Queen of the Underworld (11 page)

Did the camp director wait for them out on the street so they could all be there
as a team
when the unsuspecting mother opened the door? Was this the actual first photo when the camp director broke the news, or had staff photographer Don Kingsley, popping flashbulbs, said, “Mrs. Grainger, would you please hold it just like that for a few more?”

I felt an overwhelming nostalgia for Dean Ligon’s Tuesday afternoons (and today
was
a Tuesday) at home, when his handpicked seniors sat in the book-lined study overlooking the sun-dappled woods, drinking lemonade and nibbling Mrs. Ligon’s tea sandwiches, discussing the ethics and responsibilities of the Fourth Estate.

“I think we’ve pretty much covered today’s problem headlines in the
Miami Star,
” Dean Ligon would be saying, “but just to keep our ethical sensors on full alert, let’s examine the treatment of this grieving mother. The photo
in itself
is acceptable. Human beings have always been drawn to visual representations of grieving mothers, look at Michelangelo’s
Pietà.
But would you ever see such melodramatic cutlines in the Louisville
Courier-Journal
? Or the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
? Or the
New York Times
?”

Of course, Joelle might not be responsible for the cutlines. Though if “the ribbon on our package,” as Norbright called her, could dictate the boxes for her stories, she might dictate cutlines for their photos, too. (“I want you to know, Lou, that those cutlines were
my
idea.”)

The story that Tess thought was going to be such big news, “Don’t Interfere, Cuba Warns U.S.,” had been relegated to seven short paragraphs squeezed between sobbing Mrs. Grainger and yelling Governor Long, and ending right above “Today’s Chuckle.” (“My wife is threatening to leave me.” “That’s tough. Can’t you get her to promise?”)

Probably the whole Castro thing was a tempest in a teapot and would be over soon, but people who worked for Cuban exiles or ran hotels catering to them, people like Tess and like Alex de Costa, were bound to take it more to heart.

Now I recalled where I had seen the man behind the desk this morning. He was the father of the Cuban family who’d arrived on Sunday, the man wearing the white suit and ticking off the matching luggage with his silver pencil. The new desk clerk at the Julia Tuttle was the owner of the ten-thousand-acre sugar plantation usurped by Castro.

Before I phoned the North Miami man who was boiling mad over his water bill, I took a respite in the ladies’ room to examine last night’s damage in the mirror. The overhead fluorescent lights did their worst: I looked green around the gills. I soaked a paper towel with cold water, then locked myself in a stall, sat with my feet up out of sight against the door, and buried my face in the towel. My Emma-ness was at low ebb, and the day had scarcely begun.

Someone else came in and bolted herself into the cubicle next to mine. Platform-soled sandals, thick mud-brown stockings, ladylike tinkle, immediate flush and exit. I held my breath until she would leave the room, since I had compromised myself by hiding out in my stall. But after prolonged hand-washing sounds, I heard, to my dismay, the unzipping of a bag and small items being laid out methodically on the mirror shelf. Whoever it was then embarked on a thorough freshening-up session, complete with the swish and crackle of brushing hair (the person seemed to have a lot of it), the
pock
of a lipstick cylinder being unsheathed and resheathed, followed by brisk, rhythmic rubbing noises and the release of a familiar scent. The person then cleared her throat and burst into a lusty “Habanera,” from
Carmen,
in a professional-sounding contralto. It would have been a thrilling moment had I not been afraid I might cough, which of course I proceeded to do. The singer was silenced, and judging from the speed with which she swept everything into her bag and fled, she was as eager as I was to remain anonymous.

It was Moira Parks, I would soon learn. She took regular trips to the ladies’ room to wash the newsprint off her hands and massage them with Jergens lotion.

I returned to my desk determined to wrest a notable story from the water-bill protester.

An angry hello answered the first ring.

“May I speak to Mr. Charles P. Rose?”

“Speaking. Who is this?”

“My name is Emma Gant, from the
Miami Star.
”

“What are you, someone’s secretary there?”

“No, sir, I’m a staff reporter.” The “sir,” drilled into Southern children, slipped out on its own and disqualified me further.

“
What
did you say your name was?”

“Emma Gant.”

