Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

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.