Candles Burning

Thirteen

DR. Evarts had been born and raised in Chicago, gone to college in New York City and studied medicine in Boston. He had settled in Tallassee, Alabama, for the simple reason that there he would have no competition at all. Before he came, the nearest doctor was in Notasulga, twenty-two miles distant. With a near-monopoly in Tallassee, Dr. Evarts made upwards of fifty thousand dollars a year in 1958 dollars. The town provided an office for him. He secured the staffing of his office by marrying a competent, efficient and reasonably attractive registered nurse. It was a sensible, practical marriage—even a love match, if love of money on his part and of social status on hers was love enough. He also owned the small hospital where a few of the old and terribly sick hung on past the time that their nearest and dearest could care for them and where a few of the babies having trouble getting born either made it or didn’t. Dr. Evarts got kickbacks from drugstores and the drug salesmen and the morticians and from the bigger hospitals in Montgomery when he sent patients to them, usually for complicated operations. He was received in the finest homes as a near equal. No more than a near equal; after all, no one was ever going to confuse him with a Southerner.

Except for his twice-annual vacations, he was on call twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. He paid a retired doctor from Montgomery to come out and tend his practice during his vacations, not because he cared that much about his patients but he did not want to encourage any poaching of his practice by hungrier physicians in reach of Tallassee.

Of course, he had to deal with Mamadee and the other grandees—grandees was one of Daddy’s words for them, confusing me (when I was just a knee-baby) into a belief that all the superior folk of Tallassee were somehow related to me through Mamadee. Daddy also called them pooh-bahs. The grandees and pooh-bahs expected immediate attention, immediate relief, and then argued about the bill.

Dr. Evarts also treated the multitudinous diseases of the abjectly poor whites of the Alabama countryside when they could find a dollar or two. Pale and malformed and destitute, these unfortunates led lives hidden to all but the social worker, the sheriff, and the physician. They were deviled with diseases that Dr. Evarts’s professors had declared eradicated. The dollar that he demanded from them for an office visit barely covered his costs, and for that reason alone, he slept the sleep of the just and righteous. His conscience was not so advanced for Dr. Evarts to treat coloreds. The nearest medical care for them was in Tuskegee, and how they got there or found the money to pay for their care, was of no interest to him. I learned later that when a colored male made the mistake of entering his office, Mrs. Evarts would determine if the man’s complaint was likely to be syphilis, and if so, Dr. Evarts would direct the man to Tuskegee, to participate in the eventually notorious study in which syphilis was not treated. He was not the first or the only white physician to follow this practice; all the white physicians in the county had agreed to do it, as part of the study. I have read that colored physicians did also.

He was a good-looking man with a fine head of silvering hair—all the ladies said so. He must have been in his mid-forties at the time I knew him. Before his marriage, he had admired Mama, or so Mamadee claimed. Mama always smiled secretively when the subject came up. It strikes me as doubtful, given Mama would have been all of ten or eleven when Dr. Evarts arrived in Tallassee. Much of what I know about him, I learned as a child, overhearing Mama and Mamadee and their friends discussing him. The rest I discovered years later, in researching Daddy’s murder.

Mamadee had ordered Ford and me to our rooms. Ford lurked behind the balustrade of the grand staircase in Mamadee’s foyer, peeking and listening. I went out a side door and up the nearest live oak with a view into the salon—hand over hand and in my socks. I could see Mama clearly. She paused to light a cigarette. Then she went on breaking the remaining bits of glass out of their muntings in the French doors. With the cigarette between her lips, she wielded a silver candlestick. It broke the muntings with a sound like a wishbone snapping.

Around the corner of the house, Dr. Evarts’s two-year-old black Lincoln rolled on the gravel of the drive. Mamadee personally opened the door to him before he could ring the bell.

Mamadee rattled the key in the lock and flung open the door.

Mama had already slipped the candlestick behind the nearest sofa cushion. She flicked her cigarette out into the debris beyond the threshold of the broken doors.

Mamadee stopped short in feigned shock at the destruction.

Setting down his bag by the sofa, Dr. Evarts spoke in a soothing voice, “Now, Roberta Ann.”

Disheveled, barefoot and bare-legged, she took a step toward Dr. Evarts and swooned into his arms.

“Oh, Lewis.” She sobbed. And then, raising her face to the ceiling, she went on, “Sweet Jesus, thank you, thank you, for sending a friend in my time of need!”

