The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Buy a New Car and Get TEN Free Driving Lessons!!

  The fact that Mr. Harwood—the driving teacher—looked and sounded like Rudy Vallée didn’t hurt a thing, of course. He even had a bit of the crooner’s silver-tongued, intimate style. Darling’s matrons were smitten, just as Mildred had hoped they would be. In fact, one of the more affluent women in town had persuaded her husband to purchase a new car, and another had bought one for herself.

  “Well, my phone is working,” Liz said. “At least it was this morning. And if it isn’t, I’m sure Mr. Moseley won’t mind if I use the office phone. How about if I make the calls?”

  “If you don’t mind, Liz,” Aunt Hetty said.

  “I’ll take half of them,” Bessie offered. “I’m sure I can find a time when my phone is working.”

  And that was how they settled it.

  The Dahlias can always come up with a plan—especially when pies are involved.

  CHAPTER THREE

  OPHELIA: GIRL REPORTER

  Monday, October 22

  Ophelia took off her pink sweater and hung it on the wall beside her desk at the Darling Dispatch. “It’s warm for October,” she remarked brightly. “Bet it hits eighty today.”

  Charlie Dickens, the editor of the Dispatch, glanced at the clock, which said half-past eight. “Running a little late, aren’t you?” He went back to his two-finger attack on his Royal typewriter.

  Ophelia sighed. It was hard to be a wife and mother and a working girl all at the same time—especially when the working-girl part of you held down not one but two jobs. “I would have called,” she said apologetically, “but my phone was out.”

  Charlie stopped typing. “Again?” he asked, in the skeptical tone of a schoolteacher asking why the homework was late.

  “Yes, again,” she said. “Myra May says Darling has outgrown the switchboard. We need a new one.” Defensively, she added, “Actually, I’m late because Jed had to have a starched white shirt for a meeting.”

  She doubted that her excuse would hold any water with Charlie, though. The man had never ironed a starched white dress shirt in his life. He had no idea how much fussing it took. And since Ophelia had long since had to let her maid go, she was the one who did the fussing.

  But her remark got his attention. He stopped pecking and reached for the open pack of Camels on his desk. “What meeting?”

  Ophelia knew why he was asking. It was true that her husband was the mayor of Darling, but he was also the proprietor of Snow’s Farm Supply and a blue-plaid-shirt-and-no-necktie kind of guy. Jed only wore a starched white shirt to church and somebody’s funeral. Which meant that since this wasn’t Sunday or a revival meeting day and nobody had died, something rather unusual must be going on.

  “The Share the Wealth Society,” she replied. “They’re having a brown-bag lunch in the back room at Musgrove’s Hardware. They’re meeting every Monday now. Jed always goes.”

  Actually, Ophelia thought that she should be the one attending the meeting, since she was the one who shared most of the wealth in the Snow family. On Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, she was a reporter, advertising manager, and Linotype operator for the newspaper, a job she’d had for several years. Last spring, she had been hired to work in the commandant’s office at the nearby CCC camp on Tuesdays and Fridays, which meant a little more money coming into the family coffers.

  Ophelia’s two paychecks were as welcome as a cooling rain on a scorching July day, especially because the children (seventeen-year-old Sam and fifteen-year-old Sarah) always needed school clothes and supplies. The elder Snows, Jed’s parents, needed help with the doctor and dentist bills. Ophelia couldn’t begin to imagine how the six of them would get along without her money.

  But however welcome it was, Ophelia’s income was also a touchy subject at the Snow house. Since the Crash, farmers couldn’t afford to buy much feed or equipment, so Snow’s Farm Supply was barely able to pay its owner a salary, no matter how many hours a week he worked. Jed knew they needed Ophelia’s money, but he didn’t appreciate being reminded that his wife brought in more than he did. And even worse, one of her jobs took her out to the CCC camp, where she worked with dozens of strange men. With damn Yankees, and all of them in uniform, while Jed’s heart belonged to Dixie. Altogether, it was a bitter pill for him to swallow.

