Queen of the underworld, p.5
Queen of the Underworld, page 5
HE RETURNED me the quick way, crossing onto the mainland at Broad Causeway and heading straight down Biscayne Boulevard. But instead of following the boulevard all the way to the riverfront entrance to the Julia Tuttle, he turned right into Flagler Street and drove slowly down two blocks of darkened storefronts to the only lit-up building in sight. The way it was positioned, on the corner of Flagler and Miami Avenue, made it look like the prow of an ocean liner bearing down on us, with “The Miami Star” glowing aloft in red neon letters. In some of the yellow squares of the wraparound second-floor windows you could see human shadows moving about the newsroom.
But there was more to come. With his typical acumen for planning the next treat, Paul had got us here just in time for the first edition’s press run. He activated the button to let down the window on my side, then switched off the ignition and let the close, balmy night invade the air-conditioned darkness of the car. As though we were royalty and the performance could now begin, a bell went off inside the tall ground-floor windows. Men wearing hats made out of newspaper moved among the big presses—some were up on the catwalks—and the huge press cylinders began to roll, slowly picking up speed to the chop-chop of the folder knives. The folder spewed forth the first complete paper; the foreman gave it a fast page-through to make sure the plates were installed in the right order, then gave the high sign for the presses to accelerate to full speed. The chop of the folder knives got faster and faster until it merged with the roar of the presses into a frenzied blur of sound. There was something erotic about a press run, with its increasing tempo of excitement, its acceleration toward full speed and no return.
“Seventy thousand newspapers an hour,” crooned Paul softly, his hand lightly cupping my knee. “Just think, by this time tomorrow your byline may be hitting the streets seventy thousand times.”
3.
I SUPPOSE I EXPECTED more fuss when I stepped off the elevator into the noisy Star newsroom on Monday morning. Nobody even looked up. Men with rolled-up shirtsleeves assaulted typewriters, smoke rising above their heads. The pervasive odors were of tobacco, coffee, and the pulp copy paper Mother in her reporting days used to bring home from the Mountain City Citizen for me to scribble on. Segregated inside a glass cubicle, some middle-aged women in colorful dresses were clustered over fashion layout pages or prancing around in high heels or clacking out copy. All of them were puffing like dragons as well. A lanky, deeply tanned one with close-cropped silver curls caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back coolly and proceeded on to the managing editor’s corner. My acceptance letter had said “general assignment reporter” and I had no intention of getting corralled into the women’s department.
At least Lib, the managing editor’s secretary, who guarded his office, was expecting me. I had made sure to write down her name after my Christmas interview. She said Mr. Feeney would be out to welcome me shortly. She asked me what I thought so far of the South Florida weather, and before I could answer said not to judge it by all the rain we’d been having, meanwhile giving me the female-to-female once-over and appearing satisfied with my neat French twist and forest green shirtwaist. (“Dark dress, hair out of face, and stockings, no matter how hot”—my grandmother Loney’s career-dressing advice.) Lib herself wore a navy dress with a white collar, and her black hair was smartly sheared at earlobe level.
Supertall Mr. Feeney bounded out in his shirtsleeves and with an avuncular bow escorted me into his office. He was a gent, from the category of men I knew how to handle best. Gents tended to idealize bright young women and tried to smooth their way, shielding them from unpleasantness and strife whenever possible.
Since my Christmas visit, another executive desk facing Mr. Feeney’s had been moved into his office, making the room look cramped. A solid, dark-haired figure in an uncannily white shirt was in the act of rising from this desk.
“Emma, this is my new assistant managing editor, Lou Norbright.” That he presented the assistant manager to me indicated that Mr. Feeney was indeed of the old school. A lady ranked higher than her corporate superior. Then, in typical self-effacing-gent style, Feeney went on to praise us to each other as if that were his only role in life.
“Lou here came to us six years ago, Emma, all the way from North Platte, Nebraska, as a general assignment reporter for the Star, and before we knew it he was running the city desk, and now here he is, my second-in-command. All of which is to say, Emma”—another bow—“the Star encourages rising stars, if that doesn’t sound too corny.”
