Take One Candle Light a Room

  ALSO BY SUSAN STRAIGHT

  A Million Nightingales

  Highwire Moon

  The Gettin Place

  Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

  I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

  Aquaboogie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Straight

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Straight, Susan.

  Take one candle light a room / Susan Straight.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37953-5

  1. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. Travel writers—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Blacks—Race identity—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T6795T35 2010 813′.54—DC22 2010012683

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  v3.1

  In memory of my father-in-law, General Roscoe Conklin Sims Jr., Stanford Lanier Sims, Charles Sims, Tommie Chatham Jr., Stan Davis, John E. Murphy, Emory Elliott, Oscar Harper, John “New-cat” Bratton, and especially my brother, Jeffrey Paul Watson.

  For Dwayne Sims, General RC Sims III, Carnell Sims, Derrick Sims, Eddie Chandler Jr., Trent Chatham, and all the men in the driveway; for my nephews, General IV, Aanais, Evan, Richard “Stuxx” and Jarrod, Leroy and Tony, Corey and Cortez, EJ III and Marcus and David and Kendall, and especially for Sensei Sims.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Apache

  Toy District

  Mitla

  Dimples

  El Dorado

  The Golden Gopher

  Vermont

  The Riviera

  El Ojo De Agua

  The Villas

  Saint Streets

  Sarrat

  Home

  Part Two Lapis

  Weimar

  Sarrat

  The Lafitte

  Part Three Azure

  East of the Sun, West of the Moon

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

  —THOMAS PYNCHON,

  Against the Day

  APACHE

  I KEEP THE TWO PHOTOS on the ebony sideboard in my small dining room.

  The first is black-and-white, but has taken on that edgy silvery-brown look of a gelatin print. It is Louisiana, 1958. The five young women stand beside a truck with a curved hood, the word Apache in chrome letters beside my mother’s hip.

  They are sixteen. They are leaving their homes.

  Their faces are stark and somber, varying shades of amber and gray in the cold winter light. Claudine, with hooded eyes, a plumpness around her jaw from the baby, her arms crossed over breasts swollen like bags of rice under her shirt. Felonise, hair in a pompadour over her thin face, her coat collar too big around her flowerstem neck. Mary, black eyes fierce and slanted, the dark scar still visible on her face where his ring gouged out a kernel of skin on her left cheekbone. Zizi, whose light gray eyes are clear as water, her thick black braid askew on her head. And my mother, Marie-Claire, her face pale and round as a tortilla, her dark brows like tadpoles swimming toward each other, the only one who tried to smile for the camera.

  He hadn’t gotten her, or Felonise. Mr. McQuine.

  It was my mother who told me the story, so that I would stay home, safe, and never trust the outside world, or the white people in that world.

  If he operated now, he’d be called a serial rapist or night stalker with a nickname like the Hillside Strangler or the Westside Rapist. But back then, in rural Louisiana in the 1950s, he didn’t even make the news. He had only his own name, and that was enough. He was Mr. McQuine, and everyone knew to be afraid of him and his light blue car skimming along the road past the houses. In the dark, my mother said, the car was like a garfish swimming at night, the front grille its teeth bared. But in the daytime, the car was even worse, because it faded into the color of the pale sky and the dust cloud around it when Mr. McQuine drove slowly past people’s yards to look for smoke rising from a chimney and a girl who might have stayed home from school.

  After he took the first three girls—Claudine and Zizi and Mary—and the sheriff wouldn’t even come out, they knew. No one cared. No one would make him stop.

  Claudine was walking home from her aunt’s house. She’d stayed out of school to help her aunt with a new baby. Mr. McQuine caught her on the road from Seven Oaks where it winds along the bayou and then cuts through the woods to Sarrat.

  He kept her all night. When she made the porch of her house, she could barely walk. No one had phones, so they thought she’d stayed at her aunt’s with the baby.

  She had her own baby in the fall. Eyes pale gold as corn shucks. Her mother held it, but she wouldn’t. Her father took it away to a cousin somewhere. When he came back he wouldn’t say where.

  Mr. McQuine caught Zizi in her house, when she played sick to miss church, and after she tried to hit him with an iron he grabbed her wrist and broke it.

  He caught Mary hanging laundry in the yard behind her mother’s house, when everyone else was out weeding the cane. She fought, too, and he slapped her across the face. Blood welled into the dent left by the sapphire.

  It was that scar like a brand that made my father, Enrique, crazy.

  He said his grandmother used to tell him about her mother, Moinette Antoine, who was a slave, and the brand burned into her shoulder by the man who said he owned her.

  My father went hunting for Mr. McQuine. He went to the Time Out, where Mr. McQuine and the other white men drank, but the men only laughed and told him to buy beer at the back porch. Mr. McQuine knew, though, what Enrique wanted. Weeks later, Enrique waited in the dark kitchen at Seven Oaks after midnight, when everyone was asleep. But when the blue Chevrolet parked in the gravel, Mr. McQuine came into the kitchen with his gun already out, and he made Enrique put his own gun on the antique wooden table. He lay three envelopes on the table, moved his gun to make Enrique open each envelope and pull out the long strands. The first black and curled as moss; the second wavy and brown; the third Indian-straight and thick as horsetail.

