Queen of the Underworld (42 page)

“It was something about . . . something you were going to say about my showing up at the hospital Wednesday night.”

“Then I know what it was. Your appearing beside my gurney when you did, standing above me in your workday skirt and blouse, and your slightly awry French twist, your notebook all poised to capture my every utterance . . . You made me realize—I was still pretty groggy, but I said to myself, ‘That’s it, Ginevra! That young woman’s got exactly what you’ve been dying for these past six years.’ ”

“Which was what?”

“A job, Emma, a
job.
”

24.

W
HAT DO YOU CALL
those passages in a narrative where the hero is neither at the beginning nor even in the middle of his life’s journey? When he’s not yet setting forth in a new prologue or winding up a stage of his life in an epilogue?

Where was the word to describe . . . well . . . my life at the Broward bureau?

Even a word like “becalmed” was equivocal. Jiménez uses
“tranquilos”
in his poem to describe a hiatus after his boat has blundered into some tremendous thing. In English, “tranquil” can mean anything from peaceful to “not excitable; not preoccupied.” Well, life at the Broward bureau was not excitable, and not peaceful, either, but I
was
preoccupied, much of the time, with how to profitably endure my exile there and how to prize (another equivocal word, but with that grace note of achievement) my way out.

I refused to think of myself as
stuck.
Being becalmed was not the same as being hellishly stuck, like the Ancient Mariner. Juan Ramón’s boat might be arrested, but by the end of the poem it is sitting on an undercurrent of hopeful energy, and that is why I chose “becalmed” over “tranquil” in my translation. Quite possibly, I was “in the new,” but just hadn’t gotten my bearings yet.

Going back to Loney’s magazine serials, where would I be?

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

Already, it was unsuitable. There was nothing remotely resembling a love interest in Fort Lauderdale. And the carryover love interest from Miami, Paul the married man from Miami Beach, wouldn’t be allowed near Loney’s magazines on the far end of a ten-foot pole. Paul was flying down next week, to finish emptying Stella’s house on Espanola Way (a perfumer who had read my article was interested in buying Stella’s business) and to attend the closing of P. Nightingale’s, which had been bought by a Jewish foundation. We would have one of our good evenings together. I ardently anticipated a mutual refueling in the room he had reserved at the Diplomat.

Alex possibly could have made it into a Loney serial, had our farewell kiss been steamy, but it wasn’t, even with the
Casablanca
background of whirring propellers on a nighttime airfield. I missed our conversations and worried about him.

Almost every day in the
Star
there were ominous news items. “Broward Deputies Prevent Takeoff” reported on a moonlit raid, in which undercover customs agents seized a cache of arms believed bound for Cuba at deserted airfield in Fort Lauderdale (
our
airfield!): thirty-five rifles with telescopic sights, fifteen Browning automatics, three Thompson light machine guns, eighty boxes of .30-caliber ammunition, and twenty boxes of Browning automatic ammo (aka “sample toothpastes and floss”).

So far, Tess and Doctor Magnánimo had not made it into any illegal-export-of-arms headlines. Broward’s political writer, Lance Moseley, a sweet middle-aged man with fur rather than hair on his scalp, covered this beat, along with police and crime.

My beats were:

the Port Authority commissioners meetings and anything to do with the Everglades (the Port Authority and Everglades person was on vacation);

the South Florida State Psychiatric Hospital (an Alma Olsen staple);

any women’s stories that weren’t about “society” (Broward’s society editor, Candice McGee, an aging Southern belle, had the monopoly on those, always consulting her bible, the
Social Index
—she herself was in it—before starting a story).

Though I had inaugurated my Broward career with a splash of color (“A pair of flaming undershorts saved the life of Richard Mills, 47, who was lost for three nights in the Everglades” was my lead—the story made the front page of the Miami edition), I didn’t need much empathy or much time to figure out that, to Kyle Breckinridge, our bureau chief, I was to be his vexation, his devilment, the daily hair in his soup.

