I’d been home for almost six weeks, and while Jackie was doing some damage to Darryl, and maybe slowing him down, the sad truth was that she hadn’t stopped him. Unless something totally unexpected happened, I was beginning to think that nothing could.
Eighteen
Just when you think you have enough grit in your oysters, the devil has a way of upping the ante, allowing things to happen to distract or confound us mortals. Mama used to call these incidents “diversions meant to knock you off your path of righteousness.” Mama surely did have a way with words, tending toward the Biblical, of course.
First, there was a little incident involving Judd Hart. He’d been one of those kids who was infatuated with the Space Race and inspired by the astronauts who were, after all, just across the state at Cape Kennedy.
Jackie got an inkling that something was amiss courtesy of the town librarian, a middle-aged woman from Sarasota with a polished appearance who had been hired to replace Miss Lansbury, who had been so helpful with Jackie’s book club. One day, the new librarian called Jackie out of the blue. “I thought you should know that your son has checked out a book on explosives,” she said in a crisp, yet not accusing voice. Jackie, squelching an urge to tell her that it was no one’s business what anyone checked out of a library, thanked her for the information. Jackie fretted and fumed, and when Judd walked in a half hour later, she met him at the door demanding an explanation. Judd assured her that he was working on a science experiment for school and that he was trying for an A.
Later, she said she should have known better because Judd had said, “They’re just small rockets, not like the ones on TV.” And then the time-honored red flag, “Don’t worry, Mom.”
The first calls to the sheriff came from Mr. Cuthbert “Birdie” Gertleson who thought Communists from Cuba were making a land assault on Collier County. Birdie was—thank you, Jesus—unharmed but his frantic phone call and the words “missile attack!” sent the police into combat mode. Within minutes every able-bodied man in Naples was unlocking his gun cabinet, loading a shotgun, and heading for old Birdie’s modest homestead.
Instead of Commies, however, all they found was Judd Hart looking guilty as a Sunday School teacher sipping moonshine. Two other boys were hightailing it into the swamp.
Everything had gone perfectly, Judd explained, until the rocket tipped over at the last second. Instead of going up into the sky in a blaze of glory it raced horizontally across a grassy piece of tidal marsh. Incredibly, it managed to hit the only house within a half mile in any direction, the simple structure owned by Birdie Gertleson. Worse, when it hit the outside wall, it kept going. And going. Not until after it was all over did the police learn that Judd’s rocket, which featured a solid brass nose cone, had careered around Birdie’s living room, ripping the newspaper he was reading right out of his hands while he sat in his favorite chair, terrorizing his cat, and finally bursting through the roof.
The fact that Old Birdie wasn’t dead surprised everyone, himself especially. He was so glad he wasn’t dead, and that it wasn’t Commies that had been attacking his humble abode, that he forgot to be angry. The cat, which is all that Birdie cared about anyway, was retrieved from its hiding place underneath Birdie’s rusted 1929 Ford. Birdie’s relief did not appease the sheriff, however. Judd was two inches away from being arrested.
Ted Hart had been enjoying a rare day working close to home when a Florida Highway Patrol officer, wearing the familiar Confederate pink uniform, marched into Collier County Savings & Loan where Ted and his boss Mr. Toomb were meeting with the trustees. Without time even to call Jackie, Ted was escorted to “the scene of the crime,” as the officer called it, without elaboration other than somehow it involved Judd.
The sheriff was already there. Once Ted realized that no one, including Judd, had been injured, he felt a wave of relief he’d experienced only one other time in his life—when Japan surrendered and the war was finally over. He’d gotten drunk with his friends and whooped and hollered until they all passed out, exhausted.
This time, however, although he wanted to shout with joy, he hid his true feelings. He was scared of what the law would do to Judd.
So Ted did what a father was expected to do: He turned and yelled at his son. He made Judd apologize to Birdie and promise he would pay for repairs. And then he threatened to send Judd to military school, a place called Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, which was widely believed by Judd and other boys his age to be a reform school for kids from families with financial resources.
Satisfied that Judd had been properly shamed, the trooper and the sheriff decided to let the matter rest. Justice would be served at home by the boy’s father. The sheriff asked the dispatcher to send Harry Donahue from Harry’s Handyman Service to secure the house and make an estimate for repairs for Ted; then he took Old Birdie and his cat to the Naples Beach Club Hotel, where they would stay, at Ted’s expense, until the house was livable again. Meanwhile, the trooper agreed to drop Ted and Judd off at home.
“You are going to be mowing lawns for the rest of your life,” Ted told Judd on the way home, “and every penny will pay me back for all these expenses.”
“Do I really have to go to military school?” Judd asked, wide-eyed.
Aware that the trooper was listening, Ted said yes. But he knew that Jackie would never let that happen. Judd figured the same. Considering that he could have found himself in juvenile jail, Judd was rather pleased overall with the outcome of the day’s events. Mowing lawns would be no problem. In fact, he already had a lawn-mowing service with more than a dozen regular customers. So what if he was essentially working for his dad for a while? He’d gotten off easy.
• • •
THE SECOND UNNERVING EVENT CAME in the form of a letter hand-delivered to Mrs. Bailey White’s. Jackie had just finished telling us about Judd’s “misadventure,” as she phrased it. She had missed all the excitement involving the rocket fiasco, having driven the twins to voice lessons with a Mrs. Pendergast in Punta Gorda. “Here I was trying to be a good mother to my girls, and when we come home I find out my son has turned into a mad scientist!” she groaned, blotting her eyes with a tissue. “I had my children when I was too young! I am a complete catastrophe as a mother!”
“Oh, now, stop being a Miss Melodrama,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “Have a Dr Pepper and calm down.”
“Ugh,” Jackie said with disgust. “I hate that Dr Pepper stuff. Do you have any tonic water? Better yet, some gin to go with it?”
“Too early in the day,” Plain Jane scolded. “With this heat you’ll end up with a huge headache.”
“Ted went to New Orleans and he said all the people there drink even in the late morning,” Jackie said defensively.
“Honey child, this ain’t no New Orleans,” Mrs. Bailey White said, shaking her head. “That’s up north compared to here. We’re in the tropics. Besides, those folks are partygoers. They got pickle juice in their veins. But they don’t live as long as we do. By the way, did you know they don’t bury their people in the ground?”
“Well, what do they do with them?” Jackie asked.
“They bury ’em above ground. They call them ‘mausoleums.’ ”
“Oh, yes,” Jackie said. “I’ve seen photographs of that. I think it’s because the water table there is so high.”
A knock at the door made us jump nearly out of our skins. In a way I was grateful because the conversation was giving me the creepy-crawlies.
“I’ll get it,” I said, but by the time I reached the door I wished I’d let someone else answer it. Through the scalloped lace curtain on the windowpane beside the front door, I could see a silhouette of the distinctive hat worn by a police officer in uniform. I cracked open the door, and he thrust a letter into my hand without saying a word.
“Wait,” he said, as I started to close the door. “Someone has to sign for it.” This made me even more uneasy, but I did as I was told.
“Dora?” Mrs. Bai
ley White called out. “Who is it, dear?”
I returned to the parlor. “Oh, it’s nothing, probably. Just a letter from the town.”
“Mrs. Bailey White, did you pay your taxes?” Plain Jane said, alarmed.
“Course I did! Don’t know what this nonsense could be. Dora, dear, you open it and read it aloud, okay?”
I was beginning to think that Jackie’s gin and tonic suggestion might be a good one. “All right,” I said, my voice squeaky. “Well, let’s see. It’s addressed to you and date-stamped today—October 10, 1964. It says”:
Dear Matilda Louise Bailey White:
It has come to our attention that you have exceeded the number of unrelated persons living in this house, and that one of the residents is a child unrelated to any of the residents. You are, therefore, running a rooming house and/or child care institution without proper permit.
