Queen of the underworld, p.24
Queen of the Underworld, page 24
I lay very still and set about detoxifying myself. This was Room 510 at the Julia Tuttle and it was Saturday. For the second day in a row there was sun on the other side of the blinds. The television was on in the next room. The electric clock on my bedside table said half-past nine. The first week at work was over. I had comported myself honorably throughout and shone on one or two occasions. Lídia was miffed that I had danced and jabbered with Don Waldo and then added insult to injury by pleading journalistic exhaustion and leaving the party without ever sitting down in the chair she had ordered placed next to her. Tess was learning to fly an airplane and had neglected to tell me, but that did not mean she was plotting perfidies behind my back. Ginevra was not on her honeymoon but most likely lying in bed over on Key Biscayne right now, postponing beginning another day as Mrs. Brown. Did her dreams assemble collages torn from the colorful old days and nights on Palm Island when she supervised wardrobes, ordered food and drink and flowers, penned Federal Judge So-and-so’s name neatly into the incendiary little black book, summoned the girls when their escorts arrived by Cadillac or yacht? How frequently did her unconscious construct melodramas from which she woke herself wailing? Or did the chloral hydrate Dr. Brown doled out to her smother all dreams?
Bev had said Paul would be arriving in Miami on the noon plane. Even if the plane was dead on time, it would be close to one before he could get to the Julia Tuttle. I had three, maybe four hours to put to use.
First, as always, came sustenance, but how was I going to negotiate the distance between me and breakfast without passing through Lídia’s orbit? She was sure to be whipping about, radiating her menos mío toxins, and a quick flip-up of my window blinds revealed this to be so.
There she was below on the pool terrace, darting from table to table in a pert white blouse with sailor collar, navy pedal pushers, and matching espadrilles, pouring coffee from a silver pot. You could see from five floors up that she was playing herself as the “doña,” who had instigated desayuno for her guests in less than twenty-four hours and was now graciously serving them.
Though I had met her only yesterday, I felt capable of providing her lines as she addressed the captive audience under each umbrella. To the dependable beat of “I” and “my,” every topic from revolutions to embroidery would be orchestrated to provide a gloss on the life and times of Lídia Prieto Maldonado (plus wherever the surnames of her five husbands wedged a place for themselves).
I could sneak out to Howard Johnson’s, but what if Paul got delayed or something and tried to reach me and whoever was on the desk said “Five-ten doesn’t answer.” What would he think then? Ah, the kid couldn’t be faithful to me for one week.
I picked up the phone and dialed the desk. Please let Alex, or at least Luís, be on. I wasn’t up to communicating with Enrique Ocampo without benefit of gestures.
“Emma! Good morning, how are you?”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Your room lit up on the switchboard.”
“Listen, Alex—”
“You don’t sound so good, Emma.”
“As a matter of fact”—he had given me the perfect alibi—“I’m definitely under the weather, but I’ve got to feel better because I’ve promised to help Bev’s husband clear out his aunt’s house this afternoon.”
“You need some nourishment, Emma. Mami and her minions have assembled the promised desayuno, such as it is, down here, but I rather think you’d be better off with American coffee and your usual eggs or pancakes. Shall I send Luís over to Howard Johnson’s?”
“Oh, Alex, would you?”
“Our pleasure. I’ll send up a paper, too. You have a nice big appearance today on the front page of the Metro Section—about the lady who forecasts the weather.”
“Oh, is it in already?” With all the events of yesterday, I had completely forgotten about Martha Seawell and her low-pressure area.
“It’s on the upper half, or whatever you call it—”
“Above the fold.”
“Above the fold, with her picture, and a nice big byline that says ‘By Emma Gant, Star Staff Writer.’ Now, would you like Luís to order you eggs or pancakes—or perhaps both?”
“Just maybe some soft scrambled eggs and toast.” Pancakes on the side, while tempting, might seem excessive for someone claiming to be under the weather.
“With melted butter, right?”
“Please.”
“And don’t you want your grits?”
“Well, maybe yes.”
“Melted butter on them, too, right?”