Pausing beside my desk the first day while I rattled off a story, he took me in with a baffled incredulousness, and, after a moment, asked: “How can you type with those long fingernails?”

He and Alma Olsen were hand in glove. (Talk about fingernails, hers could have used a good nailbrush, for a start.) Both from Wisconsin, though they hadn’t met until they came to the bureau, they were kind of a brother-and-sister team, midthirties-ish and complacently unkempt, with dirty-blond hair and plodding personalities. He was married, with “two and a half children,” and she was single. In the three days she was “showing me the ropes” before flying off to her mother’s bedside for an indefinite leave of absence, she and Kyle took frequent coffee breaks, and I could imagine the kinds of things they couldn’t wait to say about me as they headed out the door.

A
LMA AND
I had gotten off to an unpropitious start on Wednesday when she came down from Broward to pick me up at the Julia Tuttle. Lídia, with her flair for an occasion and for self-dramatization, had gathered the entire staff, including Sunday’s church recruits, to wave me off from the front steps. It was a scene out of a Victorian novel: “Farewell to the Young Mistress.”

“You certainly have made a lot of friends in one week” was Alma’s flat comment as she drove us away in her no-nonsense brown-and-tan Ford Fairlane.

“Actually, a week and three days,” I corrected, flattered by Lídia’s little send-off.

Long before we got to the city limits of Fort Lauderdale, I knew Alma had shut down her receptors to me. I was already the cuckoo in the sparrow’s nest, the enemy to be carefully watched in order to be hindered and restrained.

I cannot tell myself why

You hold me back.

I do not know what the matter is.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, “El Más Mío”

So that’s where you got it, Bartleby. I found it in your volume of Jiménez.

T
HE LESS
said about Alma’s sparrow’s nest, the better. Minimal set of Danish-modern furniture, brown fabric. Alma’s weekend seashell collection marching across every surface. Writhing driftwood shapes blocking your way between rooms, snagging your clothes. No air conditioner, no TV—not that I had even once availed myself of the black-and-white set in Room 510 at the Julia Tuttle.

But now, on a certain weekday evening, Ingrid Bergman was going to be the governess in a TV production of
The Turn of the Screw.
The
Star
had run a laudatory piece about it that morning, and I was so desperate to see it that I considered—for about half a second, that is—throwing myself on the hospitality of the two unfriendly gents who rented the downstairs part of Alma’s house. I knew they had a TV, because I heard it every night. They refinished and upholstered furniture, and were always loading and unloading their van, but for the entire month I had been here they had succeeded in avoiding me. One morning, as I clopped down the outside stairs on the way to work, they actually scurried back inside their apartment to keep from having to confront me.

It was starting. From below came Ingrid’s rich voice with its distinctive cadences—I could hear only the tones, not the words. She was talking to a man. It must be the employer, the uncle in London who never wanted to be “bothered” about the children in the country.

I had purchased a ledger identical to Rod Reynolds’s futures book and borrowed a glue pot and scissors from the office, and I was sitting on Alma’s uncomfortable sofa, having dared to remove the seashells from the coffee table so I could lay my things out and proceed efficiently.

I first pasted in my Miami “appearances,” except for the ones I had sent to Loney.

From below I heard the children’s voices; the governess must have arrived at Bly. From somewhere else in my head I heard Lou Norbright saying, “You’re good at color. The next step is for you to learn how the world works in black-and-white so you can put together the big picture.”

For God’s sake, Lucifer, give me a break. In one week and three days, I met a gangster walking a dog, sat behind his notorious boss at a funeral, became friends with the ex-madam who made your name, and helped two Cubans smuggle arms out of Florida. Shouldn’t that count for something toward the big picture?

As I scissored my Broward stories, I felt close to Moira Parks. How many thousands of times her thumb and forefinger must have wielded those massive shears, slicing and separating the destinies, tucking each subject into its proper envelope, presiding over the patterns and the narratives—at least for those who
had
public narratives—right up until she clipped your final story.

