The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But Lizzy’s spine had become unexpectedly stiff. She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and pointed out that she had been employed in Mr. Moseley’s law office for fifteen years, during which time she had managed to save a tidy little nest egg, enough to move to—say—Montgomery or Mobile, where she could find a job in another law office without any difficulty at all.

  So if her mother preferred that she sell the house, she would do so—and then begin looking for a new job elsewhere. Or she could stay right here in Darling and live in her own little house just across the street and look in on her mother every day to make sure that Sally-Lou was doing a good job. (Sally-Lou was the colored woman who lived in and did Mrs. Lacy’s cooking and housekeeping, allowing her mistress to live like a Southern lady.)

  There had been a few more tears, of course, but that was pretty much the end of it. Mrs. Lacy saw the wisdom of Lizzy’s proposal—or pretended to, anyway. Lizzy and Sally had carried Lizzy’s clothes and things across the street, and Lizzy had settled into her new home more happily than she could ever have imagined. Even today, two years later, she was filled with a very deep joy as she walked up the porch steps.

  Her home. Her very own house and garden.

  And there, by the door, was the present from Grady: a Mason jar filled with water and the cutting he had promised her from one of the farms that he visited in his job as county agriculture agent. It was already beginning to put out white roots and begging to be transplanted into her garden so it could settle in and start to grow tall and strong. It was a Confederate rose.

  FIVE

  THE GARDEN GATE

  By MISS ELIZABETH LACY

  FRIDAY, MAY 16, 1930, DARLING DISPATCH

  ❧ Last Sunday, the Darling Dahlias held our first meeting in our new clubhouse at 302 Camellia Street, the former home of our club’s founder, Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone. We had refreshments and transacted club business, including a reduction in the dues to just fifteen cents a month, so if you’ve been wanting to join, now’s your chance. Also, we unveiled our new sign, painted by Beulah Trivette, noted local artist and owner of Beulah’s Beauty Bower. The sign will be installed under the cucumber tree in front of the house sometime soon. The garden will be open during the Darling Garden Tour in September, the dates to be announced. If you’d like to add your garden to the tour, please contact Mrs. Hetty Little, who is keeping a list.

  ❧ Earlynne Biddle reports that the best thing that’s happened in her garden this spring is the unexpected comeback of her Butter and Eggs, which disappeared quite a few years ago and she thought was gone forever. It isn’t where she saw it last, but that’s a daffodil for you. She says that she was so glad to see it again that she didn’t ask where it had been all those years.

  ❧ Another nice thing that happened this spring, according to Miss Dorothy Rogers, Darling’s intrepid librarian, was an automobile trip to the family cemetery, over near Monroeville. (Ask her how many flat tires they had going there and back.) Miss Rogers came home with slips from a beautiful rose, which she says was growing up into a tree beside the cemetery gate, almost twenty feet high. It was a single plant, but it was covered with blossoms in all different shades of pink, from carmine to mauve, different colors in a single cluster. She recognized it as Seven Sisters, an old rose that is thought to have been brought from Japan to Europe in 1816. Miss Rogers, who likes to use the proper names for things, says that we should call this Rosa cathayensis platyphylla or R. multiflora grevillei, Verna Tidwell says that we’ll take Miss Rogers’ word for it.

  ❧ While I’m mentioning blossoms in different colors, I should like to say that I have just received a rooted cutting of a beautiful old Southern garden plant called the Confederate rose. You won’t likely find this hibiscus (that would be Hibiscus mutabilis, Miss Rogers) for sale, but if you’re really lucky, someone may give you a slip, which you can root in water. Here in south Alabama, the Confederate rose can grow into a small tree with several trunks, as much as ten feet tall. In late summer, you’ll see clusters of round, fat flower buds on top of each stem, white as cotton, which is why it’s sometimes called cotton rose. The flowers are single or double, about the size of a saucer. They’re white when they open, then turn pink, then red, then a deep blood-red. Confederate ladies were said to have planted this hibiscus in honor of their brave soldiers. You can surely see why.

  ❧ Mildred Kilgore led several of the Dahlias on a wildflower walk in Briar’s Swamp a few weeks ago. They took their lunches and did not get lost. But they did see some beautiful spring woodland wildflowers, including shooting star; wild sweet William; giant chickweed (sometimes called dead man’s bones); an unusual fire pink, or catch fly; white foam flower; and trout lilies—just to name a few. Spring is wildflower time in Alabama!

