The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Mr. Lima examined the paper. Frowning, he handed it back to Miss LaMotte. “I am sorry, madam,” he said, “but I can’t fill this prescription.”

  “And why not?” Miss LaMotte demanded. She jabbed her finger at the paper. “It’s got the doctor’s signature on it. Right there. Can’t you see?” She spoke fast, in a high, clipped voice. She seemed to have lost any Alabama accent she might have once had. She sounded, Verna thought, like a Yankee. An impatient Yankee.

  Verna stepped past the toothpaste, moving a little closer, not wanting to miss anything. She bent over, pretending to read the label of a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. She couldn’t see Miss LaMotte’s face, but she could see the line of her jaw, which was a bit saggy. Still, the platinum blonde hair looked pretty much as it had ten years ago, and while the lady was wearing far more clothing than she had worn on Mr. Ziegfeld’s stage, the line of her generous bust was very obviously the same. Verna turned and caught Benny staring at Miss LaMotte’s figure. He colored, dropped his head, and went back to his soapsuds.

  Mr. Lima cleared his throat. “I can’t fill it, madam, because it’s over a year old. I suggest that you visit Dr. Roberts. Show him this and tell him why you need it. I’m sure he’ll be able to-”

  “But Dr. Roberts is out of town!” Miss LaMotte shrilled. “He won’t be back until Tuesday or Wednesday.” She pushed the paper back across the counter. “I need this filled today. Right now! It’s vitally important. It’s a matter of life and death!”

  Life and death? Verna pulled in her breath. Really, if Miss LaMotte’s health was in danger, Mr. Lima ought to sell her enough of whatever it was to tide her over until she could get in to see Doc Roberts. Or maybe she needed the medicine for Miss Hamer. Either way-

  “My dear lady,” Mr. Lima said. “Veronal is a dangerous barbiturate. I cannot and will not fill a prescription for it unless the patient-I assume that is yourself-is under the care of a doctor. Preferably a Darling doctor.” He looked down at the prescription. “Not a doctor in Illinois.”

  Veronal. Verna let her breath out. Sleeping pills. So it wasn’t a matter of life and death, after all-although insomnia wasn’t pleasant. Verna knew, because she sometimes suffered from it herself. Her favorite remedy was a glass of warm milk and a handful of soda crackers. The combination usually put her to sleep.

  “It’s not for me.” Miss LaMotte tapped her foot impatiently. “But if you won’t fill it, you won’t. What can I buy instead? Something to make her sleep.”

  “It’s for an adult?” Mr. Lima asked.

  Miss LaMotte gave a short laugh. “When she’s not acting like a spoiled child. But yes, she’s an adult. What can I buy that will get her a good night’s sleep?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Mr. Lima turned, scanned the shelves behind him, and reached for a bottle. “I can suggest Dr. Miles’ Nervine. It comes in either pill form or liquid. We sell a great deal of it here, particularly to the ladies.” He held up the bottle and read the label aloud. “For sleeplessness, nervousness, irritability, nervous headache, and functional hysterical disturbances.”

  “ ‘Functional hysterical disturbances.’ ” Miss LaMotte laughed bitterly. “That’s rich.” She opened her red handbag. “Well, if you say it’ll work, I’ll take it.”

  “Liquid or pills?”

  She considered. “Liquid. Better give me two bottles. No, make it three. Just in case.” Three bottles? In case of what, Verna wondered. Miss LaMotte added, grudgingly, “It might be a while before Dr. Roberts can see her.”

  “That will be three dollars,” Mr. Lima said, and took the money she handed him. “I hope it helps-at least, until the doctor is available.”

  “I do, too,” she said grimly. “This situation is driving me abso-lute-ly bonkers.” The red bow on her hat jiggled.

  Mr. Lima gave her back two dollar bills and put the bottles into a paper bag. Unbending a little, he said, “You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m Miss Hamer’s niece. Nona Jean Jamison. I’m staying with her-helping out. She’s ill, you know.”

  “I know that she has been under the weather for some time, yes.” He gave her a thin smile. “Well, then, welcome to Darling, Miss Jamison. Your aunt has been a customer of ours for a good many years.”

