Candles Burning (10 page)

Mamadee barged right on. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would never have allowed you to marry that man. People are laughing, Roberta Ann, they are laughing, and it is hard for me not to laugh right along with them. To think that Joe Cane Dakin was murdered by the Fat Lady in the Circus.”

Mama was silent for a moment. She must have had thoughts along this line even before Mamadee brought it up. Forever after, for Mama, the dreadfulness of the business seemed to condense in that one peculiarity.

Calley,
she'd say in that despairing tone that made you want to kill yourself and take a few close friends along with you,
you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that woman weighed three hundred and ninety-seven pounds.

“You did not
let
me marry Joseph,” Mama said.

“I did my best to stop you.”

“I clearly remember you saying, ‘Roberta Ann, if you do not hog-tie Joe Cane Dakin, I will.' ”

“Roberta Ann! That is a falsehood! I would never be so vulgar!”

“You always thought he was a country fool.”

“I never!”

“You kept right on buying Cadillacs. It was a deliberate insult to my late husband and I! Do you think either one of us mistook it for anything else?”

“You are distraught, Roberta Ann.” Mamadee spoke then in the reasonable tone she always took when she had driven someone to shrieking. “I am gone ignore every silly thing you have said.” Having arrived at a position of virtue, she changed the subject. “You have made plans for the funeral of course?”

“I thought I might be able to get out of these shoes first,” snapped Mama.

“Really, Roberta Ann, how coarse of you. Your son is listening. You ought to have the funeral somewhere near Joe Cane Dakin's people.”

“Why?” Mama's tone made it clear that she did not give a candle stub what the answer was.

“Because there won't be as many people coming to gawk!” cried Mamadee. “Because you know what will happen if you have it here in Montgomery or in Tallassee? You might as well rent a circus tent! And all those Dakins will turn up and remind the whole world how low you married!”

“Mama,” Mama said in a suffering voice, “Joseph's funeral will be at St. John's. The governor and his wife and a director of the Ford Motor Company will be in attendance. And so will a whole gaggle of Dakins and the only thing to do is pretend that they are as good as anybody else. Did you ever hear that some mothers actually try to comfort their children in their times of need?”

“I've heard some children speak with respect and gratitude to their mother,” Mamadee retorted.

Mama tossed back her veil, opened her pocketbook—the brown Hermès Kelly bag—poked around in it, fished out her cigarettes and lighter and lit up. The smoke exited her tremulous nostrils in a furious stream.

From time to time I glanced across the footlocker at Ford. He stuck his tongue out at me once. Another time he put his hands up to the sides of his head as if they were ears, to flap at me. Then he turned his face to stare blindly out the window. When I saw his reflection in the window, I realized he was looking at himself.

Mamadee ground the Cadillac up the driveway of our home and clashed to a halt in the turnaround. A silence settled on us as we looked at the house. It was a fine Big House, one of the best in Montgomery, Mama always said. I remember enormous trees, tall pillars, deep porches and inside, rooms with high ceilings and sun-struck chandeliers.

A sawhorse stood at the bottom of the front steps, with a sign on it.

 
NO ENTRY

 
The words at the bottom said something about by order of somebody or someone.

An orange garland of tape hung around the pillars and there was another sign on the front door. I could make out the letters of
POLICE LINE
repeated on the tape, just like decorations I had seen repeating
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
or
MERRY CHRISTMAS
.

“Why did you bring me here?” Mama asked in a choked voice. “You should have told me!”

“You think I knew?” Mamadee said. “I would hardly drive out of my way, would I?”

None of us believed her. Nothing was more characteristic of Mamadee than driving out of her way to kick someone near and dear in the gut.

“I caint believe the police have searched my home. Or was it the FBI?”

“Both. You caint stay here.” The note of triumph in Mamadee's voice was barely repressed. “You will have to come stay with me at Ramparts.”

Mama sank back in the seat and lowered the veil over her face.

“Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Are you satisfied?”

Mamadee turned to her. “Why, Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, whatever do you mean? How could I possibly derive satisfaction from the plight of my widowed child and her orphaned children?”

