The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose (7 page)

Miss Rogers’ glance went back to the shredded mass of yarn. “Do you really think it can be reknitted?” she asked doubtfully.

“I’m sure it can,” Bessie said, taking charge. “But first, we’ll need to finish what that awful cat started. We’ll unravel the yarn and wash it. Surely we’ll be able to salvage enough to knit a new cover.”

Miss Rogers still looked reluctant, but she nodded. “I suppose we can try,” she said slowly.

So for the next ten minutes, Bessie and Miss Rogers sat side by side on the edge of the narrow bed, Bessie unraveling the yarn onto Miss Rogers’ extended hands, making a skein. The yarn, which appeared to be a two-ply handspun wool, was strong for its age, Bessie thought. It must be sixty or seventy years old, perhaps older. But it had frayed in several places (or been torn by the frenzied Lucky Lindy), and when Bessie came to a break, she twisted the ends together, splicing them. Soon, she had unraveled the last row of stitches and Miss Rogers was holding a fat red skein. Bessie pulled it off her hands and tied bits of yarn around it in several places so the skein wouldn’t tangle when it was washed and hung up to dry.

While Bessie did that, Miss Rogers was turning the pillow in her hands. “There’s something very curious . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she frowned, puzzled. “Whatever can it be, Miss Bloodworth?” She held out the pillow so Bessie could have a look.

Now that the red knitted cover had been removed, they could see that there was another, second cover under it. It was made of a coarse, tan-colored fabric, linen, perhaps. Both sides were covered with neat columns of colored cross-stitch embroidery in a bewildering pattern of hieroglyphics, interspersed with numerals and a few letters of the Greek alphabet. The pillow had a musty scent, as if it had been stored in a closed trunk for a very long time.

Bessie stared at it for a moment. “How mysterious,” she said at last. “It looks like a secret code or something. Have you ever tried to figure it out?”

“I’ve never even seen it,” Miss Rogers replied. “I thought . . . I assumed that there was stuffing inside the knitted cover. Or maybe a plain cotton cover, with the stuffing inside. But nothing like this.” She turned it over. “What do you suppose these symbols
mean
?”

“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” Bessie said honestly. And then she hit on a strategy—a very clever strategy, she thought—that might keep Miss Rogers occupied while she dealt with Mrs. Sedalius and Lucky Lindy.

“I have an idea,” she said. “You could copy the letters and numbers and symbols. Maybe, when we see it on paper, we’ll be able to solve the mystery.” She paused, thinking. “Or we could show it to somebody else. Mr. Dickens at the newspaper, for instance.”

Charlie Dickens, as well as being the editor of the Darling
Dispatch
, was a veteran of the Great War, where he had served in Europe and been a captain in the army. Bessie had known his sister when they were girls, and she and Edna Fay were still good friends. Charlie was always busy reporting the news, trying to keep the antique press working, and tending to the job printing business that supplemented the slim returns from subscriptions and ad sales. She didn’t think he’d be eager to try to decipher a random assortment of symbols transcribed from somebody’s musty old pillow.

But he had once given an interesting talk at the Darling Literary Society on the history of codes and ciphers, which had been his specialty in the army. If anybody in town would know about such matters, he was the one. Maybe he could tell at a glance whether the symbols had any meaning. And if copying the complicated cross-stitching on her pillow would keep Miss Rogers busy and her mind off Lucky Lindy, it was certainly worth a try. In fact, that part of the strategy seemed to be working already.

“Oh, what a
good
idea,” Miss Rogers exclaimed enthusiastically. “Mr. Dickens comes into the library sometimes to do research, and I know that he’s interested in all manner of things. I’ll start copying this immediately. Really, Miss Bloodworth, I had no idea that it might be anything other than—”

She was interrupted by a shrill shriek from two doors down the hall. Bessie jumped to her feet, startled.

And then she heard another cry. “Lindy, Lindy, you naughty,
naughty
boy! Just look what you have done to my knitting!”

With Miss Rogers at her heels, Bessie hurried down the hall to see what was wrong. She found Mrs. Sedalius standing in the middle of her room, holding a half-knitted sock in her hand. Rows of stitches had been pulled loose, and at her feet lay a tangled ball of yarn. Lucky Lindy sat on the top of her dresser, head cocked, green eyes alight with mischief.