  But Ophelia knew that wasn’t the only reason why Jed hadn’t invited her to the meeting. The Share the Wealth Society was made up exclusively of men. Women weren’t allowed.

  “Huh.” Charlie scraped a wood match with his thumbnail and lit his cigarette. “So your husband has decided to cast his lot with Huey P.” His tone was sarcastic. “What makes him think there’ll be any more wealth to share if Long makes it into the White House?”

  “I don’t know that he does, really,” Ophelia said. She pulled out her chair and sat down at her desk, frowning. It sounded like Charlie had got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, which was unusual these days. He had been a bear to work with before he and Fannie Champaign got married and settled into her apartment over the hat shop. But Fannie had worked miracles, and the grumpy old grizzly had turned into something closer to a well-mannered lamb.

  Tentatively, she added, “What’s so bad about Senator Long, anyway?”

  Charlie blew out the match. He countered with, “Why does Jed have to wear a white shirt?”

  “Because prosperous men wear white shirts and ties,” Ophelia said, taking the cover off her typewriter. Jed had explained this, in detail. “Because Share the Wealth folks believe in dressing for success. If you dress like you’re successful, you’re more likely to be successful.”

  The men, anyway. She wondered what women wore when they dressed for success. Ha, she thought to herself, looking down at her pink and green cotton print dress, which she had sewn herself out of some yard goods she’d bought on sale at Mann’s Mercantile for twelve cents a yard. As if a woman would ever be able to dress for success.

  She turned to Charlie and asked again, “What’s so bad about Senator Long?”

  Charlie peered at her over his round, wire-rimmed spectacles. “You really don’t know, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking,” she retorted.

  But she supposed she did know. Huey P. Long—familiarly known as the Kingfish, after a character on the Amos ‘n’ Andy radio program—had been constantly in the news since the day he was elected as Louisiana’s governor and started riling people up. Now, he was a senator and a Democrat, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was also what people called a “populist.” He and FDR were poles apart, politically speaking. As Jed put it, Long and the president were as different as chalk and cheese.

  Since Roosevelt had settled in the White House the previous year and began pushing the New Deal, he had made a lot of changes to repair the damage done when the stock market plunged into oblivion. Some of the changes were welcome, like the repeal of Prohibition and the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was already creating work for thousands of unemployed young men. Others were controversial, like relief (which everybody hated, even the people who needed it) and plowing up the cotton so it wasn’t a glut on the market.

  Still, after four years of Herbert Hoover sitting on his thumbs, it was a relief to have a president who rolled up his sleeves and actually did something. As Will Rogers said on his Sunday night Gulf Headliners radio show, it didn’t much matter what FDR did. “If he burned down the Capitol,” Rogers had said, “we’d all cheer and say, ‘At least he got a fire started.’”

  But the Kingfish and his followers thought that the president ought to start a bigger fire, especially when it came to helping poor folks (who were about nine-tenths of the population). Senator Long was gearing up for a run at the White House in the 1936 election, and there were plenty of people in Darling who thought he had a very good chance.

  Charlie Dickens, on the other hand, was an FDR supporter, so naturally, he didn’t much
like the senator. Which was why he called him “Huey P.” in that sarcastic tone of voice.

  Now, answering Ophelia’s question, Charlie pursed his lips. “I guess you’ve never heard that Roosevelt called Huey Long one of the two most dangerous men in the country.”

  “No, I’ve never heard that,” Ophelia said, surprised. “Why in the world would he say a thing like that?”

  “Because Huey makes promises he can’t keep,” Charlie said. “Folks need hope, and that’s what he gives them, in spades. He gets them all riled up, promising he’ll give them everything they want. Jobs, money, better housing, better schools. Like this ‘Every man’s a king’ slogan of his, and his plan to take money away from the rich to give to the poor. But even if he gets elected president, Long won’t be able to deliver. People will be mad as hell and take to the streets. Roosevelt is afraid of a revolution.”

