Candles Burning

Seven

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.

Mama stubbed out her Kool. She picked up the note from the dining table and thrust it at him as if it were on fire. Mr. Ree-shard examined it, before replacing it carefully on the table. Ford stood a little behind Mama’s chair, with one hand on her shoulder, that now and again she would cover briefly with her left hand.

I hung about the periphery, trying to be invisible—easy enough, given Mama and Ford ignored me. Only Mr. Ree-shard ever glanced at me and that uneasily. He tried not to look again but could not help himself. A certain fear was in his eyes, and pity too. His reaction to me was not particularly unusual, so I was unperturbed. I had other causes for anxiety.

Mama assured Mr. Ree-shard that Ford and I were not a couple of kids playing a silly game. He in turn reassured Mama that he was totally at her service. Then Mr. Ree-shard made some calls to other people attending the convention—high pooh-bahs in the dealers’ association—and, having determined that Daddy was not drunk on the floor behind the sofa in somebody else’s room or suite, he called the police. By then he was somewhat chagrined—for Mama, I think, and only a little for himself, given his standard procedure had so far proved fruitless.

The chambermaid brought our full breakfast, which none of us ate. A number of folks came and went. Most of the visitors were Daddy’s fellow automobile dealers. Some had a wife in tow and all were worried, solemn, consoling.

On the arrival of the police, Mr. Ree-shard herded all the concerned callers into the elevator so that a New Orleans police detective could interview Mama in relative privacy.

The detective told Mama that kidnappers never signed their real names to a ransom note. What could be stupider than that? So there was no point in looking for a couple of female criminals named Janice and Judy. His immediate opinion was that Ford and I were playing a rotten prank and needed a good whipping. When neither of us burst into tears and confessed, Mama shooed us out of the room.

Ford conjectured to me that the detective was working on convincing Mama that the two of us could have made the whole thing up and that Daddy was in all probability drunk somewhere outside the hotel, or maybe in a whorehouse.

“What’s a whorehouse?” I asked.

“Where the floozies are.” Ford used the tone he employed to imply that I was mentally enfeebled.

I was not in fact very clear what floozies were, other than potential mothers of Daddy’s other children, or possibly the sort of woman who smoked cigarettes on the street. The word “whore” I heard as h-o-a-r, as in “Hoar-frost twinkles on the trees,” from a poem by Winnie-the-Pooh that Ida Mae Oakes had read to me when I was littler. Ida Mae told me that hoar-frost was ice. A hoarhouse must be something like an ice palace to me, where an Ice Queen might reign. I could make no connection between floozies and ice palaces. The big word Mama used so often when Daddy was late—philandering—I had been unable to find in the dictionary due to the fact that I was misspelling it as filandering. My best guess was that philandering meant inexcusably late.

Somebody’s wife—the name is long forgotten, if I ever knew it—looked in on us. She advised us that our mama was prostrate and that in this trying moment, we must be very, very good children. She told us that Mama had sent for Mamadee. The Dixie Hummingbird was making a special stop at Tallassee for her. Likely she would take us home. Then she had us kneel down and pray for Mama and for Daddy’s safe return.

It was a prayer about me, not Daddy. Prayer, as I understood it, was in the same class of mundane magic as spells and step-on-a-crack-break-your-mama’s-back and tossing a pinch of spilled salt over my shoulder. For all the churchgoing we did, I only knew the Lord’s Prayer and the bedtime prayer by heart. I thought of the bedtime prayer as the One Long Word Prayer and said it as fast as possible to annoy Mama:

Lacking a more specific hocus-pocus, I shut my eyes tightly and tried to say the Lord’s Prayer as I had it memorized, adapting the beginning to apply to Daddy.

I mumbled so that Miz Someone would not notice any errors on my part.

Ford hid his disgust until Miz Someone went away again and then muttered, “Goddamn it, I am not going home until Daddy comes back.”

I did not need to tell him that I did not want to go home to Montgomery, and not with Mamadee, and not to her big house, Ramparts, in Tallassee.

Ford tried to give me orders. “Dumbo, you have to be invisible. You have to keep your mouth shut. If Mamadee decides she’s got to run the show here, she’ll ignore us.”

I knew sense when I heard it, even if it came out of Ford’s usually lying trap.

Ford had his own strategy for himself. He stayed at Mama’s side, holding her hand, or fetching her cooling drinks, cool cloths for her brow, dry handkerchiefs when she wept, BC or Goody’s when she had a headache. She ate it up.