Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

Mama stubbed out her Kool. She picked up the note from the dining table and thrust it at him as if it were on fire. Mr. Ree-shard examined it, before replacing it carefully on the table. Ford stood a little behind Mama’s chair, with one hand on her shoulder, that now and again she would cover briefly with her left hand.

I hung about the periphery, trying to be invisible—easy enough, given Mama and Ford ignored me. Only Mr. Ree-shard ever glanced at me and that uneasily. He tried not to look again but could not help himself. A certain fear was in his eyes, and pity too. His reaction to me was not particularly unusual, so I was unperturbed. I had other causes for anxiety.

Mama assured Mr. Ree-shard that Ford and I were not a couple of kids playing a silly game. He in turn reassured Mama that he was totally at her service. Then Mr. Ree-shard made some calls to other people attending the convention—high pooh-bahs in the dealers’ association—and, having determined that Daddy was not drunk on the floor behind the sofa in somebody else’s room or suite, he called the police. By then he was somewhat chagrined—for Mama, I think, and only a little for himself, given his standard procedure had so far proved fruitless.

The chambermaid brought our full breakfast, which none of us ate. A number of folks came and went. Most of the visitors were Daddy’s fellow automobile dealers. Some had a wife in tow and all were worried, solemn, consoling.

On the arrival of the police, Mr. Ree-shard herded all the concerned callers into the elevator so that a New Orleans police detective could interview Mama in relative privacy.

The detective told Mama that kidnappers never signed their real names to a ransom note. What could be stupider than that? So there was no point in looking for a couple of female criminals named Janice and Judy. His immediate opinion was that Ford and I were playing a rotten prank and needed a good whipping. When neither of us burst into tears and confessed, Mama shooed us out of the room.

Ford conjectured to me that the detective was working on convincing Mama that the two of us could have made the whole thing up and that Daddy was in all probability drunk somewhere outside the hotel, or maybe in a whorehouse.

“What’s a whorehouse?” I asked.

“Where the floozies are.” Ford used the tone he employed to imply that I was mentally enfeebled.

I was not in fact very clear what floozies were, other than potential mothers of Daddy’s other children, or possibly the sort of woman who smoked cigarettes on the street. The word “whore” I heard as h-o-a-r, as in “Hoar-frost twinkles on the trees,” from a poem by Winnie-the-Pooh that Ida Mae Oakes had read to me when I was littler. Ida Mae told me that hoar-frost was ice. A hoarhouse must be something like an ice palace to me, where an Ice Queen might reign. I could make no connection between floozies and ice palaces. The big word Mama used so often when Daddy was late—philandering—I had been unable to find in the dictionary due to the fact that I was misspelling it as fil andering. My best guess was that philandering meant inexcusably late.

Somebody’s wife—the name is long forgotten, if I ever knew it—looked in on us. She advised us that our mama was prostrate and that in this trying moment, we must be very, very good children. She told us that Mama had sent for Mamadee. The Dixie Hummingbird was making a special stop at Tallassee for her. Likely she would take us home. Then she had us kneel down and pray for Mama and for Daddy’s safe return.

It was a prayer about me, not Daddy. Prayer, as I understood it, was in the same class of mundane magic as spells and step-on-a-crack-break-your-mama’s-back and tossing a pinch of spilled salt over my shoulder. For all the churchgoing we did, I only knew the Lord’s Prayer and the bedtime prayer by heart. I thought of the bedtime prayer as the One Long Word Prayer and said it as fast as possible to annoy Mama:

Lacking a more specific hocus-pocus, I shut my eyes tightly and tried to say the Lord’s Prayer as I had it memorized, adapting the beginning to apply to Daddy.

I mumbled so that Miz Someone would not notice any errors on my part.

Ford hid his disgust until Miz Someone went away again and then muttered, “Goddamn it, I am not going home until Daddy comes back.”

I did not need to tell him that I did not want to go home to Montgomery, and not with Mamadee, and not to her big house, Ramparts, in Tallassee.

Ford tried to give me orders. “Dumbo, you have to be invisible. You have to keep your mouth shut. If Mamadee decides she’s got to run the show here, she’ll ignore us.”

I knew sense when I heard it, even if it came out of Ford’s usually lying trap.

Ford had his own strategy for himself. He stayed at Mama’s side, holding her hand, or fetching her cooling drinks, cool cloths for her brow, dry handkerchiefs when she wept, BC or Goody’s when she had a headache. She ate it up.

MAMADEE did not arrive alone. With her was Daddy’s lawyer, Winston Weems. Lawyer Weems was even older than Mamadee, who had once in my hearing pronounced him the soul of rectitude. He certainly looked it. He was a grey man, all the way through. For no reason I have ever understood, people associate the dour, the humorless, the anemic and the old with rectitude.

Mamadee tried grimly to take the situation in hand. Her first demand was that we be sent home. She would have Tansy, her housekeeper, come for us.

Mama recovered enough to spar with her. “I will not send my children away, Mama.” She pulled Ford close and he let her, something he would normally never permit. “Ford has been my little man!”

What with Ford being so much more Carroll than Dakin, Mamadee could hardly disagree.

“Well, Calley’s just underfoot. Surely you do not want the nuisance of her, do you?”

Mama had to think about it. Ford said nothing, provoking me out of my discretion.

I laid out what I felt was compelling evidence of how utterly unjust it would be send me away before we got Daddy back.

“I am not underfoot! I am not a nuisance! I found the ransom note!”

Lawyer Weems fixed me in his toadish glare.

“You see?” Mamadee asked Mama. Then she frowned. “Did you say it was on Calley’s bed?”

The four of them looked at me. Mamadee’s eyes got cold and scary. I backed away.

“Stop that ridiculous cringing, Calley!” Mama said sharply. And then to Mamadee, “Mama, you know that Calley prints like a little typewriter. And where would she get that horrible paper and a green ink pen?”

Mamadee pointed out that anyone, even a child, could obtain such items at the nearest dime store. As always, she was more than willing to credit my intelligence for no-good.

The house phone rang, saving me from incipient conviction of all charges against me. Ford answered. Uncle Billy Cane Dakin and Aunt Jude were in the lobby of the Hotel Pontchartrain.

Mamadee and Ford and Mama couldn’t figure out how they had learned that Daddy was missing, as there had been no reports on the radio or in the papers.

Later, Mamadee would discover in the hotel bill the record of a call made from Penthouse B to Uncle Billy Cane’s home number. She accused me of making it but I never owned up.