Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society

by Amy Hill Hearth

  “I can lead a séance,” Mrs. Bailey White piped up.

  “Oh, please don’t,” said Priscilla, with more urgency than we were accustomed to from her. “It’s not nice.”

  Jackie came to her rescue. “Of course we won’t,” she said soothingly. “We wouldn’t do anything that upset you.”

  “We could pretend we’re at summer camp and tell ghost stories,” Robbie-Lee suggested.

  “That hardly seems an improvement over a séance,” Plain Jane said.

  “I think we should do neither,” Miss Lansbury said in her librarian voice. “I don’t think the trustees of the library would like it.”

  “By the way,” Jackie said to Miss Lansbury, “I’ve been meaning to ask you: what do the trustees think of us—I mean, our salon?”

  “Well, our group has raised an eyebrow or two,” Miss Lansbury said.

  “What do you mean?” Jackie wanted details.

  “Our board of trustees met last Tuesday and asked me to be there to answer some questions about our reading group.” Miss Lansbury looked uncomfortable.

  “What kind of questions?” Jackie’s tone put us all on edge.

  “They asked for the titles of the books we’ve been reading.”

  “They can’t do that!” Jackie cried. “They have no right to get involved. It’s government intrusion into our private business.”

  “Well, yes and no. They would have no right to look at your individual library cards to see what books you’ve been checking out. That’s true. But as a group, we do meet at the library. We are a library reading group.”

  “What if we compromised?” I said, hoping to keep Jackie from blowing a gasket. “We don’t give them the list, but we post it somewhere in the library for everyone to see.”

  “That’s still giving them too much control,” Jackie complained. “Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to tell us what we can read and what we can’t.”

  “Like they do in Communist countries,” Robbie-Lee said.

  “What else did the trustees say about us?” Plain Jane asked. “Why are they trying to get involved at this point?”

  “They said they have had complaints,” Miss Lansbury said flatly. “I’ve had a few, myself.”

  Jackie harrumphed. “Is it the books, or is it us?”

  “Let’s not get sidetracked here,” Miss Lansbury said firmly. “There is no need to get upset or take this personally. Frankly, I have the situation under control. I convinced the trustees that encouraging and providing a haven for a reading group is part of the library’s mission. I told them that while they probably could ask to review our book list, that sort of oversight was heavy-handed and, well, un-American. The only thing they said was no pornography, no books on Lincoln, and no books that encourage deviant behavior or glorify violence.”

  “My goodness,” Priscilla said.

  “No violence—does that mean we can’t read any books about true crime or about people who’ve gone missing? And maybe how to find them?” This was, of course, Mrs. Bailey White again. We all stared at her, considering what, if anything, to say. She looked even smaller in the candlelight, her pocketbook held tightly on her lap.

  Robbie-Lee finally broached the taboo subject. “Mrs. Bailey White,” he said gently, “what is this about ‘finding someone’? What are you talking about? You are making us nervous by bringing it up all the time.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.” But she offered no explanation.

  “Mrs. Bailey White has been through a lot, haven’t you, dear?” Jackie said, reaching over to pat her on the shoulder, which seemed an act of great courage under the circumstances.

  The storm, thankfully, was passing. We could hear the wind dying down, and the rain had slowed from pounding the roof like artillery fire to a soft, drizzly murmur that could lull a watchdog to sleep. We waited another fifteen minutes or so, long enough for the roads, which were surely flooded, to drain into the swamp. Mrs. Bailey White’s intensity seemed to fade with the storm, and everyone relaxed.

  Somewhere during the ride home, the conversation turned to Miss Dreamsville. Jackie, of course, is not the one who brought it up. We had turned on the radio to listen for static, just so we could keep track of the storm—the more static, the more danger from lightning.

  Later I realized it must have been excruciating for Jackie to hear us chatting about Miss Dreamsville. Not one of us had figured it out, and like the rest of Naples, we were mystified.

  “She’s great,” Robbie-Lee said. “I bet she looks just like Princess Grace or Audrey Hepburn. I wish she talked more. But I tell you what, she picks some darned good music.”

  Everyone agreed. Jackie simply nodded her head and kept driving. The night before, Miss Dreamsville’s show had included “Unforgettable” sung by Nat King Cole; “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Tony Bennett’s new hit; “At Last” by Etta James; and two versions of Irving Berlin’s “I’ll Be Loving You, Always”—the one sung by Josephine Baker in 1926 (which, Miss Dreamsville explained in her breathy voice, was the first recording), followed by Frank Sinatra’s version, recorded in ’42.

  This was much better than the usual sappy stuff we heard on WNOG, which led to speculation that Miss Dreamsville could not possibly be from Naples. Either that or the station manager—that guy from Canada—was picking the music. Looking back, maybe we should have realized it was Jackie, but like everyone else, we were blinded by the false picture of Miss Dreamsville we had created in our minds.

  How Jackie managed to keep her mouth shut that night in the car is beyond me. Well, it turned out she did spill the beans, but only to Plain Jane after the rest of us had been dropped off. Maybe Jackie figured her secret would be safe with Plain Jane. After all, Jackie knew all about Plain Jane’s masquerade as a sexy, in-the-know writer for the big New York magazines.

  Plain Jane thought at first that Jackie was joking, and Jackie, she recalled, had been more than a little offended. “Well, why not?” Jackie asked. “Why couldn’t I be Miss Dreamsville? Because I’m a housewife? With three kids?”

  “Well, you were awfully surprised when you found out I was writing sexy stories for magazines,” Plain Jane said.

  Jackie had to admit that was true.

  They continued their fussin’ at Plain Jane’s house over margaritas. Finally, worn out, they agreed to a truce. They would keep each other’s secret. Plain Jane would choose when to reveal to their friends that she was in fact Jocelyn Winston, trendsetting writer on racy topics for important magazines.

  But for Jackie, it was clear that the decision might be taken out of her hands—and not by Plain Jane. Friends can keep a secret but the world cannot abide a mystery for too long. The true identity of Miss Dreamsville was going to be revealed. When and how were the only questions.

  Eight

  There’s an old southern saying that if you’re worried about your weight, your clothes, or getting old, then you don’t have any real problems.

  I suppose there are two worlds—the small, protected one we carve out for ourselves, where we fret about a whole lot of nothing, and the other world, the real one, which comes knocking at the door, demanding to be let in and given a seat.

  In Collier County, those real-world intrusions were so rare, no one could remember any. Change that was in the air nationally and even in our region—like the civil rights movement—always seemed to get to us last. Between the rednecks and the folks who visited from up north, that’s the way most folks here wanted it, though sometimes I wondered if it meant we were going through life half-asleep.

  Then, all of a sudden, we weren’t far removed from the one place in the world—Cuba—that every human being on the planet was focused on. For ten days that fall, we weren’t a sleepy little backwater. Like everyone else in South Florida, we were right in the crosshairs of what was later called the Cuban missile crisis.

  The Women’s Literary Society did not meet. Lawns weren’t mowed. Customers at the post office all but va
nished. Our daily lives, even the fascination with Miss Dreamsville, were sucked into an empty space and replaced with fear.

  We shouldn’t have been so surprised. We’d lived through the Bay of Pigs fiasco the year before, when the US invaded Cuba, but it was a halfhearted effort and we knew the situation wasn’t really resolved. All we had to do was turn on the radio to be reminded. The music from Havana radio stations had been replaced with Radio Rebelde, Radio de la Revolución. You didn’t need to know much Spanish to figure that out.

  But now we were told the Russians had been building nuclear missile sites in Cuba.

  The whole idea of Armageddon coming in the form of a missile was especially unnerving. Previously, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bombs had been dropped from the sky, which meant there was a plane involved. This required a setup that not every country could pull off. And it meant the intended target had a chance to prevent disaster—by shooting down the aircraft. But a missile was something else entirely. A missile could be launched from anywhere at any time.

