FSB Author Article
Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Queen of the
Underworld
by Gail Godwin
Published by Ballantine Books; January
2007;$14.95US/$19.95CAN;
978-0-345-48319-5
Copyright © 2006 Gail Godwin
1.
Now I had graduated on this bright June Saturday in
1959 and few
were the obstacles left between me and my getaway train to Miami --
obstacles
that nevertheless must be cunningly surmounted.
"Emma, you ride in front with Earl," said Mother, as
expected. "I'll sit
in back and reminisce a little more about my time here in
Paradise."
"Oh?" challenged Earl. "What does that make the rest
of
your life, then, a
comedown?"
"The rest of my life is still in progress," Mother
lightly countered, making
room for herself among my college leftovers that were going back to the
mountains with them. "Ask me again in thirty or forty years."
We began the winding descent out of Chapel Hill as,
seven years earlier, the
three of us, with my mother's new husband at the wheel, had begun
another
descent into a new life. Only this time, they would be dropping me off
within
the hour at the Seaboard Station in Raleigh. My journey as part of this
family
unit would soon be at an end. Happily, my train to Miami left at one
fifteen, so
a farewell lunch had been out of the question, a circumstance
diminishing that
much further the chance of a last-minute blowup with Earl.
But still I was on my guard, for already he was making
those engorged throat
noises that preceded a sermon. I did not dare glance back at Mother for
fear of
catching her eye. An exchanged look of sympathy or, God forbid, a
mutual smirk
might still explode everything sky-high, as it had done plenty of times
before.
My job was to look respectfully attentive without rising to his bait. I
folded
my hands in my lap and faced front, focusing on the road ahead. Windows
on both
sides were open to let in the breeze, and the capricious little whomp-whomps
of hot air provided a divertimento against Earl's opening sally and
helped me
keep my own counsel.
Sacrifices had been made. If I would ever stop to think
about other people.
Empathy and gratitude not my strong suits. Had never known what it was
to apply
myself on a daily basis. Hadn't been required of me. Had been raised to
think
that the world revolved around me and that I could coast along without
making
much of an effort. Not completely my fault. Had been indulged too much
for my
own good by teachers as well as family. But now I was going into the
real world
where I would have to knuckle under and deliver the goods like
everybody else.
"Though why you should choose to go off half-cocked to
a place like Miami
remains a mystery to your mother and me. Your dean told us the Charlotte
Observer wanted you, but he said you'd had your heart set on Miami
ever
since you went down for that interview at Christmas. I said, well, we
were the
last to know she went to Miami for Christmas. She told us she
was staying in the
dorm to catch up on her work. We didn't learn the truth till February."
Damn and blast you, I thought. You have a single
conversation with my dean, who
adores me, and you make me out a liar.
"I didn't want to say anything to anyone until I knew I
had the job," I
cautiously replied.
"I told the dean, she doesn't even know anybody
in Miami --"
I don't know anybody in Charlotte, either, I refrained
from saying.
"She knows Tess," put in Mother from the backseat.
Tess
was her old college
roommate from Converse. "Tess will be meeting her train tomorrow
morning."
"So why didn't she stay with Tess at Christmas,
when she went down
for that interview?" His voice had edged up a decibel.
"Well, I guess she wanted to stay with someone else at
Christmas," Mother
neutrally suggested.
Of course I had told them, after the fact, with whom
I'd stayed. Or rather I
had presented an acceptable configuration of the way in which this
family I had
worked for last summer had offered me hospitality. Not that any
configuration of
the Nightingales would ever be acceptable to Earl.
"Well, I guess there's just no accounting for some
people's taste, but to move
down there to be with that tribe . . ." Menacing pause before the
refrain: "When her dean said the Charlotte Observer would have
taken
her."
The voice rolled on, but so, I congratulated myself,
did the car. Every mile we
achieved was one mile nearer to my release. We had not veered off the
road or
had a flat tire and nobody had backhanded me to start a black eye for
my first
day at work.
