Miss Flyte always keeps a few artificial lights flickering to imitate candlelight. On certain occasions, such as Christmas, she removes the cloth for safety’s sake and lights every candle in the window. From a distance, all you can see is a black window and all of those flickering lights.
Miss Flyte “does” (as she puts it) weddings and funerals. It’s easy to tell a Flyte wedding. It isn’t simply that there are a lot of candles burning; it’s more than that. Flyte weddings have a mysterious, dreamy quality, a kind of fairylike atmosphere of crystal wings and moon dust and pale colors melting into one another, rainbowlike. Naturally, a good deal of it has to do with the effects of candlelight, but I always think the glow is more than this. There is something of a blessing given about a Flyte wedding. (Her funerals I steer clear of.)
Miss Flyte refuses to “do” anything else. “Weddings and funerals and nothing in between” has always been her motto. The “in between” occasions are things like dinner parties and birthday parties, like the
huge birthday party at the home of one of the lake people, with caterers and ice swans and a five-piece band, which Miss Flyte turned down. Her refusal only made her more of a plum and a prize. The lake people, being rich, think they can buy anybody, but they can’t buy Miss Flyte. She even gets invited to take her candles to New York City and Cape Cod and other fancy places to do dinner parties. The more she refuses, the more insistent people become. It would really be a feather in your cap to get Miss Flyte.
But it is more than that. The town’s social climbers, like Helene Baum, are always trying to imitate her. They can’t, of course. For it isn’t enough just to have a hundred candles burning. Only Miss Flyte knows how to fix and arrange them, where to put the tall ones, and where the tiny ones; where to sit them and where to hang them. Nobody else has the touch. Miss Flyte is a master of light.
Next door to the Candlewick, and run by another old lady, is a little gift shop. They are friends, Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler, and nearly every day have coffee or tea and buns together in one shop or the other. Both shops have side doors facing each other, and so Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler can slip across the narrow alley between and have their mid-morning coffee or afternoon tea. I’m a customer of both, and, although I’m twelve and they’re both up in their sixties or seventies, we still have something in common. I don’t know what. But somehow sitting in Miss Flagler’s kitchen, near-to-dozing over my tea or hot chocolate, I can see the days wearing us away, we three.
Miss Flagler’s gift shop is tiny, a mousehole called the Oak Tree Gift Shoppe. I cannot figure out how she scrapes by, for she rarely seems to have customers in her shop. There’s just the single tiny room for merchandise, shelves of little porcelain soap dishes, delicate cups and saucers, china and glass animals, linen handkerchiefs, and a display case of silver jewelry, pins and bracelets and necklaces.
She might have her private source of money, for she never seems to be wanting for anything. Her clothes are good. She always wears one shade or other of gray silk or bombazine, with a white linen collar or jabot separate from the dress so that it can be washed. And the dress is always covered with a cardigan, a gray cable-knit or brown cashmere. The cashmere is my favorite; it’s the color of foxes’ fur, golden-reddish-brown, which she always wears with a strand of pearls.
Inside the door of the Oak Tree is a silver bell, set to tinkling by the movement of the door, and this will bring Miss Flagler from her
rooms in the rear, through the drapery that divides the living quarters and the shop. Although I sometimes think she regards the “shop” part of her life with distaste, she is always decorously polite. She is remote, but pleasant. My mother calls her “the last genteel maiden lady,” and I think this an excellent description. With her cat named Albertine, and her comfortable kitchen with its smell of cinnamon and ginger, I imagine there are worse lives than Miss Flagler’s. It is true that her life must be muted and lacking in gaiety, but I do not put a high price on gaiety, having seen too much of it when Aurora Paradise and her sister get out on the fire escape of the Hotel Paradise.
I am sometimes invited to share their morning coffee or afternoon tea (oh, those fresh cinnamon buns!) and could think of them as just putting up with me, but I don’t. For some reason I feel at home with old ladies, as if I wear, in my ancient twelve-year-old soul, pince-nez and cardigans.
