Queen of the Underworld (20 page)

Julio and Genio? Oh, right, the twin nephews who’d just come over from Cuba, who had loaded the dental equipment into Hector’s Cadillac—good Lord, was it only three nights ago? I’d been meeting more new people than I could digest the names of.

“Was it those drills we picked up at the airport?”

“What drills? Oh, of course, the
drills
! What a good memory you have, Emma. No,
that
equipment is in place, this is . . . some more equipment. But enough about me—are you okay?”

Just as well Tess either didn’t know or hadn’t remembered it was my birthday, since I had something more important I was dying to tell her. “Listen, Tess, guess who I met last night at the hospital?”

“The hospital! What were you doing in the hospital? Here I’ve been going on about our silly equipment—were you hurt?”

“No, the hospital’s part of my beat now. I’m taking it over for Bisbee while he’s deputy city editor. As soon as the tornado hit last night I went right over to Jackson.”

“You amazing child.
You’ll
be an editor next—”

“No, listen, Tess. I met
her
last night. The Queen of the Underworld. She was lying right out in the hall, on a gurney.”

“The queen of
what
? You met
who
? Oh, my God! You mean Ginevra Snow? You met Ginevra Snow? Was she in the tornado?”

“No, she’d taken another overdose but they’d pumped her out and couldn’t pay much attention to her because of all the people coming in with injuries. There was a small item in today’s
Star
—I guess you missed it.”

“Emma, I haven’t even had a chance to sit down, much less look at today’s paper. You say you
met
her?”

“We talked.”

“She was able to talk? What did you talk about?”

“Well, for one thing, she said she still dreamed about Miss Edith. She said, ‘I’m sorry Miss Edith passed away before I got a chance to tell her my side of the story.’ ”

“She actually
said
that? Oh, Emma, this makes me want to cry! But why were you talking about Miss Edith?”

“Well, because of you. I’d said you’d seen her at Michel’s on Miracle Mile and I described you and she said oh yes, you always smiled at her and you look like Jean Harlow.”

“Did she really say that?”

“Yes, and I told her you would have spoken, but you valued your own privacy and wanted to respect hers.”

“Well said, Emma. That’s very true.”

“But I did tell her you had both gone to Edith Vine’s Biscayne Academy and that you had taught there before you married. That’s when she talked about wishing she could have explained herself to Miss Edith. I hope it was all right I told her you went there, too.”

“Perfectly all right. Emma, all this is giving me goose bumps. I certainly
will
speak the next time I see her at Michel’s. But is all this in your story?”

“No, see, that’s the problem. Her husband, that Dr. Brown, showed up and put a stop to it. What’s in the paper is just a teeny item telling about the overdose and reminding readers of who she was. It doesn’t even have my byline. But here’s where you come in, Tess. I know she wants to talk to me again, but we have to do it without him knowing. If you could find out when her next hairdresser’s appointment is, I could maybe arrange to be there.”

“Well, I don’t know, Emma. I don’t think I can ask Michel. He’s fierce about protecting his clients’ privacy.”

“Couldn’t you just look through his book?”

“If Michel caught me looking at his book, Emma, I’d be looking for another hairdresser.”

“Sorry, bad idea. Forget it, I’ll think of something else. That’s part of the challenge of being a reporter.”

“No, wait, Emma, let me give this some thought. We need to get together again soon for dinner anyway. I want to hear all about it, but right now, I’m still at Hector’s office, rescheduling appointments in
our
book. I just wanted to see if you were okay.”

“I’m fine, Tess. And I really appreciate your concern.”

“When you next write to your mother, be sure and send her my love.”

“I certainly will. And will you please forget my stupid idea?”

“No, Emma, just let me give it some thought. I’d like to help you if I can. Why, I’d like to get to know her myself! Let me see what I can arrange.”

A
NOTHER THUNDERSHOWER
was in progress outside my window. I’d been in Miami five days now without seeing the sun. Huge severed chunks of the poor royal palm lay ready to be carted away. I was certain Alex had closed his eyes when the chain saw took its first bite. It had been “like giving orders to chop up a friend,” he’d said. If I’d known about him bringing his mother back, I would have stuffed myself with more hot sausages and crabmeat dip at the Araby. Best thing to do probably would be swallow two aspirins and hope they’d make me fall asleep before I got hungry again.