  Claudine, Zizi, Mary.

  Mr. McQuine sat at his kitchen table, his gun and Enrique’s in either hand. He said, “I smell you when I come in. Trespassing punishable by death.” Mr. McQuine was near sixty, so fat that his stomach folded like a mushroom inside the white shirt, and his black tie pointed to a pool of sweat that made the cotton transparent.

  Enrique waited for him to shoot.

  But Mr. McQuine laughed. He told Enrique when he pulled the hair from their heads it was part of an experiment. It was science. The hair of a child might have turned out blond, if the blood had been improved. But he hadn’t been able to check the hair, because the baby was gone. Then he told Enrique to go home.

  Next time, Mr. McQuine said.

  Blond hair next time. That would have been my mother.

  They packed up the girls in the night, in that old white truck named Apache, where they sat huddled in the metal bed,
hidden under blankets and sacks of rice, driven in the dark from Sarrat to Baton Rouge, where they caught a Greyhound bus that took them to Rio Seco, California, to live with Mrs. Herbert Batiste, who had left Baton Rouge years ago. She ran a boardinghouse where they would be safe.

  After the girls left, that winter day in 1958, my father, Enrique Antoine, had the photo of them developed, and he studied it every night. All the time he planted cane, weeded the rows, and then set the fields on fire the following winter for the harvest, he thought of Marie-Claire, the one he had wanted to marry, and the way she wasn’t on the porch or lingering in the field, where her fingers used to brush his when he got a cup of water.

  The only one who stayed behind was Anjolie. She was the most beautiful, too, with a golden face and full lips and so much black wavy hair her mother kept it in a thick braid coiled like a nest on her head. Her mother wouldn’t let her leave for California. She said she couldn’t live without her only child. So she kept Anjolie inside, with all the doors and windows locked. Her father built an armoire for the bedroom and whenever he left for the fields, if any car came down the road, Anjolie was locked into the armoire until her mother could see through the risen dust or falling rain who was in the yard. For more than a year Anjolie never left the house, not even for school or church, until Mr. McQuine finally died while driving back to his house after he’d been drinking all night, his blue car on fire in a ditch by the side of the road.

  The newspaper said Mr. Daniel McQuine was a fifth-generation planter whose grandfather had cleared hundreds of acres given to him by Iberville. The article said he died with no wife or heirs, and that his cousin would donate the house and land to a historic trust. The photo showed Mr. McQuine on his tractor.

  Everyone in Sarrat remembered only his car, and the chrome grille-teeth that Enrique had crept around in the bar’s gravel parking lot, where he cut the brake lines with a knife and spat on the trunk. It had taken him more than a year to find the right night. He left his saliva like a little white cloud there before he ran back to the woods to wait for the car to end in the ditch after the curve in the bayou road. But when he peered into the wrecked car, he saw Mr. McQuine’s eyes still moving and his mouth opening to say something, and my father finished him. Then he walked through the trees for miles, back to Sarrat, where there were no girls hanging up laundry or laughing in their bedrooms while they combed each other’s hair. There were no girls for a long time, because even though it was safe after Mr. McQuine was buried, Anjolie never left her house, because she was used to it, and the other girls never came back. Enrique Antoine and the man he thought of as his brother, Gustave Picard, went to California. After a few years, Gustave Picard came back and married Anjolie.

  But before that, every day she opened the curtains and sat in a chair to look out at the fields and the pecan trees and the edge of the road that led somewhere else.

  The other photo is of us. Their daughters. Five young women, standing on my mother’s porch in southern California, wearing the shirts we bought senior year. Maroon and gold, with “Class of 83—Always Wild and Free.” We are seventeen and eighteen. No one ever thought we would leave the little community my father and Gustave had made in the orange groves.

  Bettina looks like her mother, Claudine—pink skin and green eyes and huge breasts under the maroon T-shirt. Clarette like her mother, Mary—implacable dark eyes, high cheekbones, and thick black hair in a halo around her forehead. Cerise is thin and wary, Felonise’s girl, hair braided in a bun, arm wiry on my shoulder. I am vague and taupe and smudged, my hair invisible in the chignon behind my head, my face turned slightly toward Glorette.

  She was not the daughter of Zizi, who had died of leukemia when she was twenty. Glorette was the only child of Anjolie. She was even more beautiful than her mother. Her face was hammered gold, polished over her bones. Her eyebrows like hummingbird feathers, precise and dark, and her eyes the purple of night.

  We are standing on the porch after graduation, under my mother’s bougainvillea with the smallest white stars inside the blooms, but Glorette didn’t graduate. She had just given birth to Victor, whom my mother held off to the side of the photo. Glorette’s face is blurred and turned toward the sound of crying. He couldn’t be quieted, I remember.

  In the end, we were the only two who left our childhood homes.

  I was the only one of us who didn’t have children. The spinster. Maiden aunt. The godmother. Marraine, in Louisiana French, was what they called me.

