The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Is that the pillow in the photo?” she asked, before she thought. “And that’s you, isn’t it?” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she was sorry. Miss Rogers always made it plain that personal questions were highly offensive.

  But at this moment, it didn’t seem to matter. Miss Rogers reached into her sleeve for the hanky she kept tucked there. “Yes,” she sniffled, and blew her nose. “The picture was taken the day I entered the orphanage in Richmond. I was five. The pillow was the only thing I had with me, the orphanage director said. No dolls, no toys, not even any clothes, except for what I had on. And my grandmother’s red pillow.”

  Bessie took a breath and waded into new waters. “You said that your grandmother’s name was Rose?” she prompted gently, thinking that if Miss Rogers could talk about the pillow even a little, she might be less likely to cry about it. “What else do you know about her?”

  “Nothing at all,” Miss Rogers said, and blew her nose again. “Just her first name, Rose.” She paused. “No, wait, there’s a little more. I recall . . . I recall my mother telling me that my grandmother drowned.”

  “Drowned! How horrible! Do you know any of the details?”

  “None,” Miss Rogers replied, shaking her head. “My mother—her name was Rose, too—said that my grandmother was a very brave woman and that she’d tell me all about it when I was old enough to understand. But then—” Her voice dropped.

  Bessie took a breath and ventured a little further. “Then?” she asked softly.

  Miss Rogers straightened her shoulders, as if she were facing a painful fact. “Then she and my father were divorced. They were both very young, you see, when they married. She couldn’t . . . She didn’t want to keep me, and he couldn’t. He was in the army. So she left me in the orphanage in Richmond. I never heard from her again.”

  “Oh, dear,” Bessie breathed. How horrible, how unimaginably horrible, to be abandoned by both your parents! She wanted to know why this had happened, but Miss Rogers’ eyes were filling with tears again. So she steadied her voice and asked, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Your father’s name was Rogers?”

  “No.” Miss Rogers went to the window and stood, looking out. Her fingers held her handkerchief, twisting it. “I’ve never known his name, or even who he was.” Her voice dropped as if that were something that she was ashamed of. “When I was eleven, the orphanage sent me to live with Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, on a small farm in Maryland. They had no children of their own, but they had already adopted several boys to help out with the farm work. Mrs. Rogers needed a girl to help with the cooking and the housework. That’s why they took me.”

  Bessie felt her heart turn over and she bit her lip. Her own mother had died when she was thirteen, and her father had expected her to take her mother’s place in the household. But at least she had friends and a family home to ease the brutal pain of her mother’s death.

  “It must have been very hard for you,” she said quietly, thinking that this short conversation had already shed a great deal of light on why Miss Rogers had turned from a frightened little girl with banana curls into the stiff, unyielding woman she was now. Bessie hated to admit it, but maybe she ought to be grateful to Lucky Lindy, whose nasty claws had made this intimate exchange possible.

  “It was difficult to leave my friends at the orphanage,” Miss Rogers said, almost as if she were talking to herself. “But I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. I had to be responsible for myself. I had to earn my way in the world.” She pulled in her breath. “And as it turned out, I was lucky. The Rogers were good to me, and kind. They allowed me to go to grammar school, and when I did well, they let me go to high school, too.” She turned away from the window, smiling a little. “That’s where I learned Latin, you know. And learned to love books. It was my dream to work in a library. My passion. And now I do.” Her smile faded and her eyes became bleak. “Although perhaps not for long.”

  Bessie hardly knew what to say. For the first time since she had known Miss Rogers, she understood her—at least a little. If Miss Rogers could say that the people who took her were kind to her, and especially that they allowed her to get an education, she was indeed lucky. Bessie had read of instances where orphaned children were sent out to work as farmhands and mill hands and domestics and never got any sort of education.

  “So you began to use their name,” Bessie said at last. “Rogers.”

  Miss Rogers nodded. “I knew my first name—Dorothy—but there was some confusion about my surname. The documents I brought with me to the orphanage were unfortunately lost by the time Mr. and Mrs. Rogers took me. When I went to school, it was easier to use their name. And since I grew up with it, I’ve kept it, all these years.” Her eyes went to the spill of bloodred yarn on the floor. “Like Grandmother Rose’s pillow.”

