Candles Burning

Five

VALENTINE’S Day, Daddy left a bee-you-tee-full store-bought card on my pillow. The one I left on his pillow had a paper-lace-doily-edged heart on it and as much glitter as the glue would take. The one he gave me had drawings of candy hearts, the kind with Be Mine and Sweetheart and mush like that on them, and inside the envelope was a good dozen of the actual real candy. It was a joke between us: Daddy knew my opinion that nothing tastes cheaper or nastier than those little candy hearts, except for candy lipsticks.

Mama found a little box all wrapped up in gold foil paper and red ribbon on her pillow, along with a card from Daddy. It was pearl earrings. She gave him a kiss that left him laughing and wiping lipstick off his face with a big white cotton handkerchief.

Of course she had to put them on right away to see how they looked on her.

While she was admiring herself and the earrings in the mirror, Mama said, “I don’t know how you did it, Joseph, but I believe you must have read my mind. I have been longing for these earrings since the day I first saw them in the window at Cody’s.” Then she glanced up at his reflection looking at her in the mirror and added, “Don’t think this fixes anything, Joseph. I do you the honor of believing that you would never try to bribe me with baubles. I take these as a gift of the heart.”

Daddy stopped smiling and looked away. Embarrassment, anger, and weariness stiffened his face. I never saw him look sadder. It made me angry with Mama, her taking away his pleasure in giving her a gift.

Daddy was in meetings all that day. Ford went with him to most of them. Daddy listened to speeches, he shook hands, he gave a couple of talks, he shook more hands, and he said, “No thanks, I just had one,” when someone offered him a drink or a girl. This is what Ford reported to me. Ford thought it was funny. I caught on to the part about the drink but I couldn’t figure out why anybody at a convention would offer Daddy a girl, and why he would say “just had,” when he must have meant “already have,” meaning me.

Mama went with Daddy to the convention lunch. I stayed in the Penthouse with Ford. He tried to feed me half a sandwich all at once. I gritted my teeth tightly while he mashed my lips against them with the sandwich. When I shoved a pointer finger into the hollow at the base of his throat, he made a gakking noise and jumped up and slammed out. I reckoned that I had better than held my own, which made the ice I sucked to stop my mouth swelling up taste all the sweeter.

When Mama came back, she never even asked where he was. I volunteered nothing. He had not told me that he was going out or where or why, and after all, he was eleven and had gone to meetings with Daddy. I certainly did not care where Ford was, so long as he was not plaguing me.

Mama did not need to do anything else until it was time to dress for the big Valentine’s Day dinner, so she took me shopping.

And that was why Daddy got murdered.

It was still raining.

The water bouncing off the pavement made a mist around our ankles. It was like standing in a cold shower with clothes on. I kept my glasses in my coat pocket to keep them dry. The droplets beaded on my light wool coat and then began to seep through the weave. The rain did not matter to Mama. She had an umbrella and she hardly cared whether I got wet or not. More than once, she had told me that I would not melt.

Mama rarely shopped for clothes in stores back then—she turned her nose up at most everything off the rack. She had Rosetta copy fashions out of Vogue magazine. Elsa Schiaparelli was her favorite designer. Besides wearing copies of Schiaparelli designs, Mama bought real Schiaparelli hats and bags and gloves and silk stockings. Daddy had given her a real Schiaparelli karakul coat, with the label inside it to prove it.

Mostly she shopped in antique stores. Mama liked being rich and buying things that other rich people were now too poor or too dead to hold on to, and buying them cheap. Bargains indeed were to be had, for it was one of those times when the antiques trade languished. The fifties were about the new things that could be mass-produced. Mama bought small things: old jewelry, old perfume bottles, and candlesticks.

She was very fond of candlelight, which flattered her skin. I knew from the way she checked the mirrors after she lit candles. At home, she always had candles lighted on the table when we ate our evening meal. Decades before candles became a decorating fad, Mama set them out in her bathroom and her boudoir. Naturally the candles had to be in something.

