Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society

by Amy Hill Hearth

  Since she had passed her audition with flying colors, the rest would come easy. Within a few days she had chosen her theme song, a choral rendition, with full orchestra, of a sentimental Henry Mancini ballad called “Dreamsville.” The song was heard frequently on the TV series Peter Gunn, a show about a private eye that had gone off the air a year earlier.

  Bill and Charles were thrilled. This would be her signature song. They wrote a press release, which was published in the newspaper where Jackie continued to work part-time: “New Show on WNOG to Feature Mystery Temptress.”

  That last word was Jackie’s idea. Bill thought temptress might incur the wrath of the Baptists, maybe even the Methodists, but he went along with it. And he started promoting the show like mad.

  The launch of a late-night radio show—one with a hint of honest-to-gosh sex appeal, even—was a thrilling prospect in Naples. Late at night, we couldn’t pick up anything except Havana. The only exception was Saturday nights, when we could usually get WSM all the way from Nashville and listen to the Grand Ole Opry.

  The first night of the new show, I stayed up and tuned in like everyone else. There were a few seconds of music—the “Dreamsville” song—followed by a woman speaking in a low, sexy voice, each syllable drawn out.

  “Hello . . . This is Miss Dreamsville . . . bringing you beautiful music . . . to soothe the soul . . . and lull you to sleep.” Like everyone else in Naples, I was racking my brain trying to figure out who in the world was this woman? A few ideas went through my head. Not one of them was Jackie.

  I remember the very first songs she played—“Crazy,” sung by Patsy Cline, followed by Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa,” and ending with Elvis crooning “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” Then the woman with the sexy voice came on again. “Did you like that, Naples? . . . Would you like some more?” And so it went, until she signed off at two a.m., saying, “Good night . . . Naples,” and a few bars, again, of “Dreamsville.”

  The next morning, Naples was in an uproar. Every Godfearing soul wanted to know—had to know—who Miss Dreamsville was. This was the most exciting thing that had happened since a lifeguard from Everglades City got chewed up by a shark and lived to tell about it. Heck, we’d never had a radio show after midnight, and this was the first time there’d been a woman on the air at WNOG.

  At the Edge of Everglades House of Beauty, the proprietor, Bunny Sanders, insisted she had the inside track on figuring out Miss Dreamsville’s identity. “I know every woman in this town,” she’d say in a loud voice that contradicted her feminine name. “I will be the first to figure this out.”

  If the women in town were curious, the men were obsessed. Teenaged boys and young unmarried men, especially, were convinced that Miss Dreamsville was drop-dead gorgeous, like Ursula Andress or Raquel Welch. We’d hear them talking all over town: maybe, they’d say, she was a former Swamp Buggy Queen or even a Miss Florida.

  Across from the side entrance to the Book Nook was Ray’s Barbershop, a tiny building that appeared exactly square, like a sugar cube. Ray’s was communications central for the menfolk in town, and when the windows and door were left open—which was nearly all the time—you could hear the men gossip. In the days before air conditioning was common, there were few secrets.

  “Oh, that Miss Dreamsville!” one old man would say. “What do you think—blonde or brunette?”

  Then another old man would say, “I’d sure love to get my hands on Miss Dreamsville.”

  And a third voice—maybe the barber’s—would say, “Ha! You wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like that.”

  Jackie proved very good at keeping her secret, even from her family. She figured that taping her intros at different times, on different days of the week, would help confuse people. Since she still worked part-time at the newspaper, no one would be suspicious if she was seen near WNOG.

  Personally, I was relieved that this mysterious Miss Dreamsville had become the center of attention, rather than our literary society. The questions about what we were reading and why (and always with the assumption that we must be doing something wrong) stopped overnight. All anyone could talk about was Miss Dreamsville, and that was fine with me.

  Six

  There’s an old saying that you don’t know diddly about someone unless you’ve seen where they live. That was certainly true of Mrs. Bailey White and it turned out to be true of Priscilla and Robbie-Lee too.

