Queen of the Underworld (3 page)

My first impression of the Julia Tuttle was a letdown, followed by a distinct relief that I could just be myself here. Based on my furtive Christmas stay at the Kenilworth over on the Beach, paid for by someone else, I had expected more glitter and swank in a Miami hotel, even the kind I could afford. Tess was the only platinum blonde in sight, and there was none of that high-gloss decor or those snooty personnel strutting around to make you feel unstylish. A black man in a striped bib apron whom Tess addressed as Clarence loaded my suitcases onto a trolley. The only other visible staff member was a morose-looking desk clerk in a pleated shirt worn outside the pants and a few strips of hair plastered over his bald pate. His countenance brightened when Tess introduced us, and the next thing I knew he was handing me three letters, including one from Mother and one from Loney.

When I saw the creamy unstamped third envelope with its elegant red logo in the upper left corner, my heart sustained an electric surge, even though I would have been furious had that exact envelope not been waiting for me. I slipped it quickly beneath the others as Tess was conversing with the desk clerk in her sensual, tongue-tripping Spanish, which made her seem like a different version of herself. She switched back into English while discussing my arrangements.

“Is Alex here, Luís? I’d like him to meet Emma.” To me she said, “That’s the manager I was telling you about.”

“No,
señora,
is his bridge game Sunday afternoon.”

“Oh, of course, it’s Sunday, isn’t it? I’m confused because we’re working today, Doctor Hector is starting a root canal for a patient in pain.”

As we crossed the Mediterranean-tiled lobby where Clarence waited with my bags by the elevator, an arresting family tableau caught my eye. A pretty woman wearing a pillbox hat with veil and a stylish traveling suit was reading aloud to a little girl who sat beside her on a love seat flanked by potted palms and surrounded by a stockade of matching suitcases. The girl supported two solemn-faced porcelain dolls on her lap in the laissez-faire way a loving mother might balance two well-behaved offspring who could be depended on to stay put. The aloof faces of all three seemed to be equally riveted on the woman’s sprightly reading—
“a la tarde . . . los niños saltaban . . . Platero . . . giraba sobre sus patas”
—and I was elated that merely in passing I could understand enough phrases (“in the afternoon . . . the children were jumping . . . Platero . . . spun on his hooves”) to recognize Juan Ramón Jiménez’s tale of his pet donkey,
Platero and I,
which we’d studied in our first semester of college Spanish. Close by them stood a strikingly handsome man in wilted white linen, frowning and looking slightly beside himself as he ticked off items on a list with a silver pencil. Meanwhile, a chauffeur carried in more luggage to add to the pile already surrounding them.

“Ah, God, here come some more,” Tess murmured angrily as we passed. “If Fidel doesn’t stop breaking his promises, he’s going to wake up one morning and find all the good people gone.”

My room was on the fifth floor of the twelve-story Julia Tuttle, and Tess, having sent Clarence away with a folded bill before I could get my purse unzipped, proceeded to check out my closet, drawers, and bathroom. I went first thing to the window above the air conditioner to see what I would be looking out on for the next few months. It wasn’t the ocean view, which the front rooms had, but the vista was agreeable and in its way less lonely. The Miami River, with its drawbridge and boat traffic, was to my left, the hotel’s Olympic-size pool, surrounded by blue-and-white-striped cabanas, gleamed invitingly below, and to the right was a portion of Miami skyline, including, Tess proudly pointed out, as though she had put it there herself, the top of the
Star
building, where I would start work tomorrow.

Tess explained that patients sometimes had adverse reactions, and she had to remain at the office until they felt well enough to travel, so she couldn’t be with me my first evening. She named the eating places in walking distance, a White Castle and a Howard Johnson’s, and we made plans to have dinner the next evening.

“And tomorrow night, we’ll really celebrate,” she promised as she headed gaily off to the root canal.

I had concealed my relief, satisfying her that I welcomed an early night in order to be fresh for the job tomorrow. As soon as I had assured myself of that third letter in the packet Luís handed over, I had begun worrying what lie to tell Tess, who had no idea I knew a soul but her in Miami.

