Candles Burning

Fifty-three

MERRY Verlow began to keep close track of the key to the attic. When I had something to take up or retrieve, she made sure to be there. She allowed me no loitering time there to find the framed poster again. There was always another and urgent chore to be done. Trying hard to get back into her good graces, I promised myself that I would find it later, and let later become a lot later.

The high school I attended was something of an odd place—newly built, for one, and so lacking both history and cohesion. At least half the students were service brats, which meant the student population was in constant flux. Of the locals, none of us were as well-heeled, as well-traveled or as well-spoken as the children of the military. Our focus was hardly ever really on school, but on our families, on jobs that we had in the mornings before our first classes or that we had to leave for, early in the afternoon.

My courses and classes were arranged so that I could leave each day at two. Grady left at two as well; he did a full day’s work plumbing before and after school.

Grady lived with his daddy, next door to his granddaddy and right behind his five uncles. His daddy and uncles shared a couple of chronically broken-down boats from which they derived occasional income. They each had their own chronically malfunctioning pickup trucks, out of which they would sell small quantities of fish or shellfish by the side of the road, to people who didn’t know them and wouldn’t be able to find them if the fish made them sick. They were all divorced, widowed or abandoned, or some combination thereof.

Having lived so long in a woman-run household, what little I knew about the way men thought, reacted and behaved, I had had to glean from our male guests. Grady and his family were another tribe altogether. They brought to mind my half-forgotten Uncles Dakin. I could not remember any of my uncles being divorced or widowed but they had all been known to drink, get into fights, get arrested, have car wrecks, go bankrupt, do the occasional weekend in the county lockup, and find Jesus during every tent revival that came their way. The power of their wives—short of teeth and hard-worn—had been just as real as Cleonie’s power over Nathan Huggins, or Perdita’s over her Joe Mooney.

One Saturday night in the summer between sophomore and junior year, Grady and I got high on a six pack of Straight Eight. The beach was the perfect place to hoot and holler and crow. Jokes and teasing and handholding turned to grab-ass and went on from there. Of course we were clumsy and ignorant and made a mess the first time but our randiness sufficed, as it commonly does, to overcome our embarrassment.

We were grateful to each other, oh yes—Grady because of his extreme shyness and me because I was too young to realize that being goofy-looking is no bar to sexual activity. Miz Verlow was right. Our friendship allowed us the candor to admit that truelove was not a factor. I wasn’t Grady’s girlfriend, I just had the basic girlfriend equipment, and he wasn’t my boyfriend, just had the basic, etc. We were horny and curious and that was good enough for both of us.

That first time—idiot kids that we were—we took our chances and consequentially did some educational suffering, and got clean away with it. After that, Grady pilfered condoms from his father and uncles, so we didn’t worry about that little awkwardness, except for the times when one broke and another one slipped off, and we went through the sweet-jesus-spare-us again, just like everyone who has ever depended upon what, back then, we called safes.

Mama and I were incapable of maintaining a truce for more than a few hours. The only reason we didn’t kill each other was because I avoided her as much as I could. At first she didn’t realize it and when she did, she got on her very highest horse. After that she tried playing martyr about it. None of it got her anywhere with me. By then, my heart was entombed in Alabama marble.

Mama’s pretense that I was not her child occurred more often after I began my periods and intensified when she had become interested in some man. After Gus O’Hare, I recall her dating a wildlife photographer, then a former Navy flyboy come back to revisit his glory days in Pensacola, and then a radio engineer, Ray Pinette. I learned something from each of them, especially Ray. I tried to find something in each of them to like. And I tried to stay out of her limelight.

Mama went to the dog-track, the pictures, out to dinner, off on long romantic rides in her boyfriends’ cars. She smoked all she wanted, and drank a lot of expensive booze. She was only unhappy when she wasn’t getting her way, and that was going to happen with or without boyfriends. Sooner or later, the real Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin showed up to slap any infatuation across the face, and sink a stiletto heel into its foot.

As I began my junior year of high school, she was making a serious run at a second husband: an officer stationed at Eglin, a colonel no less. Tom Beddoes was twice divorced, due to his efforts to live up to the flyboy standard of infidelity. He had learned his lesson, he told Mama, and wanted only to find a decent Christian woman with a forgiving heart to spend the rest of his life with. Mama took to wearing a gold cross on a chain around her neck.

But she dithered.

Colonel Beddoes’s pay grade was excellent, with loads of perks and opportunities for advancement, and even after early retirement, eye-widening opportunities in the military industrial complex. The word “colonel” was a double-dutch fudge sundae on her lips, as “captain” had been on her mama’s. But. The armed forces were integrated, none more so than the Air Force, and there were even colored officers. As the wife of an officer she would be compelled to socialize with them.

Integration had been creeping into Pensacola, on tiptoe and with its breath held, since Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. Segregationists rushed to open all-white private schools, of course, most commonly under the aegis of a blue-eyed lily-white Jesus—and not just all over the South but in Northern cities too. Because the Pensacola area happened to be thick with active-duty military, however, the public schools could not resist the expectation of integrated schools by military personnel.

