Candles Burning

Forty-nine

MAMA sprawled facedown like a limp starfish, on a webbed chaise. Her one-piece green bathing suit, cut low in the back, had the straps undone to expose all of her shoulders to the sun. I finished oiling her back and moved down to the backs of her legs.

I asked her, “Mama, is Mr. O’Hare coming back to see us?”

“Not us, Calley,” she answered, her voice bright with a malicious smugness. “Mr. O’Hare is coming back to see me. Grown men do not interest themselves in girls your age. When he does come back, I had better not see you hanging all over him the way you do.”

“I never,” I muttered at Mama’s green-clad fanny.

“Don’t talk back to me.”

“No’m,” I agreed. “Mama, do you ever miss Daddy?”

There was long silence, so long that I thought that she had decided not to answer. She reached under the chaise, where she had placed an ashtray, a lighter and her pack of Kools. She fired up a cigarette, poking the butt through the weave of the chaise to suck at it.

Then she said, “Baby, I can hardly recall his face. It all seems like a nightmare that happened to somebody else.”

Lines from a movie or a novel or a television show, perhaps one that I had even watched with her. Some Loretta Young thing maybe.

“I remember what Daddy looked like,” I said, “and the sound of his voice. Want to hear it?”

“No,” Mama snapped. “I don’t. I don’t know what I did to deserve you being so mean to me. I haven’t had the easiest life, you know?”

I could argue that point too. I could have said that since Daddy’s death, she had not gone hungry or worked a single day for wages, let alone volunteered to lift a pinkie, or had the choice of wearing a pair of hand-me-down ill-fitting shoes or going barefoot, as Grady Driver did.

“Does Mr. O’Hare ever talk about Daddy—?”

Mama interrupted me. “He does not. Why would he want to talk about all that old unpleasantness?”

I dropped the suntan oil in the sand next to her.

“I caint imagine,” I said, in Mama’s voice.

Mama rolled over and sat up, nearly losing her cigarette in the process.

I stepped back out of her reach.

“If I could, I’d slap your mouth!”

She was too indolent to make the effort. I turned my back and strolled away, leaving her to burn, one way or another.

Gus O’Hare did return, for the long Labor Day weekend. Mama made sure that no opportunities occurred for me to be included in their outings. Then Gus proposed we all go to the drive-in. Mama resisted awhile, but fearing that she was in danger of appearing to be intransigent, finally gave in. A Southern Lady, of course, must never be perceived to be unreasonable to a suitor.

Mr. O’Hare borrowed Miz Verlow’s black Lincoln. I was assigned the backseat, and a pillow and a blanket, so that I could go to sleep when I was sufficiently weary. The first movie, Tiger Bay, could not start before dark, and that didn’t happen until nearly nine. I managed to stay awake for the whole thing, though I remember very little of it now. I remember Hayley Mills and I remember wishing Hayley were my name instead of Calley. The next movie was The Absent-Minded Professor. I dozed off.

Their voices drew me to the surface of wakefulness.

Gus: “You must worry about Calley.”

Mama made a noncommittal noise.

“Must be tough for her, her ears. I think they’re kind of cute but I bet she gets plagued by the other kids.”

“The world’s a tough place. She’s gone have to be tough to survive in it.”

“Ain’t that the truth. That’s what I like about you, Roberta Ann. You look the world straight in the eye, don’t you?”

Mama purred.

“But you’re her mama and you love her so much, you want to believe you’ll always be able to protect her. She’s gone grow up, Roberta Ann. Someday you won’t be there for her. She’ll have to take care of herself. It would be unkind not to do everything that you can to give her a fighting chance.”

“What are you gone on about?”

“Don’t take offense, now. I got some money set aside. I’d be really pleased to use it for Calley, to have her ears fixed. Honey, it’s just gone be impossible for her to get a decent job with those ears. They make people think she’s feebleminded, and she’s not, you know she’s not. She’s got a good little mind.”

“Stop right there,” said Mama. “I have never taken charity, Gus O’Hare, nor borrowed money, and I never will.”

She had, of course, and she would.

It took a lot of back and forth but eventually Gus O’Hare placed a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars in her hands. The winning argument, he thought, was his anxiety that in her devotion to me, Mama might reject an opportunity for her own happiness—to which she was more than entitled, after what she had been through. Mama appreciated being portrayed as a victim of her own virtues. Once she had the money, she spun a world of lies about seeing doctors with me.

Mama never missed cadging a magazine, or in a pinch, buying it, that had anything about plastic surgery in it. I had studied them as often as she did, and had a good idea of what was possible and what wasn’t. I didn’t want my ears fixed. The most any surgeon was likely to do was pin them back, and render me unable to waggle them. They would be just as big as ever. It was wishful thinking on Gus O’Hare’s part that some doctor could magically reduce them to normal proportions. Since I was not supposed to know that Mama was accepting money from Gus, I could make no open objection.

All the following winter and spring, Gus O’Hare visited for a week at every major holiday. He tried to give Mama his late mama’s engagement ring on Christmas Eve. Mama tried it on and faked admiring it. Anybody could see that the value of the ring, 12-carat gold set with a tiny garnet, was purely sentimental. Mama never cared for garnets. More importantly, she never cared for anything that anybody could see was more sentimental than valuable.

Overcome with tragic widowhood, Mama was so bereaved that she had never considered opening her heart to another man. It was such a shock—well, she needed more time. When Gus asked her to accept the ring as a friendship ring, she blushed and dabbed at her eyes. In the end she was able to avoid immediate acceptance.

Gus was brave, the poor boob, and admired her fidelity to a dead man as he did her maternal sacrifices for me. He wanted Mama for himself, of course, and was welcome to her, as far as I was concerned, by then.

He returned the Saturday before Easter. I finagled him into a beach walk to see a possible osprey nest, and ’fessed up that the kids at school teased me about my ears. Somehow it came out that I had not seen any doctors about my ears and that, in fact, Mama had done nothing in that direction.

My treachery precipitated the first of several strained conversations between them. Mama was, of course, devastated that he no longer trusted her, and insulted and appalled that he should turn out to be mercenary. She got it worked around so that she was the victim, and he wrote a long pathetic letter begging forgiveness. I felt sorry for Gus but I also felt like he was going to find out sooner or later, and I was saving him a few months of delusion.

Mama forgave him, of course, but forgiveness did not include mercy. She sent him away, a brokenhearted man, who blamed himself for having lost a wonderful woman. I was sorrier than I could ever admit. If I were ever to have a stepfather, Gus would have been as good as any. I suppose Mama did show him some mercy; she only relieved him of two thousand dollars. She didn’t marry him.

I never asked her what she did with the money.