The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

ONE

Elizabeth Lacy opened the small shed behind the Dahlias’ clubhouse and stowed the rakes, hoes, and spades inside. She closed the door, took off her floppy-brimmed hat, and turned to Verna Tidwell.

“The garden looks really swell, don’t you think?” she said, surveying the result of the afternoon’s hard work.

“Well, it ought to,” Verna retorted crisply, stripping off her green cotton gardening gloves. Her brown hair was short and combed straight back from her face in a characteristically no-fluff style. “We’ve poured a lot of time and sweat into this place over the past few months. How many Dahlias were out here this afternoon, slaving in the sunshine? I counted ten. That’s a good turnout.”

Lizzy stretched down and touched her toes, working out the kink in her back that came from kneeling in front of the phlox bed for two hours, pulling weeds. “Ten is right. Voleen Johnson said she had company, and Ophelia’s boy was playing in the baseball tournament at the fairgrounds. Oh, and Myra May had to work the switchboard because Violet is up in Memphis.” She straightened up and stretched her hands over her head. “Her younger sister just had a baby and Violet’s helping out. Myra May said the sister isn’t doing too well.”

Verna stuck her gloves in the pocket of her gardening skirt, wrinkling her nose distastefully. “Have you ever noticed that Voleen always manages to have out-of-town company on one of our work days? If you ask me, I think she invites them on purpose, so she doesn’t have to come over here and risk breaking one of her fingernails, all pretty and polished up.”

“You might be right,” Lizzy said, in a noncommittal tone. She didn’t like to criticize other people because you never knew when they might be criticizing you, and they might not be as nice about it as you were. But it was definitely true that Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson rarely lent her perfectly manicured hands to the task when it came to the Dahlias’ garden. Or her own beautiful garden, for that matter, since she had a colored man who did all the work for her. The George E. Picketts were among Darling’s hereditary nobility and Mrs. Pickett’s garden was a showplace, with never a leaf or a twig out of place.

“We managed all right without her,” Lizzy added, looking around appreciatively. “The garden hasn’t looked so pretty for quite a while. Mrs. Blackstone couldn’t do much in her last years.”

The small white frame house the garden club had inherited from Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone sat fairly close to Camellia Street. Behind the white picket fence out front, the yard was mostly hydrangeas and azaleas and roses. But behind the house, a large garden swept down toward a tall magnolia tree, a clump of woods, and a small, clear spring smothered in ferns, bog iris, and pitcher plants. This garden had once been so beautiful that it had been written up in newspapers all over the South, and as far away as New Orleans. But as Mrs. Blackstone grew older and less able to care for it, the plants had become disheveled and shaggy, in the ragamuffin way of gardens when there’s nobody to pull weeds or deadhead or prune the roses or dig and separate the perennials or even mow the grass regularly.

Then Mrs. Blackstone had died and left her house and the garden to the garden club she had founded, whose grateful members quickly renamed themselves the Dahlias in her honor. Then they (well, most of them, anyway) pulled on their garden gloves and picked up their rakes and hoes and trowels and clippers and set about restoring the garden to its former glory. They had yanked the smothering weeds-the dog fennel, henbit, ground ivy, and (the biggest garden bully of all!) the Johnson grass-out of the curving perennial borders, so that the phlox, larkspur, iris, asters, and Shasta daisies could take a deep breath. They had dug and divided and replanted Mrs. Blackstone’s much-loved lilies: Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and her favorite orange ditch lilies. They had untangled the cardinal climber and crossvine and honeysuckle on the fence and repaired the trellises so the mandevilla and confederate jasmine could stretch up and out. They gently disciplined the hibiscus and the dozens of roses, including the climbers, the teas, the ramblers, the shrubs, and a charming yellow Lady Banks. Yet to be done: the cleanup of the woodland and spring at the foot of the garden, where Miss Rogers thought they ought to put the bog garden. And every time a Dahlia set foot on the place, she saw something else that needed to be done, such as painting the shed, or repairing another trellis, or planting a ground cover over a bare spot. Gardens, of course, are a labor of love, and love-and its labor-is never-ending.

“It is gorgeous, Lizzy,” Verna agreed. Even she (by nature a wary, critical person who always saw the flaws in a thing while everybody else was still admiring it) had to admit that the Dahlias were well on the way to restoring Mrs. Blackstone’s garden to its former glory. And the only money they had spent on the project was the fifty cents they gave Old Zeke to cut the grass and trim along the flower beds every other week.