Mama made no answer. I could see that she had decided she was not gone talk to Mamadee any more, at least for a while.

“What about Portia and Minnie and Clint?” I asked.

Portia was our cook, Minnie cleaned the house, and Clint did the chores.

“Be quiet, Calley Dakin,” Mamadee snapped. “The help is none of your business. I am certain sure, however, that given the way colored people gossip, they knew before you did that Joe Cane Dakin was dead. I fired the lot of them as soon as I got back from New Orleans!”

Mama's cigarette smoke spurted even more violently at Mamadee's high-handedness.

I knew, of course, that the colored servants had nothing more important to do than gossip about their white employers—it was a very popular topic with Mamadee, Mama, and all their female friends. The ladies were all still seething about the bus strike when the colored help all walked to work rather than take the bus on account of Miss Rosa Parks. Miss Parks refused to ride in the back, for which she was arrested and all the colored people threw a hissy fit. Most of the maids and cooks and chauffeurs and yardmen were late to work every day for months and talked back something terrible whenever they were chastised. Now they could all ride in the front of the bus, but everybody was still riled and hardly speaking.

I remembered what Daddy said to Mama's lamentations when it started: “Well, darling, that egg's cracked, and the chick's not gone get back into it.”

I remembered what Daddy said because Mama fired Ida Mae Oakes the very next day.

RAMPARTS loomed over the small town of Tallassee from nearly its highest point. The house was surrounded by several acres of big old live oaks festooned with Spanish moss. For all intents and purposes, Ramparts was the Carroll Museum, dedicated to the eternal glorification of the Carrolls. There was hardly a wall without a portrait of some Carroll or other, or Carrolls in multiples: Judges Carroll, State Senators Carroll, State Representatives Carroll, a U.S. Congressman Carroll, a Lieutenant Governor Carroll, a State Attorney General Carroll, a General Carroll and three Captains Carroll.

I expect all those old Carrolls were like other people, each a mix of good and bad, of strength and weakness. For a fact, most of them had owned slaves and all of them had been good segregationists—the sort of moneyed white who secretly supported or ignored the Klan and its terrorism. They were hypocrites, I mean, like most of us.

I never knew my granddaddy, Robert Carroll Senior, because he died before my birth. Captain was his commissioned rank during WWI and Mamadee always referred to him that way, as Captain Carroll. Mama used to say that the town was too small and everybody knew each other too well for Mamadee to call him General Carroll, but that she would have if she could. Robert Carroll Senior had been the sole inheritor of the Carroll Trust Bank and some other Carroll properties—once upon a time, there were plantations and a couple of mills of one kind or another. In fact, there was even a Carrollton in western Alabama, but if there were any Carrolls living in it, Mamadee was not on speaking terms with them.

Though the Carroll Trust Bank never went bust in the Depression, the Carroll fortune suffered, or so Mamadee claimed in her most penurious moments. Captain Senior managed to hold on to the bank and Ramparts, and to provide Mamadee with Cadillacs and an estate sufficient to keep her from the poorhouse. Mamadee made miserly economies over the pettiest items, while justifying other, larger expenses on the grounds of value. I doubt that she was ever truly hard up, as I have observed this behavior in many wealthy people. Perhaps it is only a tingle of shame that causes rich people to chintz and chisel over pennies while indulging themselves in great luxury without hesitation, but that may be giving credit where none is due.

In its salon, Ramparts sported a Chickering baby grand. It had been locked up for all the years of my short life, except for the day every year when the tuner came to tune it. Mamadee did not play but she was not about to let anyone else play either. Nor did Mama play, and I had not been able to discover if anyone else in the family ever had. I already knew that it was hardly the only piano in the world that was less an instrument than a very large elaborate pedestal for candelabra, a vase of flowers, or a wedding portrait in a silver frame.

My personal favorite room in Ramparts was Captain Senior's old library. Mamadee almost never came into it, for one. It was called a library because it had a bookcase in it, though hardly anybody ever cracked any of the books on its shelves. The old books were falling apart, the edges of their pages crumbling and the leather bindings cracking and flaking. Every time I picked one up, I sneezed. The books were mostly about explorers, and illustrated with many old maps in pastel colors: sky blue, mint green, rose, butter yellow. All my life since I have enjoyed looking at maps, those glorious illusions that we can know where we are.

