The physical divide of the island from the mainland was one kind of safety. I would have erased that Causeway from the map if I could, but at least the bay it crossed constituted something of a moat. Mamadee did not know we were here. The crazy maid and the crazy cook from the Hotel Pontchartrain would never be able to find us here. Miz Verlow was another kind of safety, less obvious and of untested reliability, but a fallback position to Mama without a question.
Still, when I asked Miz Verlow if she had seen my broken glasses or my Betsy Cane McCall, she surprised me.
“I am not responsible for your belongings, Miss Calliope Dakin,” she said, very severely. “They are entirely your own responsibility.”
Of course she was correct. It seemed to me that I saw well enough without my glasses, and Betsy Cane McCall, well—I hardly missed her. I forgot the paper dolls and Rosetta’s shears in their shoebox. Santa Rosa Island was a better toy than I had ever had. Or would.
A day or so later, when I wanted clean clothes, I noticed that the bloodied clothes and towels that I had thrown down the laundry chute had not been returned to me. When I inquired of Cleonie if she knew where they were, she frowned and said that she had never seen them at all. She would have remembered them because of the blood, she said, which she would have soaked in cold water before sending them out to be laundered. I looked frantically but was unable to avoid Mama’s wrath that I had managed to lose one of the few changes of clothing that I owned, to say nothing of Miz Verlow’s towels. Mama made me sleep on the floor for a month.
Twenty-nine
THOUGH the very young heal quickly by nature, the salve Miz Verlow gave me for it hastened the process. What it was, I do not know. Like all her nostrums, it came unmarked in a little glass jar or bottle. They all smelled of some flower or herb.
Rarely was there any more in the jar or bottle than was needed, the most immediate exception being Mama’s pale green foot balm, which Miz Verlow provided in cylindrical milk glass containers like short fat candles. The contents would last a week. The fragrance was a new one to me, but not to Mama.
Mama declared that she had been looking for just that balm for years. It was the one that her beloved grandmama had used. It must be an old recipe, she advised me, for her grandmama’s foot balm had been made up at the local pharmacy. Either Miz Verlow had had the recipe herself or a source in some pharmacy that still had the recipe; the important thing was that Miz Verlow deserved as little credit for the superior foot balm as Mama could give her. On occasion though, when it suited Mama, she would praise Miz Verlow’s foot balm extravagantly, and speculate that it would make a fortune if it were made commercially available.
Merrymeeting had two parlors. The small parlor—relatively smaller—was, as I have said, home to the television set and the radio-phonograph console. Miz Verlow’s collection of LPs included commonplace classical music, musicals and film soundtracks. She allowed me to use the turntable in the late afternoon, before supper. The Zenith television in the opposite corner remained of only minor interest to me. Pensacola only had one television station, WEAR, and the offerings were limited. I knew how to operate the Zenith and how to adjust the rabbit ears, and did so for the guests who on occasion wanted to watch some particular program in the early evening.
The large parlor boasted the biggest bookcase in the house. On leaving, guests often abandoned books. The left-behind volumes found a new home in the big bookcase in the large parlor, or in other smaller bookcases around the house. Miz Verlow had been shelving or reshelving the books when I arrived, but before I went back to school, I took over the job. In those first few days, I thumbed through the slew of books on birds and shells and native plants.
Miz Verlow happened on me studying on one of them, on the floor behind a big wing-backed chair, so as not to be underfoot or bother anyone. She told me that I could keep the ones that I was studying in Mama’s room, unless a guest asked for it. I added them to the books that I had stolen from my dead uncle. In the room that Mama and I shared, I had a bottom drawer in a dresser for my clothes. My books fitted under my clothes well enough, at least for a while.
Later, Miz Verlow took me with her on long walks to gather herbs and bark used in her medicinals. One of these plants was the shrub that grew up against the skirts of the house. As soon as I smelled it, I recognized it as one of the ingredients in Mama’s foot balm. Miz Verlow said its common name was Candle Bush, after its yellow flower spikes. Perdita and Cleonie called it Burnin’ Candles.
For a week, Miz Verlow sent a nightcap up to Mama every evening. Mama slept late in the mornings and arose in a cheerful mood. I was able to slip out each day without disturbing her.
When I was rubbing her feet at bedtime, Mama would bemoan her woes and then swear that she would get Ford back and the money and see her mama in hell. Those goals required a lawyer, of course; she complained bitterly to me that she had no money for a lawyer. She could not hire a Florida lawyer anyway, because Florida lawyers couldn’t practice law in Alabama. She knew that for a fact because she had called a firm of lawyers in Pensacola, right out of the phone book. She consoled herself with the conviction that the lawyers in Pensacola were likely all drunks anyway, or profoundly incompetent in the protection of widows and orphans.
Mama was so gracious and sweet to Miz Verlow that no guest would ever suspect that Mama hated her. Mama had spent her life at war with Mamadee. What could be easier or more convenient than to replace Mamadee with Miz Verlow. Mama could never admit to herself that she did not, in fact, signify all that much to Miz Verlow.
Mama played Southern lady of the house to the guests when they were around. She did not speak of what had happened to Daddy nor did she hasten to reveal that I was her child. Miz Verlow introduced me merely as “Little Calley.” Some of the guests concluded that I was some foundling benefiting from Miz Verlow’s conscientious charity. Others hardly noticed that I existed, which was fine with me.
I never minded the chores that structured the day. They made me feel as if I belonged. After I washed up after each meal, Miz Verlow showed me the page of a notebook on which she kept the record of each nickel that I earned. Until my bruises healed—only a few days—I ate in the kitchen.
Miz Verlow’s guests most commonly departed on Saturday, new ones arriving on Sunday evening. Taxis summoned from town took away the guests who had not come in their own vehicles, and the parking lot emptied of everything but Miz Verlow’s Country Squire and the Edsel.
By one-thirty in the afternoon, Cleonie and I had the customary Saturday dinner buffet cleared away and the table reset for the supper that Perdita was preparing. Miz Verlow would serve it, allowing Perdita and Cleonie to take their leave. By three, the beds were stripped and remade, the bathrooms cleaned and restocked with the necessities. Thereupon, the colored taxi came to drive Cleonie and Perdita to the lives they lived in Pensacola. They would return Sunday evening by nine P.M. The other six nights of the week, they slept in a room behind the kitchen. It had its own little closet with a basin and a toilet.