“Oh, dear,” Bessie said sympathetically. “Oh, Mrs. Sedalius, I’m so sorry!”

“So am I.” Mrs. Sedalius looked down at her sock, pressing her lips together, shaking her head. “Bessie, Bessie,” she moaned. “I have been forced to a terrible decision. I’m afraid that this will make all the ladies desperately unhappy. They will hate me for it. But I have no other choice.”

Bessie pulled in her breath. “What decision?”

“I’m afraid that we’ll have to find another home for dear Lucky Lindy. This is the third piece of my knitting he has ruined—two socks and a scarf.” She looked mournfully at the cat. “I didn’t tell anyone because I kept hoping the dear fellow would mend his ways and learn to be better behaved. But I’m afraid that he had already picked up too many bad habits before he came to live with us. He’s incorrigible.” Her old face crumpled. “But oh, I will miss him! It will tear out a piece of my heart to see him go.”

“Oh, dear,” Bessie said again. “I
am
sorry. Yes, we will all miss him. What a terrible,
terrible
shame.”

She had to turn away so Mrs. Sedalius couldn’t see her smile.

FOUR

Lizzy

Lizzy was sleeping soundly on Monday morning when she was awakened by the enthusiastic crowing of Mrs. Freeman’s rooster. He lived with his harem of hens a few doors down the block and took it as his personal responsibility to wake the whole neighborhood at dawn. Lizzy tried to pull the feather pillow over her head but gave it up when Daffodil, her orange tabby, leapt up on the bed and pushed his face against hers with his rumbling purr.

“I’m up, I’m up,” she grumbled. She threw back the crinkle cotton spread, slid out of bed, and went to stand, stretching and yawning, in front of the second-floor window that looked onto her backyard.

Her
backyard. In spite of the early hour, the sight of it gave her pleasure. The weeping willow draped supple green branches over the fence, the early-morning sunlight brightened the dewy pink roses blooming against the shed, and the small kitchen garden looked green and perky after Saturday’s thunder shower. The grass was especially pretty, too, because Grady Alexander had mowed it the evening before. In partial payment, she had cooked a nice Sunday supper: fried chicken (one of Mrs. Freeman’s young cockerels), peas and new potatoes, a salad of fresh lettuce and spinach, and buttermilk pie.

Lizzy wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little as she thought of Grady. She considered him a dear friend, although her mother liked to call him her “steady beau” and Grady himself seemed to operate on the comfortable assumption that there was a wedding in their near future and a family on the not-so-distant horizon. (In fact, he had told her recently that he wanted to have at least three children, and the sooner the better, because at thirty-four, he wasn’t getting any younger.) Grady had a good job as the county agricultural agent and came from a respectable family. In her mother’s estimation, he was Lizzy’s best chance—maybe her last chance, since she had already celebrated her thirtieth birthday—at a husband and a happy home.

But while Lizzy enjoyed being with Grady and sometimes even thought she might love him enough to marry him, a wedding in the near future was entirely out of the question. Her little house—almost a doll’s house, really—wasn’t big enough for two people, and she was selfish enough (that was her mother’s word) not to want to give it up. What’s more, she had no intention of giving up her job in Mr. Moseley’s law office, or surrendering the personal independence that her weekly paycheck brought her, which was what most Darling men expected their Darling women to do when they got married. Grady wasn’t
most
Darling men, of course. He said he understood how she felt about working and he’d be willing to let her continue. But she didn’t like the sound of
willing to let her continue
. It ought to be her choice, not his.

And at the top of her mind was the insistent thought that this was no time to start having babies, which was another thing that Darling men expected to happen after you said
I do
. Of course, there were the usual methods that Lizzy’s married friends used to avoid getting pregnant. For instance, you could try saying no until your safe period, or use Vaseline or olive oil before and douche with soap suds or vinegar or Lysol after. You could go to Doc Roberts and get a prescription for a diaphragm, which you could buy at Lima’s Drugstore (if you weren’t too embarrassed to purchase it under Mr. Lima’s knowing gaze). Or you could try to get your husband to take precautions. But Lizzy’s friends kept getting pregnant even though they said they didn’t want babies, so she guessed that none of these methods were very effective.

Daffy curled himself around her ankles, purring loudly, and she reached down and picked him up. As she did, she remembered why this Monday was different, and remembering made her smile.