He then rattled off my glories to the new assistant managing editor. “Emma won her J-school’s most prized scholarship and she had her own column in the Daily Tar Heel. A real crackerjack of a column, too, timely, lively, subjects resourcefully handled, witty, very witty. Her dean sent me samples. He and I were Nieman Fellows at Harvard together.”
Lou Norbright heard out Feeney’s encomium to me with the same smiling attention with which he had received his own. He was gleamingly at attention, you might say. His glasses gleamed, his coal-bright eyes behind the silver rims gleamed, his uncannily white shirt gleamed, his black-and-silver-striped necktie gleamed, his teeth gleamed. A thin edging of gold between his top left canine and the adjoining premolar completed the overall gleaming effect.
I couldn’t place him in any of my male categories; he seemed neither gent, mentor, obstacle, adversary, sexual attractant, useful stepping-stone, buddy-cohort, nor anything potentially personal. He was more like an emblem or an idea, but I wasn’t sure of what. He appeared perfectly cordial toward me, yet he conveyed, almost viscerally, a withholding of judgment that had the effect of shrinking my confidence. It was as if I could read his subliminal reservations in the gleaming mirror of his surfaces. What if Mr. Feeney and Dean Ligon had not been Nieman Fellows together? What if Dean Ligon had not been so obviously disposed in my favor? What if Paul had not talked me into traveling to Miami for the Christmas interview “because you come across so well in person.” Where would my bare talents alone have gotten me at this early stage if Dean Ligon, Mr. Feeney, and Paul Nightingale had not been the sort of mentor-gents won over by young women like myself?
“Lou will show you around the newsroom,” Mr. Feeney was saying, “and then we’re going to start you right in at the city desk.” He gave another courtly dip in my direction. “Just like the proverbial little duck being thrown into the water, if that’s not too corny.”
Lou Norbright seemed to glide along beside me rather than walk in ordinary human steps. “So, Emma,” he said, “how are you finding our Miami weather?” The bright eyes behind the gleaming glasses appeared to expect something more “in-depth” than the conventional reply and so I allowed as how I found it a little harder to breathe in Miami. “The humidity, I guess, or my blood needs to thin. Did you find that when you first came down here from Nebraska?”
He flashed the gold-edged canine at me and looked as though I had just confirmed his private assessment of me. “No, I can’t say that I did,” he remarked cheerfully.
I was introduced first to Pat and Ed on the copydesk, both of whom wore green visors just like in newspaper movies. Though they both laid down their pencils from their respective slashings of triple-spaced copy and gave me friendly welcomes and appreciative male glances, I was enough under Lou Norbright’s confidence-leaching spell to imagine them foreseeing exactly the kinds of trifles and inadequacies they would soon be slashing out of my prose.
Next I met Bert, a soft-voiced, cherub-faced man who doubled as book editor and religion editor; he said to let him know if I wanted to review any new books for him.
“Perhaps later, when she’s settled in,” Norbright smilingly answered for me.
Next came a disheveled reporter with wild eyebrows and a crooked red bow tie, Dave Bisbee, who cocked his head impudently up at Norbright from an appallingly messy desk and invited me to “bug” him with any questions I was afraid to bother the “brass” with.
“We’ll all try to give Emma the benefit of our best guidance, Dave,” Lou Norbright suavely countered.
At her own corner desk, guarded by a large basket-shaped straw pocket-book with fake cherries on it, presided the woman reporter I already considered my rival because of her frequent sensational front-page stories: Joelle Cutter-Crane.
“Nice twist on the Jiménez stash, Joelle,” Norbright complimented her. “Readers have been calling in to comment. I’d like you to meet Emma Gant from North Carolina; she’ll be joining us in the newsroom.”
It hadn’t escaped my notice that Norbright had presented me to everybody rather than the other way round.
“I’m honored to meet you,” I told the small, brittle-featured woman with scarlet nails and a marcelled hairstyle and hair color similar to Tess’s. “I’ve been admiring your stories ever since I began subscribing to the Star in February.”
“How do you do?” said Joelle Cutter-Crane, barely glancing at me. She fixed Norbright with a hard, lipsticked smile. “It was my idea, not the copydesk’s, I want you to know, Lou, to give all that equipment in dictator Jiménez’s custom-built Cadillac—the machine gun and grenade racks as well as the luxury items—a box of its own.”