“Right.”
“And a large orange juice?”
“Uh—”
“For the energy, and vitamin C.”
“Oh, true. Alex, thank you so much.”
“El gusto es mío. Señor Bartleby must take care of his Deviled Egg.”
WHILE WAITING for my breakfast, I slipped Paul’s dressing gown over my pajamas, plucked out several wilted roses from my birthday bunch—two of the reds, the mauve, and a coral—forcibly restraining myself from looking for meanings in their order of decay, and then sat down at the desk and dashed off a letter to Loney on Julia Tuttle stationery.
Loney was the easiest, because I didn’t have to marshal my thoughts as I did with Mother. Mother expected some semblance of narrative form in a letter, with little asides of philosophy interspersed to show I was paying attention to my life’s voyage. Whereas Loney relished simple details of weather, clothes, food, and gossip. Whatever ones I served up on the page, in whatever order or no order at all, would provide savory fare for Loney’s rereadings.
I started with the tornado and said I was fine, even though I had been out in the thick of it, doing stories about the injured at the hospital. Then I went right on to the seabreeze salad Tess had served me and what Tess had said about Loney making her feel special all those years ago in Mountain City after she had just ruined her life. I said I had looked up the hitherto-left-out details of the ruin in the Star’s files and that the young war-hero brother-in-law Tess had gone to live with had asphyxiated himself in their garage. I thanked Loney for the lavender bath salts and nylons and said I hoped I didn’t wear holes in the stockings before I got some money to buy another pair of heels, as the soles of my college ones had become thin as sandpaper after just one week of walking to work. I told her I had inaugurated “our” embroidered blouse at last night’s poolside party given by our hotel manager’s elegant Palm Beach mother, who had effusively praised Loney’s embroidery. I wrote that there had been almost solid rain here until yesterday, but now that the sun had at last acknowledged my arrival I planned to take my maiden swim in the beautiful Olympic-size pool today, though I did not have a proper beach robe or shoes. My raincoat and Bass Weejuns would have to suffice. My faded old one-piece racer from St. Clothilde’s swim team was ludicrously unfashionable in a place like Miami, but it had the advantage of modesty while at the same time emphasizing my long waist and narrow hips. Before sealing the letter, I included clippings of my tornado story on Mr. Sprat and Lola, and Jake Rance’s fashion photo of me modeling the raincoat and hat.
I HAD made it halfway through a letter to Mother by the time Marisa Ocampo brought my breakfast tray. “Lo siento, Emma, sorry for the delay. Oh, what beautiful roses! You see, the food was not hot when Luís returned from the Howard Johnson’s, so we warmed it for you in the oven. And here is your newspaper. ¡Y mira! I am bringing you my yearbook from Santa Clothilde’s, Le Flambeau from 1951. Of course, you were still in the lower grades, but you will recognize some of the girls and all of the nuns. Please, keep it as long as you like. ¿Está bien? And now Luisa and I shall walk with Altagracia over to Gesu Catholic Church. It is a good thing it is so close, as Don Waldo says his wife is extremely devota. Altagracia is beautiful, don’t you think?”
Cuba’s Great Experiment
Castro’s Land
Swap Triggers
Hate and Joy
Staff Writer Joelle Cutter-Crane is touring neighboring Cuba to report firsthand on Fidel Castro’s new policy of taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. This is the first in a series of articles.
So there it was, taking pride of place in a two-column boxed presentation, top front page left.
Marge’s summary last night of Joelle’s “firstborn from the new Cuba” had been right on the money. The “quintessential Cutter-Crane recipe for success” was a perfect little crowd-pleaser of a fable. The arrogant Cuban landowner losing money at the Hilton casino’s roulette table and snarling at Castro; the humble peasants elated over their very own acres. And there was the Don Kingsley portrait of the smiling peasants, the wife bent and toothless, the husband leaning against his hoe. Followed by a mixed chorus of “unnamed” denigrators, well-wishers, and fence-sitters.
