Susan Albert - The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

“Yes, I know, Mama. But-”

“And don’t you think we could have supper first?” Her voice tightened. “There’s something we need to talk about, Elizabeth. Something important. Surely you can spare a little time for your mother, can’t you?”

Lizzy straightened her shoulders. “Of course I can. But not tonight, Mama. Verna and Myra May and I are going to have supper together before the movie.” She tried to put a smile into her voice. “How about if you come over here tomorrow after church?” Her mother was Presbyterian and never missed a service. “We can have Sally-Lou’s meat loaf and potato salad for our dinner. Will that do instead?”

“I suppose it’ll have to,” her mother said reluctantly. She heaved a plaintive sigh. “I just wish you were goin’ out with Mr. Alexander tonight, Elizabeth. He is such a fine, upstandin’ Christian young man and comes from such a good family. His mother sits in the pew right behind mine every Sunday morning. You could do worse than marry him. And of course you don’t want to live out your life as a tragic old maid.”

“Yes, Mama,” Lizzy said. She didn’t point out that Grady never accompanied his mother to church, either, and that for a fine, upstanding Christian young man, he’d been awful hot and heavy-handed in the front seat of his blue Ford coupe the last time he’d taken her out. They’d gone to see Gary Cooper in The Virginian , and then driven out to watch the moon from the hill above the fairgrounds. Lizzy had finally had to get out of the car and take a cooling-off walk.

“Well, then, don’t forget,” her mother said. “Sunday school starts at nine. You can wear that nice new blue hat I made you.”

Lizzy rolled her eyes. “Mama, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Sunday is the only day I get to sleep a little late. You just come on over here when you get home and we’ll have a nice Sunday dinner together. I’ve got some fresh string beans I can cook up with onions and fatback, the way you like them.” And when they were eating, she would tell her mother that it had been wrong to copy that key. She would have to give it back, or promise not to use it except in an emergency, or-

“I would go with you to the movies,” her mother said petulantly, “if I was asked. And if you weren’t goin’ to see Clara Bow. You know how I feel about that immoral woman. I wouldn’t go into a movie house that was showin’ one of her films.” Mary Pickford was the only movie actress Mrs. Lacy admired ( Pollyanna was her favorite, along with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ), but even Miss Pickford’s star had dimmed in Mrs. Lacy’s eyes since the actress had bobbed her hair and married Douglas Fairbanks, who, as everybody knew, led a rake’s life out there in Hollywood, where it was said that nobody paid any attention to Prohibition. Marriage to him could not be good for Miss Pickford’s moral character.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lizzy said, glad now that she had mentioned Clara Bow. “Well, then. Sunday dinner after church. All right?”

“All right,” her mother said. “And don’t forget, y’hear, Elizabeth? There is somethin’ impo’tant that we need to talk about, and it can’t be put off. It’s got to be discussed now, before either of us gets a day older.”

With a long sigh, Lizzy put the receiver back in its cradle. Once every few months, her mother came up with “something impo’tant” they needed to discuss and would pester her nonstop until they sat down and talked. The last time, it had been the green straw hat that her mother was making. She couldn’t decide between big red silk rosettes and a red veil or small white silk daisies and a white veil, and needed Lizzy’s advice.

What was it this time?

Verna watched Liz walk off down Camellia Street, heading for home. She hesitated a moment, then turned and went the other way, hurrying a little, so that by the time she got to the corner of Camellia and Rosemont and started north, toward the courthouse square, she could see Miss LaMotte. Except for the business section of town, there were no sidewalks in Darling, and Miss LaMotte was making very slow forward progress on those silly high heels, which were suitable for city sidewalks only. If Verna wanted to, she could have caught up.

But she didn’t, exactly, at least not yet. Verna hadn’t known that she was going to follow Miss LaMotte in the first place, and she wasn’t exactly sure why she was doing it. Yes, there was the idea of asking her to appear in the talent show, although Verna knew that she really should talk to Mildred first. But the real truth was that Miss LaMotte’s sudden appearance in Darling had been a shocking surprise. It had brought back such a flood of memories that Verna almost felt as if she were drowning.

Now, Verna Tidwell was not a sentimental person. In fact, she thought of herself as not having a single schmaltzy bone in her body, and she took serious pride in her reputation for a hard-headed, no-nonsense approach to life. Oh, she had loved Walter well enough, but she had never been “in love” with him, if by being in love you were thinking of that corny lose-your-head-and-your-heart nonsense that Rudy Vallée was always crooning about. She had agreed to marry Walter because it made pretty good sense at the time he asked her, and she had been truly sorry when he died, although not so sorry that she went around wearing a rusty black dress and black hat and gloves for years afterward, the way her mother had when Verna’s father passed on.

Some of her acquaintances felt that her lack of sentiment was a character fault, but Verna did not agree. It was just part of her nature, along with her habit of wanting to know what was behind the appearances that other people put on when they went out the door in the morning, and suspecting their motivations, and questioning their intentions. “Why?” was one of Verna’s favorite questions, along with “Who says?” and “What’s that got to do with it?” Walter had always complained that she was suspicious, and Verna felt he was right. She was the sort of person who rarely took anything at face value, and she knew it.

Unfortunately, Verna’s suspicious habits had been very hard on Walter during the three years of their marriage. He taught history and civics at Darling Academy and lived in a world that was studded with indisputable facts, the way an oak door is studded with nails. As far as he was concerned, all you had to do to get along happily was to learn the facts and repeat them in the right order when you were called on, and everything would be honky-dory. Verna’s habit of asking questions that didn’t have any clear-cut answers had made him very uncomfortable, and if he hadn’t walked out in front of that Greyhound bus on Route 12 that rainy afternoon ten years ago, Verna suspected that they probably would have gotten a divorce before very long. Instead, Walter had ended up under a sycamore tree in the southwest corner of the Darling Cemetery, out on Schoolhouse Road, and Verna had ended up a widow.

The month before the accident, however, they had gone on a trip to New York together. It was their first vacation and their last, so you might call it Walter’s trip of a lifetime. His cousin Gerald had taken them on the new subway line from Manhattan all the way out to Coney Island to eat cotton candy and Nathan’s Famous frankfurters and ride the new 150-foot-tall Wonder Wheel, so high it seemed to scrape the sky. And then they took the ferry to Liberty Island, where they climbed all 354 steps inside the Statue of Liberty so they could look out from the windows of the crown and marvel at the magical city across the blue, blue water.