Candles Burning (31 page)

Mrs. Mank chuckled. “Sometimes I don't even know why
I
do things, so I certainly would never speculate on the motives of evil spirits, or good spirits, or even of this little girl. But with what little I know of this situation, I would urge you not to place a long-distance call to—”

“Tallassee,” I volunteered.

“Calley! Will you never hold your tongue?”

I started to slip from my chair. “If y'all will excuse me,” I began.

Mrs. Mank interrupted me. “Mrs. Dakin, I think the child should stay.”

“I don't,” Mama snapped. Then she drew a deep drag and let it out. “But if you say she should, Mrs. Mank, then she will stay. Calley, sit down and stop twitching.”

Mrs. Mank went on. “Mrs. Dakin, suppose you put in that long-distance telephone call to—Tallulah? You would, I presume, call your mama's number. If she answers, you'll know she's alive. But what will you say to her? ‘Oh, I just wanted to know if you were alive or dead?' You'd look a fool, would you not?”

“I wouldn't have to say that exactly.”

“But you haven't spoken to your mama since you left Tallalulah. If you called her now, and she answered, it would appear to her that you were giving in. Is that what you want?”

“What if I called somebody else in Tall-Tallulah?”

“And ask, ‘Could you please tell me if my mama is alive or dead?' ” Mrs. Mank gave a little shudder. “Given the circumstances of your leaving your mama's house, the way people talk, your telephone call won't be a secret for longer than it takes for whomever you call to hang up and dial another number.”

“But I could be subtle.”

“Ask something like, ‘Oh, did the florist do a good job on the flowers I told him to put at the foot of Mama's coffin?' ”

Mama nodded yes, startled. That was exactly the sort of question she would have worked in.

“But if you ask that question and your mama isn't dead, what will people think? You could take the other route, and say, ‘Tell me, as a friend, how does Mama look these days? I'm so worried about her, and she refuses to take my help.' If you asked that and she had been buried a week ago, everyone in town would hear that you didn't even know of your own mama's death.”

“Calley could call—”

“They'd know you put her up to it.”

Mrs. Mank's advice so far had cut to the white bone of Mama's dilemma. The overriding concern was how Mama would look to others, Mama's well-being, and Mama's ease.

Mrs. Mank speared a last remnant of the sausage on her plate, and consumed it with the same relish she had previously exhibited. At last her napkin flitted at her lips again.

“There is another reason you don't want to place that call, Mrs. Dakin,” she said.

“What?”

“Suppose, for a few moments, that your mama is dead.”

Mama put on a sad face. “It's perfectly possible. The obituaries are filled with people younger than Mama every day—my beloved Joseph was taken from me in his prime—”

“My condolences,” Mrs. Mank said with the tiniest excess of sincerity.

Mama bore up bravely. “Thank you. So what next?”

“Mrs. Dakin, if your mama is dead, why have you not been informed of it? Why didn't
somebody
—your mama's lawyer?—send a telegram or telephone you?”

“Because he doesn't know where we are! Because nobody knows we're here.”

“Fennie does,” said Miz Verlow. “And if your mama died and anyone were trying to find you, Fennie would tell them you were down here with me.”

I started. Why wouldn't Fennie have called and told Merry Verlow, or Mama or myself? Why not call Fennie and ask the question directly?

“So my mama must not be dead,” said Mama. Her disappointment was indifferently concealed.

“Not necessarily. What if your friends and relatives were
not
trying to find you?”

Mama pondered a long moment. It sounded like the kind of subterfuge she herself indulged in. “Why wouldn't they?”

Mrs. Mank finished off her eggs before answering. “Something to do with family grievances maybe. Or with money. Your mama's will. Were you on good terms with the family lawyer, for instance?”

Mama's jaw set grimly. “No. He stole me blind. He and Mama. They took my darling boy away from me too.”

“Suppose that lawyer is laying a trap. If you make that call, you might be walking right into it.”

“But if Winston Weems is going to cheat me
again,
am I supposed to just sit here and do
nothing
?”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Mank. “I only said you ought not make that call yourself.”

“So who will?”

“A friend of mine. Another lawyer.”

