Queen of the Underworld (37 page)

W
HEN ALL
the mourners were seated, the rabbi signaled for the lowering of the coffin, which had been poised on its trestles above the grave. Draping himself in the shawl, with no prefatory remarks this time, he began to chant once more in the plangent tongue. His singing voice was at least an octave higher than his speaking voice and brought prickles to my face.

I suddenly teared up as Aunt Stella’s coffin began its hydraulic descent into the freshly dug trench, beside which Paul had stationed himself. This was
final.
This was the end of Stella’s story, as experienced by herself. From now on her life would exist only in memories: the resourceful twice-exiled little woman who had rubbed unguents into my cheek and covered my black eye with compresses; the beloved aunt whose name Paul took, who had inspired him to start his club and had lent him the money.

Then I thought of Loney. How long would it be until I stood at her open grave? How could I bear it? And this image, along with some from last night in the upstairs bed at P. Nightingale’s, evoked full-fledged sobs.

“There’ll be other hideaways,” Paul had said, his voice so close to my ear I couldn’t see his face. “This wasn’t our first one and it won’t be our last. I feel I’ve always known you and always will. There’s something timeless about this thing we have. I sometimes feel I
am
you. Does that make any sense or does it sound crazy?”

“No, I feel the same.”

“I’ll be there for you, whenever you need me, and I think you’ll be there for me. I knew where you were today and you knew where I was. You were with me all day long and it made the day easier. You’re a sort of extra intelligence I carry around with me. When the men were dismantling the roulette table and lugging it piecemeal down to the van, I was hearing myself telling you the details, like a bedtime story. Then, of course, I had to install a safe, to make a reason for all that empty space behind the foxhunting painting. The place is already on the market, by the way. I called my friend Marty at home this morning. He says with the new upstairs kitchen we ought to get double what we paid for it. He was sad, though. A lot of friends are going to miss the hospitality at P. Nightingale’s.”

S
TELLA WAS
in the earth beside her sister, and Paul was receiving condolences. One of the first to reach him was Manny Lanning, who shoved his hand into Paul’s and began to speak in a low voice. I realized from the look of surprise on Paul’s face and then his bodily recoil that he had not expected this meeting and perhaps hadn’t even recognized the racketeer among his aunt’s mourners. Then Paul must have said something cutting, because the older man looked taken aback, though he quickly recovered his composure and even managed a hearty slap on Paul’s arm as he made his exit.

I introduced Paul to Marge and vice versa, getting the priorities right. My face was still teary, but after all, this had been Stella’s funeral. Marge told Paul she had been a faithful customer of Stella’s, and Paul thanked me for the feature on Stella and thanked us both for coming. “We’ll be in touch,” he said to me, keeping custody of the eyes, and I couldn’t resist saying, “And please thank Bev for her thoughtfulness.”

“A
VERY
personable man, Mr. Nightingale,” Marge remarked as she drove us back downtown.

“And his wife is just as wonderful a person as well,” I immediately chimed in.

“Yes, they usually are,” said Marge pleasantly, facing ahead with her equivocal smile.

22.

Days, she dons a white uniform and plays Florence Nightingale.

When the sun sets, she slithers into a bright sarong and does the hula-hula.

Lovely Luz (which means “light”) Aquino leads a double life.

A Filipina by birth, she serves as a dandy Hawaiian.

At Jackson Memorial Hospital she is known as Miss Aquino, RN. A very gifted nurse, say doctors.

In the entertainment world she is Luz, just as gifted as a hula dancer.

She was adjusting her Hawaiian costume for rehearsal at the Roney Plaza’s lush new Polynesian Gardens, where she is starring in the South Seas “Show of Shows.”

Luz came to Miami two years ago from New York, where she undulated hips and hands at the Hotel Lexington’s Hawaiian Room. She learned both nursing and dancing in the Philippines.

“I always wanted two careers,” she explained. “I love to help make people well. I also love to dance.”

One column inch of space to go. Now I needed a snappy punch line.

But what? The quote I’d just typed was pretty much the full extent of Luz’s contribution to the interview. My hospital contact Herman Melton, who’d proposed the story to me, had delivered Luz from Jackson Memorial to the Roney Plaza so our photographer could save time by snapping her in both nurse’s uniform and hula costume at the same place. Once there, the four of us were accosted by the hotel’s high-powered publicity director, “Ken,” who pressed on me as well as on the diffident Herman a sheaf of colorful press releases telling everything we wanted to know, and more, about the lush new Polynesian Gardens and the “Show of Shows” (“Outdoor Extravaganza! Hawaiian Luau! Flashing Swords! Tahitian Volcano! Hulas and Native Love Dances!”).