“Now look here, I read the
Star
every day and I never heard of you.”

“I just started yesterday. Mr. Rose, could you tell me more about this trouble you’re having with your water bill?”

“Now look here, Miss Grant—”

“Gant.”

“Okay,
Gant.
I have nothing against you personally, Miss
Gant,
but I haven’t been waiting by the phone all morning to be shunted off to some female cub reporter I’ll have to explain everything to six times. This is not just ‘some trouble’ over my water bill. We’re talking about manipulation of the populace by a public utility.”

“That’s a serious charge, Mr. Rose.”

“Damn right it is. We were promised a
reduction
in our water rates in North Miami and what we got was an
increase.
It was all a clever wording trick to confuse us.”

“And what did the wording trick—?”

“Now look here, Miss Grant—
Gant.
Didn’t I just finish telling you I want to talk to someone who can follow me without my having to explain everything six times?”

I felt like hanging up on him. But someone was hovering within earshot behind me, probably Dave Bisbee, though it was too early for lunch, and I had to go on with the audible side of the dialogue and make myself sound confident and professional.

“Mr. Rose, I think it’s an excellent idea of yours to go over it six times. That way I can write it down so even the simplest reader can grasp it. You’ll be performing that much more of a public service. I’ve got my pencil and pad ready. Take all the time you need. Pretend I’m just your simplest basic listener who knows nothing at all about water rates.”

There was a kind of sputtering at the other end of the line, like a firecracker being doused in water. After a loud sigh, Mr. Charles P. Rose began speaking slowly, exaggeratedly, as if to a dimwit, about the treachery perpetrated on him by the North Miami Beach Water Board. I kept making him qualify and simplify, reading back his answers until I and every cretin subscriber understood base rates backwards and forwards. Once he yelled at me, “Nobody could be
that
stupid!” After we hung up, I called the Water Board and got through to the general manager, who gave me a nice quote—a perfect little dollop of revenge on Mr. Charles P. Rose.

As I was typing up my final draft, Lou Norbright drifted by my desk. “How’s it going, Emma?”

“Pretty well, I think.”

“That’s the impression I get, too,” he said, gleaming above me in his white shirt. He regarded me with a certain amusement. Or was there something conspiratorial about it, too? One go-getter recognizing another.

“Keep up the good work,” he said cheerfully, and continued on his stealthy glide. It had been the Prince of Ambition himself who’d been lurking behind me as I wrested my first news story out of Charles P. Rose.

My little victory was overshadowed soon after, when the double doors to the boardroom next to Mr. Feeney’s office were flung open and out surged all the editors, forming a fawning human horseshoe around Joelle Cutter-Crane and a smallish blond man in his forties with a dark tan. From their complacent expressions and the sudden excitement released into the newsroom you could tell the two were being celebrated for something. My first thought was that they had just gotten married, until an impudent murmur—this time it
was
Dave Bisbee hovering behind—informed me that Joelle and her “favorite visual-aid accompanist,” Don Kingsley, were being sent to Cuba to “cover the human-interest aspects of the Revolution.”

Joelle was outfitted in smart new safari-type togs and carried a brown leather shoulder-strap purse with lots of buckles and compartments and no cherries. Her visual-aid accompanist walked several paces behind her, like Prince Philip trailing the Queen. He even bore a certain resemblance to Philip, if the Duke of Edinburgh had been shorter and had had all of the expression suntanned out of his features.

Although it was only my second day on the
Star,
my envy of Joelle’s assignment actually caused bile to rise in my throat—the hangover no doubt contributing—and once more I sought refuge in the ladies’, feet up behind the locked cubicle door, face buried in hands, until someone else came in and I flushed and prepared to return to the bottom rung of the Fourth Estate.

The editor of the Women’s Section was brushing her close-cropped silver hair in front of the mirror. She addressed me by name and said she hoped I would join her and a few of the other women for lunch at the Dallas Park one day this week. I politely said I’d love to, and went out thinking, That’s all I need, to get “shunted off,” as Mr. Charles P. Rose would put it, with the women inside the glass cubicle.

