Queen of the Underworld Page 2

  His backhandings and beatings and sneaky nocturnal raids on my person accrued with my advancing teens. Like the slave owners in the not-so-distant past, he unctuously assumed it was his right to do as he pleased with the flesh under his care. No season went by without a bruise on my face for “answering back.” I grew accustomed to awakening in the dark to find him kneeling beside my bed, engaged in one of his proprietary gropes beneath my nightgown. If I cried out, he would shush me sanctimoniously. Did I want to wake the baby, the babies? I’d been moaning in my sleep again, he said, and he’d only come to check.

  During my last year of high school I wrote a masterful begging letter to Mother’s rich cousin in Alabama, the one who had wanted to annex me and Mother, and she agreed to pay for one semester at a time at a junior college for girls in Raleigh. If I kept up my grades, there would be another semester, “but after two years, darling, you’re on your own.” The implication being that two years would give any diligent girl time to either win a scholarship to the state university or find a husband to support her. Already at seventeen the rich cousin had snared her future millionaire, as she had more than once pointed out.

  I had no difficulty making the grades at the junior college and winning a scholarship to the journalism school at Chapel Hill, but that still left the summers to get through. I had to make money to cover expenses, and the job had to be somewhere that provided room and board so I could avoid Earl’s nightly prowls. The first summer, I lifeguarded at a girls’ camp; the second, I waited tables at a plush resort in Blowing Rock. The final summer, between my junior and senior years, I waited tables at the Nightingale Inn, a Jewish family hotel thirty miles from Mountain City. By this time, Earl and Mother were back in Mountain City, Earl having gone into the construction business with his father. And since their little house was now burgeoning with offspring, I was allowed to sleep unmolested across town beside Loney, the “snobbish” grandmother, in her lavender-scented four-poster bed when I “came home” to visit my family during college breaks.

  And that, Major Marjac, is the behind-the-scenes résumé of the young woman you met on the train who “started ahead of the game.”

  AS I stepped down onto the platform of the Miami depot, there was Tess, who had been my mother’s college roommate at Converse until Tess dropped out her freshman year to go home to Florida and become Miss Miami Beach. The last time I had seen Tess was when I was seven and she came to stay with us in Mountain City to recuperate from ruining her life. I was surprised to see she was the same platinum-blond goddess I remembered. In a recent letter to Mother she had announced that her looks were completely gone and she was saving for a face-lift. But why was she wearing her white uniform and stockings and nurse’s shoes on Sunday? She gathered me to her bosom like her own lost child and lavished effusions against my cheek in a whispery little-girl voice totally incongruous with her adult beauty.

  “Emma, sweet, you’re here at last! Even prettier than the picture your mother sent, which she didn’t need to. I would have recognized you anywhere. Your ‘Emma-ness’ is exactly the same.”

  Though Tess tended to flatter everybody, her remark gave me a jolt of elation. I made up my mind to adopt this concept of “Emma-ness” as a talisman against those loss-of-self times that flattened me. She still wore Joy, the perfume her husband had chosen for her. What did she have to do without in order to buy it for herself now?

  We tussled over who would carry the heaviest of my suitcases. She prevailed, and dragged her way fetchingly ahead of me to a baby blue Cadillac DeVille. She had not lost her slim, curvaceous figure, my mother would be glad to hear. Or would she?

  “You have to be wary of this humidity, Emma, until your blood has a chance to thin. Also, we’ve been having this spate of damp weather, which doesn’t help, either.” Tess was puffing by the time she allowed me to help her heft the big suitcase into a carpeted trunk that could have held three more sets of luggage. “This is Hector’s new car. He insisted I take it to meet you.”

  “How generous of him.” On leaving the train, I hadn’t noticed the humidity, but as soon as Tess drew my attention to it I could feel it sapping my energy.

  After ruining her life, Tess had gone to vocational college and was now nurse-assistant to Dr. Hector Rodriguez, a dental surgeon in Coral Gables.

  “Oh, Hector is the most generous man in the world. His patients call him Doctor Magnánimo. He’s always giving things away and he’ll see you on the weekend if you’re in pain, which is why I have to head back to the office after we get you settled at your hotel. He’s starting a root canal this afternoon for a man who’s in agony.”

