The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Besides her desk, the reception room had three chairs and a leather sofa for people who were waiting to see Mr. Moseley, as well as several floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A stand in the corner held a dictionary that had once belonged to Jefferson Davis, open (at Mr. Moseley’s instruction) to the word “integrity.” The floor was covered with a pair of worn Oriental rugs, and the wood-paneled walls were hung with diplomas and maps and the gilt-framed oil portraits of the three senior Mr. Moseleys. (Mr. Benton Moseley—who had inherited the law firm from his father, who had gotten it from his father and uncle—had a renegade streak and refused to sit for his portrait.)

  Yes, it was all very old-fashioned and staid and decorous. But it seemed to Lizzy to represent what people were seeking when they climbed the stairs: if not justice, then something close to it, something established, reliable, constant, and trustworthy. Something that would help them define the difference between what was right and what was wrong and understand what consequences would follow from what they had done or failed to do. Even those who had broken the law had to respect what they found here.

  And if she needed another way to think about justice, she could look out the front windows and see the Cypress County courthouse on the other side of the street. It was an imposing red brick building with a white-painted dome and a clock that told the right time and a bell that rang so loud and clear that everybody in town could hear it and be comforted by it.

  Yes, Lizzy thought, justice was like that. It was solid, something you could count on to be the same way every day, for everybody—unlike life, which was completely unpredictable and unfair and full of unnerving surprises. Like Mr. Moseley remarking, too casually, that he might have to reduce her hours. Like Grady marrying Sandra out of the blue and Sandra unexpectedly dying and leaving behind a bewildered husband and a bereft little boy. That was life for you, and it had nothing to do with justice or people getting what they deserved.

  And now Grady seemed eager for them to be together again, and Lizzy felt the way she did when she and Myra May were girls and got on the Ferris wheel at the county fair, and a cable snapped and the big wheel started going around, faster and faster and faster, with all the riders screaming in terror and excitement. It had taken the entire Darling volunteer fire department to stop them, and poor Al Barkley broke his arm when he tried to grab their gondola as they went whizzing past. Everybody said it was a wonder they hadn’t gone spinning out into space.

  That was the way she felt now. There was no point denying that she had been in love with Grady once, or that she’d had to learn (hard lesson!) not to love him, but without hating him or hating Sandra. And she hated the thought of hurting him now. But she could see where this was going, and what she saw both terrified and excited her at the very same time, just like that spinning Ferris wheel.

  She was still thinking about this when the telephone on her desk jangled. She picked it up and said “Law office. Good morning. How may I help you?”

  “It’s long distance from Montgomery, Liz,” an operator said, and Lizzy recognized Violet Sims’ voice. It must be her turn on the switchboard. “Please hold while I connect you.” There were several clicks, then several more, then, “Go ahead, please,” and Mr. Mosely was on the line.

  “Liz?” he said impatiently. “Liz, is that you? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” Lizzy said. “What can I do for you?”

  He sounded exasperated. “I’ve been trying to get through for the last ten minutes, but something must be the matter with Darling’s phones. Anyway, I got a call here from Regina Whitworth. She sounded pretty frantic. Have you finished typing those notes?”

  “I just got them done,” Lizzy said. “They’re in the green folder, in your desk drawer.”

  “Good. Now, here’s what I want you to do.” Mr. Moseley was being authoritative. “Close up the office and go over to the Whitworths’ house. When you get there, talk to Mrs. Whitworth and find out as much as you can about what’s going on—but don’t upset her any more than she is already. Just get the facts, then telephone me at Jackman’s office. Do it quick. Depending on what you find out, I may need to come back sooner than I planned.”

  “What’s happened?” Lizzy asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Danged if I know,” Mr. Moseley replied impatiently. “It’s a crisis of some sort. So just go, will you?” As an afterthought, he added, “If you run into the sheriff, see what you can find out from him. But don’t let him in on whatever you learn from Mrs. Whitworth. Remember client privilege.” He paused and added sternly, “Got that, Liz? Client privilege.”

  “Got it,” Lizzy said. “I’m on my way.”

