Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  That was fine with me.

  “I believe that woman must have some Dakin blood; her hair’s almost that same damn tow color, allowing for a little darkening for age. I wonder how she straightens it. She’s trying to make you her little girl, that’s what.”

  Mama seemed very pleased at the thought Miz Verlow wanted something of hers.

  “I’ve never trusted Merry Verlow one sixty-second minute,” she said. “I’ll see in her in hell before I let her take away my little girl.”

  Content that possession was nine-tenths of maternity, Mama had done a complete U-turn in about half a minute. She was back where she started, not wanting to claim me, but having to, lest somebody else get me.

  What either of those two women had in mind to do with me, other than waiting hand and foot on one or the other of them, was beyond me. All I could hope was that it would not eventually involve Solomon and cutting me in two. Hadn’t cutting up Daddy been enough?

  I was no more afraid of Miz Verlow than I was of Mama. Miz Verlow might expect me to be her servant, but at least not her unpaid servant. She said please and thank you to me, which was more than Mama ever did. If she was the cause of my losing my hair and it growing back trashy tow, Mama made a point of dressing me in cheap and boyish clothing, and in implying to other people that I was feebleminded. It all washed out about the same to me.

  Women went to beauty salons to have their hair cut, curled, permed, bleached, dyed and back-combed; female hair is distinctly mutable in its attributes. To me it was more important that I had lost a sweater that wasn’t mine, along with its severed buttons, and a stub of candle, my glasses and Betsy Cane McCall, all since arriving at Miz Verlow’s house. Children grasp the idea of mine—of property—from infancy. For all of my life, food, clothing, a bed and a roof over it, books and music and toys, had been provided in unexceptional but reliable quantity. What I wore mattered little to me. The toys, the books, the music—all had been introductions, respectively played with, looked at or later read, listened to, and then outgrown, as swiftly as my shoes. But I was not a careless child. I did not make a habit of forgetting or losing things. I possessed enough of the Carroll acquisitiveness—irritated regularly by Ford taking things away from me for the hell of it, or Mama doing it because I seemed to be enjoying something too much—that I could not help feeling the loss of those unimportant things. The Carroll in me declared that I had been robbed, and that what was stolen must be returned.

  Being robbed, though, was a mere distraction from hearing Mamadee’s ghost, seeing her ghost in the mirror in the parlor, dreaming of her death, and being nearly engulfed by a giant ghost in the fog.

  Next morning, I helped Cleonie clear the breakfast table. Only Mama and Miz Verlow still lingered over coffee when Mrs. Mank came down from her suite. In the kitchen, Cleonie handed me a cup, saucer and napkin for Mrs. Mank and nodded me toward the dining room. She came behind me, bearing a freshly brewed pot of coffee and a tray with a full breakfast under silver domes. Once I had placed the cup and saucer for Mrs. Mank, Cleonie poured for her and topped off Mama and Miz Verlow. She removed the covers from the dishes and vanished into the kitchen again. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Mrs. Mank wore a suit in a peacock-blue polished cotton, with her pewter-colored shoes. Her earrings were silver, set with a stone the color of her clothing; years later I would learn that it was called tanzanite. Mrs. Mank smiled slightly at the sight of me, and her gaze lingered a fraction of a second on my hair.

  Mama was too busy noticing everything Mrs. Mank wore, and totting up the likely prices, to spare me so much as a glance. Mama wore toreadors with a white crossover blouse and a little black wrap jacket, not really a bolero but suggestive of one. In her ears she wore the pearl earrings that Daddy had given her for Valentine’s. Her feet were pinched into black sandals with Cuban heels.

  While Mrs. Mank addressed her breakfast with her total attention, Miz Verlow favored me with a slight smile.

  Mama spoke quietly to Miz Verlow, “Maybe I should make a long-distance call.”

  “Oh no,” Mrs. Mank interjected, with her eyes still quite fixed on her plate. “That’s a very bad idea.”

  Mama stiffened in her chair. Who was this woman that she should offer Roberta Carroll Dakin advice on any subject whatever? More significantly, who was Mrs. Mank that she should know what making that long-distance telephone call meant?

