While Mrs. Mank addressed her breakfast with her total attention, Miz Verlow favored me with a slight smile.
Mama spoke quietly to Miz Verlow, “Maybe I should make a long-distance call.”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Mank interjected, with her eyes still quite fixed on her plate. “That’s a very bad idea.”
Mama stiffened in her chair. Who was this woman that she should offer Roberta Carroll Dakin advice on any subject whatever? More significantly, who was Mrs. Mank that she should know what making that long-distance telephone call meant?
Unperturbed, Mrs. Mank chewed, swallowed, dabbed her lips and finally looked at Mama. “Merry told me a little of what happened yesterday.”
Mama’s glare fell on Miz Verlow, with no more effect than a solitary raindrop sliding down a windowpane.
Miz Verlow turned her smile on Mrs. Mank. “I confide in Mrs. Mank, Miz Dakin. There is no one I trust more.”
By the way she drew in her breath, I knew Mama was about to say something vicious.
“Mama, maybe—” I began.
“We do not need to hear from you, Calley Dakin, because if any of this is anyone’s fault, I firmly believe it is yours. Mamadee would have died and gone straight to Heaven and left us in peace if you had not insisted on chatting with her as if you were both on a picnic by the waters of Babylon.”
I was aware of Miz Verlow’s watchful gaze on me, and was comforted and calmed by it without knowing why.
Once the first gout of Mama’s anger was deflected to me, she was able to address Mrs. Mank in a tone of voice that was marginally civiclass="underline" “Well, Mrs. Mank, it must sound very strange to you. Do you believe that we had an unexpected and unwelcome visit from a ghost?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Mank conceded, “but Merry Verlow does not lie, not to me. So when she tells me that she heard a voice and there was no way it might have been anyone in the house trying to trick you, then I believe her.”
Mama challenged her as if she herself had not just asserted that Mamadee had spoken to us from the dead. “Then you believe in ghosts.”
“Absolutely not,” said Mrs. Mank.
“But—”
“But I do believe that when someone speaks to you from beyond the grave, you should sit very still and listen.”
Mama scrabbled at her Kools while Mrs. Mank again addressed her breakfast.
“That I understand.” Mama stuck a cigarette between her lips with shaking fingers. “And—” She lit a match, fired the Kool and sucked at it. Around it, she finished, “I am just beginning to think you think like I do.” Her voice was full of relief and sincerity. Mama could, with no particular difficulty, believe two entirely contradictory things at the same time. It’s not a rare ability but she was a virtuoso. “But if that was my mama speaking to me from the Other Side,” she went on, “why shouldn’t I just call up and make sure she’s dead?”
Mrs. Mank politely daubed her lips again. I was interested to note that her lipstick was unaffected.
“You’re certain it was your mama who spoke to you this afternoon.”
“Yes,” said Mama. “Ask Calley if it wasn’t her mamadee.”
“Calley, was it your mamadee?”
I hesitated before I answered, “It was her voice.”
“You see.” Mama took my statement as a reinforcement of her own.
“No,” said Mrs. Mank. “Calley is saying something a little different, Mrs. Dakin. She said it was your mama’s voice, not that it was your mama.”
Thirty-four
I might have told Mrs. Mank and Miz Verlow and Mama then that I had seen Mamadee. And I did not. The choice was nothing that I reasoned out, but an instinctive holding back of the information. It was something none of them knew, not about Mamadee, but about me.
“But who else would it be!” said Mama. “She knew me! She recognized the chair that her own mama embroidered! She wanted her candlestick—” Mama stopped abruptly.
“She was wrong about the chair, Roberta Ann,” Miz Verlow said. “Because you told me yourself, that house and everything in it burned up years and years ago.”
Mama glanced at me as if for help.
“It sounded like Mamadee,” I assured her. “But maybe it was somebody else—some other ghost—just pretending to be Mamadee.”
“What for?” cried Mama.
“Exactly what I would have said, Mrs. Dakin,” said Mrs. Mank. “It might been your mama speaking or it might merely have been the voice of an evil spirit—or entity—or whatever you wish to call it.”
“Why on earth would there be some asinine evil spirit after me?” Mama demanded.
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.”