Think of it as a scene early in a novel, I told myself:
The stepfather picks one
last fight with the daughter who has not appreciated him. The mother in
the
backseat, wedged among her daughter's boxes, knees tucked under her
like a
college girl, is forgiving of the wild little breezes that mess up her
hairdo
because they mute his voice. There will be plenty more of it to listen
to on
their long drive back to the mountains. Whose novel was this going to
be? Not
the stepfather's; the writer might never grow the empathy for that one.
Not
the mother's, either, though it catches in the daughter's throat to see
the
youthful way the older woman is clasping her knees, wrapped in her own
memories
of Chapel Hill, when she still expected to get everything she wanted.
If it was
going to be the daughter's, there would be some choked-back sobs in the
mother's embrace at the train station, one last stoic offering of the
daughter's mouth for the imposition of the stepfather's kiss, and then
they
would be gone on the next page.
When, as a last-minute taunt, Earl, in the act of
setting down my suitcases
inside my roomette, asked if I thought I had "money to burn" for this
exclusive little compartment with its own washroom and pull-down bed, I
suppressed the perfect comeback that it was indeed a "burnt offering"
of my
graduation monies to thank the gods for my escape from him. At long
last I had
learned that it was never too late for a black eye when saying goodbye
to
certain people.
Alone in my luxury cubicle, I relaxed for the first
time in
months, allowing the train's diesel engine to take over the job of
getting me
to my destination. Woods pinked with afternoon June light alternated
with
tobacco fields and tin-roofed drying barns. As we shot through a dreary
little
hamlet, a character offered herself for my perusal: a girl born and
raised in
this flyblown place who had dreams of going somewhere and one day wakes
up on
her deathbed, a forgotten old maid who has never left town, and hears
this very
train hurtle by. She feels the diesel cry in the marrow of her bones
and in her
last conscious moment believes she is aboard. She savors all the
sweetness of
having gotten out, and she expires with a rapturous smile on her face
for no one
to see but the undertaker.
Could such a woman still exist in the late
nineteen-fifties, even in rural North
Carolina? Why not? Maybe I would write this existential pastorale with
its O. Henry-ish ending in the evenings when I got home from my
newspaper job.
It was
the sort of thing that might get me published in a literary quarterly,
especially one of the Southern ones, which abounded in stories about
trains
passing and nothing much ever happening at home. My plan was to become
a crack
journalist in the daytime, building my worldly experience and gaining
fluency
through the practice of writing to meet deadlines. Then, in the evening
and on
weekends, I would slip across the border into fiction, searching for
characters
interesting and strong enough to live out my keenest questions. My
journalism
would support me until I became a famous novelist. Perhaps I would
become a
famous journalist on the side, if I could manage both.
I began to lower myself into the environs of the old
maid's unlived life until
I started feeling queasy. Despite my desperate desire to be published,
I knew
this was a warning signal to get out of there. Letting yourself be
trapped in
the wrong story was another way of succumbing to usurpation. Goodbye,
old girl,
someone else will have to tell your boring tale.
I took first call for the dining car and sat down to a
spotless white tablecloth
and a red rosebud in a silver vase. Perfect icons for my new beginning.
Like an
antidote to my ditched character back in the roomette, a smart,
suntanned woman
in an Army officer's uniform slowly materialized through the haze of my
nearsightedness. Her gaze lit on me, she murmured something to the
waiter, and
the next thing I knew she was asking if she might join me.
"Please do." I heard myself switching into my
well-brought-up mode, even
though I had been counting on dining alone and savoring my getaway some
more.
Her brass name tag read "Major E. J. Marjac." She
introduced herself as Erna
Marjac. When I said "Emma Gant," she remarked on the similarity of our
first
names, which would have annoyed me had she not had such a warm smile
(and
beautiful teeth in the bargain) and had she not looked so
straightforwardly
charmed by the prospect of having dinner with me. By the time she had
ordered
from the menu, without the usual female shilly-shallying, I knew I
envied her
self-command and I resolved to use this opportunity to further my
development.
She asked where I was headed, and I said I was going to
Miami to be a reporter
on the Miami Star.
"Really? You seem so young. I thought you were a
student."
"I was until noon today. I just graduated from the
university at Chapel
Hill."
She laughed, exposing the beautiful teeth again. "You
aren't wasting any
time, are you? We ought to celebrate. May I treat you to some wine,
Emma?"