  The first time Jackie drove us all home from our “salon” was an eye-opener. Since Jackie had picked up Priscilla, Robbie-Lee, and me at work, she’d need an entirely different route for dropping us off. It took a good ten minutes for us to figure out an itinerary that made any kind of sense, with Robbie-Lee finally taking out pen and paper and drawing a little map.

  We’d already seen where Mrs. Bailey White lived, so dropping her off after dark was nothing new, except her house looked even spookier. Jackie planned to drop off Plain Jane last, of course, since they lived so near each other. I was to be the second-to-last dropped off.

  First we drove Priscilla home, then delivered Mrs. Bailey White to her big old house, and finally drove over to Robbie-Lee’s neck of the woods. There were no streetlights outside downtown Naples. Jackie made us all lock our doors. She was rattled by a story in the newspaper about Florida panthers making a comeback in the swamps. “Panthers!” she was saying. “Nobody told me about panthers! It’s not bad enough we have to worry about alligators.”

  I didn’t want to argue with her, but frankly a panther would not pose a serious threat to people in a station wagon with the windows rolled up tight.

  “Personally, I think the rednecks are scarier,” Robbie-Lee said, trying to be funny, but somehow his joke fell flat.

  Priscilla lived in the old colored section south of town. Some of the Negro population had moved to an area closer to Naples—to a block behind the gas station—into housing called the Quarters. This was a small housing project, promoted by the town fathers as a step up for colored folks. I didn’t pay much attention when they were building it, but I remember Mama muttering under her breath. She saw right through it. “Sure, they’ll have indoor plumbing,” she said, shaking her head. “And they’ll have lovely little apartments, and they’ll be closer to their jobs.” I didn’t understand her point until she looked me point-blank in the face and said, “Don’t you see? They’re going to lose more than they’ll gain.” Sure enough, soon after the public housing was built, those who’d moved to the housing project lost what little freedom they’d had. A patrol car passed back and forth like a shark, all night long.

  But Priscilla lived with the holdouts on a sandy stretch of road about three miles south of Naples. If you were white, you had never visited that area. Yet there we were, piled in Jackie’s station wagon, headed to Priscilla’s grandma’s house and pretending that this was the most normal thing in the world.

  The journey was so slow-going, I was beginning to feel like we were driving to Key West. Of course, maybe it just seemed that way. Everyone knows a destination always seems farther when you’re trying to get there than when you’re coming back. I thought we must be getting close when we came to a sharp bend in the road, but there was nothing there but a pretty little church in a clearing. We drove on, perhaps another half mile, maybe longer, when I began to see a cluster of bungalows tucked here and there among the cypress trees. Unpainted, and built at haphazard angles to one another, they were mostly hidden from the road, even in the glare of headlights from our car.

  I had to wonder about Priscilla. She was going against the grain by being with us. Heck, she wasn’t legally supposed to be out at night at all. But she seemed completely at ease, telling Jackie to turn left or turn right, until we got to her grandma’s bungalow.

  “Where are the people?” Robbie-Lee asked. I had noticed the same thing. On such a beautiful night, people should have been sitting outside.

  “They’re hiding,” Priscilla said. “You know—because of us.”
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br />   “Where shall I park, dear?” Jackie asked, a bit formally. There wasn’t anywhere to park a car, and in fact I knew we’d have some difficulty actually turning around.

  “This is fine,” Priscilla said. “I’ll just get out here. Thank you so much for the ride. And thank you for having me in your literary society.” She was so sweet and sincere, you just wanted to hug the stuffing out of her.

  It took Jackie a good five minutes to turn the car around. As we pulled away from the bungalow community, Robbie-Lee peered out the back window and said, “Look, I think I can see some people.” And sure enough, now that we were leaving, we could see outlines of men and women in the moonlight.

  “My,” Jackie said after a while, “I need a cigarette.”

