Candles Burning

Six

THE elevator jerked and sighed and thumped to a stop like somebody getting hanged. Mama tiptoed into the Penthouse in her stocking feet, holding her high heels in one hand by their ankle straps. She crept into my room and grabbed my foot under the blanket and shook it.

“Calley, wake up and come unzip me,” she whispered.

I sat up and knuckled my eyes as if I had been asleep, though the only time my eyes had been closed since she and Daddy went out was just before she reached my room. The more I tried not to think about the strange time in the shop that ticked, the more it troubled me. It was a relief to have Mama back. Putting on my glasses and grabbing Betsy Cane McCall from under my pillow, I hopped out of bed and followed Mama to the big bedroom and its dressing room.

Mama had gone out in a strapless copper taffeta with an iridescent peach half-skirt. She dropped her heels on the carpet and simultaneously reached for one of her earrings. I watched her replace her jewelry in its velvet-lined boxes. She tipped her chin toward the vanity bench. When I knelt on it, she backed up to me so I could reach the hidden zipper running down the back of the dress to her waist. Another one, meant to prevent any stress on the waistline or hip, ran down from under one armpit past the waist about six inches. She could have done that one herself but she turned sideways with her arm up, so I did it. The taffeta slipped in a luxuriant rustle to the carpet; she stepped daintily out of it.

I zipped the dress onto its padded hanger and returned it to the rod in the closet. “Where’s Daddy?”

Mama shucked her half-slip over her head, flung it aside, and turned to the vanity to light a Kool. “Having a last drink and cigar with the boys.”

I watched her unhook her silk stockings from her garters. Mama loved her silk stockings.

“Hands and nails,” she said.

I held out my hands.

“Calley, have you been shucking oysters while I was out? Get some cream onto those claws.”

Obediently, I rubbed some of her cold cream into my hands.

Mama sat down at the vanity to raise one foot while I slipped the stockings off as I had been taught, rolling them carefully from top to toe. I tucked them into her lingerie bag.

When she had unpainted her face and was nearly finished putting on her skin food, I asked for something. “Mama, come sleep with me tonight. Please.”

She looked at me hard. “Why?”

“I just want you to.”

“You do not just want me to, Calliope Dakin. You have always got a reason for asking a favor.”

“I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

I shrugged.

“A great big girl like you. Scared. You are a crazy girl. I am gone be one of those poor women saddled with a mental case for a child for the rest of my life.”

“Please, Mama.”

She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. I could not bring myself to look at another clock face just yet.

“I go to bed in here, your daddy will come bumbling in and wake me up.”

After grinding out her cigarette in the ashtray, she followed me to my room.

There she dropped wearily onto my bed. “Get down at the foot and rub my feet. They are killing me.” The foot of the bed, she meant.

Mama often wanted me to rub her feet. Mama would lie down with her head on the pillow and I would huddle at the end of the bed, cradling her feet and rubbing them. And if I rubbed her feet long enough, she would fall asleep in my bed. I loved sleeping with Mama. I wasn’t ready to stop being a little girl yet. The sound of her heartbeat was my best lullaby.

I paused once when her eyes were closed and she hadn’t said anything for a long while, but she spoke right up: “Keep on it, Calley, or I might as well go on back to my own bed and wait there for your philandering father.”

But when I stopped again later, Mama did not speak. I collected Betsy Cane McCall from the floor where I had dropped her, crawled back up to the head of the bed, turned my pillow over to get the cool side, and fell into a sweaty doze. I didn’t feel as if I were asleep. Instead, I was trapped in the panicky darkness beneath the surface of sleep. The darkness was a sea of keening and lamentations and loss. I was under that dark water again, the rain spattering desperately against the glass. I was breathing that woe and misery, my mouth, my ears, my eyes stinging with its bitterness.

Some time later Mama shook me awake. She was out of bed, evidently having checked the bedroom she shared with Daddy.

“It’s one o’clock, Calley, and your daddy is not back. He’s drinking, or else he has run off with some New Orleans floozy with Negro blood in her veins.”

