The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But the air show—well, that was something people were looking forward to. It was the brightest spot in an otherwise pretty dismal summer, what with Ozzie Sherman cutting back on the hours his men worked at the Pine Creek sawmill, and the Coca-Cola bottling plant laying off one full shift, and Cypress County reducing the size of the road repair crews. If Dad was out of work and the family couldn’t afford the buck it cost to watch the air show from the field, they could pay fifteen cents apiece for tickets to the Watermelon Festival and watch the show from the fairgrounds. They wouldn’t get to see the clown or the magic show or the head-on car crash, but they could see the airplanes and the wingwalker. If that was canceled, there’d be dozens of disappointed dads, moms, and kids.

  Lizzy thought for a moment more, then reached for the telephone. What she had to tell Mildred was important, and she could say it without mentioning anything about Lily Dare and Roger Kilgore. She would call and be sure that Mildred would be home this evening, then ride her bike out there after work and have a little talk with her friend.

  • • •

  During her lunch hour on Wednesdays, Lizzy usually treated herself to a shampoo and set at the Beauty Bower over on Dauphin Street, just a couple of blocks from the office. The Bower was owned and operated by fellow Dahlia Beulah Trivette and located in the enclosed back porch of her house, where her devoted husband Hank had installed two shampoo sinks, two barber chairs, and two big wall mirrors in front of the chairs. Hank also put in an electric hot water heater, which meant that Beulah and her helper, Bettina Higgens, wouldn’t have to pour hot water for shampoos out of teakettles and pitchers, with the potential for somebody to get scalded.

  In addition to the hot water heater, Hank had recently installed another innovation for his wife: a new electric permanent wave machine. Well, it wasn’t new, it was used, but the condition was “like new” and the price was right. Aunt Hetty Little had sniffed at the contraption and said it looked like a “flock of black caterpillars dangling from a buzzard’s nest.” But as far as Beulah was concerned, it turned the trick. With that magic machine, she could make any woman beautiful.

  Beulah loved everything that was beautiful but especially adored big, floppy pink cabbage roses and had wallpapered the Bower’s walls with them. In fact, pink was her very favorite color, so she painted the floor a beautiful shade of pink and spattered yellow, gray, and blue paint all over it, much to the amazement of her older customers, who had never seen so unusual a thing as a deliberately paint-spattered floor, let alone one that started out pink. (“A pink floor,” Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson had sniffed. “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”) After the floor was spattered, the walls were covered with roses, and the furnishings installed, Beulah hung her beautiful gilt-framed degree from the Montgomery College of Cosmetology on the wall where everyone could see it and declared that the Beauty Bower was open for business.

  Beulah had chosen to practice the art of making women beautiful, in part because she herself had been gifted with physical beauty and wanted to share it. Her blond hair was loosely curled and artistically lightened and she had a glorious complexion and a generous mouth with dimples that deepened when she smiled. She also had an enviable figure. (That is, the Darling women envied her figure, while the Darling men envied her husband.)

  And as an artist, Beulah was truly gifted, especially where hair was concerned. She kept informed about the latest hair styles by studying photographs of starlets in the Hollywood magazines. She worked astonishing miracles with the curling iron, even on the most uncooperative hair. And while coloring hair was considered daring, Beulah dared to do it, offering any shade that any client (she never called her customers “customers”) might desire, from the palest peroxide platinum of Jean Harlow to Myrna Loy’s gorgeous russet-red. These talents had earned her a special spot in the hearts of Darling ladies, and especially in the hearts of her sister Dahlias, who were as eager for beauty as anybody else.

  Indeed, as Lizzy walked in just after noon that Wednesday for her regular appointment, she saw that two other Dahlias were there before her. Aunt Hetty Little was just leaving, her old black handbag over her arm, her snowy white hair faintly blued and beautifully waved. And Fannie Champaign had her head in the shampoo sink, where Bettina was giving her a vigorous shampoo and scalp massage.

  “I’m glad I ran into you, Liz,” Aunt Hetty said. “I stopped over at the Dahlias’ vegetable garden this morning to see how it’s coming along. We’re going to have more snap beans and sweet corn than you can shake a stick at. Did you remember to ask Myra May to call the Dahlias and remind them about the pickin’ party on Friday afternoon?”

