Susan Albert - The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

But Lizzy wasn’t thinking about this. She was thinking about what Verna had told her. A pair of vaudeville stars had moved to Darling! And if Verna was right (Verna usually was), one of them had come a long, long way. To go from being plain-Jane Miss Nona Jean Jamison of Monroeville, Alabama, to Miss Lorelei LaMotte of the Great White Way must have been an incredible journey.

And then a wonderful idea suddenly popped into Lizzy’s head. The Naughty and Nice Sisters act wasn’t suitable for the Dahlias’ talent show, but wouldn’t Miss LaMotte make a splendid subject for a feature story in the Darling Dispatch ? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of article that Charlie Dickens, the newspaper’s editor, would love to print?

Why, of course it was! It was one of those uplifting, heartwarming, hometown-girl-makes-good stories that everybody likes to read, especially in hard times. And while Darling wasn’t Miss LaMotte’s hometown, Monroeville was, and Monroeville was only fifteen miles away. Lizzy shivered a little, thinking of the exciting possibilities. She could do an interview with Miss LaMotte about her life, starting with her small-town girlhood as plain-Jane Nona Jean Jamison. And then her move to New York, where she had enjoyed a huge success in the glamorous and competitive world of vaudeville, catching the eye of Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld himself. Miss LaMotte had doubtless taken a few hard knocks along the way, which Lizzy could use to show how dedicated she was to becoming a dancer and how hard she’d worked to get to the top. The article could end with her decision to leave her big-city life and move to tiny Darling, Alabama, where she planned to care for her aging aunt and lead a life of quiet and peaceful retirement, far from the madding crowd. It would be a charming true-life story that everybody in town would read and talk about for weeks, maybe months.

And she-Elizabeth Lacy-was the perfect person to write it, wasn’t she? For the past five years, she had written a garden column for the weekly Dispatch. Lizzy loved writing about plants and people’s gardens and the passing of the seasons and the sweltering heats and sudden storms of their Alabama climate. She enjoyed doing research and corresponding with other Southern gardeners.

But in May, she had written a feature story about a young woman who had been shot in a green Pontiac roadster that belonged to a dentist and the car pushed into Pine Mill Creek. The story was based on her own investigation into the life and death of Eva Louise Scott, the girl in the car, and everybody told her what a great piece of reporting it was. It was a sad story, too, for Bunny-that was the girl’s nickname-had been beautiful and gay and young. And even though she was a bit reckless and heedless and wanted jewelry and other pretty things more than was probably good for her, Bunny hadn’t deserved to die, which of course was the main point of Lizzy’s article.

After that successful debut as a feature writer, Mr. Dickens had told her that if she came up with another interesting story idea, he’d be glad to consider it. Lizzy had thought of several, but none seemed to be exciting enough. The summer had passed with its customary sedateness, with nothing more explosive than the fireworks blowing up at the Elks’ Club Fourth of July picnic or more tragic than the swimming hole drying up in the long August drought or more unexpected than the out-of-the-blue emergency landing of a Cessna Model A airplane on the grassy airstrip near the county fairgrounds-none of which put a match to Lizzy’s creative fire.

But this was different, Lizzy thought excitedly. A story about Lorelei LaMotte, famous Broadway performer, would give her a chance to do some serious writing about a woman who surely had a fascinating personal history of success in a difficult profession, with a few intrigues and adventures here and there. It would definitely be a literary challenge, which was just what she had been looking for.

For years Lizzy had read everything-good, bad, and indifferent-that she could get her hands on. She kept a notebook, writing little stories about people she knew and places that captured her attention and events that took place here in town. And even though nothing very big or exciting ever happened in Darling, there were always lots of little things going on, surprising crises that poked up unexpectedly out of the serene surface of the day like… well, like those lilies, those naked ladies shooting suddenly up out of the grass when you had absolutely no idea they were there and dazzling you with their astonishing blooms. They weren’t the kinds of stories you’d read in the newspaper, which was usually full of facts and figures, but Lizzy enjoyed writing them.

But while Lizzy was a small-town girl who knew she could comfortably write about Miss LaMotte’s small-town beginnings, she couldn’t even begin to imagine the life of a vaudeville performer. She would have to do a huge amount of research-talk to Miss LaMotte at length and maybe Miss Lake, and read entertainment magazines like Variety and Billboard -before she could even think of writing anything. She frowned. But if she couldn’t imagine Miss LaMotte’s life, maybe she’d never be able to write about it, no matter how much research she did. It’s hard to write about something that is entirely foreign to you.

Occupied with these thoughts, Lizzy had crossed Dauphin and Franklin and reached her block of Jefferson Davis. She was home almost before she knew it, walking up the steps to the front porch, putting her key into the lock and turning it, with the special happiness that she felt every time she stepped through the green-painted front door and into the tiny front hall, which was just big enough for a single shelf, an oval wall-hung mirror, and a row of coat hooks, where she now hung her floppy-brimmed hat.

Home. The word had taken on a new and very special meaning a couple of years before. Until then, Lizzy had lived her whole life with her mother. Her father had died when she was a baby, leaving his widow a nice little cache of money, safely and prudently invested. It wasn’t enough to allow her mother to live an extravagant life, but it was certainly enough to keep her from working or worrying her pretty head about anything of any consequence. This fiscal consideration had allowed Mrs. Lacy to focus every bit of her attention, energy, and concern on Elizabeth, her only child. She loved sewing and hat-making, and she dressed her daughter in her beautiful creations: ruffled and embroidered dresses and hats piled with ribbons and silk flowers.

Her mother’s attentions had not bothered Lizzy so much when she was a little girl, but as she grew older, the fuss over what she wore and how she fixed her hair turned to a constant, quarrelsome nagging. It was “Elizabeth, if you keep on frowning, your forehead will be permanently wrinkled!” and “Elizabeth, stop chewing your nails this instant! Your hands are a scandal!” and “Elizabeth, I simply will not allow you to bob your hair!” And every time Lizzy turned around, her mother had made her another new hat-or redecorated an old one-and insisted that she wear it.

The only way she could escape was to close the door to her room and write in her journal or read, for Mrs. Lacy couldn’t follow her into the pages of The Railway Children (who were blessed with a very agreeable mother) or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Huck had no mother at all) . The trouble with writing in her journal, of course, was that Lizzy was writing about the secret places of her own inner life, and she could never be sure that-no matter how carefully she hid her work-her mother hadn’t found and read it. Lizzy was under no illusions. Her mother was that kind of mother.