When Mama found out that Roger Huggins was transferring from his old all-black high school to mine, she was horrified. Almost as terrible as the thought of integration was the fact that her dependence on the services of Cleonie and Perdita forced her to mute her indignation.

She was speechless when Nathan Huggins drove up to Merrymeeting one evening in our old Edsel. Its fenders and hood had been replaced at some time, and were different colors—red and blue—from the original, but it was the very one that we had once owned all right. Mr. Huggins had found it being offered for sale at the side of some dirt road in Blackwater. Never having seen it before, he had no idea of its history until I cried out with delight at the sight of it. Mama insisted that we had never even owned an Edsel. Miz Verlow walked all around it and shook her head in distasteful wonder and said nothing.

Mr. Huggins did not dispute Mama’s denial or Miz Verlow’s obvious disapproval. He picked up Cleonie and Perdita and took them home after work and began to ferry them back and forth. They ceased to live at Merrymeeting during the week anymore: more change.

Mama was pleased to learn that Roger was acutely unhappy at school. He missed his girlfriend, a sweet and very smart girl named Eleanor, who did not make the transfer with him. His old school was closer to home. I only had to look at Roger to know that he felt isolated and vulnerable in the face of the deliberate, stony indifference of the majority and the moronic persecution by a handful of bonehead resisters. Despite the specific warning of Miz Verlow that the best thing that I could do for Roger was to steer clear of him, I made an attempt at offering my support. Roger thanked me and told me that the best thing I could for him was leave him be, to try and settle in on his own.

After ten weeks, he transferred back. I knew that was the deal that he had made with his mama and his daddy. Rarely have I felt so helpless or so frustrated. I went so far as to accuse Grady, who was entirely innocent of any such thing, of failing to help Roger make a success of integration. After I apologized to him for my hissy at him, Grady sat quietly on the beach with me for a long while.

Then he said, “Roger shouldn’t have to be miserable for no cause. You’re makin’ him feel bad about it. You want to be miserable for a cause, you do it.”

I wanted to accuse Grady of being just like the boneheads, but I couldn’t.

He put one arm around me and ruffled my snarly hair affectionately.

“Preacher says there’s a time for ever purpose,” Grady said. “Things’ll come round or they won’t. One lil ol’ Calley caint do it all by her lonesome.”

Mama could hardly contain her triumph, though she had done nothing to affect the outcome one way or another.

For the first time in my life, I said, “Oh, shut up, Mama.”

That made her jaw drop.

I was too big to hit anymore. I might hit back.

Since the end of my high school education was on the horizon, and I was all too clearly more Dakin than Carroll, the urge to wash her hands of me was getting stronger in Mama.

Ford’s twenty-first birthday was only months away.

Mama was incapable of shutting her trap about the fortune coming in her son’s hands, so Tom Beddoes knew all about it. It didn’t make Mama any less attractive to him. He was interested enough to interrogate her very closely, and to nose about for legal advice that didn’t come from Adele Starret.

I didn’t care whether Mama stayed anymore, not for my own sake, but I had not forgotten the warning that if she left the island, she would be unprotected. Just because I was out of patience with the woman’s whine in my ears, the stink of her tobacco, and her pretentiousness, didn’t mean that I wanted her harmed. I heartily wished that she would marry again and go live in Eglin, which was not only on the island, but had armed guards at its gates.

For one, I was very likely to inherit her bedroom, which was much nicer than my hole-in-the-corner. I would paint it a light color and refurnish it with furniture that didn’t look like it came from Tara. These thoughts went through my head at the very same time that I knew that I planned to leave the island myself; I wanted to go to college, for one, and I wanted to see the world. Of course I intended to return; there was no thought that Merrymeeting and Santa Rosa Island would not always, ultimately be my home.

On a Saturday morning, I found Merry Verlow in her office, with the door open. I flung myself onto the sole other chair. She glanced up and then down again at her accounts.

“Something, Calley?” she asked abstractedly.

“Yes, ma’am. I want to go to college—”

She looked up and interrupted to me. “Of course you do. You’ll be doing your undergraduate work at Wellesley and then go on to Harvard for an MA. You’ll live in Mrs. Mank’s home in Brookline, which if you check a map of Massachusetts, is a suburb of Boston convenient to both those colleges. Mrs. Mank has a high opinion of your potential.”

Rarely had I much to do with Mrs. Mank, other than waiting on her, but occasionally she would announce that she wanted a walk on the beach, just before supper, or just after, and require my presence, so that she might teach me a little astronomy.

And that’s exactly what she did. Mrs. Mank would sit on the beach in a rusting old lawn chair, with me at her feet, and she would point out a star, a constellation, a planet, or observe the state of the moon. I learned to find Polaris by the pointers of the little dipper, and from there, Betelgeuse and Rigel, and how to locate Spica by following the Crow’s beak. I learned enough to be aware of the night sky, and often, of the day sky, where the cold moon hung pallid and emaciated in the blue sky or Venus burned on the edge of the world.

It took me a minute to catch my breath. Miz Verlow’s gaze had returned to her accounts.