Which had been a very good thing (as Verna, the club’s treasurer, knew very well), because when the Dahlias inherited the house, they were nearly broke. Mrs. Blackstone had left them enough to pay the property taxes for several years, relieving some of Verna’s worry. But there was barely enough in the club kitty to keep the lights on, let alone fix the leaks in the roof and replace the plumbing in the bathroom.

And then, glory be and hallelujah! When they dug the holes to plant their Darling Dahlias sign in front of their new clubhouse, the Dahlias had struck silver. That is, they had uncovered the chest of sterling flatware that Mrs. Blackstone’s mother (a Cartwright) had buried to keep it from falling into the greedy hands of pillaging Yankees as they stormed through Alabama near the end of the War Between the States. When the Dahlias began to look through the chest, they found, in addition to the sterling, a bracelet set with an old-fashioned square-cut emerald, a pair of pearl teardrop earrings, a diamond ring, and a velvet bag containing ten gold coins: twenty-dollar double eagles, still as perfect as the day they were new-minted.

But the discovery of this buried treasure had resulted in a hot debate about what to do with it. Some wanted to keep everything. After all, the silver, the coins, and the jewelry were heirlooms, and all of it was very beautiful. But Earlynne Biddle had pointed out that these were Cartwright heirlooms and every last Cartwright was dead and gone from this earth and in no position to care about heirlooms. Aunt Hetty Little had pointed out that if the Dahlias kept the silver, the Dahlias would have to polish it, since they couldn’t afford a maid to do it for them. And Verna had added that the whole kit and caboodle must be worth a small fortune, and the club needed cash money a whole lot more than it needed heirlooms.

So the Dahlias voted (Mrs. Johnson being the lone dissenter) to sell. Verna and Lizzy took the silver, the gold, and the jewelry to Ettlinger’s Jewelry store in Mobile, where it brought enough to fix the leaky roof and repair the plumbing, with some left over. The Dahlias could now face the autumn rains without fear of flooding, they could flush without fear of overflowing, and their savings account in the Darling Savings and Trust was, if not fat, nicely plump. They called it the “Treasure Fund.”

“It’s hard to believe we’ve accomplished so much in just five months,” Lizzy replied, fanning herself with her hat as they walked around the house toward the front. She felt a justifiable sense of pride. After all, she was president of the club and she’d worked hard to organize the garden project.

“Hot months, too,” Verna said. The Dahlias had held the first meeting in their new clubhouse in May, and the summer months in Alabama are not exactly the most comfortable months for outdoor work. But the Dahlias were not delicate Southern belles-most of them, anyway. When it came to gardening, they didn’t wilt.

Lizzy pushed her brown hair out of her eyes, put her hat back on, and paused, looking at the large empty lot beside the house. The area had once been Mrs. Blackstone’s vegetable garden, with a border of strawberries, two peach trees, and a fig tree in the back. Old Zeke had mowed the weeds for them, but the place still looked straggly and forlorn.

“I’ve been thinking about this area,” she said. “What would you say to turning it back into a vegetable garden-not for just us Dahlias, but for everybody? There are lots of folks in this town who might be willing to trade some garden work for sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, okra, collards-things that are sure to grow. I’m sure we could get Mr. Norris to bring Racer over and plow the ground early next year.” The name of Mr. Norris’ horse was a joke, because the old bay gelding was slow as blackstrap molasses in January. But he knew what to do when he was hitched to the business end of a plow, and he and Mr. Norris made a few dollars every spring by plowing gardens.

“Good idea,” Verna agreed cautiously, “but what makes you think people will be willing to help? Everybody loves a handout, but when it comes with a rake or hoe attached-” She shrugged.

Lizzy clucked her tongue. “Verna, you are so cynical.”

“Just realistic,” Verna replied with a chuckle. “Comes from working in the county courthouse. Want to see people at their worst? Sit behind my desk for a day or two.”

“Well, the folks who come into Mr. Moseley’s law office don’t win any happiness prizes,” Lizzy retorted. “They only need a lawyer when they’re in really bad trouble.” Mr. Moseley was one of Darling’s three lawyers, and as his secretary, receptionist, and legal assistant, Lizzy had an insider’s view into people’s problems. Unlike Verna, she had an innate sense of compassion and concern and always tried to put herself in the other person’s shoes. “But just because I see the ones who are unhappy or in trouble doesn’t mean that everybody in town is like that,” she added.