  “Yes,” Bessie said. “I see.”

  She did, too. As an amateur historian, she knew how important it was to be able to trace your family tree, to know where you came from and where and to whom you belonged. Poor Miss Rogers knew none of that. She had a borrowed name, a lost mother, an unknown father. No wonder she was so distressed about the damage Lucky Lindy had done. The pillow wasn’t just a pillow, or even just her grandmother’s pillow. It was her only link to a faraway past in which she had been loved and cared for, a time when she had been somebody’s daughter, somebody’s granddaughter.

  Miss Rogers replaced her hanky in her sleeve, took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders. Her voice became brisk.

  “Well, then. That’s all there is to say, Miss Bloodworth. You have seen the damage. You must tell Mrs. Sedalius that she has to get rid of that cat. The creature simply can’t be trusted.”

  “You’re certainly right about that,” Bessie said repentantly. If she had said no to that cat in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened. She bent over and picked up the pillow with its trailing strings of ripped and frayed yarn. She turned it over in her hands.

  “I wonder,” she said, “whether we could unravel the yarn and wash it. Then perhaps we could ask Mrs. Sedalius to knit a new cover for you, using your grandmother’s yarn.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” Miss Rogers said, shaking her head. “That’s the cover my grandmother knitted, with her very own hands.”

  “But it would be the same yarn,” Bessie persisted gently. “And don’t you think it might be better to have a repaired cover than no cover at all?”

  Miss Rogers’ glance went back to the shredded mass of yarn. “Do you really think it can be reknitted?” she asked doubtfully.

  “I’m sure it can,” Bessie said, taking charge. “But first, we’ll need to finish what that awful cat started. We’ll unravel the yarn and wash it. Surely we’ll be able to salvage enough to knit a new cover.”

  Miss Rogers still looked reluctant, but she nodded. “I suppose we can try,” she said slowly.

  So for the next ten minutes, Bessie and Miss Rogers sat side by side on the edge of the narrow bed, Bessie unraveling the yarn onto Miss Rogers’ extended hands, making a skein. The yarn, which appeared to be a two-ply handspun wool, was strong for its age, Bessie thought. It must be sixty or seventy years old, perhaps older. But it had frayed in several places (or been torn by the frenzied Lucky Lindy), and when Bessie came to a break, she twisted the ends together, splicing them. Soon, she had unraveled the last row of stitches and Miss Rogers was holding a fat red skein. Bessie pulled it off her hands and tied bits of yarn around it in several places so the skein wouldn’t tangle when it was washed and hung up to dry.

  While Bessie did that, Miss Rogers was turning the pillow in her hands. “There’s something very curious . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she frowned, puzzled. “Whatever can it be, Miss Bloodworth?” She held out the pillow so Bessie could have a look.

  Now that the red knitted cover had been removed, they could see that there was another, s
econd cover under it. It was made of a coarse, tan-colored fabric, linen, perhaps. Both sides were covered with neat columns of colored cross-stitch embroidery in a bewildering pattern of hieroglyphics, interspersed with numerals and a few letters of the Greek alphabet. The pillow had a musty scent, as if it had been stored in a closed trunk for a very long time.

  Bessie stared at it for a moment. “How mysterious,” she said at last. “It looks like a secret code or something. Have you ever tried to figure it out?”

  “I’ve never even seen it,” Miss Rogers replied. “I thought . . . I assumed that there was stuffing inside the knitted cover. Or maybe a plain cotton cover, with the stuffing inside. But nothing like this.” She turned it over. “What do you suppose these symbols mean?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to guess,” Bessie said honestly. And then she hit on a strategy—a very clever strategy, she thought—that might keep Miss Rogers occupied while she dealt with Mrs. Sedalius and Lucky Lindy.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “You could copy the letters and numbers and symbols. Maybe, when we see it on paper, we’ll be able to solve the mystery.” She paused, thinking. “Or we could show it to somebody else. Mr. Dickens at the newspaper, for instance.”