“This isn’t your everyday Monday, Daffy,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his golden fur. After a moment, she put the cat back on the bed and stripped off her filmy nightgown. “I’m in charge of the office today. And not just today, either. All this week and maybe next. It’s going to be swell fun!”

She stepped into her cotton panties and put on a brassiere and slip. She was slim enough not to need a “foundation garment” or even a lighter-weight girdle, an omission that her mother—who wore a boned corset—considered disgraceful. Padding barefoot to her closet, she took out a silky rayon crepe with three-quarter sleeves and a ruffled neckline. In soft browns and orange, it was her favorite dress. She wore it when she felt like celebrating.

As Daffy watched, Lizzy sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her brown hair. “And where, you are asking, will Mr. Moseley be while
I
am in charge of the office?” Talking to a cat was one of the pleasures, she thought, of living alone. “Why isn’t he sitting behind his desk, smoking his pipe and signing papers, the way he usually does?”

Without waiting for Daffy to answer her question, she picked up her brown eyebrow pencil and began to sketch out thin, stylishly peaked eyebrows. “Well, since you’ve asked, I’ll tell you. Mr. Moseley has gone to Birmingham to meet with the Alabama Roosevelt for President club. They are planning to send a delegate to the Democratic convention next year to try and get Governor Roosevelt on the ticket. Then Mr. Moseley is driving over to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he is going to meet with the governor, who spends his vacations there. So what do you think of
that
, Daffodil? Mr. Moseley is meeting with Governor Roosevelt!”

Lizzy picked up her lipstick—a soft orangey red—and applied it deftly. She was glad that the Kewpie-doll lips of the twenties were passé and full lips, like hers, were back in fashion. That done, she added gold button earrings and turned her head this way and that, studying her reflection in the mirror. She saw a not-quite-pretty face with wide-spaced, steady gray eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a resolute chin, framed by a ripple of soft brown curls. It was the face of a woman who knew her own mind, she thought. The face of a woman who could handle just about any challenge that came her way.

She got up. “And while the cat is away, my dear, sweet Daffy, the mice—so to speak—will play. While Mr. Moseley is gone,
I
am in charge!” She bent over and swept up the cat with a fierce hug. “Isn’t it wonderful, Daf? Mr. Moseley trusts me enough to ask me to manage the office while he’s gone!”

And with that, she skipped down the narrow stairs and into the kitchen, where she poured out a bowl of Daffy’s dry cat food and sat down to coffee and Post Toasties with fresh sliced strawberries from her own backyard. When she finished, she rinsed her dish and made her lunch: a piece of leftover fried chicken, an egg salad sandwich, and two raisin-oatmeal cookies, with two more for Verna. She and Verna planned to eat lunch together the way they always did, in Verna’s office if it was raining or on the courthouse lawn if it wasn’t.

The kitchen of Lizzy’s bungalow was small, but there was room for a table and two red-painted chairs, a four-burner gas range, and a white GE Monitor refrigerator. The table was covered with a red-and-white-checked oilcloth. There was a red linoleum-topped counter along one wall, white-painted cupboards with china knobs, and over the sink, a wide window with ruffled dotted Swiss crisscross curtains. On the windowsill sat a red geranium in a red ceramic pot, and over the table hung a lamp with a red-fringed shade that Lizzy herself had painted with bright images of fruit and flowers. She loved her kitchen, and though it might be silly to say so, she absolutely adored her GE refrigerator. It was the one with the motor on top. It kept everything beautifully cold and even froze ice cubes! It was so wonderfully
modern
after the smelly, leaky, zinc-lined icebox in her mother’s kitchen across the street.

All the rooms in Lizzy’s house were small. She had bought the old place, very cheaply, from Mr. Flagg’s estate two years before. She had spent several months and a fair amount of her savings having it remodeled and installing a telephone, electric wiring, plumbing, and a bathroom. She had also employed painters and paperhangers to refinish the woodwork and worn wooden floors and repaper the plastered walls to suit her taste. While all this was going on, she continued to live with her mother in the house just across the street. Until the work was finished and she was ready to move in, she kept her purchase of Mr. Flagg’s house a secret—intentionally, because her mother had a habit of telling her what to do.

