Candles Burning
Page 17
“Hot water be’s the onliest thing to wash proper.”
I swabbed the glass and rinsed it. She took it from me and wiped it dry with a sacking towel. She held it up to the light. Then she lowered it and looked at me solemnly through the bottom of the glass.
I was able to look out the window over the sink. To my surprise and pleasure, the Edsel was parked there, with some other vehicles. One of them was a ’56 Ford Country Squire. A silver coupe of a make unknown to me and with a Maryland plate sat idling within sight. Miz Verlow stood next to it, bent to the open driver’s side window. The driver was a woman, or at least wearing a woman’s hat, a high-style fedora, at an angle that shaded her face.
“Good-bye,” Miz Verlow said, stepping back.
The woman behind the wheel lifted a gloved hand in a small wave and then the sedan drew away.
Miz Verlow watched it go and then turned and went into the house through some door that I could not see from where I stood.
A few minutes later, Miz Verlow emerged into the same area outside the kitchen window from another part of the house. She had wound a handkerchief around her head and changed from skirt and blouse to coveralls rather like the ones mechanics wear. As I washed the glasses, she began to unload the Edsel onto a handcart. The ease with which she lifted the heavier cases and bags revealed an unexpected physical strength.
There were a lot of dishes to wash and dry and a lot of luggage to unload. Miz Verlow disappeared from time to time with the loaded handcart. I could hear its wheels rumbling up a ramp beyond my vision, but which had to be fairly near at hand. A door would open, the reverberation of the wheels changed, and the handcart’s burden would be unloaded inside the house. Somewhere nearby there was another staircase, a backstairs for Cleonie and Perdita and Miz Verlow.
My hands became redder and then wrinkly, as if the skin were too sodden to stay stuck on. I was frankly tired by the time I finished and did not much care if Miz Verlow magically folded up the Edsel, loaded it onto the handcart, and made it disappear into the house.
When Cleonie left the kitchen, I heard her on the backstairs. Then, behind her step, the sound of bundles of linen came thumping down from above through a chute to an unseen bin.
Miz Verlow returned, restored to ordinary dress of skirt and blouse. The handkerchief was gone. I noticed then, for the first time, that her hair was not white, as had been my earliest impression, but white-blonde, like Jean Harlow’s. It was not marcelled, like Fennie’s. Rather she wore it coiled in braids around her head. Fine wisps escaped the braids to make a barely perceptible halo. Miz Verlow’s skin, though, was not that of an old woman, nor was her bearing. I had little interest in her age at the time, but if asked, I would have reckoned her casually as neither as young as my mother nor as old as Mamadee.
Though she wore lipstick, she was otherwise barefaced. Mama having made me aware of jewelry, I noticed that Miz Verlow wore a gold band and solitaire on the third finger of her right hand. She never spoke of a husband, dead, departed or divorced, and I never saw any photographs of her with any man who might pass for a spouse. Now, of course, I can imagine many reasons why an unmarried woman might wear the signifiers of marriage. Back then I merely expected that sometime or other, a Mr. Verlow would make an appearance. Too young to have fully grasped the conventions, I did not yet understand that Merry Verlow was far more likely to share a last name, a maiden name, with her sister, Fennie, than that they had somehow married men with the same last name.
Miz Verlow came through the butler’s pantry, making a brief inspection of the crystal and china now returned to their cupboards.
“Did Miss Calliope Dakin do a proper job?” she asked Perdita.
Perdita looked at me impassively. “She done.”
“Good.” Miz Verlow’s hand went to a pocket at the seam of her skirt and when she opened her palm, there was a nickel in it. “You best save it, Calley. Anything you break, you have to pay for.”
I looked at the nickel. Then I shook my head.
“You best save it for me.”
Miz Verlow studied my face. Then she pocketed the nickel.
“We will have an account between us. Let’s go find your mama.”
Miz Verlow stopped in the foyer to pick up a bundle of copies of the local newspaper from just inside the door. They were tied into a fat roll with a piece of string. Miz Verlow slipped the knot and shook them out. Black ink stained half the front page. It was an extraordinarily ugly black, that ink, and I had an immediate revulsion to it. None of the guests wanted to touch them either, so those papers would remain unread.
Mama had taken coffee on the verandah with some of the other guests, and then, with fewer of them, begun a social cigarette break. It was a fair day, warming gently from the cool of the early morning, and there was much admiring of the view of sand and sea going on among them.
Miz Verlow placed the newspapers on a convenient wicker table and apologized to the guests, with the observation that something disastrous must have occurred at the newspaper’s printer.
Ordinarily, not all her guests were interested in seeing a newspaper, particularly a local one. Most of Miz Verlow’s clientele wanted to get away from the rest of the world for at least a time.
The same inkblot problem with the newspaper occurred several days running. Then the printer apparently cured it. Some weeks later it occurred again but only on one day.
When I was rummaging through all the ephemera having to do with Daddy’s murder, I finally saw those papers without blotches. What the ink obscured, of course, were the accounts of the trial in New Orleans of the two murderesses and their subsequent sentencing.