Mama knew, of course, that Dr. Evarts had been called. She went all limp and weak in his arms and he carried her to the sofa.

“Roberta Ann,” Dr. Evarts said gravely, “your mama is your best friend, you know. You have had a terrible time, haven’t you? Forgive me, my dear, I am remiss. Please accept my deepest condolences.”

Mamadee passed Mama her handkerchief and Mama wiped her eyes, allowing Dr. Evarts to slip a syringe from his bag.

“I’ll bet you haven’t slept since this horrible tragedy started, have you?” he said as he pumped the syringe, squirting a little fluid out the needle.

Seeing it now, Mama recoiled. “I do not need whatever that is, Lewis. I just need for that damned lawyer to answer my questions.”

With the syringe in one hand, Dr. Evarts swabbed at her near arm with a little pad. “This will get you to sleep, my dear.” He paused to look at her bare legs appreciatively.

She yanked her arm away. “Who the hell do you think you are, Lewis Evarts? Mama wants you to knock me out and haul me off to the mental hospital, doesn’t she? She wants everybody to think I am crazy. Well, I am not. I am as sane as you are, Lewis.”

Dr. Evarts sighed and put down the syringe. “Roberta Ann, nobody is going to put you in the mental hospital. Now, you let me help you get to sleep. You’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”

“No! You can take that needle and stick it in Mama if you want. Then I will go over to Winston Weems’s house and he will talk to me or I will know the reason why.”

Dr. Evarts glanced quickly at Mamadee, who stood with her arms crossed, glaring at Mama.

“Win’s had a gallbladder attack,” Dr. Evarts told Mama. “I was there not an hour ago. He’s no spring chick, Roberta Ann. It’s all been a terrible shock to him too.”

Mama was amazed, at least outwardly.

Out on my tree branch, I heard the lie in the doctor’s voice. Mama could not, of course, though she assumed it. She never could hear the lie in her own voice. However could she hear it in anyone else’s? How could she hear the truth and know it to be so? I have wondered if she did not spend her whole life assuming everyone was lying about everything all the time, all because she had a tin ear for truth.

“I knew it,” Mamadee said. “Roberta Ann Carroll, you’ve thrown a big tantrum over an old man being too sick to come running at your beck and call. What would your daddy think of you, carrying on like you did not know any better?”

Dr. Evarts picked up the syringe again. He reached for Mama’s arm.

“Lewis,” Mama said. “Put that thing back in your bag and get me a glass of bourbon. That and a cigarette will put me right and I will sleep like a baby.”

Dr. Evarts nodded and put the syringe away.

“Lewis,” Mamadee protested.

“Mrs. Carroll,” the doctor said, rising to his feet, “I think a little bourbon would do us all good.”

Mamadee shot him a poisonous glare. One of the things—such as having the unplayed piano tuned—that Mamadee continued to do after Captain Senior’s death, because she had always done it, was to keep the house stocked with the finest bourbons. Everyone knew it. Her circle relished the challenge of forcing her to part with a glass. Ford raided it whenever we visited, just to prove that he could.

Mamadee went to the salon breakfront, where behind glass doors dozens of crystal glasses stood holding their few ounces of empty air. In daytime, when the draperies were drawn open, the glasses broke the light into rainbows, just as prisms did in the antique shops Mama and I used to visit. Below the glass doors were mahogany doors, and behind those were cut-glass decanters, very like the ones in Penthouse B of the Hotel Pontchartrain in New Orleans.

On the side of the tree that was hidden from the house, Ford came scrambling up to look into the salon with me.

Mama tucked her legs underneath her on the sofa and lit a cigarette. Mamadee took out three glasses and a decanter. As she poured, Dr. Evarts admired the spill of bourbon into the glasses.

I touched the key on the string around my neck. I was hungry enough to eat the key and have the string for dessert. It was cold outside and I was shivering. Abandoning the tree to Ford, I went down it and retrieved my shoes.

I found Tansy at the table in the kitchen, eating a piece of the hot fruit casserole that was supposed to be dessert. Without invitation, I scrambled onto the other chair at the table. Tansy lumbered out of her chair to fetch a chipped dish and a cloudy glass from the cupboard where she kept dishes for her use and Leonard’s. She poured milk for me and then spooned fruit casserole into the dish. She topped it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and put it down in front of me, with a spoon.

Sitting down again with a grunt, she watched me while I wolfed the fruit casserole and drained the glass.

“You got any space for chicken pie?” Her tone was sarcastic.

