Tuesday, September 3, 1935
Beulah Trivette had closed her Beauty Bower on Labor Day so she and Hank could take their two youngsters for a picnic at Pine Mill Creek, where somebody, years ago, had hung a rope from a big oak tree. Little Hank and Spoonie had had a wonderful time playing Tarzan and Jane, swinging over the swimming hole and dropping into its dark, cool depths. After an hour in the water, there were plates heaped with Beulah’s fried chicken, potato salad, and deviled eggs; ears of corn roasted in the ashes of a hot fire and slathered with butter; and—late in the afternoon—chunks of watermelon carved from the fat green melon that Hank had floated in the river.
So for Beulah, Tuesday was the first day of a new week and a new month. With a private smile, she closed the door of the cupboard over the twin shampoo sinks. She had just checked her beauty supplies, making sure she had plenty of her favorite homemade setting lotion and that there was enough shampoo and conditioner to last until the next supply order came in on the Greyhound. It made her happy when events unfolded in a regular, predictable order, without interruptions and especially without too many appointment cancellations and reschedulings, which could throw an entire week into chaos.
Beulah had been especially happy when she slipped into her ruffled smock this morning—pink, of course, her favorite color. She was already looking forward to today’s beauty appointments, beginning with Ophelia Snow, who wasn’t just a client but a special friend and a fellow Dahlia. She saw from today’s schedule that Opie was coming in for a shampoo and set, no doubt because (Beulah had heard) her new boss would be in town later today and she wanted to look her best. Ophelia’s lovely brown hair took to pin curls like a duck takes to water, so making her even more beautiful was always a pleasure.
But Beulah couldn’t help sighing when she saw the next name on the list. She had learned long ago that while some people (like Ophelia) were all sunshine and smiles, others were scowls and thunderstorms. Leona Ruth Adcock was among the scowlers. Her skies were usually filled with ominous clouds.
In fact, Leona Ruth (whose sparse, graying hair was a challenge for anybody in the beauty business) reminded Beulah of the Wicked Witch of the West in Mr. Baum’s magical book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which she had read—over and over again—to Spoonie and Little Hank. Mr. Baum had written that the ugly old witch “had but one eye, yet that was as powerful as a telescope, and could see everywhere.”
Well, Leona Ruth had two eyes and both of them were like telescopes. Whenever she could, she used them to peer into the private lives of Darling folk, like somebody peering through a knothole in the back fence or a gap in the bedroom curtains. What’s more, she took a mean pleasure in telling tales about what she saw, although it was usually pretty hard to tell what was true and what was the product of Leona Ruth’s vivid imagination. In Beulah’s view, the woman was a tragedy, for she could have been just as beautiful as anybody else if she hadn’t been such a witch.
Quickly, Beulah picked up a pencil and wrote Bettina’s name next to Leona Ruth’s. Which was only fair. She had done Leona Ruth last time.
But the rest of the day was filled with friendly appointments, and beyond that, Beulah had plenty of other reasons to be happy. There was Hank, who might not be the best-looking guy in town but was certainly the sweetest and most helpful. After all, he had built the Bower for her, enclosing the screened porch at the back of their house, wiring it for electricity and a new hot water heater, and installing the twin shampoo sinks and hair-cutting chairs and mirrors. Beulah herself had done the rest, painting the wainscoting her favorite shade of bright pink, wallpapering the walls with lovely pink roses, and spatter-painting the pink floor with blue, gray, and yellow. Beulah’s life had begun on the wrong side of Darling’s railroad tracks, so her Beauty Bower seemed something like an earthly version of paradise.
A perky, pretty blonde with a passion for all things artistic, Beulah was also a practical person whose hard-scrabble childhood had taught her that life was much easier when there was a little extra hidden under the mattress. She was proud of her earnings from the Bower, which usually amounted to two, sometimes even three dollars a day. But while she was glad she could give Hank a hand with the family expenses, she wasn’t in the beauty business for the money. She genuinely wanted to help women make the most of whatever the good Lord had given them, especially when it came to hair.
