The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star (8 page)

“The party?” Fannie asked. The mask completely covered her face and she wore a cucumber slice over each eye. She lifted one now to see who she was talking to. “Oh, hi, Liz. No, I wasn’t thinking about the party. I just like to look nice for Mr. Dickens.” Her voice softened. “He’s coming for supper tomorrow night. Wednesdays are our regular nights, you know.”

“Is that right?” Lizzy murmured, uncomfortable now. Should she spill the beans to Fannie, and let her know that one of Charlie’s old friends—a former lover, it seemed likely—was going to be in town this weekend? Or should she keep what she knew to herself and let Fannie discover whatever there was to discover? Of course, she didn’t like to interfere, but at the same time she hated to see Fannie build up her hopes. It was a difficult subject to get into, though. If she was going to give Fannie a hint of what was brewing, she’d have to have an opening.

There had always been something of a mystery about Fannie Champaign—where she had come from and why she had chosen their town as a place to live and set up her hat shop. Her hats were very attractive, but it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that she wasn’t selling a lot of them to the local ladies, maybe because the local ladies didn’t have a lot of money to buy hats—or maybe because Fannie’s hats had too much big-city style and made the Darling ladies (only a few of whom kept up with the latest style in hats) uncomfortable.

And Lizzy had her own questions. Fannie had once told her that her sister had a millinery shop in Miami and a cousin had a shop in Atlanta, so she was able to send her hats there for sale. But even that couldn’t bring in very much, Lizzy thought. Hats couldn’t fetch that much of a price, could they? So where was she getting the money to pay the rent on her shop and apartment and buy groceries and the stylish clothing she liked to wear?

Lizzy wasn’t the only one who wondered about Fannie Champaign, of course. Some of the Darling ladies—Leona Ruth Adcock, for instance, the biggest snoop in town—had made it a point to try to find out about her. To no avail, however. Fannie kept her business to herself and turned away with a polite smile from the (sometimes impolite) questions asked by nosey parkers like Leona Ruth. But no doubt their curiosity about Fannie was one reason why people were watching and wondering about her and Charlie Dickens.

Lizzy didn’t know Fannie any better than did Leona Ruth or the others. But she had found her to be such a sweet, modest person that she couldn’t help but like her—and besides, Fannie had given her mother a job making hats when no other work would have suited. So Lizzy felt as if she owed her a debt.

Fannie smiled again, as if to herself. “I don’t know if you’ve heard this, Liz,” she said softly, “but Mr. Dickens and I have been seeing quite a lot of one another lately.”

“I’ve heard something to that effect,” Lizzy said reluctantly, thinking that Fannie sounded like a schoolgirl with a crush.

Fannie folded her hands across her midriff. “We go out sometimes—to a movie or a social event. But I like it best when he comes over to my apartment for supper. I make something easy, jambalaya or stewed chicken and dumplings, and we play pinochle and sometimes dominoes and listen to the radio.” She sighed happily. “He pretends to be a crusty old journalist who has seen too much of the world and is tired of all of it. But underneath that tough veneer, he’s a very sweet man.”

“Mr. Dickens has definitely been around,” Lizzy agreed. Maybe this was the opening she was looking for. “I’m always surprised when he tells me about the places he’s been and the people he’s known. Why, just take Miss Dare, for instance. The Texas Star,” she added, just in case Fannie didn’t remember who Miss Dare was.

“The female pilot?” Fannie asked. “The one who’s doing the air show this weekend?” She raised her head and peeled off one of the cucumber rounds so she could look at Lizzy. “Mr. Dickens
knows
her?”

“Oh, yes.” Lizzy chuckled uneasily, wondering if she would regret opening this subject with Fannie. “I understand that they’re . . . old friends.” She didn’t intend for the last two words to have such a significant emphasis, but they certainly came out sounding that way, as if she meant to suggest something more than a friendship.

“Old friends,” Fannie repeated slowly, replacing the cucumber slice and putting her head back down. “He . . . told you this?”

“Yes,” Lizzy said. “We were talking about the air show, and he started telling me about Miss Dare. He seems to be excited about seeing her again. He knew her when he was working at the newspaper in Fort Worth. I gather that they developed a rather . . . close friendship.”

“I see,” Fannie said quietly, chewing on one corner of her lip. “Well, I don’t suppose that’s a huge surprise. Mr. Dickens has worked and lived and traveled in lots of places. He must have . . . friends all over the world.”

