Candles Burning

Sixty-five

ROLLING gently over gravel, the Benz chuckled and cackled as if it were amused. My eyelids felt glued shut. The effort it took to open them had that protest of lashes tearing out.

The light was morning soft, and the world around was drunkenly green. A yawn forced its way out of me, and the flavor of all that fresh green washed into my mouth and lungs. My cells seemed to suck it up. I wondered if I would be green when next I looked in the mirror.

The Benz came to a seemingly inevitable stop, and settled heavily on the gravel. Mrs. Mank sighed as if she had made a great effort. I looked toward her, and met her gaze. It was calm and confident and more than a little smug.

I wanted to slap her face.

Some fierce glint must have shown itself in my eyes because she flinched.

“Calley,” she said, “I’m trying to give you the world.”

That was the secret?

“I don’t want it,” I said, without thought, and with plenty of adolescent pout in my tone.

“You have no choice,” she said. “Debts have been assumed and must be repaid.”

“Not by me.” I opened the car door and unfolded myself from the Benz.

Inhaling lovely cool green air, feasting my eyes on the flawless depth of green lawn, I strolled away from the Benz to face the house squarely. If any question had risen in my mind that Mrs. Mank was very wealthy, the house in Brookline answered it definitively. It didn’t have a name the way a Southern house would, but the double front doors opened wide onto a high-ceiling hall, and in that hall stood a grand piano. Not a baby grand, a grand.

I went straight to it, opened it, and let my fingertips caress each key reverently.

Mrs. Mank spoke over my shoulder. “It’s not going anywhere, Calley.”

And I wasn’t, at least not right away. I wanted to explore. Mrs. Mank chose to behave as if I were going to go along with her plans, despite my defiance in her driveway. It was an attitude that Mama would have been right at home with.

The no-longer-quite-young man who had opened the doors as the roadster stopped in the drive came in with my bindle—my pillowcase. Mrs. Mank greeted him with the name Appleyard, and casually told him my name. Appleyard was an ugly man who wore a neat beard to cover acne scars. His eyes however were as beautiful as any I ever seen, the shade of violet once associated with the eyes of Elizabeth Taylor.

I was shown to the room that was to be mine, a room with its own bathroom, and an east-facing balcony with a tiny table and chair for civilized morning coffee. An assortment of new clothing hung in the closet or was folded in the drawers of the dresser. I liked the clothes that Mrs. Mank or one of her minions had chosen for me. For the first time in my life I did not feel like an orphan in a thrift shop.

The bathroom was furnished luxuriously as well, with the biggest bathtub I had yet to encounter, along with a walk-in shower. A terrycloth bathrobe sat folded on a stool by the tub. From soap to knickers, everything that I could conceivably need was provided.

So this was what it was like to have something.

The first thing that I did was drop my clothes and shower. After, when I sat at the vanity and picked up the comb, I thought: This is how Mama feels, like a grown woman. Tugging the comb through the tangles of my hair, I was surprised to see a fistful of my hair on its teeth. I went on combing, out of curiosity, and in a few minutes was looking at myself, entirely bald, in the mirror.

Mrs. Mank was unperturbed.

“It will grow back in,” she declared.

She took me out after we breakfasted and bought me a copper-penny-colored wig, in a dramatically asymmetric style. For me, the extremes of fashion in the sixties are divided between Space-Age Stewardess and Thrift Shop Halloween Costume. My new wig belonged to the first category. Though Mama had accepted the Jackie Kennedy variant, Space-Age Stewardess Married To Airline CEO, she would have been horrified by the color and unfeminine style of the wig as too too, to say nothing of being inappropriate for a young girl still in school. The wig amused me almost as much as it did Mrs. Mank and Appleyard.

Appleyard turned out to be Mrs. Mank’s factotum. He turned up sooner or later in all of Mrs. Mank’s homes, of which she had, at that time, nine. The Brookline house had its own housekeeper, a woman addressed only as Price, and two mute, hearing-impaired maids, Fritzie and Lulu, with whom it was necessary to communicate in sign language. Since it was the preferred lingua franca of the household, I picked it up as quickly as I could.

With so little spoken aloud, the house retained a fundamental library quiet. It was a house without television but not without music. Often classical music filled the house, played from the hi-fi system that was connected to speakers in every room. Mrs. Mank’s LP collection was enormous and, I would come to realize, immensely valuable in the number and quality of its rarities. I have found recordings there of which there is no public record, that must have been made just for her.