Now, Beulah went to the basket in the corner, took out the fluffy pink towels (the same pink as the smock she was wearing) and began to fold them. The Sears radio on the shelf beside her hair-cutting station was tuned to WDAR and Tommy Lee Musgrove came on to read a weather bulletin about the dangerous hurricane—the “storm of the century” he called it—that had slammed into the Florida Keys the day before. She paused to listen, remembering that she and Hank and the kids had been enjoying a swim and a picnic while that terrible storm was raging across those little islands.
In fact, the hurricane may have killed as many as five hundred people, Tommy reported, many of them veterans working on the new Overseas Highway. An eleven-car railroad train had been sent to pick them up, but the locomotive and several cars had been blown off the track. “Mountainous waves” had slammed the passenger steamer Dixie into a coral reef. A couple of ships were standing by, desperately hoping for the seas to calm enough to launch the lifeboats and rescue the nearly four hundred people on board. The storm was in the Gulf of Mexico now and the Weather Bureau couldn’t predict where it was headed. The whole Upper Gulf Coast—from the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans—was on the alert.
The whole Upper Gulf Coast? Beulah shivered, remembering a few years back, when a hurricane leveled parts of Miami, crossed Florida into the Gulf, and then smacked into Alabama, flooding poor little Darling. If there was anything to be glad about where big Gulf storms were concerned, she couldn’t think what it was.
But she started to smile again when Tommy Lee began playing a recording of Nick Lucas’ popular song, “Singing in the Rain.” Darling didn’t need another flood, but it would be wonderful if the Labor Day hurricane would bring them a little rain. Heaven knows, they could use it. The whole town was tinder-dry, which made the recent grass fires all the more scary. She had just joined Nick Lucas in singing a lusty “Come on with the rain, I’ve a smile on my face” when Bettina Higgens opened the door and stepped in.
Bettina certainly hadn’t been the prettiest blossom in the garden when she applied to become the Bower’s first beauty associate. Her brown hair had been lank and greasy, she was round-shouldered and as flat as a board in front, and she (unlike Beulah) had not graduated from beauty school. But Beulah recognized the unspoken desire in Bettina’s heart and the untutored talent in her deft fingers and understood that this unlovely young woman possessed the remarkable hidden gift of making the ordinary woman beautiful.
She had been a perfect choice, and as the weeks went by, Bettina had bloomed. Beulah gave her a more becoming hairstyle and permanent wave and saw to it that she had a good lunch every day so that the girl not only blossomed but filled out in all the right places.
What’s more, it quickly became clear that the two of them were kindred spirits. They believed that it was not Pollyannaish in the slightest to look on the bright side of things—to play the “glad game,” as Pollyanna herself called it. In fact, they both felt that it was especially important to be positive during bad times, like the years they were living through right now, when jobs were scarce and money was scarcer. They also agreed that even a random bit of beauty—a helping hand or a smile, extra zucchini or cucumbers in a basket on a neighbor’s doorstep, or even a homemade “I’m thinking of you” card pushed under someone’s door—went a long way toward making people happy in this gritty, grimy world.
And if not happy, then perhaps a little easier to get along with, which you have to admit is pretty important when everybody is scrambling just to get by and all people can think is oh how hard it all is. Even a little something beautiful might make them a lot more cheerful.
But Bettina hadn’t started the morning with a beautiful thought, and she wasn’t playing the glad game. Instead, she wore a worried frown as she put on her pink cotton smock, a match to Beulah’s. “Have you heard about the house fires yesterday?”
“The house fires?” Beulah reached over and turned the radio off. “Oh, my gracious sakes, no! It was so blessed hot that Hank and I took a picnic out to the river so the kids could go swimming. It’s far enough away so we wouldn’t have heard the siren. What happened, Bettina? Whose house?”
For the past year, Bettina had been going steady with Sheriff Buddy Norris, so she usually had the latest news, which definitely wasn’t pretty, let alone beautiful. Like last week, when Mr. Clinton imbibed a little too much of Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning and drove his old red Ford taxi into the lake. His brother had hitched his team of mules to the Ford and hauled it out, but Rufus Radley said it would take a while to get to the repairs, since he’d just been elected fire chief and had other fish to fry. If you wanted to take the taxi to Monroeville to go shopping, you’d have to wait a week or two.