Having heard similar speculations from her on other occasions when Daddy was late, and not really understanding them, I took her remarks indifferently.

She slipped back into the bed and I snugged up to her. We went back to sleep.

I woke up before Mama, about seven o’clock, and wiggled out of bed to run to the bathroom.

Mama yanked the covers tight over herself so I could not get back in under them.

“I’m sorry, Mama. I had to go.”

“That’s what comes of drinking water in the night. Be quiet now and let me sleep.”

I went to check the master bedroom of the suite. The big bed was just as the chambermaid had left it, turned down for expected occupants, and unused.

It was my turn to shake Mama’s shoulder. “Daddy’s still not here.”

She rolled toward me a little and lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes narrowed. She flung off the covers and jumped up.

“Joe Cane Dakin,” she said, “you are a dead man!”

When she stalked off to the master bedroom, I decided it was time for Ford to wake up. I gooched Ford in the nape of his neck with two fingers. He rolled over with a pillow clutched in one hand and hurled it at me. I batted it away.

“Daddy’s been out all night. Drinking or run off with a Negro floozy, Mama says.”

“That’s hooey, Dumbo.” Ford flopped back on his bed and closed his eyes.

I went looking for Mama again and found her in the dressing room.

“He was in a wreck, I just know it,” Mama whispered, with a quick tearful glance at me.

She disappeared into the bathroom. The pipes clanked and the water crashed in the shower directly to the tiles, unimpeded by Mama’s body, as she ran it until it was really hot. I sat at the vanity and moved things around, but I did not use any of her makeup. I knew better, right down to the knuckles on which she would use the spine of a comb if I messed with any of it. In the bathroom, Mama stepped into the shower.

She came out all pink and soft and shooed me off the vanity bench, where she sat down to do her face. I studied her the way I did most mornings when she was putting on her face. The intensity of her concentration fascinated me as much as what she did. In the middle of it, she came to a sudden stop, her mascara wand in her hand. She stared at herself.

“I’m gone be old,” she said, “and nobody’s gone care what happens to me.”

“I will!”

Her expression went from bleak self-pity to irritation and she made scatting motions with her hands.

I was in my room, pulling up my underpants, when the doorbell chimed. I ran to get the door.

Ford glanced out of his door and informed me what I already knew perfectly well: that I was in my underpants. It occurred to me that when I was fully dressed, I could still be said to be in my underpants, but Ford closed his door before I could advance the argument.

It was only the maid bringing the tray with the coffee and brioche that Mama needed to face the day. I recognized the maid as the one from the previous morning. A disconcerted look came over her when she beheld me half-naked. Realizing that I was embarrassing her, I went into reverse, backing toward Mama’s room.

“Please leave it on the table,” I told her, as if I were Mama, and the instant I did so, I realized how ludicrous I was, a seven-year-old girl in her underpants instructing a chambermaid as if I was a grown-up lady.

I retreated to Mama’s dressing room to tell that her coffee and brioche had arrived. She was particularly fond of the brioche, for which the Hotel Pontchartrain was as famous as it was for its Mile-High Pie.

She was still at the vanity, angrily smoking a Kool. I reckoned when Daddy finally showed up, he was gone be in for it.

“Mama.”

“Calley, stop parading around naked this minute and make yourself decent!”

“I’m not naked—” I began.

She slapped me.

I would not give her the satisfaction of making me cry, especially not over a little slap. She turned back to the mirror.

I marched back to my room, ready to give Betsy Cane McCall a whipping that she would never forget.

Betsy Cane McCall was sitting on top of a pink envelope, on one of the pillows of my unmade bed. With a mother who wore Schiaparelli pink and Schiaparelli Shocking perfume, I knew tasteful pink and tasteful scent from—as Mama and Mamadee would put it—vulgar. The pink of that envelope could not be more vulgar. The paper itself reeked with a scent that was even worse. It crossed my mind that it was another Valentine, maybe from Daddy. Or Ford might have made me a joke one, something that would be hurtful or spring something nasty in my face. The envelope was unaddressed and unsealed. Inside was a sheet of matching paper. It was printed in green ink and read: