The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Lizzy counted the strikes. “Mercy. Four o’clock already. I need to get home. Is six okay for supper? The movie starts at seven fifteen.”

  “Sure,” Verna said. “Six o’clock, at the diner.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder if the Naughty and Nice Sisters have ever met Clara Bow.”

  TWO

  Lizzy’s Key

  Lizzy said good-bye to Verna, turned, and walked east along Camellia. She crossed Robert E. Lee, went another block, and turned north on Jefferson Davis. This was a pretty part of town, and even though the houses weren’t as big and fancy as the newer ones out near the country club, they were painted white or gray with blue or red shutters, and the front porches were furnished with a rocking chair or a porch swing and wreathed with honeysuckle. There were lawns, too, with grass that was green in the spring and turned brown in the dry, hot summer. It was early October and the lawns were brown now, but most of the houses had flower beds out front, and in the dusky evenings, people sat on their porches, knitting or reading the newspaper and watching the little girls jumping rope and the boys playing baseball or tag in the dusty street.

  Glancing at the houses, a stranger might find it hard to tell that times were so tough and money was so hard to come by. But if he looked more closely, he’d see that half the shingles on Mrs. Weber’s roof had been ripped off in a wind storm and hadn’t been replaced yet. Mrs. Weber didn’t live there anymore. She had lost the house to foreclosure and had gone to Mobile to live with her daughter. And three doors down, the house with the two broken windows in the front had been vacant for so long that the bank’s faded For Sale sign was hidden in the withered grass. People who couldn’t pay their rent or make their mortgage payments were moving in with family-with their children or their parents or their brothers or their sisters. They had to. They had no place else to go.

  But Lizzy wasn’t thinking about this. She was thinking about what Verna had told her. A pair of vaudeville stars had moved to Darling! And if Verna was right (Verna usually was), one of them had come a long, long way. To go from being plain-Jane Miss Nona Jean Jamison of Monroeville, Alabama, to Miss Lorelei LaMotte of the Great White Way must have been an incredible journey.

  And then a wonderful idea suddenly popped into Lizzy’s head. The Naughty and Nice Sisters act wasn’t suitable for the Dahlias’ talent show, but wouldn’t Miss LaMotte make a splendid subject for a feature story in the Darling Dispatch? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of article that Charlie Dickens, the newspaper’s editor, would love to print?

  Why, of course it was! It was one of those uplifting, heartwarming, hometown-girl-makes-good stories that everybody likes to read, especially in hard times. And while Darling wasn’t Miss LaMotte’s hometown, Monroeville was, and Monroeville was only fifteen miles away. Lizzy shivered a little, thinking of the exciting possibilities. She could do an interview with Miss LaMotte about her life, starting with her small-town girlhood as plain-Jane Nona Jean Jamison. And then her move to New York, where she had enjoyed a huge success in the glamorous and competitive world of vaudeville, catching the eye of Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld himself. Miss LaMotte had doubtless taken a few hard knocks along the way, which Lizzy could use to show how dedicated she was to becoming a dancer and how hard she’d worked to get to the top. The article could end with her decision to leave her big-city life and move to tiny Darling, Alabama, where she planned to care for her aging aunt and lead a life of quiet and peaceful retirement, far from the madding crowd. It would be a charming true-life story that everybody in town would read and talk about for weeks, maybe months.

  And she-Elizabeth Lacy-was the perfect person to write it, wasn’t she? For the past five years, she had written a garden column for the weekly Dispatch. Lizzy loved writing about plants and people’s gardens and the passing of the seasons and the sweltering heats and sudden storms of their Alabama climate. She enjoyed doing research and corresponding with other Southern gardeners.

  But in May, she had written a feature story about a young woman who had been shot in a green Pontiac roadster that belonged to a dentist and the car pushed into Pine Mill Creek. The story was based on her own investigation into the life and death of Eva Louise Scott, the girl in the car, and everybody told her what a great piece of reporting it was. It was a sad story, too, for Bunny-that was the girl’s nickname-had been beautiful and gay and young. And even though she was a bit reckless and heedless and wanted jewelry and other pretty things more than was probably good for her, Bunny hadn’t deserved to die, which of course was the main point of Lizzy’s article.