  “I sure did,” Lizzy said, and added fervently, “I hope we’ll have plenty of help getting everything to our booth.” With all the other problems involved with the festival, she didn’t need another worry.

  “We’ve got more watermelons than we banked on, too,” Aunt Hetty added. “Obadiah Carlson said he’s bringin’ a wagonload. Says he can’t sell ’em so he might as well give ’em away. And he might have more by Sat’iddy afternoon.”

  “A wagonload!” Lizzy’s eyes widened. “That’s a lot of watermelons, on top of what’s already promised.”

  “My sentiments exactly.” Aunt Hetty paused, frowning. “It’s got me wonderin’ if there’s such a thing as too many watermelons.”

  “Never!” Beulah declared, bustling into the beauty parlor from her kitchen with a fresh pitcher of lemonade. She liked her clients to think of coming to the Bower as though they were coming to a party (which most of them did), and always served cookies or cupcakes with drinks. “We can never have too many watermelons at the Watermelon Festival—and if we do, why, we’ll just give ’em to people to take home. Folks’ll love us for it.” She gave them a dazzling smile.

  “Beulah, dear,” Aunt Hetty said, “you are always so danged cheerful. Makes my teeth hurt just to see you smile.” She glanced at Lizzy. “I dug up that Texas Star and put it into a pretty pot so you can give it to Miss Dare at the party Friday night.”

  “Thanks for taking care of that,” Lizzy said gratefully. Aunt Hetty might be twice as old as the rest of them, but she could always be counted on to do what she promised. And she could outlast them all in the garden.

  “I’ll be ready to shampoo you in a few minutes, Liz,” Beulah said, waving good-bye to Aunt Hetty. She put the lemonade on a small table, beside a plate of cookies. “You just take a seat while I go check on Spoonie.” Spoonie was Beulah’s little girl. “She’s out back playing with her chicken.”

  Lizzy sat down in a chair beside the shampoo sinks, where Bettina was applying a conditioner to Fannie’s hair and scalp. Commercial hair conditioners had gotten so pricey, Beulah said, that she’d started mixing up her own, from eggs (produced by her backyard chickens), Johnson’s Baby Oil (lightly scented, just twelve cents a bottle at Lima’s Drugstore), and warm water. If you wanted this extra-special conditioning, Beulah added a nickel to the price of the shampoo.

  Fannie was already wearing Beulah’s homemade facial mask, whipped up from grated cucumbers (peeled, of course), mixed with buttermilk and a spoonful of cream from the top of the milk bottle. It was only a nickel, too—and even better, Beulah’s clients said, than Frances Denney’s facial cream, which cost almost six dollars for a teensy tiny jar. Beulah herself said she was thinking of going into business with her own cosmetic line, which she could sell right there at the Beauty Bower.

  “There now, Miz Fannie,” Bettina said, rinsing her hands. “You just lie in that chair and relax and think beautiful thoughts, and then I’ll rinse you off.”

  Bettina herself was no beauty. When she came to work for Beulah, she wasn’t even pretty. Her dark brown hair was thin and limp, she was as skinny as a flagpole, and flat as a board. She hadn’t been to beauty school, either. But Beulah (who always saw the beauty in everybody) spotted Bettina’s hidden talent with a c
omb and scissors and gave her a chance to put it to work. Under Beulah’s generous guidance (and with a few beauty tips here and there), Bettina was blossoming. She even had a beau, Lizzy had heard—Alice Ann Walker’s brother Lester.

  Lizzy glanced at Fannie, her head still in the sink. “Getting all prettied up for the Kilgores’ party Friday night?” she asked. “From everything I hear, it’s going to be quite an occasion.”

  Lizzy had always admired Fannie’s lovely complexion and light brown hair, which was short and softly curled. It was an attractive complement to the hats Fannie wore as an advertisement for Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux, the only milliner’s shop in Darling. If you admired the hat she was wearing, she would encourage you to try it on, to see if it looked good on you. If you liked it, she’d sell it to you right off her head, with a ten or fifteen percent discount because it was “gently worn.” And since every one of Fannie’s hats was an original, you didn’t have to be afraid that you’d end up in church on Sunday morning, sitting right next to (or right behind) the very same identical hat.