This morning, the news was even more alarming. “The siren went off twice yesterday,” Bettina said. “The first fire was at the Dahlias’ clubhouse. The second was the old Popplewell place just down the block from me—the one everybody says is haunted. Was haunted,” she corrected herself. “It burned down to the ground. If there were any ghosts in it, they’ve been fried.”
“The Dahlias’ clubhouse!” Beulah’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, no! It didn’t . . . it didn’t burn down, did it?”
“Buddy said that Bessie Bloodworth spotted it when she was hanging sheets on the clothesline. She put it out with her rinse water before Big Red and the Hot Dogs got there. Apparently, there’s a burned place in the kitchen floor that needs fixing and the walls and ceiling will have to be repainted, but otherwise, the house is okay. And nobody got hurt. So I guess we can be glad of that.”
“Amen,” Beulah said.
Bettina sighed. “But the Popplewell place sits on the corner behind some trees, so nobody saw the fire until it was too late to save the house. It burned right down to the ground.” She began to sort through her combs and scissors, getting ready for the day. “Buddy says it’s a bad sign. Whoever is starting these fires has graduated from burning grass to burning buildings.” She reached under the counter for a box of pin curl clips. “He’s deputized some men to set up lookout posts around town. And Mr. Duffy at the bank is offering a reward. They’re hoping that somebody will give them a tip.”
Beulah shuddered. It went against her grain to think unpleasant thoughts, but when there were bad people out there setting fire to good people’s houses, what else could you think?
“I will be awfully glad when they catch him,” she said. “Who do you suppose he is? A teenager looking for excitement?”
Bettina set the box of pin curl clips on the counter beside her combs and scissors and went to take a look at the schedule. Over her shoulder, she said, “Maybe it’s not a he. Starting a fire doesn’t take much more than a match and some tinder. It’s the easiest thing in the world. I reckon a woman could do it just as well as a man.” She looked down at the schedule and made a face. “Oh, boo-hoo,” she muttered. “Leona Ruth.”
Beulah felt instantly guilty. “I can take her if you don’t want to, Bettina.”
“No, I can,” Bettina answered. “You did her last time.”
Gratefully, Beulah went back to the subject. “A woman could do it, yes. But no woman would. I mean, a woman might cause a fire by accident, like letting the grease in her frying pan get too hot. My mama did that once, frying bacon, and caught the tea towels on fire. But no woman would ever burn somebody’s house down. Not deliberately, I mean.”
“Well, you wouldn’t.” Bettina was thoughtful. “But maybe she would. For instance, it could be a case of a woman who’s got a grudge against the world. She feels like people are always picking on her or something like that. Lighting fires makes her feel like she’s getting revenge. Or maybe—”
Bettina’s speculation was interrupted by Ophelia Snow, who came bouncing into the Bower with a bright smile on her pretty face. She was wearing a sunshiny yellow dress, sleeveless, with a swingy skirt bordered with several rows of white rickrack.
“Good morning, ladies!” she sang out. “Isn’t it just the most beautiful day?”
But Leona Ruth, ten minutes early for her appointment, was right behind Ophelia. “Enjoy the sunshine,” she said ominously. She took off her purple hat and checked the bodice of her purple dress to make sure it was buttoned up to the neck. “The radio says it’s fixin’ to blow up a serious storm. A hurricane, ackchually.”
“Hurricane?” Bettina’s eyes went wide. “Really? We’re having a hurricane? How exciting!”
Bettina sounded almost eager, Beulah thought. But then, Bettina hadn’t lived in Darling long enough to remember what happened the last time a hurricane had blown in from the Gulf. “Tommy Lee has been reading the bulletins on WDAR this morning. But it’s a long way off,” she added in a reassuring tone. “We can be glad that the Weather Bureau is watching it for us. They’ll let us know if it comes in our direction.”