  We drove at ten, maybe fifteen miles an hour. A mule could have gotten us home faster. But Jackie was nice enough to give us a ride, so we said nothing. Eventually we were back on familiar turf and, finally, at Mrs. Bailey White’s.

  Since this was the first time Robbie-Lee had seen Mrs. Bailey White’s house, he expressed surprise. “Dang,” he said. “That’s some house.”

  Mrs. Bailey White responded with a small smile, which meant who knows what. She must have been tired like the rest of us, ’cause she did not drag out her good-byes. “Thank you, all,” she said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time.”

  I didn’t even have the energy to consider what Mrs. Bailey White may or may not have meant, but Plain Jane’s actions said it all. She called out, “Good night,” and then rolled her window back up so fast, I thought she might break the handle. Somehow I doubted it was panthers she was worried about.

  Robbie-Lee, we soon learned, lived deep in the heart of an area known as Gun Rack Village, where the menfolk were partial to shooting at each other. I was surprised Robbie-Lee lived back there, because these were the last kind of people on earth who would tolerate a person who might be a homosexual. The so-called road that brought us to his house was no better than the sandy trail we took to Priscilla’s. Of course, this was the exact opposite direction. Jackie was getting one hell of an education, just by driving everyone home. But without a ride, I expect they wouldn’t have come; like most people who didn’t live in town, they walked a mile or two to a main road and prayed for a bus to come before they got eaten alive by skeeters.

  The house where Robbie-Lee lived was a small fishing lodge converted into a home. The place was ablaze with light; in fact, as we came near, we realized there were floodlights pointed at us.

  “Ah, Dolores is waiting up for me,” he said. “She’s always watching my back.” This last comment was said with pride.

  “Dolores?” asked Plain Jane, thinking what we all were: Robbie-Lee lived with a woman?

  “I call my mom Dolores,” he said. “She never did like it when I called her Mom.” Dolores, he added, was retired.

  “Retired from what?” asked Jackie.

  “She was a dancer in Tampa, pretty successful, but then she had me. She was tired of all that anyway, so we moved down here to get away. I grew up right here”—he pointed to the house and the clearing—“and Dolores makes a good living hunting alligator.”

  “She hunts . . . alligators,” Jackie said. She had trouble just saying the word. “Isn’t that illegal? I mean, isn’t that . . . poaching?”

  Robbie-Lee employed a classic southern technique: he ignored the unpleasant question and just kept talking. “She sells the gator meat at the farmers’ market and sells the skins by mail order.” From the admiring tone of his voice, you would think his mother ran a tea shop where she sold homemade cookies to lonely war veterans.

  “Isn’t she afraid of the . . . alligators?” Jackie asked.

  “Dolores isn’t afraid of anything,” Robbie-Lee said cheerfully. “She’s got a real talent with a steel-wire lasso. And even though she’s lost her looks, the men around here still like her. She’s kind of a character.”

  Now I understood how Robbie-Lee, Naples’s only obvious homosexual, was able to survive: no one messed with him on account of his mother.

  The station wagon slid a bit on the sand as we pulled up to the doorstep. “It’s a lot like driving on snow,” Jackie marveled. “I think I can get the hang of this.”

  Robbie-Lee took Jackie’s hand and kissed it, a gesture that could not have seemed more out of place. “Good night, ladies,” he called to us. I didn’t even look toward the house as he went in; the blinding floodlights made that impossible. But at least we knew he’d get safely inside. Dolores would see to that.

  By the time we got to my house, all I wanted to do was drag my exhausted self inside. I wondered about these new friends of mine and hoped I hadn’t gotten in over my head. I had a funny feeling they were either going to drive me nuts or become the best group of friends I’d have in my whole life. As things turned out, it was a little of both.

  Seven

  We were still reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The film starring Audrey Hepburn had come out the previous year and—as Robbie-Lee had predicted—we’d all seen the movie, except for Mrs. Bailey White, because she’d still been at the state women’s prison at Lowell.

