Queen of the Underworld (21 page)

“Yes, Mami, but we need a permit to serve meals, and Abuelito insists Fidel will be out and all our guests gone back to Cuba before we can even schedule an inspection and fill out the forms.”

“Your
abuelito
is too busy buying up real estate in the swamps north of Pompano to keep up with the important gossip. When I saw Dolores López at our planning meeting of the Society of Four Arts, she told me the Wald brothers are in Havana this very moment, negotiating the official ‘life of Castro’ film. They’ve set up preproduction headquarters in a mansion in the Country Club district and turned the lawn into a helicopter pad—that seems to be the preferred mode of transportation for this regime. They are hoping to cast Marlon Brando as Castro if his price is not too high—Brando’s, not Fidel’s: Fidel is delighted. Even Fidel’s army is excited about being in the film. Now, I ask you, does it sound like the Revolution will be over tomorrow when Marlon Brando is on his way to Cuba to grow a beard and be fitted for fatigues?” (Lídia pronounced it
‘COO-bah.’
) “So I think we must purchase one of those rolling
cocinas
like the street vendors have, that run on gas, and offer a
petit déjeuner
to our guests. We could start tomorrow.”

“What sort of
desayuno,
Mami? And who is going to prepare it?”

“Who do you think? Didn’t I organize breakfast and canteen food for the
periodistas,
including Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, during the Spanish Civil War? When supplies were not only scarce but one had to dodge the bullets to get them. Leave it to me,
hijo.
You have more important things to do today. As does our clever young journalist, Emma. It will be nothing fancy, baguettes from a bakery,
jugo de naranja, huevos
—hard-boiled—perhaps some
jamón.
” She swallowed a sip of her coffee and grimaced. “The important item is the
cafecito,
good strong Cuban coffee, not this
agua sucia,
like dirty water.”

A
T LEAST,
I congratulated myself as I walked through the dense heat to the
Star
building, I had stopped short of blurting out, “You knew
Hemingway
?” As for the Spanish Civil War, I would look up who was on which side and what they were fighting for in the morgue’s encyclopedia. No more displays of historical ignorance like my thirty-eighth-parallel gaffe. Though Lídia, of course, would not lash out at me as Jake Rance had. That devastating little smirk of hers would simply fly through the air to her son, as it had when the waitress had mistaken the meaning of “hard roll,” and Alex would think I was slightly less amazing. The odd thing was, I wasn’t sure I even liked Alex’s mother, but I was determined that she should like me. And, though her presence did in some way diminish Alex, I knew that life would never be boring when she was around.

R
OD
R
EYNOLDS
was back at his desk in his role of city editor. “Emma, they tell me you’ve been going great guns around here.”

“I guess I’ve been keeping busy.” Who were “they”? Norbright? Or just Bisbee—who was nowhere in sight. “How is your father doing?”

“He’s stable, thanks. Had one heart attack at home in the bathroom and then a second in the ambulance. All his cronies have been sneaking him cigarettes in the hospital. I told him I myself was not proud of my nicotine habit but I definitely was not willing to die for it. He just laughed and said, ‘I’d rather be a dead tiger than a live chicken, son.’ And that’s when I decided the father-son cord was fraying and it was time to get back here. Just in time to miss all the tornado excitement. Your friend Herman Melton over at Jackson Memorial wants you to call him. He has something for you. What a beguiling little piece you wrote about that Sprat fellow.”

“Thank you.”

“Just the kind of thing
Star
readers lap up. Not what Eisenhower is doing—the Queen’s trip to Canada, eh, maybe, and Castro’s daily antics, if you’re a Cuban refugee waiting it out in Miami until he lays an egg—but an old man reunited with his dog? They can never get enough of that. I stuck an interview possibility in your typewriter bar—about this woman meteorologist over at the Weather Bureau. But get your funeral homes done first.”

“Naturally.”

I settled into my rightful slot that the tornado rewrite man had preempted yesterday, and dialed Ken at my first “fun home.” Since Monday, I’d established “once-removed” relationships on the phone with the various undertakers, and so far I liked Ken at Pedersen’s best, with his exotic Minnesota accent and his sympathetic attention to detail.

