and her nose was a tiny bump between those fat cheeks. She had so many chins there was no telling where her jaw ended and her neck began. She weighed three hundred and ninety-seven pounds. Janice worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Pontchartrain, baking the brioche that Judy brought up to the room every morning.

  Mama raised her newly penciled eyebrows when I held out the folded note to her. She took it and sniffed at it.

  “Cheap, darling, vulgar. You ever catch me using perfume like this, shoot me.”

  She opened it and quickly scanned the words. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Calley, I do not like jokes.”

  As if I didn’t know.

  Her fingers crushed the note into a sharp-edged ball and she flung it at me. It stung against my cheek.

  Mama stared at me. The red of her anger drained from her face.

  “Oh—my—God,” she whispered. She scrambled for the note, spread it open and studied it. “You did not write this, did you?” Her eyes were wide now and suddenly tearful. The note shook in her hands. Her lips quivered and then she screamed like somebody just tore off her arm.

  Ford came running. Mama was incoherent and hysterical. Ford poured a glass of something from one of the decanters, closed her hands around it and brought it to her lips. It did calm her in another few moments—enough for her to go scrabbling around the room, looking for her cigarettes and lighter.

  Ford read the note hastily and then shoved me out of the room. “Did you write this?”