Tess had broken the spell of my color-coded-rose ritual, but I made myself complete it anyway. Mother surely deserved the last of the reds for having me. Then I’d switch to the coral, which were also beautiful, to commemorate another high point with Paul: when he had driven me back to college at the end of last summer. We had stopped overnight at a famous “restricted” golf resort in Pinehurst, where Paul signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Tom Mann. Next morning he played nine holes on foot with me tagging along. The autumnal air was poignant with our imminent parting. We were plotting our keeping-in-touch tactics for the long separation, when Paul sank a putt with the ease of someone in a dream and announced: “Got it.”

“You sure did,” I replied, thinking he meant the hole in one.

“No, I’ve got it figured out,” he said. “At Christmas we’ll get you to Miami, and then next June you’ll start work on the
Miami Star.
”

When I asked how all this was going to come about, he said, “Easy. I’ll take care of the Christmas part and you’re gonna do the rest.”

Loney wouldn’t care what colors she got, as long as they were from me, so I gave her the remaining yellow and both pink, since Mother couldn’t stand pink. That left the other coral, which I dedicated to my first raise on the
Star.
That left the single white rose, which I decided should portend my satisfied death, knowing I had fulfilled my destiny—unlike the stay-at-home old maid who had died while hearing my train pass.

Later, as I was soaking in Loney’s lavender bubble bath, I recalled these serials in her beloved magazines.
“To be continued,”
or
“To be concluded,”
it would say at the end of each installment. And then at the top of next month’s continuation, there would be a little box in italics:
“The story so far . . .”

The story so far: Emma has arrived in Miami, and . . .

I got into my pajamas—the drip-dry blue ones with white sailboats that Loney and I had bought in the boys’ department at Belk’s before I went off to college. I also had a yellow pair with navy stripes from the same shopping trip. After seven years of having been forced to wear the shortie nightgowns Earl brought home from the chain store where he was training unsuccessfully to become management material, I had wanted classic sleepwear with legs and arms and some privacy.

I swallowed three aspirins—surely nobody died from just
one
extra—and settled back on the pillows to await sleep. If Paul called, it would be a pleasure to wake up, and if Alex called later for
medianoches,
I could always dress again.

I played with “Emma’s story so far” awhile longer and then, rather than counting sheep, began making a mental list of all the people I had met since boarding the train last Saturday.

First Major Marjac (“Weaponry is opening up to women in an unprecedented way!”), and then Luís at the hotel desk, and the exiled Ocampos surrounded by their stockade of luggage, and Clarence the bellman, and Alex, and the potbellied proprietor in the pink guayabera at La Bodega. Then the whole
Miami Star
crew: Rod Reynolds; Bisbee; Joelle Cutter-Crane; Pat and Ed on the copydesk; Gabe Truro, the touch-typing crime reporter; Bert, the books and religion editor; Moira Parks of the morgue with her massive shears; Marge, the friendly Women’s Section editor, whose glass cage I was determined to avoid; humorless personnel inquisitor Harry Harmon; Mr. Feeney and his capable secretary, Liz; and of course Norbright, “Lucifer,” though he seemed to require a class of encounter all his own. And Jake Rance the Rude. And Julio and Genio, the Cuban twins, who had slipped my mind; and Mr. Sprat with his Lola; and Ginevra and Dr. Brown and the nurse Ginevra had called a “sadistic bitch.”

But then, what about the borderline cases, like the photographer Don Kingsley, who had gone to Cuba with Joelle; or Charles P. Rose, who had yelled at me over the phone, but whom I hadn’t seen in the flesh—and, likewise, Herman Melton, my hospital contact?

I made a second column for these “once-removed” people I had merely brushed against but hadn’t actually met. They kept popping up in no particular order: the two men who were ousted from Alex’s grandfather’s table at La Bodega, the men playing dominoes in the lobby of the Julia Tuttle, the airport official who had stuck his head into the Cadillac and been dazzled by Tess’s beauty, the waiter at the Americana who hadn’t been quick enough to light Paul’s cigarette. (“But we’ll give him three out of ten,” Paul had said, “because he recognized his mistake and because I’m happy tonight.”) And the two men riding up with me in the hotel elevator, the gloomy one with the new work permit, who “shat” on Fidel, and his friend, who had apologized to me afterwards for the obscenity. Oh, yes, and the three middle-aged people in their bathing suits and rain hats on the passing yacht that first rainy afternoon.

