The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies (13 page)

And even though the strangers might only be down on their luck and without a shred of malice in their hearts, they were also quite likely to be desperate. In Mobile, a string of local household robberies had been attributed to a pair of young vagrants picked up by the police when they were found sleeping in a nearby park. The boys, barely out of their teens, protested their innocence and the only evidence that connected them to the crimes was circumstantial.

At least, that’s what Mr. Moseley had said to Lizzy, after he read about it in the Mobile
Register
. He called it scapegoating and had gotten quite angry, saying that it sounded to him like the police had simply collared the nearest hoboes, in order to make an object lesson of the poor fellows. But a jury had agreed with the police, and they were sent to jail.

As the district attorney said during his final summation to the court, “Desperate men will commit desperate acts. It is our duty to be watchful.”

Bessie Bloodworth was a dedicated student of Darling’s history and knew the family stories of almost all of the local residents. She could tell you anything you wanted to know about who was related to whom and where people’s ancestors had come from. She had even written a little book, which was sold by the local history club. It was called
A Few Skeletons in Our Closets: A Peek at Darling History
.

Unfortunately, Bessie had recently been reminded that she had a few skeletons in her
own
family closet. She had climbed up to the attic to get the old green living room drapes that she was planning to donate to the Darling Quilting Club to make comforters for the needy. Under the drapes, shoved far back in a corner, she found a box of her father’s business papers, left after his old office had been cleaned out. Today was both his birthday and the tenth anniversary of his death, so Bessie thought that maybe she should sit down and sort through everything. Or maybe tomorrow, or next week. There was really no hurry, she told herself. Bessie and her father hadn’t been close for years. That was only one of her painful memories. There were others.

Bessie lived at Magnolia Manor, next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse. She had given this name to her family home after her father had died, when she turned it into a boardinghouse for older unmarried and widowed ladies. (Mrs. Brewster, over on West Plum, operated a boardinghouse for younger unmarried ladies. Her Rules for Proper Behavior were very strict, whereas Bessie had no rules at all, believing that if her boarders didn’t understand proper behavior by now, they probably never would.)

Running a boardinghouse was the last thing Bessie had planned to do with her life. She had hoped to train as a nurse. But her mother had died when she was a girl—one of the painful parts of the Bloodworth family story—and her three older brothers had left Darling just as quickly as they could. They wanted to get away from their father, who had changed after their mother died. But Bessie didn’t have the same freedom. She couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to. As her father’s only daughter, she was expected to live at home until she was married—to a local boy, of course. After that, she was expected to live close enough to be available to manage her father’s household and take care of him whenever he needed her. There was nothing unusual about this. It was a duty that every Darling parent expected and an obligation that all Darling girls understood.

And that was what Bessie had expected, too. She fell in love with Harold, the boy across the street, and when she graduated high school, agreed to marry him. They planned to live with her father until they could afford their own home. Lots of young people in Darling did this, but it wasn’t an ideal situation and they knew it. Mr. Bloodworth was a volatile man who was given to rash, temperamental outbursts, and he hadn’t approved of his daughter’s choice of a husband. As Darling’s only undertaker and a member of the City Council, he thought Bessie could have done much better if she’d taken the time to look around a little, instead of settling for Harold Hamer, whose prospects were not exactly bright. That’s what her father
said
, anyway, although Bessie suspected that he would have felt the same way about anyone she chose. Nobody would ever be good enough to marry a Bloodworth.

But the young man’s sister, who had raised him and with whom he lived, was equally temperamental and equally unimpressed by her brother’s choice of a bride, and let Harold know about it in no uncertain terms. So to Bessie and Harold, living with Bessie’s father (who was at least gone all day and quite a few evenings, tending to his funeral parlor and gravestone business) seemed the lesser of two evils.

But as it turned out, they didn’t live there at all—and this was the most painful part of Bessie’s story, the part she had tried so hard to forget. About a week before the wedding, her fiancé left Darling, abruptly and without a word of good-bye, and neither Bessie nor Harold’s sister nor anyone else had ever heard another word from him. The wedding was at first postponed and then canceled, and all over town, people were saying that poor Bessie had been jilted. Everybody felt sorry for her. She could see the pity written on the face of every single person she encountered. The loss of Harold and the pity of the townspeople—taken together, it was almost too much to bear, and her heart had broken.

Surprisingly, Mr. Bloodworth had shown his daughter many small kindnesses in this terrible time, taking her wedding dress back to Mann’s and canceling the arrangements she had made at the church. When she had cried out loud, “Why? Why?” he had answered gruffly but kindly, “Some things don’t bear looking into, child.” It was as good an answer as any, and at the time, she had felt her father was right. Harold was gone. That was all she had to know. The
why
could remain a mystery forever.

Bessie wept until she couldn’t weep anymore, and then she pulled herself together and went on doing the things she was expected to do. To help her get through, she played a game with herself, pretending that Harold had just gone off on a trip to New Orleans or Memphis and would one day walk through the door and everything would be exactly the way they had always planned it. It wasn’t pretending, she told herself: she believed to her soul that it was true.

But time passed, as time has a way of doing, and one morning Bessie woke up and discovered that Harold was only a dim memory, a distant melody, like a song sung so far away that it could scarcely be heard. She no longer wanted to pretend that he was coming home, and she found to her surprise that this was all right. “Time heals all wounds,” she reminded herself, and felt that the hoary old proverb was true. She still loved Harold, she supposed, and she still longed to know what had happened to him and whether he was well and happy. But she was ready to stop living on the hope that he would come back.