  ❧ The Dahlias are aiming to plant a bog garden in the wet area at the back of the Dahlia House garden. Some of the plants we are looking for include the wild blue flag, cardinal flower, great blue lobelia, false dragon-head, and golden-eyed grass. Miss Rogers will be glad to supply the Latin names (if you need them). If you’ve got any of these plants to share, stop by the library (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, noon to three p.m.) and let Miss Rogers know. She’ll be glad to send somebody to dig them up. Dahlias: please contact Bessie Bloodworth and let her know when you’re available for garden cleanup at the new clubhouse. That boggy area is going to be a challenge! (Wear old shoes. Or boots.)

  ❧ One last thing. These are tough times for everybody. The Dahlias are compiling a list of handy tips for what you can do to stretch what you have. We’re calling it our “Making Do” list, and plan to publish it in a pamphlet. Your contributions are welcome. Just write them down and leave them for Elizabeth Lacy at the Dispatch office.

  SIX

  The Dahlias Gather at Beulah’s Beauty Bower

  Monday, May 19,1930

  Beulah Trivette discovered her talent for hair as a teenager, when she bobbed her own hair. Her friends loved it and begged her to bob theirs, which she did, to the horror of many of the mothers in Darling, who were convinced that bobbed hair was the first step on the road to perdition.

  Beulah herself thought that her ability to do hair might be the first step on the road to a career. Right after high school, she took the Greyhound bus to Montgomery, where she got a job at a diner and worked her way through the Montgomery College of Cosmetology. She majored in hair and learned how to do a shampoo and head massage, cut a smooth Castle Bob (named for Mrs. Castle, the ballroom dancer who made it popular), manage a marcel iron, make pin curls and finger waves, and color hair. There was also skin care (facials), nails (manicure and pedicure), and makeup—all you needed to know, as the MCC advertised, “to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful.” Beulah (who was already pretty and aspired to being beautiful) graduated at the top of her class in cutting and styling and then came back to Darling, fired with the ambition to introduce every woman in town to the fine art of beauty.

  And so she did—in part because Beulah herself was a generous soul and genuinely wanted to help women make the most of whatever the good Lord had given them, whether it was a little or a lot. She was a perky, pretty blonde with a passion for all things artistic—not just hair, but drawing, painting, sewing, and flower arranging. She loved flowers with big, floppy blooms, especially cabbage roses and dahlias and sunflowers, and crowded as many as possible into her backyard.

  After a couple of years of being eagerly courted by a great many Darling males (during which time she was thought pretty “fast”), Beulah married Hank Trivette. Most people were surprised, since they’d expected her to fall for one of the rowdy crowd that hung out at the Watering Hole, going out to the parking lot every now and then to pass their bootleg bottles around. Hank was a settled young fellow without much in the way of looks or gumption and he didn’t spend much time at the Watering Hole. He couldn’t dance, either, and pretty much steered clear of the Dance Barn.

  But Hank (who had a few hit
herto undemonstrated sterling qualities) endowed Beulah with something she wasn’t likely to get from her other suitors: respectability and a marketing opportunity. Hank was the youngest son of the pastor at the Four Corners Methodist Church, where Beulah confessed her sins and joined on the Sunday before the wedding, wiping the slate clean and getting the marriage off to a good start. Before long, all the respectable Methodist women were coming to Beulah to get their hair shampooed and set, and then the Pentecostals joined the beauty parade, and finally even the Presbyterians. Beulah was on her way.

  After the birth of Hank Jr., Hank (who knew a good thing when he saw it) bought a larger house on Dauphin Street, between Jeff Davis and Peachtree, and enclosed the screened porch across the back so Beulah could have herself a real shop. He installed a shampoo sink and haircutting chair and big wall mirror and wired the place for electricity for that new Kenmore handheld hair dryer that Beulah wanted.

  That done, Beulah wallpapered the walls with big pink roses and painted the wainscoting pink. She painted the wooden floor pink, too, but pretty quickly discovered the problem with that and spattered it with gray, blue, and yellow. Then she painted a beautiful sign, decorated with a basket of pink roses, and hung it out front. Since Dauphin Street was the way most people came into town, lots of people saw the sign.