  “The party?” Fannie asked. The mask completely covered her face and she wore a cucumber slice over each eye. She lifted one now to see who she was talking to. “Oh, hi, Liz. No, I wasn’t thinking about the party. I just like to look nice for Mr. Dickens.” Her voice softened. “He’s coming for supper tomorrow night. Wednesdays are our regular nights, you know.”

  “Is that right?” Lizzy murmured, uncomfortable now. Should she spill the beans to Fannie, and let her know that one of Charlie’s old friends—a former lover, it seemed likely—was going to be in town this weekend? Or should she keep what she knew to herself and let Fannie discover whatever there was to discover? Of course, she didn’t like to interfere, but at the same time she hated to see Fannie build up her hopes. It was a difficult subject to get into, though. If she was going to give Fannie a hint of what was brewing, she’d have to have an opening.

  There had always been something of a mystery about Fannie Champaign—where she had come from and why she had chosen their town as a place to live and set up her hat shop. Her hats were very attractive, but it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that she wasn’t selling a lot of them to the local ladies, maybe because the local ladies didn’t have a lot of money to buy hats—or maybe because Fannie’s hats had too much big-city style and made the Darling ladies (only a few of whom kept up with the latest style in hats) uncomfortable.

  And Lizzy had her own questions. Fannie had once told her that her sister had a millinery shop in Miami and a cousin had a shop in Atlanta, so she was able to send her hats there for sale. But even that couldn’t bring in very much, Lizzy thought. Hats couldn’t fetch that much of a price, could they? So where was she getting the money to pay the rent on her shop and apartment and buy groceries and the stylish clothing she liked to wear?

  Lizzy wasn’t the only one who wondered about Fannie Champaign, of course. Some of the Darling ladies—Leona Ruth Adcock, for instance, the biggest snoop in town—had made it a point to try to find out about her. To no avail, however. Fannie kept her business to herself and turned away with a polite smile from the (sometimes impolite) questions asked by nosey parkers like Leona Ruth. But no doubt their curiosity about Fannie was one reason why people were watching and wondering about her and Charlie Dickens.

  Lizzy didn’t know Fannie any better than did Leona Ruth or the others. But she had found her to be such a sweet, modest person that she couldn’t help but like her—and besides, Fannie had given her mother a job making hats when no other work would have suited. So Lizzy felt as if she owed her a debt.

  Fannie smiled again, as if to herself. “I don’t know if you’ve heard this, Liz,” she said softly, “but Mr. Dickens and I have been seeing quite a lot of one another lately.”

  “I’ve heard something to that effect,” Lizzy said reluctantly, thinking that Fannie sounded like a schoolgirl with a crush.

  Fannie folded her hands across her midriff. “We go out sometimes—to a movie or a social event. But I like it best when he comes over to my apartment for supper. I make something easy, jambalaya or stewed chicken and dumplings, and we play pinochle and sometimes dominoes and listen to the radio.” She sighed happily. “He pretends to be a crusty old journalist who has seen too much of the world and is tired of all of it. But underneath that tough veneer, he’s a very sweet man.”

  “Mr. Dickens has definitely been around,” Lizzy agreed. Maybe this was the opening she was looking for. “I’m always surprised when he tells me about the places he’s been and the people he’s known. Why, just take Miss Dare, for instance. The Texas Star,” she added, just in case Fannie didn’t remember who Miss Dare was.

  “The female pilot?” Fannie asked. “The one who’s doing the air show this weekend?” She raised her head and peeled off one of the cucumber rounds so she could look at Lizzy. “Mr. Dickens knows her?”

  “Oh, yes.” Lizzy chuckled uneasily, wondering if she would regret opening this subject with Fannie. “I understand that they’re . . . old friends.” She didn’t intend for the last two words to have such a significant emphasis, but they certainly came out sounding that way, as if she meant to suggest something more than a friendship.

  “Old friends,” Fannie repeated slowly, replacing the cucumber slice and putting her head back down. “He . . . told you this?”

  “Yes,” Lizzy said. “We were talking about the air show, and he started telling me about Miss Dare. He seems to be excited about seeing her again. He knew her when he was working at the newspaper in Fort Worth. I gather that they developed a rather . . . close friendship.”