On the wall behind his desk, there were several pictures of Captain Senior, all of them with men and guns and dogs, and none with Mamadee. The wedding photograph of the two of them was in the foyer, and the big one of Mamadee in her wedding dress was on the Chickering.

A 1913 Victrola with a plaque inside declaring that it was a Victor Talking Machine stood next to Captain Senior's favorite leather chair—still, after all these years, imprinted with the shape of his buttocks. As a smaller child, I had busted my lip several times trying to turn the crank to make the turntable of the Victrola turn. Like Daddy's coffin, the Victrola—or rather its cabinet—was mahogany, which I knew because Mamadee and her maid, Tansy, had warned me more than once not to scratch it.

In the cupboard part of it, there were big old heavy records. Nobody seemed to mind if I scratched
them
. I had been playing with them since I was no more than a baby. They were heavy and sharp-edged. When I was too small to carry them, I had picked one up and dropped it on my toes. I still remember how entirely purple all my small toes became.

The 78s sounded as if they had been recorded at the bottom of the sea, and were wonderfully punctuated.

 
Poppetyshushshushpopshush

 
Though later I realized that Captain Senior's musical taste was pedestrian, at the time, the 78s provided lovely noise to me. “Alabama Jubilee,” “Hard Hearted Hannah,” “Red River Valley,” “Down Yonder,” “The Tennessee Waltz” and “Good-night, Irene” are some that I recall.

On one side of the fireplace was Captain Senior's Westing- house Superheterodyne radio. It still worked just fine. There was no television set in the room or anywhere in Ramparts. Mamadee thought television was a passing fad, like 3-D movies. From the way she used to skirt the console at our house in Montgomery, I suspected that she was afraid of it.

I got as far as the library and had the cupboard open to take out some records when Mamadee stuck her head in the door and said, “Calley, you are bound and determined to scratch that cabinet. Go on upstairs and unpack.”

We visited often enough to have our own regular rooms. Mama's room went back to her girlhood. Daddy used to make little jokes to Mama about the bed whenever we came to visit. Mamadee altered nothing in the room after Mama married Daddy, requiring my parents to sleep in Mama's old bed. Fortunately it was at least a full bed. Crowded, Daddy used to say, but cozy.

To me, the most interesting thing in Mama's room was the curling color snapshot of her that was stuck in the frame of the vanity mirror. In it, she wore a sleeveless blouse and the wide knee-length shorts of the forties. She sat on the verandah railing back against a pilaster, hugging her knees.

Her hair was parted in the middle and curled back and away in that forties' hairstyle that I have never figured out. Not that I could have done it with my hair. I knew that this was how Mama looked when she met Daddy.

Ford's room had been Mama's younger brother's—the junior Robert Carroll. Balsa wood airplanes hung from the ceiling and a framed copy of “Invictus” hung over the desk. A small bookcase was crowded with boys' adventure stories full of Toms and Joes and Franks and Dicks and goshes and gollies and gee willikers. I vaguely recall banners on the walls and a diploma of some kind hung with a gilded tassel.

Another bedroom, furnished with twin beds, had belonged to Mama's older sisters, Faith and Hope. I only knew it because Mama said so, just once. I had an idea that they were either in jail, which was the worst place I knew of short of hell itself, or they were dead. Portraits, photographs and snapshots of Junior were here, there, and everywhere at Ramparts, but I cannot remember so much as a curling snapshot of Faith or Hope. I might have slept in that room, except the beds were never made up, the rugs were rolled up against the walls, and dustcovers shrouded every object. The woodwork of the door frame in the hallway was curiously pitted with nail holes. I concluded that at some time the room had actually been boarded up. It would not have surprised me if it had been, and Faith and Hope left to starve to death within, as punishment for some perceived defiance of Mamadee. Possibly a scratch on the mahogany of the Victrola.