Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  Mama was in a kind of distracted daze as she looked all around, but she shook it off, to say archly, “I am very happy that you are not a Dakin.”

  “I confess I have only heard of the Dakins, through Fennie, of course,” Miz Verlow said, “who is related to them somehow. You are the first one I have actually met and I must say I am pleasantly surprised.”

  The derogation of Daddy’s relatives, especially by someone who had never met any of them, went over very well with Mama. “Well, you would not be so pleasantly surprised if you met any of the others, because I am not a bit like the rest of them. I am by birth a Carroll, after all.”

  “Oh?” Miz Verlow said. “Do come inside. I expect your feet are just about to take leave of your ankles, walk off this verandah, and dig a grave for themselves in the sand.” She stopped as I started past her. “Calley, just shuck those tennis shoes right here.”

  In the reflection of a mirror above a deal table in the hallway, I saw the glisten of a tear on Mama’s face. What caused that tear was something that Mama had expected but had no right to expect—that in Merry Verlow’s house, she would find the same furniture, the same runners, the same faded lithographs, the same crack in the newel post that Mama remembered in her grandmama’s house. But she was far too exhausted to try to reconcile the existence of a duplication here, almost one hundred and fifty miles away on the Gulf of Mexico, of her grandmama’s house, long since reduced to ashes in Banks, Alabama.

  But all she said was, “What is that noise?”

  “The waves on the shore.” Miz Verlow was amused. “It is high tide.”

  Mama moved almost blindly toward the stairway. I was embarrassed, for we were guests of Miz Verlow and Miz Verlow hadn’t invited us to go upstairs. Mama had not spoken one word of thanks for Miz Verlow’s hospitality.

  I must have looked stricken, for Miz Verlow playfully flicked one of my ponytails.

  “Miz Dakin,” she said to Mama, “I’ll trouble you to leave me the keys to your vehicle. It has to be moved first thing in the morning, to open the road.”

  Mama stopped, fumbled in her bag, and then dropped the keys into Miz Verlow’s outstretched palm.

  “Are the candles all snuffed?” Mama asked vaguely.

  “I see to it myself every night,” Miz Verlow answered.

  Mama reached for the banister and began to ascend the stairs, as slowly and ceremonially as a bride processing down the aisle. As if there were a bridegroom waiting for her.

  Miz Verlow nodded toward Mama. “Go help your mama undress, child.”

  “But—”

  “She knows which room is hers. Tonight and for the time being, you will sleep with her.”

  “Thank you, but—”

  “Your bags from Elba are in the room. I have put everything away. Your mama will know where to find things. The two of you will be sharing the bathroom at the end of the hall with two other guests. I always leave a light on.”

  I blurted, “I like the sound of the waves.”

  Miz Verlow smiled. “Sometimes it seems as if that’s all you can hear, and sometimes you can hardly hear them at all.”

  She turned off the light in the foyer.

  “Mama says this house was her grandmama’s, in Banks, Alabama. Then she said it burned down.”

  “You are just seven, child. Have you ever heard that we see through a glass darkly?”

  “Yes, I have.” I remembered the windows at the train depot. “Mama said that she was happy in her grandmama’s house.”

  “Roberta Carroll Dakin happy? That’s a sight you and I and the angels in Heaven would like to live to see.”

  Maybe Miz Verlow knew everything.

  Or maybe Miz Verlow was just giving back nonsense for nonsense to a little girl who was up past her bedtime, disoriented by a long ride and her mother’s bizarre declarations.

  We reached the landing, where a diamond-shaped window with a border of squares of stained glass looked out toward the endless moon-colored highway of beach. Beyond it, the Gulf of Mexico rolled as black and depthless as the sky in which the waxing moon still rode.

  “ ‘I see the moon,’ ” Miz Verlow whispered next to me, “ ‘and the moon sees me.’ ”

  Mama called my name softly from somewhere above.

  “I have her, Miz Dakin,” Miz Verlow called back just as softly. “She will be up in a few minutes. I want to give her something for your feet.”

  “Oh, that would be so nice.” A door closed softly.

  I still watched the view from the landing. “Is Miz Fennie Verlow coming?”

  “What do you think?”

  I shook my head in the negative.

  “Where do little girls get it into their heads that they are supposed to be happy? There are other things that are so much more important for little girls.”

  How she got from her sister Fennie’s absence to my expectations of happiness, I had no idea. I did not realize what an odd thing she had said until years later. But I knew that she did not mean all little girls. She meant Calliope Dakin and no one else.

  “Like saying the right things,” I ventured.

  “That’s right.”

  “And taking care of Mama.”

  “So is that.”

  “And not asking so many questions.”

  Miz Verlow flicked my ponytail again. “Roberta Carroll Dakin has got one smart little girl.”

  I shook my head no. “Mama doesn’t think I’m smart.”

  “The opinion of Roberta Carroll Dakin doesn’t mean one hoot in hell to me or to my sister, Fennie.”

  She showed me the bathroom and put out a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a washrag and a hand towel. She gave me a jar of scented cream for Mama’s feet and left me with a casual good night.

  I brushed my teeth earnestly, more earnestly than usual, and washed my face and neck and ears with care. Miz Verlow must see that I was a proper child, fastidious and obedient, lest I be the cause of her sending us away. I thought of Ford, stuck back there, in Alabama with Mamadee. Later I understood that it was less his choice than it appeared. But just then, he was as gone as Daddy was. I wondered if I would miss him as I missed Daddy. Probably not, I concluded.