“What about leaving the island?”

“What about it?” Her pen scratched some notation on one of her papers.

“Is it safe?”

She snorted. “Of course it’s safe. It’s all inside the borders of the United States, everybody speaks English or something like it, and you’ve had all your shots. Stay away from race riots and you’ll be fine.”

“What about Mama’s enemies?”

Miz Verlow’s pen described a curlicue in the air. “Oh, she’ll always be able to make new ones, wherever she is.”

I sat silent for a while, working up the courage to push on in the face of looking utterly foolish.

“My daddy was murdered,” I said in a low tone, and despite my best efforts to sound calm and grown-up, my mouth went squiggly on me.

Miz Verlow looked up again and put her pen down. Then she reached into her sweater pocket. Out came a clean handkerchief, which she offered to me silently.

I blew my nose.

“It’s a grief that will always be with you, Calley. All I can say is that the passage of time will dull it. Roberta Carroll Dakin’s fate is in own her hands, as indeed it always has been. If she is fool enough and he is too, she may marry Colonel Beddoes without objection from me. I would be happy to have the room back. Your brother might have something to say, though.”

My brother. I hadn’t spared him a thought in ages; he was Mama’s obsession.

“How do you know?” I blurted.

Miz Verlow didn’t answer the question. She settled her attention on her paperwork.

“Go along, Calley. You have work to do, and as you can see, so do I.”

“Why can’t you answer the question? There’s a lot more that I need to know,” I said.

“Too bad,” she said. “But it’ll give you something to look forward to.”

A few days later, coming home after classes, I ran upstairs to toss my books into my room and there was Mama, busy rummaging one of my dresser drawers.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The first shock of being surprised flashed into a posture of defiant innocence.

“I need a tampon,” she said, in an irritated voice. “I’ve run out unexpectedly.”

She was lying and she knew that I knew. It was a struggle not to throw her bodily out of my room.

“Why don’t you get off your backside and walk to the store and buy some?”

“I won’t dignify that with a response.”

She cringed past me.

“You won’t find any money, no matter how hard you look,” I said.

In the ceiling of the crookedy triangular closet in my room, a space that I could no longer stand in straight up, I had a hidey-hole. The light fixture in the closet was a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling. All I had to do was loosen the collar of the fixture at the ceiling, pull the light cord down a little, and clear grit and mouse scat around the hole in the closet ceiling. The space accommodated a tin box with my spare cash in it, just bills, acquired mostly as tip money from guests, and so not deposited in my Nickel Account. With the light cord tightened to raise the bulb again, the collar firmly in place, and the bulb kept dirty, the hidey-hole was successfully disguised. Mama would never touch the lightbulb nor would she mess about with a fixture, for fear of electrocuting herself. If Mama were ever faced with changing a lightbulb, she would choose to sit in the dark.

Mama’s mouth tightened, the lipstick crinkling into lines at the edges of her upper lip. She wasn’t anywhere near an old woman yet but she spent too much time tanning, convinced that it made her flaccid flesh look tighter. She was hardly alone, of course; it was several years before the doctors started warning people about too much sun. Of course any half-wit could look at the skin of people who worked in the sun and see the damage, but no one has ever gone broke underestimating the capacity for self-delusion in the species.

“How dare you call me a thief!”

“You’ve done it whenever I had a nickel!” I shot back. “How dare you go through my drawers!”

“I have not!” Mama cried, with great crocodile tears standing in her eyes. She rushed away toward her room.

I shut the door and dropped my books on my bed.

Did I want the future that Merry Verlow and Mrs. Mank between them were conspiring to give me? Wellesley? Harvard? They were names in news magazines. Would they allow me to follow my own interests or had they already determined what I would be become? Those distant places beckoned me, to be sure, and my only other option was one of the state university campuses, or no further education at all. I had no answers about my own future, only a slew of questions.

Where was the moon tonight? In its last quarter? I checked the little lunar calendar in my nightstand drawer where I kept it in a notebook.

The middle drawer of my dresser still stood open. There was nothing in it but a couple of pairs of cotton pajamas from Sears. Most everything in my wardrobe had a Sears label on it. Sometimes I bought clothes at a thrift shop, and those nearly always had a Sears label. Or one from Montgomery Ward—Monkey Ward, Grady called it. Mrs. Llewelyn still sent me an occasional hand-knit sweater, but was far more likely to put cash into a Christmas or birthday card now. She was apologetic, but said that there was no way to know my taste now I was a teenager, and styles had changed so radically. Dr. Llewelyn still sent toothbrushes and toothpaste and floss, though.

My daddy had been murdered. I didn’t even have a picture of him. And I was going to go to Wellesley and Harvard and live with Mrs. Mank and Mama was going to marry Colonel Beddoes and my brother might have something to say about it.

I should talk to him, I thought. I wanted to hear what he might have to say, not just about Mama getting married again, but about everything. He was practically grown up now and so was I. Maybe the hole in my life wasn’t Daddy’s absence so much as it was Ford’s. And I didn’t even know how to get in touch.