And what about the “twice-removed” people I had heard about through the stories of the first-column people? Did they need another column? Tess’s boss Hector and Hector’s wife, Asunción; and Tess’s hairdresser, Michel, and her late friend Edith Vine; and the fired reporter, Kirk, who had “tried to bring in the union,” and had left his condoms and his rubbers in my bottom drawer. And Alex’s mother, Lídia, with her quintet of husbands and her causes, who was en route with her son this very evening into my first column.

“She is between causes,” Alex had said. “At least I think so.” And then had added: “Lídia would approve of you. You’re like her in some ways.”

12.

I
WAS WALKING DOWN
a road, watching myself walking down a road, and someone was walking toward me.

“What you need to do to protect yourself,” coached my watcher self, “is say this person’s name loud and clear.” But the sun was in my eyes and all I saw was the figure approaching. I couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or a woman.

I awakened sweaty in a cradle of buttery morning light for the first time since I’d taken up residence at the Julia Tuttle.

Still under the omen of the dream, I snapped up the window blinds to confront an almost aggressive tropical blue sky. To the right was the roof of the
Star
building, where I had posed for Jake Rance on the eve of the tornado. Down the Miami River puttered a motorboat towing a barge. The barge had an outlandish little house sitting on it—did someone actually live in it? The whole affair was too low for the drawbridge to need to ring its bells and go up, and recalled to me against my will a joke told by a boy at a fraternity party back in Chapel Hill.

“Hey, girls, wanna know the height of male vanity? This gnat is floating down the river on his back, and he calls out, ‘Raise the drawbridge!’ ”

Followed by the pause it took for the girls to “get it,” and turn the obligatory shade of pink; followed by the prurient haw-hawing of the joke teller, who happened to be my date.

The chopped-up giant palm down by the pool looked sadder than ever in this cruel sunshine. When would Alex have the pieces removed? I wondered. As if conjured by my question, a whiplash of a little woman in a white dress and Panama hat shot into view, trailing two brown-chested men in Levi’s jeans and work boots. She jabbed her finger toward the dismembered tree, then with other staccato hand gestures appeared to be describing more things she wanted done. The hulking men nodded. Her hat and wraparound sunglasses hid her face, but even from five floors up I could tell she was used to having her orders carried out promptly.

Alex, in a baby blue polo shirt, ambled into view, hands thrust deep into his pants pockets, pulling the material of the chinos tight across his rump. He slouched apart from the action with a sort of languid resignation while the woman, followed by her bare-chested retainers, continued to dart about, jabbing and pointing and making her designs in the air.

Damn, damn, damn. Though I was ravenous to get to Howard Johnson’s to have my breakfast and check out my stories in today’s
Star,
I took extra time dressing and making up my face in case I had to run Lídia’s gauntlet—for who else could it be down there but Alex’s mother?

They were in the lobby when I came down, Alex chatting in Spanish with the men at their dominoes table in the corner, their little transistor turned faithfully to Radio Reloj for the minute-by-minute news update from Cuba. The woman had removed her Panama hat and was frowning down at the Mediterranean tiles. (Was she thinking of replacing them?) Her dark glasses now perched tiara-like on top of her head, the way I could never get mine to do. As soon as I stepped off the elevator, Alex called out, “Oh, there you are, Emma. I want you to meet my mother.”

I lowered my eyes as we converged, but could feel her going over me from French twist to stockinged ankles.

“Lídia, this is Emma Gant. Emma, this is my mother, Lídia Prieto Maldonado y—”

“Please, Alejandro, enough,” the little woman cut him short in a voice more masculine than his. She stuck out a manicured hand with a gigantic pink pearl ring on the middle finger and gripped mine. “I have had too many names. Please call me Lídia. So you are the young
periodista
on the
Miami Star.
He talked about you all the way from Palm Beach, and when we arrived, I wanted to telephone you and take you out for a birthday toast, but
he
insisted it was too late.” Though she spoke with a much heavier Spanish accent than her son, she raced pell-mell through her sentences, never pausing for a word and never messing up the grammar.

