Queen of the Underworld (14 page)

The rescue diver was in an iron lung over at Jackson Memorial, waiting to be flown to a decompression chamber aboard a salvage ship in Key West. I scribbled the information from Bisbee’s contact at Jackson, a friendly sounding man named Herman Melton.

What were the bends and what was a decompression chamber? There was obviously a whole new vocabulary that went with watery locations, and here I had grown up in the hills. Meanwhile, how to bluff my way through with this liaison who probably assumed I was as informed as Bisbee? What to do? Hang up, run for the big dictionary in Moira Parks’s morgue, then call Melton back and say we had been cut off by the switchboard? Sleazy behavior for a heroine-in-progress. Humbly confess I didn’t know? Stupidly unprofessional. Indirection was more my style.

“At what
point
did he get the bends?” Ask a slightly offbeat question and hope to squeeze clues from his response.

“That’s something only he could answer,” said Melton. “He came up too fast, he was down eighty feet. You know what the bends are, don’t you?”

“I do in a
visceral
way, of course, but I wish you would tell me, from a medical standpoint, exactly what happens inside the person who’s having them. That way I can make it more accessible to our readers.” Borrowing from my Charles P. Rose strategy.

“Well, when pressure gets reduced too rapidly, nitrogen bubbles form in the blood. The lungs can’t circulate the nitrogen fast enough and there’s a lack of blood supply to the brain. The person undergoes disorientation and severe pain, the kind that bends you double—that’s where the term ‘bends’ came from—and then syncope occurs.”

“Ah,
syncope.
” I scribbled rapidly. And I had thought I was educated.

“You might want to say ‘loss of consciousness,’ for the benefit of your readers.”

“Thank you, Mr. Melton. Good idea.”

“I like your desire to be accessible, Miss Gant. There’s too much misinformation floating around about what goes on inside hospitals. And inside the human body. That’s why my job was created, to clear away some of the confusion. Now do you know what a decompression chamber does?”

“I believe so, but I’d like to be as clear as possible. And please call me Emma.”

“If you’ll call me Herman. Come over to Jackson soon, Emma, and I’ll show you around. Meanwhile, feel free to call if you need medical translations. I was premed at Emory, but I tripped up on organic chemistry. The terminology stays with you, though.”

9.

June 17: Room 510

new words:
moot
coup de grâce
syncope
bends

tomorrow I will be 22

I closed my “Go, Tar Heels!” notebook and slid it back into the bedside drawer on top of the Gideons Bible. An evil sky glowered outside my window. It looked as though Jake Rance was going to get his storm. Nasty man gets nasty storm. The ring of the phone made me jump.

“Hi,” said Paul.

“You’re here
already
?”

“Nope, I’m calling from your home state. I just fired my chef. His replacement won’t be here until tomorrow, if then. I’m not going to make it for your birthday, kid. I can’t walk out and leave Bev and Aunt Stella to break in a new guy. You understand, don’t you?”

“Why did you have to fire the other one?” I was crushed, but whining wasn’t part of Paul’s image of me.

“Too slow. Guests were getting restless waiting for their main courses. But he sabotaged himself today when Stella walked into the kitchen and heard him complaining to the sous-chef about having to sacrifice his culinary art to Hymie cuisine. You know how tiny she is, he never even saw her. I went in and told him to pack his bags and drove him to the bus station. He can practice his culinary art at the Mountain City Men’s Club, where they drink their dinners and don’t allow Hymies. If they’ll take him back.”

I was bitterly disappointed and tired of being brave. “Ah, I wish I had been at the bus station to go back to the Inn with you.”

“There’s no going back for people destined for the heights, Emma. I’m hoping to be down the weekend after this one. How’s it going at the
Star
?”

“No heights in sight yet. I modeled a raincoat for the fashion page and wrote a story about a police diver who got the bends. It should be in tomorrow.”

“We’re several days behind here. I just got Sunday’s
Star
in this morning’s mail. You realize you and I were together Sunday?”

“You think I’ve forgotten?”

“Just hearing your voice picks me up. I’ll be looking for the diver story. And that picture in the raincoat. It’s not so long till weekend-after-next.”

“It seems very long to me.”

“That’s one advantage of being old, darling. Time goes faster.”

After we hung up, I tried to go on with my rereading of
The Fall,
the one book I had brought with me, like a talisman, to Miami. Just holding it in my hands made me feel closer to the day when I would have a published book of my own. Last spring, I had devoted a
Daily Tar Heel
column to this little masterwork of irony by “the spokesman of his generation,” as Camus was described on the dust jacket. That column, titled “We Fornicated and Read the Newspapers,” and bearing my mug shot with its flying hair and don’t-mess-with-me smirk, was praised and envied by all my literary friends and earned poor Dean Ligon another scolding phone call from the dean of women, saying that I continued to abuse the privilege of my column with provocative language and cynicism.

What kind of thing would I have to write to be called the spokeswoman of my generation? I hugged
The Fall
to my chest. What if I were to be granted a split-second vision of my first published novel, the colors and design of its jacket?
The ——,
by Emma Gant.