  Unperturbed, Mrs. Mank chewed, swallowed, dabbed her lips and finally looked at Mama. “Merry told me a little of what happened yesterday.”

  Mama’s glare fell on Miz Verlow, with no more effect than a solitary raindrop sliding down a windowpane.

  Miz Verlow turned her smile on Mrs. Mank. “I confide in Mrs. Mank, Miz Dakin. There is no one I trust more.”

  By the way she drew in her breath, I knew Mama was about to say something vicious.

  “Mama, maybe—” I began.

  “We do not need to hear from you, Calley Dakin, because if any of this is anyone’s fault, I firmly believe it is yours. Mamadee would have died and gone straight to Heaven and left us in peace if you had not insisted on chatting with her as if you were both on a picnic by the waters of Babylon.”

  I was aware of Miz Verlow’s watchful gaze on me, and was comforted and calmed by it without knowing why.

  Once the first gout of Mama’s anger was deflected to me, she was able to address Mrs. Mank in a tone of voice that was marginally civil: “Well, Mrs. Mank, it must sound very strange to you. Do you believe that we had an unexpected and unwelcome visit from a ghost?”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Mank conceded, “but Merry Verlow does not lie, not to me. So when she tells me that she heard a voice and there was no way it might have been anyone in the house trying to trick you, then I believe her.”

  Mama challenged her as if she herself had not just asserted that Mamadee had spoken to us from the dead. “Then you believe in ghosts.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Mrs. Mank.

  “But—”

  “But I do believe that when someone speaks to you from beyond the grave, you should sit very still and listen.”

  Mama scrabbled at her Kools while Mrs. Mank again addressed her breakfast.

  “That I understand.” Mama stuck a cigarette between her lips with shaking fingers. “And—” She lit a match, fired the Kool and sucked at it. Around it, she finished, “I am just beginning to think you think like I do.” Her voice was full of relief and sincerity. Mama could, with no particular difficulty, believe two entirely contradictory things at the same time. It’s not a rare ability but she was a virtuoso. “But if that was my mama speaking to me from the Other Side,” she went on, “why shouldn’t I just call up and make sure she’s dead?”

  Mrs. Mank politely daubed her lips again. I was interested to note that her lipstick was unaffected.

  “You’re certain it was your mama who spoke to you this afternoon.”

  “Yes,” said Mama. “Ask Calley if it wasn’t her mamadee.”

  “Calley, was it your mamadee?”

  I hesitated before I answered, “It was her voice.”

  “You see.” Mama took my statement as a reinforcement of her own.

  “No,” said Mrs. Mank. “Calley is saying something a little different, Mrs. Dakin. She said it was your mama’s voice, not that it was your mama.”

  Thirty-four

  I might have told Mrs. Mank and Miz Verlow and Mama then that I had seen Mamadee. And I did not. The choice was nothing that I reasoned out, but an instinctive holding back of the information. It was something none of them knew, not about Mamadee, but about me.

  “But who else would it be!” said Mama. “She knew me! She recognized the chair that her own mama embroidered! She wanted her candlestick—” Mama stopped abruptly.

  “She was wrong about the chair, Roberta Ann,” Miz Verlow said. “Because you told me yourself, that house and everything in it burned up years and years ago.”

  Mama glance
d at me as if for help.

  “It sounded like Mamadee,” I assured her. “But maybe it was somebody else—some other ghost—just pretending to be Mamadee.”

  “What for?” cried Mama.

  “Exactly what I would have said, Mrs. Dakin,” said Mrs. Mank. “It might been your mama speaking or it might merely have been the voice of an evil spirit—or entity—or whatever you wish to call it.”

  “Why on earth would there be some asinine evil spirit after me?” Mama demanded.

  Mrs. Mank chuckled. “Sometimes I don’t even know why I do things, so I certainly would never speculate on the motives of evil spirits, or good spirits, or even of this little girl. But with what little I know of this situation, I would urge you not to place a long-distance call to—”

  “Tallassee,” I volunteered.

  “Calley! Will you never hold your tongue?”

  I started to slip from my chair. “If y’all will excuse me,” I began.

  Mrs. Mank interrupted me. “Mrs. Dakin, I think the child should stay.”