“Yes,” Lizzy said. “I suppose he does.”

“I have been very foolish,” Fannie said, again as if to herself, speaking so low that Lizzy could barely hear her. “How could I have been so foolish?”

Lizzy knew she wasn’t expected to answer, but she felt like apologizing for having spilled the beans. Obviously, Fannie was very badly hurt by what she had heard. She was enormously relieved when Beulah came hurrying back into the beauty shop.

“Sorry, Liz,” Beulah apologized. “Spoonie had to be rescued. She loves to play with her pet chicken, but that old rooster has spurs like knives and Spoonie’s afraid of him. I had to pen him up, and he’s the dickens to catch.” She picked up a towel. “Now, then, we’re doing a shampoo and set today? Or do you want a trim, too?”

“Just a shampoo and set,” Lizzy said. As she sat down in the shampoo chair and leaned back so that Beulah could wash her hair, she was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable about what she had said to Fannie.

Had she done the right thing by tipping her off to Charlie’s relationship to Lily Dare?

Or should she better have kept her mouth shut and let Fannie find out for herself?

Lizzy was still turning these questions over in her mind as she went back to the office. But what was done was done and there was no help for it. All she could do was hope she hadn’t caused Fannie too much grief and go on about the usual work of the office on a day when Mr. Moseley was out of town. She was also thinking ahead to the evening, when she had promised to talk to Mildred Kilgore, who lived near the Cypress Country Club on the southern outskirts of town.

Lizzy didn’t own a car. Until a year or so ago, she had been saving to buy a used one. But instead, she had handed over the money to Mr. Johnson at the Darling Savings and Trust, to keep him from foreclosing on her mother’s house.

Now, to somebody who didn’t know the full story, using her hard-earned car money to save her mother’s house from foreclosure might have seemed like a generous and unselfish act. Lizzy, however, knew that the opposite was true. She was very selfish, at least where her mother was concerned. If she hadn’t done this, her mother would have moved in with
her.
She and her cat, Daffodil, lived all by themselves in a beautiful little house that was just big enough for the two of them. There simply wasn’t room for her mother, who always seemed to take up more than her share of space and who (to make things worse) was constantly telling her daughter what to do, how to dress, and who to marry: Grady Alexander, of course.

Besides, as Lizzy often reminded herself, she didn’t really need to own a car. She could always borrow Grady’s blue Ford or Myra May’s old Chevy touring car when she had to drive over to Monroeville or (less often) down to Mobile. And Darling was a small town. She lived close enough to walk to the office, and she could ride her bicycle anywhere else she wanted to go.

“We never sit down to supper before eight in the summer, so you just come on out whenever you get off work,” Mildred had said over the phone. So after Lizzy closed the law office for the afternoon, she hurried home, grabbed a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and changed into a pair of khaki slacks and a green plaid blouse. Then she climbed on the old blue Elgin bicycle she had ridden since her sophomore year in high school and biked all the way south on Robert E. Lee to Cypress Avenue, then turned off Cypress onto Country Club Drive.

The evening was warm and humid and the air was as heavy as a hot, wet blanket. But Lizzy was riding through a pretty part of town so she was distracted from the heat by the summer flowers blooming in people’s front yards. In Lizzy’s opinion, all of Darling was pretty. Some of it wasn’t, of course, but Lizzy understood that not everybody had the time, the money, or the inclination to keep a place looking good—and pretty wasn’t everything. In her view, her little town was a fine place to live, with friendly residents, mild winters, and a long gardening season. She smiled a little as she rode down the shady streets lined with beautiful magnolias and live oaks. She thought back over Darling’s history and reflected that the original settlers—Mr. Darling and his wife and children—would be utterly amazed if they could see the town today, with its impressive brick courthouse, its well-kept streets, and its up-to-the-minute electrical and telephone systems.

The town had come a long way since it was established (more or less accidentally) by Joseph P. Darling. Some 125 years before, he was on his way from Virginia with his wife, five children, two slaves, two milk cows, three old hens and a rooster, a team of oxen, and a horse. He was aiming to start a plantation somewhere along the Mississippi River and make a lot of money growing cotton.

