The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Mr. Moseley planned to go home after the meeting, so Lizzy went into his office to close his wooden blind. She stood for a moment gazing at the imposing Cypress County courthouse across the street. Built of brick more than a quarter century before, it sat in the middle of the town square, under a white-painted dome and a stately clock tower. It was surrounded by several large tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera, Miss Rogers would insist), an apron of bright green spring grass, and the staked-out spot on the lawn where the Dahlias planned to plant a quilt garden—flowers planted in a familiar quilt pattern, in red, yellow, blue, and white. The club maintained several flower beds around their little town, believing that when times were tough, a few pretty blossoms went a long way toward brightening the dark days. And since most of the seeds were saved from the previous year’s flowers, all it cost was a few hours and a little bit of digging.

  A storm was blowing up from the south and Lizzy was glad that she had brought her umbrella to work that morning. As she stood at the window, the courthouse clock struck six, startling a flock of gray pigeons out of the shelter of the tower. The basement door opened and old Hezekiah, the courthouse’s colored custodian, hurried out to pull down the American flag before the rain arrived. Lizzy appreciated Hezzy’s efforts, for she hated to see the splendid Star Spangled Banner hanging out in the rain. The flag always seemed to her to represent what was true and good about this country. Like the courthouse itself, but maybe even more so, it stood for the law and justice that held America together like a special kind of glue.

  When she had first come to work in Mr. Moseley’s law office, right after high school, Lizzy had been naïve enough to think that the law was black and white and right in every respect, and if you were a good citizen you always obeyed it, not just because you didn’t want to get in trouble but because doing what was wrong was . . . well, it was wrong. The law said so.

  But the longer she worked here and the more she saw of the law in action, the more she understood that this just wasn’t true. The law was hundreds of shades of gray, not black and white, and sometimes it was outright wrong instead of right—like that legal loophole that Ozzie Sherman was using to avoid paying workmen’s compensation for the men at the sawmill. Or as Mr. Moseley liked to say, “All the justice in the world isn’t fastened up in that old courthouse over there, Lizzy my girl. Sometimes the law works better when it’s bent just a little.”

  Lizzy wasn’t going to think about that right now, however. She had a date with Grady Alexander at seven and it was time to go home. She closed Mr. Moseley’s blind and went back to the outer office, where she covered her Underwood, checked that the hot plate was unplugged, and took one last look around, making sure that everything was ready for the next morning’s work.

  She loved the special character of this old room, with its creaky wooden floor, glass-fronted bookcases, and wood-paneled walls hung with certificates and diplomas and the somber, gilt-framed portraits of the three deceased senior Moseleys—Mr. Moseley’s great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father. The junior Mr. Moseley, however, stubbornly refused to have his portrait—or even a photograph—taken.

  “All traditions have to come to an end sometime,” he said firmly. “And I am putting a stake through the heart of this one right now. Anybody wants to know what I look like, they can by God take a gander at my face, not at my portrait.”

  But he left the portraits hanging, he said, as a reminder that “the sins of the fathers are forever with us, especially in the goldurned South.” Then he’d shaken his head dejectedly and muttered something that Lizzy didn’t quite understand: “Forever and forever. We’ll never be free of them.” But then, Mr. Moseley often said things that Lizzy didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  By the time she closed the door and went down the outer stairs to the street, the rain had stopped, and Lizzy was glad. She and Grady were driving over to Monroeville to see Grand Hotel, with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, and she didn’t want to get her hair all wet and straggly. Just in case, she put up her pink umbrella against any stray drops and turned left and hurried east on Franklin past the Dispatch. She noticed that the newspaper office was closed and dark, and she wondered how the meeting had gone and whether Jed Snow had gotten over his objections to the Darling Dollars. Passing Musgrove’s Hardware, she saw that Mr. Musgrove still hadn’t changed his window display, maybe because he didn’t have any new merchandise, as Aunt Hetty had said, since he couldn’t pay for it. And then the diner, with Myra May behind the counter, where only two people were seated—not a very good crowd for this time of evening. In the old days, before all this trouble, every seat at the counter was filled and most of the tables. Lizzy would have gone in to say hi and maybe buy a piece of Raylene’s pie for supper, but she was already late. So when Myra May looked up, she just waved and went on across Robert E. Lee and east toward home.