“Good morning, Emma. Nice to see the sunshine for a change, isn’t it? I have two for you this morning. Ready?”

One woman and one man: a ninety-year-old widow of a druggist and a seventy-two-year-old switchman for the Seaboard Railway. Nothing newsworthy about either, until Ken pointed out I’d want to be sure to mention that the widow had been active in “the following local charities” (a list of ten) and also said to remind readers that her late husband had been proprietor of the first drugstore in Miami, which still bore his name. The switchman had been grand master of his Masonic lodge.

“Those details make all the difference,” I said, scribbling in my pad. “They catch the eye of more readers. All the people who know the drugstore, all the Masons.”

“You’re too young to believe this, Emma, but most older people—and there are lots of us out there—read the obituaries before they read anything else. Well, but these folks got to live out their full lives. Our establishment up in Lauderdale got such a tragic call this morning. A three-month-old baby was smothered by the new curtains blowing across her crib. The young parents had gotten alarmed by all the recent stories of plastic-bag fatalities and thought it would be safer to replace the plastic curtains with gauze ones. Talk about the ironies of fate.”

Rod Reynolds, slashing up someone’s copy at his adjacent desk, perked up when I exclaimed, “God, how awful!”

“Get on the phone and call Lauderdale,” said Rod, when I relayed the incident after hanging up with Ken.

“You mean call the Pedersen funeral home in Lauderdale?” I was already fiddling with the words for my lead. (“An infant girl suffocated in the new gauze curtains that her parents, alarmed over recent plastic-bag fatalities . . .”)

“No, our bureau in Lauderdale. One of our Broward reporters will call Pedersen’s and get in touch with the parents and write the story.” Seeing my disappointment, he added, “That’s what bureaus are
for,
Emma.”

I
’D BEEN
hoping while typing up my obits that Herman Melton had decided to sneak me Ginevra Brown’s home phone number after all. But no, when I returned his call, he only wanted to proffer a tip for what he described as “a nice little feature for you.” A registered nurse at Jackson Memorial was also a professional hula dancer, currently starring in a Hawaiian production over at the Roney Plaza. Herman said he could set it up so she would pose both in white uniform and in sarong. I supposed this was his way of making it up to me for withholding Ginevra’s phone number.

I then set up an interview for three o’clock with the lady meteorologist at the Weather Bureau, reported my appointment to Rod so he could assign a photographer to drive me, and set off with my spiral-bound pad for the morgue.

Moira Parks, in smoke-tinted glasses and snood-restrained hair, was busy with her massive shears. Multiple copies of

First Lady
Of Stage
Dies at 79

lay awaiting their separate envelopes on the long table perpendicular to her desk.

“Good morning, Moira. I’m just going to research something in here.” I could never look at her without remembering that burst of operatic splendor when she thought she was alone in the ladies’ room.

“Don’t hesitate to ask for help.”

“What would be the best source for a concise summary of the Spanish Civil War?”

“
The Columbia Encyclopedia,
I would think,” she replied in her monotone. “That would be the best place to start.”

I had already planned on starting with the
Columbia,
but it seemed the cordial thing to take Moira up on her inveterate offer of help. I lugged the tome from its shelf, established myself at one of the library tables, and experienced a pang of nostalgia for college days and looking things up. I had particularly relished the research on the young Elizabeth for my Tudor History course. That’s when I had become smitten with the concept of usurpation and all the ways a person could be usurped.

A virginal copy of this morning’s
Miami Star
had been placed at the end of each table. In my earlier self-oriented perusal of the paper at Howard Johnson’s, I had missed Ethel Barrymore’s front-page obituary, wedged as it was under a bigger story

Senate Rejects Strauss
As Commerce Secretary;
Ike “Good ’n Sore”

Also, the one-column photo of the dowager-ish woman in her black dress was very overlookable. The “First Lady of the American Theater” had died at age seventy-nine, on my birthday. “She was in good spirits right up to the end,” reported her nurse.

And who was to contradict the nurse? What was to stop people from telling whatever stories they liked about their deceased friends, especially if the friends had been famous—like Lídia telling about Ortega at the bullfight.