  “I don’t,” Mama snapped. Then she drew a deep drag and let it out. “But if you say she should, Mrs. Mank, then she will stay. Calley, sit down and stop twitching.”

  Mrs. Mank went on. “Mrs. Dakin, suppose you put in that long-distance telephone call to—Tallulah? You would, I presume, call your mama’s number. If she answers, you’ll know she’s alive. But what will you say to her? ‘Oh, I just wanted to know if you were alive or dead?’ You’d look a fool, would you not?”

  “I wouldn’t have to say that exactly.”

  “But you haven’t spoken to your mama since you left Tallalulah. If you called her now, and she answered, it would appear to her that you were giving in. Is that what you want?”

  “What if I called somebody else in Tall-Tallulah?”

  “And ask, ‘Could you please tell me if my mama is alive or dead?’ ” Mrs. Mank gave a little shudder. “Given the circumstances of your leaving your mama’s house, the way people talk, your telephone call won’t be a secret for longer than it takes for whomever you call to hang up and dial another number.”

  “But I could be subtle.”

  “Ask something like, ‘Oh, did the florist do a good job on the flowers I told him to put at the foot of Mama’s coffin?’ ”

  Mama nodded yes, startled. That was exactly the sort of question she would have worked in.

  “But if you ask that question and your mama isn’t dead, what will people think? You could take the other route, and say, ‘Tell me, as a friend, how does Mama look these days? I’m so worried about her, and she refuses to take my help.’ If you asked that and she had been buried a week ago, everyone in town would hear that you didn’t even know of your own mama’s death.”

  “Calley could call—”

  “They’d know you put her up to it.”

  Mrs. Mank’s advice so far had cut to the white bone of Mama’s dilemma. The overriding concern was how Mama would look to others, Mama’s well-being, and Mama’s ease.

  Mrs. Mank speared a last remnant of the sausage on her plate, and consumed it with the same relish she had previously exhibited. At last her napkin flitted at her lips again.

  “There is another reason you don’t want to place that call, Mrs. Dakin,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Suppose, for a few moments, that your mama is dead.”

  Mama put on a sad face. “It’s perfectly possible. The obituaries are filled with people younger than Mama every day—my beloved Joseph was taken from me in his prime—”

  “My condolences,” Mrs. Mank said with the tiniest excess of sincerity.

  Mama bore up bravely. “Thank you. So what next?”

  “Mrs. Dakin, if your mama is dead, why have you not been informed of it? Why didn’t somebody—your mama’s lawyer?—send a telegram or telephone you?”

  “Because he doesn’t know where we are! Because nobody knows we’re here.”

  “Fennie does,” said Miz Verlow. “And if your mama died and anyone were trying to find you, Fennie would tell them you were down here with me.”

  I started. Why wouldn’t Fennie have called and told Merry Verlow, or Mama or myself? Why not call Fennie and ask the question directly?

  “So my mama must not be dead,” said Mama. Her disappointment was indifferently concealed.

  “Not necessarily. What if your friends and relatives were not trying to find you?”

  Mama pondered a long moment. It sounded like the kind of subterfuge she herself indulged in. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Mrs. Mank finished off her eggs before answering. “Something to do with family grievances maybe. Or with money. Your mama’s will. Were you on good terms with the family lawyer, for instance?”

  Mama’s jaw set grimly. “No. He stole me blind. He and Mama. They took my darling boy away from me too.”

  “Suppose that lawyer is laying a trap. If you make that call, you might be walking right into it.”

  “But if Winston Weems is going to cheat me again, am I supposed to just sit here and do nothing?”

  “Of course not,” said Mrs. Mank. “I only said you ought not make that call yourself.”

  “So who will?”

  “A friend of mine. Another lawyer.”

  Mama smiled.

  “She’ll know what to do,” Mrs. Mank assured Mama.

  Mama stopped smiling. “A woman lawyer.”

  Mrs. Mank responded without a moment’s hesitation. “In deference to your objections to women lawyers, Mrs. Dakin, I will never mention the matter again.”

  At this moment Cleonie emerged to see if any more coffee was wanted.

