The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (15 page)

She had never forgotten the magnolia-scented evening when she and Ima Gail strolled down St. Charles Avenue in their floaty white dresses, arm in arm with the Newcomb college girls; the rich coffee-and-chicory
au lait
and sugar-dusted beignets at the old Café du Monde in the French Market, where you could hear the whistles and the
chug-chug-chug
of the riverboats; and the thrilling sound of the Bourbon Street jazz band playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.”

Indeed, the visit had been so enchanting that—if Verna hadn’t already said yes to Walter Tidwell, who was patiently waiting for her to come back to Darling and marry him—she might have stayed on in the City That Care Forgot and lived a satisfying and perhaps even carefree life.

But Ima Gail had no Walter to go home to, so she had stayed. In fact, she was still there, once married, now divorced and working in a bank on Canal Street, in the city’s downtown district. She came back to Darling every so often to visit her mother, dazzling all her high school friends with her chic clothes and stylish coif. The last time she was home, she had confessed to Verna that the city didn’t seem quite so magical as it had when they were nineteen, now that so many of the elegant townhouses and Creole mansions had turned shabby and unkempt, like once-proud matrons down on their luck.

But the Café du Monde still had the best chicory coffee in the world, and when you walked down Bourbon and Dauphin, jazz and blues still poured like liquid velvet from every open door.

“I love the nightlife,” Ima Gail had said, “and the music and the food and the people. I even love my bank job.” Shaking her head, she’d added, “To tell the truth, I don’t know how you stand it here in this backwater of a town, Verna. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing at all!”

That wasn’t strictly true, Verna thought. There had been plenty of excitement in Darling over the past couple of years, what with Bunny Scott getting herself killed, and Al Capone’s ex-girlfriend moving in with her aunt across the street from the Dahlias’ clubhouse, and the theft from the county’s bank accounts, and all that furor over the Texas Star and her flying circus. In fact, as far as Verna was concerned, life had been a little too exciting lately. She realized, though, that Ima Gail—who was now a city girl—might not agree.

Ima Gail’s first job had been as a teller at the Bienville Bank and Trust, and she was now a loan officer there. Verna hoped that she might know—or be able to find out—whether the mysterious Mr. Duffy was who he said he was. That was the phone call Verna intended to make, and since she didn’t have a home telephone number for Ima Gail, she had to make it during business hours.

So at four thirty sharp, she walked into the Darling Telephone Exchange office and took the chair next to Rona Jean. The switchboard might look complicated, but it hadn’t changed a bit since Mrs. Hooper had taught Verna to operate it several years before. A marvel of modern technology, it worked on a relatively simple system—simple, that is, as long as you kept your mind on what you were doing and didn’t stick the right plug into the wrong socket, or vice versa.

Verna and Rona Jean were sitting in front of a vertical board that displayed rows of empty sockets, one for every individual or party line in town, and a horizontal board with a dozen pairs of cords with phone jacks on the ends. When a caller—Bessie Bloodworth, say—rang the switchboard, a tiny bulb began blinking above her socket on the vertical board. Rona Jean would pull out one of a pair of cords from the horizontal board, plug the jack into Bessie’s socket, and say, “Number, please,” into her headset microphone. When Bessie gave the number or said, “Rona Jean, honey, please ring up the grocery store for me,” Rona Jean would plug the other cord into the Hancock’s Grocery socket and send a signal down the line to ring the phone on the wall behind the grocery store counter, under a big yellow cardboard sign advertising Brown’s Mule Chewing Tobacco—“Every bite tastes right.”

When Mrs. Hancock answered, Rona Jean was supposed to flip the switch that cut off her headset so that Bessie could order her groceries without Rona Jean finding out that she was going to make a tuna fish casserole for supper, or had run out of toilet paper. That was the principle, although everybody in town knew that the operators didn’t always bother to turn off their headsets, especially when the traffic on the switchboard was slow.