As soon as I was alone, I threw myself on the bed and opened the creamy unstamped envelope with its Bal Harbour address.

Will call for you at your hotel at 7 p.m.

Paul

Then I flew into action, unpacking my bags and lining the drawers and shelves with the sheets of lavender-scented paper supplied by my grandmother. Loney had sent them, along with six pairs of stockings and a new Vanity Fair slip, for my graduation, from which “her heart” had kept her home. Which was true in the equivocal sense that she stayed behind with her mild angina to take care of my three little half siblings so Mother and Earl would be free to enjoy the trip alone.

After arranging my things in their Loneyed nests, I plugged up the tub, ran it half full of hot water, hung tomorrow’s work outfit and tonight’s dress on the shower-curtain rod, and shut them up in the bathroom to steam out the wrinkles. I then flopped back down on the bed to read my other letters.

Loney, who did not think of herself as a writer, had come through with her usual page-and-a-half nosegay of faith, hope, and unconditional love, with one of her observant sprigs of advice thrown in, like a florist’s free fern.

. . . If you’ll just remember, Emma, that you can’t be everybody at once, you’ll do fine.

My mother, whose thwarted desire was to have her writing talents recognized by the world, had gone all out with a four-page single-spaced masterpiece typed on Corrasable Bond, written and mailed the Monday before my graduation so it would be sure to be here to greet me. It was both an idyllic recounting of our best times together, mostly from the pre-Earl period, and her triumphal prophecy of my eventual success in garnering the laurels that had eluded her. She did not relay any news or anecdotes about my little half siblings. This was strictly a mother-daughter valedictory. Just skimming it elicited tears; it had probably, I thought, made the writer weep while typing it. To confront it sentence by sentence, which I postponed doing, would bring guilt and sorrow. She was the wounded comrade I had to leave behind in the cross fire of her conflicted destiny.

I returned to the note that had been hand-delivered to the Julia Tuttle, rereading and savoring it. I allowed myself to be the person who had pulled out a fresh sheet of club stationery from his desk drawer over in Bal Harbour and scrawled this ultrarestrained welcome. I imagined the images going through his head as he anticipated our reunion tonight, until the power of my own imagination brought on a little shudder of rapture. Whereupon I returned the note to its envelope and tucked it midway into the new “Go, Tar Heels!” spiral-bound notebook, which was to be the first of my Miami journals. I still had the rest of the afternoon to get through. Perhaps I would sample the pool.

2.

T
ESS HAD SAID THAT
Miami was having a spate of rainy weather, and sure enough, by midafternoon on Sunday, the day of my arrival, when I had just about motivated myself to try the Julia Tuttle’s Olympic-size pool, the skies opened and I felt reprieved. I had nothing except a raincoat to wear over my bathing suit, an ancient but flattering long-waisted racer from my swim-team days at St. Clothilde’s, and I was shy about crossing the lobby of what aspired to be a European-style family hotel without the proper attire.

Now I could wash my hair and fuss with it at leisure and continue to do what I liked doing best anyway: lying in bed reading or writing. I decided not to venture out to the White Castle; even one of their bitty burgers might take the edge off my evening appetite. Paul was always asking me was I hungry, and he was so pleased when I said yes. He equated youth with being hungry all the time (and with being able to eat vast amounts without getting fat), so he expected it of me.

The clanging of the drawbridge sent me scurrying for my distance glasses and then back to the window to see what manner of craft would be passing through its portals. If it was a yacht, I would be a success in my career and my love life; if a sailboat with a tall mast, I would have a pleasant workmanlike life but be unremembered after my death; if some dreary drudge of a vessel, I was slated for abject failure and loneliness, starting immediately.

It was a yacht, a fairly big one named
Dixie Naiad,
with three middle-aged people, two men and a woman, in skimpy bathing suits that would have been obscene without their tans. They wore big-brimmed yellow rain hats. I could feel how the downpour gave them a thrill of empowerment, like having a playful servant-god overturning buckets on their sleek brown bodies when they were all but naked anyway. I could hear the loud hollow rain plops as they would sound from inside the hats, and yet their hairdos would still be in place for dinner. They could no longer eat anything they wanted but were making a pretty good effort to keep in shape, considering they probably docked at a five-star restaurant every night. A married couple and a friend? The husband’s friend or brother? The wife’s secret lover? All we knew about Tess’s calamity was that she had fallen in love with her husband’s much-younger brother. If she had been more cunning, would she now be aboard her husband’s yacht, with the young brother along for the ride and still in the picture, all three keeping their secrets to themselves under their matching rain hats?