We sit on turquoise and buttercup-yellow painted wooden chairs (that have me revising my notion of a lack of gaiety in Miss Flagler’s life) pulled up to the white kitchen table. In winter we are warmed by the black cast-iron stove into which Miss Flagler shovels fresh coals. She has a gas stove, too, but she swears by the cast-iron for even baking. My mother does too, so I take Miss Flagler’s word for it. The buns and biscuits always come out of the coal stove, and my cocoa is heated in a pan on one of the iron cylinders on top. There’s a big white GE refrigerator she said can run circles around “these skinny new ones.” From a pantry off to one side, I can sometimes hear the noisy thumps of a Bendix washing machine that sounds like it’s in agony.
I love the cocoa. But I have a problem trying to get the skin off the top of the steaming surface without appearing rude. I usually just blow it back and drink quickly as my close-up eyes watch it drifting towards my mouth. Or I “clumsily” drop my paper napkin in the cup and that sops up the milk skin. If there’s a marshmallow engaged in this sopping up, that makes it frustrating, for I especially like the melting marshmallows.
We sit and sup and they ask after my mother, who they greatly admire, and after Lola Davidow, who they admire far less, and after Ree-Jane, who they don’t admire at all. Misunderstanding my made-up name, they call her “Rae Jane,” an error I have never corrected, knowing how Ree-Jane hates it. I think it balances out the injustice of
my being confused with her and called “Janey” sometimes. It’s simply infuriating to be overshadowed by a girl who appeared on the Hotel Paradise scene only five years before, and canceled out my existence.
Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler never make this mistake. They know who I am and that the Hotel Paradise has little to do with the Davidows. But Ree-Jane goes around telling people that her mother “owns” the Hotel Paradise, which makes me absolutely furious, and I tell my mother it does, but she has never done or said anything to correct this mistake; she simply tells me to never mind.
Of course, one reason Miss Flagler and Miss Flyte like having me there is that they’re gossipy—and why not?—and like to know what’s going on in Spirit Lake, mainly in the Hotel Paradise with Aurora living up there at the top. Aurora has always been (they say) “a bit of a wag,” which I think is a nice way of saying she’s crazy as a coot.
Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler are both of an age to have come in contact with the Devereaus and with Mary-Evelyn, Miss Flyte being sixty-three and Miss Flagler (I was surprised to find out) seventy years old. That meant both were young women in their twenties or thirties when Mary-Evelyn died. Yet their memories are vague on that count. Miss Flagler remembers “a little red-headed girl with a faraway look” who was always beautifully dressed, if a bit peculiar. No, Miss Flyte corrected Miss Flagler; it was those aunts of hers who were peculiar. One of the aunts was a wonderful seamstress. Sewed for a living, and had made Miss Flagler a dress once of organdy and silk. It had been quite the thing (Miss Flagler said, and Miss Flyte agreed) to own a Devereau dress, for she had been the best dressmaker in the state, and this was back when dressmaking was commonplace. Now, one could go to Hebrides, perhaps, to the Emporium; or one could travel even farther to Camberwell, which is La Porte’s equivalent of a nearby “city,” to a shop called the Europa, owned by Heather Gay Struther. She supposedly does her buying in Europe. But it is doubtful any dress in the Emporium or in the Europa is the equal of a Devereau dress. Miss Flagler’s dress had been ice-green organdy, with a silk lining. She had worn it to a garden party, which she described to me as “all white”: white dresses, white suits, white pumps, white roses, white-iced cakes.
I was momentarily carried away, or carried back, to this fairy world of garden parties and organdy dresses. I have personal experience of neither. I try to picture Miss Flagler moving airily around in her ice-green
organdy, a punch cup in one hand and a plate of tiny sandwiches in the other. The color sounded both cool and delicious. I decided it must be the color of Albertine’s eyes.
Mary-Evelyn had attended the party in a Devereau dress, of course. She had been handing around plates of small sandwiches. A really pretty little girl, Miss Flagler had said, in a pale yellow dress.
With a faraway look, I added to myself. I was glad she’d been at the party, for when I picture Mary-Evelyn, she is always by herself—at the lake’s edge, maybe; or behind one of those high dormer windows, pushing back the curtain, looking down. On what, I don’t know. So it was nice to think of Mary-Evelyn at a party, even if it was a party of adults, and she was apparently there to hand around plates of cakes and sandwiches.
Why were they thought to be peculiar? I wanted to know, and asked Miss Flagler.
Well. Miss Flagler didn’t actually know. It was all what she’d heard. A look passed between Miss Flagler and Miss Flyte, as smooth as passing a plate of junket.