  After that successful debut as a feature writer, Mr. Dickens had told her that if she came up with another interesting story idea, he’d be glad to consider it. Lizzy had thought of several, but none seemed to be exciting enough. The summer had passed with its customary sedateness, with nothing more explosive than the fireworks blowing up at the Elks’ Club Fourth of July picnic or more tragic than the swimming hole drying up in the long August drought or more unexpected than the out-of-the-blue emergency landing of a Cessna Model A airplane on the grassy airstrip near the county fairgrounds-none of which put a match to Lizzy’s creative fire.

  But this was different, Lizzy thought excitedly. A story about Lorelei LaMotte, famous Broadway performer, would give her a chance to do some serious writing about a woman who surely had a fascinating personal history of success in a difficult profession, with a few intrigues and adventures here and there. It would definitely be a literary challenge, which was just what she had been looking for.

  For years Lizzy had read everything-good, bad, and indifferent-that she could get her hands on. She kept a notebook, writing little stories about people she knew and places that captured her attention and events that took place here in town. And even though nothing very big or exciting ever happened in Darling, there were always lots of little things going on, surprising crises that poked up unexpectedly out of the serene surface of the day like… well, like those lilies, those naked ladies shooting suddenly up out of the grass when you had absolutely no idea they were there and dazzling you with their astonishing blooms. They weren’t the kinds of stories you’d read in the newspaper, which was usually full of facts and figures, but Lizzy enjoyed writing them.

  But while Lizzy was a small-town girl who knew she could comfortably write about Miss LaMotte’s small-town beginnings, she couldn’t even begin to imagine the life of a vaudeville performer. She would have to do a huge amount of research-talk to Miss LaMotte at length and maybe Miss Lake, and read entertainment magazines like Variety and Billboard-before she could even think of writing anything. She frowned. But if she couldn’t imagine Miss LaMotte’s life, maybe she’d never be able to write about it, no matter how much research she did. It’s hard to write about something that is entirely foreign to you.

  Occupied with these thoughts, Lizzy had crossed Dauphin and Franklin and reached her block of Jefferson Davis. She was home almost before she knew it, walking up the steps to the front porch, putting her key into the lock and turning it, with the special happiness that she felt every time she stepped through the green-painted front door and into the tiny front hall, which was just big enough for a single shelf, an oval wall-hung mirror, and a row of coat hooks, where she now hung her floppy-brimmed hat.

  Home. The word had taken on a new and very special meaning a couple of years before. Until then, Lizzy had lived her whole life with her mother. Her father had died when she was a baby, leaving his widow a nice little cache of money, safely and prudently invested. It wasn’t enough to allow her mother to live an extravagant life, but it was certainly enough to keep her from working or worrying her pretty head about anything of any consequence. This fiscal consideration had allowed Mrs. Lacy to focus every bit of her attention, energy, and concern on Elizabeth, her only child. She loved sewing and hat-making, and she dressed her daughter in her beautiful creations: ruffled and embroidered dresses and hats piled with ribbons and silk flowers.

  Her mother’s attentions had
not bothered Lizzy so much when she was a little girl, but as she grew older, the fuss over what she wore and how she fixed her hair turned to a constant, quarrelsome nagging. It was “Elizabeth, if you keep on frowning, your forehead will be permanently wrinkled!” and “Elizabeth, stop chewing your nails this instant! Your hands are a scandal!” and “Elizabeth, I simply will not allow you to bob your hair!” And every time Lizzy turned around, her mother had made her another new hat-or redecorated an old one-and insisted that she wear it.