Mama smiled.

“She'll know what to do,” Mrs. Mank assured Mama.

Mama stopped smiling. “A woman lawyer.”

Mrs. Mank responded without a moment's hesitation. “In deference to your objections to women lawyers, Mrs. Dakin, I will never mention the matter again.”

At this moment Cleonie emerged to see if any more coffee was wanted.

Mrs. Mank crossed her fork and knife on her plate and folded her napkin. She smiled up at Cleonie. “I think I'll have this cup on the verandah.” Rising with a polite smile and her refilled cup, she started toward the door.

Mama had expected Mrs. Mank to spend the next quarter hour convincing her to
allow
her friend, the woman lawyer, to devote her entire professional career to her cause. Mama simply wasn't used to being taken at her first and always exaggerated word. Panicked, she snatched up her cup and jumped from her chair.

“What a lovely idea!” she cried.

Mrs. Mank stood with one hand on the door, the other holding the coffee cup and saucer. The steam curled up toward her face, and she breathed in the odor. “What idea would that be? Are you reopening the discussion, Mrs. Dakin?”

“Coffee on the verandah,” Mama said, “and your woman lawyer friend—both—I was distracted by the thought of losing my mama so quickly after my darling Joseph. . . .” Mama lapsed into Southern-belle helplessness. “I am so flustered! You must think I don't have a brain in my head.”

With no more than the faint inclination of her head that expressed a polite agreement with Mama's last assertion, Mrs. Mank passed onto the verandah. Mama followed, Miz Verlow after her, and I fell in behind.

As Mrs. Mank settled on a chair outside, she smiled at me the way adults smile at children whom they abhor.

Nothing could have reassured Mama more.

Once settled herself, she addressed Mrs. Mank carefully, “You know what it was?”

“What
what
was?”

“Why I reacted the way I did when you talked about your friend the woman lawyer. It was because of Martha Poe. You know who I'm talking about, don't you, Calley?”

Mama wanted me to back up her lie.

“You mean the woman lawyer, Mama?”

“Well, who else? Of course, I know that every woman who gets to be a lawyer just has to be smart, smarter than any man, but Martha Poe I guess is just the exception that proves the rule. The only reason that Martha Poe ever gets a client is that her stepdaddy is a judge on the circuit court and he decides every case in Martha's favor, so I'd probably hire her too. But on her own, Martha Poe wouldn't know how to fix a speeding ticket. She's the only reason I said what I did.”

Mrs. Mank's expression softened a little, as if she were accepting Mama's explanation.

I knew that Martha Poe wasn't a lawyer at all—she was a practical nurse in Tallassee, who had once spent two nights at Ramparts when Mamadee was passing a kidney stone.

“I've been thinking,” Mama went on, “another good thing about a woman lawyer is that she probably won't charge as much as a good lawyer.”

Mrs. Mank stiffened.

Mama corrected herself quickly. “A good
man
lawyer, I mean—a good
woman
lawyer wouldn't charge as much. What is her name anyway?”

“Adele,” said Mrs. Mank, with no warmth at all. “Adele Starret.”

“Adele is my favorite name,” Mama gushed. “If I hadn't named Calley after one of the muses, I would have called her Adele. My best friend in college was named Adele. Mrs. Mank, could I prevail upon your good nature to speak to your friend Adele on my behalf?”

“We'll see,” said Mrs. Mank.

“When?” Mama persisted. “Because if it doesn't work with—”

“I'll look into it, Mrs. Dakin. But now, I'm going to enjoy my coffee. Merry, my dear, have the newspapers arrived?”

Mama tried not to press Mrs. Mank about the woman lawyer but when Mrs. Mank finally folded the last section of the third newspaper she had read that morning, Mama was still there, grimly sipping her fifth cup of coffee and barely controlling a very bad case of the fidgets brought on by too much coffee. Mama sighed her martyr's sigh in expectation of Mrs. Mank
finally
saying something, but Mrs. Mank merely gave Mama and me a perfunctory and polite smile.

Mama could contain herself no longer. “Are you going to call her today?”

Mrs. Mank's eyebrows lifted quizzically.

