Candles Burning

Sixty-six

MAMA was not missing for long. Floating around in that swimming pool in the middle of the cement slabs on which a hotel stood two days previous, like a bug in a puddle in the middle of a cemetery, she would have been hard to miss.

Miz Verlow was able to contact us via marine radio on the nineteenth, so I knew that Mama had gone to Mobile. She had hired Roger to drive her in the Edsel. Why that old clunker? I wondered if she had thought that it might in some obscure way please Ford.

Finding Roger took longer because he was taken sick with pneumonia in a shelter set up in a little colored church in Mobile. He had no memory of how he had gotten there or what had happened to the Edsel or Mama. The last he remembered was he and Mama smoking cigarettes inside the Edsel, parked on the broken pavement that was all there was left of the Ford automobile agency once owned by Daddy, and debating whether they should find a hurricane shelter. Mama had wanted to wait for Ford who surely, she insisted, had promised to be there. The Edsel rocked from side to side in the blasts of wind, scaring the both of them, but when Roger decided that he was getting the hell out of there and started the Edsel again, he could see nothing outside. The Edsel began to roll seemingly on its own, with Mama shrieking in the back. Roger clung to the wheel. The elements became so indistinguishable, a freight-train vortex of wind and rain, that Roger thought he might for a while have actually flown the Edsel in it.

After the hurricane, the broken pavement was gone, replaced with the roof of a Chinese restaurant. The Edsel turned up driven halfway into the hull of a fishing trawler named Katie sitting athwart East Beach Boulevard, also known as Route 90. Dorothy and Toto were nowhere to be seen.

Mrs. Mank relayed the news from Merry Verlow to me, in the garden of the house in Brookline, just outside of Mrs. Mank’s ground-floor sitting room. I had heard the phone ring and Merry Verlow’s voice over the phone from where I was, stretched out on a comfortable chaise with a book in one hand. Mrs. Mank hung up and came to the French doors that opened from her sitting room into the garden.

“You know,” she said.

I nodded numbly.

“Have you heard anything?”

From Mama, she meant. I shook my head no. I was not lying. She knew that I had been listening since we heard of Mama’s disappearance. I had been listening for Roger too.

My brother, Ford, or someone so identifying himself, claimed Mama’s corpse. None of the officials Miz Verlow queried had any idea where Ford had taken Mama’s remains but she was told that he had made mention of cremation. Where and when the cremation occurred or if any sort of funeral had been held, or burial of an urn or scattering of ashes done, she was unable to learn. Colonel Beddoes’s desolation deepened when he learned that he was not going to get back Mama’s ring, for it was not recovered. Either the hurricane had taken it, or some other thief.

Camille beat up Santa Rosa Island as well, just not as severely as Mobile and Pass Christian. She tore off most of the verandah and punched Merrymeeting’s roof through with seven pine boles and an Adirondack chair. The damage report from Miz Verlow, via Mrs. Mank, added that a school bus from Blackwater had been discovered half-buried in the dune fronting Merrymeeting. Its windows were sealed closed and it was full of water, and water moccasins.

Two days after Miz Verlow reported that Ford had claimed Mama’s remains, the mail arrived at Mrs. Mank’s. It was late morning, and I was in the garden again, trying to read and failing, for the desire to leave was very intense. Mrs. Mank was in her bedroom, with her masseuse. I heard the mail van on the gravel of the drive, and knew it was mail-time, but it was a surprise to have Appleyard emerge from the house with an envelope in hand. He presented it to me silently.

It was an ordinary greeting card envelope, addressed to me in care of Mrs. Mank at the Brookline address, and without a return address.

Inside was a black-edged card announcing that an interment service for Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin would be held in Tallassee, Alabama. The given day and hour were the morrow, the place a cemetery called The Promised Land. I recognized the name as the one where Daddy was buried, that I had not been able to remember when I returned to Tallassee with Grady. There was no RSVP number. No one to contact.

Later, when I showed it to Mrs. Mank, I said, “This is from Ford, obviously, and I want to see him.”

She frowned. “It’s a long way to go. How are you going to do it?”

“Take a bus,” I said. Of course, I didn’t have the fare. I would steal it, if I had to, or beg it at the bus station.

Mrs. Mank gauged my determination and shrugged. “We’ll fly—”

“You weren’t invited,” I said.

She covered her shock with a cold little laugh.

“Yes,” I said suddenly, “let’s fly.”

The flinch in her eyes was satisfying. “Don’t be tiresome,” she said. She crossed her arms over her bosom. “You’re in no position to order me around.”

“Never mind,” I answered, turning toward the stairs. “I’ll take the bus.”

“No,” she said, biting the word off sharp. “We will fly.”

I smiled to myself and went upstairs to pack my brand-new luggage.

We were to leave early the next morning, the day of the service.