  Miss LaMotte made a huffing sound. “Then I would’ve thought you could’ve helped me out with that prescription.”

  Mr. Lima looked humble. “I’m sorry. Is there anything else I can get for you this afternoon?”

  “No, thank you,” Miss LaMotte said, lifting her chin. She took the bag and turned to go.

  By this time, Verna had decided on a course of action and a way to introduce herself. She followed the lady out of the store and caught up with her just as she turned onto Rosemont.

  “Miss LaMotte,” she said, “I couldn’t help overhearing what you and Mr. Lima were talking about. I’ve had some experience with insomnia, and I would like to recommend warm milk and crackers.” She smiled cordially. “It may sound simple, but it works for me every time.”

  Miss LaMotte had turned and was regarding her with some disdain. Verna was suddenly conscious that she was wearing her gardening clothes-a plaid cotton blouse and a green twill skirt, neither of them clean or pressed.

  “You are speaking to me?” Miss LaMotte asked, frowning.

  “Well, yes,” Verna said, thinking that this was obvious. She held out her hand. “My name is Verna Tidwell. I had the privilege of seeing you perform ten years ago, at the New Amsterdam Theater, in New York City. You were swell.”

  At that moment, Mr. Bailey Beauchamp’s Cadillac came around the courthouse square on Dauphin and cruised down the block toward them, slowing so that Mr. Beauchamp could have another look. As Lightning turned onto Rosemont, to begin another circuit around the square, Mr. Beauchamp tipped his hat and gave Miss LaMotte a flirtatious smile.

  Miss LaMotte turned away, pretending not to notice. She faced Verna, lifting her chin. “I am sorry,” she said sharply, ignoring Verna’s outthrust hand, “but you are mistaken. You are confusing me with someone else. My name is Nona Jean Jamison. I am staying with my aunt here in Darling.”

  “Yes, Miss Jamison,” Verna said, feeling rebuffed. She put her hand (her nails really were a little grubby) into her skirt pocket. “I understand that you’re Miss Hamer’s niece, and that you grew up over in Monroeville. But my husband Walter-he’s dead now-and I saw you at the New Amsterdam on West Forty-second Street with Walter’s cousin Gerald. Gerald is from Monroeville, too. So he knew who you were-although he said he would never in the world have recognized you.” She smiled reminiscently. “You and Miss Lake were the Naughty and Nice Sisters. You danced the shimmy, and Miss Lake sang and played the mandolin and made funny jokes. I just want you to know that my husband Walter enjoyed it so much. It was all he talked about on the train back to-”

  Miss LaMotte stamped her foot. “I said,” she cried shrilly, “that you are wrong! Wrong, do you hear? I have never been in the theater, and I don’t know a thing about Mr. Ziegfeld’s shows or dancing and singing! I should like to go on about my business now. And I’m sure you have something else to do besides accosting perfect strangers.” Chin up, shoulders straight, clutching her handbag and the paper sack Mr. Lima had given her, she turned away.

  But not before Verna saw the shadow of fear in her eyes.

  FOUR

  Saturday Night in Darling, or Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries

  Over the summer, Grady had taught Lizzy to drive his blue Ford coupe and encouraged her to practice whenever they went out. She was saving her money to buy a car, but that would take a while. In the meantime, she could ride her bicycle or walk anywhere she wanted to go in Darling and the surrounding countryside. Her house was only a couple of blocks from the courthouse square, around which most of the town’s businesses were located, including the law office where Lizzy worked, upstairs over the newspaper office.

  Directly opposite the Dispatch bu
ilding, in the middle of the square, stood the Cypress County Courthouse, an imposing two-story red brick building with a bell tower and a white-painted dome with a clock that struck every hour. The courthouse, built in 1905, was surrounded by a ragged brown apron of scuffed grass bordered with bright summer annuals: marigolds, zinnias, nasturtiums, cosmos, and the like. The flowers were planted, watered, and weeded by the Darling Dahlias for everyone in town to see and enjoy. The Dahlias believed that when times were hard, a few flower seeds could go a long way toward making people feel better, and they put that belief into practice wherever they could. Times were definitely hard in Darling these days, although folks who had been up north or back east said it was a lot worse in the big cities, where people were mostly strangers to one another and had to rely on the Salvation Army soup kitchens for food and Red Cross shelters when they didn’t have a place to sleep. “We’d rather be in Darling than anywhere else,” those folks said when they got back home, “especially when things are bad.”

