The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies Read online

  Her eyes narrowing, Lizzy picked it up. It was written in her mother’s hand, telling her to look inside the refrigerator, where she found four thick slices of Sally-Lou’s meat loaf (one of Lizzy’s favorite dishes), a large bowl of potato salad, two ripe tomatoes, and two pieces of apple pie. The note said that since there was enough food for two people, Mrs. Lacy was planning to join Lizzy for supper at six o’clock.

  Obviously, Lizzy’s mother had used her key. And she wasn’t making any secret of it.

  Huffing out an aggravated breath, Lizzy poured milk into a saucer for Daffy. As he got down to business, she went to the phone that hung on the wall. She and her mother were on the same party line, so she didn’t have to ring through to the telephone exchange. She cranked two shorts and a long.

  In a moment, Sally-Lou answered with her pleasant, musical “Miz Lacy’s residence.”

  “Sally-Lou, let me speak to Mama, please,” Lizzy said. Then she thought of something else. “Oh, before you get her, I wonder-have you heard from your aunt DessaRae since Miss Hamer’s niece and her friend have moved in?”

  “Yes’m, Miss Lizzy, I has,” Sally-Lou said, and paused, turning the silence into the unspoken question: Why you askin’ me ’bout this?

  Sally-Lou had been fourteen when Mrs. Lacy hired her to take care of two-year-old Lizzy. An orphan, she had been a long-limbed, gangly girl, as black as night, young enough to play games and sing songs with Lizzy but old enough and smart enough to make the little girl mind. Still, Lizzy had grown up thinking of her as a friend. In fact, when Mrs. Lacy had climbed up on her high horse about something or other, Sally-Lou became not only a friend but an ally and a staunch defender, adroitly helping Lizzy stay out of her mother’s way and sometimes even standing between mother and daughter. She had never married-whether by choice or happenstance, Lizzy didn’t know. But as she got older and became more sure of herself, Sally-Lou had made her own place in the household and become her own woman. If you didn’t know her, she might seem so meek that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and you might think you could push her around. But she was strong as a stick of cordwood when need be, and feisty as a banty rooster.

  “I’m asking because… well, because I saw Miss LaMotte this afternoon,” Lizzy replied, a little lamely. “I was just wondering how they were getting along.” Actually, she was asking because it had occurred to her that maybe, via Sally-Lou and DessaRae, she could get an insider’s view of Miss LaMotte.

  Sally-Lou’s reply was guarded. “It look like they done moved in to stay, is what Aunt Dessy say. Brung they clothes and suitcases an’ such.”

  There wasn’t much information in that, Lizzy thought, disappointed. She tried a different question. “Is Miss Hamer happy with the new arrangement?”

  What Lizzy really wanted to know was whether Miss Hamer was aware that her niece had once been a vaudeville dancer, but she didn’t think it wise to ask. Anything she said to Sally-Lou would reach DessaRae’s ears, and in this case, that might not be a good idea. Not yet, anyway.

  “Miz Hamer happy?” Sally-Lou chuckled wryly. “Well, now, I don’ know ’bout that, Miss Lizzy. That ol’ lady ain’t happy wi’ much of anythin’ these days. Aunt Dessy just say the ladies are gettin’ settled is all. She ain’t seen nothin’ of Miz Lake, though. She lay low in her bedroom, don’t come out at all, even to eat her meals.”

  “Hmm,” Lizzy said, thinking that this wasn’t much help, either. “Well, keep your ears open for me, would you?”

  The silence stretched out a little. “If you don’ mind me askin’, how come?” Sally-Lou asked, almost warily. “Somethin’ bad goin’ on over there?”

  “Oh, no,” Lizzy replied hastily. “I’m just curious, that’s all.” Before Sally-Lou could ask another question, she said, “Could I speak to Mother now?”

  “Sho thing, Miss Lizzy,” Sally-Lou said. “Hang on-I get her.”

  Lizzy took a deep breath. When her mother came on the line, she said, very firmly, “Thank you for fixing my hat, Mama, but tonight isn’t a good night to have supper together.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Lacy said, and heaved a pained sigh. “Whyever not, Elizabeth?” There was a brief pause, and then her usual question, tinged with hopefulness: “You and Mr. Alexander are goin’ out for supper, I s’pose.”