“What else does it say?” Jackie asked, after she recovered enough to speak. “Is there a court date? Do we pay a fine?”
“It’s a warning,” Plain Jane said.
“Can we ignore it?” Jackie asked. “In Boston if you get a letter like that, you just ignore it. Nine times out of ten, that’s the end of it.”
“I don’t think we can do that,” Plain Jane said. “I think we’ll have to address it in some way.” She thought for a moment and added, “Well, I suppose it’s not surprising. They always find a way to get to you.”
“Who?” Jackie asked. “You mean Darryl?”
“Yes, Darryl. And maybe his backers, too. Those people from that place in New Jersey.”
Mrs. Bailey White nodded. “He’s fighting dirty,” she said.
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said, but the second the words left my lips I realized it was probably true. Plain Jane, Jackie, and Mrs. Bailey White had been looking after Dream for more than a year. There had been complaints but nothing had really come of it. This felt like retribution.
We discussed what we should do. As Mama would have said, we talked that ol’ topic to death and right into the next world. Finally, we agreed to face it head-on by going to the municipal offices. The plan was that we’d go together. By now it was late in the day so we decided to meet at 8:30 sharp the next morning outside the town-owned trailer, adjacent to the police station.
The first accusation in the letter to Mrs. Bailey White turned out to be easy to disprove. Jackie, Plain Jane, and I were able to demonstrate that we were only “visitors” at the house owned by Mrs. Bailey White. For Jackie, it was as easy as handing them her driver’s license with her home address on it. Plain Jane and I, who didn’t drive, brought our property tax bills with us.
“But what about the girl?” The clerk, a plump gal with a beehive hairdo, posed the question as if she was sure we were hiding something.
“What girl?” Plain Jane asked.
“The colored girl,” the clerk said, snapping gum in her mouth. “The one who comes to stay there. And her colored baby.”
Clearly, the clerk had been apprised of every detail. “What, are you guys spying on us?” Jackie said, in her usual “anything but subtle” way.
“No one’s spying on anyone,” the clerk snapped. “But we have become aware that a colored girl about age twenty stays in that house from time to time. And her baby is there all the time. Is it their legal residence?”
The question caught us off-guard. “The girl’s legal address is at her grandmother’s,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “And the baby’s, too.” Whether or not this was true, I didn’t know, but it was a good answer.
The clerk sighed. “All right,” she said. “Looks like you’ve satisfied the first part of the complaint. But not the second. If that baby isn’t related to any of you, and you have no legal status in her life, then she shouldn’t be living there. Unless you have a license for some kind of school or maybe a home for unwed mothers and their babies, something like that.”
A smile that I recognized as mischievous suddenly appeared on Jackie’s face. “Well, thank you so very much!” Jackie gushed to the clerk. “You’ve been so very helpful!”
Jackie practically skipped out the door.
“What are you so happy about?” Plain Jane asked warily.
“That gal in there just handed us the solution!” she said. “All we have to do is open a house for unwed mothers and babies. It’s that simple! We can keep Dream and maybe help some other young women, too.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” Plain Jane said.
“What do you think, Mrs. Bailey White?” Jackie asked, adding, “Of course, this is entirely up to you.”
Mrs. Bailey White looked overwhelmed but smiled. “I don’t know how much good I’ll be to y’all,” she said slowly, “but you’re welcome to use my house.”
“I admit that it’s a fascinating idea,” Plain Jane said cautiously, “but Jackie, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? You always have us rushing into things!”
“Dora, what do you think?” Jackie asked, ignoring Plain Jane.
“Well, I won’t be here. I still plan to go back to Mississippi,” I said. “But if y’all think you can do it, I don’t see why not. Of course, there’s something you’re forgetting. We need to talk to Priscilla first. She should be told what’s going on. She would need to be on board with this.”
It was agreed. Jackie would try to reach Priscilla by telephone and report back to us the next day.