Along with ashtrays, candlesticks made excellent hissy-fit projectiles. Mama was no athlete but she could always summon strength enough to pitch a candlestick or an ashtray. Fortunately, she rarely hit anything or anyone who might be too far away to grab her wrist and arrest her throw. Her habits did maim or destroy quite a few ashtrays and candlesticks, as well as the walls and furniture and windows, making replacements in kind welcome. Her ashtrays never came from antique stores. She ordered cut-crystal ones that fit the palm of her hand, by the dozen, from the best downtown jeweler, the one where Daddy bought her the pearl earrings.

We traipsed from one antique shop to another. Each shop was a single room, cramped with enormous pieces of mahogany furniture, every piece dark with wax, every piece laden with old lamps and old porcelain figurines and old odd pieces of brass. On the walls were old bad paintings of saints, old good portraits of the formerly rich and old mildewed prints behind glass that sweated with Louisiana moisture. Even in Montgomery or Mobile or Birmingham, each shop was always still and damp and the proprietor was always an old woman with paper-white skin, or sometimes a middle-aged man with pomade-shiny hair, who was likely the son or nephew of the old woman with narcissus-petal skin. The light was dim and dusty in those shops and my only occupation, while Mama poked about and the old proprietor kept a wary watch on me, was to try to catch stray gleams of sunlight as they were refracted through the dusty dangling prisms of old chandeliers and lamps.

As soon as we entered a shop, Mama would order me to touch nothing and be still and silent, on pain of some gaudy punishment. The proprietor would then stare at me for fear that I would seize a poker from a fender set and run wildly through the shop, screaming like a maniac, smashing everything I could. Sometimes I longed to do just that. Knowing my own clumsiness, I usually found a spot out of the way and pretended to be a big dead doll, imagining what bits of me were broke and how messy my hair was and that my eyeballs were all popped out and looking in different directions.

In the last shop but one, the proprietor reacted to Mama’s warning with a violent hiss and shooing gestures directed at me. Mama sent me outside, where I stood on a corner and dripped and listened to the sounds a steady rain makes on all the different surfaces around a person standing in it. I wondered what snow would sound like. Someday I meant to see snow in the flesh and hear it and feel its cold kiss upon my upturned face but, of course, I could hardly expect it in New Orleans. I wondered if it had ever snowed in New Orleans. Snow would sound not like a leaf falling but like a downy feather. I would have liked to hear the birds in New Orleans. Hadn’t Daddy said that there were wild parrots in New Orleans? I would have liked to hear the voices of whatever other critters lived there. Surely there were chipmunks or squirrels or both, and certainly as wet a place as it is, there must be rats. There had to be mice and cats and dogs, and someone in New Orleans surely had a monkey. There must be a zoo. But the rain drowned out any hint of any of those enchanting possibilities. A sudden swoop of wind threw rain into my face and down the back of my neck and the downpour intensified, so I shivered. I tipped back my head and opened my mouth to the rain, and got a face-wash as well as a drink.

The next shop we approached ticked. I heard it distinctly from outside and around the corner. As the jangle of the brass bell on the door announcing our entry subsided and the ticking again dominated, I took my glasses out of my coat pocket where they been safe and dry and put them on. A whole wall of old clocks, none of them with their hands pointed at the same hours or minutes or seconds as the others, ticked and tocked and clicked and thocked and pecked and clucked like an aviary of mechanical birds.

This shop also seemed to have more candlesticks than most, though candlesticks are by nature reticent and usually more numerous than at first impression. Stand still and look around any old antique or junque shoppe and they are everywhere: prickets and chambersticks; chandeliers never converted for electric lights; three-, five-, and seven-branched candelabra; wall sconces in brass and glass; girandoles; glass candleholders in ruby, cobalt, and crystal; old dented candlesticks in pewter; old blotched candlesticks in brass; and old silver candlesticks, tarnished black as a lost soul. The servants of light in the centuries before whale-oil lamps, gaslights, and electricity, the holders of candles are no longer necessities, but are reduced to bric-a-brac, nicknack-paddywhack, bring the dog a bone. Occasionally one might still become a blunt object and make a dent in a wall or extract a little blood. Colonel Mustard, in the library. Mama, in her boudoir.

