Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! Read online

  “RICH AND REWARDING …

  [Flagg’s] growth is evident as she delves deeper into matters only touched on in her previous novels.… Her characters are as real as the folks sitting next to you, the people in your family album. Full of pathos, the impact of this little book will stay with you long after you put it down.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Gripping … Fans of the charming Southern novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe will also enjoy Fannie Flagg’s latest.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “If you’re among the fans who can’t get enough of Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets Of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, you won’t soon leave this tempting, all-you-can-read buffet.… Expect to spend a lot of sleepless nights savoring this bundle of joy.”

  —Clarion-Ledger (MS)

  “Another winner … An assortment of zany, lovable, and intriguing characters … Catapults the reader, through a rash of revelations, to a surprising denouement. Don’t think you can begin Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! and then put it down for a few days. But don’t read it too fast, either; it definitely invites savoring, sort of like a big dish of the richest homemade strawberry ice cream.”

  —Chattanooga Free Press

  “The Garrison Keillor factor—that’s the strength of Fannie Flagg’s latest novel.… A delightful take full of solid values and savory small-town tidbits. Though Flagg’s narrative territory is the American South, her stories are kissing cousins to Keillor’s Minnesota-based Lake Wobegon tales.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “It’s a tale of tough, eccentric, endearing women who first endure and then prevail.… It will make you laugh out loud—and shed a few tears.… It will touch your heart and imbed itself in your memory.… It’s profoundly American.… The novel is filled with Miss Flagg’s trademark comic touches, but the book’s strength, as always, is its author’s love for people.… Deeply imagined and fully realized characters … Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is another rattling success.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “TALK ABOUT FUN TO READ …

  Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is about life in a small Missouri town and life in the Big Apple. It’s about homespun wisdom and commercial skullduggery, what’s right and what’s wrong with America. And it’s a mystery story.… Flagg has a perfect sense of place. She’s the author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and Welcome has a lot of the same down-home humor and down-home common sense.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A well-choreographed story of loyalty and survival that zigzags deftly across the postwar years, panning in on the never-changing decency of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, then pulling back to watch national TV news devolve into sensationalism—all the while drawing us into the compelling life of Dena Nordstrom.… Dena’s college friend Sookie and great-aunt Elner are reminders of how well Flagg can cook up memorable women from the most down-to-earth ingredients, while a cameo by Tennessee Williams is uncannily true to life.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Considerable charm … Witty dialogue … Fannie Flagg hails from the southern-fried school of novel writing, which means her books are as lively as a burlap bag stuffed with possums, thanks largely to characters who always have something wise or funny to say and invariably do just that.… There’s plenty of insight into the workings of the human heart, too.… A worthy successor to Fried Green Tomatoes. Flagg can tell a story and draws characters who possess blood and bone.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Baby Girl fires on many of the same cylinders as Tomatoes.… A fascinating set of characters … Full of Flagg’s pitch-perfect dialogue … Wonderful scenes and vignettes.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “Extremely enjoyable … Quite moving … [An] engaging paean to the joys of down-home Southern life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “ENTERTAINING … THE CHARACTERS SING.…

  You’ll love everyone connected with Elmwood Springs.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Another endearing tale, spun in Flagg’s trademark nostalgia … One of the strengths of Flagg’s work is its ability to immerse readers in the rich milieu of rural Southern life.… Few writers conjure the small-town world of unlocked doors, decent folk who bake cakes for sick neighbors, and Friday night bonfires down at the local high school with the sweetness and sentiment Flagg manages.… [At] moments one can practically smell the doughnuts being tipped out of the fryer at the Elmwood Springs coffee shop or hear thumb bells being rung by kids passing on bicycles.… Many will be unable to resist traveling with her down the back roads to self-discovery and, eventually, to home.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Fannie Flagg gives popular fiction a good name.… Flagg excels at strong, striving, and good-hearted small-town women.… While building the suspense, she also supplies diversions by way of a big, spirited cast of supporting characters.… Let others pretend to literary greatness. Flagg goes for literary goodness—and achieves it, colors flying.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Flagg has created a novel nothing short of glorious.… At long last, Fannie Flagg has invited readers back onto her fictional front porch for a much-overdue installment of down-home writing. Settle back with Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! and prepare to lose yourself in 467 pages of incredible storytelling, delightful characters, and wonderfully hypnotic prose. The only thing Flagg does better than weaving compelling narratives is conjuring memorable characters to populate them.… Meaty, funny, page-turning, and just as delicious as Neighbor Dorothy’s melt-in-your mouth circus cakes … Flagg has tenderly, delicately, lovingly created another wonderful novel. It would be a shame not to spend time on her latest front porch, listening to the radio waves crackle through the night and far into Canada.”