  Grady Alexander had been Lizzy’s boyfriend, more or less, for the past year or so. Mrs. Lacy, who had gotten used to having her unmarried daughter handy whenever she was needed, had opposed the relationship at first, finding all kinds of reasons why Grady wasn’t right for Lizzy. But in the past couple of months, she seemed to have changed her mind about him and was now leaning the other way-and leaning on Lizzy about it, too.

  “You’re not gettin’ any younger, you know, dear,” she said, several times a week. “There aren’t that many eligible men in Darling. And he is such a fine-lookin’ gentleman.”

  This sudden change of heart was a mystery, since Grady was exactly the same person he had always been. But maybe the answer was as simple as a dependable paycheck. Grady had a job in the Alabama Agricultural Department and it looked like he was going to keep it. Or maybe it was a matter of status. As the county agricultural agent, he was respected in the community. Either money or status, in Mrs. Lacy’s eyes, might have transformed him from Mr. Wrong to Mr. Right.

  Lizzy took a deep breath. “No, Mama, I am not going out with Grady tonight. Myra May and Verna and I are going to the movie-just us girls. We’re going to see The Saturday Night Kid. Clara Bow stars in it.”

  The minute the words were out of her mouth, though, she knew she had made a mistake. Her mother didn’t approve of Clara Bow, the “It Girl.” (Nobody knew what “It” was, exactly, but everybody suspected it was “Sex Appeal.”) In fact, Mrs. Lacy had told Mr. Greer, the owner of the Palace, that he should not show any more movies starring Clara Bow, because she was nothing but pure trash.

  Mrs. Lacy said testily, “I wish you wouldn’t, Elizabeth. You know my opinion of Clara Bow.”

  “Yes, I know, Mama. But-”

  “And don’t you think we could have supper first?” Her voice tightened. “There’s something we need to talk about, Elizabeth. Something important. Surely you can spare a little time for your mother, can’t you?”

  Lizzy straightened her shoulders. “Of course I can. But not tonight, Mama. Verna and Myra May and I are going to have supper together before the movie.” She tried to put a smile into her voice. “How about if you come over here tomorrow after church?” Her mother was Presbyterian and never missed a service. “We can have Sally-Lou’s meat loaf and potato salad for our dinner. Will that do instead?”

  “I suppose it’ll have to,” her mother said reluctantly. She heaved a plaintive sigh. “I just wish you were goin’ out with Mr. Alexander tonight, Elizabeth. He is such a fine, upstandin’ Christian young man and comes from such a good family. His mother sits in the pew right behind mine every Sunday morning. You could do worse than marry him. And of course you don’t want to live out your life as a tragic old maid.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Lizzy said. She didn’t point out that Grady never accompanied his mother to church, either, and that for a fine, upstanding Christian young man, he’d been awful hot and heavy-handed in the front seat of his blue Ford coupe the last time he’d taken her out. They’d gone to see Gary Cooper in The Virginian, and then driven out to watch the moon from the hill above the fairgrounds. Lizzy had finally had to get out of the car and take a cooling-off walk.

  “Well, then, don’t forget,” her mother said. “Sunday school starts at nine. You can wear that nice new blue hat I made you.”

  Lizzy rolled her eyes. “Mama, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Sunday is the only day I get to sleep a little late. You just come on over here when you get home and we’ll have a nice Sunday dinner together. I’ve got some fresh string beans I can cook up with onions and fatback, the way you like them.” And when they were eating, she would tell her mother that it had been wrong to
copy that key. She would have to give it back, or promise not to use it except in an emergency, or-

  “I would go with you to the movies,” her mother said petulantly, “if I was asked. And if you weren’t goin’ to see Clara Bow. You know how I feel about that immoral woman. I wouldn’t go into a movie house that was showin’ one of her films.” Mary Pickford was the only movie actress Mrs. Lacy admired (Pollyanna was her favorite, along with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), but even Miss Pickford’s star had dimmed in Mrs. Lacy’s eyes since the actress had bobbed her hair and married Douglas Fairbanks, who, as everybody knew, led a rake’s life out there in Hollywood, where it was said that nobody paid any attention to Prohibition. Marriage to him could not be good for Miss Pickford’s moral character.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lizzy said, glad now that she had mentioned Clara Bow. “Well, then. Sunday dinner after church. All right?”