“Maybe not,” Verna said, “but at least half of them are. Times are tough. People are scared. They’re hanging on for dear life to their jobs or their farms or whatever. If they don’t have money, they’ll do almost anything to get it. If they have it, they won’t spend an extra nickel.”

“Well, then,” Lizzy said reasonably, “maybe they’ll be willing to work for some fresh food-so they can save their nickels.”

They had come around the front of the house now. Mrs. Blackstone’s prize azaleas, hydrangeas, and weigelas had finished blooming months before, but the Autumn Joy sedum was gorgeous, next to some red spider lilies that looked like a fireworks display. Lizzy smiled, thinking that while jobs and money and food were definitely important-you couldn’t live without them-beauty was important, too. Vegetables could provide a feast for the table, but flowers were a feast for the soul.

“Aren’t those lilies pretty?” Lizzy said admiringly. “Or Lycoris radiata, as Miss Rogers would say.” Miss Rogers, the town librarian and its leading intellectual, always insisted on calling plants by their Latin names, an insistence that drove everybody crazy.

“Yes. But not half as pretty as those naked ladies in front of old Miss Hamer’s house.” Verna pointed across the street, where a two-story frame house, weathered gray with green shutters and in need of a coat of paint, was fronted by a few rosebushes and a mass of leggy lilies in a rainbow of colors: pumpkin orange, sunshine yellow, sizzling scarlet, as well as the quieter mauve, blush, and white. Verna chuckled and imitated Miss Rogers’ high-pitched voice. “Lycoris squamigera, girls. ‘Naked ladies’ is not a respectable name for a plant.”

“My mother calls them ‘resurrection lilies,’ ” Lizzy said, and laughed a little. “When I was a girl, I always thought they were sort of magical, the way the leaves died in the summer and then the stalks poked up out of the ground, all of a sudden, and in the next day or two, here came the blooms-poof!” She waved her hand. “Maybe the new people will clean up the front yard a little,” she added. “Those naked ladies deserve a place to show off. You can hardly see them for all that grass and weeds.”

“The new people?” Verna asked, raising her eyebrows. “You mean, somebody has moved in with old Miss Hamer?”

Miss Julia Hamer had to be eighty if she was a day and probably older, although nobody knew for sure, except possibly Bessie Bloodworth, the town’s unofficial historian and genealogist, who knew everybody’s family tree as well as she knew every branch of the flowering dogwood just outside her kitchen window. Bessie, who lived next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse, had written up Miss Hamer’s family story in the collection of local histories she had gathered years before. Miss Hamer’s father had been among Darling’s early settlers, and the old woman had lived in the house on Camellia Street, across from Mrs. Blackstone and Bessie Bloodworth, since long before Lizzy was born.

There were other women in town who didn’t go out much, but as a recluse, Miss Hamer without a doubt took the cake. She hadn’t been to church for forty years, which was scandal enough to raise all the Darling eyebrows, and when the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers made their annual round of visits to inquire about the state of her eternal soul, the door was always shut in their faces, and not very politely, either. Miss Hamer’s colored maid, DessaRae (an aunt of Lizzy’s mother’s maid, Sally-Lou), took the weekly grocery list to Hancock’s Groceries, but the household’s milk, eggs, and ice were of course delivered right to the door and the bills regularly paid by mail. Old Zeke was employed to mow and trim the yard twice a year, not often enough to keep it neat but just enough to keep the weeds from taking over. And if Miss Hamer sat outside on a warm summer evening, as most folks did in Darling, she sat in her daddy’s old pine rocker on the back porch, where she couldn’t be seen because the backyard was entirely enclosed by a holly hedge so dense that not even the neighborhood children could peek through it. Nobody except Bessie Bloodworth, Doc Roberts, and DessaRae had so much as laid eyes on the old lady for a very long time, except as a pale shadow moving slowly behind the drawn window shades in the evening, after the kerosene lamps were lit.

And now she was no longer living alone.

“They moved in last Saturday,” Lizzy replied, in answer to Verna’s question. “Two ladies. Miss Hamer’s niece and her friend, Miss Lake. Miss Jamison-that’s the niece-is doing some legal business with Mr. Moseley. He’s handling the sale of her house back in Illinois, and he’s been corresponding with her. I met her when she came into the office right after she and her friend arrived, and she’s been back a time or two.” Lizzy wrinkled her nose. “She’s kind of a cool customer.”

“Two women, moving into Miss Hamer’s house?” Verna said, shaking her head incredulously. “Don’t you find that a little surprising, Liz? After all, she’s lived by herself-with DessaRae to help out, of course-for decades.”