Mama spent a lot of time in this particular shop. If she spent more than five minutes in a shop, she always bought something lest the proprietor think his prices were too rich for her financial blood or that she was not the sort of woman truly to appreciate rare and beautiful objects.

Because of the rain, no sun refracted through the prisms in the shop. The ticking shop was empty except for me and Mama and the middle-aged man behind the high schoolmaster’s desk that served for a counter. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other that Mama and I were in his shop. When Mama had been his only customer for ten minutes, the shop door opened with the ring of the brass bell.

The proprietor smiled and said to the lady coming through the door, “Oh, I’m very glad to see you.”

The lady smiled back at him.

I do not remember what she looked like. Well. Sometimes I think I do, but wonder if my memory is trustworthy. Perhaps I have given the lady the face that suited her, or me. I do remember the knife-pleat of her skirt, though not the color or print, and the filmy plastic galoshes she wore over her shoes, which were pumps with low heels. In that era, most women had a pair of those galoshes; Mama did. They were supposed to be see-through so the shoe inside was visible but they never were—shoes visible nor galoshes truly transparent, I mean. Her hands were gloved, as indeed Mama’s were, gloves being like hats a commonplace accessory.

And I do remember the way the lady looked at me.

Just once at first, and for only a few seconds. She was looking at me. She was not looking at a gawky little girl who was wet and trying not to drip on anything. She was looking at Calliope Carroll Dakin, whoever she was at the age of seven years. She looked at me a moment and then she looked at Mama.

Then she said to the proprietor, “There’s a wet little girl standing behind your door, Mr. Rideaux. Does she belong to you?”

“She’s mine,” Mama said.

The lady turned abruptly to the proprietor. “I’m looking for a candlestick, Mr. Rideaux.”

The atmosphere of the shop was suddenly very precarious. Anything might happen. Mama picked up the nearest candlestick—just a dollar-and-a-half of cobalt glass—and took it back to the proprietor’s desk.

That was when Mama discovered that she no longer had her pocketbook.

Mama was embarrassed, and more. She was flustered. Somehow she had managed to misstep repeatedly. She assured Mr. Rideaux that her handbag was somewhere, that she really did have the money for the candlestick (even though she probably did not really want it at all), and pleaded for him to put it aside for her until she came back with the money.

“Did you have your pocketbook with you earlier?” he asked politely, but in an easy tone that suggested he hardly cared much one way or the other.

“I don’t remember.”

The strange lady had been moving slowly about, looking at and picking up this candlestick or that, and putting it down and smiling to herself. She paused by a magnificent stuffed macaw that had escaped my notice until she ran her gloved fingers over its scarlet crown and down its back. A parrot in New Orleans, after all, but as dumb as any candlestick. She looked at me again—a clean, swift, prompting look.

“You must have, Mama, because you bought that little cameo pin and I saw you take out your change purse,” I said.

Mama glared at me. I was not supposed to speak in public unless it was to make my manners to someone or to say something nice about her.

“Probably you left it there, last place you were in,” Mr. Rideaux suggested.

“Probably I did,” Mama agreed. “Come on, Calley.”

A look passed between the strange lady and the proprietor.

“Oh, leave the little girl here, she is being an angel,” the proprietor said.

Mama looked at him and then at me. She was trying to decide whether this might be a treat for me, in which case she was not about to allow it. But I looked as wet and miserable and bored as I could, so she relented.

“You hit her if she breaks anything and I’ll pay double for it when I get back,” Mama said.

So Mama went out with her umbrella and the satisfaction that Mr. Rideaux knew that she had money enough to pay twice the price of anything he had in his store.