Long-distance phone calls involved more operators. The switchboard had a couple of lines that connected to the long-distance switchboard in Mobile. If Bessie wanted to talk to her friend Alva Ann in Pensacola, she would give the number to Rona Jean, who would call the Mobile operator and tell her that she had a party who wanted to talk to Pensacola. The Mobile operator would patch the call through (eventually) and sooner or later, Rona Jean would be able to give Alva Ann’s number to the Pensacola operator. When Alva Ann answered her phone, Pensacola would connect with Mobile and Mobile would connect with Rona Jean and Rona Jean would plug Bessie in so she and Alva Ann could trade news and recipes. It might take fifteen minutes or more to make the connection, especially if the circuits were busy or the call had to go through several long-distance operators before it finally got where it was going and back again.

Since Verna was calling during business hours, she ran into the usual “Sorry, that circuit is busy” several times. But at last she had Ima Gail on the other end of the line, and after exchanging the usual hellos and how-are-yous, was saying, “Ima Gail, I wonder if you could help me. I need to find out about someone you may know. His name is Alvin Duffy.” Rona Jean was busy handling a couple of local calls, but Verna lowered her voice when she said Mr. Duffy’s name.

“Alvin Duffy?” Ima Gail asked. Verna pictured her frowning and picking up a pencil to jot down the name. “Is that D-u-f-f-i-e?”

“D-u-f-f-y,” Verna corrected. “Mr. Duffy works for Delta Charter. Or so I’ve been told,” she added cautiously. Who in Darling knew for sure? Mr. Johnson? Maybe she ought to talk to him, too. Once she had the information from Ima Gail, she could see if it matched what Mr. Johnson knew.
If
he would tell her anything, which he might not. Too bad Ellery Queen wasn’t around. People always seemed to tell him everything they knew, as soon as he asked.

“Duffy,” Ima Gail repeated thoughtfully. “Sorry. The name doesn’t ring a bell. But Jackie-boy goes around with some of that Delta Charter bunch. I can ask him.” Ima Gail was partying her way through a string of boyfriends, of whom Jackie-boy (who was several years her junior) seemed to be the latest. “Any special information you’re looking for? And how soon do you need it?”

“The sooner the better,” Verna said. Diffidently, she added, “If Jack can find out anything about his . . . um, personal life, that might help.”

“Ah-ha.” Ima Gail chuckled knowingly. “The plot thickens. Do I detect the sweet scent of romance in the air? Has this gentleman expressed an interest in you?” She gave the words a sly emphasis. “Has he
proposed
?”

“Absolutely
not
.” Verna bit off the words with an emphatic firmness. “How about if I give you a call around noon tomorrow and see what you’ve found out?”

“That might be too soon,” Ima Gail said. “But it won’t hurt to call. If Jackie-boy knows anything, I’ll pass it along A-S-A-P. Romance, huh?” She chuckled again. “I keep telling you, Verna, you are looking for the man in the moon. You’ve got to lower your sights. Nobody’s perfect. There are no knights in shining armor anymore. You need to learn to take the bad with the good. Settle for what’s available and stop holding out for Mr. Ideal Husband. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

Verna did not say what she thought of this philosophy. Instead, she replied, in a reasonable tone, “I am not looking for a husband, Ima Gail, let alone an ideal one. My interest in Mr. Duffy is a purely business matter. If you can’t help—”

“Okay, okay.” Ima Gail chuckled. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Verna. I’ll see what Jackie-boy can find out about your Mr. Duffy.”

“He’s not
my
Mr. Duffy,” Verna said crossly.

“Whatever you say,” Ima Gail said. “Talk to you tomorrow, Verna.”

Verna unplugged and took off her headset, feeling that—if nothing else—she had gotten the ball rolling. She was getting up from her chair when Rona Jean looked up and said, tentatively, “You were asking about Mr. Duffy?”

Verna sat back down. “I thought you were too busy to listen.”

Rona Jean, a thin, plain-faced girl in her early twenties, pushed her straggly brown hair out of her eyes. “I wasn’t listening,” she protested. “I mean, I wasn’t
trying
to listen. But you’re sitting right next to me. I couldn’t help but overhear it when you actually spelled his name.”

“Okay.” Verna gave up. “So what about it?”