Lizzy shrugged. “Miss Jamison told Mr. Moseley that her aunt invited them. Maybe Miss Hamer needs more help than she’s getting from DessaRae, who has a bad back, Sally-Lou says. And Miss Jamison is family.” Which of course explained it, Lizzy thought, since family usually pitched in to help when things got difficult.

“Well, I’m sure there’s room,” Verna said in a practical tone. “That house must have at least three bedrooms upstairs. So you’ve met them. What are they like?”

Lizzy raised her eyebrows. “Well, I haven’t met Miss Lake, so I couldn’t say about her. But when it comes to Miss Jamison, you’d really have to see her to believe-”

But just at that moment, the front door of the house opened and a woman came out onto the porch. She was dressed fit to kill in a stylish fire-engine red dress with a dropped waist and a pleated skirt that came just to the knee. A filmy red scarf was wrapped several times around her neck, the ends flowing loose. A chic red felt hat with a floppy red bow on one side perched on her platinum blond hair. She was wearing black gloves and red suede high-heeled shoes with four-inch French heels and narrow ankle straps, and carried a red-and-black pouch handbag big enough to stuff a live chicken into.

“That’s her,” Lizzy said. “Miss Jamison.”

“Jeepers,” Verna muttered, staring.

The woman came down the steps, looked up and saw them, and gave a little wave before she turned away. Even from a distance, it could be seen that Miss Jamison’s face and eyes were heavily made up, that her mouth was painted bright red, and that she was generously endowed in the bosom department. Very generously.

But as Lizzy waved and smiled in return, she couldn’t help thinking that, unless Darling’s newest resident changed her style, she was going to find it difficult to fit into the local scene. For one thing, while one or two of the smartest ladies might wear a red dress and makeup to an evening party, particularly around the winter holidays, red was not considered an appropriate choice for afternoon shopping. And nobody-not even the younger women-wore that much makeup, ever. If Lizzy knew anything about the residents of Darling, she’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Miss Jamison would cause a titanic stir in Hancock’s Groceries or Mann’s Mercantile or Lima’s Drugs, wherever she was going. In that red dress, she would be as noticeable as a big brown June bug in a plate of grits. Tongues would be wagging around Darling’s supper tables tonight.

Verna’s eyes were wide. “Jamison?” She turned to Lizzy. “Is that the name she’s using?”

“Well, yes. Nona Jean Jamison. As I said, she’s Miss Hamer’s niece. She-”

“I heard what you said. But Nona Jean Jamison has another name, Liz. She is Lorelei LaMotte. Lorelei LaMotte! She’s a Broadway star! A vaudeville dancer!”

Lizzy frowned doubtfully. “Are you sure? She didn’t say a word about a dancing career or being in vaudeville or anything like that. What Miss Jamison told Mr. Moseley was that her mother was Miss Hamer’s younger sister and that she grew up over in Monroeville and visited here in Darling. But that was years and years ago. She said she’d never been back since she was a little girl. She came here from Chicago-one of the suburbs, actually.”

“She didn’t mention being Lorelei LaMotte?”

“Nope.” Lizzy shook her head. “If you ask me, she’s had a rough life, Verna. She’s definitely well preserved and still very pretty, but up close, you can tell that she is definitely looking over her shoulder at forty. I’m not doubting your word, but if she’s a dancer, she-”

“Doubt my word?” Verna was sputtering. “I am right, Liz, and I have a souvenir playbill to prove it. A photograph of Lorelei LaMotte, nearly naked, with her actual signature on it! I’d know that face and figure anywhere. She’s the naughty half of the Naughty and Nice Sisters. They’re dancers.”

“Nearly naked dancers?” Lizzy’s eyes got big, and she turned to look as the woman in red, hips swaying, walked down Camellia Street toward Rosemont. “Where was this, Verna? And when? And wouldn’t you think she’d mention it to Mr. Moseley?”

“It was the Ziegfeld Frolic, back in 1920. Ten years ago, but it seems like yesterday. I remember every minute of it.”

“The Ziegfeld Follies?” Now Lizzy’s mouth fell open. “Seriously?”

“No, not the Follies, the Frolic. The Midnight Frolic. The Follies were designed for a more refined audience.” Verna gave her a wicked grin. “The Frolic was naughtier. The girls were more… um, naked.”

“More naked than the Follies?” Lizzy stared at her, remembering the scanty costumes she had seen in photographs. “But how in the world do you know about this, Verna?”