“Prices Highest Ever (AP)—$1.24 Today is $1 of 1947–49” and “Work Crews Return City to Normal after Tornado” shared the rest of the above-the-fold space with Joelle, while below were “Prosecutor of Tokyo Rose Takes Life in Seattle” and “Grizzly Bear Mauls Man in Glacier Park,” both from AP, plus “Today’s Chuckle.” (Is your wife economical?” “Sometimes. She used only 30 candles on her 40th birthday cake.”)
Then on to the Metro Section.
She Charts Steady Course
Martha’s Career Is Stormy
By Emma Gant
Star Staff Writer
When it rains, Martha Seawell looks out the window and says stoically, “Hmmm . . . low-pressure area.”
Then, if it’s a working day, she puts on her slicker and goes down to the Weather Bureau. If you are one of the people who call that day to ask whether downtown Miami is flooded or whether you should plan that barbecue, you’ll probably talk to Martha.
Miami’s only lady meteorologist, she’s accustomed to answering the phone and having a voice say, “Please connect me with someone who knows something.”
“Lately, it’s gotten better,” Martha says wryly. “Now they call and say, “Let me talk to someone.”
The city’s lone weatherwoman has been measuring cloud heights and mapping low pressure areas here for 16 years. When she came to Miami after finishing a weather-observer course in Atlanta, she told friends: “It’ll be easy predicting the weather down there. It’s always sunny.”
“That was before I met a hurricane,” she says today.
During Hazel, in 1954, which kept the Weather Bureau on a 24-hour vigil, Martha issued scores of bulletins heard on radio and TV. When her time came to go home and snatch a few winks on the Friday night Hazel struck, where did she go?
Martha drove over to Haulover Beach to watch the waves. “I’d never seen hurricane swells before,” she said. “I’d been so busy predicting them or drawing them on charts. This was my chance to come face-to-face with the real thing.”
On her days off, Martha and her husband, Alan Seawell, drive to Tampa Bay to collect minerals and gems (they belong to the Lapidary Guild and the Miami Mineral and Gem Society). If it rains, they stay at home in North Miami and mull over their extensive collection.
“That is, until the phone rings,” laughs Martha. “Usually it’s one of my friends calling me instead of the Bureau to ask when I think the weather is going to clear up.”
On Martha’s behalf, I deplored the tiny one-column profile head shot. She could have been any female with cast-down eyes, lipsticked mouth, and the glint of an earring. The cropping excised all traces of her wit or professional status. I had liked her on sight and felt a surge of comradery when she confided her “Let me talk to someone” experience. I wasn’t the only professional woman who had her Charles P. Rose cross to bear.
I glanced over my “fun home” obits, adding up to eight this morning in their tiny, tedious format.
Mrs. Rebecca Brule
Services for Rebecca Page Brule, 82, of 500 N. 17th Ave., who died Thursday at Jackson Memorial Hospital, will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at Fairchild Funeral Home. Interment will follow at Evergreen Cemetery. Mrs. Brule, who moved here 35 years ago, is survived by a sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Kuntz, and a brother, Robert Page.
Elmer F. McConnahey
Services for Elmer F. McConnahey, 77, of 42 Sidonia Ave., Coral Gables, will be at 7 tonight at the Washburn Funeral Home. Mr. McConnahey, who came here seven years ago from Baltimore, was a retired auto dealer and a member of the Coral Gables Country Club. He is survived by his wife, Becky. Burial will be in Baltimore.
Everybody who croaked—as Bisbee so elegantly termed it—got one of these 8-point notices. From their boilerplate group appearance under “Dade Deaths,” it was hard to believe each one had been individually composed about an untransferable self by another untransferable self.
Even if you were the mayor, you got the 8-point in addition to your front-page story. In Sunday’s paper Stella would have her boilerplate, which I had labored to expand and individualize as far as the space limits allowed. And on Monday Paul would open up his paper and there would be her front-page profile in For and About Women. I would tell him today, of course, so he would know it was coming.
Very soon it would be time for my bath—late enough to maintain the clean scent, but early enough to avoid being in the tub when Paul might phone from the airport.
