I hardly ever saw the moon without thinking the first two lines, but the second two, I used only when I sang the whole song.
Did I long to see Ford? I didn’t think it was exactly longing. Maybe it was only curiosity.
Mama had been the spit of Cosima. The image in my mind was as distinct as the portrait in the egg locket, the egg locket on the bird’s harness that I had found in the attic. The harness and egg locket hidden in my hidey-hole.
Fifty-six
SCHOOL could not let out nor Mama leave soon enough for me.
She no longer wore the wedding ring that Daddy had put on her finger but flaunted a showy diamond ring at table and in one parlor or the other or on the verandah, as if every one of our guests were an unsuccessful beau or an ex-husband to be taunted with it. If that weren’t nauseating enough, whenever Tom Beddoes was around, she clutched his arm as if in fear that he might escape. The two of them cooed and cuddled ostentatiously.
In the meantime, the Atlas volume of the encyclopedia was under my bed, for immediate consultation of the map of Alabama, and my lunar notebook was filling up with questions and plans.
1. Alabama Directory Assistance
a. Billy Cane Dakin (Birmingham? Jefferson Co.)
b. Ford Agency, Birmingham
c. Jimmy Cane Dakin (Montgomery? Montgomery Co.)
d. Ford Agency, Montgomery
e. Lonny Cane Dakin, Dickie Cane Dakin (Mobile? Mobile Co.)
f. Ford Agency, Mobile
g. Dr. L. Evarts, Tallassee (Elmore Co.), Off., Res.
h. Winston Weems, Tallassee (Elmore Co.), Off., Res.
i. Adele Starret (Montgomery? Or Tallassee?) (Elmore Co.)
j. Fennie Verlow (Montgomery? Tallassee?)
I seized any fleeting opportunities when I was alone with a telephone. Eventually Miz Verlow would see the long-distance calls on the bill but I planned to own up unflinchingly and offer to pay her back.
Like a punishment for my petty larceny, any hope of quick contact with one or another uncle, who might know where Ford was, died aborning; not one of them was listed in Birmingham, Montgomery, or Mobile, or in the respective counties of those towns. And in those towns, the Ford agencies—no longer Joe Cane Dakin’s Ford-Lincoln-Mercury—had no one working for them named Dakin, and no one able to check any records that might have existed since the agencies changed hands, but somebody “might get back to me when they had the chance.”
No Adele Starret or Fennie Verlow was listed in Montgomery or Tallassee. Dr. Evarts was not listed in Tallassee either as regards his office or his residence and there was no office number for Mr. Weems, only a residential one. I supposed Dr. Evarts might have unlisted his home telephone number, and perhaps joined a practice with other doctors, but the directory assistance could not tell me if that was so. Lawyer Weems, old as he was when I last saw him, might very well have retired.
School let out, and a few days later, Colonel Beddoes took Mama to the airport. Within five minutes of seeing the tail end of his MG scoot down the road, I locked myself in Mama’s bedroom and went through every last inch of her space and all her hidey-holes. It had been a while since I had bothered with a complete search of her things. I had thought that I knew them so well, they were boring.
The only address book that I found, at the back of a drawer, was one that I had given her for Christmas in 1962: still blank, every page of it, with not even her own name written in the front. In the tin-lined pot chamber of her nightstand were all her papers having to do with Adele Starret’s contest of Mamadee’s will, including a copy of the document itself. As I read through them all, it was apparent to me that their real purpose had been bamboozling Mama into thinking that something was happening. I copied the return address and office telephone number from one letter with some excitement. When I studied on the will, Mamadee’s naming of herself as Deirdre Carroll stood out as odd in a way that it had not when I was a little girl. She wasn’t born a Carroll. She should have had a maiden name in the middle. Unless she was a Carroll cousin of sufficient distance to avoid incest. Or not. Maybe incest didn’t apply to Carrolls, the way it didn’t to Egyptian pharaohs. More rummage turned up Mama and Daddy’s wedding certificate, then my birth certificate. But not Ford’s. Had Mama destroyed it in a fit of pique or frustration? Just as likely it was in some file somewhere with the papers that concerned his legal custody.
About Daddy, there was nothing else—no death certificate, copies of his obituary, personal papers or love letters. And of evidence of the existence of any other Dakins, there was none either.
The only photographs were two that Mama had brought from Ramparts: a school photo of Ford at eleven, and of herself, sitting on the railing in her shorts. No wedding photos, no baby photos, no family photos.
Satisfied that there was nothing more to glean from Mama’s room, I tidied it up, but with no attempt to make it appear untouched. Mama would think that Cleonie had cleaned it. If she noticed anything out of place, she would blame Cleonie. Any guilt that I felt at Cleonie catching blame, I assuaged with the likelihood that in the chaos of her belongings in which Mama lived, she would not in fact notice at all.
Cleonie was more than able to defend herself. Mama had blamed Cleonie for something nearly every day of our lives at Merrymeeting. Cleonie unhesitatingly met Mama eye to eye and with imperturbable calm, rendering untenable the accusation of the day. The most revenge Cleonie ever took that I could identify as such was in serving me the best portions of whatever was going and of treating me better than Mama did.
Roger told me that his mama looked on my mama as a different species, Mama’s insults and idiocies as the natural nastiness of Mama’s kind. A cat will claw a wicker chair. Beyond a quick squirt of water to drive it temporarily away from its mischief, little could be done but accept cat-clawed wicker. Mama and cats were one of those mysterious ways Cleonie’s AME Christian God moved his wonders to perform. I was pleased to think that Cleonie did not allow Mama to be more than the most minor irritant in her life.
One afternoon, Miz Verlow went to the dentist in Pensacola to have a root canal done. I took the key to the attic from her office.
I still hoped to find an old address book, a family Bible, a photo album, a shoebox of photographs, a cardboard box of personal papers. The framed poster. As I groped my way among the litter of objects, many of them shrouded, I thought it unlikely I would ever be able to find anything that Mama had brought with us.
Something fluttered. I paused briefly and the flutter erupted again, out of the dark, an oilier feathered darkness that coalesced into a fish crow, setting gently onto an object nearby. I held still, so as not to frighten the bird, and out of my own animal caution in any new situation.
The crow perched there blinking at me. We studied each other a moment, and then it began to preen itself, darting its sharp beak into its own feathers, looking for whatever itched it. It was a letdown to have bored it so quickly.
Just as abruptly as it had settled, the crow rose suddenly with a loud uhhhk. It brushed one of the bulbs in passing, and for half a moment, the light was querulous and confused, showing one thing and then another. I glimpsed a collection of umbrella stands: The handles and shanks rose up from the open tops as if someone had stuffed dozens of flamingos and herons and ibises upside down into the stands.
In another direction, the moving light caught the dusty drops and pendants of a chandelier hanging, lopsided, from a rafter over the coarse-woven shape of a grand piano. The shroud turned the piano into its own ghost. On its back it bore a collection of candlesticks and candelabra and wee-willie-winkies, some of them with the stubs of tapers sagging in them, melted not just by fire but by the heat in the attic.