The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

This week’s column was what she called a “potpourri,” since it was a collection of short items she had been saving. She was not quite half done with her draft when the tall grandfather clock at the top of the stairs cleared its throat and struck the half hour. Four thirty, and time to go home. She put her work away and straightened her desk, covered the typewriter, checked Mr. Moseley’s office to be sure that everything was shipshape and ready for the next morning, and left, locking the door behind her, both at the top of the stairs and at the bottom, on the street.

Home was only a few blocks away. East on Franklin outside the Dispatch building, past the diner and Musgrove’s Hardware, across Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, and left on Davis. Halfway up the block, heading north, she reached her house. Her very own house.

She was turning up the path when she heard a shrill, quavering “Eliz’beth!” It was her mother, of course, calling from her front porch on the other side of the dusty, unpaved street. She was sitting in her rocking chair, her knees covered with a crocheted granny afghan. “Eliz’beth, Grady stopped by ‘bout an hour ago. He left somethin’ for you. A glass jar of somethin’. On the porch, right there beside the door.”

“Thank you, Momma,” Lizzy called, and waved, thinking once again that life would be much easier if she had a sister or two, or at least a brother.

No such luck. Her mother had been nearly forty when Lizzy was born. Her father had died when she was a baby, and Mrs. Lacy had lavished all her attention on her only child. For the first ten years, this was a privilege Lizzy had enjoyed. Mrs. Lacy loved to sew, so her daughter was always dressed in the prettiest dresses, organdies and sheer cottons, always white, with ribbons and embroidery. Lizzy’s Mary Janes were always spotlessly white and polished. Her brown-gold hair was twisted up in rags every night so she could have bouncy banana curls.

But as Lizzy got older, her mother’s fussing began to feel oppressive, to the point where it seemed that every action she took, every moment of her life, was watched, evaluated, criticized, and managed. When she was eighteen, fired by the desire to leave her mother’s house, she had said an overeager “yes” to Reggie Morris and accepted the engagement ring he gave her. She began looking forward to having her own home and husband and children to take care of. In the meantime, when Reggie signed up to fight, she got a job at Moseley & Moseley and tried to learn how to wait.

But Reggie hadn’t come back from France with the rest of the 167th Infantry. It had taken Lizzy a while to get over that, and then she had started carrying a torch for Mr. Moseley. That took a while to burn itself out, and by the time he married Adabelle, Lizzy was well on her way to spinster-hood. To her surprise, she found she didn’t mind that much-maligned state very much at all. What she minded was living at home with her mother and being thoroughly managed. Why, she couldn’t even have a cat, because her mother was allergic. As to a dog, that was out of the question, too. Dogs barked. It was becoming increasingly obvious (as her mother liked to say) that “a son is a son ’til he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life.”

Which was why, two summers ago, Lizzy did something highly unusual, at least by Darling’s standards. Old Mr. Flagg had lived for many years across the street from her mother. When he died, Lizzy bought his white frame house, with sunflowers and raspberries in the backyard and a profusion of roses on the trellis and a little vegetable plot and a fence covered with butterbean vines. Mr. Moseley was in charge of handling Mr. Flagg’s estate for the old man’s out-of-town heirs. Lizzy was able to purchase the house privately, before Mr. Manning, the local real estate dealer, could get in on the act and add his percentage. She didn’t tell her mother, or anybody else, for that matter.

Lizzy had been saving five or six dollars a week since she had started working, so she was able to pay cash for the small house. She even had enough money left to get the old place repainted and wired for electricity (Mr. Flagg had liked his coal oil lamps). The work was done under the watchful eye of a local contractor whom Mr. Moseley had privately hired for her. When it was almost finished, Lizzy took the train to Mobile and treated herself to a new Tappan gas range and a GE Monitor-top refrigerator with coils on top, as well as a few items of necessary furniture, and arranged to have them delivered and installed. She didn’t tell her mother about any of this, either.