“Well, I was just sort of . . . um, wondering. I mean, you know I live at Mrs. Brewster’s?”

Verna hadn’t known, but she wasn’t surprised. There were only two places in Darling where unattached females could board—that is, unless they were wealthy enough to take a room at the Old Alabama Hotel. One was Bessie Bloodworth’s Magnolia Manor, next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse. Bessie catered to congenial widows and spinsters of a certain age who liked to play mah-jongg or sit out on the Manor’s front porch in the evenings, listening to the radio, with glasses of cold lemonade and their knitting.

The other option for ladies was Mrs. Brewster’s, over on West Plum. That’s where the young working women—the two first-year schoolteachers and Miss O’Conner, the home demonstration agent—boarded. Mrs. Brewster, who wore long-sleeved black dresses with a ruffle of white lace around her throat and wrists, liked to promise the parents of her young ladies that she would act
in loco parentis
. This was supposed to mean that she would be just as strict as they were, although in most cases, her young ladies decided that she was twice as strict, and found another place to live as soon as they could.

“Living at Mrs. Brewster’s can’t be much fun,” Verna said sympathetically.

“It’s what I can afford,” Rona Jean said with a shrug. “I don’t go out at night much anyway, and I don’t have a boyfriend. But you were asking on the phone about”—she broke off and lowered her voice—“Mr. Duffy.” She gave Verna a meaningful look. “His
personal
life.”

Verna’s skin prickled. What could Rona Jean Hancock possibly know about Alvin Duffy? He surely hadn’t approached
her,
had he? Why, she couldn’t be more than twenty-one!

“What about his personal life?” she asked.

“Miss Champaign is sweet on him,” Rona Jean said, with the excited air of someone who is holding on to a tantalizing secret. “You know—the lady who has the hat shop. She just got back from Atlanta a couple of weeks ago.”

Verna knew that, of course, although she hadn’t seen Fannie since her return. She had no idea that Fannie even
knew
Alvin Duffy, let alone—

“Sweet on Mr. Duffy?” she asked skeptically.

Rona Jean nodded. “I don’t think it’s mutual, though. Because of the way he acted. And because of what Miss Champaign did afterward.”

“Wait a minute, Rona Jean. How do you know all this?”

“Because Miss Champaign wanted him to kiss her when he brought her home from the movie on Saturday night. But he only shook her hand and tipped his hat. Then I heard her crying in her room.”

“In her
room
?” Verna asked, feeling confused. “You mean, she’s boarding at Mrs. Brewster’s? But Fannie—Miss Champaign has an apartment over her hat shop!”

“She
did,
” Rona Jean amended. “While she was staying in Atlanta, she rented her apartment to Miss Richards, the supervisor over at the Academy. Miss Richards has the apartment until June, when the school year is over. Meanwhile, Miss Champaign is boarding at Mrs. Brewster’s.”

“I see.” Verna frowned. “Well, how do you know she wanted him to kiss her?”

“I’ve got eyes, haven’t I?” Rona Jean laughed shortly. “It was dark, but Mrs. Brewster always leaves the porch light on and they were standing by the gate where I could see them out of my window. She was leaning up against the fence and raising her face, the way they do in the movies. But he didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t kiss her. Just shook her hand and thanked her for a pleasant evening and said good night. She said something about maybe seeing him again, and he said that would be nice but you could tell—I mean,
I
could tell—that he wasn’t going to be beating a path to her door. That’s when she came upstairs and started crying. I wanted to go in and ask her if she needed something, water or something. But I didn’t think she’d want me to.”

The switchboard buzzer sounded and two lights began to blink at the same time.

“Oops!” Rona Jean said. “Gotta get back to work.”

Verna sat for a moment, thinking of Fannie, disappointed in love not just once (by Charlie Dickens) but twice (by Alvin Duffy), and counting her lucky stars that she had not been so foolish as to lose her heart to that insolent rascal.

Not Charlie Dickens, of course.

Alvin Duffy.