  This section of Darling had always been pretty, and even though the houses were small, their owners had kept them neatly painted, with flowers along the walks and the lawns mowed and trimmed. In the dusky evenings, folks sat in their porch swings or their rocking chairs, reading the newspaper or crocheting an afghan and watching the neighborhood girls playing jacks and jumping rope and the boys swatting baseballs in the dusty street. In the spring, the windows would always be open and you could hear radios playing through the evening air. People liked The Fred Allen Show and Jack Benny for comedy and The Carnation Contented Hour for music, and when you walked down the street, you could sometimes hear a little of both.

  Lately, though, Lizzy had noticed a change. The houses needed painting, the yards weren’t as tidy, and people didn’t sit on their porches so much. You could still hear the radios and the scene looked serene—until you noticed that the porch roof on Mrs. Friedman’s house had blown off in a January windstorm and hadn’t been replaced. That was because the bank had foreclosed on the house and Mrs. Friedman was living in Selma with her sister. And on the other side of the street, Mr. Harrison’s house had been vacant so long that the honeysuckle completely covered the front window and the FOR SALE sign had fallen facedown. Old Mr. Harrison had died and the little house looked lonely and deserted and desperately in need of rescue. Lizzy, who loved little houses, wished somebody would buy it and give it the tender, loving care it deserved.

  Usually, Lizzy sauntered along the street. But Grady would soon be there and she was in a hurry to get home. So she walked fast, thinking about what she was going to wear to the movies and looking forward to the ride to Monroeville on such a nice spring evening. She hadn’t seen Grady in a week or so, and she wanted to catch up on all his news.

  A few moments later, she was climbing the front porch steps of her house and greeting her sweet orange cat, Daffodil, who always sat on the porch swing, waiting for her. Daffy jumped down and followed her as she unlocked the green-painted front door and stepped inside, feeling the special pleasure that always settled over her like a comfortable shawl when she stepped into the tiny front hall. She had wallpapered it with tiny pink roses on a white background and hung a gold-framed oval mirror she’d rescued from a pile of discards when Mr. Harrison’s son had cleaned out his house. The mirror was hung beside a row of brass-plated coat hooks, where she kept her ragged green sweater and her straw garden hat.

  Her house had been a “rescue,” too. It had belonged to old Mr. Flagg, who had lived across the street from Lizzy and her mother for as long as she could remember. After he died, the dilapidated frame bungalow was put up for sale. Through Mr. Moseley, Lizzy had arranged to buy it—without saying a word to her mother about what she was doing. She was afraid her mother would interfere. And she was half afraid that her mother would try to stop her. It was better to hire workmen and get the place entirely finished and ready to move in, and then tell her. So all Mrs. Lacy could do was watch the renovations and wonder out loud who in the world was putting all that work and money into that little old hous
e.

  And it was little. In fact, it was a miniature, like a little dollhouse. It had a postage-stamp parlor, a minute kitchen, two small upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, a narrow front porch just wide enough for a white-painted porch swing, and a little screened-in back porch. But the backyard was ten times bigger than the house, with sunflowers and a fig tree and pink roses on the trellis, and a kitchen garden just a step away from the back porch. As far as Lizzy was concerned, her dollhouse was perfect, and it was perfect because it was hers.

  Mrs. Lacy had always been a domineering mother, and when she found out that it was her daughter who had bought the old house and renovated it—without so much as a by-your-leave—she pitched a fit. A widow, Mrs. Lacy had planned that Elizabeth, her only child, would live with her until she got married, and then she would have a home to go to when she couldn’t (or didn’t want to) manage for herself—not a plan that Lizzy could endorse with any enthusiasm. And even though her new house wasn’t quite far enough away to serve as an escape from her mother’s daily interference—it was, after all, just across the street—it gave Lizzy at least some of the privacy she craved.