Miss Aquino in her pristine white uniform and cap was so demure and self-effacing I couldn’t imagine her drawing blood from a patient’s vein, much less swiveling her hips in native costume.

It didn’t facilitate matters that the assigned photographer was Jake Rance—being his usual corrosive self. Pipe clenched between his teeth, he bitched all the way to the Beach, murderously wielding the shift stick on his noisy Kharmann Ghia. (“They call this a
story
?”) Over Ken’s protests and Herman Melton’s apologies to Ken, Jake refused to snap the nurse pictures anywhere but in the dullest corridor, which took some finding in the plush hotel. (“It’s phoney enough that this
isn’t
Jackson Memorial, but I see no reason to advertise the amenities of the Roney Plaza
twice.
”) If I had been cowed by his unflattering comments during our rooftop trench coat session, no wonder the shy Filipino nurse looked ready to flee. I was surprised when she returned barefoot—and smiling for the first time. Either Ken had fortified her with a pep talk, or she knew how appealing she looked in her sarong. Jake positioned her in the grass, in front of a totem pole stacked with grimacing Polynesian-god masks, and ordered her to dance. That’s when she came to life, enchanting us all. Jake went into action, lunging about on his polio leg, chanting, “Beautiful, beautiful . . . oh, that’s a knockout!”

“Watch my hands,” she told him, swaying and smiling. “They are telling a story.”

Luz began the sinuous Hawaiian dance, swaying with a liquid grace and intricate arm movements.

“Watch my hands,” she said, swaying lightly on the balls of her feet. “They tell a story.”

But who was watching the hands?

Not my proudest feature, and queasy-making on a couple of counts. “A very gifted nurse, the doctors say,” had come from Herman Melton’s mouth alone. And the ending was worthy of “Today’s Chuckle”—or Earl.

As I was pasting up my three sheets of triple-spaced copy to drop in Rod Reynolds’s metal basket, the double mahogany doors to the boardroom next to Mr. Feeney’s office swung open and released the editors from their afternoon meeting, minus Mr. Feeney, who was on vacation in Maine with his family. Lou Norbright was in command until mid-July.

I had been waiting to spring two new feature ideas, both timely and both concerning Cuba, on Rod as soon as he emerged from boardroom, but seeing that Lucifer was gliding alongside him back to our city desk, I postponed my trip to the ladies’ room and briskly rolled a blank sheet of paper into my typewriter, though I had nothing further to write.

“Well, Emma,” Rod greeted me, “I hear from Marge that your feature on that little perfume lady packed the house at Fisher’s Funeral Home this morning.”

Norbright, sinisterly tailored all in gray, white, and black today, flashed his gold-edged canine at nobody in particular. He seemed to float in the ether of his yet-to-be-revealed intentions toward the newsroom over which he now held sway.

“I just finished that hula-dancer nurse,” I told Rod. “I was about to put it in your basket.”

“That it?” He snatched up the streamer of copy, still smelling of glue. “Hmmm, ha! Ha, ha. Good girl. This kind of thing comes easy to you, huh?”

“
Moderately
so. It wasn’t all that big a challenge. I’m hoping Jake Rance’s pictures will bump it up a notch or two in pizzazz. She was such a completely different creature in her two outfits.”

“Good old pizzazz, eh?” Rod laughed, flinging off his seersucker jacket, de rigueur for the boardroom, and shoving up his shirtsleeves. “Though I’m not sure our Dean Ligon would approve of pizzazz.”

To Norbright he explained, “He was our ultratraditional J-school dean at Carolina.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” mused Norbright cheerfully.

His bright eyes behind their silver-rimmed glasses were trained on the sheet of paper in my typewriter as if something not to my advantage had suddenly appeared on its blank surface.

“I told Marge at our editorial meeting,” Rod informed me, “I said, ‘That was a beguiling story Emma wrote for you about the little perfumer on the Beach, Marge, but don’t go trying to kidnap her from the city desk.’ Didn’t I, Lou?”