“We got back at half-past ten,” said Alex. “I was afraid you’d be asleep, Emma.”

“Nonsense,” Lídia said. “When I was her age, I never went to bed before three in the morning.”

“I hope you didn’t go to bed hungry again,” said Alex.

“As a matter of fact, I did. But now I’m headed out for a huge breakfast at Howard Johnson’s.”

“May we
take
you to breakfast there?” Alex’s mother was the most formidably groomed female I had so far encountered. The sleeveless white sundress showed off her exquisitely sculpted arms and neck; every hair of her cunningly tinted coiffure (subtle stripes of rich reds and golds against a base of caramel) was in shining place. The earrings in her pierced ears were smaller versions of the pink pearl on her middle finger. (Why middle? To show she had grown tired of advertising her husbands?) Her narrow feet were shod in high-heeled pumps of woven straw that matched her Panama hat, and her stockings were of the palest beige. Even Bev Nightingale, my arbiter of style, suddenly seemed a piecemeal effort next to the effect of this Lídia. Alex had said his mother was “still beautiful,” but “still,” in her case, seemed beside the point. You could imagine her looking exactly the glossy same at sixteen or sixty, given regular tucks and tints and frequent assaults on expensive boutiques. Tess, though “still” more naturally beautiful, would sag in comparison with this highly carved, coutured creature.

“But, Mami, Emma likes to read the
Star
with her breakfast and check her stories.”

“Oh, no, I—”

“Of course she must!” cried Lídia, giving me a sly wink. “We shall be very quiet at breakfast and allow Emma to check her stories.”

Girl-to-girl, she linked her arm through mine as the three of us walked to Howard Johnson’s. “Alejandro says you admire my great friend Pepe Ortega.” Then, seeing me draw a blank, she added, “Y Gasset.”

“You
knew
José Ortega y Gasset?”

“We became close friends when Alejandro’s favorite stepfather was cultural attaché in Madrid in 1948. Ortega had recently come back from exile. He was extremely
galante
with all women, but he especially enjoyed my company. ‘A little Spanish gentleman with the face of an old
torero,
’ that’s how Pepe described himself. Franco,
de mala gana
—with not very good grace—had allowed him to return to Spain, but Ortega never got over his exile, he felt he had lost his best years. He loved when we would argue politics and philosophy. ‘Lídia,’ he would say, ‘you argue like a man.’ ” She gave a throaty chuckle. “However, it was at a bullfight that I won his heart for
not
being a man—Alejandro,
por favor,
walk on ahead of us—my son hates when I tell this story. I had talked Pepe into coming with me to the
corrida.
Though he was fascinated by the sport, the history and theory of it, and so on, he had no stomach at all for the actual thing—”

“You’re going to spoil your story if you’re not careful,” Alex warned his mother.

“
Gracias, hijo,
you are right.” She gave me another wink. “So there we were at the
corrida
”—Lídia’s rolled
r
’s were a splendid percussive instrument all her own—“and the picadors had sunk their lances, and thank God not one of the horses had been gored; that would have done in poor Pepe, although I didn’t know it at the time. And then the
banderilleros
came running out and the first of them plants his
banderillo
into the neck of the bull and Pepe closes his eyes, and exactly (
ess-ACK-ly
) at that moment I feel a gush of blood you know where—walk on ahead, Alejandro, and order our coffees—and I said: ‘Listen, Pepe, I hate to tell you, but something very embarrassing has just happened and after the
corrida
you are going to have to help me.’ I was wearing a white dress, as I am now, only now I am past the time to worry about such accidents anymore. ‘After the bullfight,’ I said to Pepe, ‘I will not be able to rise from my seat until I have something to cover me from behind.’