“Because I was there, you goose! Walter’s cousin Gerald was living in Brooklyn at the time. He took Walter and me to see her do the shimmy.” Walter was Verna’s husband. He’d been killed when he walked out in front of a Greyhound bus on Route 12. “We rode the train to New York and Gerald showed us the sights. The Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square. And the New Amsterdam Theater, where Mr. Ziegfeld had his shows.”

“I didn’t know you’d been to New York.” Lizzy was impressed. She had never been any farther than Atlanta. “And you’re saying that Miss Jamison starred in the Frolic? She’s the one you went to see?”

“And how!” Verna nodded vigorously. “Only her name was LaMotte, not Jamison. The show was in the rooftop theater at the New Amsterdam, on West Forty-second Street. Fanny Brice and W. C. Fields headlined, and the Naughty and Nice Sisters did this swell song-and-dance act.” She rolled her eyes expressively. “Boy-o-boy, that woman could kick up her heels. And shimmy? You wouldn’t believe it, Liz. She did this song called ‘Shimmyshawobble.’ ” Verna held her arms out straight and shook the rest of herself. “‘I can’t play no piano,’” she warbled, “‘I can’t sing no blues, but I can shimmyshawobble from my head down to my shoes.’”

“Oh, my stars,” Lizzy said, wide-eyed at the sight of Verna doing… what Verna was doing. “Is that what the shimmy looks like?”

She had heard “Shimmyshawobble” on the radio, of course, but she’d had to use her imagination when it came to the shimmy itself, as well as the Turkey Trot, the Bunny Hug, the Texas Tommy, none of which she had ever seen. She had seen the Charleston, though. Vaudeville acts featuring singers, dancers, and comedians sometimes came to the Dance Barn, out on Briarwood Road. Last year, a pair of girls had danced the Charleston. It had caused quite a sensation. The Baptist preacher (who had dropped in to make sure that there were no “licentious acts” that might sully the souls of his flock) even called the sheriff. When Sheriff Burns got there, he asked the girls to give him a private performance, just so he could see what the preacher was complaining about. He declined to press charges.

Verna dropped her arms and stood still. “That’s what the shimmy looks like-except that I’m not any good at it, compared to her. She shook everything, Liz. And I do mean everything, top to bottom and all parts in-between. Walter was bug-eyed. Gerald said he went to the Frolic whenever he could afford it, just to watch a hometown girl do the shimmy.”

“But how did Gerald know that she was a hometown girl?” Lizzy asked reasonably.

“He said he went to school with her. He and Walter both grew up over in Monroeville, you know. Of course, I had no idea that Lorelei LaMotte had an aunt here in Darling, and I’m sure Gerald didn’t, either. He just thought it was a really swell joke. He got a big kick out of seeing her up on stage, all made up and beautiful, shaking her chassis and belting out those songs. He said he’d never in the world have recognized her.”

“Shaking her chassis?”

Verna laughed at Lizzy’s shocked look. “Well, that’s what she was doing. And you should have seen her costume-what there was of it! For all practical purposes, she was naked. After the show, we went backstage and she signed the playbill for me. ‘For Verna,’ she wrote, ‘with all my love. Lorelei LaMotte.’ This is the same person, Liz. Believe me.”

“What about her sister?” Lizzy asked, by now completely convinced. “The ‘nice’ part of the act. Did she shimmy, too?”

“No, she mostly played the mandolin and sang-not very well, but I think her mistakes were on purpose-and made remarks about how naughty Lorelei LaMotte was and how it was going to get her into trouble if she didn’t watch out. She was funny and everybody laughed. She wasn’t really Lorelei’s sister, though. That was just the way they were billed.” She paused, frowning. “What’s the name of Miss Jamison’s friend? The one who’s moved in with her and Miss Hamer?”

“Miss Lake. Lily Lake, I think she said.”

“Of course!” Verna snapped her fingers. “That was her-Lily Lake! The ‘nice’ half of the Naughty and Nice Sisters. She was pretty, too-a brunette. But Lorelei LaMotte was the famous one, because of the shimmy.”

“If she’s so famous,” Lizzy replied thoughtfully, “how come folks around here don’t know who she is?” She frowned. “For instance, Mr. Moseley had no idea. I’m sure that if she’d told him that she was a Ziegfeld Girl, he would have mentioned it to me.”

