The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

But the young man’s sister, who had raised him and with whom he lived, was equally temperamental and equally unimpressed by her brother’s choice of a bride, and let Harold know about it in no uncertain terms. So to Bessie and Harold, living with Bessie’s father (who was at least gone all day and quite a few evenings, tending to his funeral parlor and gravestone business) seemed the lesser of two evils.

But as it turned out, they didn’t live there at all—and this was the most painful part of Bessie’s story, the part she had tried so hard to forget. About a week before the wedding, her fiancé left Darling, abruptly and without a word of good-bye, and neither Bessie nor Harold’s sister nor anyone else had ever heard another word from him. The wedding was at first postponed and then canceled, and all over town, people were saying that poor Bessie had been jilted. Everybody felt sorry for her. She could see the pity written on the face of every single person she encountered. The loss of Harold and the pity of the townspeople—taken together, it was almost too much to bear, and her heart had broken.

Surprisingly, Mr. Bloodworth had shown his daughter many small kindnesses in this terrible time, taking her wedding dress back to Mann’s and canceling the arrangements she had made at the church. When she had cried out loud, “Why? Why?” he had answered gruffly but kindly, “Some things don’t bear looking into, child.” It was as good an answer as any, and at the time, she had felt her father was right. Harold was gone. That was all she had to know. The why could remain a mystery forever.

Bessie wept until she couldn’t weep anymore, and then she pulled herself together and went on doing the things she was expected to do. To help her get through, she played a game with herself, pretending that Harold had just gone off on a trip to New Orleans or Memphis and would one day walk through the door and everything would be exactly the way they had always planned it. It wasn’t pretending, she told herself: she believed to her soul that it was true.

But time passed, as time has a way of doing, and one morning Bessie woke up and discovered that Harold was only a dim memory, a distant melody, like a song sung so far away that it could scarcely be heard. She no longer wanted to pretend that he was coming home, and she found to her surprise that this was all right. “Time heals all wounds,” she reminded herself, and felt that the hoary old proverb was true. She still loved Harold, she supposed, and she still longed to know what had happened to him and whether he was well and happy. But she was ready to stop living on the hope that he would come back.

There were other changes in Bessie’s life, not all of them as healing as this one. Her father had become increasingly temperamental and hard to live with. He sold his funeral parlor to Mr. Noonan and the gravestone business to a man from Mobile and retired. Within a month, Doc Roberts diagnosed him as having cancer of the lungs. Bessie took care of him until at last he died and was buried next to her mother in the Bloodworth family plot in the Darling Cemetery on Schoolhouse Road—the cemetery that Mr. Darling had owned and where so many of his professional duties as Darling’s only undertaker had been carried out. And there she was, all by herself in the big house, faced with the challenge of supporting herself and unexpectedly, surprisingly lonely.

But not for long. As soon as word of her father’s death got around, two suitors—Mr. Hopper and Mr. Churchill, both recently widowed—appeared at her door with bouquets in their hands and hopeful grins on their faces. At first Bessie was flattered, even though she didn’t care for either of them as much as she had cared for Harold. But it wasn’t long before she began to suspect that Mr. Hopper was only looking for a place to live and Mr. Churchill chiefly wanted someone to cook and do his laundry, and if her domestic services were what they were after, she might as well open a boardinghouse and be done with it. And anyway, she needed the money, since Mr. Noonan’s payments on the funeral home note were her only income, and they didn’t amount to very much.

So she said shoo to both of her suitors, put a notice in the Darling Dispatch (“Room and board for older ladies of refinement”), and within a few weeks all of her bedrooms were full. Magnolia Manor was not a hugely profitable business—she cleared only five or six dollars a month on each of her boarders. But that was enough to pay the taxes and buy coal and electricity and food and household supplies, and her own living expenses were negligible. Lots of people, she told herself, were in much worse straits, and they had jobs.