Queen of the Underworld (2 page)

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.”

A
S
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.