Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

“Daddy’s been out all night. Drinking or run off with a Negro floozy, Mama says.”

“That’s hooey, Dumbo.” Ford flopped back on his bed and closed his eyes.

I went looking for Mama again and found her in the dressing room.

“He was in a wreck, I just know it,” Mama whispered, with a quick tearful glance at me.

She disappeared into the bathroom. The pipes clanked and the water crashed in the shower directly to the tiles, unimpeded by Mama’s body, as she ran it until it was really hot. I sat at the vanity and moved things around, but I did not use any of her makeup. I knew better, right down to the knuckles on which she would use the spine of a comb if I messed with any of it. In the bathroom, Mama stepped into the shower.

She came out all pink and soft and shooed me off the vanity bench, where she sat down to do her face. I studied her the way I did most mornings when she was putting on her face. The intensity of her concentration fascinated me as much as what she did. In the middle of it, she came to a sudden stop, her mascara wand in her hand. She stared at herself.

“I’m gone be old,” she said, “and nobody’s gone care what happens to me.”

“I will!”

Her expression went from bleak self-pity to irritation and she made scatting motions with her hands.

I was in my room, pulling up my underpants, when the doorbell chimed. I ran to get the door.

Ford glanced out of his door and informed me what I already knew perfectly well: that I was in my underpants. It occurred to me that when I was fully dressed, I could still be said to be in my underpants, but Ford closed his door before I could advance the argument.

It was only the maid bringing the tray with the coffee and brioche that Mama needed to face the day. I recognized the maid as the one from the previous morning. A disconcerted look came over her when she beheld me half-naked. Realizing that I was embarrassing her, I went into reverse, backing toward Mama’s room.

“Please leave it on the table,” I told her, as if I were Mama, and the instant I did so, I realized how ludicrous I was, a seven-year-old girl in her underpants instructing a chambermaid as if I was a grown-up lady.

I retreated to Mama’s dressing room to tell that her coffee and brioche had arrived. She was particularly fond of the brioche, for which the Hotel Pontchartrain was as famous as it was for its Mile-High Pie.

She was still at the vanity, angrily smoking a Kool. I reckoned when Daddy finally showed up, he was gone be in for it.

“Mama.”

“Calley, stop parading around naked this minute and make yourself decent!”

“I’m not naked—” I began.

She slapped me.

I would not give her the satisfaction of making me cry, especially not over a little slap. She turned back to the mirror.

I marched back to my room, ready to give Betsy Cane McCall a whipping that she would never forget.

Betsy Cane McCall was sitting on top of a pink envelope, on one of the pillows of my unmade bed. With a mother who wore Schiaparelli pink and Schiaparelli Shocking perfume, I knew tasteful pink and tasteful scent from—as Mama and Mamadee would put it— vulgar . The pink of that envelope could not be more vulgar. The paper itself reeked with a scent that was even worse. It crossed my mind that it was another Valentine, maybe from Daddy. Or Ford might have made me a joke one, something that would be hurtful or spring something nasty in my face. The envelope was unaddressed and unsealed. Inside was a sheet of matching paper. It was printed in green ink and read:

JUDY was Judy DeLucca, the chambermaid who brought the breakfast tray up to the room that morning. She was twenty-two, with brown eyes and brown hair. Her nose tilted to the left as if somebody right-handed had given her a very hard slap.

Janice was Janice Hicks, twenty-seven years of age, brown eyes and brown hair. Her whole face looked flat because her cheeks were fat and stuck out and her nose was a tiny bump between those fat cheeks. She had so many chins there was no telling where her jaw ended and her neck began. She weighed three hundred and ninety-seven pounds. Janice worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Pontchartrain, baking the brioche that Judy brought up to the room every morning.

Mama raised her newly penciled eyebrows when I held out the folded note to her. She took it and sniffed at it.

“Cheap, darling, vulgar. You ever catch me using perfume like this, shoot me.”

She opened it and quickly scanned the words. Her eyes narrowed.

“Calley, I do not like jokes.”

As if I didn’t know.

Her fingers crushed the note into a sharp-edged ball and she flung it at me. It stung against my cheek.

Mama stared at me. The red of her anger drained from her face.

“Oh—my—God,” she whispered. She scrambled for the note, spread it open and studied it. “You did not write this, did you?” Her eyes were wide now and suddenly tearful. The note shook in her hands. Her lips quivered and then she screamed like somebody just tore off her arm.

Ford came running. Mama was incoherent and hysterical. Ford poured a glass of something from one of the decanters, closed her hands around it and brought it to her lips. It did calm her in another few moments—enough for her to go scrabbling around the room, looking for her cigarettes and lighter.

Ford read the note hastily and then shoved me out of the room. “Did you write this?”

I yanked my hand from his clasp. “Creep! My letters are perfect!”

My writing was—and is—extremely neat, each small letter carefully spaced and equal in size. It looks typed, as well it might, since I learned myself when I was five by tracing the letters Ida Mae Oakes typed on an old Corona. Ida Mae said that I could do it if I concentrated and that I had to concentrate. Learning to concentrate was more important even than learning to write.

My first-grade teacher, Miz Dunlap, wanted me to learn to connect up the letters. Script, she called it. I pretended to be too stupid to get the hang of it. Stupid is something else I learned from Ida Mae Oakes, who told me if a person just stands there silent, paying attention but not reacting, a lot of folks, the rackety kind, would jump to the conclusion that the person was stupid, which was sometimes a very useful thing to be. A person might get yelled at or punished or even fired, but if a person didn’t want to do something, being stupid might be the way not to do it. Or maybe a person would get the time to figure out what to do next, just by being stupid.

Ford had one hand fisted, ready to punch me. “Liar!”

“Jerk!”

“If it turns out you did this, I am gone drown you head first in the toilet!”

Then he came to a sudden halt. His anger wavered. For once he seemed unsure of himself.

“What do we do now?” His whisper revealed a degree of shock and fear that, like a pebble making rings in water, acted to enlarge my own emotions.

After bringing Mama more of whatever it was from the decanter, from which he took a good knock on the way, Ford persuaded her to summon Mr. Richard, the hotel manager. While we were waiting, Ford ordered breakfast.

I finished dressing. I remember that I hurried, because it seemed suddenly important that I be dressed and not just because mere underpants made me vulnerable to slaps or suspicions. I felt as if I had been caught unprepared by some great emergency, like a fire, a flood, a tornado.

Mr. Richard emerged from the Penthouse B elevator in a high state of managerial calm, exuding reassurance and confidence that all would be well. He announced himself, as if we had never met him before, in order to remind us that his name was said the French way: Ree-shard .