Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

Since Ford would not be caught dead touching an actual doll, I did have my Betsy McCall doll with me. She was little, just the right size for me to clutch in my hand. If I touched him with her, he would shudder and shrink away and threaten to tear her limb from limb.

Mamadee subscribed to McCall’s magazine. She brought it to Mama every month after she had perused it. “Perused” was her word. Mama did not want it, which is why Mamadee brought it to her. Mama took it because she was not gone let Mamadee think anything Mamadee did was significant enough to irritate her. They managed to insult each other more with courtesies than they could have with a whole dictionary of cuss words.

Betsy McCall paper dolls appeared in every issue of McCall’s . Betsy McCall’s face was plain and sweet as a sugar cookie, with great big widespread eyes like root-beer balls. She had a little smiling rosebud mouth and no chin to speak of, and a proper little girl hairstyle with curls, and on the rare occasions that they showed, elfin little ears. Every month, Betsy McCall Did Something . She Went To A Picnic or Started School or Helped Her Mother Bake Cookies. What she did, she did it first and last name, always in capital letters, and it always required a wardrobe.

Every month, I cut out Betsy McCall and her dog and her friends and relations and played with them in sight of Mamadee and Mama. Mama told Daddy that I loved Betsy McCall so much that he should buy me a Betsy McCall doll for Christmas. So he did, all unknowing that Mama knew that I wanted a baby doll. I had a name all picked out: Ida Mae. And knowing that Mama had been so mean, I made a great fuss over Betsy McCall. I took that Betsy McCall doll everywhere with me and sniveled if I were made to leave her behind. Since I was deprived of the privilege of naming my own doll by the fact that Betsy McCall already had a name, I gave her a secret middle name: Cane.

After a while, Daddy started talking to Ford about the new bridge in New Orleans. I settled back to listen to the sound of the tires on the road and sounds of the engine and the air conditioner and the satisfying tautness of the fan belt. With the windows closed, I could not hear the birds or animals or people outside. The speed of the Edsel spun all the sounds outside behind it; those separate sounds got all slurried together like drops of water forced out of a hose hard enough to bruise.

I slept some of that long ride, dreaming of loud rain that kept getting louder until there was nothing else but the sound of it. A hard rain makes what one day I would discover is called “white noise.” It is better than cotton balls in my ears.

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I heard Daddy singing, the way he did sometimes when we took a drive together or when I was going to sleep.

It seemed to me that Daddy was singing it to me as I slept, making a joke between the two of us, because it was raining. Rain so hard it scared me in my sleep. I felt as if I were drowning in that relentless rain, the rain itself, the dying breaths of thousands of other people hanging round my neck, drawing me down into the city of the dead.

Half an hour outside of New Orleans, I woke up when Ford slid over to pinch me.

“Wake up, Dumbo. We’re getting there. You got drool all over yourself,” Ford said.

Ford was lying; the corners of my mouth were a little wet but that was all. I knew it was raining before I tried to look out the window. I could smell the rain, even over the ever-present cigarette smog. We were inside my dream, inside the car, and for all I could see, we might as well have been under water.

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Ford looked bored. It was about his favorite thing to do when he was not up to actual no-good, and he did it a lot. He had not wanted to come on this trip nor had he wanted to stay home, and like Mama he was not gone have a good time no matter what. He tried real hard to stay bored as we began to see New Orleans but I could tell from the way he straightened up taller that it was drawing his attention. Mama was paying attention too. She paused for a second or two, taking out a new cigarette.

I knelt on the seat and stared out the window on my side, and past Daddy, out his window and the span of the windshield. Most of what I saw and heard was rain. The lights of other vehicles on the road wobbled past in blurred yellow and red, like candle flames wavering in a draft behind a wet window.

There was a lot more to New Orleans than Mobile or Birmingham or Montgomery, never-you-mind Tallassee—though Tallassee could claim a big league second baseman, Fred Hatfield. I reckoned that New Orleans could probably claim so many big league players that nobody there bothered to boast of it. There were ever so many more people, of which we were hardly more than four drops in the rain, but I couldn’t see them. I knew they were there because when I found out we were going to New Orleans, I looked it up in Daddy’s atlas that gave the population of ever’where. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear them through the rain, so much as what I heard of them was diluted to not much more than a shiver at the nape of my neck. I was frightened. Not for me. For all those people I couldn’t see but whose distant voices under the downpour sang to me not in words but in their terror.

THE Hotel Pontchartrain loomed twelve stories over St. Charles Avenue and we were staying on the very top floor, in Penthouse B. Penthouse sounded like some kind of jail to me, but Daddy said that meant it was the best. I was still scared when the hotel manager took us up in the elevator. I believe that I was born hating elevators. The minute I enter one, I just want to sit down on the floor and hug my knees and squinch my eyes tight, so I won’t see the doors close. It’s bad enough to have to listen to the machinery work and see in my head the push-pull-yank-thump-clank of the belts and chains and gears that could go awry anytime with nary a doorknob or sesame in sight.

Penthouse B turned out to be a patch of big rooms with high ceilings and a baby grand piano with a key in it that Mama snatched away when I reached for it. There was a color television console and a bar with cut-glass bottles, heavily carved dark furniture, turkey rugs, and damask draperies over swagged and bellied sheers on the windows. Except for the baby grand, our home in Montgomery was much the same, only bigger, and Mamadee’s in Tallassee was even more so.

The manager opened some draperies and shutters to show us French doors. We went out on the balcony and looked down. St. Charles Avenue was a black ditch of rain, so far down, it made me a little dizzy. I backed off the balcony and into the parlor of the Penthouse. The piano was still locked. A piano is an echo chamber, a sounding board, and I was not ever gone make this one tell me its secrets. Mama was gone keep that key for the whole time we were at Hotel Pontchartrain. I could see my face like a sick melting ghost in the mirror of its glossy black finish. I looked like I was in a grown-up coffin, way too big for me.

Mama ordered supper for Ford and me. I helped her unpack and hang her clothes and watched her change to go to dinner with Daddy. She used the dressing room while Daddy did his changing in the bedroom. Mama’s dress was a wasp-waisted horizontal-striped strapless sheath, with a filmy over-skirt in the back like a short train. She put up her hair like Grace Kelly and made herself up like a movie star, with emphatically arched brows and plenty of mascara and dark lipstick. When Daddy whistled at her and shook his fingers to put out the fire, she pretended to ignore him, but her eyes shone.