“Of course!” Verna snapped her fingers. “That was her-Lily Lake! The ‘nice’ half of the Naughty and Nice Sisters. She was pretty, too-a brunette. But Lorelei LaMotte was the famous one, because of the shimmy.”
“If she’s so famous,” Lizzy replied thoughtfully, “how come folks around here don’t know who she is?” She frowned. “For instance, Mr. Moseley had no idea. I’m sure that if she’d told him that she was a Ziegfeld Girl, he would have mentioned it to me.”
Verna shrugged. “If she hasn’t been back to Darling since she was a girl, there’s no reason for people around here to make the connection. Please forgive me for besmirching Benton Moseley, but I seriously doubt that he pays any attention to show business. In fact, he’s probably never even heard of Mr. Ziegfeld.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Lizzy conceded. For years, she had carried a secret torch for her boss, but even when she was so head-over-heels she couldn’t see straight, she hadn’t been blind to his limitations. Mr. Moseley was nice-looking and very smart, but he was not the most scintillating man in the world. He almost never went to the movies, and while he subscribed to newspapers like the Sunday New York Times (which came on the bus from Mobile every Thursday), he mostly read about national politics and international affairs, not the entertainment section. Mrs. Moseley said he was a “stuffy old stick-in-the-mud,” and Lizzy suspected that this had something to do with her recent decision to get a divorce.
“Anyway,” Verna went on, “the Naughty and Nice Sisters may have been a big hit back in 1920, but that was before Prohibition. Lots of clubs folded, and I read that Mr. Ziegfeld himself hasn’t been doing so hot lately. It’s no surprise that nobody in Darling has ever heard of Lorelei LaMotte or the Naughty and Nice Sisters.” She narrowed her eyes at Lizzy. “But I’ll show you that playbill, and you can see for yourself who Nona Jean Jamison is. Who she really is, in the flesh, so to speak.”
“Well,” Lizzy replied with a little laugh, “I guess they’ll hear about her now. In that red outfit and those high heels, she’ll be the talk of the town.” In Darling, gossip was everybody’s favorite recreation.
“Oh, golly, Liz!” Verna snapped her fingers. “I have just got the most incredible idea!”
“Idea? What idea?” Lizzy asked cautiously. Verna was very intelligent and eminently practical, but she could be too smart for her own good. Sometimes she outfoxed herself.
“About the talent show.” Sponsored and organized by the Dahlias, this annual event was held at the Darling Academy gymnasium in late October. It was always a mixture of the melodramatic (Mrs. Eiglehorn reciting “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight”) and the comic (Mr. Trubar clowning around with his shiny trombone and his dancing dog, Towser). It was the highlight of Darling’s fall social season. Everybody in town looked forward to it with a great deal of anticipation.
“Uh-oh,” Lizzy said. Mildred Kilgore was putting the talent show program together, and she was a very detail-oriented person who liked everything to turn out just the way she planned. Where Mildred was concerned, the only successful program was the one where even Reverend Trivette, the minister at the Four Corners Methodist Church, could go away saying what swell family entertainment it had been. The Naughty and Nice Sisters would give Mildred Kilgore heartburn.
“No, no,” Verna protested. “It’s a good idea, Liz! Let’s ask Miss LaMotte and Miss Lake to do an act for the talent show. I’ll bet they’d really bring in a crowd. We could put up posters and advertise-”
“Verna! You know Mildred wouldn’t think of inviting those ladies to perform. Why, the audience would be scandalized! Most of them would get up and walk out, and the ones who stayed would cause a riot.”
“I wasn’t thinking of asking them to do their Ziegfeld Frolic act,” Verna replied hastily. “It would be different-something suitable for a Darling audience. If they’re planning to be in Darling for any length of time, it would be a perfect way for them to get acquainted. I’ll bet the Dahlias would be delighted to have their help with the show.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Lizzy said, shaking her head warily. “From what you say, they sound like an intriguing pair, but they’d probably feel more at home out at the Dance Barn. You’d better talk it over with Mildred before you get all excited about the possibilities.” She thought of something else. “Listen, Myra May and I are having supper at the diner tonight, and then we’re going to see The Saturday Night Kid. Clara Bow is in it, and Jean Harlow. Want to come with us?”
“I’d love to,” Verna said. “But what about Grady? How come you’re not going out with him?” Grady Alexander, the county agricultural extension agent, was Lizzy’s more-or-less steady boyfriend.
“He drove over to Auburn for an ag meeting. He’ll be gone through the middle of next week.” Lizzy sighed. “To tell the truth, Verna, I’m glad to get a little breathing space. I’m trying to put off-” She turned down her mouth. “Well, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Verna said sympathetically. She grinned. “But it’s a nice problem to have, in my opinion.” The courthouse clock began to strike. It was several blocks away, but its booming note could be heard all over town. The people of Darling always said they didn’t need watches. They had the courthouse clock, so there was never any excuse for being late.
Lizzy counted the strikes. “Mercy. Four o’clock already. I need to get home. Is six okay for supper? The movie starts at seven fifteen.”
“Sure,” Verna said. “Six o’clock, at the diner.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder if the Naughty and Nice Sisters have ever met Clara Bow.”
TWO
Lizzy said good-bye to Verna, turned, and walked east along Camellia. She crossed Robert E. Lee, went another block, and turned north on Jefferson Davis. This was a pretty part of town, and even though the houses weren’t as big and fancy as the newer ones out near the country club, they were painted white or gray with blue or red shutters, and the front porches were furnished with a rocking chair or a porch swing and wreathed with honeysuckle. There were lawns, too, with grass that was green in the spring and turned brown in the dry, hot summer. It was early October and the lawns were brown now, but most of the houses had flower beds out front, and in the dusky evenings, people sat on their porches, knitting or reading the newspaper and watching the little girls jumping rope and the boys playing baseball or tag in the dusty street.
Glancing at the houses, a stranger might find it hard to tell that times were so tough and money was so hard to come by. But if he looked more closely, he’d see that half the shingles on Mrs. Weber’s roof had been ripped off in a wind storm and hadn’t been replaced yet. Mrs. Weber didn’t live there anymore. She had lost the house to foreclosure and had gone to Mobile to live with her daughter. And three doors down, the house with the two broken windows in the front had been vacant for so long that the bank’s faded For Sale sign was hidden in the withered grass. People who couldn’t pay their rent or make their mortgage payments were moving in with family-with their children or their parents or their brothers or their sisters. They had to. They had no place else to go.
But Lizzy wasn’t thinking about this. She was thinking about what Verna had told her. A pair of vaudeville stars had moved to Darling! And if Verna was right (Verna usually was), one of them had come a long, long way. To go from being plain-Jane Miss Nona Jean Jamison of Monroeville, Alabama, to Miss Lorelei LaMotte of the Great White Way must have been an incredible journey.
And then a wonderful idea suddenly popped into Lizzy’s head. The Naughty and Nice Sisters act wasn’t suitable for the Dahlias’ talent show, but wouldn’t Miss LaMotte make a splendid subject for a feature story in the Darling Dispatch? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of article that Charlie Dickens, the newspaper’s editor, would love to print?