The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

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.