I nodded violently.

Getting up again, she brought me a piece of the pie that been sitting on the top of her stove and was still warm. She refilled my glass. “Onliest one that wants my food is you. The Lord be’s humblin’ me. I’m thinking ‘whatsomever you does for the least a mine, you does for me.’”

“Thank you, Tansy. Did you see the snow?”

“Snow? Snow in Alabama! Lying be’s a sin, Miss Calley Dakin!”

I changed the subject. “You got any Scotch tape?”

“What if I does?”

“I need some.”

She studied me awhile, trying to decide if I was responsible enough to be entrusted with tape. When I had cleaned my plate and drained my glass again and said thank you yet again, she produced a roll of tape. It was yellowed with age.

“Don’t you be gittin’ up to no good with none of my Scotched tape,” she said.

I held up my right hand and made the two-fingers-up, thumb-across-palm Girl Scout pledge gesture that I had learned from the older girls in the schoolyard.

“What’s that hoodoo?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Git. Yo face make me tired.”

I left her muttering in the kitchen about spoiled white children, and what her mama would have done to her, had she wasted food, never mind the luxury of Scotch tape.

I bounded up the two flights of stairs to my room. The sticky on the tape was mostly dried up and I came to the end of the roll very quickly. The tape made an ugly as well as useless bandage. It would not hold paper doll Betsy McCall’s neck and head stuck to her shoulders.

The room was as cold as it was outside. My stomach was too full. I just had time to yank the old pot from under the bed before Tansy’s chicken pie, her hot fruit casserole and ice cream and a pint of milk, slightly used, made their reappearance in it.

Shortly after Dr. Evarts’s car left, I heard Mama’s bare feet on the stairs and then the door of Mama’s bedroom slammed below me.

“Roberta Ann!” Mamadee called up the stairs but Mama made no answer.

I crept downstairs, pot in hand, and tapped on Mama’s door. In a moment, Mama unlocked and opened it. She looked down at me, registered the pot in my hands, and made a face.

I slipped past her and took it into her bathroom to dispose of it.

Mama stood in the open bathroom door. “I suppose Tansy let you make a pig of yourself?”

I rinsed out the pot in the basin and then helped myself to Mama’s Listerine. “You want me to rub your feet, Mama?”

“I am gone have a bath, Calley. You can wait in my bed. Go get your pajamas on while I draw my bath.”

That was more than I could hope.

My pajamas were four days past their last wash at the Hotel Pontchartrain. I dropped them on the floor with my grey dress and underpants and socks. I did have clean underpants. I put them on and padded back to Mama’s room.

“My pajamas are dirty,” I told her when she let me in.

She sighed a long-suffering sigh and poked around in a drawer and found an old undershirt of Daddy’s. It was cotton, softened by many wearings and washings. On me, it made an oversized nightdress, but at least I was decent. I was more than decent. I felt all at once as if Daddy’s arms were around me.

“Don’t wear those underpants to bed,” Mama said, as if I didn’t know that wearing underpants at night is nasty.

I dropped my underpants, picked them up and folded them the way I found them in my drawer at home: crotch up, sides over, like an envelope.

Between Mama’s sheets, I hugged a pillow. As Daddy’s undershirt warmed me, I realized I had been shivering and no longer was. My stomach was calmer. Perhaps because I felt better, I thought of Ida Mae Oakes. I let myself hope that she might come to see me, to offer her condolences. She might come straight to Ramparts, knock at the kitchen door, and be offered refreshment by Tansy, but insist on first seeing me. Or she might come to the funeral and the reception.

Mama had to wake me up when she came to bed. And we began a new ritual.

Mama had had Leonard place the footlocker with the ransom locked inside it in an even bigger old cedar chest at the foot of her bed. She strung the key to the cedar chest onto the red silk string around my neck. That first night at Mamadee’s, when she had waked me again, she unlocked the cedar chest and checked the locker. Mama did not allow me to take the silk string off my neck and so I had to kneel down in front of the chests so she could fit the keys into the locks. It was so much like kneeling by the bed, I felt as if I ought to say the bedtime prayer.

That night I dreamt for the first time of finding such a footlocker and lifting the lid. Sometimes in my dreams—to this day—I find the ransom. Sometimes I find Daddy, alive, neatly folded like a jack-in-the-box, ready to pop up and surprise me. And sometimes I find what you would expect me to dream of finding: the nightmare, the bloody broken, profoundly unpleasant, nightmare.