The very first paper also reported that no evidence had been found to link the widow Dakin to the crime. She was not in attendance at the trial and could not be reached for comment. The paper also reported a strange coincidence. But we were to learn of that event through quite another channel and at another time. The last blotched paper reported the strange deaths of Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks.
At the time, I paid next to no attention. Mama never was a newspaper reader—not of respectable ones anyway, and not even the tabloids, at the time—and I was too young to care about any part of a newspaper aside from the funny pages. And for all I knew then, the local newspaper was often late and ink-blotched into an unreadable condition.
“Miz Dakin,” Merry Verlow said softly. “May I have a word?”
Smiling graciously, Mama butted her cigarette in an ashtray and followed Miz Verlow back inside, where I was waiting.
“Did Calley break something? You just go right ahead and hit her.”
“I have not found that hitting children improves them,” Miz Verlow said, “and I know that it does not improve me.”
That brought Mama up short. She had taken Miz Verlow, who had given her back her own bedroom and put a light in it for her, for an acolyte. Now Miz Verlow was making declarations.
Miz Verlow went on. “I have put some gasoline in your vehicle and brought it to the back of the house. As a matter of convenience, it is my practice to ask guests to leave their car keys with me, as our parking space is so limited and vehicles may have to be moved. I have taken the liberty of unpacking your vehicle and sending your luggage to your room. You may store anything you wish in the attic, which is locked, of course. You need only ask for the key should you desire to retrieve anything that you choose to store at anytime. If you would like to go up now and see to its disposition—”
Mama’s mouth was set in a straight line that meant nobody was putting anything over on her. “I believe I’ll do just that.”
She started upstairs.
“Go out and play, Calley,” Miz Verlow said, without looking at me.
She followed Mama up the stairs.
Twenty-six
TO give the two women time to reach Mama’s room, I sat on the floor and worked at nonexistent knots in my laces. Then, leaving my tennies at the door, I went barefoot up the stairs.
I bolted for the bathroom. When the doorknob would not turn for me and I realized that it was occupied, I turned back to Mama and Miz Verlow, the panic on my face more genuine than it might otherwise have been.
Miz Verlow pointed down the stairwell. “Under the stairs.”
I whirled and raced down the stairs.
Behind me, Mama said, “I caint tell you how many times I’ve told that child not to wait until the last minute, Miz Verlow.”
I had little choice but to follow through with my feint and hie for the WC under the stairs. It was an unavoidably dark little room with a steeply rising ceiling and at that moment, unoccupied. I spent a few minutes closeted there. I decided I might as well, so I did. It was worth noting just how much I would be able to hear from that location. On exiting, I was careful to give the door a little more force than it needed to close, so that it would be heard upstairs. Going through the foyer to the screened door onto the porch, I opened it and then let it slap shut, as if a kid had run outside.
I crept up the stairs again. Mama’s bedroom door was closed.
I studied on my options. Ear to the keyhole was a ridiculously exposed position. There were doors up and down the hallway and on either side of Mama’s bedroom. Most of them opened on other bedrooms, or even small suites, as I would discover soon enough. I sidled along the wall, testing door-knobs as silently as I could, and preparing myself to explain to some adult that I was lost and could not remember which room was Mama’s. One after another doorknob proved unmovable.
Reaching Mama’s door, I held my breath past it. I turned the hall corner. The hall ended on the landing of the backstairs that went down to the kitchen. Only one full-height door broke the blankness of the wall. A small metal door was set in the wall at waist height. It had to be the laundry chute, the source of the whumps I had heard. When I tried the knob of the full-height door, I discovered a walk-in linen closet. Quick as a single beat of my heart, I was inside it, with the door closed behind me. Mama’s voice in relentless low complaint helped me locate the best listening post, the wall that the closet shared with our bedroom.
The closet walls were lined with cupboards below and open shelves above. On the open shelves were ribbon-tied stacks of towels. I used the cupboard counter to heist myself onto a shelf about six feet from the floor. A layer of towels softened the hard wood of the shelf, and stacks of them gathered around myself masked me from inadvertent discovery—so I hoped. In my pocket Betsy Cane McCall made an uncomfortable lump, so I extracted her and tucked her among the layered towels. Then I could open my ears completely.
“I know what was in my vehicle,” Mama said, her voice all sharp cutting edges. “Explain, if you please, why everything is not here.”
“But everything is, Miz Dakin.” Miz Verlow did not sound at all threatened.
Mama stamped her foot. “I will not be robbed again!”
Miz Verlow paused briefly and said, “I have heard it said that a thief cannot be robbed.”
“Just what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I have given you refuge in my home as a favor to my sister, Fennie. This favor is not without its costs to me, Miz Dakin, as you can easily understand. You have very little means, and I am aware of no prospect of future income. You have a choice. You can accept my terms or you can go elsewhere.”
Mama tore a match across a matchbook with savage intensity, a flame popped and sizzled, and she drew on a cigarette. “Even if everything you just said was true, I don’t even know what your terms are!”
Miz Verlow told her.
Cleonie padded softly down the hall.
