Queen of the Underworld (41 page)

T
HE LAST
time I’d boarded, the houseboat was in darkness and heavy rain, after Tess and I had unloaded the famous “dental equipment.” Now early evening sunshine sparkled on the wavelets of the bay and bathed the assembly of male statues on the deck in a warm golden light. At first I thought there was a new statue among them, a boy in a tunic, reclining on a low bench between two potted plants. But then he moved and at the same time Tess cried, “Oh, dear, are we late?”

“No, I’m early,” replied the figure in her thrilling contralto. “I’ve been looking forward to this smoke since noon.”

Rising from the bench, Ginevra, locks sculpted almost as short as Paul’s after his Saturday trim, took another drag on her cigarette, then extinguished it in the soil of a pot and carefully stored the remains in a silver case, which she dropped into a slim purse. She was absolutely dazzling in her white tunic dress—a cross between a goddess and a boy angel, on fire with the sultry golden evening light. Of course, up until now I had seen her in mere black-and-white newsprint or in washed-out color after having her stomach pumped.

“Well, Emma,” she said, wending her way gracefully through the throng of statues to offer me her hand, “as you see, I took your advice and said hello to your aunt.”

“Your haircut is spectacular,” I could only say.

“Thank you. It was time for a change.”

“Yes, isn’t it a triumph?” said Tess. “Not many faces could bear up under a cut like that. Mine certainly couldn’t, even when I was at my peak. Emma, while I freshen up, will you pour Ginevra and yourself daiquiris in the galley and show her around? The pitcher’s in the fridge. I used limes this time; the peach was maybe a little too potent for us.”

“Goodness, what a layout,” said Ginevra, taking in the velvets and brocades, the bust of the Roman soldier with his lavender boa, the porcelain and the peacock feathers, the theater posters covering the walls.

“Not exactly what you’d expect of a seagoing interior,” I said.

“To whom does all this belong?”

That refined “whom” again! Edith Vine had certainly left her imprint.

“He directs summer theater up in Connecticut.”

“Ah, that figures.”

“They’ve had this arrangement for years. Tess boat-sits in the summer and rents out her Coral Gables apartment for the extra income. Wait till you see the mirror collection in the bathroom, there’s about a thousand and one of them. Lord, she’s even frosted up the glasses. I hope you like daiquiris.”

“As well as anything. I’m more of a social sipper than a drinker. Smoking is my vice. I started at twelve. My husband hates it, but I’ve managed to cut down to four a day and I no longer smoke inside the house or in the car. Thank you, that’s plenty. And may I have a glass of water, too?”

“Coming up. Tall or short glass?”

“The taller the better. Thanks. How is the good old
Miami Star
? I read your delightful story about the old man and his dog. And Edwin and I were relieved at how little was said about my mishap. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but we’re grateful. Three times in a row is hard to live down.”

“Oh, well.” I took a hefty slurp of daiquiri. “It was deadline and I just called in the bare facts. I was sorry there wasn’t time to do a real interview, but then the more I thought it over afterwards, the more I felt your story now belonged in another context.”

“And what context would that be?”

She was sipping her water, the daiquiri so far untouched. Her wide-spaced smoky eyes were trained astutely on me. From a distance, with the cropped hair, she could have passed for a beautiful sixteen-year-old of either sex, but up close the eyes were too shrewd and the mouth, though as finely formed as the rest of her face, was a little hard.

“Less newspapery. More like a story behind a story.” I fueled myself with more daiquiri to free up my powers of expression. “My first day on the
Star,
one of the older reporters took me to lunch and told me about the ‘Queen of the Underworld’ series. I went back to work and devoured your file. I felt Norbright had taken something that belonged to me, even though I was a sophomore in high school when the story broke. I felt this strange affinity with you.”

“Yes, you said that at the hospital. I remembered it.” She finally took a sip of the daiquiri, then went back to her water.

“Bisbee, that’s the reporter who took me to lunch, said Norbright made you into a modern-day Persephone.”

“Oh, yes, kidnapped by the Lord of the Underworld while picking flowers in a field. Only I was selling fruit behind a stand. Miss Edith always called her Proserpine. I didn’t keep a scrapbook of the trial. After I’d been in therapy for a year with Edwin, he gave me his complete set of clippings and suggested I make up a ritual for myself and burn them. I did: I drove over to the beach one night and made a little bonfire.”