  —Grand Rapids Press

  “Flagg’s memorable prose and unforgettable characters—especially her wise women with their quirky, homespun charm—make this novel a worthwhile read.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  ALSO BY FANNIE FLAGG

  Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven*

  A Redbird Christmas

  Standing in the Rainbow

  Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man

  (originally published as Coming Attractions)

  Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

  Fannie Flagg’s Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook

  *forthcoming

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Willina Lane Productions, Inc.

  Reading group guide copyright by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “You’re All the World to Me” by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, copyright © 1949 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., and copyright renewed 1977 by EMI Miller Catalog, Inc., and excerpts from “You’re the Top” by Cole Porter, copyright © 1934 (renewed) by Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc.,

  Miami, FL 33014.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 0
0-109768

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79095-8

  v3.1

  For Sam and Jo Vaughan, with love

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following, whose encouragement and support have been invaluable to me: Susie Glickman, Lois Scott, De-Thomas Bobo & Associates, Ulf Buchholz, Wendy Weil, Steve Warren, Sally Wilcox, Mrs. Ray Rogers, Evelyn Birkby, Colleen Zuck and staff, the State of Alabama, and especially all my friends and family, who are a joy to me every day.

  “… Poor little old human beings—they’re jerked into this world without having any idea where they came from or what it is they are supposed to do, or how long they have to do it in. Or where they are gonna wind up after that. But bless their hearts, most of them wake up every morning and keep on trying to make some sense out of it. Why, you can’t help but love them, can you? I just wonder why more of them aren’t as crazy as betsy bugs.”

  —Aunt Elner, 1978

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Preface

  The “Neighbor Dorothy” Show

  Book One

  The News

  Hangover

  Aunt Elner

  I Did What?

  Going to Siberia

  Souvenir

  How She Got There

  A Nice Person

  Trust Me

  Moving Up

  A Question for Macky

  A Dilemma for Dena

  Taking a Chance

  The Power Play

  My Hero

  Let’s Have Lunch

  Selma Calling

  Old Times

  City Lights

  The SMU Kappa Newsletter

  Ira’s Pep Talk

  Appointment

  Meanwhile, Back at the Springs

  Shrinking

  Passing the Torch

  Who Are You?

  Neighbor Dorothy’s Christmas Show

  Dena Digs at Diggers

  A Much-Needed Breather

  The Little Girl in the Lobby

  Hawaiian Good-bye

  Mommies and Daddies

  Letters Home

  Three Telegrams

  Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Lodor Nordstrom, Sr.

  One Telegram

  Book Two

  Looking Through Windows

  The Phone Call

  On a Whim

  The Verdict Comes In

  How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

  Tour

  Death of a Cricket

  The Captive

  A Cheerful Visit

  My Funny Valentine

  The Rescue

  Rumors

  Aren’t People Wonderful?

  The Last Day

  Celebrity Mail

  Turkey Time

  Born Again

  Good-bye

  Two Letters

  True Love

  What Are Friends For?

  A Greek Bearing Gifts

  The Court of Two Sisters

  Book Three

  Sookie’s Secret

  Letter in a Tin Box

  A Dish Best Served Cold

  The Banquet

  Marion Chapman

  A Night at the Theater

  Christmas

  Me and My Shadow

  Wall-Cap Productions I

  Plain Manila

  Secrets Can Kill

  Wake Up and Live

  Good-Luck Clover

  A New Friend

  The Circus Cake

  Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

  Not Yet

  The Middleman

  The Neighborhood

  Tilt-A-Whirl

  Who Was My Mother?

  A Brief Family History

  Dena Nordstrom, Girl Reporter

  A Woman Scorned

  Carlos Maurice Montenegro

  That Something Else!

  Living a Lie

  Vienna, City of My Dreams

  A Few Scribbled Words

  Book Four

  Partial to People

  The Decision

  Blue Skies Trailer Park

  Gerry’s Surprise

  And So

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Preface

  Elmwood Springs, Missouri

  1948

  In the late forties Elmwood Springs, in southern Missouri, seems more or less like a thousand other small towns scattered across America.

  Downtown is only a block long with a Rexall drugstore on one end and the Elmwood Springs Masonic Hall on the other. If you walk from the Masonic Hall to the Rexall, you will go by the Blue Ribbon cleaners, a Cat’s Paw shoe repair shop with a pink neon shoe in the window, the Morgan Brothers department store, the bank, and a little alley with stairs on one side of a building leading up to the second floor, where the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl is located. If it is a Saturday morning you’ll hear a lot of heavy tapping and dropping of batons upstairs by the Tappettes, a troop of blue-spangled Elmwood Springs beauties, or at least their parents think so. Past the alley is the Trolley Car diner, where you can get the world’s best chili dog and an orange drink for 15 cents. Just beyond the diner is the New Empress movie theater, and on Saturday afternoons you will see a group of kids lined up outside waiting to go in and see a Western, some cartoons, and a chapter in the Buck Rogers weekly serial. Next is the barbershop and then the Rexall on the corner. Walk down on the other side of the street and you’ll come to the First Methodist Church and then Nordstrom’s Swedish bakery and luncheonette, with the gold star still in the window in honor of their son. Farther on is Miss Alma’s Tea Room, Haygood’s photographic studio, the Western Union, and the post office, the telephone company, and Victor’s florist shop. A narrow set of stairs leads up to Dr. Orr’s “painless” dentist’s office. Warren and Son hardware is next. The son is eighteen-year-old Macky Warren, who is getting ready to marry his girlfriend, Norma, and is nervous about it. Then comes the A & P and the VFW Hall on the corner.