"Thank you, that would be nice."
Major Marjac signaled the waiter. "What would you
like?"
"Oh, whatever you're ordering will be fine." Having
grown up in
beer-and-bourbon land, I hadn't a clue.
"Well, since we're both having red meat, a half bottle
of this Côte du Rhône
will go down well. If we'd chosen the chicken, I would have suggested
the Blue
Nun."
My first lesson in wines.
She told me she'd just completed a very successful
recruiting tour and was
heading for some R & R with a friend in Pensacola before reporting
back to
duty at Fort McClellan in Alabama.
"What do you do on a recruiting tour?"
"I show a film about the opportunities the Army offers
to women today and then
I have interviews the rest of the day. I'm very good at assessing
character
and signing up the best ones, but this time I broke my own record.
Thirty-seven
young women from fifteen states will be reporting for duty at Fort
McClellan by
the end of the month."
I might have been number thirty-eight, I thought, had I
not had my hiring letter
from the managing editor of the Miami Star tucked in my purse.
But then,
of course, I wouldn't have been on this train.
Major Marjac's character-assessing gaze gave me a stamp
of approval. "You're fortunate, Emma, you started ahead of the game.
But for many
young
women, we offer the only hope of independence."
Over wine and dinner she told me stuff about code
breaking and weaponry, and
about the physical ordeals the new recruits would undergo: gas chambers
and
such. I strained hard to retain everything in case I decided at some
future
point to write a story about a girl in her last year of high school,
desperate
to escape her circumstances: she passes this window with a sign, Army
Recruiting
Women Today, and inside is handsome Major Marjac with her welcoming
smile.
When we said goodbye -- she would be getting off at
Jacksonville before dawn --
the Major gave me her card.
"Slip this into your wallet, Emma. If things don't meet
your expectations at
the Star, drop me a line. With your college degree you could go
straight
into officers' training."
I asked the porter to make up my roomette for sleeping
and was in bed before
dark, swaying with the train's motion, mellow from Major Marjac’s
Côte
du Rhône. When I was in my pajamas, I raised the shade again so I
could
get the
maximum benefit from the experience, lying straight as a mummy in my
little
coffin-bed of rebirth, hurtling through one town after another where
people
steeped like old tea bags in their humdrum lives, speeding farther away
by the
minute from Earl-dom and all the other bottlenecks I had narrowly
squeezed
through.
It both gratified and goaded me that I had come across
to an observant recruiter
as one of those sleek, fortunate ones who "started ahead of the game."
Wasn't that the image that I had cultivated? Yet, when so much lay
hidden, I
got no credit for my struggle, did I? When Major Marjac had proudly
confided, "Weaponry is opening up to women in an unprecedented way," I
couldn't
help
inventorying my own arsenal to date, the weapons best suited to my
personality
under duress: guile, subter-fuge, goal-oriented politeness,
teeth-gritting
staying power, and the ability, when necessary, to shut down my heart.
Forces
had been mobilizing inside me for the past eleven years to do battle
with
anything or anybody who might try to usurp me for their own purposes
again.
"Usurp" had become my adversarial verb of choice ever
since I had seized
upon it from a History of Tudor England course to trounce my archenemy,
the dean
of women, in my Daily Tar Heel column. ("With her latest
Victorian
edict, Dean Carmody has, quite simply, usurped the rights of every
Carolina
coed.") After that column, perfect strangers would call out familiarly
as I
crossed the campus: "Hey, Emma! Anybody been usurping you lately?" I
delighted in the powers of the Fourth Estate. My twice-weekly column,
"Carolina Carousel," carried a mug shot of me with flying hair, cagey
side
glance, and my best don't-mess-with-me smirk.
And the more I meditated on it, the more the "usurp"
word compounded in
personal meanings. Not just kingdoms and crowns got usurped. A person's
unique
and untransferable self could, at any time, be diminished, annexed, or
altogether extinguished by alien forces. My soon-to-be twenty-two years
on this
earth had been an obstacle course mined with potential or actual
usurpers.
Since day one, it seemed, I had been confronted by them
in one form or another.