There were other changes in Bessie’s life, not all of them as healing as this one. Her father had become increasingly temperamental and hard to live with. He sold his funeral parlor to Mr. Noonan and the gravestone business to a man from Mobile and retired. Within a month, Doc Roberts diagnosed him as having cancer of the lungs. Bessie took care of him until at last he died and was buried next to her mother in the Bloodworth family plot in the Darling Cemetery on Schoolhouse Road—the cemetery that Mr. Darling had owned and where so many of his professional duties as Darling’s only undertaker had been carried out. And there she was, all by herself in the big house, faced with the challenge of supporting herself and unexpectedly, surprisingly lonely.

But not for long. As soon as word of her father’s death got around, two suitors—Mr. Hopper and Mr. Churchill, both recently widowed—appeared at her door with bouquets in their hands and hopeful grins on their faces. At first Bessie was flattered, even though she didn’t care for either of them as much as she had cared for Harold. But it wasn’t long before she began to suspect that Mr. Hopper was only looking for a place to live and Mr. Churchill chiefly wanted someone to cook and do his laundry, and if her domestic services were what they were after, she might as well open a boardinghouse and be done with it. And anyway, she needed the money, since Mr. Noonan’s payments on the funeral home note were her only income, and they didn’t amount to very much.

So she said shoo to both of her suitors, put a notice in the Darling
Dispatch
(“Room and board for older ladies of refinement”), and within a few weeks all of her bedrooms were full. Magnolia Manor was not a hugely profitable business—she cleared only five or six dollars a month on each of her boarders. But that was enough to pay the taxes and buy coal and electricity and food and household supplies, and her own living expenses were negligible. Lots of people, she told herself, were in much worse straits, and they had
jobs.

At the present time, there were four boarders—the Magnolia Ladies, they called themselves, all of straitened means. Dorothy Rogers, the town’s part-time librarian, had lost all her money on one awful day in the stock market. Leticia Wiggens was a retired teacher who lived on a very small pension. Mrs. Sedalius had a son who was a doctor in Mobile and sent her a check once a month, although he almost never came to see her. Maxine Bechdel was slightly better off than the others. She owned two rental houses whose tenants were able to pay their rent about half the time.

Bessie managed the place with the help of Roseanne, a live-in colored lady who cooked and did the laundry. But the Magnolia Ladies did their part, too. Leticia and Maxine washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Sedalius swept and dusted upstairs, and Miss Rogers swept and dusted downstairs, and of course each boarder kept her room neat. In addition, they all worked in the Manor’s flower beds and the impressive vegetable garden and tended the half-dozen hens that lived in the coop against the back fence and delivered three or four fresh-laid eggs every morning, just in time for breakfast.

And Bessie discovered, to her surprise, that managing the Magnolia Manor was decidedly preferable to managing her father’s household, and that her new life was a great deal more interesting and livelier than the old—and a great deal livelier and less stressful than life with either Mr. Hopper or Mr. Churchill would have been. Her beloved fiancé was a long-ago dream, the Magnolia Ladies were the sisters she had never had, and her family history was by now just that: history.

 

 

When Bessie got home from the Dahlias’ meeting, she went upstairs and changed into the gray cotton work dress and old shoes that she wore in the garden, then took a pair of clippers and went out to deadhead the roses. The peaches from the trees near the back fence were already in their jars in the cellar, pickled and spiced and canned, and the apples would soon be ripe. They had picked the last crop of green beans and would be digging the sweet potatoes in another few weeks, to wrap in newspaper and store in bushel baskets in the cellar. The Magnolia Ladies had a lot to show for their gardening efforts this year.

“Yoo hoo, Bessie!”

She looked up from her work to see Liz and Verna ducking through the hedge between the Manor and the Dahlias’ clubhouse. She dropped the clippers into her basket and wiped her forehead with her sleeve, pushing her hair out of her eyes. It was a muggy afternoon. The way her shoulder was hurting, there’d be rain by supper time.

“Whew,” she said. “Enough of that. Come and see my Angel Trumpet.” She left her basket where it was and led them to a corner of the garden where a tall, sturdy-looking shrub was growing against the fence. It had large, coarse green leaves and was covered with huge, pendulous blossoms, a beautiful shade of creamy peach. They were tightly furled now, ready to open at twilight. “You can’t believe the perfume,” she said. “It’s heavenly. We leave all the upstairs windows open when we go to bed, just so we can smell it.”

“Gorgeous,” Verna said, touching one of the blossoms with her finger. “Will you save us some seed?”

“Or a few cuttings,” Liz said enviously. “I have the perfect site for it.”

“Of course,” Bessie said. “Oh, and you can mention it in your ‘Garden Gate’ column, Liz. Tell folks that they can come and get some cuttings. But you might also tell them it’s poisonous. They need to be careful with it, especially if there are children around.”

“Hard to believe that something so beautiful could be harmful,” Liz said.

Bessie nodded. “My grandmother claimed she smoked it for her asthma, but it’s a pretty powerful narcotic. Now, shall we sit down?” She led them toward a trio of white-painted chairs and a little table in the shade of a weeping willow, pausing at the kitchen door to ask Roseanne to bring out a pitcher of lemonade and some glasses.

“Where is everybody?” Verna asked as they sat down. “It’s such a lovely afternoon, I figured they’d all be out here in the garden.”

“Leticia and Maxine are playing canasta on the front porch,” Bessie said. “Can’t you hear them bickering? Dorothy went to her room to read, but five will get you ten that she’s really having a nap. And Mrs. Sedalius’ son is here for a visit. He’s taken his mother for a ride in his car. First time in a year he’s been to see her.” She cocked her head at her guests. “So. What’s this family history you wanted to talk about?”