But Mrs. Darling had had enough. She put her foot down. “I am not ridin’ another mile in this blessed wagon, Mr. Darling,” she declared resolutely. “If you want your cookin’ and your washin’ done reg’lar, this is where you’ll find it. You can go on if you want, but the lit’le uns and me are not stirrin’ another step.” She is said to have added, “And we are keepin’ the chickens and the red cow—you can take the old black cow. She’s dry, anyway.”

Mr. Darling looked around and saw that the gently rolling hills were covered with longleaf and loblolly pines, and that there were sweet gum and tulip trees growing in the creek and river bottoms, along with sycamore and magnolia and sassafras and pecan. There was wild game on the land and fish in the nearby Alabama River, and Andrew Jackson had already evicted the Creek Nation (which Lizzy had always thought was very cruel and unjust) so there was nobody to tell him that the land already belonged to somebody else. All told, Mr. Darling figured, this was a pretty good place—as good as he was likely to find anywhere. And anyway, he liked to eat every day and wear a clean shirt on Sundays and was mightily fond of Mrs. Darling and their little Darlings.

So he built a big log cabin for his family and a very little log cabin for his slaves and a fair-sized log barn for the milk cows. Then he built a log hut and nailed a painted sign over the door:
Darling General Store
. Mr. Darling’s cousin followed him out from Virginia and built the Darling saw mill on Pine Creek. Another Darling cousin built the Darling grist mill just upstream, so that people could get their corn ground for corn pone. Then they planted cotton, and when their cotton fields began producing, they built a cotton gin and a cottonseed oil mill. Traffic on the nearby Alabama River began to build, with steamboats plying a weekly route between Montgomery and Mobile, stopping at plantations along the way to drop off supplies and pick up bales of cotton and other produce.

But things began to change. The War (always spoken of in Darling with a capital W) put an end to slavery, thereby putting an end to the plantation system and substituting sharecropping instead. The Louisville & Nashville railroad, which by the 1800s ran from Kentucky all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, put an end to the steamboats, since trains were cheaper to operate than paddle wheelers, ran on time, and almost never blew up or hit a snag. Then the boll weevil came along and put a crimp in cotton.

But by that time, the Darling city fathers had built a twenty-mile railroad spur connecting Darling to Monroeville and the L&N, and farmers and timber merchants could get their beef, poultry, and lumber to markets around the state, which made them—some of them, anyway—wealthy. The wealthier farmers and merchants got together and bought a large piece of land from the Little family. On it, they built the Cypress Country Club and Championship Golf Course, and then they bought property and built houses as close to the golf course as they could get. It was exclusive, and they liked that.

Lizzy was thinking about all this as she swung off Country Club Drive and into the Kilgores’ circular driveway. Mildred and Roger lived with their young daughter, Melody, in a large plantation-style white house a short walk from the ninth green. As Lizzy rode up, she saw that Mildred’s car—a snazzy-looking 1932 blue Dodge Roadster with chrome wheels—was parked in front of the house. She gave it an envious glance. Mildred’s father’s money had set Roger up in the Dodge dealership, and Roger thought that letting his wife drive the latest model was good advertising.

Lizzy leaned her bike against the wrought-iron fence, went up on the impressive plantation-style portico, and rang the brass doorbell. The door was opened by Mildred’s colored maid, Ollie Rose, dressed in a black uniform, spotless white apron, and perky white cap. Mildred had kitchen help, as well. The Kilgores were among the few Darlingians who could still afford to keep full-time servants.

Lizzy followed Ollie Rose through the big house to the back veranda. There, Mildred was stretched out on a cushioned chaise longue, a pitcher of cold lemonade and two glasses on the glass-topped table, beside a large crystal bowl filled with plump, pillowy purple and blue hydrangeas.

From the veranda, Lizzy could look out across Mildred’s camellia garden. It was planted around a rustic pergola and a native stone fountain, with a greenhouse off to one side. Lizzy knew that Mildred had spent a lot of money on her garden, and if there was a camellia anywhere in the world that she didn’t have, she would pay any price to get it. What’s more, she had a gardener who worked three days a week—full time during the annual December Home and Garden Tour. Many of her camellias were in bloom then, and people came from as far away as Montgomery to admire their spectacular beauty.

Lizzy’s own garden was filled with pass-along plants that hadn’t cost her a red cent. But she could not really begrudge Mildred her garden or her gardener—or, for that matter, her stylish clothes or her big house and servants. Mildred had inherited a sizeable fortune from her father (one of those who had grown wealthy planting cotton) and Roger was a respectable Darling businessman. How the Kilgores chose to spend their money, Lizzy always told herself, was no business of hers.