Lizzy Makes a New Start

After Grady left on Monday night, Lizzy had sat in the dark for a long time, curled up on her sofa, holding Daffy in her arms and wetting his orange fur with her tears. When she went to bed, she cried herself to sleep. And when she got up on Tuesday morning, her throat felt raw, her eyes were swollen, and she looked like a wreck. It would be better, she decided, if she didn’t go to work, especially since there wasn’t anything terribly crucial on her desk. So she called Mr. Moseley at home, saying that she had a little cold and wouldn’t be in.

But she must have sounded pretty terrible, because Mr. Moseley became so concerned that she found herself telling him the real reason she wasn’t coming to work—and taking a perverse pleasure in the unkind things he said about Grady.

Then, when she realized how she was feeling, she said, “Oh, please, stop! Please, Mr. Moseley. It wasn’t Grady’s fault. He—”

“What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault?” Mr. Moseley demanded gruffly. “He could have— He shouldn’t have—Oh, hell, you know what I mean, Liz. Of course it’s his fault! It’s always the man’s fault.”

Was it?
Lizzy wondered.
Always the man’s fault?
But that wasn’t what she had meant, anyway. She had meant that sometimes things just happened, and nobody was to blame.

Mr. Moseley’s voice softened. “You take as much time as you need, Liz. I don’t want you to come back to work until you’re feeling better.”

“Thank you,” she said gratefully. “I’m sure I’ll be feeling better tomorrow. I can catch up then.”

“Don’t worry about catching up,” Mr. Moseley said. “Just concentrate on . . . well, feeling better.”

Lizzy hung up, thinking how lucky she was to have such a wonderful employer. She would take the whole day to get used to the idea that Grady was now permanently a part of her past. Tomorrow, she would face her future. But first—

But first, she should go across the street and tell her mother that Grady was getting married,
before
her mother found it out from someone else. She shivered when she thought about it. This wasn’t going to be easy. Her mother had her heart set on Grady’s becoming her son-in-law.

As it turned out, though, her mother already knew. Ouida Bennett, who lived across the alley and two doors down, had hurried over right after breakfast with the news. Mrs. Bennett was Twyla Sue Mann’s second cousin, and had heard about the wedding the night before.

Sally-Lou met her at the kitchen door, wearing her usual gray uniform dress, nicely pressed, and a white apron. “She took it real hard,” Sally-Lou said in a half whisper. “She’s in her bedroom, layin’ down with a wet washrag on her head. She done tol’ Mr. Dunlap she ain’t comin’ in to work at the Five an’ Dime today. You can go in, if’n you want, Miz Lizzy, but it ain’t gonna be good. She’s gonna give you a right big piece o’ her mind.”

Lizzy had been a toddler when Mrs. Lacy hired Sally-Lou as a live-in maid and baby-minder. The girl was only fourteen, gangly and black as night, but she was already a good cook and housekeeper. She had raised two brothers and knew how to make even a stubborn little girl mind when she was told to do something. Still, Sally-Lou was young enough to play games and sing songs with her young charge and Lizzy had grown up thinking of her as a friend. And when her mother got angry about something or other (she seemed to do that a lot, as Lizzy got older), Sally-Lou was not only a friend but an ally and a staunch defender. If you didn’t know her, she might seem so meek and mild that a good hard breeze would pick her up and carry her off. Looks were deceiving, though. When need be, she was as strong as a stick of stove wood and as feisty as a young rooster.

But Sally-Lou no longer lived in. Mrs. Lacy, through her own bad management and several foolish ventures, had lost all her money in the stock market. She would have lost her house, too, if Lizzy hadn’t stepped in and bought it from the bank so that her mother would have a place to live. (This was not an unselfish act. Lizzy couldn’t bear the thought of having her mother move in with her.) To make ends meet, Mrs. Lacy, who had always enjoyed being creative with bits of lace and beads and feathers, had begun working in Fannie Champaign’s hat shop.

But when Fannie closed the shop and went to stay with her cousin in Atlanta, Mrs. Lacy swallowed her last vestige of pride and went to work for Mr. Dunlap at the Five and Dime—hard work, because she had to stand on her feet all day behind the counter. She didn’t really make enough money to keep Sally-Lou, but she couldn’t lose face with her friends by letting her maid go completely.

