Queen of the underworld, p.35
Queen of the Underworld, page 35
The one gift that boring Broward had vouchsafed me in spades was a glut of solitary time in which to assess my progress so far. And the more I thought of it, the more I prized my alliance with the Queen of the Underworld. Ever since Bisbee had related her story in his Walgreens Tutorial, even before my fortuitous meeting with her at the hospital, I had sensed she belonged to me. She was the worthy subject I had been waiting for, the opposite of the old maid who had died in her flyblown hamlet as my train passed without ever setting off on her own adventure. Norbright might have covered the notorious trial and given the Queen of the Underworld her name, but the rest of her was mine. She was my sister adventurer, another unique and untransferable self who had been places I hadn’t and who had returned with just the sort of details I craved to imagine further.
MY MOST faithful correspondent was Mrs. Brown. Not that she was very eloquent or descriptive—she spoke much better than she wrote. That surprised me, but seeing her schoolgirl handwriting on an envelope addressed to me never failed to lift my Broward moods.
They were moving to Palo Alto. Dr. Brown had accepted a tenured teaching position in a department of psychiatry: “As long as he has a warm climate and can help people, Edwin doesn’t care where he is.
“And I am going back to school. I still have some high school courses left to do, but they’ve got this thing for us ‘oldies,’ you just have to pass some exams. Edwin has already purchased some sample tests for me to practice on. I hardly dare to think what I may be doing one of these days!”
Because her letters were never more than a page, I didn’t want to scare her off by sending epistles. So I restricted myself to one or two “bulletins” a week.
“Well, Ginevra, I didn’t take touch-typing in high school, so you’re ahead of the game there. At our Broward office you have to send your stories over the teletype machine, which has unmarked keys. I’ve been getting by with a keyboard I made for myself on a piece of cardboard that I balance on my lap while I’m ‘sending to Miami,’ but today the light finally dawned. After everyone left for the night, I took out my bottle of Platinum Frost nail polish and painted the numbers and letters and punctuation on the blank, black keys: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, Q, W, E, R, T, Y, U, I, O, P, etc., etc., etc.
“Now I am waiting for them to dry.”
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Dan Starer for his rigorous and intuitive research. This is our seventh book together.
Robert Wyatt, once again, for vital early editorial guidance.
Nancy Miller, my editor at Random House, for her keenly sensitive fine-tuning of the manuscript.
The following books were of particular help:
Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba
Hugh Thomas’s Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom
Howard Kleinberg’s Miami Beach: A History
Harold Mehling’s The Most of Everything: The Story of Miami Beach
Robert M. Neal’s News Gathering and News Writing
Frank Luther Mott’s American Journalism
Al Neuharth’s Confessions of an S.O.B.
About the Author
GAIL GODWIN is the three-time National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and Father Melancholy’s Daughter.
She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She has written libretti for ten musical works with the composer Robert Starer. Currently she is writing her next novel, The Red Nun, and preparing The Making of a Writer, volume II, with Rob Neufeld.
Also by Gail Godwin
NOVELS
Evenings at Five (2003)
Evensong (1999)
The Good Husband (1994)
Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
A Southern Family (1987)
The Finishing School (1984)
A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)
Violet Clay (1978)
The Odd Woman (1974)
Glass People (1972)
The Perfectionists (1970)
SHORT STORIES
Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983)
Dream Children (1976)
NONFICTION
The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963 (2006)
Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life (2001)
Queen of the Underworld is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Gail Godwin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Godwin, Gail.
Queen of the underworld : a novel / Gail Godwin.
p. cm.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Women journalists—Fiction. 3. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3557.O315Q44 2006
813′.54—dc22
2005048592
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-518-7
v3.0
Gail Godwin, Queen of the Underworld