“Oh, we’re keeping a close eye on Emma,” Norbright smilingly replied before gliding on his way.

“L
ISTEN,
R
OD,
have you got a minute?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, I have some ideas for features about the Cuban refugees staying at my hotel. They’re pouring in every day, and one’s a world-famous teacher and critic who just smuggled his dangerous memoirs out of Cuba in his new wife’s skirt, and the other escaped just yesterday in his family’s plane when their cattle ranch in Camagüey was confiscated by Castro. The soldiers slaughtered a twenty-thousand-dollar breeding bull for a
barbecue
and arrested—”

“Hey, slow down, Emma, let me get my book.”

He rummaged in a drawer and snatched out a dog-eared ledger of blue cloth with red leather corners and spine, bulging from things pasted into it.

“Oh, what’s that?”

“My futures book. Don’t tell me they left that out of your training.”

He was riffling through the dated pages at the hectic rate he did everything.

“Where you record the daily news calendar and store reminders for upcoming stuff,” I said.

Dean Ligon had done his job there, too; it was just that I had never met a futures book in person. I loved its archival appearance and determined to get one for myself as soon as I received my paycheck. What a perfect repository for my “appearances,” as Alex called them, plus jottings for future
Star
projects to further my own star. It would be my business record, to be kept separate from my “Go, Tar Heels!” plaints, pep talks, and fantasies.

“Okay,” said Rod, shoving up the loose cuff of his rolled-up right sleeve as he scribbled, “roasted a twenty-thousand-dollar breeding bull—and then what?”

After I had filled him in on both stories, he suggested I start on Don Waldo, since there were some sensitive issues about the Camagüey takeover.

“For a start, Joelle and Don are still running around loose in the countryside, representing the
Star
under the protection of the new regime, and we don’t want to embarrass them or put them in any jeopardy. The other thing is, John, our editorial page editor, is writing an editorial to run on Saturday, the day after Joelle and Don get back, in which he’ll state the
Star
’s position on the landgrabs—”

“What
is
the
Star
’s position?”

I could see from the city editor’s flung-up eyebrows that I had overstepped my humble-cub-reporter bounds, but he sportingly rallied.

“John’s still working on that. It’s not all that cut-and-dried, Emma. There are so many ramifications. Even Ike is being cautious in his pronouncements about Castro’s Cuba.”

I finished off the afternoon tracking down Don Waldo in the morgue—what there was of him. Moira Parks, having finished scissoring and storing Sunday’s bulky edition, was working on today’s, humming under her breath. Not in sight on her clipping table, but somewhere in the pile, if not already filed, was “Popular Perfumer Transformed Lives,” tucked into separate envelopes for Gant, Emma; Rossignol, Stella; Lapidus, Morris; Godfrey, Arthur; and Nightingale, Paul—I was glad to have added some more bulk to his file.

He should be on the feeder flight now, somewhere between Raleigh and Mountain City. For once,
he’d
had more time to think about
me
than the other way round. During the first leg of his journey, I had returned to the paper with Marge. (What an odd remark of hers, “They always are.” Was she intimating that she knew I was Paul’s lover? Had she herself had similar experiences?)

Then back over to the Beach again with crosspatch Rance, my interview with Luz at the Roney Plaza, back once more to the
Star,
with Jake growling about Ken and something called “space graft,” which I misunderstood as “space
graf,
” provoking another tirade: “No, graft, GRAFT, with a
t,
as in bribery and corruption. The sole aim of his despicable breed is jimmying free advertising into newspapers.”

I had composed my flimsy piece with its cheap punch line, been elevated sky-high by Rod’s warning Marge off trying to “kidnap” me from the city desk, only to be shot down again by Norbright’s oblique response.

Don Waldo’s
Star
file contained only two items. A non-bylined 1957 announcement, with a one-column head shot, of his upcoming lecture on
Don Quixote,
sponsored by the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Miami, free to the public; and a 1958 AP wire story containing Don Waldo’s “when reached by phone in Havana” reminiscences of his contemporary and friend Juan Ramón Jiménez, who had just died in exile in Puerto Rico. “When Juan Ramón was informed he had won the Nobel Prize in Poetry in 1956, his wife, Zenobia, was on her deathbed and he told reporters to go away, that his wife should have had the prize and he would not go to Stockholm. After Zenobia’s death he wrote no more poems.”