In the interim I took up Marisa Ocampo née Velázquez’s handsome 1951 Le Flambeau. Each graduating class got to choose the color and style of its leather cover, as long as the icon of the lit torch was somewhere in sight. Marisa’s year had distinguished itself with smooth, plump cream leather bisected top to bottom by a fiery red torch. My own Class of ’55, of which I was no longer a member when it came time to graduate, had chosen a flattish crimped leather in powder blue with a door-key-size torch in the lower right-hand corner.
I recalled a vexing afternoon in Chapel Hill when a former classmate from St. Clothilde’s discovered me in the student lounge and insisted on dragging me across the street to the Chi O house to show me “our” year’s Flambeau, assuming I was dying to see it.
“There’s Julie Orbach looking sultry, you’ll remember even back in ninth grade what a terrible flirt she was. She dropped out her first semester in college to get married—they say she had to.”
It was an ordeal to sit hip to hip with this girl I had never much cared for on her Bates bedspread in the overheated room choked with ruffles and be led page by page through memories in which I figured as a ghost. There was the row where I would have appeared among the seniors, alphabetically flanked by Melanie Jane Frazier and Stephanie Goode, each of us in a dark, round-necked sweater set off by a single strand of pearls. There were my absent pale thighs in the swim team lineup, my editorial influence missing from the yearbook staff. (“Listen, we can do better than this wrinkly powder blue—and that insignificant torch wouldn’t attract a moth.”)
“Of course, you would have been one of the Outstanding Seniors, if you hadn’t moved away,” the yearbook owner assured me, with a little butt-wriggle of complacency, as she herself had made the list of eight, her specialty having been “best personality.”
Yes, there I wasn’t, a missing full-page portrait of myself at eighteen in V-necked velvet evening dress with sleeves, the St. Clothilde Honor Cross on its gold chain resting in my modest décolletage—and below, my stash of ghostly accolades: “With scholarship offers so far (as this book goes to press) to Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Salem College, Emma Gant (Please! No relation to Eugene!) is headed for success whichever alma mater she picks, etc., etc.
At last I had escaped the Chi O hothouse—a yearbook with a graduating class of twenty-one girls contained only so many pages, after all—and trudged back to my dorm in a blue funk. It was impossible to locate the cause of my disquiet. After all, hadn’t I made it anyway? Here I was, a junior in college, even without the tailwind of strenuous St. Clothilde’s; I loved being on a university campus where there were ten males to every female; and I had my own column bearing my mug shot twice weekly in the Daily Tar Heel. (“Why, you’re already famous on campus!” cried Best Personality of ’55 as she pounced on me in the student lounge.)
What’s going on here? I asked, kicking savagely at the fallen leaves in my path. Whence came this sudden wind-rush of miasma? Surely I can’t be mad because someone else wrote the class poem when I could have done a better job. Who on this earth has ever managed to live two lives at once?
That I couldn’t track the miasma to its source made it all the more oppressive.
When I got to my dorm room, I found my roommate, a devout Christian Scientist, crumpled on the floor “working on” an injury. Someone had kicked her in the stomach at basketball practice.
“Can I do anything?” I asked.
She said no, but it was comforting just having me there in the room. So I propped up pillows on my bed, intending to sketch out my next Tar Heel column in a notebook. But what came instead, like ointment being squeezed urgently from a tube, was the class poem I didn’t get to write.
On a fair hill stately set,
Saint Clothilde, you claim us yet.
We who came of age
Within your cloistered walls
Still haunt your winter-lit schoolrooms,
While nuns chant psalms in chapel gloom,
Hearken to your raven’s call,
Tilt on wings in his deep air,
Ride his mountains range on range,
Peaks inflamed with autumn change.
Time was prime.
The soul unfurled
Midst sullen winds and rain
And crisp blue space again,
Scudding drifts of colored leaves,
Hoary frost on Hallows Eve,
Nativity beneath the throbbing stars.
Spring’s wild green hour!
A girl’s song floats from topmost tower:
“Saint Clothilde in thee we glory,