As I nodded off to sleep that night, I marveled at Jackie’s enthusiasm and her ability to find answers while I was still busy mulling over the question. She was persuasive, and made things sound easier than they were—like talking me into going to Mississippi to find out about Mama and her people. Once you’ve known someone like Jackie, however, you can’t easily go back to a life in which you’re sitting on the sidelines, waiting for something to happen. Before I knew her, I thought the best way to travel through life was to take the most comforting and familiar routes. While I still longed to do this at times—it was part of my nature—I could see now that playing it too safe might mean never really living at all. From Jackie, I had learned to take the plunge into the deep end of the pond, not just stick my toe in, or wade around in the shallows.
Nineteen
As the Trailways bus rambled toward Naples, Priscilla yawned politely and stretched, taking care not to bump into the older woman sitting next to her. She reminded Priscilla a little of her grandma—tiny and hunched over, with hands swollen and disfigured from a lifetime of working in the fields.
Priscilla had been trying to read on the long bus ride from Daytona, with some success on the Sanford to Tampa stretch, but then began dozing off, tired from working late in the college laundry. One employee went home sick, so she’d been doing the job of two people but complaining was unthinkable. Working until midnight—even in a hot and humid laundry—was easy compared to what her grandma did, day after day.
The older woman suddenly elbowed her and cried out, pointing to something outside the bus window. Even wedged as they were in the far-back seat of the colored section, it was hard to miss: a brand-new, oversized billboard with lime-green lettering.
Welcome to Dreamsville! the sign hollered.
What in the world? Priscilla thought.
And then they passed another, identical to the first. This time, Priscilla got more than a glimpse. Accompanying the astonishing words was a stylized illustration of an idealized American couple. A white gal was tastefully reclined in a lounge chair with a long cigarette in one hand and a cute little mixed drink—the kind with an umbrella in it—beside her on a small table. A white fellow, presumably her husband, loomed in the foreground with an expensive-looking fishing pole in one hand and a golf club in the other, grinning so broadly it was scary. Lord, Priscilla thought, you’d think God himself had just handed him the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Imagine going through life with that amount of self-assurance. The couple, to Priscilla’s eyes, looked vaguely Northern. For one thing, they were tan. With the exception of me
n who worked outdoors—a farmer with his red neck from driving a tractor, or a fisherman with deep crows’-feet wrinkles acquired from squinting at the water—local white folks protected their skin from the sun. In fact, it was said among black folks that the Caucasians of Collier County were so white that looking at them hurt your eyes. Priscilla tried not to join in when others joked like that. White folks couldn’t help being white any more than she could help the fact that she was not. Besides, she’d been treated exceptionally well by white folks. Most of them, anyway.
The other indication that the folks depicted in the sign were supposed to be Yankees was, in a word, jewelry. The gal on the lounge chair had a ring on one hand that would have made Elizabeth Taylor pass out, plus ropes of gold, pearls, and who-knows-what hanging heavily around her neck. All this, and wearing a bathing suit, too. The man, who wore a polo shirt with some kind of insignia like a family crest or college logo, sported an oversized watch on one wrist.
In sociology class, Priscilla had learned that these folks were called “the Northern Leisure Class.” But why would they come to Naples? Who was putting out the welcome mat?
And why were there so many? Unlike the South, where there were a handful of rich folks in every small town—with everyone else poor as dirt—there seemed to be a surplus of people with money to burn in Yankeeland. She couldn’t imagine being able to afford one house, let alone one up north and a second one in Florida just for vacations. Vacations! That was a concept she couldn’t grasp, either. Life was not a cakewalk for anyone, her granny used to counsel, but sometimes it sure seemed that way from the outside looking in.
When the bus passed a third, identical billboard, this time Priscilla noticed the words “Coming Soon!” on a banner that stretched across the lower right corner. Well, whatever was going on, it probably wasn’t good, and Priscilla felt a cool chill move down her spine like someone had just walked over an unsettled grave.
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Page 12