  Mrs. Mank crossed her fork and knife on her plate and folded her napkin. She smiled up at Cleonie. “I think I’ll have this cup on the verandah.” Rising with a polite smile and her refilled cup, she started toward the door.

  Mama had expected Mrs. Mank to spend the next quarter hour convincing her to allow her friend, the woman lawyer, to devote her entire professional career to her cause. Mama simply wasn’t used to being taken at her first and always exaggerated word. Panicked, she snatched up her cup and jumped from her chair.

  “What a lovely idea!” she cried.

  Mrs. Mank stood with one hand on the door, the other holding the coffee cup and saucer. The steam curled up toward her face, and she breathed in the odor. “What idea would that be? Are you reopening the discussion, Mrs. Dakin?”

  “Coffee on the verandah,” Mama said, “and your woman lawyer friend—both—I was distracted by the thought of losing my mama so quickly after my darling Joseph. . . .” Mama lapsed into Southern-belle helplessness. “I am so flustered! You must think I don’t have a brain in my head.”

  With no more than the faint inclination of her head that expressed a polite agreement with Mama’s last assertion, Mrs. Mank passed onto the verandah. Mama followed, Miz Verlow after her, and I fell in behind.

  As Mrs. Mank settled on a chair outside, she smiled at me the way adults smile at children whom they abhor.

  Nothing could have reassured Mama more.

  Once settled herself, she addressed Mrs. Mank carefully, “You know what it was?”

  “What what was?”

  “Why I reacted the way I did when you talked about your friend the woman lawyer. It was because of Martha Poe. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Calley?”

  Mama wanted me to back up her lie.

  “You mean the woman lawyer, Mama?”

  “Well, who else? Of course, I know that every woman who gets to be a lawyer just has to be smart, smarter than any man, but Martha Poe I guess is just the exception that proves the rule. The only reason that Martha Poe ever gets a client is that her stepdaddy is a judge on the circuit court and he decides every case in Martha’s favor, so I’d probably hire her too. But on her own, Martha Poe wouldn’t know how to fix a speeding ticket. She’s the only reason I said what I did.”

  Mrs. Mank’s expression softened
a little, as if she were accepting Mama’s explanation.

  I knew that Martha Poe wasn’t a lawyer at all—she was a practical nurse in Tallassee, who had once spent two nights at Ramparts when Mamadee was passing a kidney stone.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Mama went on, “another good thing about a woman lawyer is that she probably won’t charge as much as a good lawyer.”

  Mrs. Mank stiffened.

  Mama corrected herself quickly. “A good man lawyer, I mean—a good woman lawyer wouldn’t charge as much. What is her name anyway?”

  “Adele,” said Mrs. Mank, with no warmth at all. “Adele Starret.”

  “Adele is my favorite name,” Mama gushed. “If I hadn’t named Calley after one of the muses, I would have called her Adele. My best friend in college was named Adele. Mrs. Mank, could I prevail upon your good nature to speak to your friend Adele on my behalf?”

  “We’ll see,” said Mrs. Mank.

  “When?” Mama persisted. “Because if it doesn’t work with—”

  “I’ll look into it, Mrs. Dakin. But now, I’m going to enjoy my coffee. Merry, my dear, have the newspapers arrived?”

  Mama tried not to press Mrs. Mank about the woman lawyer but when Mrs. Mank finally folded the last section of the third newspaper she had read that morning, Mama was still there, grimly sipping her fifth cup of coffee and barely controlling a very bad case of the fidgets brought on by too much coffee. Mama sighed her martyr’s sigh in expectation of Mrs. Mank finally saying something, but Mrs. Mank merely gave Mama and me a perfunctory and polite smile.

  Mama could contain herself no longer. “Are you going to call her today?”

  Mrs. Mank’s eyebrows lifted quizzically.

  “Are you going to call Adele Starret? Your friend the female lawyer who’s going to help me. I mean, your friend Miz Starret who might be able to help me. If she wants to. If she thinks it might be worth it.”

  Mrs. Mank’s smile warmed. “Oh yes, Adele.”

  Miz Verlow came to her feet just a fraction of a second before Mrs. Mank, picking up not only her own coffee cup but Mrs. Mank’s as well. Mama rose quickly too but I was faster, and picked up Mama’s coffee cup.