  The only way she could escape was to close the door to her room and write in her journal or read, for Mrs. Lacy couldn’t follow her into the pages of The Railway Children (who were blessed with a very agreeable mother) or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Huck had no mother at all). The trouble with writing in her journal, of course, was that Lizzy was writing about the secret places of her own inner life, and she could never be sure that-no matter how carefully she hid her work-her mother hadn’t found and read it. Lizzy was under no illusions. Her mother was that kind of mother.

  Sometime during her last year of high school, Lizzy realized that she was never going to have a life of her own if she didn’t find a way to escape. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many options. The Lacys were well enough off to live comfortably in the house Mr. Lacy had left them, but not so well off (at least, that’s what her mother said) that Lizzy could go away to college. There hadn’t been any available jobs in town at the time, and the thought of leaving Darling for some unknown city was so daunting that Lizzy (more timid then than she was now) couldn’t even think it.

  So when Reggie Morris had proposed the day after her high school graduation, Lizzy had said “yes” without a second thought. Reggie’s father was a building contractor and the Morrises were well enough off so that Lizzy and Reggie would have their own house. Against her mother’s loudly expressed wishes, she took Reggie’s modest diamond engagement ring and began dreaming about the joys of having her own home, where she could read and write to her heart’s content and her mother would come only when she was invited.

  But when the Alabama 167th came home from France in 1919, Reggie hadn’t come home with them. It took a long time to get over the death of her dream. Lizzy (who by that time was older and somewhat braver) thought of moving to Mobile or Birmingham to find work and get away from her mother, which would have been the right thing to do. But she had already taken a secretarial job at Moseley & Moseley Law Office, where she found herself developing an extraordinary crush on Mr. Benton Moseley. He was just out of law school, handsome and bright, newly in practice with his father, a widely respected lawyer and former state senator. Mr. Benton Moseley had always been a complete gentleman, of course, although Lizzy (who by this time was reading a great many dime-novel romances in which beautiful and worthy but penniless young women met and married handsome, worthy, and wealthy young gentlemen) found herself conjuring up endless fantasies about him.

  When the senior Mr. Moseley died, the junior Mr. Moseley continued the practice, and Lizzy (who had finally put Reggie’s diamond in a box in her dresser drawer) had gone to work every day happily cocooned in her romantic dreams. She continued to live at home, but her mother had somehow faded into the background-still bothersome, of course, but more like an annoying barking dog that lived in a house a block away, rather than on the other side of the fence. Lizzy, so fully focused on Mr. Moseley that she felt his presence shining on her like a warm spring sun, lived for the hours she spent at work. It had been rather like living in a dream that was so intense and so magically real that it usurped all other realities. It hadn’t mattered that the object of her adulation didn’t return her feelings-or even appear to notice them.

  In fact, Lizzy had gone on glorying in her unrequited love even after Mr. Moseley had courted and married a blond debutante from a wealthy Birmingham family, built a big fancy house out near the country club, and fathered two girls. Then had come his election to the state legislature, and Lizzy had dutifully carried on, keeping the practice going while he followed his father’s footsteps to the capitol in Montgomery.

  That was probably what brought her to her senses. With Mr. Moseley away for weeks at a time, Lizzy woke up from her dream and began to realize what an utter fool she was making of herself. She toted her dime-novel romances out to the backyard and burned them. She took the treasured snapshot of Mr. Moseley out of the secret place in her billfold and added it to the fire. Then she went back to writing in her journal-but she kept it with her, in her handbag, so that her mother could not find and read it.

  Mrs. Lacy, of course, never suspected any of this. She had decided that her daughter (her heart broken by the death of her young fiancé) would be a lifelong spinster, quite naturally preferring to live with her mother for the rest of her life. And Lizzy, who had been putting away money out of every paycheck against the increasingly remote possibility that something would happen to change her circumstances, found herself beginning to share her mother’s unassailable belief that the two of them would go on living together, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

  And then something unexpectedly wonderful had happened.