  Charlie Dickens, as well as being the editor of the Darling Dispatch, was a veteran of the Great War, where he had served in Europe and been a captain in the army. Bessie had known his sister when they were girls, and she and Edna Fay were still good friends. Charlie was always busy reporting the news, trying to keep the antique press working, and tending to the job printing business that supplemented the slim returns from subscriptions and ad sales. She didn’t think he’d be eager to try to decipher a random assortment of symbols transcribed from somebody’s musty old pillow.

  But he had once given an interesting talk at the Darling Literary Society on the history of codes and ciphers, which had been his specialty in the army. If anybody in town would know about such matters, he was the one. Maybe he could tell at a glance whether the symbols had any meaning. And if copying the complicated cross-stitching on her pillow would keep Miss Rogers busy and her mind off Lucky Lindy, it was certainly worth a try. In fact, that part of the strategy seemed to be working already.

  “Oh, what a good idea,” Miss Rogers exclaimed enthusiastically. “Mr. Dickens comes into the library sometimes to do research, and I know that he’s interested in all manner of things. I’ll start copying this immediately. Really, Miss Bloodworth, I had no idea that it might be anything other than—”

  She was interrupted by a shrill shriek from two doors down the hall. Bessie jumped to her feet, startled.

  And then she heard another cry. “Lindy, Lindy, you naughty, naughty boy! Just look what you have done to my knitting!”

  With Miss Rogers at her heels, Bessie hurried down the hall to see what was wrong. She found Mrs. Sedalius standing in the middle of her room, holding a half-knitted sock in her hand. Rows of stitches had been pulled loose, and at her feet lay a tangled ball of yarn. Lucky Lindy sat on the top of her dresser, head cocked, green eyes alight with mischief.

  “Oh, dear,” Bessie said sympathetically. “Oh, Mrs. Sedalius, I’m so sorry!”

  “So am I.” Mrs. Sedalius looked down at her sock, pressing her lips together, shaking her head. “Bessie, Bessie,” she moaned. “I have been forced to a terrible decision. I’m afraid that this will make all the ladies desperately unhappy. They will hate me for it. But I have no other choice.”

  Bessie pulled in her breath. “What decision?”

  “I’m afraid that we’ll have to find another home for dear Lucky Lindy. This is the third piece of my knitting he has ruined—two socks and a scarf.” She looked mournfully at the cat. “I didn’t tell anyone because I kept hoping the dear fellow would mend his ways and learn to be better behaved. But I’m afraid that he had already picked up too many bad habits before he came to live with us. He’s incorrigible.” Her old face crumpled. “But oh, I will miss him! It will tear out a piece of my heart to see him go.”

  “Oh, dear,” Bessie said again. “I am sorry. Yes, we will all miss him. What a terrible, terrible shame.”

  She had to turn away so Mrs. Sedalius couldn’t see her smile.

  FOUR

  Lizzy

  Lizzy was sleeping soundly on Monday morning when she was awakened by the enthusiastic crowing of Mrs. Freeman’s rooster. He lived with his harem of hens a few doors down the block and took it as his personal responsibility to wake the whole neighborhood at dawn. Lizzy tried to pull the feather pillow over her head but gave it up when Daffodil, her orange tabby, leapt up on the bed and pushed his face against hers with his rumbling purr.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” she grumbled. She threw back the crinkle cotton spread, slid out of bed, and went to stand, stretching and yawning, in front of the second-floor window that looked onto her backyard.

  Her backyard. In spite of the early hour, the sight of it gave her pleasure. The weeping willow draped supple green branches over the fence, the early-morning sunlight brightened the dewy pink roses blooming against the shed, and the small kitchen garden looked green and perky after Saturday’s thunder shower. The grass was especially pretty, too, because Grady Alexander had mowed it the evening before. In partial payment, she had cooked a nice Sunday supper: fried chicken (one of Mrs. Freeman’s young cockerels), peas and new potatoes, a salad of fresh lettuce and spinach, and buttermilk pie.

