The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

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 bothersome, of course, but more like an annoying barking dog that lived in a house a block away, rather than on the other side of the fence. Lizzy, so fully focused on Mr. Moseley that she felt his presence shining on her like a warm spring sun, lived for the hours she spent at work. It had been rather like living in a dream that was so intense and so magically real that it usurped all other realities. It hadn’t mattered that the object of her adulation didn’t return her feelings—or even appear to notice them.

In fact, Lizzy had gone on glorying in her unrequited love even after Mr. Moseley had courted and married a blond debutante from a wealthy Birmingham family, built a big fancy house out near the country club, and fathered two girls. Then had come his election to the state legislature, and Lizzy had dutifully carried on, keeping the practice going while he followed his father’s footsteps to the capitol in Montgomery.

That was probably what brought her to her senses. With Mr. Moseley away for weeks at a time, Lizzy woke up from her dream and began to realize what an utter fool she was making of herself. She toted her dime-novel romances out to the backyard and burned them. She took the treasured snapshot of Mr. Moseley out of the secret place in her billfold and added it to the fire. Then she went back to writing in her journal—but she kept it with her, in her handbag, so that her mother could not find and read it.

Mrs. Lacy, of course, never suspected any of this. She had decided that her daughter (her heart broken by the death of her young fiancé) would be a lifelong spinster, quite naturally preferring to live with her mother for the rest of her life. And Lizzy, who had been putting away money out of every paycheck against the increasingly remote possibility that something would happen to change her circumstances, found herself beginning to share her mother’s unassailable belief that the two of them would go on living together, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

And then something unexpectedly wonderful had happened.

Old Mr. Flagg died. He had lived across the street from the Lacys for nearly four decades, in a small frame bungalow with a postage-stamp parlor, a kitchen, two little upstairs bedrooms, a front porch with a swing, and a screened-in back porch. Mr. Flagg had been a gardener who lavished his time and attention on his large yard, where he grew sunflowers and a fig tree and pink roses on the trellis and a perennial border. There was also a small vegetable garden—just large enough for one person—only a step away from the back porch. Lizzy was suddenly seized by the idea that she had to have this house, and she had taken her improbable scheme to Mr. Moseley, who was in charge of settling the old man’s estate.