  “Doctor Magnánimo,” I echoed, trying to copy the sexy way she lightly tongued the back of her front teeth for the first n.

  “See, Emma, you sound like a natural already! So many of their words are the same as ours, only with this little extra flourish on the end. You’ll pick up Spanish in no time in Miami.” (Tess pronounced it “My-AM-uh.”) “There are lots of Cubans and more coming over all the time, professional, well-bred people like Hector and his wife, Asunción, although they left a while ago to get away from Batista. The ones arriving now are coming because Fidel has let them down. But you know all about that, you’re going to be a reporter on the Star.”

  “As soon as they wrote to say I had the job, I subscribed to the paper. I’ve been reading it cover to cover since February, everything from Castro’s land grabs to the big Miami society weddings.”

  Damn, blast, shit, hell, Emma. Why didn’t you stop at Castro? But Tess neither flinched nor looked sad, as though she didn’t recall herself being the star of one of those big society weddings. Her perfect Grecian profile went right on smiling as she steered serenely down a wide avenue, the skirt of her crisp uniform tugged up to reveal her shapely white-stockinged thighs.

  “Hector said you must be just phenomenally smart, to land a job like this right out of college. Everybody wants to be a reporter for the Star. I said yes, you were, just like your mamma. I can’t wait for you to meet Hector. And Asunción, too, of course.”

  “Well, I don’t know about phenomenally,” I said. The way she had dutifully tacked on Asunción made me ponder whether Doctor Magnánimo might be more to her than just a generous boss.

  But mostly I was occupied with keeping myself intact in this new environment. My guerrilla antennae were on full alert, sensing new threats and opportunities pulsing at me as we skimmed along streets lined with palm trees and sea grapes and modest pastel bungalows with those slatted glass windows that keep the heat and rain out. In this tropical city I would have to wear lighter clothes; more of my body would be on display for new critics as well as new potential gropers. There would be levels of sophistication to tap into without revealing my ignorance, levels far more demanding than Major Marjac asking me about wine. There would be new brands of wickedness undreamed of by someone arriving overnight from a sheltered Southern university existence. And usurpers a million times subtler and smoother than Earl.

  “I think you’re going to like your hotel,” Tess was saying. “It has a pool and it’s only a few blocks from Miami Avenue. You’ll be able to walk to work in your heels. We were able to get you the special monthly rate because the manager, Alex de Costa, is Hector’s patient. Alex was being groomed to take over his grandfather’s hotel in Havana, but when things got shaky down there, the grandfather had the foresight to sell out in time and buy the Julia Tuttle here. It was a little run-down, but he’s renovated it in the European style. Hector says it’s exactly like a good family hotel in Madrid or Barcelona now.”

  “Should I know who Julia Tuttle is?”

  “The Mother of Miami? You certainly should! She made Henry Flagler bring the railroad here from Jacksonville. When everything north of Miami froze, she sent him a box with an orange blossom from her tree, and that convinced him. Your hotel stands on the land where her old home was. Granny sewed for Julia and her daughter, you know. Mother remembers Granny altering a who
le bunch of Julia’s gowns for Miss Fannie right after Julia dropped dead. Poor Julia, she was only forty-eight. I’ll be, well, close to that next year, but don’t you dare tell a soul. Granny always said Julia worked too hard on her dream and it killed her. Miami was just a swamp full of Seminoles and alligators before Julia came down here on a barge after her husband’s death, with all her furniture and silver from Ohio. She had this dream of creating a beautiful subtropical resort, and she made it happen, though she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for it nowadays.”

  Tess didn’t resent other people’s accomplishments or good fortune, even with her own life so compromised. I was sure that in her place I would have become bitter or crazy. Here she was working on Sunday in a white uniform for a Cuban dentist when she had once traveled by private yacht. She had not seen her high-school-age son since he was fifteen months old. The first thing I planned to do when I got to the Star was to look up Tess in the newspaper’s morgue. Not even Mother knew the whole story, and I had promised I would find out what I could.

  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.

  TESS 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.