  After the Bay of Pigs, we didn’t have much information to go on. Of course we were worried, but there wasn’t anything we could do. But we began to get inklings there was fresh trouble brewing when the newspapers reported a huge increase of naval activity in Miami. This was confirmed by Ted, who had been there on a business trip. Next thing we knew, there was an announcement that President Kennedy was going to speak to the nation on the radio and television. The only TV station we could get was from Miami, and the reception wasn’t too good, but you didn’t need a clear image of the president to understand the seriousness of the situation. The Cubans, he said, now had nuclear missiles pointed at the US. It was no longer a question of them trying to build missile sites. They were already in place.

  The president had a map that showed the likely range of the missiles. There were concentric circles starting in Cuba that ended as far north as Washington, DC. This wasn’t too clear on my television set, but I didn’t need a map to realize that if you lived in South Florida, you were a sitting duck.

  I was at home watching alone. I thought about calling Marty. I even considered calling Darryl. I knew that Jackie and Ted and their kids would be watching together from their living room sofa. Maybe Plain Jane would’ve joined them. Robbie-Lee and Miss Lansbury would be at their respective homes listening on the radio. But Mrs. Bailey White and Priscilla didn’t have a television or a radio in their homes. Priscilla didn’t even have electricity. Most likely, they wouldn’t know until the next day.

  Jackie said the twins were quiet—for once. They actually listened while the president spoke. When the announcement was over, Ted stood up and flipped off the set and said, “This is really serious.”

  Jackie had to fight the urge to get everyone into the car and start driving north, as far away from those concentric circles as they could get. But what she thought and what she said were two different things.

  “We’re going to act completely normal and do everything we usually do,” she told her kids.

  “Why?” asked Judd.

  “Because we are not the type of people who panic in the face of adversity.” This from Ted, who was, after all, a World War Two veteran. This line of thinking had worked well for his generation.

  “Oh,” said Judd, not entirely convinced.

  But this is the way the crisis was addressed, not just in the Hart household, as Jackie described it to me, but throughout Collier County and, for all I know, the entire southern part of the country. Since panicking was un-American, we suffered in silence, like a bunch of Christians facing the lions. Only one family in town was known to have built a bomb shelter, but they had been ridiculed as paranoid, so they had abandoned it. The rumor was that the shelter had filled with water.

  The schools, churches, and stores stayed open, but activity was cut by half or more. Or maybe that’s just the way it seemed to me. We spoke in funeral parlor voices, if we spoke at all.

  Sorting the mail at the post office seemed ridiculous but comforting at the same time. I tried to stay busy. I just hoped that if a missile headed for Collier County, I’d be hit head-on. I didn’t want to be around afterward.

  We knew there would be no warning. Everyone understood that you might not be with your family when it happened. People made excuses to spend more time at home. I noticed more of the men who worked downtown were going home for lunch.

  The Korean War vets were the only ones whose talk was full of bravado. I don’t know why. They spoke about the possibility of an invasion by the Cubans and Russians. They were still thinking of old-fashioned warfare. “We’ll meet ’em and fight ’em in the woods,” they said.

  The mayor came into the post office to study the maps that Marty had hung on the wall for tracking hurricanes. One showed the state of Florida. Another, the Gulf of Mexico and the states around it. And a third, labeled “Islands of the Caribbean,” included the Florida Keys—and Cuba. We all knew that Cuba was ninety miles from Key West, and we weren’t a heck of a lot farther north than that. When the Civil Air Patrol went looking for fishing vessels missing along our stretch of the Gulf, they could see the Cuban coastline.

  I was beginning to think that a missile strike was inevitable when suddenly it was over. That’s when everyone started acting crazy. People drank too much and got into fights. They drove too fast and got into accidents. Myself, I walked for hours along the beach, not caring what I stepped on—a dead fish, seaweed, shells. I didn’t care. I had an urge to run into the water, sharks be damned, and start swimming straight out into the middle of the Gulf. Maybe swim all the way to Brownsville, Texas. I got home just in time to hear Miss Dreamsville close her show with Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “America the Beautiful.”