I held my breath again in the hope that she would pass by. The door open; she entered. She began to take linen from a cupboard. Then she turned to the towels. All at once she paused. She lifted the towels behind which I was hiding with Betsy Cane McCall. Cleonie hooked up an eyebrow at the sight of me.
I held my finger to my lips pleadingly.
Like a bird, she cocked her head and caught Miz Verlow’s deadly calm murmuring. Cleonie’s lips pursed in disapproval. She dropped the towels down in front of me again and picked up another stack. The door closed behind her.
Even a dunce could see that my luck was clinging to a cliff edge by its fingernails. I crept out of the linen closet half a minute after Cleonie left it. Before the second half of that minute had passed, I had hustled myself and Betsy Cane McCall right out of that house.
Beyond the first great dune and the raggedy parade of tall grasses, the water of the Gulf of Mexico worked quietly upon the sand. Morning light and low tide cast the beach as wide as a desert; there was no end to it in either direction. Breathless from my escape, I paused at the top of the dune to look all around.
Behind me, Merrymeeting stood high and alone. Nowhere could I see any other houses, only swales of sand and the strange greenery.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the house. Big as it was, I was no stranger to big houses. Unlike other houses though, this one stood on what seemed to seven-year-old me to be tip-toes. In this, it was more like Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house on its brick piers than Ramparts or our house in Montgomery, which had actual stone-wall foundations and underground cellars. Piecrust lattice skirted the verandahs, hiding a considerable space beneath the house. Scribbles of evergreen shrubs sprawled low along the bottom edge of the latticework. Whatever color the structure had once been, the weather had beaten every bit of it out of the wood, shingles and brick, so the house seemed oddly insubstantial. An insistently real television antenna poked above one of the roofs. It made me think of the stave on which music is written. The antenna meant that Miz Verlow did not think that television was a passing fad. I had not heard a television yet but that only meant that it was off.
In the near-enough future, I would learn Miz Verlow’s rules about use of the radio-hi-fi-phonograph console and the black-and-white Zenith television that squatted in the small parlor. Guests might listen to radio, either the Stromberg Carlson in the library or one brought with them, but must mind the volume in deference to their fellow guests. The television set was available for a very limited time each evening, with majority rule in choice of programming.
A drapery twitched. Miz Verlow looked out at me from Mama’s window.
Spinning about, I raced down the dune toward the beach. Some of the allegedly Yankee guests had also come out to play. A few were already settled on wooden and canvas chairs brought from the verandah to the beach. Another few tramped along the beach.
Scurries of little birds rushed the negligible waves in retreat and were immediately routed in peeping frantic flutters by the incoming wave. I hunkered down at the edge of the water to watch and listen to them. Their names as yet unknown to me, their voices were enthralling. I became aware too of the squeak of the clams under the sand. The water dampened my tennies but I wouldn’t melt.
After some time, I straightened up and used my toes against the opposite heel to kick off my tennies. If Mamadee had seen me do it, I’d have gotten a hiding for sure. Lazy and careless of expensive footwear, two evidences of degeneracy at once. I picked my tennies out of the water and flung them toward the dunes.
The shore seemed to go on forever. I started to run through the water where it sloshed upon the sand. I had no destination nor any desire to ever stop. I just ran. It was a glorious feeling to be moving barefoot through the shallow of the water at the greatest speed I could summon from myself. The long day’s travel in the car must have wound me up like a spring. Of course I was nearly always wound up like a spring. Nothing more or less than the violent energy of childhood, as uncomplicated and irrational as
the very elements themselves, propelled me.
When my side finally stitched and I slowed, I was out of sight of the house and of a single soul. On one side of me sparkled the restless water of the Gulf. On the other, a wilderness of dunes dozed in the sun. Behind me and before me, the sand stretched down the middle. As I turned back in the direction from which I had come and moved higher on the beach, out of the shallows and onto the wet sand, I left behind me the only footprints on the beach. I jumped high, twitching myself into a half-turn, and came down facing the other way, so that I could walk backward for a while, amusing myself with my false trail.
Distantly, a pickup truck or small van worked along the dirt road beyond the dunes. From its open windows came a faint but steadily strengthening female voice, with an accent like Desi Arnaz:
I’m Chiquita Banana
And I’ve come to say
bananas have to ripen in a certain way.
I went back to the top of the dune, where I could see the road. A small, shabby van rolled at no great pace toward the house, its windows down. On its side were the words:
ATOMIC LAUNDRY
The driver of the ATOMIC LAUNDRY van wore his black hair in a crew cut. As I ran closer, I saw that he was Chinese. Or Japanese. I was ignorant of the fact that there were any other varieties of Asians. Ford had once informed me that Japanese could be distinguished from Chinese by the direction, up or down, of the slant of their eyes, but I could not remember whether it was up for Japanese, down for Chinese, or topsy-turvy. In any case, I assumed that Ford was lying, as usual, so it didn’t matter.
The ATOMIC LAUNDRY van driver waved at me as he rounded the side of the house toward the kitchen. I raced down the dune and after him, arriving in time to see Cleonie lean out an open window on the second floor.
Chiquita’s song had given way to a Bosco ad:
Chocolate flavored Bosco