But her friendship with Mildred (which went all the way back to elementary school) was sometimes complicated by a few uncomfortable feelings of . . . well, envy. Lizzy wasn’t jealous of Mildred’s money and easy life, exactly. But she had to admit that every so often she felt a few sharp prickles of resentment. It usually happened when Mildred went out of her way to tell her about a Mediterranean cruise that she and Roger were planning or some extravagant trip they had taken to New York or Chicago or San Francisco.

There hadn’t been much of that kind of talk lately, however. Mildred and Roger didn’t seem to travel together as much as they had in the past. But Mildred’s splendid camellias were a sight to behold, and Lizzy could never in the world bring herself to criticize somebody who spent her money on flowers.

As Lizzy came up behind Mildred, she saw that her friend was reading a letter. Mildred glanced up, saw Lizzy, and hastily slipped the letter between the pages of a book that was open on her lap, her cheeks flushing a dull red. A plump, rather plain-looking woman, she had a too-high forehead, a too-long nose, and a receding chin. But she made up for her plainness by choosing expensive, smart-looking clothes and wearing them with panache. This evening, she was dressed in a yellow-and-red flowered cotton sundress with a flared skirt and perky bunny-ear straps that tied over her bare shoulders.

“My gracious, Elizabeth Lacy,” she said in her usual Southern drawl. She closed her book with a solid thump. “Just
look
at you. You are sweatin’ like a field hand and your face is as red as a firecracker. You walked all the way here?”

“Rode my bike,” Liz said, wiping the sweat off her cheeks with her forearm.

“Serves you right, then,” Mildred said in a scolding tone. “All you had to do was ask and I would’ve driven over and picked you up. It is just too hot to go riding that bicycle of yours all over creation.” She looked down at her book as if to make sure that the letter wasn’t visible. Then she reached over and picked up the pitcher of lemonade. “You need to sit down and cool yourself off.”

Mildred was sometimes sharp and critical, but it was just her way. Lizzy knew she didn’t mean it. She accepted the frosty glass of tart-sweet lemonade and settled back gratefully into a comfortable chair, wondering how to work her way around to the subject she had come to discuss.

But Mildred took charge of the conversation. “Are you all set for the party? I suppose you’ll be coming with Grady, but you can tell that man from me that he
has
to wear a dinner jacket, or he will be turned away at the door. And what are you wearin’?” She was talking faster and more nervously than usual.

Without waiting for an answer to her question, she added, “I swear, Liz, I have just about worked my fingers to the bone getting ready for this party. I sent Melody off to stay with her aunt for the entire week. I just could not bear to have her underfoot. And of course Roger has not been one bit of help.” She spread out her fingers to indicate how bony they had become, and her diamond wedding and engagement rings glittered. “I am goin’ to be a complete wreck by Friday night. I have told myself
that this will be the biggest and best party of the season. I will allow
nothing
to go wrong. Not one little-bitty thing.”

If Mildred’s fingers were worked to the bone, Lizzy thought, they didn’t show it. But of course she didn’t say so. Stalling for time (she still hadn’t decided the best way to get around to the reason for her visit), she countered with her own question. “What are you going to wear, Mildred?”

Mildred brightened. “Oh, thank you for askin’, Liz. I have the most
marvelous
new dress! It is emerald green silk, with a beaded bodice and shoes to match. I bought it at Bergdorf Goodman, on Fifth Avenue, especially for the party.” Her voice sounded tinny and she swallowed. “What did you say you’re wearing, Liz? Don’t forget—you’ll be in the spotlight. As the Dahlias’ president, you are presentin’ the Texas Star to Miss Dare.”

Lizzy thought that Mildred spoke the last two words as if they were distasteful, but she only said, “It’s not a Texas Star. It’s a
Hibiscus coccineus.
” They both laughed. “I’m wearing my gray silk,” she added, and sighed, feeling briefly envious of Mildred’s Bergdorf Goodman dress. “It’s the only halfway decent thing I own.”

Actually, the dress was rather pretty, the soft fabric cut on the bias and draped across the bodice and hip to show her slim figure to advantage. With it, she usually wore her grandmother’s antique silver earrings and the silver bracelet Grady had given her, back when he could afford things like that. She wore the dress often, but since she wasn’t usually invited to country club parties, it ought to do for this one.