So she cut corners elsewhere and paid Sally to come in one morning a week. Now, Sally-Lou was living with her cousin Danzie over in Maysville and working on Tuesday mornings for Mrs. Lacy and the rest of the week for Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson—although Lizzy wondered what was happening now that Mrs. Johnson had left town.

When Lizzy went into her mother’s bedroom, she saw that the curtains were drawn across the bedroom windows, darkening the room. Mrs. Lacy, a woman of substantial shape and size, was lying flat on her back with a cloth over her forehead. She pushed herself up on her elbows when Lizzy came in.

“Why did you let him do it, Elizabeth?” she cried petulantly. “Why, oh why oh
why
?”

“I could hardly have stopped him, now could I, Mama?” Lizzy asked, lightening the question with a chuckle. But it was the wrong thing to say.

“Stopped him? You drove him to it!” Mrs. Lacy cried, balling her hands into fists. “I know you did, you wicked, wicked girl! He would have married you at the drop of a hat, if you’d only had the sense to say yes. But you didn’t, and now that girl is pregnant and—”

With a loud, lamenting groan, she fell back on the pillow and flung an arm over her eyes. “You didn’t even have the grace to tell me about it. I had to hear it from Ouida Bennett, that old busybody. She positively
gloated
over it when she told me.”

“I didn’t feel like coming over last night, after Grady told me,” Lizzy said, trying to keep her voice steady. “And I’m sorry Mrs. Bennett gloated. But there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s happened, and Grady’s getting married, and we have to be nice.”

“Be nice?” her mother cried angrily. “Be
nice?
Elizabeth Lacy, you stupid girl, how can you say that word! That evil,
evil
man has dragged your name in the dirt, besmirched your reputation—not to mention mine! And you want us to be
nice
to him?”

“You and I aren’t having a baby, Mama,” Lizzy said patiently but firmly. “None of this has anything to do with me
or
you. And Grady didn’t mean to do what he did. It was an accident, like the time you hit and killed Mr. Perkins’ cow and he threatened to sue.” That was a low blow and Lizzy knew it, but she was getting angry, too. “People make mistakes and get themselves in trouble and have to pay a price. But it doesn’t mean that they’re bad or evil or—”

“You always were a silly, sentimental fool,” Mrs. Lacy said bitterly. “Just like your father.” She turned over to face the wall. “You’ll have to see them every day, you know. They’ll be neighbors. See how kindly you feel about it
then
.”

Lizzy frowned. “See them every day? What are you talking about?”

Her mother flopped over to look at Lizzy. “Ouida Bennett says Grady is buying the old Harrison house, just a block away from here. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Elizabeth.” She turned back over to face the wall.

The Harrison house?
Lizzy swallowed. For some reason, she hadn’t thought beyond the wedding. It hurt to picture Grady buying a house and living in it with his wife—
his wife!—
and their new baby. She should probably take a different route to work.

“If that’s all, Mama,” she said dispiritedly, “I’ll go back home and let you rest.”

But her mother wasn’t through. “You’ve lost your only chance at getting married,” she said in a muffled voice. “I told you to take it when it was offered. And now you’ve been jilted, for a teenaged Mann!”

A teenaged Mann?
Those two words struck Lizzy as funny and she giggled.

“Laugh!” Mrs. Lacy snapped. “You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth when you’re old and wrinkled and fat and nobody wants you.” With a storm of weeping, she pulled the pillow over her head.

Lizzy stood for a moment, trying to think of something to say that might comfort her mother. But it was obvious that she didn’t want to be comforted. She preferred to be miserable and to make her daughter miserable, too. Lizzy quietly left the room, shutting the door behind her.

Back in the kitchen, Sally-Lou had brewed a pot of tea and put slices of fresh-baked pecan-and-sour-cream coffee cake—a longtime favorite of Lizzy’s—on two plates. “I’s sorry to hear ’bout Mr. Grady,” she said softly, pouring the tea. “Do beat all, what folks’ll get up to when they think nobody’s lookin’.” She patted Lizzy’s hand. “But you’ll come out all right in the end, Miz Lizzy-luv. I knows it. I
knows
it.”

