Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

The lady spoke suddenly, making Mama start. “I found it, right over here.”

She pointed to a little petticoat table—five hundred pounds of mahogany and Georgia marble that had been carved and glued and polished in order to support a little mirror, six inches off the floor, so the ladies of the 1850s could check the fall of their crinolines. Mamadee had one, of which she was sinfully proud. Mama and Mamadee often informed me of instances of sinful pride on the part of the other. I myself was so often hell-bound from my sinful pride that I was sinfully proud of it.

Mama smiled and held her pocketbook against her breast and hugged it.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Mama said to the lady.

“I was going to steal it, and your little girl too, but I was afraid I would get caught,” the lady said.

“Who would want Calley?” Mama said.

The lady gave me a warm smile. “Well, wet little girls must be good for something .” Then she turned back to the proprietor and said, “You’ve got so much new stock, Mr. Rideaux, and I’m just not sure what I want. I think I’ll have to come back one day when it’s not raining.”

She left with a tinkle of the little brass bell, and without looking at me again.

“Can you change a fifty?” Mama asked Mr. Rideaux. Before he could answer, Mama cried, “Oh, no wait, I think I have two singles.”

Mr. Rideaux smiled and started to take the bills.

Mama held on to them. “Then all I can buy is this little piece of cobalt?”

“That’s all you can buy today, ” he said, delicately plucking the two bills out of her hand. “But you come back tomorrow, and I promise I won’t let you out for under that fifty you’re putting back in your purse.”

Mama laughed delicately too, at this proof that Mr. Rideaux knew that she had money. “Then I guess I’ll have to come back.”

But of course we never went back.

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.