“Ah, Joelle, don’t we give you enough credit as it is?” Norbright teased.
As we continued on our rounds he said, “Joelle’s the ribbon on our package and we try to keep her happy. The team concept of newspapering is completely beyond her.” As he seemed too calculated a type to indulge in gossip merely for its own pleasures, I concluded he was giving me a token of his own “guidance.” The only trouble was, I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was saying it was better to be a ribbon or a team player.
Next stop was the morgue, the library in newspaper offices where you looked up the people and events you wanted to know about and the stories of yesterday you needed for background. The stories were stored in open cardboard file boxes containing alphabetically labeled envelopes stuffed with all the paper’s clippings on that topic. Tess’s sad story from the forties was lying there right now in an envelope bearing her ex-husband’s surname, and all Joelle Cutter-Crane’s old scoops could be found under the the letter C, as well as under the first letter of the subject of each scoop. The career of rapidly rising Norbright was stuffed into its envelopes, to be tracked whenever I could find the time. There would probably even be a file on P. Nightingale’s Club and its owner. And perhaps starting as early as tomorrow under G would begin the clipped and filed documentation of my own rising star.
The librarian for the morgue was the first person in our round of introductions to whom Lou Norbright showed deference. This person sat within her bubble of remoteness, a stack of Sunday Miami Stars spread out on a long table perpendicular to her desk. As we entered her glassed-in sanctum, she was in the act of clipping multiple copies of yesterday’s front-page lead, WHERE THE DICTATOR STASHED HIS MILLIONS, as its eight-column banner headline read, to go into the various envelopes: “Cutter-Crane,” “Jiménez,” “Venezuela,” “Dictators,” “Ex-dictators,” plus those of all the minor figures mentioned in the story, and probably even “Cadillacs, custom equipment,” from Joelle’s very own box idea.
“Moira, this is Emma Gant. We’ll be starting her off on the city desk. Emma, meet Moira Parks. I’m sure you know from J-school what an indispensable shop Moira runs.” Though Norbright spoke with his usual assurance, he seemed, in Moira’s domain, to take up only a normal amount of human space and not flow into hers. Moira Parks ceased applying her massive shears to yesterday’s big story and raised her thick, smoke-tinted glasses toward us. It was impossible to guess her age. She wore a shoulder-padded dress in a style from the forties. Her incredible mass of springy gray hair, the bottom clump somewhat restrained by an old-fashioned snood, suggested thousands of quivering electric wires conducting messages to and from her head.
“How do you do?” I said. Her eyes were barely discernible behind the smoky whorls of glass. “You’ll probably be seeing a lot of me in here.”
“Don’t hesitate to ask for help.” She spoke in a carefully articulated monotone, as though to a foreigner or simpleton. “That’s what I’m here for. The files are organized alphabetically. I ask that you take out only one envelope at a time and replace it before taking another. You’ll find tables and chairs behind those shelves. If you need to take an envelope to the newsroom, you sign it out in this book, but it’s never to go out of the building.”
“I got in big trouble with Moira my first day at the Star when she caught me heading out of here with sixteen envelopes,” Norbright roguishly confessed.
Moira gave no sign of having heard him. I could picture him gliding out with his hoard of envelopes. It would have been fun to see how she stopped him. Whose trail had he been onto? Which career-promoting story had come out of it?
“Don’t hesitate to ask for help,” Moira Parks repeated in her remote monotone, and went back to her scissoring.
The city editor, Rod Reynolds, a blond, apple-cheeked man with carelessly pushed-up sleeves, assigned me the desk directly to his left. “That way if you need help I’m in shouting distance. Also, ha, ha, I can keep an eye on you.” He was a former Chapel Hill graduate, so we played “Do you know?” for the first few minutes as Norbright, smiling at our repartee, faded from the scene, though leaving behind his gleaming afterimage.
“Old Doc Speers, does he still drop hot ash down the front of his shirt while he’s lecturing?”
“He burned two holes during my semester of Feature Writing with him,” I was happy to report.
“Lordy, Lordy, the good old J-school days.”
