The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

“Copper-red would be wonderful and a few bare spots wouldn’t matter one bit,” Miss Jamison said eagerly. “Could I see it?” And when Beulah found it in the closet and brought it out, she was delighted. “It’s perfect,” she exclaimed. “And better yet, I can take it with me. How much do you want for it?”


Beulah looked at the wig, thinking that it wasn’t as frayed as she remembered. It had cost three dollars, she recollected, and she’d already gotten as much good out of it as she was going to get. “How does a dollar fifty sound?” To her, that sounded a little high, so she brought it down. “Let’s make it a dollar.”

“A dollar fifty sounds good to me, considering that I won’t have to order and wait and wait,” Miss Jamison said generously, and watched while Beulah put it in a box. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to get that.”

Beulah couldn’t imagine why a platinum blonde who wanted her hair dyed brown would also want to pay a dollar fifty for a red wig, but that was none of her business. “Well, now,” she said, taking a pink cape off the rack, “you just come over here and sit down in the shampoo chair and we’ll get you started.” She raised her voice. “Bettina, darlin’, before Miz Bloodworth gets here, would you go into the kitchen, please, and fetch Miz Jamison a cup of coffee. One for me, too. Black.”

She had the feeling she was going to need it.





TEN


Bessie Bloodworth Learns a Thing or Two The story Bessie had told Liz and Verna on Sunday afternoon had awakened memories in her heart and a painful longing that she thought she had put away long ago, and for good. A longing for Harold? No, that wasn’t quite it, she told herself. Not a longing for him, for the man himself. Too much time had passed for that, and Bessie had already lived too much of her life on her own terms to wish it otherwise. No, what she felt was more of a longing to know why Harold had left and what had happened to him, and why he had never gotten in touch. She sighed. Maybe it was time to finally sit down and talk to Miss Hamer. Harold’s sister surely had to know more than she had let on.

At the thought of Miss Hamer, Bessie frowned. What exactly was going on at the house across the street?

This question had become even more interesting after Bessie and the Magnolia Ladies had heard Miss Hamer shrieking on Sunday evening, so loudly that she could be heard over the vocal acrobatics of the operatic soprano they were listening to. Miss Rogers enjoyed classical music, and it had been her turn to choose. So they were sitting out on the front porch after supper, with the Victrola volume turned up and the parlor window open so they could hear it. Rosa Ponselle, the Metropolitan’s soprano sensation, was singing one of her famous arias from the opera Norma when the shouting began.

By itself, this was not unusual, for Miss Hamer shrieked whenever she felt like it—and apparently for the fun of it—as often as once or twice a week. Miss Rogers said she thought it was entertaining, because the yelling seemed to go with Miss Ponselle’s music. Mrs. Sedalius supposed that Miss Hamer might be singing along (although it didn’t sound all that melodic) and maybe they should turn down the volume, which they did. But still, as the shrieking went on and on and got so loud that it could be heard over Rosa Ponselle, Bessie wondered. What was going on behind that closed front door, those curtained windows?

She wondered about Miss Jamison, too. If Miss Hamer’s niece was also Lorelei LaMotte, the dancer, why had she come to Darling? There was no place around here to perform—and certainly not in the kind of costume she was wearing in the photo on Verna’s playbill. The Dance Barn occasionally featured burlesque, but even there, she couldn’t dance half-naked. She’d have to wear a lot more clothes.

And—the essential question, now that Bessie had had a chance to think about it—was this woman really Miss Hamer’s niece? If she was, could she prove it? If she wasn’t, how would they know?

These intriguing questions were at the top of Bessie’s mind the next morning when she put on her third-best mauve cambric dress (the one with the purple buttons and the Peter Pan lace collar), set her black felt hat on her salt-and-pepper curls, and started out for Beulah’s Beauty Bower to keep her nine-thirty appointment for her weekly shampoo and set. She was still puzzling over the question of Miss Jamison’s real identity as she walked up the steps to the Bower. And when she opened the screen door and saw who was sitting in Beulah’s haircutting chair in front of the mirror, big as life and twice as natural, she had to blink to make sure she hadn’t conjured up the vision.