The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Beulah’s Beauty Bower, on Dauphin Street, was one of the two places where every Darling woman went to get beautiful. The other was Conrad’s Curling Corner, on the north side of town. The Dahlias always preferred the Bower, of course, because it was owned and managed by one of their own, and because everybody agreed that Beulah beat Julia Conrad hands down when it came to style and creativity. Beulah was a serious artist of hair.

Beulah had been raised by her single mother on the wrong side of the railroad spur that connected Darling to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, just outside of Monroeville. Her innate talent for hair made itself known as early as high school, where she was the first to bob hers, creating a fad for bobbed hair that swept like a spring tornado through the school and caused all the Darling mothers to pull theirs out in sheer agony at the sight of all those bobs.

On the day after graduation, fired with an artist’s ambition, Beulah filled a brown cardboard suitcase with all the clothes she had, climbed on the Greyhound bus, and rode to Montgomery to pursue her dream. She got a job as a waitress to make ends meet and signed up for the full course at the Montgomery College of Cosmetology, where she learned all she needed to know “to make the ordinary woman pretty and the pretty woman beautiful,” as the college proclaimed in its advertisements. Beulah wielded a mean marcel iron, made pin curls and finger waves with an astonishing flair, and finished first in a final exam that covered everything from the basics of beauty to the safe use of toxic chemicals.

Beulah graduated at the top of her class and earned the MCC’s first-class certificate of achievement. Flushed with success, she got back on the Greyhound and rode home to Darling, determined to introduce all the women in town to the fine art of beauty, whatever their ages and social station and whether they knew they needed it or not.

Beulah was petite, pretty, blond, and significantly endowed, and many Darling young men (especially the bunch that hung out at the Watering Hole on Saturday nights) were wild to sample her considerable charms. But Beulah possessed an admirable brain and a generous helping of self-discipline as well as beauty and ambition. Instead of letting herself go gaga over one of the town rakes and rascals, she married Hank Trivette, the son of the pastor of the Four Corners Methodist Church, a sedate young fellow who came from the right side of the spur tracks. Hank loved Beulah not only for her outstanding physical attributes, but for her unaffected compassion and her generous good humor. Beulah (who had a practical soul hidden beneath those other endowments) loved Hank for his good common sense, his respectability, and his handy way with tools. He was marrying beauty and sweet spirit. She was marrying up.

Beulah and Hank had two children, Hank Jr. and Spoonie. After Hank was born, they bought a nice frame house on the best end of Dauphin Street, big enough for their growing family and for Beulah’s business. Hank enclosed the screened porch across the back for the beauty shop, repaired the back steps so the ladies wouldn’t turn an ankle, wired the place for electricity, and installed shampoo sinks and hair-cutting chairs and big wall mirrors. Beulah (who was as talented with a paintbrush as she was with a pair of scissors and a comb) wallpapered the walls of the Bower with her favorite fat pink roses, painted the wainscoting pink, and hung her Montgomery College of Cosmetology certificate of achievement beside the door, where everybody could see it when they came in. Then she painted the words Beulah’s Beauty Bower on a white wooden sign and decorated it with painted flowers. Hank hung the sign out front, where anyone walking or driving down Dauphin Street would be sure to see it. She was open for business.

The Bower was so attractive and Beulah was such a skilled beautician that every single customer walked out the door feeling much more beautiful than when she walked in. So she naturally made a second appointment and then a third and told all her friends that the Bower was the very best beauty parlor in town. A few months later, business was so good that Beulah hired Bettina Higgens, not the prettiest flower in the garden (as Bettina herself put it) but a willing worker who quickly came to share Beulah’s commitment to beautifying Darling, one lovely lady at a time.

But of course, people didn’t come to the Bower just to get pretty. They came to talk about what was on their mind, to brag about a new grandchild or to complain about a new daughter-in-law, and to discuss what was going on with their neighbors. It was right up there with the party line as the best way to get an earful of the latest Darling news.