“Well! Dear Pepe was overjoyed! He jumps up immediately. ‘
¡Voy en seguida!
I’ll go at once,
querida,
there is a lap robe in the boot of my car.’ ‘But we parked far away,’ I said. ‘If you go now you’ll miss the
faena
’—that’s the final third of the
corrida,
when the matador does his work with the
muleta
and then kills the bull. I begged him to stay but he wouldn’t hear of it, and that is exactly what happened, he missed the
faena.
By the time he returned with the lap robe, they had already cut off the tail and presented it to the matador. I proposed that we stay for the next fight, now that I was ‘covered,’ but Pepe wouldn’t hear of it. I tied the lap robe around my waist, like a sweater, and off we went for our cocktails. Pepe treated me like a delicate flower the rest of the afternoon and was in an extremely cavalier mood. Only later did I learn from a friend that my ‘accident’ had saved him from revealing he was squeamish about the sport he found so fascinating in theory. Despite his liking to call himself an old
torero,
Pepe lacked the stomach for watching an actual bullfight.”

I was itching to suggest that this was perfectly in keeping with Ortega’s transmigration theory; he was imagining himself inside the soul of the bull. But this was obviously one of Lídia’s pet stories, and at this early stage it seemed imprudent to try to impress her with my grasp of Ortega’s philosophy.

“Poor Pepe, it’s hard to believe he has been dead four years,” concluded Lídia, sailing ahead into Howard Johnson’s while I held the door for her.

Alex had ordered our coffees and bought the
Miami Star,
which was placed reverently in front of the space where I had sat across from him yesterday morning. It was even the same booth.

8-Inch Rainfall Slows
Mop-up After Tornado

Gabe Truro, the reporter who had commandeered my desk, and two other “field” reporters shared the byline for the banner story.

$5 Million
Loss Seen
In Miami

I skimmed the table of tornado-related stories at the bottom of page one, ticking off my contributions: “These Are Still in Hospital,” “How to Handle the Home Problems,” “Miamians Burn Up Long-Distance Wires,” and “What to Do if Another Comes,” with Lou Norbright’s snappy ending. Oh, good, here it was: “Man and Best Friend Reunited after Twister,” A7. Heart already contracting at the possibility someone had left off my byline, I rattled through to the page. Whew, no, there it was. Plus the story was
above the fold,
taking up three columns, with Jake Rance’s great photo. Wouldn’t Mr. Sprat be pleased! He’d probably gone out at daybreak to buy copies, one for himself and one for Lola. Now to relax and order my breakfast. I could check on my other stories later and look less avid about it.

“How many appearances do you have today, Emma?” Alex asked.

“Five, not counting the obituaries. But only one biggish one.”

“May I see the biggish one?” asked Lídia, who had seated herself next to me.

I folded the paper and slid it over to her.

“What will you have, Emma? Same as always?” Alex made it sound as if we’d been having breakfast together for years.

“No, I think I’ll have the blueberry pancakes today with bacon and a large orange juice. And some grits on the side, with melted butter.”

“Lídia?”

“Just a small baguette,” Lídia said, without glancing at the menu. “With two pats of butter,
not
melted, on the side.”

“My mother means a hard roll,” Alex explained to the waitress.

“Sorry, sir, but all our rolls are baked fresh every morning; we wouldn’t have any hard ones.”

“Well, then a
fresh
one will have to do,” said Lídia, sending her son a superior smirk. “With two pats of cold butter on the side.”

“Yes, ma’am. May I freshen up your coffee?”

“Please.” Lídia seemed on the verge of adding something else, then resolutely pressed her lips together.

“And you, sir?”

“I’ll have the fruit plate with cottage cheese again,” said Alex. Something was different about him today. Cross? Disturbed? Less in charge? I would have to think about it at work.

Lídia uttered another guttural chuckle as she read my story. “This is
muy simpática,
Emma, very dear—and so clever. You are totally inside the personality of this old man.”

“That’s his late wife in the picture frame,” I said. “He asked that we include her in the photo.”

“Yes, but anyone can see that now he is married to his dog,” said Lídia.

Our breakfasts came. I tucked into mine. Lídia pinched off a tiny piece of her Howard Johnson dinner roll, scrutinized it, buttered it slowly, and popped it in her mouth. She made a few perfunctory chewing motions and swallowed. “Well, it is certainly
soft,
” she said. “Almost like whipped cream.
Escucha,
Alejandro, we must do something about breakfast at the Julia Tuttle.
En seguida,
right away. Our Cuban guests must have their
desayuno.
”