“Did it make a difference?”

“It must have. Not long after that I was able to let Edwin persuade me I wouldn’t destroy his life if we got married.”

“Did—?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“I know what you were going to ask. I didn’t destroy his, but I came close to destroying mine. Since I was old enough to stand on a crate and count money, I have held down a job, and I have always been good at my jobs. Whether I was selling oranges and peaches to tourists driving up and down the Sunshine Highway or coaching the Palm Island girls in deportment before a date, I was good at what I did. Even when Prince Charming’s uncle was sending me to the Biscayne Academy, I worked for Miss Edith; I typed all her correspondence and cut all the mimeograph stencils. I’d learned touch-typing in high school. And then suddenly Dr. Brown made an honest woman of me and I lived in a nice house on Key Biscayne, with a maid who came twice a week to clean, and even the neighbors who remembered the trial were friendly. I was their exotic rescued neighborhood pet. Wives were always asking me to have lunch at the club, but after a while I begged off. I couldn’t take those boozy lunches, they put me out for the rest of the day. Meanwhile Edwin’s practice got bigger and bigger and I withdrew more and more into myself. Then I found I couldn’t sleep, but I didn’t want to stay awake, and that’s when we got into the sleeping-potion habit. Sometimes I took it in the afternoon, when I could track down where he’d hidden it; I couldn’t wait to conk out. It wasn’t until my third trip to the emergency room last Wednesday that it finally dawned on me what I was missing—and you, showing up as you did, played an important part, Emma.”

“I did?”

Of course Tess chose this moment to emerge from her freshening-up, changed into a low-necked blouse and slacks and sandals, and emanating Joy.

“If anyone needs to go to the head, please excuse the steamed-up mirrors from my shower. Oh, good, I see you’ve made a start on the daiquiris—at least you have, Emma, you need a freshener.”

“I prepared her for the mirrors,” I said, to deflect attention from Tess’s refilling of my glass.

“Yes. They can be rather alarming if you’re not prepared for them.” Tess went into her amusing spiel about the mirrors for the benefit of her new guest. “I usually prefer to keep my eyes closed when I’m on the john, but some of them can be useful if you need a particular close-up of yourself.” She poured herself a daiquiri. “Well, cheers, girls. It’s so good to have you here, Ginevra. I’m sorry we didn’t get acquainted sooner.”

“So am I,” replied Ginevra, clicking her glass to each of ours and taking another small sip, immediately followed by water.

A motorboat passed and the waters of the bay rocked Tess’s floating summer home. Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, now carrying poignant associations with Alex’s departure, presided over our “girls’ ” salon. Ginevra was only a year older than Alex.

Damn it, what had Ginevra been about to say about my playing an important part?

“I hope you don’t mind,” Tess was saying to Ginevra. “I gave a thought to clearing his dining table over there, but”—she waved helplessly at the Roman soldier and the peacock feathers and all the framed snapshots—“it was simply beyond me. However, I think we’ll actually be cooler up here on our counter stools.”

Out from the fridge came the orange Fiestaware platter. “Now, I’m not going to pretend I made all these cold salads from scratch. There’s this wonderful deli on Miracle Mile. The only thing I did make, Emma, is your grandmother’s seabreeze salad. I got up an hour early this morning to do it.”

“That’s really sweet of you, Tess.” It would have been churlish to add,
It must have been hard, seeing you were up so late loading dental equipment.

Now Tess was relating the story about Loney’s seabreeze salad and how Loney had said to Tess, when Tess had come to lick her wounds with us in Mountain City, “Well, why shouldn’t we be festive?
You’re
here.”

I was wondering whether the next story would be Tess being blown away in the hurricane of never-mind-what-year when Tess instead surprised me by comparing Loney with Edith Vine.

“They are both
gentlewomen
from a bygone era. Or, I regret to say, in Miss Edith’s case,
was.
We won’t see
their
stature again.”

And here was Ginevra replying as if on cue (okay, Tess, so I underestimated your interviewing skills), “I’m sorry Miss Edith passed away before I got a chance to explain. I still dream about her. Sometimes we’re sitting under her ficus trees and I’m telling her the whole thing, from beginning to end. I think she would have understood—Emma, how did you put it?—I think Miss Edith had enough wisdom and kindness to be able to hear the story behind the story. Once she said, ‘Ginevra, let’s you and me start another school.’ ”

“She said that to you?” Tess looked envious.