  Lizzy wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little as she thought of Grady. She considered him a dear friend, although her mother liked to call him her “steady beau” and Grady himself seemed to operate on the comfortable assumption that there was a wedding in their near future and a family on the not-so-distant horizon. (In fact, he had told her recently that he wanted to have at least three children, and the sooner the better, because at thirty-four, he wasn’t getting any younger.) Grady had a good job as the county agricultural agent and came from a respectable family. In her mother’s estimation, he was Lizzy’s best chance—maybe her last chance, since she had already celebrated her thirtieth birthday—at a husband and a happy home.

  But while Lizzy enjoyed being with Grady and sometimes even thought she might love him enough to marry him, a wedding in the near future was entirely out of the question. Her little house—almost a doll’s house, really—wasn’t big enough for two people, and she was selfish enough (that was her mother’s word) not to want to give it up. What’s more, she had no intention of giving up her job in Mr. Moseley’s law office, or surrendering the personal independence that her weekly paycheck brought her, which was what most Darling men expected their Darling women to do when they got married. Grady wasn’t most Darling men, of course. He said he understood how she felt about working and he’d be willing to let her continue. But she didn’t like the sound of willing to let her continue. It ought to be her choice, not his.

  And at the top of her mind was the insistent thought that this was no time to start having babies, which was another thing that Darling men expected to happen after you said I do. Of course, there were the usual methods that Lizzy’s married friends used to avoid getting pregnant. For instance, you could try saying no until your safe period, or use Vaseline or olive oil before and douche with soap suds or vinegar or Lysol after. You could go to Doc Roberts and get a prescription for a diaphragm, which you could buy at Lima’s Drugstore (if you weren’t too embarrassed to purchase it under Mr. Lima’s knowing gaze). Or you could try to get your husband to take precautions. But Lizzy’s friends kept getting pregnant even though they said they didn’t want babies, so she guessed that none of these methods were very effective.

  Daffy curled himself around her ankles, purring loudly, and she reached down and picked him up. As she did, she remembered why this Monday was different, and remembering made her smile.

  “This isn’t your everyday Monday, Daffy,” she sa
id, rubbing her cheek against his golden fur. After a moment, she put the cat back on the bed and stripped off her filmy nightgown. “I’m in charge of the office today. And not just today, either. All this week and maybe next. It’s going to be swell fun!”

  She stepped into her cotton panties and put on a brassiere and slip. She was slim enough not to need a “foundation garment” or even a lighter-weight girdle, an omission that her mother—who wore a boned corset—considered disgraceful. Padding barefoot to her closet, she took out a silky rayon crepe with three-quarter sleeves and a ruffled neckline. In soft browns and orange, it was her favorite dress. She wore it when she felt like celebrating.

  As Daffy watched, Lizzy sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her brown hair. “And where, you are asking, will Mr. Moseley be while I am in charge of the office?” Talking to a cat was one of the pleasures, she thought, of living alone. “Why isn’t he sitting behind his desk, smoking his pipe and signing papers, the way he usually does?”

  Without waiting for Daffy to answer her question, she picked up her brown eyebrow pencil and began to sketch out thin, stylishly peaked eyebrows. “Well, since you’ve asked, I’ll tell you. Mr. Moseley has gone to Birmingham to meet with the Alabama Roosevelt for President club. They are planning to send a delegate to the Democratic convention next year to try and get Governor Roosevelt on the ticket. Then Mr. Moseley is driving over to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he is going to meet with the governor, who spends his vacations there. So what do you think of that, Daffodil? Mr. Moseley is meeting with Governor Roosevelt!”

  Lizzy picked up her lipstick—a soft orangey red—and applied it deftly. She was glad that the Kewpie-doll lips of the twenties were passé and full lips, like hers, were back in fashion. That done, she added gold button earrings and turned her head this way and that, studying her reflection in the mirror. She saw a not-quite-pretty face with wide-spaced, steady gray eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a resolute chin, framed by a ripple of soft brown curls. It was the face of a woman who knew her own mind, she thought. The face of a woman who could handle just about any challenge that came her way.