No one else came into the shop. Mr. Rideaux sat at his desk, writing in a ledger. The lady glanced at me. I must have looked like I was about to drop because she made a little noise in her throat that provoked Mr. Rideaux to look at her again.

He pointed his pen at me. “Young lady, go sit yourself down on that little chair over there.”

I sat on the very edge of the tapestry seat of the little mahogany chair. My hair, my dress and coat dried while I watched and listened to the wall of clocks telling all their false times. An excitement bloomed in me. I laughed aloud. The clocks had nothing to do with time but were merely instruments, the clicking and ticking of silver and gold and bronze and pinchbeck arrows, a droll and slapstick rhapsody of lies. And the odd music became odder, less chaotic, more complicated; it came to me that a new timepiece had entered the song and transformed it.

Entranced as I was, I saw the lady’s mouth quiver and the proprietor’s left eyebrow jig as they exchanged looks. I felt their gazes on me from time to time but there was in them no censure or disapproval but contrariwise, a quiet pleasure.

The jangle of the bell on the door broke the spell as Mama opened it. I gasped as if my heart had come to a stop in my chest. And just at that instant, all the clocks on the wall stopped, so that the shop was suddenly as still as the dead old things it sheltered.

“Calley, what do you mean, plopping yourself down on Mr. Rideaux’s antique chair?” Mama said.

She marched back to the proprietor’s desk.

“Mr. Rideaux, I could not find my pocketbook anywhere, but I will have my husband write you a check for that chair Calley has probably ruined, and of course I still want the candlestick.”

Mr. Rideaux smiled at Mama. I did not believe his smile but Mama did.

“The young lady did not ruin that chair. I reserve that chair for wet little girls who come into my shop and I would not sell it for the world. And I am not one bit surprised that you did not find your pocketbook because it was here all the time,” said Mr. Rideaux.

He got up, fingered a key out from the watch pocket of his vest, and used it to open his filing cabinet. From the top drawer of his filing cabinet he pulled out Mama’s pocketbook, her brown Hermès Kelly bag.

My view from the chair of Mr. Rideaux had been full. At no time had I seen him find Mama’s pocketbook, and at no time did he even get up from his desk, much less unlock the filing cabinet and stick Mama’s pocketbook into it. I felt the strange lady’s gaze on me. I said nothing, and it came into my mind that I hardly knew how much real time had passed while the clocks had entranced me. It was what Daddy would call a conundrum.

The lady spoke suddenly, making Mama start. “I found it, right over here.”

She pointed to a little petticoat table—five hundred pounds of mahogany and Georgia marble that had been carved and glued and polished in order to support a little mirror, six inches off the floor, so the ladies of the 1850s could check the fall of their crinolines. Mamadee had one, of which she was sinfully proud. Mama and Mamadee often informed me of instances of sinful pride on the part of the other. I myself was so often hell-bound from my sinful pride that I was sinfully proud of it.

Mama smiled and held her pocketbook against her breast and hugged it.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Mama said to the lady.

“I was going to steal it, and your little girl too, but I was afraid I would get caught,” the lady said.

“Who would want Calley?” Mama said.

The lady gave me a warm smile. “Well, wet little girls must be good for something.” Then she turned back to the proprietor and said, “You’ve got so much new stock, Mr. Rideaux, and I’m just not sure what I want. I think I’ll have to come back one day when it’s not raining.”

She left with a tinkle of the little brass bell, and without looking at me again.

“Can you change a fifty?” Mama asked Mr. Rideaux. Before he could answer, Mama cried, “Oh, no wait, I think I have two singles.”

Mr. Rideaux smiled and started to take the bills.

Mama held on to them. “Then all I can buy is this little piece of cobalt?”

“That’s all you can buy today,” he said, delicately plucking the two bills out of her hand. “But you come back tomorrow, and I promise I won’t let you out for under that fifty you’re putting back in your purse.”

Mama laughed delicately too, at this proof that Mr. Rideaux knew that she had money. “Then I guess I’ll have to come back.”

But of course we never went back.