Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (5 page)

Mrs. Bailey White's house was tucked back from the road. I still got a little
thumpety-thump
in my heart as we approached it, but when we rounded the bend of the long private drive I was surprised. Why, the old Victorian house looked almost presentable. The serpent-like vine that had gone up one side of the house, across the roof, and down the other side had been removed. There was a fresh layer of paint or stain, and the broken window on the third floor had been replaced. I wouldn't say the old house looked spiffy. There was still something about it that wasn't quite right, and I found my eyes searching for flaws. It simply looked tired, as if it were an older lady trying to reclaim her glory days by wearing an excess of Maybelline.

I'm pretty sure I'd never actually been hugged by Mrs. Bailey White, even when I climbed on the bus bound for Mississippi the year before, so I was a little shocked when she greeted me with a ferocious little embrace. This, despite her appearing more delicate. She didn't look older but somehow gave the impression of being more fragile, and yet I could see she hadn't given up in the way that some older ladies do. Her clothes and hair were tidy and there was a toughness in her manner that was hard to describe. She was in a battle against decline, much like her house.

She excused herself to locate a bottle of wine she'd made from her rose blooms the previous year. I don't know what impressed
me more, the fact that she was able to grow roses in Collier County or that she'd managed to make wine out of the faded blooms before they turned moldy. There was no telling what an old-timer like Mrs. Bailey White had stashed away in that mind of hers.

We were interrupted by a shrill sound, and for a second I thought a bird got itself caught in the chimney and couldn't find its way out.

“She's awake from her nap,” Plain Jane announced, and I realized she was talking about the baby. “My turn,” she said, clapping her hands together, and then practically ran up the stairs. Plain Jane looked thinner than I remembered, at least from behind. They were all getting older, I thought, a bit startled. Since I was past thirty I wasn't anyone's idea of a spring chicken but I wasn't in the same league. Plain Jane, as I said, was more or less sixty; Jackie had crossed the most dreaded boundary of all—forty. Mama would have lumped them all into the category “ladies of a certain age,” which is a courteous way of referring to a woman past her “prime,” a term which I'd always found annoying on account of it making you sound like a side of beef.

I didn't know about up north—I could ask Jackie someday, at a delicate moment—but here in the South, women were said to peak by twenty. By the time you were in your late twenties, it was said that the bloom was off the rose. While I was busy brooding over the unfair burdens placed on womankind, Plain Jane, beaming, appeared at the top of the steep staircase with a sleepy infant cuddled in her arms.

Eudora Welty Dreamsville Harmon—Dream, for short—lifted up her head when she spied a stranger—me. She was wearing a starched pink dress with matching pink hair clips and little white leather lace-up shoes. But what impressed me most
were her eyes, large and soft and intense like a doe's, exactly like her mama's. She couldn't stop staring at me the whole time Plain Jane walked carefully down the stairs, until the moment I put out my arms to take her. Then she began to wail, and buried her face in Plain Jane's neck.

“That's okay, she doesn't know me at all,” I said cheerfully, although I was—truth be told—a little sad. I hadn't seen Dream since she was four months old, and I knew she would have no memory of me. Still, the fact that she was so comfortable with the others made me feel like a fifth wheel. The baby was partly named after me—the Eudora Welty part—and Dream was a nod to Jackie being Miss Dreamsville. But I hadn't been around to watch her grow.

Mrs. Bailey White appeared with what I presumed to be the rose wine and ushered us into her parlor, which was dripping in lace and velvet and featured a horsehair sofa that no one wanted to sit on. With great care, she set up a neat little row of crystal glasses, nicer than anything I'd ever drunk from, that's for sure. When Dream turned her head and smiled right at Mrs. Bailey White, we all cooed with delight—even Jackie, who had never struck me as the cooing type. Considering that neither Mrs. Bailey White nor Plain Jane had children, and Jackie wasn't exactly June Cleaver on
Leave It to Beaver
, it was a pleasure to see they'd all got the mothering bug and were not just doing a perfunctory job.