  And that privacy was her deepest joy. For the first time in her thirty-plus years, Lizzy held the key to her own life. She could step into her own sweet little house, close the door behind her, and be perfectly at home. Lizzy didn’t need company: she loved books and dreamed of one day writing one herself. And if she wanted to hear a human voice, she could talk to Daffy, who never ever talked back.

  But while the house was plenty big enough for Lizzy and her cat, it wasn’t big enough for two people, and therein lay the rub, at least as far as Grady Alexander saw it. He and Lizzy had been dating for several years, and if he’d had his way, they would have been married by now—if only she hadn’t gone and installed herself in a miniature house that would be a very tight fit for a man and his wife, not to mention a man and his wife and his sons (and maybe a daughter or two or three, if the sons were slow in coming).

  Lizzy often wondered whether she had bought the house as a way of fending off Grady’s determined courtship. True or not, she had definitely put off saying yes to him, much to her mother’s chagrin.

  “The Alexanders are fine Christian people,” Mrs. Lacy frequently fretted. “I think the world of Mrs. Alexander, and Grady has a good job, and gumption. And he takes such good care of his mother, too.” She would pause to let the full implications of that sink in, then add, “You’ll never find anybody better, Elizabeth. And you’re not getting any younger, you know. Shilly-shally much longer and you’ll lose your looks, and then you’ll never find a husband. You’ll be an old maid, that’s what you’ll be. And you won’t have anybody to blame but yourself, my girl.”

  Lizzy didn’t disagree with what her mother said about Grady as a prospective husband, for he had gone to college and gotten an agriculture degree and worked as the county ag agent. The job didn’t pay a lot but it was steady, and he was good at it. But while her mother seemed to feel that old maids led unhappy lives, Lizzy wasn’t so sure. Just look at Bessie Bloodworth, who had never married but who was perfectly content to look after her little family of boarders at the Magnolia Manor. And Verna, who often said that she wouldn’t have another man if somebody paid her to take him. And Fannie Champaign, who—

  No, not Fannie, Lizzy thought. Fannie might be an old maid, but she wasn’t contented. Fannie wanted a husband. Actually, she wanted Charlie Dickens (or thought she did), although it didn’t look like she was going to get him.

  “And Grady is extremely good-looking, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Lacy would add, in a censorious tone. “You cannot object to him in any possible way. It’s just sheer obstinacy on your part. You are every bit as stubborn and hard-hearted as your father. You never think of anybody but yourself.”

  Lizzy never understood exactly how stubborn and hard-hearted that was, since her father had had the misfortune of dying when she was a baby. She only knew that whenever she fell short of her mother’s expectations, she was her father’s daughter. He apparently had never measured up, either.

  Grady himself never came right out and said that Lizzy was stubborn and hard-hearted. She suspected he thought so, though—but not for the reason her mother did. He thought she was stubborn and hard-hearted because she wouldn’t . . . well, go all the way.

  Now, Lizzy was no prude. She certainly enjoyed their steamy sessions in the hot, breathless dark, parked in Grady’s blue Ford on the hill above the Cypress Country Club’s eighteenth green. But she always made him stop when she knew that if she didn’t make him stop right that very second she would stop wanting him to stop, and that was dangerous. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, at least not morally wrong—at least not morally wrong in her view, since in spite of what the preacher said on Sunday mornings, it seemed to her that God had better things to do than punish his children when what they were doing didn’t hurt anybody else. And she wasn’t worried about getting pregnant, because Grady carried those rubber things in his wallet, just in case she might change her mind, which wasn’t revolting at all but rather sweet and touching. She knew, because she had found one there when he gave her his wallet to run into Jake Pritchard’s filling station and buy them each a cold soda.

  But it was dangerous in a different way, for if she and Grady had sex, he would take it as a signal that she was ready to marry him. And while she cared for him—sometimes she even thought she loved him—she wasn’t ready for marriage. At least, not just yet, although she had been shaken by the intensity of the jealousy that had gnawed away at her when she’d thought that Grady was planning to take DeeDee Davis to the Kilgores’ party last summer.

