Queen of the Underworld (10 page)

“There I was, flying through the air along with coconuts and roof shingles and blowing sand. I looked down and saw this grand piano and some oriental rugs floating down the street on top of the water. Then my feet were on the ground again and I had my arms around this big old royal palm and I held on for dear life till the turbulence was past. Just think of it, Emma. One hundred and thirteen people were drowned or crushed in that hurricane, but
I
landed on my feet. Have you ever heard the sound a hurricane makes?”

“Only in
The Wizard of Oz.
”

“Oh, that was just special effects, Judy Garland never even left the ground. The real thing sounds like a freight train heading right at you. You’ll hear it in September when hurricane season starts. Ready for some more? We’ve done this much damage, we might as well finish the pitcher. But here you’ve let me go on and on about my ancient adventures, when I’m dying to hear about your first day at the
Star.
”

“Well, you know, they start everybody off at the bottom.” I figured I might as well be truthful and get the obits out of the way. “And then one of the reporters, Dave Bisbee, took me to lunch at Walgreens.”

“I’ve seen his byline. Is he attractive?”

“Not especially, but he told me lots of helpful things.”

Tess giggled appreciatively, woman to woman. “Such as?”

“Mostly filling me in on other people. For instance, he warned me not to be too interesting when I went up to have my interview with the personnel director, who’s a stuffed shirt.”

“But why do you need to be interviewed by the personnel director? You’re already hired.”

“To have something to measure against my performance later, was the way the stuffed shirt put it. It’s a new policy at the
Star.
Bisbee said Lou Norbright probably implemented it.”

“That horrible man who destroyed my friend Edith Vine! I thought he was gone. I was hoping something awful had happened to him. You never see his byline anymore.”

Edith Vine, Edith Vine, now where had I recently heard or read that name? Damn these sugary alcoholic drinks, the mixture went twice as fast to your brain.

“No, he’s assistant managing editor now. He’s the one who showed me around today. He’s pretty scary, in a fascinating way. Bisbee said the others call him Lucifer. Who is Edith Vine?”

“Poor Edith no longer
is.
She died of heartbreak, though the official diagnosis was heart attack. Her life’s work was completely destroyed after the Ginevra Snow scandal. Edith was subpoenaed, she never got over having to testify in a courtroom. People made jokes about her wonderful school, where the daughters of the most prominent Miami families had gone for forty years. The Biscayne Academy of Prostitution, they called it during the trial. Ginevra Snow was this—”

“She was the Queen of the Underworld.”

“Honestly, Emma, no grass grows under
your
feet! You already know about that?”

“I skimmed the clips this afternoon. Bisbee told me that’s how Norbright got his big break and I was curious. Now I remember. The Mafia uncle sent Ginevra to Edith Vine’s charm school.”

“Edith would
never
have referred to the Biscayne Academy as a ‘charm school,’ that was Mr. Norbright’s vulgar description. It was more like a finishing school, though Edith always preferred just plain ‘academy,’ because, as she rightly said, it was a place of training in the special arts of life. Edith herself was classically trained. I took some courses there when I was in the running for Miss Miami Beach, back in, well, never mind what year. You know, Emma, I’m going to suggest you spend the night on board, I’m a bit light-headed, and you’re too precious to risk my driving you back through all this rain. I’ll lend you one of my nightgowns and I have a shopping bag full of giveaway toothbrushes, compliments of Hector. What time do you have to be at the
Star
?”

“Nine-thirty. But I’d need to go back to the hotel and change first.”

“Of course you would. And I have to be at the office by seven-thirty, because Hector and I have to unload our new equipment before the patients come, so I’d have you back at the Julia Tuttle by seven, how’s that?”

“Sounds perfect. But you were saying about the special arts she taught you at the academy.” Keeping on the scent of the story Norbright had stolen from me six years ago.

“On the first day of every new term, Miss Edith would take the new girls out to the school’s enclosed garden. We sat in a circle under her big ficus trees and she told us that Akademeia was the name of Plato’s garden in Athens where he taught his students what they needed to know to get on in the world beautifully, and then she’d say, ‘and here we are in the middle of Miami in
our
little Akademeia and we’re going to learn how to get on in
our
world beautifully.’ I helped Miss Edith for a few years after Mother’s death. I wanted to have some life on my own before I met someone and got married, and I enjoyed teaching the girls, and learning more myself. There’s always more to learn.”