Touched by Sally-Lou’s use of her childhood nickname, Lizzy covered one of the dark hands with her own. “I know it, too, Sally-Lou. It’s hard now, and I’m hurting, but it’ll get better. For Mama, too.”

“For your mama?” Sally-Lou chuckled as she sat down on the other side of the table. “I don’ think so. I think she’ll go on bein’ all sour inside for as long as she can. And ever’ time she sees Mr. Grady’s mama, she’ll cross over on the other side of the street and lift up her nose and pretend she don’ see her.”

Lizzy had to smile at that. Sally-Lou was an astute observer of human nature. She spooned sugar into her tea and stirred, then changed the subject, thinking there’d been enough talk about Grady this morning. “You’re working at the Johnsons now, aren’t you? I heard that Mrs. Johnson is out of town.”

“Gone to her sister’s up in Montgom’ry,” Sally-Lou replied. “She asked me to stay nights at the house and get Mr. Johnson’s breakfast and do for him while she’s gone, ’cept the mornin’ I comes here.” She looked troubled. “I’s worried for him, Miz Lizzy. Some men come by last night after dark. They bang on the door and yell ’bout him closin’ the bank. Say they gonna get him for cheatin’ them outta they money. Night before, somebody throw’d a rock through the front window. Had a note tied to it.”

“Oh, dear. What did the note say?”

“Dunno. But it wa’n’t good, the way Mr. Johnson looked when he read it.”

Lizzy remembered the conversation she had overheard on the street, the farmer saying that somebody ought to take Mr. Johnson out behind the woodshed and teach him a thing or two. She forked a bite of coffee cake, as delicious as always. “I’m sure he hasn’t deliberately cheated anybody. It’s just that people don’t understand what’s going on. Did he call Sheriff Burns when the men came?”

Sally-Lou shook her head. “They went off right quick, so he didn’t.” She sounded worried. “He did call Mr. Moseley and talked to him some ’bout it. But you know folks, Miz Lizzy. Wouldn’t surprise me none if they be back one of these nights.”

Until recently, Mr. Johnson had enjoyed an excellent reputation in Darling, for he was a town booster and had been generous in the making of loans—too generous, Mr. Moseley had said regretfully. Some of those loans didn’t stand a chance of being paid back, which is what got the bank into trouble. Nevertheless, people found it easy to see him as the villain behind the closing, and now he was probably the most unpopular man in town. He looked like a villain, too, for he was thin and gaunt, with slick black hair parted precisely down the middle of his scalp and a dark, pencil-thin mustache over colorless lips.

But Lizzy had a different view of the man. She had dealt with him about the threatened foreclosure of her mother’s house—the very house in which she was sitting right now—and had found him to be unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. Since then, in her role as president of the Darling Dahlias, she’d met with him several times to discuss the money the club had on deposit in the bank and he had helped her iron out a few wrinkles in the Dahlias’ ownership of the clubhouse they had inherited from their founder, Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone. She felt indebted to him for his help, and every time they got together, she’d liked him more. She was sorry that people were reacting the way they were to the trouble at the bank. Now, she wondered what would happen to Mr. Johnson if the bank somehow failed to reopen.

“I wish Mr. Johnson had somebody—a friend—who could come and stay with him while this is going on,” Lizzy said, finishing the last of her coffee cake. “Somebody he can trust.”

“He got his gun,” Sally-Lou said with a dark chuckle. “Although I have my doubts ’bout him usin’ it. He took it out back the other day and tried shootin’ tin cans. Missed ever’ durn one of ’em.”

Lizzy shivered. The idea of Mr. Johnson with a gun was not exactly heartening. And she didn’t much like the idea of Sally-Lou being in the Johnson house at night, with potential trouble on the other side of the front door. “If you need any help,” she said, “you let me know. You can always call, no matter how late it is.”

Sally-Lou smiled. “Remember the time me an’ Auntie DessaRae banged on them pots and pans and Miss Hamer gave the rebel yell and chased off that ole gangster who come down from Chicago to cause trouble for them two nice ladies livin’ with Miss Hamer?”