  After a few months, the Beauty Bower was such a runaway success that Beulah had to put an advertisement in the Dispatch for somebody to help her out with shampoos and manicures. Bettina Higgens applied, demonstrated her skills on Beulah’s very own hair and nails, and got the job. She was definitely not a pretty woman herself (she was tall and her brown hair was irredeemably thin and lanky) and she didn’t have the advantage of cosmetology school. But she was a fast learner and Beulah was a good teacher, and within two weeks, they were working shoulder-to-shoulder at the now-twin shampoo sinks and haircutting stations.

  The Beauty Bower opened promptly at nine in the morning, after Beulah saw Hank Jr. and daughter Spoonie off to school. Then she took out her hair curlers (she had traded her bob for curls), applied her makeup, and donned a freshly ironed pink-ruffled apron, with Beulah’s Beauty Bower embroidered across the bib. Bettina, similarly aproned, was already at work, sweeping the floor, folding towels, and making sure that the customers’ cover-up capes were clean and ready to be deployed.

  Each day brought its regulars—the Mondays, Tuesdays, and so forth. These ladies had gotten so used to meeting at Beulah’s that it was more like a tea party than anything else, especially since somebody usually brought cookies while somebody else brought cupcakes, to go with the coffee percolating in Beulah’s kitchen and the iced tea in the icebox. There were also the “irregulars,” as Bettina called them, women who never could remember what day their appointment was or whether they had made one at all and just stopped by to see if Beulah or Bettina could fit them in. They usually could, after a short wait, which nobody minded because the Beauty Bower was such a good place to catch up on the news.

  The Mondays included Myra May Mosswell and Miss Dorothy Rogers (nine o’clock), Mrs. Voleen Johnson and Leona Ruth Adcock (nine thirty). Beulah especially liked having Myra May first on Monday morning. That way, they got to hear a full report of all the weekend goings-on, straight from the telephone exchange and the Darling Diner. It got the week started off right.

  “Well, dear?” Beulah asked, when Myra May was stretched out flat in the chair with her feet on a stool and her toes turned up in her peep-toed shoes (Myra May liked to paint her toenails red so they showed through her rayon stockings). Her eyes were closed, and her head lay in the shampoo tray. “Got any good news to tell us? Have they captured that escaped convict yet?” Beulah poured a pitcher of water over Myra May’s dark hair.

  Myra May opened her eyes and squinted up. “Water’s too cold, Beulah. I like it hot, remember?” Beulah poured some more hot water out of the teakettle into the pitcher and tried again.

  Myra May smiled blissfully and closed her eyes. “No, they haven’t captured him. Sheriff Burns says they’re still looking. But there’s some other news. Somebody stole a car on Saturday night”

  “Stole a car!” Beulah and Bettina exclaimed in astonished unison.

  “Well, my goodness gracious,” Miss Rogers said. She was in the same prone position as Myra May, toes up (sensibly shod) and head in the shampoo tray. “A car theft? In Darling?”

  “Whose car?” asked Bettina, scrubbing Miss Rogers’ gray hair energetically.

  “Watch your fingernails, Bettina,” Miss Rogers reprimanded. “And the water could be a little cooler. I don’t like hot water.”

  “The car was a roadster,” Myra May said. “Pontiac, near new. Stolen from in front of Fred Harper’s house. Belonged to his brother. He phoned the sheriff around midnight Saturday night to say it’d been stolen.”

  “Who stole it?” Beulah asked, vigorously applying shampoo.

  “Mr. Harper said he didn’t know. A man and a young woman. They—”

  “A woman?” Miss Rogers interrupted sharply. “Really. I don’t know what girls these days are coming to. Dancing, smoking, drinking, taking the Lord’s name in vain.” She sniffed. “And now stealing cars. Society is going to utter wrack and ruin.”

  “Was Mr. Harper’s brother visiting?” Beulah asked.

  “No,” Myra May replied. “He’d borrowed the car. Mr. Harper, that is. His brother is a dentist, lives over in Monroeville.” She opened her eyes. “That feels lovely, Beulah, but you can rub a little harder.”