  Darlingians generally agreed. Of course, there were the usual complainers, who didn’t like this or that or the other thing. But for the most part, people thought their little town was a fine place to live. It was located in the gently rolling hills seventy miles north of Mobile-a full half-day drive away, more, if the roads were muddy-and a hundred miles south of the state’s capital, Montgomery. As Bessie Bloodworth related the story in her lectures on local history, the town had been established in the early 1800s by Joseph P. Darling, a Virginian who had come into the area with his wife, five children, two slaves, a team of oxen, two milk cows, and a horse. Surveying the rich timber and fertile soils, the nearby river and the fast-flowing creek, Mr. Darling thought that the little valley would be a good place to live-and besides, his wife was sick and tired of life on the road and insisted that they settle down. According to Bessie, she said, with extraordinary firmness, “I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon, Mr. Darling. If you want your meals and your washin’ done steady, this right here is where you’ll find it.”

  So Mr. Darling (who liked to eat every day and wear a clean shirt on Sundays) built two log cabins (a big one for his family, a smaller one for his slaves) and a barn, and then (because he was of an entrepreneurial turn) a general store. The gently rolling hills were covered with loblolly and long-leaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the creek and river bottoms, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan. Mr. Darling’s cousin, who had followed him from Virginia, built a sawmill, so that all those fine trees could be turned into boards for building. A gristmill followed almost immediately, which meant that anybody who could put in an acre or two of corn could get it ground and make corn pone. A couple of churches came next, and a schoolhouse, and not long after, several cotton gins and a cottonseed oil mill, which processed the cotton grown on plantations around the town and along the Alabama River, a few miles to the west. The roads were indescribably bad when it rained (which was often), so the Alabama River carried most of the north-south traffic, with steamboats shuttling back and forth between Montgomery and Mobile, delivering people and supplies at plantation landings and picking up baled cotton and other products.

  Darling’s history didn’t include very much in the way of historic events, except when some Union soldiers tore through the town at the end of the War (always spoken of in Darling with a capital W). Or when the railroad spur was finally finished, connecting Darling to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad just outside Monroeville and delivering a final blow to river travel, since trains and railroad tracks were more reliable and cheaper to operate than the old-fashioned paddle wheelers, which had a nasty habit of sinking when the steam engine blew up or the boat rammed a snag. Oh, and there was the 1907 tornado, which had done more damage than the damn Yankees, tearing the bell tower off the recently built courthouse and ripping the roofs off houses and killing a dozen people.

  But after that, things quieted down. The bell tower was rebuilt, the town grew a little bigger, and when the Great War came, the price of cotton went through the roof. Still, nothing much of note had happened since the boys of the 167th came home from France in 1919-or didn’t, as in the case of Lizzy’s fiancé, Reggie Morris. The Roaring Twenties had roared through Darling very quietly, since the local ladies weren’t crazy about bobbed hair and skirts so short they couldn’t sit down in them, and most of the people in town belonged to a church that turned thumbs-down on dancing. There wasn’t supposed to be any drinking of alcoholic beverages after the Alabama legislature passed the Bone-Dry Act of 1915, five years before the rest of the country followed suit, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, since Alabamans always talked dry and drank wet. Voters thought that prohibiting alcohol was the Christian thing to do, since it might help people whose spirits were willing but whose flesh was weak. But there were plenty of folks who were Christians on Sunday morning and dancers and drinkers on Saturday night, and if somebody wanted hooch, he (or she) knew right where to go to get it.