He then handed me a list of funeral-home phone numbers to call and showed me the Star’s format for standard obituaries. “Anything out of the ordinary, run it past me. I’m not here, look into it yourself, if you think it rates a story.”
“Out of the ordinary in what way?”
“Human interest angle, anything bizarre. Switched to an earlier plane and it crashed. Freak accident in the home. Child drowns in half an inch of water. Anything at all to do with a child.”
“Will the funeral home tell me these things?”
“Come on, Emma, you know better than that.” He ripped a sheet out of his typewriter, slammed it down on the metal spike holding stories ready for the copydesk without looking out for his hand—which made me wince—and retrieved a smouldering cigarette from the ashtray. “Anybody under forty, you ask for the cause of death, even if we don’t print it in our routine obits. If it sounds unusual or has pathos, you call the family. And get a picture. Especially if it’s a kid, you want to get a picture.”
“Like that little boy who drowned at Y camp last week?”
“Good girl. Lou said you’d been studying the paper to see how we do things. It wouldn’t go over in Dean Ligon’s famous Senior Seminar, but the Star is not the good gray Times or—what were his other standards of excellence?”
“The Louisville Courier-Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch?”
“Lordy, yes. Well, our readership isn’t the Courier-Journal’s or the Post-Dispatch’s, either. Miami is not like anywhere else on earth. That’s why I love it, it’s surreal.”
The cutline under the child’s photo had read:
Eric’s first day at camp . . . and last.
If we seniors in Dean Ligon’s Ethics and Responsibilities of the Press Seminar had been discussing that cutline last spring, the dean would have crimped his lips and grumbled, “This isn’t as blatant as Joe Pulitzer’s famous headline, ‘How Babies Are Baked,’ that ran in the New York World after 392 children died in a heat wave, but it has the same yellow tinge. As responsible journalists, you’ll want to avoid the yellow tinge as you would want to avoid hepatitis.”
SEVERAL HOURS later, I had produced eleven triple-spaced biographies of unmemorable Dade County residents who were on record as having expired in the last twenty-four hours. My first morning’s labors had been scribbled over by Rod and slammed down on the spike to await the copyboy’s pickup for their trip across to the copydesk and then up to the composing room. I felt distracted and intrigued and excluded by all that was going on around me. What was in the printout that the copyboy tore off the teletype machine and rushed into Feeney’s office?
“Did they jail those two witnesses up in Tallahassee yet?” I heard Gabe Truro’s bass voice speaking into a telephone somewhere behind me—followed by a burst of remarkably fast typing.
(Since when were witnesses jailed?)
Rod Reynolds had introduced me to the Star’s suave middle-aged crime reporter while I was doing my obits. Being a gent, Truro had paused long enough to welcome me properly before turning aside to Rod to murmur, “Well, the indictment finally came through.” Whose indictment? Would I have to wait until it was in the newspaper to find out?
I was aware that others around me were taking lunch breaks, and that I was eligible to do the same, but a lassitude seemed to emanate directly out of the fluorescent ceiling lights and keep me rooted to the swivel chair in front of my typewriter pit.
After finishing each obit, I had jotted down the age and gender of its protagonist, thinking I might come up with some clever quip to show Rod Reynolds how I could investigate beyond the ordinary. (“Interestingly enough, Rod, all the deaths under sixty in today’s count were women, whereas all those who made it into their eighties were men. That reverses the usual statistics, doesn’t it?”)
But only a few moments before, Rod had shoved down his shirtsleeves, snatched up his rumpled cotton-cord jacket, and, with neither a word nor a look my way, bolted off in his toed-out Southern-boy swagger.
Although I had known from the movies and from the simulated newsroom set up for us in the basement of the journalism school that my place of work was going to be one big noisy arena jammed with desks at which scores of reporters clattered away, I still must have held out in my imagination for some kind of enclosure affording a sense of privacy between me and my typewriter. To know that I could be observed by others, in all my flattering and unflattering angles, from the front, back, and sides, as I hunched over my machine, pecking away, not to mention spied on from behind management glass by eel-eyed Norbright himself, had produced an unusually concentrated amount of work on my part, but had left me with a tension headache and a sense of unreality.