As I scanned the lengthy entry under “Spanish Civil War,” I fought down the familiar agitation of
losing ground.
For a college graduate and news reporter, I knew such a little about such a lot. Jake Rance had certainly made his point. Where had I
been
all those years? Surely some adults must have discussed the Korean War during my young life, and most likely they had discussed this war in Spain that had begun shortly after my birth. What had I been thinking of? During the Korean War, I had been tethered to Earl and Mother’s gypsy caravan, moving from high school to high school, in every one of which the only war we ever seemed to study was the American Civil War. I had made A’s in these history courses, and could still recite by heart, and in order, all the battles of the four-year conflict our Southern teachers enjoined us to call “The War Between the States,” because “civil war” meant a divided nation and made the Confederate states seem more at fault.

How would I ever catch up and fill in the gaps of my ignorance?

“You’ve been scribbling so assiduously I’m loath to interrupt you,” said a familiar insolent voice over my left shoulder.

“Bisbee! I’ve been wondering where you’d got to.”

“Can you join me for a quick bite at my club? I’ve got news.”

“About
what
?”

“About myself.”

I couldn’t read his face. “Is it . . . good news?” I remembered his prediction of a few days back that the
Star
sometimes elevated you like a balloon, then cut your string.

“
Commensurately
so. I’ll tell you everything when we get to Walgreens and you be the judge.”

“S
O, TELL
me, how has your first week gone?” Bisbee had started right in, after ordering my grilled cheese sandwich and Coke and his tuna sandwich and black coffee.

“Well, you’ve been my boss for a good part of it,” I said. “How do you think it went?”

“Oh, I know how
I
think it went. You get five stars from me.”

“Out of a total of how many?”

He laughed. “That’s such an Emma question. Out of five, of course.”

Had I detected a twinge of ruefulness in the laugh? Bisbee seemed altogether
tamped down
today. And I found it ominous that his hair was for once smoothly combed, his bow tie perfectly straight. “But that’s not what I asked you,” he went on. “I want
your
assessment of your first week at the
Star.
”

“Won’t you please tell me your news first? I’m dying of curiosity.”

“A reporter should always be dying of curiosity; it should be his or her chronic ailment, to be exacerbated at every opportunity. Nope, I want your assessment first. Consider it your final assignment for my Walgreens Tutorial.”

He leaned forward, training his full gaze on me. I noticed with surprise that his eyes were a serious pale gray, not the nervous brown I’d just assumed were under the wild brown eyebrows.

“Well, sticking with your five-star system,” I said, “I’d give myself five for overall effort. And for endurance. Definitely for endurance. And for not sassing back. Though, no, I did come close to the line when you wouldn’t let me follow up on my Queen of the Underworld story yesterday. But I don’t think you caught my little sarcasm.”

“Oh, I caught it, all right. In some things I’m your equal, Emma. But in the perspicacity department, I’m leagues ahead of you. I’ve had more opportunities to fine-tune my instrument. I have more to say about your Queen of the Underworld, but for now continue with your assessment.”

“I’d have to give myself a low mark, say a one, for not following through on that Ginevra opportunity at the hospital. I really bungled my chance. It wasn’t completely my fault, I ran out of time, and her husband showed up, but the ideal me would have done more with our time together. Actually, I won’t even give myself a one, because not one thing came out of it. Just a stupid paragraph I called in and someone else wrote.”

“I see,” said Bisbee. “Zero stars for Ginevra. Go on.”

“I’m going to give myself another five for Henry Sprat and Lola; even though they weren’t as thrilling a story as Ginevra would have been had I made the most of it, I squeezed the most out of Mr. Sprat. Of course, Jake’s photo contributed. Which brings me to something else that’s figured largely in my week. Keeping my temper under control. Jake Rance isn’t exactly a picnic to go on assignment with. And on my first day there was this old man, Charles P. Rose, who kept yelling at me over the phone, ‘Nobody could be
that
stupid!’ And I just went on being sweetly patient and saying let’s go over this again so that every reader, no matter how simple, can get it—”