  Ophelia thought about this for a moment. Reluctantly, she supposed there was something to it—although when Huey P. was governor of Louisiana, he had delivered a lot of roads and schools. Of course, quite a few of his cronies had gotten rich in the process, but she supposed that was the way these things worked. People in government thought they had to take care of their friends, or they wouldn’t have any.

  She frowned. “Who’s the other?”

  Charlie pushed his glasses up on his nose. “The other what?”

  “The other most dangerous man.”

  “Ah, him. General Douglas MacArthur.”

  “Oh,” Ophelia said. Then, humbly, “I guess I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t remember when the Bonus Army was camping out in Washington, the summer of thirty-two? MacArthur ordered the cavalry and six tanks to charge on them. Those poor souls were veterans, just wanting the government to pay them the bonus they were due from the Great War.”

  “Oh,” Ophelia said again, remembering. “I guess somebody like that couldn’t be a very good general, could he?”

  “Right.” Charlie went back to his rapid-fire, two-finger typing for a moment, then stopped, regarding her. “I don’t suppose you’d like to go to that meeting. Share the Wealth, I mean.”

  “Of course I would,” Ophelia said. “But I can’t.” She wrinkled her nose. “Jed says it’s just men.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Charlie chuckled sarcastically. “I forgot. Every man is a king. Huey P. doesn’t say anything about women, does he? But you can go as a reporter, if you want to. Take notes, write up a story for next week’s Dispatch.”

  “Gosh, that would be swell!” Ophelia said excitedly. “Thank you, Charlie.” She had been stuck with Darling’s women’s news—the Mothers’ Guild, the Quilting Society, the Dahlias—for way too long. She was eager to sink her teeth into some real reporting. Share the Wealth would be a great place to start.

  Charlie held up a finger. “One caveat,” he said. “I’m not going to run a story about how wonderful Huey P. is and what he’s promising to do to help all us poor folks improve our lot in life. There’s enough of that stuff out there. What I want is a story about the men in the Share the Wealth Society—why they joined, what they’re afraid of, what they want to see happen here in Darling that they’re not seeing now. Individual stories about real people. Human-interest stories. Why-it-matters stories.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You think you might be able to handle that assignment, Ophelia?”

  “I can try,” Ophelia said, a little doubtfully.

  “Do it,” Charlie said, and went back to his typing.

  Ophelia stole a glance at her boss. His green celluloid eyeshade was pulled low and his cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth the way it always did, the smoke curling in front of his face. As usual, his wire-rimmed glasses were perched on the end of his nose, his shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, and his gray vest hung open to reveal a loosely knotted tie.

  But she thought his face was a little grayer, his shoulders a little more slumped, and he didn’t seem to be attacking his typewriter with his usual ferocity. Ophelia wondered why. Now that the CCC camp was in full swing and spending several thousands of dollars a month in Cypress County, advertising and subscriptions were both back up, and the Dispatch was on a surer footing. Charlie ought to be in a better mood.

  But maybe there was something wrong with the newspaper’s equipment—always a possibility, since (as Charlie frequently said) it was older than dirt. She turned to look at the black Babcock cylinder press, a hulking four-pager that shook the floors and rattled the windows when it was chugging along at top speed on Thursday nights, when Charlie ran the home-print pages. It looked the same as always. And so did her Linotype machine, a prewar monster that she operated easily, even though women were not supposed to be strong enough to pull that heavy lever. The small Miles proofing press sat on the table beside the Linotype. Against the other wall stood the marble-topped tables where the pages were made up, the printers’ cabinets with their drawers full of type fonts, and the stacks of paper, press-ready. And the smaller job press on which Charlie printed the flyers and invoices and business forms that filled in the income gaps as newspaper ad revenue waxed and waned.

  But nothing looked amiss and she turned back, sneaking a sidelong glance at Charlie. Yes, he definitely didn’t look as chipper as he had since he and Fannie were married. Maybe something was wrong at home, now that the honeymoon was over and the two of them had to learn to live together—a challenge in any marriage, as she herself had to admit.