  “Lord sakes. A girl?” Bettina was shocked. “What’ll Sheriff Burns do if he catches her? Will he put her in jail along with Clipper Rexnoth?” Clipper could be counted on to get roaring drunk a couple of weekends a month and be confined to jail to sober up safely.

  “That will never do,” Miss Rogers said definitively. She fished for a hankie in her brown-checked bosom (Miss Rogers always wore brown—checks, stripes, plaids, or plain) and wiped a drop of water off her cheek. “The sheriff will have to find somewhere else to put her.”

  “There’s an old lockup in the cellar of the courthouse,” Bettina offered, pouring a pitcher of rinse water through Miss Rogers’ hair. “I saw it once, years back. Used to be full of old records, but they got wet and mildewed, so they had to put ’em somewhere else.”

  “That won’t do, either,” Miss Rogers said. “It’s like a dungeon down there. She’d catch her death of pneumonia.”

  “What did she look like?” Beulah asked Myra May. “The girl who stole the car, I mean.”

  “All I know is what Mr. Harper told the sheriff,” Myra May replied. “She was—”

  The telephone on the wall rang. Beulah was the one person on the street who had a private line, because the phone rang so often with calls from women wanting their hair done that the constant jangling would be a nuisance to anybody else on the line.

  “If that’s Olive LeRoy,” Myra May said emphatically, “don’t tell her I’m here. She wants me to work for her on the switchboard tonight, and I’m playing hearts at Ophelia’s. Any of the rest of you coming?”

  “Wish I could but I can’t,” Beulah said, as Bettina went to the phone, leaving Miss Rogers with her head in the shampoo sink. “I’m workin’ on Spoonie’s new Sunday dress. Promised it to her last week, but didn’t get it done. It is the sweetest thing, blue and white checks with white ruffles and blue rickrack trim.”

  “I don’t play cards,” Miss Rogers said disapprovingly.

  “Miss Rogers,” Myra May said, “just what do you do for fun?”

  “Fun?” Miss Rogers asked. “Well, I read. I’m reading Wuthering Heights right now.”

  “I thought that was ‘withering,’” Beulah said, finishing with Myra May’s rinse.

  “Wuthering, my dear,” Miss Rogers said, in a superior tone. “The word refers to the atmospheric tumult to which Thrushcross Grange is exposed.”

  It wasn’t Olive LeRoy on the phone; it was Mrs. Johnson, canceling her nine thirty. “Says she’s
got a bad cold,” Bettina reported to Beulah, returning to Miss Rogers.

  “Must be really bad,” Beulah said sympathetically. “Miz Johnson never misses an appointment. Likes to get her nails done on Monday so they look nice all week.” Voleen Johnson didn’t do any real work, except for cutting the flowers that went to the bank every day, so keeping her nails nice wasn’t difficult.

  “A cold?” Myra May was derisive. “Is that what she said? Well, I for one doubt it.”

  “Sit up, Myra May, and I’ll wrap you,” Beulah said, taking a towel. “Why do you doubt it?”

  “Because she was perfectly fine yesterday morning in church. And because there’s trouble at the bank, and she’s probably afraid one of us will ask her about it” The minute Myra May said it, she pursed her lips, as if she knew she’d said something she shouldn’t.

  “Trouble?” Miss Rogers asked, pushing herself up from her prone position. She sounded alarmed. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Wait,” Bettina said hurriedly. “You’re dripping. Let me get your towel.” She wrapped Miss Rogers’ head in pink terrycloth. “There. You look just like Cleopatra.”

  “You say there’s trouble?” Miss Rogers frowned. “At the bank?”

  Myra May tsk-tsked. “Now, Miss Rogers. You know I’m not supposed to talk about what goes through the exchange.”

  “But you told us about the pair that stole the automobile,” Miss Rogers protested. “The man and the young woman.”

  “That’s different,” Myra May said defensively. “I could tell you that because you’ll read all about it in the paper, and because once the report goes to the sheriff’s office, it’s public. Like the escaped convict business, stuff like that. I don’t talk about the private things I hear. The things nobody’s supposed to know about” She gave them a significant glance. “And there’s a bushel of those, believe you me. I could tell you things that would curl your toes. But I don’t. Because they are strictly private, and I am a professional telephone operator.”