Jackie offered a toast. “To Dora, who has returned to us. At least for now.”

Mrs. Bailey White settled herself into a fine-looking rocking chair and stretched out her arms. “Let me have her,” she said.

“Oh, all right,” Plain Jane said reluctantly.

As I watched Mrs. Bailey White settle herself in the rocker
with Dream on her lap, I wondered to myself,
Why does this seem so strange?
And it dawned on me that I had never before seen a white woman with a colored baby on her lap. Negro women took care of white women's babies, not the other way around. And yet it seemed perfectly normal. No doubt it would upset plenty of white people to see this, but how could they object? It was love, that was all. Just love.

“Can you believe this, Dora?” Jackie asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?”

“That we're taking such good care of Dream? Aren't we just the most devoted mommies you've ever seen?”

“You surely are,” I said. “How old is she now?”

“Sixteen months,” Jackie said between sips of wine.

“Sixteen months and three weeks,” Plain Jane corrected.

Mrs. Bailey White laughed. “And two days. Not that anyone's counting.”

“Priscilla must be very happy with the job you're doing,” I said.

“You just missed her,” Jackie said. “She was here for three days, on one of her visits home.”

This was disappointing news.

“But don't worry, I'm sure she'll be back soon,” Jackie added, seeing my long face. “She comes home as often as she can.”

“Is she doing well in school?” My mama would have said that was a “none of your business” question but I couldn't help it. I prayed that this arrangement was working out for Priscilla. I'd never been so surprised in my life as when I learned that she was expecting a baby. She wasn't married and there wasn't even a beau in the picture as far as I knew, and I thought we'd been pretty good friends. She was focused, mature, and diligent in the
way she lived her life. But she was also very young, just nineteen when Dream was born, and, as they say, it only takes one mistake. No one—not even our Priscilla—was perfect.

If there was anyone who deserved a second chance in life, it was her. Although she had hoped to go to college, and shared her dream with us at book club meetings, on some level she never truly believed it could happen. A person gets tired of aiming for a dream that most folks think is pure foolishness, she said. One day she met a man and made what Mama would have called an “unwise choice.” In a single moment of weakness, she nearly ruined her whole future. That is how she explained it—that it was a mistake—but in my own heart I wondered if she had allowed the pregnancy to happen as a way of giving up—of sabotaging her own dream—because she could not stand the strain.

And, indeed, that gal was under pressure. It wasn't until later that we understood that her community had placed its hopes on her shoulders. She was the one who showed the most promise, and she was expected to succeed. It wasn't just “Priscilla is going to follow her dream and go to college.” It was, “Priscilla is going to make all
our
dreams come true by showing the other young folk how it's done.”

When her disgrace became known, the most excruciating scorn was from those who felt let down. Then there were the jealous types who thought she'd been reaching too high, anyway. The way Priscilla told it, she had to endure the sneers of those who said, “I told you so” and “Ha, she's no better than the rest of us.” When Jackie came up with her wild idea, giving Priscilla the chance to go to college anyway, part of her motivation, she confided in me, was to get away from her own people who were judging her. The other factor was that she really did want to go to college, and with Jackie and the others looking
after Dream, she figured it must be part of God's plan. But it all hinged on whether she could make the adjustment—being away from home, the first person in her family to go to college, and leaving a baby behind might prove too much. While she'd written me several letters, I felt there was a lot she wasn't saying.

“She's doing great in school,” Plain Jane said. “So far she's had perfect grades.”

No surprise there. Priscilla was the smartest person I'd ever known.

“But how is she doing with . . .” I searched for the right words.

“With missing Dream?” Jackie said, finishing my question. “Well, as good as could be expected. I mean, she cries for hours before it's time for her to catch the bus back to Daytona Beach.”

“But she wants to keep going?” I asked, saying aloud what I feared most to ask.

“So far, so good,” Jackie said. “We're trying to make it as easy on her as possible by taking very good care of Dream. And they'll be reunited when Priscilla graduates.”