  “All right,” her mother said. “And don’t forget, y’hear, Elizabeth? There is somethin’ impo’tant that we need to talk about, and it can’t be put off. It’s got to be discussed now, before either of us gets a day older.”

  With a long sigh, Lizzy put the receiver back in its cradle. Once every few months, her mother came up with “something impo’tant” they needed to discuss and would pester her nonstop until they sat down and talked. The last time, it had been the green straw hat that her mother was making. She couldn’t decide between big red silk rosettes and a red veil or small white silk daisies and a white veil, and needed Lizzy’s advice.

  What was it this time?

  THREE

  Verna Is Rebuffed

  Verna watched Liz walk off down Camellia Street, heading for home. She hesitated a moment, then turned and went the other way, hurrying a little, so that by the time she got to the corner of Camellia and Rosemont and started north, toward the courthouse square, she could see Miss LaMotte. Except for the business section of town, there were no sidewalks in Darling, and Miss LaMotte was making very slow forward progress on those silly high heels, which were suitable for city sidewalks only. If Verna wanted to, she could have caught up.

  But she didn’t, exactly, at least not yet. Verna hadn’t known that she was going to follow Miss LaMotte in the first place, and she wasn’t exactly sure why she was doing it. Yes, there was the idea of asking her to appear in the talent show, although Verna knew that she really should talk to Mildred first. But the real truth was that Miss LaMotte’s sudden appearance in Darling had been a shocking surprise. It had brought back such a flood of memories that Verna almost felt as if she were drowning.

  Now, Verna Tidwell was not a sentimental person. In fact, she thought of herself as not having a single schmaltzy bone in her body, and she took serious pride in her reputation for a hard-headed, no-nonsense approach to life. Oh, she had loved Walter well enough, but she had never been “in love” with him, if by being in love you were thinking of that corny lose-your-head-and-your-heart nonsense that Rudy Vallée was always crooning about. She had agreed to marry Walter because it made pretty good sense at the time he asked her, and she had been truly sorry when he died, although not so sorry that she went around wearing a rusty black dress and black hat and gloves for years afterward, the way her mother had when Verna’s father passed on.

  Some of her acquaintances felt that her lack of sentiment was a character fault, but Verna did not agree. It was just part of her nature, along with her habit of wanting to know what was behind the appearances that other people put on when they went out the door in the morning, and suspecting their motivations, and questioning their intentions. “Why?” was one of Verna’s favorite questions, along with “Who says?” and “What’s that got to do with it?” Walter had always complained that she was suspicious, and Verna felt he was right. She was the sort of person who rarely took anything at face value, and she knew it.

  Unfortunately, Verna’s suspicious habits had been very hard on Walter during the three years of their marriage. He taught history and civics at Darling Academy and lived in a world that was studded with indisputable facts, the way an oak door is studded with nails. As far as he was concerned, all you had to do to get along happily was to learn the facts and repeat them in the right order when you were called on, and everything would be honky-dory. Verna’s habit of asking questions that didn’t have any clear-cut answers had made him very uncomfortable, and if he hadn’t walked out in front of that Greyhound bus on Route 12 that rainy afternoon ten years ago, Verna suspected that they probably would have gotten a divorce before very long. Instead, Walter had ended up under a sycamore tree in the southwest corner of the Darling Cemetery, out on Schoolhouse Road, and Verna had ended up a widow.

  The month before the accident, however, they had gone on a trip to New York together. It was their first vacation and their last, so you might call it Walter’s trip of a lifetime. His cousin Gerald had taken them on the new subway line from Manhattan all the way out to Coney Island to eat cotton candy and Nathan’s Famous frankfurters and ride the new 150-foot-tall Wonder Wheel, so high it seemed to scrape the sky. And then they took the ferry to Liberty Island, where they climbed all 354 steps inside the Statue of Liberty so they could look out from the windows of the crown and marvel at the magical city across the blue, blue water.