“What did you teach them?”

“Well, the very first thing was how to enter a room, and of course the debutantes had to learn how to deep-curtsy and we always had a few clodhoppers every term. And little stickler-things, like you always sit down and get up from a banquet table on the right side.”

“I didn’t know that.” I filed this away for future banquets.

“Most people don’t, but it prevents traffic jams.”

“And how do you enter a room?”

“Always with an invisible moat of reserve around your person. You keep it in place even when you’re being warm and charming. And, let’s see, we taught them how to project their voices from their diaphragms and
not
from inside their noses. The ironic thing was—poor Edith confided this to me after the academy closed down—Ginevra was one of the best pupils she’d ever had. ‘That little white trash girl had a natural grace and beauty many of my flat-footed debutantes would have sold their souls for,’ that’s what Edith told me. Ginevra was smart as a whip, she said, and eager to learn everything she could to better herself. Miss Edith gave her private elocution lessons in the evening. Ginevra was boarding there; the Mafia uncle said she was too young to be out on her own in wicked Miami, and Miss Edith accepted his explanation about the nephew and Ginevra being too young to marry yet. Of course, she never dreamed the uncle was a mob person. Ginevra’s speech when she came to Biscayne Academy was pure undiluted Georgia cracker, but when Miss Edith got through with her she could read Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” aloud and have everyone in the room under her spell. And all that, Miss Edith said, just to prepare someone for running a whorehouse. As I said, it broke her heart. What do you say to another
half
pitcher of daiquiri, Emma?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

Tess had run out of peaches, so it was just daiquiri mix and rum. I felt crammed to the gills with new information about how to get on in this world—from banquet tables to invisible moats. But I was annoyed with Edith Vine for giving up and dying. She should have been proud that she could turn a white trash girl into a queen, even if it was a “queen of the underworld.” She could have built on her success with Ginevra to carry on the school with or without the debutantes. What a story I might have done on her!

FORMER DEBUTANTE DOYENNE
RECALLS NOTORIETY

SHARES CHARM SECRETS

Maybe even a series. Who ever got enough of such secrets? As Bisbee said, you had to remind readers now who Ginevra Snow was, but getting ahead beautifully never goes out of style.

W
HEN EVENTUALLY
we stumbled off to bed, giggling and clinging to each other for balance, it was as if Tess was more my friend than Mother’s.

While Tess sat in front of a dressing table and creamed her face and slid metal clips into her marcelled waves, I lay on my side watching two of her performing these motions. The houseboat creaked and swayed as badly as if we were at sea. If I did have to throw up, I would have to crawl all the way to the head.

“Uh-oh, my roots are beginning to show,” said Tess to her mirror. “Honestly, my hair seems to grow faster the older
I
grow. I guess I shouldn’t complain. Hector’s wife, Asunción, says hers is thinning, even though she’s—never mind how many years younger than I.”

Tess’s orange-smelling night cream, mingled with Joy, made it harder for me to concentrate on not being sick. If I closed my eyes, the room spun, or whatever you called this part of the houseboat. As soon as the light was out I would resort to my emergency remedy of putting one foot on the floor to allay my dizziness.

“Well, I’ll call Michel on Miracle Mile and ask if he can fit me in this week,” Tess prattled on. “He’s always so booked, but that’s because he’s the best in town.
She
goes to him, too, though her name is Brown now. I sometimes see her when I’m having my two-color process. She has a wash and a trim every few weeks. Everyone knows who she is but we respect her privacy. I went through that myself after my marriage blew up and my sad story was in the
Star.
I was so grateful when people smiled or nodded and said hello and treated me like just any woman getting her hair done. Miami is still a provincial town, everybody knows everybody’s business. She married her psychiatrist after the trial. He’s English or Scottish or something and the rumor is he’s kind of a stick-in-the-mud. She’s tried to kill herself twice, they can’t keep that out of the papers, but everyone at Michel’s respects her privacy completely.”

Tess finished up her bedtime ritual by slapping her creamed cheeks vigorously and then tying on some kind of bonnet with a chin strap.