Verna shrugged. “If she hasn’t been back to Darling since she was a girl, there’s no reason for people around here to make the connection. Please forgive me for besmirching Benton Moseley, but I seriously doubt that he pays any attention to show business. In fact, he’s probably never even heard of Mr. Ziegfeld.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Lizzy conceded. For years, she had carried a secret torch for her boss, but even when she was so head-over-heels she couldn’t see straight, she hadn’t been blind to his limitations. Mr. Moseley was nice-looking and very smart, but he was not the most scintillating man in the world. He almost never went to the movies, and while he subscribed to newspapers like the Sunday New York Times (which came on the bus from Mobile every Thursday), he mostly read about national politics and international affairs, not the entertainment section. Mrs. Moseley said he was a “stuffy old stick-in-the-mud,” and Lizzy suspected that this had something to do with her recent decision to get a divorce.

“Anyway,” Verna went on, “the Naughty and Nice Sisters may have been a big hit back in 1920, but that was before Prohibition. Lots of clubs folded, and I read that Mr. Ziegfeld himself hasn’t been doing so hot lately. It’s no surprise that nobody in Darling has ever heard of Lorelei LaMotte or the Naughty and Nice Sisters.” She narrowed her eyes at Lizzy. “But I’ll show you that playbill, and you can see for yourself who Nona Jean Jamison is. Who she really is, in the flesh, so to speak.”

“Well,” Lizzy replied with a little laugh, “I guess they’ll hear about her now. In that red outfit and those high heels, she’ll be the talk of the town.” In Darling, gossip was everybody’s favorite recreation.

“Oh, golly, Liz!” Verna snapped her fingers. “I have just got the most incredible idea!”

“Idea? What idea?” Lizzy asked cautiously. Verna was very intelligent and eminently practical, but she could be too smart for her own good. Sometimes she outfoxed herself.

“About the talent show.” Sponsored and organized by the Dahlias, this annual event was held at the Darling Academy gymnasium in late October. It was always a mixture of the melodramatic (Mrs. Eiglehorn reciting “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight”) and the comic (Mr. Trubar clowning around with his shiny trombone and his dancing dog, Towser). It was the highlight of Darling’s fall social season. Everybody in town looked forward to it with a great deal of anticipation.

“Uh-oh,” Lizzy said. Mildred Kilgore was putting the talent show program together, and she was a very detail-oriented person who liked everything to turn out just the way she planned. Where Mildred was concerned, the only successful program was the one where even Reverend Trivette, the minister at the Four Corners Methodist Church, could go away saying what swell family entertainment it had been. The Naughty and Nice Sisters would give Mildred Kilgore heartburn.

“No, no,” Verna protested. “It’s a good idea, Liz! Let’s ask Miss LaMotte and Miss Lake to do an act for the talent show. I’ll bet they’d really bring in a crowd. We could put up posters and advertise-”

“Verna! You know Mildred wouldn’t think of inviting those ladies to perform. Why, the audience would be scandalized! Most of them would get up and walk out, and the ones who stayed would cause a riot.”

“I wasn’t thinking of asking them to do their Ziegfeld Frolic act,” Verna replied hastily. “It would be different-something suitable for a Darling audience. If they’re planning to be in Darling for any length of time, it would be a perfect way for them to get acquainted. I’ll bet the Dahlias would be delighted to have their help with the show.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Lizzy said, shaking her head warily. “From what you say, they sound like an intriguing pair, but they’d probably feel more at home out at the Dance Barn. You’d better talk it over with Mildred before you get all excited about the possibilities.” She thought of something else. “Listen, Myra May and I are having supper at the diner tonight, and then we’re going to see The Saturday Night Kid. Clara Bow is in it, and Jean Harlow. Want to come with us?”

“I’d love to,” Verna said. “But what about Grady? How come you’re not going out with him?” Grady Alexander, the county agricultural extension agent, was Lizzy’s more-or-less steady boyfriend.

“He drove over to Auburn for an ag meeting. He’ll be gone through the middle of next week.” Lizzy sighed. “To tell the truth, Verna, I’m glad to get a little breathing space. I’m trying to put off-” She turned down her mouth. “Well, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Verna said sympathetically. She grinned. “But it’s a nice problem to have, in my opinion.” The courthouse clock began to strike. It was several blocks away, but its booming note could be heard all over town. The people of Darling always said they didn’t need watches. They had the courthouse clock, so there was never any excuse for being late.

Lizzy counted the strikes. “Mercy. Four o’clock already. I need to get home. Is six okay for supper? The movie starts at seven fifteen.”

“Sure,” Verna said. “Six o’clock, at the diner.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder if the Naughty and Nice Sisters have ever met Clara Bow.”