  And on their last night Gerald had taken them to see the Naughty and Nice Sisters in Mr. Ziegfeld’s notorious Frolic, where Miss Lily Lake and Miss Lorelei LaMotte paraded onto the stage right over the heads of the gasping audience, on a runway made of see-through glass. In another act, scantily clad dancers strutted out into the audience, encouraging male customers to use the glowing tip-ends of their cigars to burst the balloons that covered essential parts of the girls’ anatomy. Walter had been bug-eyed, and even Verna couldn’t remember a more exciting evening.

  So even though she swore she didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, Verna certainly had a few sentimental memories and this was the best of them. Walter had been happy and she had been happy and that happiness had followed them like a rosy cloud all the way back to Darling, Alabama, where Walter had stepped out in front of the Greyhound bus and Verna had become a widow.

  And there, just a half block ahead of her, teetering along on her ridiculous red high heels, was the reason for that happiness. Miss Lorelei LaMotte, who had put on a performance that had made Walter’s eyes bug and made Verna laugh out loud. Miss Lorelei LaMotte, who had given Verna and Walter something interesting and unusual to talk about on their long journey home. And Verna, who wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered to do any such thing, felt suddenly compelled to tell Miss LaMotte just how happy her performance had made them. She picked up her pace.

  But right when Verna had almost caught up, Miss LaMotte slowed, looked around as if to make sure where she was, then turned to go into Lima’s Drugstore, which stood at the southwest corner of the courthouse square. At that same moment, a 1929 lemon yellow Cadillac Phaeton, the canvas top folded back, came down the street at a fast clip, trailing a thick cloud of dust. It was Mr. Bailey Beauchamp’s Cadillac, driven by Mr. Beauchamp’s colored man, Lightning, with Mr. Beauchamp himself, dressed in his usual white suit and wearing a white straw hat, sitting in the backseat, smoking a large cigar. As the Cadillac zipped past the drugstore corner, Verna saw Mr. Beauchamp’s head swivel, like one of those funny wooden dolls with its head on a spring. He was staring at Miss LaMotte. He was still staring as Lightning drove into the next block.

  Verna chuckled. Miss LaMotte was a head turner, all right. It was no surprise that she had attracted Bailey Beauchamp’s attention. He was a gallant Southern gentleman, of course, and the owner of one of the largest plantations in the area. But he had been widowed three years before, and in the time since, had developed quite a reputation with the ladies. He was currently reputed to be pursuing Mrs. Sophia Hobart, a widow of substantial fortune and influence in Darling. Rumor had it that Mrs. Hobart was planning to go to Atlanta to shop for her trousseau, so the announcement of their engagement was ex
pected soon.

  Verna turned and followed Miss LaMotte inside Lima’s Drugstore. Owned and operated by Mr. Lester Lima, the shop had a glass display window that featured a variety of products. Today, it was a pyramid of men’s Brylcreem (“For Head-First Brilliance”), Wildroot Hair Tonic (“For Dandruff and Falling Hair”), and an assortment of combs and hairbrushes, along with a large poster that featured a handsome man being rejected by a pretty girl, with the ominous warning, “You should have used Listerine-kills germs in 15 seconds!” The shop was long and narrow, with a soda fountain on the left, where Earlynne Biddle’s son Benny was washing glasses, and a cosmetics department on the right, where Bunny Scott used to work. Mr. Lima himself presided over the pharmacy department at the back of the store.

  Benny looked up. “C’n I help you?” he asked, shaking the suds off his hands. “Oh, hi, Miz Tidwell. C’n I make you a banana split? A malt, maybe?”

  “Not today, thanks, Benny,” Verna replied. “I’m just browsing.”

  “That’s jake.” Benny grinned and nodded toward the back of the store. “Real looker, ain’t she?” He licked his lips hungrily. “Hotsy totsy.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t approve of that language, Benny,” Verna said sternly.

  The boy looked down. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Didn’t mean nothin’.”

  Verna turned away to a display of boxes of Euthymol and Pepsodent toothpastes, glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder. She had expected to see Miss LaMotte, who was a cosmetics customer if she had ever seen one, browsing the lipstick and nail polish displays. But she wasn’t. She had gone directly to the back of the store, to the pharmacy counter, where she was handing a piece of paper to Mr. Lima, a tall, thin man in a white coat and a pair of round gold glasses that rode low on his long, thin nose.