  She put down the phone, feeling her skin prickle. Obviously, some sort of crisis had happened. She put her notebook and pencil in her pocketbook and settled her dark blue, narrow-brimmed sailor hat on her head. Mr. Moseley was expecting her to investigate, and she wouldn’t let him down.

  What’s more, she would do her job so well that he would have to concede that she was indispensable. He would give up the idea of cutting her back to part-time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MYRA MAY IS STYMIED

  At the Darling Diner, next door on the east to the Dispatch building, Myra May Mosswell was cleaning up after the last breakfast customer had finished his coffee and gone out the door.

  Wearing a blue bibbed apron over her red blouse and khaki slacks, she collected the empty mugs from the tables, dumped the coffee grounds out of the big urn, and began sweeping the floor behind the counter. From the kitchen, she could hear the comfortable chatter of Raylene and her helpers as they started lunch preparations. From the back room, she could hear the murmuring voices of Violet and Lenore Looper as they managed calls on the switchboard of the Darling Telephone Exchange—as well as little Cupcake’s sweet giggles as she played telephone with her dolls under Violet’s chair.

  Myra May smiled to herself. Customer-wise, it had been a good morning. Now that the CCC camp was in full swing out by Briar Swamp, more money was coming into town. Myra May always measured the size of the crowd not just by the cash that ended up in the register (including the brightly colored Darling Dollars, the emergency scrip still in circulation after the bank had nearly failed the year before), but by how much chow her customers put away. This morning, they had disposed of a large urn of coffee, six quarts of orange juice, three dozen eggs, two-and-a-half pounds of thick-sliced bacon, a quarter of a good-sized smoked ham, four pounds of thin-sliced red potatoes, a four-quart pot of grits, three dozen biscuits, and five quarts of Raylene’s redeye gravy. The men (the diner’s breakfast crowd was exclusively male) liked to eat.

  The men also liked to listen to the morning farm and market reports while they were downing all that chow, so the Philco on the shelf behind the counter was tuned to Mobile’s radio station WALA. (Supposedly, the letters stood for “We Are Loyal Alabamians.”) Myra May cared more about what she had to pay for pork chops at Hancock’s Grocery than what pork bellies were selling for at the East St. Louis stockyards, so she reached up and turned the dial to WGN, broadcasting from the Drake Hotel in Chicago. The nine o’clock Music for Your Morning show had just begun, and the announcer was playing a recording of Bing Crosby crooning “Dancing in the Dark.” She turned up the volume and began to sing along. Smiling happily and swinging her broom in time with the music, she sang all the way to the last two lines of the chorus: “We can face the music together, dancing in the dark.”

  If somebody asked you who you thought was the prettiest woman in Darling, Myra May Mosswell would not top your list. She had a strong face with a square forehead, a square jaw, and deep-set eyes that seemed to bore straight through a person. If you had just met her, you might think she was checking to see if your hair was combed and your socks matched, but that wasn’t it at all. She was checking to see if you had half a brain—and she stopped checking as soon as she figured out that you didn’t. If there was one word to describe Myra May, “direct” would do it.
If you wanted a few more words, you could try “does not suffer fools gladly.”

  Myra May’s best friend and partner, on the other hand, easily came to everyone’s mind as the loveliest woman in Darling. Violet Sims was petite and picture-pretty, with bouncy brown curls, a warm smile, and a soft heart. She and Myra May shared the diner, the Exchange, the flat upstairs, and little Cupcake. People who knew them explained their friendship as an illustration of the old saying, “Opposites attract,” and since they were two very different people, perhaps that was true.

  But whatever held the two of them together made for a very strong bond. As far as business was concerned, Myra May’s no-nonsense, let’s-get-this-damn-job-done-now manner was complemented by Violet’s sweet-natured charm and friendliness, which put everyone immediately at ease and made them want to pitch in and help. On the personal side, Violet’s accommodating and sympathetic personality balanced Myra May’s prickly impatience and smoothed out life’s little bumps.