  “You know, this book is about a call girl. You might not guess that from watching the movie,” Jackie complained.

  “She’s not a call girl,” Robbie-Lee said. He looked offended.

  “Well then, how is she making a living?” Jackie demanded.

  “She’s a New York café society girl,” Robbie-Lee countered. This was like a tennis match. The rest of us looked back and forth as the two of them took turns.

  “Aw, come on, she makes a living by getting money from rich old men,” Jackie said. This was getting ugly.

  “Well, I don’t see it that way,” Robbie-Lee said. “She was just charming and young and funny and men liked to spend time with her.”

  “Ugh,” sniffed Jackie.

  “Well, the movie does not really follow the book that closely, wouldn’t you agree?” This was Miss Lansbury, using her librarian’s voice to get them back on track.

  “Well, I wish I had read the book first, because I couldn’t see Holly Golightly in any way, shape, or form other than Audrey Hepburn.” This from Jackie, who still had her nose out of joint.

  “She was magnificent,” Robbie-Lee said. It was amazing how much he admired women, considering he had no carnal interest in us whatsoever.

  “Everyone loves Audrey Hepburn,” Plain Jane said, putting her two cents’ worth in. Priscilla nodded sweetly in agreement.

  “Yes, and she’s so cute and adorable, there’s no way you could believe that the character is, uh, a call girl,” said Robbie-Lee. “I mean, it’s not about sex.”

  “Yes, it is about sex!” Jackie cried. “It’s implied throughout the movie! The character is pathetic, when you think about it—a young, beautiful catastrophe. Why do they have to portray women like that?”

  “Who?” asked Mrs. Bailey White.

  “Hollywood,” said Miss Lansbury.

  “And male writers. Like Truman Capote,” added Jackie.

  I was glad no one expected me to say anything. It’s not like we went around the circle and everyone had to chime in. I noticed Plain Jane had an interesting technique—raising questions instead of giving her opinion. I decided, then and there, that I ought to learn how to do it. “But don’t you love reading about New York, about people who move in those circles?” Plain Jane asked.

  “Well, sure,” Jackie said.

  “I had trouble imagining the Holly Golightly character as anyone other than Audrey Hepburn too,” Miss Lansbury said. “And the funny thing is, I had read the book first! But that’s the problem with film compared to books. When you read, you fill in all the blank spaces yourself, using your own imagination. When you see a movie, someone else has chosen what you will see.”

  “And if the actors are really great, like Audrey Hepburn, they ‘own’ the part,” Robbie-Lee said.

  “Well, she was great in the movie,�
� Jackie said, “but I think I like the book better.” She was still grumpy.

  “I told you we should have read true crime or a mystery,” Mrs. Bailey White said crossly. “Why can’t we read a book about a person who’s gone missing?”

  God must have a sense of humor, ’cause at that very moment, the library’s lights went out. We’d been half expecting an electric storm all day. Now here it was, in all its glory. You had to respect these storms. They didn’t so much as arrive, they pounced.

  I didn’t mind thunder, especially the rumbling kind. Mama had convinced me, as a child, that thunder was “just some angels bowling in heaven.” That took the sting out of my fear. But nothing Mama said could ever calm me when it came to lightning. A mean boy in school had told me that lightning was flames shooting from a dragon’s mouth, and the image stuck in my head forever.

  The library, I realized, was not a bad place to be in a storm. Miss Lansbury knew the layout like the palm of her own hand and, in no time at all, found a candle and matchbook she had put aside for emergencies. (Was there anything, I wondered, that a librarian didn’t think of?)

  The candle gave off very little light, just enough to create shadows whenever one of us moved even slightly. The window drapes were thin, and with each bolt of lightning, the room lit up like a set of flares on a pitch-black highway.

  “Should we have a séance?” Jackie asked. I hoped she was teasing.