  Old Mr. Flagg died. He had lived across the street from the Lacys for nearly four decades, in a small frame bungalow with a postage-stamp parlor, a kitchen, two little upstairs bedrooms, a front porch with a swing, and a screened-in back porch. Mr. Flagg had been a gardener who lavished his time and attention on his large yard, where he grew sunflowers and a fig tree and pink roses on the trellis and a perennial border. There was also a small vegetable garden-just large enough for one person-only a step away from the back porch. Lizzy was suddenly seized by the idea that she had to have this house, and she had taken her improbable scheme to Mr. Moseley, who was in charge of settling the old man’s estate.

  But Mr. Moseley didn’t think it was improbable at all. With his help, Lizzy secretly bought the house, commissioned the necessary repairs-including a bathroom, electricity, gas, and water-and furnished it. She didn’t say a single word to her mother, who was in great suspense about the secret identity of the new across-the-street neighbor, until the work was done and her new home was ready to move into. The announcement had sent Mrs. Lacy into hysterics, of course, but Lizzy, for the first time in her life, had held her ground.

  And even though her own house was not quite far enough away to qualify as an “escape” from her mother, it had made all the difference. For the first time ever, Lizzy held the key to her own life. She could step into her own place, close the door behind her, and be perfectly at home. She still felt a warm affection for Mr. Moseley, but the torch she had carried for so long was quite extinguished and there had been another man in her life-Grady Alexander-for more than a year. Lizzy wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about Grady, who always seemed to want something from her, and she knew (uncomfortably) that she would have to make a decision about their relationship before very long. But for the moment, she felt she could handle the situation. She hoped things would stay that way.

  And now, as she turned up the path that led from the street to her front porch and saw Daffodil, her orange tabby, sitting on the porch railing waiting for her, Lizzy felt once again the pleasure of coming home to a house that was completely, entirely, and remarkably hers.

  Except that her mother had a key.

  This was a new situation-it had just happened the week before-and Lizzy was still quietly fuming about it. Mrs. Lacy had apparently lifted Lizzy’s spare key from its hook by the back door and taken it to Musgrove’s Hardware, where she said that her daughter wanted her to have a copy. Lizzy knew about this bald-faced lie, because Mr. Musgrove had happened to mention it to her when she stopped in to get a new rubber plug for her bathtub. She hadn’t yet decided whether to tell her mother to hand over the copied key or have Mr. Musgrove install new locks on the front and back doors. Either way, there was going to be a battle.

  But Lizzy always tried to see things from both sides of the question and give the othe
r person the benefit of the doubt. On balance, she felt that her mother probably wouldn’t use the key very often, and she was determined not to let it disturb the pleasure she felt each time she put her very own key in the lock of her very own door and turned it.

  “Come on, Daffy,” she said, as the cat rubbed against her ankles, purring an enthusiastic welcome. “Let’s get you some milk.”

  Stepping inside, Lizzy took a deep breath of the faint lemony fragrance she used to polish the furniture and savored the quiet that fell on her like a shawl every time she came in. On the left, a flight of stairs led up to two small bedrooms. On the right, a wide doorway opened into a little parlor, which she had furnished with a very nice Mission-style leather cushioned sofa, a chair she had reupholstered in dark brown corduroy, and a Tiffany-style lamp with a stained-glass shade. She had paid seven dollars and fifty cents for that lamp-far too much, she knew, but she had fallen in love with its amber-colored light, which gleamed richly against the refinished pine floors. Behind the parlor was the kitchen with a tiny dining nook, just big enough for two, looking out on the garden. At the end of the hall was a large storage room, part of which she had converted into a bathroom with a claw-footed tub, tiny sink, pull-chain toilet, and newly tiled floor. (Mr. Flagg had used the privy behind the garage.) It was the most perfect house in the world, she felt, and-after all the quarrelsome years she had lived with her mother-a perfectly private place, almost like a sanctuary.

  She went down the hall to the kitchen, Daffy running eagerly ahead of her, and stopped stock-still in the doorway. In the middle of the oilcloth-covered table was her last-year’s blue felt cloche, newly decorated with exquisite peacock feathers and glass beads, all shades of blue-a gift from her mother, no doubt. Beside it was a folded note.