  They knew where to get a good meal, too, although most people in Darling ate breakfast, dinner (the main meal of the day, at noon), and supper at home with their families. If you had a reason for eating away from home, you had several choices, depending on who you were. If you were a traveling gentleman staying at the Old Alabama Hotel or a husband who wanted to give his wife a treat by taking her out for an expensive meal, you could go to the hotel dining room and sit down at a table with a bowl of flowers in the middle of a white damask tablecloth, and a waiter would pour water into a crystal goblet and offer you a menu that featured (depending on the time of year) tomato frappe, asparagus vinaigrette, green peas and carrots, your choice of a thick filet mignon wrapped in bacon or a cold plate with chicken, and a maple nut sundae for dessert-for which you would pay seventy-five cents. While you dined, you could listen to Mrs. LeVaughn playing soft, elegant dinner music-Chopin and Debussy and Liszt-on the beautiful rosewood square grand piano, which was surrounded by potted palms in the Old Alabama lobby.

  If you were a single man and wanted a hearty meal that would stick to your ribs (beef stew and dumplings, say, or baked ham and mashed potatoes), you could walk over to the Meeks’ boardinghouse two blocks west of the rail yard where the railroad workers and some of the men from the sawmill boarded and see if Mrs. Meeks could make room at the table for one more, which she usually could, especially if you didn’t mind waiting until the second shift sat down. For the main dish, plus corn bread and green apple pie and all the coffee you could drink, you would expect to pay thirty-five cents, but you had to eat fast, because there was usually a third shift waiting to sit down. There was no time to talk, or anybody to talk to, either, since all the diners had their heads down, shoveling in their food. Definitely no dinner music.

  Or you could go to the Darling Diner. You wouldn’t pay a fortune, you wouldn’t have to rush through your meal, and you could talk all you wanted with your friends, since all your friends were likely to be there, too. As for dinner music, there was the Philco radio on the shelf behind the counter. It played whatever the customers wanted to listen to-mostly farm information, daily crop and livestock and milk prices, weather reports, and stock market information, which often produced hisses and boos from those listeners who felt that Wall Street was another word for the devil.

  For thirty years, the diner, located between Musgrove’s Hardware and the Dispatch building, was owned and operated by Mrs. Hepzibah Hooper, who lived in the apartment on the second floor. Mrs. Hooper had a large garden out in the back, where she grew some of the okra, green beans, Southern peas, collard greens, tomatoes, bell peppers, and sweet potatoes that she served to her customers. As time went on and her clientele expanded, she found she had to have help with the cooking and was lucky (or smart) enough to hire Euphoria Hoyt, a colored lady who specialized in fried chicken, meat loaf, and meringue pies. It wasn’t long before Euphoria was acknowledged as the best cook in that part of Alabama, and business got even better.

  But Mrs. Hoo
per was a heavy woman, and when her legs began to swell, she had trouble standing behind the counter for more than a couple of hours, so she decided to sell. By that time, she had bought a half-interest in the Darling Telephone Exchange, and Mr. Whitworth (who owned the other half-interest) installed the switchboard in the storage room at the back of the diner. The Exchange started out with just one operator working part-time, but before long, almost everybody in town was on the telephone, except for a few holdouts like Miss Hamer, who was hard of hearing, and Mr. Norris, who objected because the ringing jangled his nerves. This meant that the Exchange had to have an operator on the switchboard every hour of the day and night, which was more than Mrs. Hooper had bargained for, especially after her legs started to swell. So she began looking around for a buyer-for both the Exchange and the diner.

  And that’s where Myra May Mosswell and Violet Sims came into the picture.

  Myra May had learned her kitchen savvy when she managed the kitchen and the dining room at the Old Alabama Hotel. Her daddy, a much-loved Darling physician, had died and left her a house, some cash money, and a 1920 Chevy touring car named Big Bertha. Myra May was still considering what to do with her inheritance when a young woman named Violet Sims got off the Greyhound and applied for a job at the hotel. Violet was brown-haired and petite and very pretty, in a feminine sort of way, although this didn’t mean that she was any pushover, because she definitely had her own ideas about the way things ought to be done. And the fact that she liked to wear pretty cuffs and collars and jabots made of lace and silk georgette and smiled a lot and laughed in a soft, sweet voice didn’t mean that she was soft on the inside, too. Inside and out and through and through, Violet was definitely her own woman.