The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page B

certainly enough to keep her from working or worrying her pretty head about anything of any consequence. This fiscal consideration had allowed Mrs. Lacy to focus every bit of her attention, energy, and concern on Elizabeth, her only child. She loved sewing and hat-making, and she dressed her daughter in her beautiful creations: ruffled and embroidered dresses and hats piled with ribbons and silk flowers.
    Her mother’s attentions had not bothered Lizzy so much when she was a little girl, but as she grew older, the fuss over what she wore and how she fixed her hair turned to a constant, quarrelsome nagging. It was “Elizabeth, if you keep on frowning, your forehead will be permanently wrinkled!” and “Elizabeth, stop chewing your nails this instant! Your hands are a scandal!” and “Elizabeth, I simply will not allow you to bob your hair!” And every time Lizzy turned around, her mother had made her another new hat—or redecorated an old one—and insisted that she wear it.
    The only way she could escape was to close the door to her room and write in her journal or read, for Mrs. Lacy couldn’t follow her into the pages of The Railway Children (who were blessed with a very agreeable mother) or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Huck had no mother at all) . The trouble with writing in her journal, of course, was that Lizzy was writing about the secret places of her own inner life, and she could never be sure that—no matter how carefully she hid her work—her mother hadn’t found and read it. Lizzy was under no illusions. Her mother was that kind of mother.
    Sometime during her last year of high school, Lizzy realized that she was never going to have a life of her own if she didn’t find a way to escape. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many options. The Lacys were well enough off to live comfortably in the house Mr. Lacy had left them, but not so well off (at least, that’s what her mother said) that Lizzy could go away to college. There hadn’t been any available jobs in town at the time, and the thought of leaving Darling for some unknown city was so daunting that Lizzy (more timid then than she was now) couldn’t even think it.
    So when Reggie Morris had proposed the day after her high school graduation, Lizzy had said “yes” without a second thought. Reggie’s father was a building contractor and the Morrises were well enough off so that Lizzy and Reggie would have their own house. Against her mother’s loudly expressed wishes, she took Reggie’s modest diamond engagement ring and began dreaming about the joys of having her own home, where she could read and write to her heart’s content and her mother would come only when she was invited.
    But when the Alabama 167th came home from France in 1919, Reggie hadn’t come home with them. It took a long time to get over the death of her dream. Lizzy (who by that time was older and somewhat braver) thought of moving to Mobile or Birmingham to find work and get away from her mother, which would have been the right thing to do. But she had already taken a secretarial job at Moseley & Moseley Law Office, where she found herself developing an extraordinary crush on Mr. Benton Moseley. He was just out of law school, handsome and bright, newly in practice with his father, a widely respected lawyer and former state senator. Mr. Benton Moseley had always been a complete gentleman, of course, although Lizzy (who by this time was reading a great many dime-novel romances in which beautiful and worthy but penniless young women met and married handsome, worthy, and wealthy young gentlemen) found herself conjuring up endless fantasies about him.
    When the senior Mr. Moseley died, the junior Mr. Moseley continued the practice, and Lizzy (who had finally put Reggie’s diamond in a box in her dresser drawer) had gone to work every day happily cocooned in her romantic dreams. She continued to live at home, but her mother had somehow faded into the background—still