  This jealousy thing was on her mind because the previous Friday, she’d run into Alice Ann Walker at the post office, and Alice Ann had told her that her husband, Arnold, had seen Grady driving around with a girl from Monroeville. The girl was blond and very pretty, Arnold had said. And young, barely twenty.

  “Just thought you should know,” Alice Ann said sympathetically, and reached out to squeeze her hand.

  Now, the thought of another girl riding around in Grady’s Ford was troubling, and Lizzy pushed it away. Rumbling his anticipatory purr, Daffodil was rubbing against her ankles. “Come on, Daffy,” she said, and scooped him up. “Let’s get your supper.”

  As she went down the hall, Lizzy savored the quiet space—a space that was all hers. On the left, polished wooden stairs led up to the two upstairs bedrooms. On the right, a wide doorway opened into the parlor, with its small Mission-style leather sofa, a used armchair that she had reupholstered in brown corduroy, a Tiffany-style stained-glass lamp, and several bookshelves lined with books. Behind the parlor was the kitchen with its dining nook and the window that looked out into the garden. At the end of the hall, the bathroom (converted from a storage room) held a claw-footed tub, a tiny sink, a pull-chain toilet, and newly tiled floor. It was the most perfect house in the world, Lizzy felt, a perfectly private place, a sanctuary from all the dark things that were going on around it.

  She put down a dish of cooked chopped beef liver for Daffy and fixed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk for herself. Then she ran upstairs and took her pretty blue silk crepe dress—Grady’s favorite—out of the closet, the one with the ruffled cape sleeves and the shiny blue belt. In front of her vanity mirror, she brushed out her golden brown curls and fastened them back with a pair of blue barrettes, then added a smudge of rouge to her cheeks and some glossy pink lipstick to her lips. She smiled at herself, thinking that for someone who was past her thirtieth birthday, she looked . . . well, young. Not as young as that girl in Grady’s car, maybe, but not nearly old enough to be an old maid.

  She heard Grady’s knock and ran down the stairs to open the door. He was wearing his usual date-night clothes, a white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled above the elbows, showing tanned, strong arms; dark twill wash pants; and a brown
felt fedora tipped to the back of his head. His brown hair was rumpled, as usual, and a little long on the back of his neck.

  But he wasn’t wearing his usual rakish, devil-may-care grin. Instead, he had what Lizzy thought of as that “Grady look” on his face, the intent, frowning expression he wore when he was thinking of something serious.

  And he didn’t tilt his head and say, “Hey, doll, ready to rumble?” the way he usually did. Instead, he pulled off his hat and said, “May I come in, Liz? I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Lizzy said, stepping back to let him in. “But hadn’t we better be going?” Monroeville was fifteen miles away, and Grady always insisted that they get to the theater in time to get their buttered popcorn and Cokes and find exactly the right seats before the newsreel began.

  Grady didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped into the little parlor and gestured toward Lizzy’s corduroy-covered chair. “Have a seat,” he said, and sat down on the sofa, hunching forward, elbows on his knees.

  Lizzy perched on the edge of the chair. “I don’t understand,” she said, uncertain. “Is something wrong? Why are we—”

  “Because we are,” he said huskily. He looked at her with the oddest look, his eyes lingering on her blue dress, her hair, her face. It was a hungry look, as if he were storing away the memory against a famine.

  “Well, then.” Uneasily, she groped for something to say. “Can I . . . can I get you something? Lemonade, maybe? Coffee?”

  “No. Nothing. I don’t want anything.” He put up a hand and rubbed his eyes, closing them for a moment, as if he were closing them against a sharp pain. His mouth tightened, and when he opened his eyes and looked at her, she saw that they were red rimmed and bloodshot, as if he had been crying. But that couldn’t be right, because Grady never cried, not even when he’d had to shoot the horse he’d ridden ever since he was eight.