I was allowed free use of the piano. Without a day’s lesson, I could and did play exactly what I heard. Mrs. Mank did not play the piano—people, money and information, interchangeably, were her instruments. She was incessantly on the phone, and heaps of discarded newpapers marked every place she sat.

Piano playing was not my only occupation. I immersed myself in a stack of books that constituted the summer reading list for my new school, the name and location of which I was not given. I amused myself by carefully not asking Mrs. Mank for that information. I did not intend to ever attend that school.

And I listened. Mrs. Mank knew that I was listening. She had brought me into her house, knowing that I would. Perhaps that is why she made so little effort to keep most of her secrets from me. For the time being, I chose not to remark upon what I heard. I waited. And listened.

By the end of the first week of our arrival in Brookline, I was still bald under the wig but stubble was emerging on my scalp. I wasn’t sure but I thought it was the sand-color of my hair before Santa Rosa Island. When I reported this to Mrs. Mank, she was again unperturbed.

“How would you explain such a phenomenon?” she asked me.

I had been thinking about it long enough. “Miz Verlow’s shampoo that she made for me.”

Mrs. Mank smiled her secretive smile.

“I have made an appointment for you with a gynecologist, my dear. You will need a reliable method of birth control now.”

Ah. Miz Verlow’s vitamins. Thanks for letting me know, Miz Verlow. It might have saved Grady and me a few days of wretched anxiety. No wonder Merry Verlow had looked just a wee shamefaced when I last saw her.

My large and growing feet made shopping for shoes the most daunting task of all. One day in the second week of August, Mrs. Mank took me back to the shop where she had ordered specially fitted shoes for me. As I waited for her to pay for the shoes, a transistor radio babbled softly in the back of the shop. A change in the cadence of speech clued me in at once that a newscast was on but then the place names shouted at me: Gulf of Mexico! Hurricane! Gulf Coast! Florida Panhandle!

“There’s a hurricane off the Gulf Coast,” I told Mrs. Mank.

“Oh my,” she said mildly.

The Benz sedan in which Appleyard had driven us occupied a parking slot a few spaces from the shop. Appleyard waited on the sidewalk to relieve us of the shopping bags as we reached the sedan. While Mrs. Mank and I folded ourselves into the backseat of the Benz, Appleyard whipped the bags into the trunk, closed it, and was there to close the door of the sedan after me.

When he was behind the wheel, Mrs. Mank asked him to turn on the radio and tune it to a station that would report on the weather. We were in Brookline and entering the drive to Mrs. Mank’s house before we heard another report on the approaching hurricane. Appleyard turned up the volume and we sat in the sedan in the driveway, in the air-conditioning, while the radio told us that a hurricane named Camille was churning over the Gulf toward the coast of Mississippi. She was expected to turn toward Florida’s Panhandle in the next twenty-four hours. All hurricanes are dangerous but Camille, according to this report, was extraordinarily powerful.

Mrs. Mank attempted in vain to reach Miz Verlow. Rising winds preceding the hurricane had already taken down the line and cut off Merrymeeting on Santa Rosa Island.

Camille’s threat raised a storm of guilt in me at leaving without saying good-bye to Perdita and Cleonie and Roger and Grady. I did miss them. Still, I had not sent so much as a postcard, let alone written a letter. Every night I went to bed thinking that in the morning, I would leave, go back to Santa Rosa Island, collect my money, and find myself a school of my own choice. Every morning, I woke with the thought that it was the day that I should confront Mrs. Mank and demand the secret that I was promised, and then I would leave, at once. In her presence, though, I felt a certain amount of fear, enough to keep me hesitant. I told myself that I was playing a long game, and everything that I learned while I waited was worth the while. And damn, I was going to have a lot to tell Grady about living the life of the wealthy.

Writing after the hurricane would be pointless. No one on Santa Rosa Island would be getting any mail for a while. I lost myself in reading. When eyestrain blurred the words and headache locked up all sense, I prowled the house, trying to interest myself in Mrs. Mank’s LPs or the books shelved in nearly every room. Mama was supposed to meet Ford in Mobile on the seventeenth. I hoped that the deterioration of the weather ahead of the hurricane had not trapped her on Santa Rosa Island, preventing her from the reunion she had so desired.

Camille never made the predicted swerve toward Santa Rosa Island and Pensacola. She struck the coast of Mississippi head on, over the seventeenth and eighteenth of August. Camille savaged Mobile, but it was Pass Christian she hurt the worst.

It was Pass Christian and not Mobile where Mama’s body was found, floating tits up in a hotel pool. The hotel the pool once graced was gone.