Breakfast noises and smells evoked an instant, almost painful explosion of hunger. We had not eaten since lunch in Elba the previous day.
Going to the nearest window, I slipped between the draperies and the windowpane. The mysteries of the previous night were resolved neatly into an ordinary pale early morning, lightly shadowed by the low angle of the rising sun. By daylight, I could see the dune between the wide bleached swathe of beach and the house. The beautiful shore. The sound of the Gulf had not ceased in the night.
I went to Mama to nudge her gently.
“Mama, smell the breakfast!”
She opened one eye reluctantly, wrinkled her nose, and then sat up for a languorous stretch and yawn.
“Lord what a fine smell that is. Coffee. Bacon.” She breathed deeper. “And I smell the saltwater too.” She sounded almost happy.
She cast off the bedclothes, took her robe and bathroom things and hurried down the hall.
Though I had washed my face and brushed my teeth before bed, I had forgotten the rubber bands in my hair. Consequently, the bands and my hair were interwoven into a witch’s nest.
When Mama came back from the bathroom and saw me gingerly tugging one strand at a time, she grabbed me and about scalped me tearing the bands out. I gritted my teeth. Wincing and wailing would only make it worse. She dragged a comb through my hair. It felt as if she were yanking out what was left of it. But there was enough left to tie up again, with the old rubber bands cleared of strays.
Then she put on some clothes—a simple white blouse, dark trousers, and sandals. She did the pageboy with the barrettes and lipstick, and was all ready for a Loretta Young entrance.
We followed our noses down the stairs into the foyer through which we had entered the previous night. It too was revealed in daylight to be an everyday room. My tennies were still there, just inside the door, all shaken out and ready to wear. I slipped into them and caught up with Mama.
Mama did not seem disoriented. She might have been following her nose, or perhaps the house was as familiar to her as she had said. She made straight for a wide doorway that had not been there the previous night. Among the sounds I had heard earlier had been the slide of pocket doors back into the walls. It must have been those.
Mama halted in the doorway. “Who are these people?”
I peeked past her. Several strangers were breakfasting at the long mahogany table, where a colored woman in a maid’s uniform waited upon them. The breakfasters all paused in their fast breaking and their conversations to smile at us welcomingly.
From behind us, Fennie’s sister emerged at Mama’s shoulder.
“Miz Verlow, these people aren’t Dakins, are they?”
“They’re my guests.”
“Your guests…” Mama’s voice faltered. She took a deep breath and murmured through gritted teeth, “Your paying guests, you mean…”
“Of course.”
The idea that a relative, even one connected to us as distantly and obscurely as Merry Verlow, might rent out the rooms of her home to strangers was humiliating to Mama—much worse than being suspected of conspiring to commit the brutal murder of one’s husband. Letting rooms was the first wretched public admission of financial need. Of all the delusions that furnished Mama’s world, the belief that the entire world was awaiting eagerly—nay, plotting—her downfall from the decayed social structure she was born to rule was the most ridiculous. But I was only seven and as much as I had come to distrust Mama, and to feel unloved by her, I had too little knowledge of the world not to feel as she did—threatened by forces just beyond my grasp.
We had nowhere else to go. Despite her horror and dismay, Mama was waiting for Merry Verlow to come up with some reason we should remain. I despaired. What could Miz Verlow possibly say that would relieve Mama of the humiliation and disgrace that she thought it her duty to feel and display?
“They’re all Yankees,” Miz Verlow whispered to Mama.
It was the only perfect, the only right, the only sufficient thing for Merry Verlow to have said.
Merry Verlow’s clientele were none of them wealthy but they were comfortable. Their reasons for spending weeks or months on this beach were various and of no import to Mama or, at that point in my young life, to me. I was far more interested in the beach than I was in Miz Verlow’s guests. They were merely a collection of grown-ups I did not know. What would make them bearable to her was they could not bring back tales to anyone we knew, or so Mama came quickly to believe.
With as charming a smile as I ever saw on her face, Mama took the seat at the head of the table. She settled instantaneously upon the role of hostess, with all its subtle implication of ownership.
Mama addressed the table in general. “I am so pleased to be able to join you all for breakfast.”
The breakfasters murmured a polite chorus of welcome.
One of them asked Miz Verlow whether the newspapers had arrived yet.
Miz Verlow threw her hands up in mock dismay. “Not yet! I expect the printer doesn’t know we’re waiting on him!”
The guests chuckled amiably.
Having claimed the chair at the head of the dining room table, Mama directed the conversation at that first breakfast and every subsequent meal that she took with the guests.
I had not an inkling where I was supposed to sit. I looked to Miz Verlow for direction. She prodded me toward the maid who in turn shooed me ahead of her through a swinging door into a butler’s panty and onward into the kitchen.
Another colored woman, floured to her elbow dimples, was kneading dough. The two women exchanged a glance. A white-floured forefinger pointed me to a small table in a corner. I took it for granted that it was where the maids ate their own meals.
My experience had been that nearly all colored people, except the very old, tended to be terse in the presence of whites. Small white children often seemed to be exempted from that caution, and so I knew that colored people were more talkative among themselves. After a few exchanges, I had heard enough from both of the women who worked for Miz Verlow to realize that their speech was as terse and even more opaque than that of the colored people in Alabama and Louisiana. The syntax, accent, diction, cadence and even timbre—words that I did not know at the time, though I grasped their sense—those aspects of their speech were different to my ear, in significant as well as subtle ways. I do not wish to depict a well-developed subdialect as ignorance or stupidity—that is, I loathe the thought of portraying them as characters from Amos and Andy. My seven-year-old sense of their speech is an unsatisfactory compromise.
“Sit,” said the cook, as she indicated the table. But she reached out as I passed her and pinched my upper arm. “Scrawny,” she murmured to the maid. “Not a decent broth in it.”
The maid smothered a laugh in her palms. Then she put a breakfast down in front of me: grapefruit juice, a hobo egg—a hard-fried egg—broken bits of bacon and a sausage patty on the plate. I wondered how they knew that a hard-fried hobo is my favorite kind of egg. The egg in its frame of toast was right out of the iron spider; the breakfast meat had come off of plates returned to the kitchen, too cooled or unwanted for the guests. I was a little bit too young and too hungry to be insulted. I didn’t look up again until it was all inside me.
The maid came back from the dining room, carrying a tray heaped with dishes cleared from the table. Once she put it down, she took a mug from a cupboard, spooned in an eye-opening quantity of sugar, poured in coffee and then topped the mug with a thick layer of cream. And to my astonishment, she set it down in front of me. While in the past I had stolen sips of coffee from the abandoned cups of adults, never before had I been given any coffee just for myself, let alone a rich feast of a cup.