“Calley,” shouted Mama.
I turned toward her voice.
A ghostly giant stood right in front of me. My breath stopped in my throat. As the fog shivered and rippled, the giant shivered and rippled over me, as if to engulf me.
The oncoming vehicle was behind me, the noise of its approach increasing, the sweep of its lights intensifying even as the giant ghost loomed closer over me. An automobile horn blatted violently.
A sudden gust dissolved the giant ghost. The fog-colored coupe, smoothly losing momentum, sailed by along the milky way of its own headlights.
I scampered back to the verandah steps to find Miz Verlow smiling at the coupe while Mama, at her side, peered at it anxiously. When I slipped behind Mama, grabbing at her skirt, she yanked the cloth from my fingers briskly.
“Stop being such a baby,” Mama said, but her attention was riveted on the arriving guest.
Like the servants in a BBC period-costume film, Mama and I stood to one side as Miz Verlow opened the door of the silver coupe with the Maryland plate. A woman emerged from behind the wheel.
Everything about the lady was grey, yet she seemed neither old nor faded at all. She appeared older than Mama and Miz Verlow, younger than Mamadee, and there was nothing stupid or weak about her. She was no ghost out of the fog but a woman of dense human substance. Her presence calmed me. The giant ghost figure that I had seen seemed at once to have been nothing more than a flighty delusion.
When she drew off her driving gloves, her hands were exquisitely manicured, and the skin younger than that of her neck. Obviously she protected and cared for her hands, even though they were not in themselves beautiful or elegant. They were entirely unremarkable hands, square and short-fingered. Soft of course. This woman never did a lick of work for herself, or even stooped to playing tennis or gardening. She wore no rings or bracelets.
As I was sorting out these memories, I realized that she looked like someone whose face was familiar to me. Years would go by before I was able to put a name to the face.
Miz Verlow introduced her to us that night as Mrs. Mank.
Mrs. Mank’s hair was grey, shot with strands of black, and fashioned in short, tight, rather harsh waves. Her eyes were grey too, a lighter grey than the pearls around her neck. Her cheeks, pale with powder, were full and round, her nose sharp and long and cold like grey marble. The pink of her lipstick was like Mama’s palest lipstick with a coating of grey ash. The dress she wore was of two shades of nearly indistinguishable grey, the piping pearl grey, the basic fabric a little more silvery. A double strand of pearls glistened around her neck and her earlobes held fat pearl studs.
Her shoes were softly burnished pewter in color; Mama told me later that they were handmade. She also said that they were about her size, a size five; they may have been size fives but Mama’s shoe size was a six. That never stopped her cramming her foot into a five or a five-and-a-half. Mrs. Mank’s stockings were silk, the color of cobwebs.
Mrs. Mank smiled warmly. “Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, at last.”
Her accent was not the familiar accent of Alabama or Florida or Louisiana, nor was it anything that I recognized as obviously foreign—the ones like the Chiquita Banana lady’s, or the hoity-toity English accent that I knew primarily from television and radio. If her plates were Maryland plates, I speculated, she might be from Maryland; her accent might be that of Maryland.
Already disconcerted by the most recent events, Mama must have been more than a little dazzled by the silver coupe that Mrs. Mank drove—a foreign make at a time when few Americans drove foreign cars—and then by Mrs. Mank’s pearls and by Mrs. Mank’s sheer presence.
Mrs. Mank looked at me briefly, the way most people did, expecting very little and apparently finding somewhat less.
Intent on making Mrs. Mank welcome, Miz Verlow accompanied her to her rooms. Mrs. Mank had a private bath and a sitting room as well as a bedroom, a suite created by unlocking doors between connecting rooms. Miz Verlow surprised me by asking me to bring up Mrs. Mank’s luggage. She must have known that it consisted only of a train case and a Gladstone bag (a term I had picked up in the short time since our arrival at Miz Verlow’s house). At first they seemed heavy, but before I had taken two steps from the open trunk of Mrs. Mank’s foreign automobile, they seemed as light as if they were empty.
Once I had delivered the two pieces to Mrs. Mank’s suite, I returned to close the coupe’s trunk. The automobile fascinated me: a low, long-nosed, short-tailed two-seater with wire hub-caps, so unlike the American makes that I knew by sight. The Edsel looked gaudy next to it. Where the Edsel sported a blinding weight of chrome and a squared-off roofline, fins, scallops and deep-set owlish headlights above its massive split bumper, this vehicle was—tidy, elegant, secretive. While the Edsel thrust itself forward, as if to plow through the air, Mrs. Mank’s car occupied its own space wholly. The Edsel was boxy; the whole body of Mrs. Mank’s coupe curved. It was chromed, to be sure, but unconventionally and elegantly. The headlights sat on the very hood, in their own chrome-edged caverns. On the hood and the trunk a medallion depicted a leaping horse, and another medallion, a horse with wings, head-on. And on the trunk, in script, was the word
Like Pegasus, the winged horse. Pegaso must be foreign for Pegasus but what brand of foreign, I could not begin to guess. I tried it out to myself in Mrs. Mank’s voice and accent: Pegaso. Evidently it was not a magic word, for no magical event occurred—no sudden flash, no piano trill, no winged horse pawing the sand.
The glove box was locked, preventing me from educating myself from any manuals or registration forms that might have been inside it.
The wind had risen and become urgent, shredding the fog and blowing it away. It snatched at my clothing, trying to drag me toward the beach. But it was not great enough to muffle the sound of two more vehicles on the road from the Pensacola Beach.
The yellow sweater provided no warmth. It felt as if it were shrinking in tight bands around my chest and neck and wrists.
I ran to the kitchen for a pair of shears and began cutting the buttons off the sweater. I started at the bottom, as it was easiest. The edges of the buttons had not dulled in the time since I had forced them through the holes, and they were hard to grasp. But I succeeded, at the cost of a few cuts and a little blood, in getting the blades of the scissors behind the shanks of the buttons and through the thread holding them to the wool. Despite the relaxation of the wool as the buttons fell away onto the floor, the one at the top was the most difficult, with my chin tucked to the point of the scissors blade. The threads gave way very suddenly to the gnawing of the blades and the button popped the highest and widest of them all—popped directly onto Mrs. Mank’s forefinger and thumb, as if it were on an elastic string. I never heard her enter the kitchen. An instant’s terror snapped through me; it was like touching an electrical socket.
She stood there in the middle of the kitchen, looking down at me. Her face was as straight as her back.
The button flickered between her fingers and was gone.
“Waste not, want not,” she remarked. “Or so I have been told.”
And then she passed regally out of the kitchen by way of the swinging door to the butler’s pantry. As she walked through the dining room and the foyer and out the door onto the verandah, I listened to her step. It was as audible as anyone else’s would have been.