  “I see,” Fannie said quietly, chewing on one corner of her lip. “Well, I don’t suppose that’s a huge surprise. Mr. Dickens has worked and lived and traveled in lots of places. He must have . . . friends all over the world.”

  “Yes,” Lizzy said. “I suppose he does.”

  “I have been very foolish,” Fannie said, again as if to herself, speaking so low that Lizzy could barely hear her. “How could I have been so foolish?”

  Lizzy knew she wasn’t expected to answer, but she felt like apologizing for having spilled the beans. Obviously, Fannie was very badly hurt by what she had heard. She was enormously relieved when Beulah came hurrying back into the beauty shop.

  “Sorry, Liz,” Beulah apologized. “Spoonie had to be rescued. She loves to play with her pet chicken, but that old rooster has spurs like knives and Spoonie’s afraid of him. I had to pen him up, and he’s the dickens to catch.” She picked up a towel. “Now, then, we’re doing a shampoo and set today? Or do you want a trim, too?”

  “Just a shampoo and set,” Lizzy said. As she sat down in the shampoo chair and leaned back so that Beulah could wash her hair, she was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable about what she had said to Fannie.

  Had she done the right thing by tipping her off to Charlie’s relationship to Lily Dare?

  Or should she better have kept her mouth shut and let Fannie find out for herself?

  SIX

  “I Have to Stop Her!”

  Lizzy was still turning these questions over in her mind as she went back to the office. But what was done was done and there was no help for it. All she could do was hope she hadn’t caused Fannie too much grief and go on about the usual work of the office on a day when Mr. Moseley was out of town. She was also thinking ahead to the evening, when she had promised to talk to Mildred Kilgore, who lived near the Cypress Country Club on the southern outskirts of town.

  Lizzy didn’t own a car. Until a year or so ago, she had been saving to buy a used one. But instead, she had handed over the money to Mr. Johnson at the Darling Savings and Trust, to keep him from foreclosing on her mother’s house.

  Now, to somebody who didn’t know the full story, using her hard-earned car money to save her mother’s house from foreclosure might have seemed like a generous and unselfish
act. Lizzy, however, knew that the opposite was true. She was very selfish, at least where her mother was concerned. If she hadn’t done this, her mother would have moved in with her. She and her cat, Daffodil, lived all by themselves in a beautiful little house that was just big enough for the two of them. There simply wasn’t room for her mother, who always seemed to take up more than her share of space and who (to make things worse) was constantly telling her daughter what to do, how to dress, and who to marry: Grady Alexander, of course.

  Besides, as Lizzy often reminded herself, she didn’t really need to own a car. She could always borrow Grady’s blue Ford or Myra May’s old Chevy touring car when she had to drive over to Monroeville or (less often) down to Mobile. And Darling was a small town. She lived close enough to walk to the office, and she could ride her bicycle anywhere else she wanted to go.

  “We never sit down to supper before eight in the summer, so you just come on out whenever you get off work,” Mildred had said over the phone. So after Lizzy closed the law office for the afternoon, she hurried home, grabbed a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and changed into a pair of khaki slacks and a green plaid blouse. Then she climbed on the old blue Elgin bicycle she had ridden since her sophomore year in high school and biked all the way south on Robert E. Lee to Cypress Avenue, then turned off Cypress onto Country Club Drive.

  The evening was warm and humid and the air was as heavy as a hot, wet blanket. But Lizzy was riding through a pretty part of town so she was distracted from the heat by the summer flowers blooming in people’s front yards. In Lizzy’s opinion, all of Darling was pretty. Some of it wasn’t, of course, but Lizzy understood that not everybody had the time, the money, or the inclination to keep a place looking good—and pretty wasn’t everything. In her view, her little town was a fine place to live, with friendly residents, mild winters, and a long gardening season. She smiled a little as she rode down the shady streets lined with beautiful magnolias and live oaks. She thought back over Darling’s history and reflected that the original settlers—Mr. Darling and his wife and children—would be utterly amazed if they could see the town today, with its impressive brick courthouse, its well-kept streets, and its up-to-the-minute electrical and telephone systems.