  At the foot of Mama’s bed, I sat rubbing the cream into her feet by candlelight. Gently I daubed away the grains of sand that had lodged in her toenails. The sand had scratched the red polish, so it looked as if she had tiptoed in blood. I tried to make out the shapes of the room’s furnishings, wondering what colors would show by day in the draperies, the carpet, the upholstery, the paper on the walls, the pictures hanging there.

  The ocean outside never stopped its sighing. I listened to a voice that sounded—or seemed to sound—beneath the waves. It might have been singing, or it might have been asking questions. My eyes began to close and I shook my head, to keep from falling asleep.

  From within the house, I heard other sounds: Merry Verlow’s step in the hall, an interior door being opened and closed—Miz Verlow going to bed. But we were not alone with Merry Verlow in this house. I detected the even breathing of sleepers, a faint cough, snores, the creak of bedsprings as someone shifted, a whisper of sheeting, a plumping of a feather pillow. I did not recognize any of them as characteristic of the people I knew.

  Ida Mae Oakes bent over me and murmured in my ears, both at the same time, a magic she could do; her slow-sung lullaby was the rolling shush and slosh of the surf upon the sands. I was oh so very tired.

  “You can stop,” Mama finally whispered. She pinched the flame on the candle. “Come up here and put your head on my shoulder.”

  I set aside the jar of cream and crept up beside Mama in the bed. The hard lump of Betsy McCall in my overall pocket pinched me. I slipped her out and under the pillow.

  I tuned my ears to Ida Mae’s

  coming from the Gulf. Another note intruded.

  Hushabyesleepyheadhushabyeneverstophushabyesleepyhead

  “I hear somebody in the next room, Mama,” I whisper
ed. “I hear someone moving around and talking to someone. I hear wings.”

  “Of course you do, silly girl. It’s your great-grandmama. She can never get to sleep before two o’clock in the morning, and she keeps everybody else in the house awake doing it.”

  Twenty-five

  HAVING slept in my clothes, my overalls and Daddy’s shirt, I woke up feeling grubby, piratical, and oddly naked. Light and unbound. No keys pricked the base of my throat with their small, sharp teeth, no silk string hung on my neck.

  Breakfast noises and smells evoked an instant, almost painful explosion of hunger. We had not eaten since lunch in Elba the previous day.

  Going to the nearest window, I slipped between the draperies and the windowpane. The mysteries of the previous night were resolved neatly into an ordinary pale early morning, lightly shadowed by the low angle of the rising sun. By daylight, I could see the dune between the wide bleached swathe of beach and the house. The beautiful shore. The sound of the Gulf had not ceased in the night.

  I went to Mama to nudge her gently.

  “Mama, smell the breakfast!”

  She opened one eye reluctantly, wrinkled her nose, and then sat up for a languorous stretch and yawn.

  “Lord what a fine smell that is. Coffee. Bacon.” She breathed deeper. “And I smell the saltwater too.” She sounded almost happy.

  She cast off the bedclothes, took her robe and bathroom things and hurried down the hall.

  Though I had washed my face and brushed my teeth before bed, I had forgotten the rubber bands in my hair. Consequently, the bands and my hair were interwoven into a witch’s nest.

  When Mama came back from the bathroom and saw me gingerly tugging one strand at a time, she grabbed me and about scalped me tearing the bands out. I gritted my teeth. Wincing and wailing would only make it worse. She dragged a comb through my hair. It felt as if she were yanking out what was left of it. But there was enough left to tie up again, with the old rubber bands cleared of strays.

  Then she put on some clothes—a simple white blouse, dark trousers, and sandals. She did the pageboy with the barrettes and lipstick, and was all ready for a Loretta Young entrance.

  We followed our noses down the stairs into the foyer through which we had entered the previous night. It too was revealed in daylight to be an everyday room. My tennies were still there, just inside the door, all shaken out and ready to wear. I slipped into them and caught up with Mama.

  Mama did not seem disoriented. She might have been following her nose, or perhaps the house was as familiar to her as she had said. She made straight for a wide doorway that had not been there the previous night. Among the sounds I had heard earlier had been the slide of pocket doors back into the walls. It must have been those.

  Mama halted in the doorway. “Who are these people?”

  I peeked past her. Several strangers were breakfasting at the long mahogany table, where a colored woman in a maid’s uniform waited upon them. The breakfasters all paused in their fast breaking and their conversations to smile at us welcomingly.

  From behind us, Fennie’s sister emerged at Mama’s shoulder.

  “Miz Verlow, these people aren’t Dakins, are they?”

  “They’re my guests.”

  “Your guests . . .” Mama’s voice faltered. She took a deep breath and murmured through gritted teeth, “Your paying guests, you mean . . .”

  “Of course.”

  The idea that a relative, even one connected to us as distantly and obscurely as Merry Verlow, might rent out the rooms of her home to strangers was humiliating to Mama—much worse than being suspected of conspiring to commit the brutal murder of one’s husband. Letting rooms was the first wretched public admission of financial need. Of all the delusions that furnished Mama’s world, the belief that the entire world was awaiting eagerly—nay, plotting—her downfall from the decayed social structure she was born to rule was the most ridiculous. But I was only seven and as much as I had come to distrust Mama, and to feel unloved by her, I had too little knowledge of the world not to feel as she did—threatened by forces just beyond my grasp.

  We had nowhere else to go. Despite her horror and dismay, Mama was waiting for Merry Verlow to come up with some reason we should remain. I despaired. What could Miz Verlow possibly say that would relieve Mama of the humiliation and disgrace that she thought it her duty to feel and display?

  “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 top
ped 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.