“The Weather Bureau’s about as much help as a poke in the eye when it comes to hurricanes,” Leona Ruth said sourly. “Last time we had a big storm, my neighbors let the ditch in front of their house get plugged up and a foot and a half of water backed up into my parlor. Ruined my best rug.”
Beulah’s heart sank. The old lady was in one of her moods, which meant that the next hour would not be as pleasant as she had hoped.
“Oh, that’s too bad.” She summoned a smile. “Well, now, Ophelia, if you’re ready, let’s get you shampooed. Leona Ruth, you’re getting lucky today. Bettina is going to do you.” She patted Bettina’s arm in sympathy.
“Yeah,” Leona Ruth said darkly. “Like Dish Night at the Palace Theater last week. I was hoping to finish out my Cabbage Rose collection, but Mr. Greer ran out of soup bowls just as he got to me. He would, natchurally.” She sweetened her tone. “Nothin’ personal, Bettina. Just sayin’ it’s how my luck runs.”
A few moments later, Ophelia and Leona Ruth were stretched out in the twin shampoo chairs with their heads in the shampoo sinks, and Beulah and Bettina were at work, washing and rinsing and conditioning. While they worked, they talked, all four of them.
About Rufus Radley, who had bought the fire chief’s election and then hadn’t shown up at either of yesterday’s fires. “I heard he claimed he had a repair job but he really went fishing,” Bettina said with disgust.
About Bessie and Roseanne, who had saved the Dahlias’ clubhouse from burning down. “We ought to give them an award,” Ophelia said. She giggled. “We could call it the Red Hot Mamas Medal.”
“Like Sophie Tucker,” Beulah replied delightedly. Waggling her hips, she paraphrased a few lines from the song in Sophie’s movie, Honky Tonk:
We’re the last of the red hot mamas,
We’ll put the other fires out!
When it comes to fightin’ fire, you know where to go—
And you can always get your hot stuff
Straight from our volcano!
Beulah couldn’t help laughing along with Bettina and Ophelia. Leona Ruth was not amused.
And then they talked about tomorrow’s exciting event: Huey P. Long’s appearance in Darling, which would likely turn out the largest crowd in the town’s history, unless maybe it was back in 1925, when the Coles Brothers circus came to town with a trainload of zebras and elephants and a sideshow of human oddities.
Bettina reported that the sheriff’s office was a little nervous about Long’s visit. “The senator isn’t just real popular with everybody,” she said, taking a bottle from the shelf and splashing some of its contents into the rinse water in the shampoo sink. “But Buddy says he’s bringing his own security guards. All he and Wayne have to do is direct traffic.”
“Hang on just a durn minute, Bettina,” Leona Ruth said sharply. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that I smell? What are you putting on my hair?”
Bettina held the bottle where Leona could see it. “I put just a few drops of Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing in your rinse, Mrs. Adcock. It tones down the brassy color that folks sometimes get with gray hair.” She smiled teasingly. “It might make you look just a little like Jean Harlow.”
Everybody knew that actress Jean Harlow, famous for her gorgeous hair in Platinum Blonde, used a blue rinse, maybe some of Mrs. Stewart’s laundry bluing. But it went much farther than that, Beulah knew. She had read that Miss Harlow’s white-blond hair required a weekly application of ammonia, Clorox, and Lux soap flakes, a combination that made her shudder. Sometimes the price of beauty just wasn’t worth it, which is what she told anybody who asked her whether they could be as platinum as Jean Harlow.
“I’m sure you don’t want all your hair to fall out,” she’d tell them. “That’s what’s going to happen to Miss Harlow, if she’s not careful. Even beauty has its limits.” But to Leona Ruth, she said, “Bluing isn’t going to hurt at all, dear. It’s the gentlest thing in the world.”
“Well, then, only a few drops,” Leona Ruth conceded grudgingly. “I don’t want to walk out of here with a head of blue hair.”
“Oh, that’s not going to happen,” Beulah assured her. “You’ll just be beautiful. Won’t she, Bettina?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Bettina agreed.
“Hrummph,” Leona Ruth said.
A few moments later, as Ophelia was seating herself in Beulah’s hair-cutting chair, she went back to the conversation about Huey P. Long. “You don’t suppose that Senator Long is really afraid that somebody might shoot him, do you? I mean, who would dare?”