Mrs. Lacy, of course, was dismayed when she learned that her daughter was moving out. But that wasn’t the end of it. In fact, not long after Lizzy had settled into her new home, Mrs. Lacy announced that the bank was repossessing her house, in payment of a loan she had taken out in order to speculate on the stock market. She would be moving in with her daughter.

It took a while to resolve the issue, but at the last moment, Lizzy managed to make a deal with Mr. Johnson at the Darling Savings and Trust. With money she’d been saving to buy a car, she made a down payment on her mother’s house, which she now owned. She helped her mother to get a job as a milliner for Fannie Champaign (the very first job in Mrs. Lacy’s life) so she could pay twenty dollars a month in rent, which Lizzy then handed over to the Savings and Trust. In ten years, if all went well, the house would be free and clear.

It wasn’t a perfect arrangement, but at least it kept her mother out of her hair, most of the time. And it allowed Lizzy to keep her perfect little house to herself, which was exactly the way she wanted it. And if that was selfish—well, so be it.

Fifteen minutes later, Lizzy was walking south along Jefferson Davis Street, her brown felt swagger-brimmed hat perched at a fetching angle and her lunch in her handbag. One block later, at Franklin, she turned right and walked another block, to Robert E. Lee. Just ahead on the left was the imposing Cypress County Courthouse. Built of brick, it sat in the middle of the town square, under a stately clock tower and white-painted dome, surrounded by a few trees and neatly mowed grass. On Lizzy’s right after she crossed Robert E. Lee were Musgrove’s Hardware and the Darling Diner, owned and managed by her friends Myra May and Violet.

Normally, Lizzy didn’t drop in at the diner in the morning, because Myra May, Violet, and their colored cook, Euphoria, were busy serving the crowd of men who regularly ate their breakfasts there. But this morning, she was in a celebratory mood—
she
was in charge of the office this week! So she opened the door and went in to get one of Euphoria’s famous doughnuts. She’d take it to the office with her.

“Good morning, Liz,” Myra May called from the cash register end of the counter. Violet, carrying a tray filled with two plates of ham, eggs, and biscuits with red-eye gravy, looked up with a smile.

“Hey, Liz,” she said warmly. “Nice to see you. Sit anywhere you can find a seat.”

As usual, the tables were filled, but there were several empty seats at the counter, so Lizzy made her way there. The white Philco radio on the shelf behind the counter was tuned to the morning farm and market reports, and the men’s voices were muted as they listened. Through the pass-through into the kitchen, Lizzy could see Euphoria, dressed in her usual white uniform, flipping pancakes and frying eggs, bacon, and ham. Myra May, wearing a white bibbed apron over her customary slacks and blouse, stepped away from the cash register and picked up a china mug.

Myra May wasn’t the prettiest woman in town, not by a long shot. She had a strong face with a square jaw, a firm mouth, and deep-set eyes that seemed to look right through you. Her intense intelligence made some people squirm—especially men who weren’t used to women with brains. Her friend and co-owner, Violet, on the other hand, was petite and picture-pretty, with loose brown curls, an engaging smile, and a soft heart. If you were in trouble and needed help, Violet was ready to do what she could.

Judging by looks (of course, a lot of people always do just that), Myra May and Violet might appear to be an illustration of the old adage,
opposites attract
. But whatever pulled them together, their partnership seemed to make perfect sense. As far as business was concerned, Myra May’s no-nonsense, let’s-get-on-with-it management skills were complemented by Violet’s customer-oriented charm and friendliness. On the personal side, Violet’s accepting nature allowed her to deal sympathetically with Myra May’s prickly impatience and smooth out the irks and quirks in their friendship.

Violet and Myra May lived in the apartment over the diner with irresistible little Cupcake, the daughter of Violet’s dead sister. Cupcake wasn’t a year old yet, but she had strawberry curls and the bluest of blue eyes, and while everybody knows that there’s no such thing as a perfect baby (they all cry, spit up, and dirty their diapers), Violet and Myra May were convinced that she was the nearest thing to it and counted themselves lucky to have her. Cupcake spent her days cuddled on a customer’s lap or napping in a bassinet next to the door to the Darling Telephone Exchange, which was conveniently located in the back room of the diner. Conveniently, that is, because Myra May and Violet owned half of the Exchange, with Mr. Whitney Whitworth owning the other half.