The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

But she didn’t, exactly, at least not yet. Verna hadn’t known that she was going to follow Miss LaMotte in the first place, and she wasn’t exactly sure why she was doing it. Yes, there was the idea of asking her to appear in the talent show, although Verna knew that she really should talk to Mildred first. But the real truth was that Miss LaMotte’s sudden appearance in Darling had been a shocking surprise. It had brought back such a flood of memories that Verna almost felt as if she were drowning.

Now, Verna Tidwell was not a sentimental person. In fact, she thought of herself as not having a single schmaltzy bone in her body, and she took serious pride in her reputation for a hard-headed, no-nonsense approach to life. Oh, she had loved Walter well enough, but she had never been “in love” with him, if by being in love you were thinking of that corny lose-your-head-and-your-heart nonsense that Rudy Vallée was always crooning about. She had agreed to marry Walter because it made pretty good sense at the time he asked her, and she had been truly sorry when he died, although not so sorry that she went around wearing a rusty black dress and black hat and gloves for years afterward, the way her mother had when Verna’s father passed on.

Some of her acquaintances felt that her lack of sentiment was a character fault, but Verna did not agree. It was just part of her nature, along with her habit of wanting to know what was behind the appearances that other people put on when they went out the door in the morning, and suspecting their motivations, and questioning their intentions. “Why?” was one of Verna’s favorite questions, along with “Who says?” and “What’s that got to do with it?” Walter had always complained that she was suspicious, and Verna felt he was right. She was the sort of person who rarely took anything at face value, and she knew it.

Unfortunately, Verna’s suspicious habits had been very hard on Walter during the three years of their marriage. He taught history and civics at Darling Academy and lived in a world that was studded with indisputable facts, the way an oak door is studded with nails. As far as he was concerned, all you had to do to get along happily was to learn the facts and repeat them in the right order when you were called on, and everything would be honky-dory. Verna’s habit of asking questions that didn’t have any clear-cut answers had made him very uncomfortable, and if he hadn’t walked out in front of that Greyhound bus on Route 12 that rainy afternoon ten years ago, Verna suspected that they probably would have gotten a divorce before very long. Instead, Walter had ended up under a sycamore tree in the southwest corner of the Darling Cemetery, out on Schoolhouse Road, and Verna had ended up a widow.

The month before the accident, however, they had gone on a trip to New York together. It was their first vacation and their last, so you might call it Walter’s trip of a lifetime. His cousin Gerald had taken them on the new subway line from Manhattan all the way out to Coney Island to eat cotton candy and Nathan’s Famous frankfurters and ride the new 150-foot-tall Wonder Wheel, so high it seemed to scrape the sky. And then they took the ferry to Liberty Island, where they climbed all 354 steps inside the Statue of Liberty so they could look out from the windows of the crown and marvel at the magical city across the blue, blue water.

And on their last night Gerald had taken them to see the Naughty and Nice Sisters in Mr. Ziegfeld’s notorious Frolic, where Miss Lily Lake and Miss Lorelei LaMotte paraded onto the stage right over the heads of the gasping audience, on a runway made of see-through glass. In another act, scantily clad dancers strutted out into the audience, encouraging male customers to use the glowing tip-ends of their cigars to burst the balloons that covered essential parts of the girls’ anatomy. Walter had been bug-eyed, and even Verna couldn’t remember a more exciting evening.

So even though she swore she didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, Verna certainly had a few sentimental memories and this was the best of them. Walter had been happy and she had been happy and that happiness had followed them like a rosy cloud all the way back to Darling, Alabama, where Walter had stepped out in front of the Greyhound bus and Verna had become a widow.