We dined by candlelight, just the two of us, as usual, in the formal dining room of the house in Brookline. Mrs. Mank had begun educating me about wine and food. I was surprised to discover that wine was well-worth drinking, and the knowing-about was only important to my palate, not to impress anyone. Mrs. Mank had been pleased that I appeared to possess both an educable palate and a strong head.

At the end of the meal, Price set out the brandy snifters in their sterling silver cradles. Mrs. Mank poured the decanted brandy herself, and lit the spirit flames beneath the snifters with a long wooden match.

The wine that we had consumed during the meal had mellowed us both, lessening the tension over my defiance.

“Tell me about the Circus,” I said, and made a little calliope wheeze.

Mrs. Mank laughed at my boldness.

“You’ve been listening,” she said, with some pride.

Indeed I had. I did a little more calliope, and she laughed again.

“I use the term generically,” she said. “Life’s a circus, is it not?”

“Fat ladies and acrobats and lions—oh my.”

“Indeed,” she said agreeably.

“It means something more, doesn’t it?”

“Of course.” She twiddled the crystal balloon, so the candlelight gilded its contents. “I prize talent, special talent. People with special talents have special needs. Their talents need protection. People who stand out of a crowd,” she said, “like excessively large ears on a Calley Dakin’s head, draw the sometimes murderous hatred of all those sadly untalented people who make up the mob. Is there any more characteristic human behavior than the burning of witches?”

It was an assertion that I could not refute.

“My Circus provides a refuge for certain specially talented people. Now, it happens that the talents in which I am interested can and often do occur in families. Your great-grandmama, for instance—”

“Cosima—”

She nodded. “Cosima. What a gifted woman she was. To give credit where it’s due, the idea of the circus as a refuge was hers. It isn’t at all surprising to me that mere death had not silenced her. Personalities of Cosima’s strength do not easily unravel. She married your great-granddaddy when he was a mildly successful proprietor of what he called ‘A Traveling Show.’ She made it into a real Circus. She drew talent like a magnet. She made him a wealthy man. He repaid her with infidelity. In turn, she took revenge by nursing him through his final illness, which was syphilis. Before the syphilis reduced him to a grinning toothless lunatic, he suffered her extraordinary kindness and gentleness. Forgiveness is a terrible thing, Calley. It wracks the guilty worse than hate.”

“It’s a point of view,” I ventured. I wasn’t about to commit myself to forgiving anybody, least of all Mrs. Mank.

“It’s the truth,” she said, straightening in her chair. “Cosima was a goddamned angel.” Her tone was sarcastic. “She forgave everything.”

The brandy had loosened her tongue. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

“Your grandmama had only her looks. Beautiful women are as common as sin, of course. Because the world so overvalues beauty in a woman, the beautiful woman often becomes an empty shell. I myself,” she added, “am not beautiful.”

I wondered if she meant the face that she presently wore, with its strong resemblance to that of the current Queen of England, or the one with which she had been born. Had she changed her face for strategic purposes or because she hated her original one?

“I have a particular talent, and that is to be able to recognize and use the talents the rest of the populace would gladly smother in infancy.” She nodded toward me significantly.

She may have wanted me to thank her. I didn’t.

She drank a little of her brandy and continued. “Your mama received only Deirdre’s and Cosima’s useless beauty. It brought her only grief, I can assure you.”

“Speak ill of the dead,” I said.

“If I wish.” She pursed her lips. “Your mama’s sisters had talents. Deirdre tried to kill them. She was enraged to be afflicted with them, the sort of people that she had fled in her marriage to ‘Captain’ Carroll.” Mrs. Mank said “Captain” roguishly, mocking Mamadee. “Cosima saved them from her. Alas, your mama undid Cosima’s best efforts. When she was in her teens and Deirdre was becoming jealous of her looks, she ran away to Cosima.”

“It’s a fairy tale,” I said. “‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all.’”

Mrs. Mank smiled sourly. “Of course it is. Once in Cosima’s house, your mama could not abide living with her own sisters, those ugly but talented young women. Did she mean to burn the house down and everyone in it except herself? Ask Cosima sometime, will you? Or your mama, if you can. It hardly matters. Faith and Hope were lost, and so was Cosima.”

For a moment she sat silent, brooding. “I wanted to hate Cosima. I was never very successful at it. I had my jealousy, for I had neither Deirdre’s beauty, nor talent of the kind that Cosima and your aunts had. Mine are talents far more common in the world. Jack Dexter’s talents.”

Her features sagged with dissatisfaction.

“Yes, I am Deirdre’s sister. Your great-aunt.” She looked at me with suddenly wide-open eyes. “I’m half-pissed,” she said.

I laughed. “It’s been fascinating.”

She laughed as if she had been clever. “I bet. Look, I’ve been a fairy godmother to you. I expect some return on my outlay. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded as if in the affirmative. I needed her in order to get to Tallassee for Mama’s interment.

I drank her brandy, and let her think that she was ringmaster.