“Only in a dream, I meant.” Ginevra uttered a sorrowful throaty laugh. “In real life, she would have said, ‘Let’s you and
I.
’ ”

Shared laughter. Then Tess said, “I have to tell you about the time she was trying to break an Alabama deb of her diphthongs. This was after I became Miss Miami Beach and hadn’t found anyone I wanted to marry, so I was teaching at the academy . . . “

Out in the bay a larger craft zoomed by, and here came the high waves, sloshing against the deck, rocking the houseboat so violently I felt myself tipping sideways on the stool. The second of those two Cinzanos Lídia had sent up to my room probably had been one too many.

After a bleep of lost time, I heard myself saying in a woolly voice that I needed to visit the head.

“Oh, Emma, love, don’t tell me I’ve gone and got you sozzled again.”

“Oh, no, I’m perfectly fine. I just need to . . . say hello to those thousand and one mirrors behind the red door.”

Managing not to fall off my stool, I got up and swayed off to the head.

Once inside, I splashed cold water on my face, then decided to help myself at Tess’s cosmetics table. I slapped on some orange-smelling cold cream so rich it required a dozen tissues to wipe it off. I followed up with a toner “For Mature Skin,” then experimented with a liquid foundation that felt like velvet.

After a brief toilet break, remembering to flush, I saluted all the mirrors—round, square, heart-shaped, Art Deco, framed in seashells, the masks of Comedy and Tragedy—with various snippets of my anatomy, and then curled up on the soft rug, still damp from Tess’s shower, and took long, even breaths until things stopped spinning.

I could hear them laughing and talking on the other side of the door, the oft-repeated mantra of Miss Edith’s name acting on my senses like a lullaby.

“O
H MY
Lord, Emma. You poor child. Your mother would kill me if she saw you wrapped around the toilet like that. What do you say to spending the night on board again? I can have you back first thing in the morning. I have to be at the office at seven.”

“Unloading all those toothbrushes—”

“Oh, I can give you a toothbrush, and I can lend you a nightgown.”

“No, I need to get back. I need to spend tonight at my hotel.”

“I’ll be glad to take her back,” Ginevra said.

“Well, she’s perfectly welcome to stay here again. But it’s as you wish, Emma. Ginevra, the Julia Tuttle Hotel is right across from the Dupont Plaza.”

“I know where it is. Edwin has his office suite at the Dupont Plaza.”

“W
HERE IS
this, Ginevra?”

“It’s the beach. I thought you needed some air first.”

“It’s awfully dark for the beach. Where are the hotels?”

“This is Crandon Park Beach. Where I made a bonfire of those newspaper clippings.”

“Where’s Crandon Park?”

“Halfway across Rickenbacker Causeway. Farther on comes Key Biscayne, where Edwin and I live.”

“Where is your famous Palm Island?”

“You’d want to take the next causeway, the MacArthur, for South Beach. The turnoff for Palm Island is halfway across.”

“Have you ever gone back? I mean, just to look around.”

“No, it doesn’t interest me anymore. That was another time.”

“It’s very good of you to walk up and down with me like this. I feel a little better. At least I’m not seeing two of everything anymore.”

“It was very good of you to show up when you did at the hospital. One good turn deserves another.”

“What did you . . . ?”

“Yes, Emma?”

“I forgot what I was going to ask. These sweet alcohol drinks are just
poison.
I really must learn—”

“Yes. There were a couple of my girls I used to take on these night walks over on Palm Island. If I’d got to you earlier this evening, before you went to sleep in the john, I would have advised you to stick your finger down your throat, bring it all up, before it started circulating. Mind you, that’s not a smart remedy for everyday use, but it does get the alcohol out. The best remedy of all is not to take the alcohol
in.
”

“Your girls, the night walks . . . ?”

“They weren’t supposed to drink on dates. There’s nothing appealing about a woman who’s had too much to drink. I should know. My mother was a drunk. Just order a single cocktail, I instructed them. And always ask for a glass of water on the side. For every sip of the cocktail, take three sips of water. But some of them disobeyed, especially the college girls. They thought they were immune. They considered themselves in a different class from the rest of us, they just thought it was cool to supplement their allowances this way. How are you feeling now, Emma? Have you remembered what you forgot to ask me?”