Candles Burning (30 page)

Deirdre's eyes rolled in her head as she strained to see him. Avoiding eye contact, Dr. Evarts approached the bed. The surface of the boil was sooty black but it was definitely skin—the charred black skin of burn victims who had to sleep sitting up because it was less painful than lying down. Yet the boil glistened in places—shone with a lick of purple. Realizing his mouth had twisted in disgust, he tried a smile. The attempt failed.

“You should have called me sooner,” he said, reaching a finger to touch the black boil. She winced away. He was unable to avoid the panic in her eyes:
Please don't touch it!
The same panic most people had of the needle, of the knife, of the cold steel forceps.

“It's all right, Deirdre, you're just going to feel a little pressure,” he said, lightly pressing his index finger against the boil's black burned skin.

It exploded.

EVEN as I sweated through that nightmare, I realized that I had dreamt and forgotten it several times. But this time, I woke with the conviction that Mamadee was indeed dead.

The napkin around my head had come loose. As soon as the soles of my feet slapped onto the floor, it fell away. I paid no mind. All I wanted to do was get out of the dark closet and wash my face.

When I did, what I saw in the bathroom mirror startled me. The hair growing on my head was not my old dull sandy hair. Its color was very like Miz Verlow's. It was very fine, though, finer than hers, and snarly. Hillbilly tow, I thought: Mama's gone be wild. All I needed was pink eyes. My new hair was still very short, just enough to wind around my forefinger, but that seemed like a remarkable length considering how short a time it been growing. My ears looked very naked. I thought that I looked quite a lot like a blonde monkey.

Downstairs, Mama was charming the guests at supper.

Miz Verlow came up the backstairs. I kept the bathroom door closed until she passed by and then peeked out. She bore a tray. At the door of Mrs. Mank's suite, she stopped, knocked lightly, and was admitted.

I slipped down the backstairs into the kitchen. Cleonie and Perdita had not yet returned. Remembering my little bundle, I hastened to their room to retrieve it. It was gone. The inexplicable absence frightened me more when I was already skittish. I tried to reassure myself that nobody in the house except myself would bother to sneak into Cleonie and Perdita's room. They had nothing to steal and besides, nobody would want to know what a cramped dingy little space they were accorded.

Miz Verlow was in the kitchen doorway from the back hall when I turned around, having closed the door to Cleonie and Perdita's room with exaggerated caution.

Miz Verlow smiled at me. “Is that Calley Dakin creeping underneath that bird's nest of hair? Or is that some new little girl come to take her place?” She ruffled my hair softly, not so much with admiration as with satisfaction. “My Lord, it makes me think of my hair when I was a child. I believe it's a touch lighter than mine. Someday it will be quite beautiful, even if you never are. Well, Roberta Ann Dakin is not gone care for it one bit. You best take your supper here. Then you shoo back upstairs to your mama's room. My guests get an eyeful of you, they'll think the place must be an orphanage for albino monkeys. Oh, and I left you some shampoo in the bathroom.”

She made no remark at all about catching me closing the door to Perdita and Cleonie's room.

For once Mama's door was unlocked, and so while everyone else was still occupied with supper, I was able to wash my hair and bathe and put on my pajamas. I worked a comb through my tangles and managed to stick most of my hair damply to my skull. I could tell it was going to snarl up again the minute it was dry.

I was on my stomach on the bed, studying on a bird guide, when Mama stuck her key in the lock and then yanked it out. She jerked the door open one-handed.

“I left this door locked! How'd you get in?” she demanded, even as she registered my hair. She slammed the door closed behind her without spilling a drop of the drink in her hand. “Jesus God!”

I resisted the impulse to say
He ain't here
. Instead I suggested, “Maybe you didn't turn the key all the way.”

Miz Verlow must have unlocked it for me. I was not about to give her away to Mama.

“You didn't creep in under the door?”

Mama put her drink down and patted a pocket in her skirt. With an air of secretive triumph, she drew a nearly full pack of Kools from it. I would not give her the satisfaction of asking her where or how she had obtained them. She was dying to tell but she wasn't going to do it unless I asked. She smoked three of them, one after the other, while I did her feet.

“That woman bleached your hair right out and you never so much as said no please, did you? You caint be expecting me to claim you, can you?”

Falsely meek, I said, “No, ma'am.”

“Damn right,” declared Mama. “I swear. Nobody with eyes in their head will ever mistake you for anything but a Dakin now.”

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.”

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 glanced 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.