That there was some sad secret attached to Mary-Evelyn and her aunts I had long known. The Sheriff didn’t know anything about them, as I said before. If he had known, he would have told me, especially since whatever people might have said about them could easily be some old bits of rumor, gossip without any foundation that had floated down over the years, passing from generation to generation, growing and diminishing, shooting out new little leaves here and there, far from its original root.
Miss Flyte could not really add much to the picture, except to note that Mary-Evelyn had no friends to speak of, none her age. I asked how could she have, since it was known that she didn’t go to grade school in Spirit Lake, or anywhere else; she had private lessons from tutors. I took the defense of Mary-Evelyn upon myself.
My mother had not said anything about Mary-Evelyn’s “peculiarity,” so I wondered if Miss Flagler was merely being overly delicate in not telling me some unsurprising detail she had picked up about her. Unrepeatable bits of information usually have to do with sex, a subject I know next to nothing about; I’m only dimly aware, even, that it is a subject. I suppose I know on some uncomfortable level of my mind that the occasional Saturday-matinee scene (that might slip past the watchful eye of Mr. McComas) involving the embraces of the
actors are not going to stop with hugs and kisses; still, I don’t know into what country these folks are headed. I feel embarrassed and somehow forsaken by them, leaving me there in the dark popcorny musk of my seat (that I slide farther and farther down into) while they travel where I cannot follow. I don’t know how a person can live for twelve years and come up blank on a subject that is on everybody’s mind for most of the waking day and all of the sleeping night. That I can remain ignorant of it goes to show what I feel to be my “operating room” life: white and sterile and into which people come gloved and masked and silent. That might sound peaceful and quiet (it certainly sounds clean) if you forget the scalpels. A lot of the time I wander around feeling doped up, but appearing alert. Too alert, some people might say.
Which is what Miss Flagler might have felt, as I refused to let that “look” that passed between her and Miss Flyte pass on into the land of lost looks. I pressed Miss Flagler for details. What was “peculiar”?
Well, Miss Flagler said, pouring out some more cocoa from the jug and adding a big marshmallow (an act I took to be some harmless bit of blackmail), Mary-Evelyn had not seemed a very affectionate sort of person, not very loving; no, she did not seem to love many things.
The definition of “peculiar” appeared to be getting further away from us. What things did she not seem to love?
Miss Flagler nibbled at her lower lip, as if she should be able to produce evidence of the charge of “peculiarity.” Mary-Evelyn, she told me, had a cat that died. She didn’t feed it, it was said. And the poor thing died.
Then we all turned to look at Albertine, sitting in plump state on the white table, as if we were consulting her on the consequences of withholding her canned milk. But I was astonished by Miss Flagler’s news. Even if some townsperson—daily woman or handyman—could have reported this tidbit, I couldn’t understand why Miss Flagler didn’t seem to take in the obvious implication of what she’d said. When I had this thought, something gave way and sank within me, leaving me overwhelmed by sadness.
If the cat died, no one else fed it, either.
The implications of this I didn’t even want to consider. Yet I knew I must if ever I was to understand what happened to Mary-Evelyn Devereau.
I recalled that Marge Byrd had said one day when Ulub (or Ubub) was raking leaves around her yard—slowly and thoughtfully, like the Woods did everything—that one or the other or both of them had done yard work for the Devereaus. For several days I watched Ubub and Ulub on their various seats and benches—the Rainbow, Axel’s Taxis, and Britten’s store—before finally deciding to tackle them.
As long as I can remember, I have never seen anyone conversing with the Woods, not beyond a friendly “hello,” or maybe a playful punch on the shoulder and a “hi.” The two of them can hear all right, because they respond with words or grunts, though Ubub is, I think, more vocal than Ulub. They aren’t twins and don’t even look much alike, one being tall and lanky, the other squat. I’m pretty sure Ubub is the tall, thin one because he is Useless Big Bob—UBB.
I see them on the flaking green bench provided by Britten’s store, used by two or three old men who occupy it in the morning, until the afternoon shift of two or three old men comes to relieve them. They’re the bench regulars, and the Woods sometimes swell their ranks, making the green bench a tight squeeze. It was my intention to advance on Ubub and Ulub some afternoon when they might have the bench to themselves, as occasionally happens.