“Are you going to call Adele Starret? Your friend the female lawyer who's going to help me. I mean, your friend Miz Starret who
might
be able to help me. If she wants to. If she thinks it might be worth it.”

Mrs. Mank's smile warmed. “Oh yes, Adele.”

Miz Verlow came to her feet just a fraction of a second before Mrs. Mank, picking up not only her own coffee cup but Mrs. Mank's as well. Mama rose quickly too but I was faster, and picked up Mama's coffee cup.

“Calley and I will just clear these to the kitchen,” Miz Verlow announced.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mank. “Please tell Perdita how much I enjoyed my breakfast, and especially the sausage. I cannot get sausage as fine as hers anywhere else in the world, and tell her that I have tried.”

I believed her assertion that she had tried
all over the world
. To my knowledge, I'd never met anyone who had been
all over the world
. Yet Mrs. Mank was taking the trouble to send Perdita a detailed compliment.

Mama, however, was thinking of neither sausage nor globe-trotting. “You were saying, Mrs. Mank—”

“I was?”

“—about your friend the lawyer.”

“Oh yes. Well. I'll speak to Adele today. If she's available.”

“Oh thank you so much—”

Mrs. Mank nodded and strolled off along the verandah.

For the next day or so, Mama mostly kept to our room. Pacing up and down, chain-smoking, she cursed Mrs. Mank's infuriating coolness, cursed Mrs. Mank's friend the woman lawyer, cursed Merry Verlow and her sister, Fennie, and all the Dakins and all their relations by blood or marriage, but most vehemently Mama cursed Mamadee, alive or dead, for all the trouble she had caused.

Since it was the place in the house Mama was least likely to go, I spent a great deal of time in the kitchen. There I learned from Cleonie and Perdita that Mrs. Mank was an occasional guest, that she always had the same rooms, took most of her meals in her suite, and that Miz Verlow treated her like the Queen of England.

“Miz Mank onced done Miz Verlow a favor,” Cleonie explained.

“And she likes Perdita's sausages,” I said, adding sincerely, “probably almost as much as I do.”

Perdita didn't say anything to that but that afternoon my iced tea was mysteriously warmed with a dash of bourbon.

Perdita did give me a warning. “You look out, you hear? Miz Mank caint bide churn.”

OVER the next few days, in the rare moments when no one else was within sight, I tried Miz Verlow's office door, in hope of finding Fennie's telephone number. It was always locked. Every time I tried to sneak down that particular hallway to Miz Verlow's room on the same mission, something happened to deter me: She herself appeared, or Cleonie did, or Mama did.

It was Thursday morning when Mama informed me that she and Miz Verlow were driving into Pensacola to shop, to pay the current installments on Cleonie's and Perdita's various layaway plans, and to pick up some important letters that Mrs. Mank was expecting.

I went so far as to ask permission to go with them.

“Calley, no, and that's final. I think you can find something to do here this afternoon.”

I sulked. “No, I caint.”

“One more word—” Mama threatened, almost absently.

I rocked sullenly in the verandah swing when Mama and Miz Verlow came out the front door.

“What time you coming back?”

“About four,” Miz Verlow answered.

“Why are you asking?” Mama wanted to know.

“I was hoping you'd bring me something.”

Mama sniffed. “Four-thirty. Maybe even five, depending on how long the lines are. And I don't think we're going anywhere that has presents for children, so don't waste the afternoon
hoping,
because I don't want to see you spend the evening
moping
.” She gave Miz Verlow an arch look, at her own wit.

They got into Miz Verlow's Country Squire and drove off. I stayed in the swing, pretending to study on a bird guide, in case they came back for anything.

Mrs. Mank was in the house—I would have heard or seen her had she gone out. I checked both parlors and the dining room and listened at strategic points all over the first floor.

At Miz Verlow's office door, I looked every which way, listened intently, and then tried the knob. It did not move. Then, before I could take my hand away, the knob moved without any effort from me. I snatched my hand away behind my back, even as I took a step backward and started to turn on my heel to run away. Mrs. Mank reached through the opening door and caught me by one shoulder.