  Glorette was like my sister. And she had died August 25, 2000. Five years ago tomorrow. Her small body folded in on itself by someone who’d left her in a shopping cart in an alley behind a taqueria, her long black hair tangled around her beautiful face and falling through the metal mesh that left marks on her cheek.

  TOY DISTRICT

  “YOU A LIE!” someone shouted from the alleyway near where I walked downtown, where homeless men had congregated, and it sent me directly to my childhood. “You a damn lie!”

  That was how people accused each other back in Rio Seco. Not “That’s a lie,” or “You’re a liar.”

  You were the lie.

  “I ain’t no lie, you drunk-ass—”

  The shouts faded when I left the hot sidewalk that smelled faintly of beer and pee and onions, off Spring Street, and went into the lobby of a beautifully restored building that used to be a toy factory. Two people were already in the elevator. The young woman held the door for me and smiled.

  “Hi, I’m Donovan,” she said. “I’m the publicist’s assistant. What a great building!”

  “It used to be like a Third World country on this block,” the man said. Perfect pressed shirt. Artful stubble. He nodded. “Jeremiah. I’m one of Arthur’s lawyers.”

  They looked at me expectantly. “FX Antoine,” I said.

  Donovan, whose hair was a shining auburn bob, said, “Oh, I loved your last article in Vogue! It was on Belize, right?”

  Jeremiah looked sideways at me. “Your mom named you FX?” he said.

  I smiled. People from my childhood didn’t know the initials I used for my travel essays, because no one from home ever read them. I had just finished one about Oaxaca for Vogue, and an article on Bath for Travel and Leisure. At noon today, I’d gotten off a plane from Zurich. I was working on a Switzerland piece for Immerse, the funky travel magazine where I had regular assignments.

  No one who read my essays or assigned them knew my real name.

  “She did,” I said to Jeremiah as the elevator door opened.

  The loft had cement floors the color and texture of limestone cliffs, and ebony-wood furniture, and grass growing in pots. Arthur Graves’s new place. He’d made a career by moving to a different city each year and writing a book, always about himself—a man who searched for the right apartment or house where he could paint, who always found a local woman to cook for him and another local woman to love him. He’d done Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, San Francisco, and Avignon. After a year, he’d leave for another place. Another love.

  Arthur Graves actually looked like his jacket photo—white-blond hair combed severely back from his tanned forehead and curling like commas behind his ears, black horn-rimmed glasses. Very British. He stood near a table piled with empanadas and fruit, his new book propped on a side table with a vase full of white roses. He’d been in Argentina this time. Not Buenos Aires but Córdoba, and the first chapter had been published in Immerse. So here we were—magazine writers, editors and publicists, people from the Los Angeles Times, and people from Hollywood because this book was being made into a movie.

  I was headed for the empanadas when my phone rang. Rick, my editor at Immerse. “Hey, FX, you at the launch party?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Tony’s there with you?”

  “No,” I said, bending to get a plate.

  “Come on, get him out of the house. This guy from The Wall Street Journal said he might come. He wants to cover Immerse, and if Tony’s at the party, tha
t makes it worthwhile.”

  Tony had just won a Pulitzer for a photo essay on children without fathers—he’d gone to rural Mexico, Nigeria, Kentucky, Montana, and Iraq and shot pictures of children holding cell phones, talking to the absent fathers whose portraits were beside them. “Tony doesn’t go out on Wednesdays. And I’m not staying long—I need to go home and sleep. I only came to check out some new connections.”

  “Try,” Rick said. “I’ll be there in a while.”

  I stood near a window, looking outside at the heat waves shimmering off the skyline and the parked cars below glinting like silver teeth. We were on the fifth floor. Down there, homeless men were gathering in an alley, settling along the wall though it was not near sunset yet. From here, the green pup tents, brown cardboard squares, and shopping carts made the alley look like a cul-de-sac with absolute boundaries and property lines. Two men were shirtless, their dark backs wide with muscle.

  Grady Jackson might be out there, arranging cardboard or sleeping however he had in the streets for so many years. Grady Jackson, who’d been a walking fool, who’d made me know I was a walking fool way back when I was fifteen. He brought me here to LA the first time, when he stole a car and I climbed into the backseat. I had thought of Grady every day of my life since then. But he was a fool for love, too, and I would never be. He was homeless, living somewhere in an alley or under an overpass, and I lived in Los Feliz in an Art Deco apartment building.

  We had been kids together, and he fell in love with Glorette. Then he’d stolen something from her—the man she loved—so she’d have to marry him. But she could never love him, and when she left him, he lost his mind. He came here and lived on Skid Row. Glorette had lost her heart, and filled the emptiness every day with the smoky vapors of crack.

  Tomorrow was five years since she died. She’d been killed on her thirty-fifth birthday.

  Maybe Grady was dead now, too. Below, the two men were setting up a domino game. When I turned, a woman was just behind me, holding dark wine in a big goblet. The red swayed, and the low sun reflected a patch of light that swayed, too. Arthur Graves came between us and said, “Look at it! The windows were black with grime, I remember. Absolutely black.”