  Elmwood Springs is mostly a neighborhood town, and almost everyone is on speaking terms with Bottle Top, the white cat with a black spot that sleeps in the window of the shoe repair shop. There is one town drunkard, James Whooten, whose long-suffering wife, Tot Whooten, has always been referred to as Poor Tot. Even though she has remarried a teetotaler and seems fairly happy for a change, most people still call her Poor Tot out of sheer habit.

  There is plenty of fresh air and everybody does their own yard work. If you are sick, somebody’s son or husband will come over and do it for you. The cemetery is neat, and on Memorial Day, flags are placed on all the veterans’ graves by the VFW. There are three churches, Lutheran, Methodist, and Unity, and church suppers and bake sales are well attended. Most everybody in town goes to the high school graduation and to the yearly Dixie Cahill dance and twirl recital. It is basically a typical, middle-class town and in most living rooms you will find at least one or two pairs of bronzed baby shoes and a picture of some child on top of the same brown and white Indian pony as the kid next door. Nobody is rich but despite that fact, Elmwood Springs is a town that likes itself. You can see it in the fresh paint on the houses and in the clean, white curtains in the windows. The streetcar that goes out to Elmwood Lake has just been given a new coat of maroon and cream paint and the wooden seats shellacked to such a high polish they are hard not to slide out of. People are happy. You can see it in the sparkle in the cement in front of the movie theater, in the way the new stoplight blinks at you. Most people are content. You can tell by the well-fed cats and dogs that laze around on the sidewalks all over town and even if you are blind you can hear it in the laughter from the school yards and in the soft thud of the newspaper that hits the porches every afternoon.

  But the best way to tell about a town, any town, is to listen deep in
the night … long after midnight … after every screen door has been slammed shut for the last time, every light turned off, every child tucked in. If you listen you will hear how everyone, even the chickens, who are the most nervous creatures on earth, sleep safe and sound through the night.

  Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is not perfect by any means but as far as little towns go it is about as near perfect as you can get without having to get downright sentimental about it or making up a bunch of lies.

  The “Neighbor Dorothy” Show

  Elmwood Springs, Missouri

  June 1, 1948

  Everyone in Elmwood Springs and thereabouts remembers the day they put the radio tower in Neighbor Dorothy’s backyard, and how excited they were that night when they first saw the bright red bulb on top of the tower, glowing like a cherry-red Christmas light way up in the black Missouri sky. Because the land was flat, it could be seen for miles in every direction and over the years it came to be a familiar and comforting sight. It made people feel connected somehow.

  Had you been there, between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M., unless somebody had knocked you out cold, most likely you would have been listening to the “Neighbor Dorothy” radio show just like everybody else except for old man Henderson, who still thought that radio was a silly invention for silly people. Both the high school and the elementary school scheduled study periods between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M. so the faculty could hear it in the teachers’ lounge. Farm wives for miles around stopped whatever it was they were doing and sat down with a pad and pencil at the kitchen table to listen. By now Dorothy Smith was one of the most listened-to radio homemakers in the midwest, and if she gave out a recipe for maple swirl pound cake that day, most men would be eating it for dessert that night.

  The show was broadcast live from her living room every day Monday through Friday and could be heard over station WDOT, 66 on your dial. Nobody dared miss the show. Not only did she give out household hints and announce upcoming events, you never knew who might show up. All sorts of people would drop by to talk on the radio or sing or tap dance or do whatever it was they had a mind to do for that matter. A Mrs. Mary Hurt even played the spoons once! Mother Smith played organ interludes. Other regulars you didn’t want to miss were Ruby Robinson, the radio nurse; Beatrice Woods, the little blind songbird who played the zither and sang; Reverend Audrey Dunkin, the minister, who would often drop by for an inspirational talk or read an inspirational poem; as well as a handbell choir from the First Methodist church. Last year The Light Crust Doughboys came on and sang their hit “Tie Me to Your Apron Strings Again, Mother” and Neighbor Dorothy also had a visit from the Hawaiian Fruit Gum Orchestra, all the way from Yankton, South Dakota. This is not to mention two local gals, Ada and Bess Goodnight, who would sing at the drop of a hat, and the news, which was mostly good.