After my alcoholic father crashed his car fatally into a tree on the
day of my
birth, Mother's Alabama cousin, a childless woman married to a rich
man, tried
to annex me. The offer included my widowed mother, but my grandmother
Loney was
not part of the package -- the cousin thought Loney was "too
undemonstrative" -- and so Mother had to decline.
Next came a string of suitors who were willing to take
on a little girl to get
the attractive, sexy mother, but not willing to take on the
grandmother, so once
again I was spared. Next came World War II, four years during which my
mother's job as a reporter on the Mountain City Citizen
sufficiently
engaged her libido. She covered the Veterans Hospital overflowing with
wounded
soldiers straight from the battlefront, interviewed visiting
celebrities,
reviewed books, and even contributed the occasional seasonal poem. But
then the
war ended and the men came home and wanted their jobs back and three of
them
wanted my mother. She chose the one my grandmother and I liked least,
an
oversensitive bully who brought to the match his overflowing trousseau
of
sermons and insecurities. After great storms of tears and reproaches
between the
women, my grandmother was left behind in our old apartment and I found
myself
part of a new family in a worse apartment on the other side of town,
with new
rules to follow and new things to worry about.
Earl immediately began his campaign to remove me from
my "snobbish"
grandmother's influence altogether. It took three years for him to get
us out
of Mountain City, but at last he succeeded, which meant plucking me out
of my
beloved St. Clothilde's, to which I had won a full high school
scholarship the
year before. Thus at the end of ninth grade, when I was going on
fifteen, we
packed up and drove out of our mountains, to begin our strange migrant
years of "transferring" up and down the East Coast, gradually adding
more human
beings to our family mix, while Earl discovered, or his bosses
discovered for
him, that he was temperamentally unsuited to a career in chain store
management.
In those gypsy years of Earl's and Mother's, I felt
like someone kidnapped
from my rightful environment and tethered to a caravan of someone
else's
descent.
In my last year at St. Clothilde's, when our ninth
grade had been immersed in David
Copperfield, Sister Elise, a svelte, scholarly young nun recently
transferred from Boston, read us a letter the adult Dickens had written
to a
friend, describing his terrible experience of being sent to work in a
blacking
factory at age twelve. It was for less than a year, while his family
was
bankrupt and living in debtors' prison, but, Sister Elise informed us
in her
Back Bay accent, it left a scar ("skaah") on Dickens forever, even
after he
had become rich and world famous and was surrounded by an adoring
family of his
own. No words could express, Dickens had written to his friend, the
secret agony
of his young soul as he sank into this low life, pasting labels onto
blacking
bottles for six shillings a month in a rat-infested warehouse with
urchin boys
who mockingly called him "the little gentleman." Snatched from his
studies
with an Oxford tutor, obliged to pawn all his books (The Arabian
Nights, his
favorite eighteenth-century novels), the young Dickens felt his early
hopes of
growing up to be a distinguished and learned person crushed in his
breast. All
that he had learned and thought and delighted in was passing away from
him day
by day. His whole nature, he wrote to the friend who, Sister Elise told
us, was
to become his first biographer, had been so penetrated with grief and
humiliation that even now he often forgot in his dreams that he had
escaped it
all and was famous, caressed, and happy.
Now I, too, knew that constant sinking feeling of
losing ground. Each day seemed
to put more distance between me and where I thought I should be by this
time,
had Earl not entered our lives. Had I stayed on at smart, rigorous St.
Clothilde's, I would be polishing my already sterling record to a high
sheen
and -- as many of my classmates would go on to do -- would graduate
with a nice
bouquet of scholarship offers from top colleges, including Sister
Elise's own
Radcliffe. Whereas, tethered to Earl's itinerant career, I had to start
all
over again each year in a new high school (once I did two schools in a
single
year), make my qualities known as quickly as possible, and pray I could
claw my
way into a college, any college, somehow. Very early on in our life
together,
Earl had announced that even if he could afford to send me, which he
certainly
couldn't, he wouldn't, because
his own parents, who could have
afforded it,
hadn't offered to send him.
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 whole 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 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's 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.
Excerpted from Queen of the Underworld by Gail Godwin Copyright © 2006 by Gail Godwin. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.