Take One Candle Light a Room: A novel - Hardcover

Straight, Susan

3.67

270 ratings by Goodreads

9780307379146: Take One Candle Light a Room: A novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307379140 ISBN 13: 9780307379146

Publisher: Pantheon, 2010

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

From the author of A Million Nightingales (“a writer of exceptional gifts and grace”—Joyce Carol Oates) comes a luminous new novel about the forces that tear families apart and the ties that bind them together.

Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her Southern California home. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her closest childhood friend, Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-two-year-old son—and Fantine’s godson—Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor has fled to New Orleans. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.

Fantine’s own fate will be altered on this journey as well: her father will reveal the wrenching secrets of his past, and she will be compelled to question the most essential choices she’s made in her life. As they cross from California to the heart of Louisiana, all three characters will come face-to-face with the issues of race that beset them: Fantine, whose light skin has allowed her a kind of invisibility; her father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South and has tried to guard his family against that world; and Victor, whose fall into violence mirrors the path of so many other young black men. For Fantine, finding Victor could offer them both a way to face the past and decide between different futures.

Powerful and moving, Take One Candle Light a Room illuminates the intricacies of human connection and the ways in which we find a place for ourselves within our families and the world.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Susan Straight is the author of six novels, including A Million Nightingales and the National Book Award finalist Highwire Moon. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Her short stories have won an Edgar Award and an O. Henry Award. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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 mag�azine 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 C�rdoba, and the first chap�ter had been published in Immerse. So here we were—magazine writ�ers, 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 edi�tor 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, that 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 shimmer�ing 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, hold�ing 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.”

The woman had hair the color of champagne and a silky dress like lime sorbet. She smiled at me without showing her teeth, and my phone rang in my pocket.

I smiled back and rolled my eyes, mouthing “Excuse me” while I turned.

“You comin?” Cerise said. Not hello, how are you? She was my sister-in-law. Even though my two older brothers had left my two childhood friends, the women they’d married right when we got out of high school, Clarette and Cerise were still my sisters. “Tomorrow is five years, Fantine. They lookin for you to come home. Your maman and mine cookin right now.”

“I’m at a work thing,” I said softly. “And I just got off a plane. I’ll be there tomorrow.” I walked to the bar, picked up a glass of the red wine, and moved to a different window, hearing laughter.

“Where you been?” she said. That was the question I heard every time from my family. Wherever I’d been, it wasn’t as important as being home.

“Switzerland and France.” I knew she wouldn’t ask me anything about either place.

“So you might drop by, huh? If you ain’t too busy.” Cerise sounded pissed, like she did every single time we talked. She was mad at me for being in LA, mad at my brother Lafayette for leaving her and their kids, and mad at Glorette for being dead.

“Fantine!” she whispered harshly. “You didn’t never see her any�more! But I saw her all the time.” Cerise was crying now. “If I went to get my nails done. Or at Rite Aid. She went in there for a break.”

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to imagine what Glorette had looked like by then.

“She would just smile and say, ‘Hey, girl,’ like it wasn’t no big thang she had a bruise on her neck.”

“Cerise,” I said. “I’m coming tomorrow.”

“Shit, Fantine,” she said, her voice sharpened, clearing of sobs. I knew it was always good that she could hate on me for a minute. “Fly round the damn world every week and cain’t drive sixty-two miles home. Uh-huh.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said, and she hung up.

I took two long swallows of the wine. The sour fullness washed my throat, went behind my eyes. An older man smiled at me and lifted his own glass. “Lovely merlot from the Rio Negro Valley in Patagonia. They made sure to buy Argentinean wines.”

I nodded and took another sip. He said, “Are you working with Arthur? Are you with the publisher?”

“No,” I said. “I work for magazines.”

“Ah!” He stood beside me now. His face was that classic combination of silver eyebrows, blue eyes, and pinkish cheeks. The blush was really a mesh of fine red veins, a net of blood rising to the skin.

“I’m with his publisher now. I’ve finished my first book. Arthur teases me by calling it another Greatest Generation tome. World War II, you know.”

The last swallow of wine settled in my chest. “My father was in the war,” I said.

His eyebrows moved like pale moths. “Really? Which front?”

“In France somewhere. He never said the place.”

“He didn’t talk about his experiences,” he said, nodding.

I put down the empty glass on a beautiful ebony-wood table and gave him my b...