  Not that we could relax completely. Within days, there were rumors about the CIA setting up shop deep in the swamps right here in Collier County. A man named Curly Brown said he came across a brand-new building going up, a low-rise cement structure with no windows and a helicopter landing pad on the roof.

  Then another peculiar building popped up, this one visible if you were out on the Gulf, though oddly enough, it was said you couldn’t see the structure from the air. Jackie’s son, Judd, had seen it. Armed with the confidence of his new name, Judd had finally made a few friends and was out in a motorized rowboat one day, fishing, when they spotted it. Being twelve-year-old boys, they had more curiosity than common sense, and headed over to take a look. It was a fortress, they said, a thick seawall with a barbed-wire fence that crackled with electricity.

  In the middle of all this tension, something almost funny happened. Maybe he got the idea from watching spy movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, but Judd Hart came up with a spectacularly bad idea. Someone, he thought, ought to learn Russian, the language of the Commies. After all, if the bad guys invaded, someone needed to know what they were saying. How else could we outsmart them?

  So Judd decided to order some records from the Berlitz mail-order company. That was the difference between Judd and other people: maybe a few had the same thought, but Judd actually pursued it, and once he got an idea in his head, there was no stopping him.

  The result of Judd’s new hobby was like a bullet fired straight into a gas can at a bonfire. Judd’s mistake was letting his fishing buddies in on his plan to learn Russian. They were the same two boys that had been with him when they saw the CIA building going up on the Gulf, and they begged Judd to teach them a few phrases.

  Probably no one would have known what they were up to, except one day, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, they practiced Russian over their walkie-talkies. Unfortunately, it was a Saturday afternoon and close enough to the VFW Hall that someone heard it on a CB radio. Since the veterans were drinking liberal amounts of beer and moonshine, it didn’t take much for them to fly into a full-fledged mobilization. They couldn’t speak or understand a lick of Russian, but by golly, the veterans knew Russian when they heard it. They leaped into their jeeps and headed into the swam
ps, looking for those damn Commies.

  Later that day, Jackie was called down to the sheriff’s department. When she arrived, she found Judd locked up in the whites-only cell, alone. Judd had persuaded the sheriff that he was the ringleader and to let the other two boys go home.

  Jackie begged the sheriff, who was not the sharpest stick in the pile, to listen—really, truly listen—to what Judd had to say.

  But the sheriff scoffed. “The boy is part of a Communist conspiracy,” he said to the astonished Jackie, who couldn’t wait to tell us about it at the next meeting of our reading group. Ted, arriving separately from Jackie, walked into the jail just in time to hear the sheriff say that Judd was “a tool” of the Commies.

  “He’s a what?” Ted yelled.

  The sheriff ignored him. “Say something in Russian,” the sheriff said to Judd.

  “Zdravstvuite tovarishch. Gde ulitsa Gorkogo?” Judd replied.

  “What the hell does that mean?” the sheriff demanded.

  “Hello, citizen,” Judd said calmly. “Where is Gorky Street?”

  “This is absurd,” Ted shouted. “The boy is just very intellectually curious. Can we please go home now?”

  The answer was no. Ted asked to make a call and was directed to a pay phone in the hallway. He wanted his boss to hear this story from him, not anyone else. He told Mr. Toomb everything—about the Berlitz records, Judd’s talent for language, the real reason the boy wanted to learn Russian.

  To the surprise of everyone, Mr. Toomb had his driver bring him directly to the sheriff’s department. Leaning on his cane, one of the most powerful men in the state hobbled into the building and went straight to the lockup. Judd, trying to be brave, stood up and came toward the iron bars.

  “Young man,” Mr. Toomb said, “I want to shake your hand. You are a true patriot.”

  Turning to the sheriff, Mr. Toomb added, “And you, sir, are an idiot!”

  With that, they all went home.