“There! That will have to do until I can save up for my face-lift. No, I don’t hold
her
responsible, she was practically kidnapped to start with, then set up and betrayed, it could happen to any girl. At least she escaped that Georgia hellhole and learned some graces. It’s that vile Norbright and his vulgar, self-promoting ‘Queen of the Underworld’ series I blame for killing poor Edith.”

6.

I
MMACULATE IN HER WHITE
uniform, with every platinum-blond wave in place, Tess delivered me—with a steaming container of black coffee and a whopping headache—to the Julia Tuttle by seven on Tuesday morning. I wanted to ask her to walk me in, so that if Alex de Costa was behind the desk, he wouldn’t assume I had stayed out all night with a man, but I knew she was dying to get to the office and help “Doctor” unload the new dental equipment.

“Thanks a bunch, Tess. It was the first time I ever slept aboard a boat.” Every word made my temples throb.

“Not exactly a seagoing boat, but we had fun, didn’t we? Only, please, Emma, don’t tell your mother I got you sozzled.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Neither Alex nor gloomy Luís was behind the desk, but a handsome man in a guayabera I knew I had seen before but couldn’t place. As I came through the revolving door, he snapped to attention, looking almost painfully eager to be of service. I already had my room key out of my purse and smilingly waved it at him, though it cost my head another twinge. He nodded and sat down on his stool again.

In Room 510 I swallowed two aspirins, set the alarm clock for eight fifteen, and crawled naked into my bed. What would Dean Ligon think if I called in sick my second day of work? What would Lou Norbright think? I slipped into a doze and woke out of it five minutes before the alarm was due to go off.

Somehow I managed to bathe and dress. As I was pinning my hair into its French twist in front of the bathroom mirror, the memory of Tess sticking clips into her marcelled waves last night resuscitated her stories about Edith Vine and the Biscayne Academy, which might otherwise have been lost in the murk of my hangover. Following that, as a piece of forgotten dream will often dredge more of it up into consciousness, came Tess’s offhand revelation that she and Ginevra Snow went to the same hairdresser.

R
OD
R
EYNOLDS
was not at his desk, but there was a torn-off piece of yellow copy paper stuck in my typewriter, to “eg” from “rr,” all in abbreviations and lowercase, telling me to call a man in North Miami who was boiling mad about his water bill and see if there was a “huint sty” in it. What on earth was a “huint sty”? After that, my instructions were to “do fun home roundup.”

I cracked the “fun home” code first—funeral home—and, after a little more work, realized I was being asked to write a human-interest story.

None of the brass were anywhere to be seen. I would have ambled over to say good morning to Dave Bisbee, but he was hunched over his desk, both hands plunged into his disheveled hair, reading today’s
Star
as though it contained the secret to his salvation. Damn it to hell. If I hadn’t been de-sozzling myself back at the Julia Tuttle, I could have had a leisurely breakfast at Howard Johnson’s with “Florida’s Most Complete Newspaper” and been ahead of the game. But alas, Tess, unlike my perfect Paul, did not possess the fine art of controlling the alcohol drip for one’s guests.

There was an untouched copy of Tuesday’s
Star
on Rod’s desk, and I slid it over onto mine and scanned the headlines.
H-BOMB BLAST BLINDS ANIMALS
300
MILES OFF
was the banner, even though, it turned out, the news was a year old: two multimegaton hydrogen bombs had been fired in the Pacific
last
summer, you learned further down in the story, but yesterday was the first official report by the Atomic Energy Commission. Dean Ligon would have disapproved of the misleading headline. He also would have raised an eyebrow at the modifier in the cutline under the wirephoto of Earl Long: “Yelling governor is returned to hospital.”

The local front-page story, by Joelle Cutter-Crane, with a three-column picture of a weeping mother, was another child’s drowning at camp; this time the child was a seven-year-old girl. The cutlines read, “A man’s tragic task . . . a mother’s unbelieving tears: Mrs. Roberta Grainger sobs as camp director John Travis relays news of daughter’s death.” “
Star
Staff Photo by Don Kingsley” was the credit line. Dean Ligon would have a holiday of distaste over today’s front page. I underwent a surge of revolt myself as I imagined Joelle Cutter-Crane and her pocketbook with the cherries riding alongside the photographer to the Grainger home.