I was alive and unhappy on all my cylinders, but I did not feel vanquished, not even in the dreary Broward office on its unshaded, dusty avenue, with its edgy, unglamorous staff—excepting maybe Candice McGee, who had a subversive streak and a wicked talent for mimicry. As long as I had this urge to keep track of myself and put my exile in perspective, I would not be vanquished.

“Saberse Transplantar.” Know how to transplant yourself. That was one of the chapters in Don Waldo’s little book of essays,
Pensamientos y Argumentos,
from Alex’s box. It was not in an English translation, so I had been slogging through it with my dictionary, trying to finish before I drove down next week in Alma’s car to interview him. (Rod Reynolds had let me keep this Miami assignment as a farewell present.)

“Know how to transplant yourself,” Baltasar Gracián advises in Maxim 198 of his
Oráculo,
that canny handbook for getting on in life. “There are plants and persons who are esteemed only after transplanting themselves,” the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit tells us. “Some who were scorned as fools in their own little corner attain worldly eminence in a foreign place.”

But as every exile knows, the obverse must also be argued. Certain natures who flourished like the reigning bullfrog in their native bog might find their lordly song squelched or altogether extinguished (
apagado
) upon being relocated in a foreign pond.

Marisa had written one note on Julia Tuttle stationery. Lídia had thrown Luisa a birthday pool party, complete with balloons and piñata and exiled Cuban children like herself. “And just in case that
esbirro
Fidel isn’t out by September, Enrique and I have enrolled Luisa in Assumption, a very good Catholic school on Brickell Avenue. However, Hortensia at the UN continues to hear promising rumors of the training camp—the CIA is involved now, they say! Don Waldo has accepted a professorship at the University of Miami, and he and Altagracia will continue to live in their suite at the Julia Tuttle. Lídia says she refuses to let them go.”

B
EHIND
A
LMA’S
house was a chicken farm. Imagine the early mornings, when the sky grows light at six, and the heat and the smells press through the bedroom screens. After I had researched Baltasar Gracián, I was going to have to look up chickens. Unlike the birds I had grown up with—a peep here, a twitter there, rising into a dawn chorus—these chickens all seemed to start squawking at once.

My French twist was always wilting in the humidity—a far cry from Ginevra’s affectionate description of it as “slightly awry.” The Carolina-coed shoulder-length hair had to go.

I walked six doors down to the beauty shop on South Andrews Avenue and asked for a short haircut. Not as short as Ginevra’s; I didn’t have the facial scaffolding. I also treated myself to a manicure and bought a new platinum nail polish. “You are a sight for sore eyes in this office,” said Candice McGee when I returned. “How would you like to come to Boca with me on Saturday for the fall fashion show? You’ll be my guest at the Boca Raton Hotel for lunch.”

E
LSEWHERE IN
the world, Marilyn Monroe, married to playwright Arthur Miller, went into a New York hospital to fix a “baby problem” so she could conceive; “Satchmo” was gravely ill with pneumonia in Spoleto (he “blew himself out”); Queen Elizabeth II of England was expecting her third baby; there were five thousand Castro-hating counterrevolutionaries training in the Dominican Republic; Princess Grace took a royal splash in the pool with the fifteen-month-old prince of Monaco; Hawaii became the fiftieth state; a thirteen-year-old mom was divorced in Columbia, Missouri; and Cuba had broken off diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic.

Alex hadn’t written, but what did I expect? A thick college-boy missive with one of those pennants stuck on the front of the envelope:
Anti-Castro U
? I had planned to know him for life. He would be that precious gift, an adoring male friend you could tell anything to. I tried to imagine him learning to load and shoot an assault weapon.

My Broward clippings were pasted up to date in my ledger. The Seminole twin papooses born in Dania; Broward’s only woman plastic surgeon attending the International Plastic Surgeon Congress in London; Port Authority commissioners up for reelection commenting on how they got through election day; a hospital custodian fixing his hi-fi antenna electrocuted on his windy roof; the stowaway who begged the Port Everglades immigration officer who dug him out of a cruise ship’s linen closet to put him in jail rather than send him back to Cuba.