“Well, there’s always a few crazies out there,” Bettina replied as she settled Leona Ruth into the neighboring chair. “Don’t forget that somebody tried to shoot President Roosevelt just a couple of years ago.”
This shocking event had happened not long before FDR’s inauguration, when the president-elect was giving a political speech in Miami. The gunman missed Roosevelt and hit four other people, including the mayor of Chicago. The mayor died. The gunman had been executed barely a month later. The story had been front-page news for weeks.
“And lots of people don’t like Senator Long, apparently,” Bettina went on. “I read that he’s been getting a flock of death threats.”
Beulah draped a pink cotton cape around Ophelia to keep the clippings off her pretty dress and gave her a bowl of pin curl clips to hold in her lap. “Well, nothing bad is going to happen to him while he’s in Darling,” she said confidently, picking up her comb and taking the lid off her bottle of setting lotion, which she made herself out of seeds from the quince bush at the back of the yard. “We’re a very peaceful little town. Nothing bad ever happens here.”
“The fires are happenin’,” Leona Ruth objected—to which Beulah had no response. “In fact, somebody could be settin’ one right this very minute, for all we know.” She winced. “Bettina, you be careful with that comb. You almost got it in my eye.”
“Nothing is going to happen to Senator Long because he has all those bodyguards,” Bettina said reassuringly, going back to the subject. “Buddy says they’re really tough, like those gangster bad guys you see in the movies. They carry blackjacks. And guns. And they stay with him all the time, night and day.”
“Mr. Nichols told me that the US Senate is investigating Senator Long,” Ophelia chimed in, as Beulah began combing and snipping. “They may even kick him out of office.”
At the mention of Mr. Nichols, Leona Ruth gave Ophelia a tight little smile, as if she’d just tasted a lemon. The two women were sitting side by side and they weren’t supposed to turn their heads. But they could see one another’s faces in the mirrors in front of them.
“I heard that Mr. Nichols is comin’ to town this week,” Leona Ruth said. “This afternoon, ain’t it, ackchually?” In an acid tone, she added, “I s’pose you’re getting yourself all dressed up for the occasion. And ain’t that a new dress? I b’lieve I saw it in the window at Mann’s Mercantile just last week. A dollar-ninety-eight is what I remember.”
Beulah, winding Ophelia’s copper-brown hair around her finger, knew from long acquaintance that Leona Ruth specialized in making hurtful remarks, but this one was more ill-mannered than usual. She winced, and when she glanced at Ophelia in the mirror, she saw the blush rising quickly on her friend’s neck.
When Ophelia spoke, her voice was taut. “Thank you, Leona Ruth,” she said, handing Beulah a pin curl clip out of the bowl. She was pretending that Leona Ruth had complimented her dress. “I’m so glad you like it. And no, it didn’t come out of the Mercantile window. I got it from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I always think it’s a good idea to look your best when you have an important business appointment.”
Beulah dipped her comb in setting lotion, then took the pin curl clip and pinned a curl. “A shampoo and set is always a good investment,” she put in hastily, hoping to smooth things over.
Bettina spoke up, too. “Especially when your business associate comes from out of town,” she said, snipping rapidly at Leona Ruth’s hair. “My goodness, but that Yankee fellow does make my little Southern heart go pitty-patter. I’m glad you could get such a pretty new dress, Mrs. Snow. If it were me, I’d still be searching through my closet for something to wear.” She gave a dramatic sigh. “And of course, I would never have the right dress. Let alone the shoes to go with it.”
Ophelia’s cheeks were now bright red, but she tried to laugh as she handed Beulah another hair clip. “Well, as I said, I think it’s a good idea to look nice—”
“As long as it’s just a business appointment,” Leona Ruth remarked pointedly, lifting her chin. “Didn’t I see the two of you havin’ supper at the Old Alabama, Ophelia? Let’s see . . .” She screwed up her face, pretending to remember. “I believe that must have been the week Mr. Snow was in Mobile.”