  Several years before, Myra May and Violet had purchased the diner and the Darling Telephone Exchange from old Mrs. Hooper, who had been forced to sell when her feet and ankles swelled so badly that she couldn’t stand behind the counter. With the purchase had come a good-sized vegetable garden out back, a ramshackle garage for Bertha (Myra May’s old green Chevy touring car), and a very nice upstairs flat with lots of windows and a pleasant view of the Cypress County courthouse on the other side of Franklin Street.

  The flat was occupied by Myra May, Violet, and Violet’s adorable three-year-old niece, whom they had informally adopted after her mother’s death. Cupcake had strawberry curls, dimples in both cheeks, and the bluest of blue eyes. She was the apple of her mamas’ eyes and the darling of Darling’s fond heart. (Darling swore that she was every bit as cute as Shirley Temple, whose latest movie, Bright Eyes, was a huge hit everywhere.) The diner’s kitchen was under the expert management of Raylene Riggs, Myra May’s mother, who lived south of town at the Marigold Motor Court. The Exchange was ably managed by Violet, with the help of a well-trained team of switchboard operators—the Hello Central girls, as some Darling wag had once called them.

  But nothing is ever perfect, and as it happened, there was an unfortunate fly in this otherwise delightful ointment. Myra May and Violet owned only half of the Exchange. The other half inconveniently belonged to Mr. Whitney Whitworth, who was not an accommodating partner. When they first bought Mrs. Hooper’s half of the Exchange, Myra May and Violet had offered to buy his half, too, but they couldn’t afford what he was asking. Now they could, but his price had gone up—way up, and out of their reach. Before, Mr. Whitney Whitworth had been an occasional pain in the patootie. Now, he was a serious thorn in their side.

  The problem was that while their partner was glad to pocket half the profits, he did nothing to help with the management of the Exchange. Worse, over the past two years he had objected to every single one of the improvements Myra May and Violet proposed to make—and there were plenty of those, since they were still using the original switchboard, which was over twenty years old. The Hello Central girls did the best they could, but calls had to wait, or were abruptly disconnected, or (worse) switched to the wrong numbers. What’s more, the party lines caused lots of problems, and people were demanding private lines—which they couldn’t have because the old board didn’t have enough capacity. Making the switchboard work, Violet said despairingly, was like trying to poke a cat out from under the porch with a rope. You just couldn’t do the job with the only tool you had.

  The problem, unfortunately, was progress. When the Exchange first started out back in 1913, most Darlingians got along just fine without a telephone. There were fewer calls, so one operator working part-time could easily handle the switchboard. But more and more people wanted telephones, and more and more telephone wire was strung on more and more poles around town. Violet now had to keep one or two and sometimes even three girls on duty. The poor things were packed shoulder to shoulder in front of the old switchboard like sardines in a can. On a warm, humid day, in that small back room, they were hot enough to sizzle.

  Myra May kept abreast of the advances in telephone technology and felt that if they brought their equipment up to date, they could provide a much more reliable service. In fact, she was convinced that things were getting to the point where modernizing wasn’t just an option. It had to be done, or one morning Darling would wake up and all the telephones in town would be dead as doorknobs. She had investigated and found a new exchange system with automatic features that would solve these problems. It would also allow Violet to reduce the number of Hello Central girls and—most attractively—it had a “secret service” feature that would keep the operators from listening in, which was always a problem in a small town.

  Sold by the Kellogg Switchboard Company in Chicago, the new equipment cost $1,000 down, with the rest on a monthly payment plan. A thousand dollars was a lot of money, of course, especially in these difficult days. But Myra May could come up with five hundred from what was left of her father’s small estate. If Mr. Whitworth would ante up the other half of the cost, they could get the job done quickly, and make the monthly payments out of the savings.

  He wouldn’t.

  “No, thank you,” he had said pleasantly. “I see no need to improve our little enterprise, Miss Mosswell. It seems to be functioning quite adequately.”

  “But you don’t hear the complaints,” Myra May had protested. “It is not functioning quite adequately. In fact, we’re just damn lucky if it functions at all. What’s more, if we replace the switchboard, we can reduce the number of operators. In the long run, we’ll save enough money to pay for the thing twice over.”