Now they were waving to someone on shore, or else just generally waving, as the passing privileged tend to do, whenever envious peons might be looking on. If that striking Cuban family I’d seen in the lobby happened to be looking out at this same view from their room, their hearts could well be aching for some lovely yacht of their own left behind in Cuba. Or maybe they had come over in it, and were expecting, like so many others, that Fidel would bite the dust any minute, so they could go back and reclaim their usurped lives. Yes, amigos, wave and pass through, the Cuban father or mother might be saying inwardly in Spanish to the
Dixie Naiad
crew, you never know what turn of fortune waits to capsize
you
round the next bend.

Patas
were the feet of an animal;
pies
the feet of people. The Cuban woman had been reading the little girl
Platero and I,
and I had recognized it! My mother had once worn a pillbox hat with a veil like that. How could I have been so stupid as to have sent my Spanish-English dictionary back to Mountain City?

I washed my hair and set it on rollers to get the curl out of it so I could loop it into the sleek French twist Paul liked. I then settled back onto propped-up pillows in my Julia Tuttle bed, which was an old-fashioned double—in other words, hardly more than a single—with a real headboard and footboard. All the furniture in this room could have come straight from my grandmother’s. Whatever “renovations” the owner had carried out must have applied only to the bigger rooms or those overlooking the bay, though my light blue walls did have the look and the smell of a recent paint job.

I flipped to the back pages of the “Go, Tar Heels!” notebook and reviewed the notes I’d been collecting on recent top stories in the
Miami Star.
I don’t know quite what I expected, my first day of work: some sort of quiz, perhaps.

Name the most important news developments of international significance in the last three months.

Well, of course, everyone knows the Reds want us out of West Berlin and they’re threatening to spoil the Geneva Conference; and Castro’s “Robin Hood” land grabs continue to bring joy to the peasants and fury to the likes of Arthur Vining Davis; and Venezuela and all sorts of other people are arming Nicaraguan rebels. And on the home front Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column, “My Day,” scolds Washington for its lack of both imagination and breadth of world vision and declares herself frustrated by the Democratic congressional leaders’ “want of comprehension about the real needs of the world.” And Governor Earl Long of Louisiana, shouting hog calls and obscenities, is committed, released, and returned to the mental hospital.

Also, I was hoarding for the opportune moment of newsroom repartee an AP wire story buried inside the June 1
Miami Star
about Castro’s plans to tax the society pages in Havana’s newspapers: $1 per item, $1 per adjective, $5 for each square inch of photograph of a person mentioned in a story, and $100 for each title of nobility of a Cuban national mentioned in a story.

I could hear myself remarking casually to a fellow reporter, perhaps to the city editor himself, “Better watch my adjectives, Castro’s charging a dollar apiece for them now.”

After reviewing these notes, I flipped back to the pristine first page of the notebook, which had been awaiting this moment, and entered the date, time, and place of composition, including my room number, 510. After announcing my arrival in Miami, I listed a few impressions, including Tess’s continued good looks and the elegant displaced Cuban family in the lobby, and gave myself a pep talk about what I intended to accomplish at the
Star.

I then switched over into my Paul-cryptography, worked out over the past year of our secret liaison, so that should these or any similar jottings fall into an interloper’s hands, he or she would assume that the diarist was deliberately switching from reportage into the continuation of a fantasy romance between a distinguished alien from another world and the young protégée he has been sent to protect and instruct so that she can fulfill her destiny.

In this installment, the young woman is anticipating a reunion with her alien guardian-lover and, in her impatience to be joined with him after a separation of six months, frequently crosses the line into purple prose. The interloper could either hop aboard the passion train or watch it go by and scoff, “What a caprice! Of course, this could never happen in real life.”