The remark, so innocent on its face, hung like a threat in the air, stifling all speech. The silence was punctuated only by the sound of Bettina’s scissors. In the mirror, Beulah saw that Ophelia’s blush had faded to dead-white and her jaw was clenched. It was several moments before she managed to answer Leona Ruth.
“We did have a business supper there,” Ophelia said, her voice thin. “Ryan—Mr. Nichols—has an expense account and was kind enough to suggest that we discuss the project over a nice meal.” She darted a glance at the mirror. “I sincerely hope you’re not suggesting that I—that Mr. Nichols and I—”
“Oh nothing like that!” Leona Ruth interrupted, pretending alarm. Her voice turned sweet and syrupy. “Far be it from me to criticize, Ophelia dear, and you know I never have a personal opinion. I only ever want what is best for all involved.” She took a breath. “I was just thinkin’ of what our Darling friends could be sayin’. You know what they’re like, I’m sure—always tittle-tattlin’ about any little thing they happen to see, especially when it’s out of the usual. And where there’s smoke . . . well, you know. Bound to be fire, even if it’s only a little ’un.” She paused significantly, both eyebrows arched. “I’m just hopin’ that you and your Mr. Nichols will be . . .” Another pause. “Well, careful, that’s all.”
“He is not ‘my’ Mr. Nichols.” Ophelia’s shoulders had now gone rigid and a muscle worked in her jaw. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Adcock.” Her voice was low and Beulah could tell she was making every effort to keep it from trembling. “I have no reason to be careful of anything, especially where my employer is concerned. He is a perfect gentleman.”
“Of course he is, dear,” Leona Ruth replied, in a tone that said exactly the opposite. “And I’m sure you are a perfect lady.”
Bettina wielded her scissors dangerously close to Leona Ruth’s left ear. “Well, if it was me, Mrs. Snow, I would jump at the chance for a business dinner at the Old Alabama. A white tablecloth, real china and crystal, and Miz Vaughn playing the piano.” Defiantly, she met Leona Ruth’s eyes in the mirror. “And if the Darling gossips wanted to talk—well, those old moth-eaten biddies could go ahead and say whatever they want. It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.”
“It might if you were married,” Leona Ruth retorted sweetly. “And if your husband was in a prominent position in this little town. Say, if he were the mayor, as a for-instance.” She pulled a long face. “Don’t get me wrong, ladies. I am not accusing anybody of anything. I am only thinkin’ about what Darling folk might be whisperin’ among themselves tomorrow morning.”
Ophelia flinched as if she’d been slapped in the face. Beulah, who always tried to look on the sunny side of everything, could no longer escape the creeping realization that in spite of Ophelia’s protests, her relationship with the attractive Mr. Ryan might not be as straightforward and aboveboard as she wanted people to think. There were secrets here, unsettling secrets. Something was going on that Beulah knew she did not want to know about.
And there was no point at all, ever, in trying to argue with Leona Ruth. The old lady made it her business to put people in the wrong, just for the momentary pleasure of feeling herself in the right. This conversation had to go somewhere else.
Winding another pin curl over Ophelia’s ear, Beulah raised her voice a notch. “We’re planning to close early tomorrow so Bettina and I can both go to hear Senator Long. I’m sure it’ll be as hot as blue blazes out there on the square, so I’m thinking of wearing my pink pongee with the lace collar and angel sleeves. It’s the coolest dress I have. What are you wearing, Bettina?”
Bettina took the hint. “My pink plaid shirtwaist, I think,” she said quickly. “It’ll stay nice and fresh, even in the heat. And it washes, so dust won’t do it any harm.” She added another pin curl at Leona Ruth’s temple. “What will you be wearing, Mrs. Adcock?”
“My green rayon print,” Leona Ruth trilled. “And my perky little lime green straw pillbox from two years ago. I’ve updated it with a couple of green parrot feathers. Oh, speakin’ of hats, did you see what Voleen Johnson was wearin’ on hers on Sunday? I was sitting in the pew right behind her, so I had a front-row seat, so to speak. It was a real bird, dead and stuffed.”
And that, thank goodness, was the end of that.