  “No.” Mr. Whitworth smiled a small smile. “Perhaps I should remind you—once again, Miss Mosswell—that I am a limited partner.”

  And that was the rub. Mrs. Hooper had signed a paper saying that the money she originally got from Mr. Whitworth to start the Exchange was all she was ever going to get, while Mr. Whitworth would receive his share of the profits, forever. He might be invited to invest more, but it was his privilege to say no. Which he did.

  And it wasn’t because he didn’t have the money, Myra May thought resentfully. Mr. Whitworth’s wife Regina had inherited a cotton plantation on the Alabama River from her grandmother, Helene Marie Vautier. The Whitworths lived in a nice brick home on Peachtree, a street of nice brick homes. Mr. Whitworth was a past member of the Darling Town Council, and he sang with the Lucky Four Clovers. He belonged to the Darling Rotary Club, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and the Share the Wealth Society. He drove the 1923 Pierce-Arrow that his wife had inherited from her grandmother, a fine old car that everyone in town had come to recognize. He was known to be a thrifty man who managed the family money carefully—a sterling citizen, as far as Darling was concerned.

  But none of this was of any comfort to Myra May. She felt totally stymied by Mr. Whitworth’s refusal to carry his fair share of their joint business responsibilities—regardless of his “limited” partnership. And in this unfortunate situation, she and Violet were not alone, for Mr. Whitworth was a “limited” partner in at least one other Darling business. She had heard that he treated his other partner in the same way, pocketing his share of the profits (if there were any) and refusing to put a dime into maintaining or expanding the business.

  Which is where matters stood on that October Monday. Things were, however, about to change, for just as Myra May finished sweeping and put her broom away, the front door opened and Sheriff Buddy Norris came in. And from the grave look on his face, Myra May concluded that he hadn’t come in for a nice hot breakfast and some friendly conversation.

  Something was going on in Darling, and the sheriff didn’t like it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE DAHLIAS BLOOM AT THE BEAUTY BOWER

  A few blocks away from the diner, at the Beauty Bower on Dauphin Street, Beulah Trivette had just taken a stack of fluffy pink terry towels out of the
laundry basket and put them into the cupboard. She was humming happily because it was Monday, and because Beulah considered herself to be the luckiest woman in Darling.

  With good reason, too, for Beulah Trivette had everything her heart desired: her husband Hank, who might not be the handsomest guy in town but was certainly the sweetest. And her smart son, Hank Junior, who had won Darling’s grade school spelling bee last week with the word “malfeasance,” which Beulah had never once in her life even heard, and there was Hank Junior standing up in front of everybody and spelling it pretty as you please. And her lovely blond daughter Spoonie, and good friends, and the Beauty Bower, her very own hair salon.

  The Beauty Bower was located in what had been a screened-in porch at the back of the Trivette house. Hank had enclosed the porch for her, installed two shampoo sinks, two hair-cutting stations, and big wall mirrors. He had also wired the place for electricity for hair dryers and the new electric permanent wave machine that Beulah mail-ordered from a firm in Minneapolis.

  Beulah had wallpapered Hank’s new walls with floppy pink cabbage roses and painted the ceiling and wainscoting a matching pink. She painted the plywood floor pink, too, but discovered the problem with that when the first rainy day arrived and she had to get out the mop. So she spattered the pink with yellow, blue, and purple and put a purple rug in front of the door. Then she put a sign out front and she and Bettina Higgens, her beauty associate, tied on their pink ruffled salon aprons and picked up their combs and scissors. They had a vital mission: they were dedicated to making all Darling women beautiful, one head of hair at a time.

  Beulah looked forward to Mondays because most of her Monday customers were Dahlias. They would share their weekend news and brighten one another’s day with little bits of this and that. They agreed with Beulah that even a little beauty—a smile, a helping hand, bright marigolds along a walk, pink roses blooming beside an old house—goes a long way toward making people happy in this gritty, grimy old world. And if not happy, then perhaps a little easier to live with, which is important when bad things happen to good people and everybody finds themselves scrambling to get by.