Dave Bisbee invited me to his “club” again, but I declined. I didn’t want to be sitting in the basement of Walgreens with an also-ran while Joelle Cutter-Crane and Don Kingsley were flying off to Havana, probably first-class, drinking champagne and planning their assaults on the human-interest aspects of the Cuban Revolution.

(“Now, Don, I want you to get a really good close-up shot of a rich landowner just as he’s being ousted by the guerrillas, and then I want to pair it with—”

“A really good close-up shot of the happy peasant who inherits the confiscated land.”

“You read my mind, Don, but do let’s strike the word ‘confiscated’ from your vocabulary. We’re guests of the new government, remember?”

“Your wish is my command, Joelle, but it wasn’t me who used the word ‘guerrillas.’ ”

“Touché, but remember, I’m calling the shots. Stewardess, excuse me—Miss? We’re ready for another round of champagne over here.”)

I rolled a piece of copy paper into my typewriter, cradled the receiver on its rubber cushion between my right shoulder and ear, and dialed the first “fun home” number on my alphabetized mortuary list.

Eventually I took a break and explored the desk drawers I had inherited from the fired Kirk, who drank and tried to bring in the union. The top drawer had copy paper, paper clips, and a half roll of Tums, plus some dirt and crumbs. I threw out the Tums and wiped out the drawer with a Kleenex. In the lower drawer were a pair of men’s rubbers, the kind you slip on over your shoes. As I was tossing these in the wastebasket, out fell one unused Trojan in its tinfoil wrapper. Well, I wanted to compete in a man’s world, didn’t I? I considered dropping in on Bisbee at his desk and making a joke about the pun, but then decided I preferred the moat of my reserve.

T
WO MEN,
conversing in Spanish, rode up with me in the Julia Tuttle’s slow, hiccuppy elevator at the end of the workday.

“Tengo mi permiso de trabajo,”
said one with a sigh. He must have gotten his work permit.

“¡Felicitaciones!”
congratulated the other, clapping him on the back.

“Pero estoy calificado para nada,”
replied the first with a tired laugh. But I’m qualified for nothing. Adding gloomily,
“Mañana, busco un hotel más barato.”
Tomorrow he was going to look for a cheaper hotel. Good going, Emma.

“¿Quieres que vayamos a tomar algo?”
Would you like to go out and have something?

“Lo siento, pero estoy muy cansado.”
The man with the new work permit was too tired. I was
“muy cansada”
myself.

“Bueno, en otro momento,”
replied the other. He had done all he could, and he didn’t sound too disappointed.

The gloomy one got off on four.
“Me cago en Fidel,”
he suddenly spat back as he left the elevator.

“Ssst!”
the other scolded, shaking his head. As the doors closed us in together, he apologized for his companion’s obscenity.
“Perdón, señorita.”

“Oh,
está bien,
” I replied airily, with a dismissive wave of my frosty nails. This obscenity—as well as his standard
“¡Mierda!”
—was quite familiar to me through Pepe Iglesias, my Cuban dance partner from St. Clovis Hall, the male branch of St. Clothilde’s.
Me cago en
this and
me cago en
that: Pepe was always “shitting” on someone or other.

The man broke into a gratified smile; he probably assumed that I was fluent. Luckily, my floor was next, so I didn’t have to lose face. Like most language students, I could read and write more than I could hear, and I could speak far less than I could overhear. Bisbee had a point, I should find a tutor, which shouldn’t be too hard with a hotel full of Cubans.

The galling thing was, I probably had known more Cubans personally than Joelle Cutter-Crane did. At St. Clothilde’s, there had been two or three Cuban girls in every grade. Many Cuban businessmen and diplomats posted in Washington and New York sent their daughters there because of its archaic rules and because the nuns absolutely forbade the foreign boarders to converse in their native tongues. In seventh grade, Raquel Cortez had asked me to go home with her for Christmas, which my mother thought would be educational, but I found Raquel off-putting with her melon-size breasts and her painful English, which she sputtered too close to your face, and Loney was able to intervene and convince Mother that I might come down with some awful disease from drinking Cuban water. Now I was sorry I hadn’t gone; if this revolution did drag on for a few more months it would have come in handy at the newspaper. (“Yes, I know Havana well, my friend Raquel Cortez lived in the Vedado, I used to go home with her for Christmas.”)