To myself, I thought,
That's three more years. I hope Priscilla can hold on.

“Well, all we can do is the best we can,” Jackie said cheerfully. “And we are getting expert guidance from Priscilla's grandmother.” This had been part of the deal: Priscilla's grandmother, who lived a few miles away and made a living working in the fields, would see the baby regularly.

“Now, let us hear about
you
, Dora,” Plain Jane said warmly, “and why you are here. Not that you need a reason.”

“Oh, I tell you
what
, being back home makes me realize how much I missed it,” I said with a rush of emotion. “How much I
missed
y'all
. But I have a little more I need to do in Jackson. And I can't leave my landlady hanging on forever.”

“Well, however long you're here, we are happy to see you,” Jackie said.

“We were just about to write you a long letter, just to let you know what's going on,” Mrs. Bailey White said. She sounded a little uneasy.

“About Darryl,” Jackie added, in her direct, Yankee way.

“Thank you,” I said, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “But I got a telegram about it.”

This raised a few eyebrows. “Really?” Jackie demanded. “From whom?”

I told them how Dolores Simpson had contacted me, hoping I would come home and talk some sense into Darryl. “Her house is right smack in the middle of where he plans to build,” I said.

Jackie looked surprised and maybe a little impressed. So did Plain Jane and even Mrs. Bailey White. They'd all encountered Robbie-Lee's mother in the past and concluded they were no match for the former stripper turned alligator hunter who lived back in the swamps.

“So you saw her?” Jackie asked. “I mean, you've met with her since you got back?”

“Last night,” I said. “Went straight to see her after getting off the bus. By the way, Mrs. Bailey White,” I added, trying to divert the conversation away from Dolores Simpson, “have you looked at the maps? I'm worried that your house isn't all that far from Dolores's, at least as the crow flies. I hope you're not in the way of Darryl's plans.”

A moment of dread seemed to settle in the room like a cloud of decades-old dust. “Not to worry,” Mrs. Bailey White
said. “I cornered the mayor when I was at the bank recently. He wouldn't give me any details but he said I wouldn't be affected. He said I'm near the development but not directly in the way.”

“But Darryl couldn't take your house, anyway, unless you wanted to sell,” Plain Jane said.

“Oh, who knows what he could do, now that he seems to have the town fathers behind him,” Mrs. Bailey White said in a voice that sounded world-weary.

“Who, exactly, are these ‘town fathers'?” Jackie asked.

“The powerful people in town,” Plain Jane said. “The mayor, of course, but also the high school football coach—he could probably burn the town down and get away with it—and also the preacher at First Baptist, plus the core group of people who come from good families with
old money
.”

“My family was ‘old money' people with a good name, except I kind of made a mess out of things,” Mrs. Bailey White said sheepishly. “I mean by going to jail and all,” she added, as if we didn't know what she meant.

“I think we need to look into Darryl's money source, 'cause he's getting financing from somewhere,” Plain Jane said.

“Well, it's not from Mr. Toomb,” Jackie said, referring to her husband's employer.

“How do you know that for sure?” I asked.

“A few weeks ago Ted was talking on the phone late at night with Mr. Toomb, and I picked up the extension in the kitchen and listened,” she said. “Mr. Toomb was saying that he didn't like Darryl Norwood one bit, and that the young scallywag—that was the word he used—was too big for his britches. I think Darryl angered Mr. Toomb by not kowtowing to him. Mr. Toomb would expect a young man like Darryl to come to him first and let him know what his plans were.”

“Well, then Darryl is getting his money from outside the county, and probably out of state,” I said. “From people who won't care one bit about what happens here.”

“Carpetbaggers,” Mrs. Bailey White said ominously.

“What, like Sherman's march?” I asked. “Wrecking everything in his path? That was a hundred years ago, up in Georgia.”

“Yeah, and there's been carpetbaggers in one way or another ever since,” Mrs. Bailey White said gravely. “Always some Yankees sniffing around the wreckage and making money off the suffering of their Southern brethren.”