  But if that’s what it was, she reminded herself sternly, it was none of her business. Jed was always warning her against sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. “Do it once too often and somebody will smack you right in the kisser,” he said, and she thought he was probably right.

  So instead of asking Charlie if everything was all right at home, she took out her steno pad and flipped through the pages until she found the notes she had taken at the meeting of the Ladies Guild in the Baptist Church basement the week before. Then she rolled a long, column-width strip of paper into the old black Underwood she had bought for a dollar-fifty at Mr. Wheeler’s yard sale and began to type. The machine was still a little stiff, even after her son Sam had cleaned it up and oiled it, but it wasn’t long before her fingers were flying.

  And this story was actually fun to write. The Ladies Guild had held its annual rummage sale on the Baptist Church lawn, where they had sold children’s clothes, shoes, dishes, books, and tools, raising a grand total of $42.35—almost a record, the organizers said. The entire amount would go toward buying groceries for the Darling Blessing Box.

  Ophelia typed –30– at the end of the story and pulled it out of her typewriter. Charity, she thought happily, didn’t have be doled out by the federal government in Washington, DC. There were plenty of ways to share the wealth right here at home. And she had a new assignment. She was going to that meeting after all—as a reporter!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHARLIE DICKENS GETS A TIP

  Charlie was working on the lead story for Friday’s Dispatch, about Boomer Bronson falling off the roof of Claude Peevy’s barn without killing himself, thankfully (although how thankful you were depended on what you thought about Boomer, Charlie reckoned). That Boomer was drunk as a skunk on Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning probably figured heavily in his survival, although that wasn’t the kind of detail that Charlie could include in the Dispatch.

  Nor could he include the fact that this happened at midnight and that Claude was up there on the roof with Boomer, both of them naked as jaybirds. Or that when they were found by Mrs. Peevy, they were lying on their backs on a pile of hay, yodeling to the moon. Or what Mrs. Peevy might have said (or might have been imagined to say) when she came upon the scene.

  Without these interesting details, Boomer’s tumble wasn’t much of a story—which was a sad thing, but nothing new. Once upon a time, Charlie had written feature stories for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun—undercover stories, investigative stories, in-depth, tell-it-all stories tha
t told readers what they didn’t know. He had dug up the dirt on local politicians, blown the whistle on some notorious police corruption, and triggered a federal investigation that ended with a major-league crime boss going to jail. He had been read, applauded, rewarded, and even fired a time or two. He had been good. He had been damn good.

  That was then. This was now. While Charlie had scored several big stories in the Dispatch—the killing of Rider LeDoux by the federal revenue agents at Mickey LeDoux’s still on Dead Cow Creek, the embezzlement scheme at the CCC camp, and the sensational murder of the “Eleven O’Clock Lady”—there had not been one single shred of news worth reporting in the past few months. (Boomer’s story, unfortunately, was more notable for the parts that couldn’t be printed in the paper.)

  And the only news on the horizon was the barbershop quartet competition being held in town next week. There certainly wasn’t much excitement in that—just a bunch of guys singing close harmony on the stage at the Academy, with a big community pie supper afterward. Of course, if the Lucky Four Clovers were lucky enough to win, there might be a nice story in that. Local interest, anyway, with a focus on each of the four men. If they won. People said they were good, but Charlie wasn’t enough of a music fan to know whether the hometown team stood even half a chance.

  With an ironic twist of his mouth, Charlie pulled Boomer’s story out of his typewriter and dropped it into the wooden tray on his desk, one of a stack of wooden letter trays labeled Page One, Two, Three, and Four. They were the same trays his father had used for the very same purpose back in the day when he edited and published the Dispatch. That was before the senior Charles Dickens succumbed to lung cancer and left the newspaper to his only son. Charlie, himself a newsman, had figured to sell it quick, pocket the change, and go back to his old job of crime reporter for the Plain Dealer.