Damn it, I was going to be
alone on my birthday.
It was like having a crucial floorboard collapse in my palace of security, sending me plunging right back into the old dungeon of panic and loneliness. I knew it was not the end of the world; if anything, it would only increase Paul’s desire for me. But how I hated him for that last remark. By the time I was Paul’s present age, he would be sixty-two; when I was sixty-two, he would be eighty-two. I saw us married, Paul on his deathbed, his hair completely white and flowing back from his temples like some ancient rabbi’s. He squeezed my hand, and I heard his voice as clearly as a few minutes before: “I’ve loved you more than anyone, kid, but, darling, I’m old and it’s time to move on.” Then the pressure of his grasp weakened and dissolved, and I felt the chill of aloneness circulating around my freed hand.

This scenario of my future grief actually brought me off the bed and onto my feet, and I was standing in front of my fifth-floor window, gazing out through a scrim of widow’s tears at the weird greenish pallor on the horizon when a rumbling came out of nowhere, like a low-flying plane passing at top speed right outside the Julia Tuttle. Jagged lightning slashed the sky, blue fireworks danced up and down the power lines, glass shattered, awnings collapsed with a
whump,
outdoor metal furniture flipped upside down and shrieked across the concrete. The underwater light in the swimming pool and all the area lamps around the cabanas went out just after a giant royal palm heaved itself partway out of the ground and swayed back and forth over the pool, its tresses dragging the water.

Shouts and Spanish-speaking voices burst forth from all directions. I picked up the phone to ask Luís on the desk what had happened, but the line was dead. The lamp didn’t turn on, either, so I slipped on my skirt, grabbed my purse, and headed for the elevator, which wasn’t working.

The stairwell was crammed with other guests and their exclamations.

“¡Dios mío!”

“¡Ay, qué susto!”

“¿Como salgo de aqui?”

“¡Apaga la luz, apaga la luz!”

“No puedo, tonto. Hay un fallo eléctrico.”

“Un asalto de viento.”

“¡Qué ruido!”

About twenty more had already gathered in the gloom of the lobby, talking nonstop. I was beginning to understand how foreigners feel, but at least these people weren’t speaking something impossible, like Russian or Greek. I could recognize about one Spanish word out of ten.

Looking happier than I had ever seen him, Luís scurried about, setting out hurricane lamps and reassuring guests.
“Estamos fuera de peligro . . . Sí, sí, tornado, pero se terminó . . .”
As soon as he saw me he called out, “Is okay, the danger is pass,
señorita.
Was a tornado, but it has moved elsewhere.”

The dominoes players had a hurricane lamp on their table and their transistor was tuned to a Miami station. A knot of men clustered around them, translating the news from English to Spanish for those outside the circle. I edged as close as I could and strained at snatches from the bulletins.

Twister heading north, reported to have hit northeast Miami full force . . .

I needed to call the
Star
and offer to come in.

I was on my way to ask Luís where I could find the nearest working telephone when someone touched my arm.

“Mees Gant?” It was the Cuban mother, wearing a turban and lounging pajamas, her frowning little daughter in tow. The girl carried one of the porcelain dolls I had seen her with on the day of my arrival—of all our arrivals—was it only three days ago?

“I am Marisa Ocampo.” The name bubbled off her tongue like sparkling water. “Alejito says you are from Mountain City and are also a St. Clothilde’s girl, yes?” She was alight with expectancy. Beneath the turban her hair was wet; she must have just washed it. “I was Marisa Velázquez, Class of Fifty-one, my sister Hortensia was Fifty-three.”

“I was Fifty-five. Or I would have been if my family hadn’t moved away.”

“Ah, then in 1951 you were still in the grammar school, you would not remember me.”

But I did remember Hortensia Velázquez, in the fragmentary way the handful of Cuban girls had registered themselves upon our cliquish North American concerns. Hortensia’s fragment had been her dark moustache, a source of curiosity to us: Why didn’t she use a depilatory, or had the nuns confiscated it as a sin against God’s will? Naturally, I didn’t bring up the moustache, but that I recalled her younger sister was enough for Mrs. Ocampo. She released a flood of news about Hortensia: degree in languages from Columbia, married to an American, both of them working at the UN. “No little ones yet, but they are both so active in their careers. This is my daughter, Luisa.
Luisa, quisiera presentarte a señorita Gant . . .
”

I caught “Mountain City” (
MON-tan CEE-ty
) and “Santa Clothilde” (
Clo-TEEL-day
), of course, but the rest was too fast for me.

Luisa shifted the doll so she could offer me her hand.
“Buenas tardes, señorita.”
Her voice was surprisingly unchildlike, solemn, with a gravelly roughness, like a miniature smoker’s voice.

“Hello, Luisa.
Me llamo Emma. ¿Como se llama su muñeca?
” I was thrilled to have remembered the word for doll.

“Manuela.”
She stroked the doll’s hair as if soothing her.

“¿Y, donde está su amiga?”

Luisa regarded me with polite incomprehension.

“I mean, let’s see . . . Where is your, ah,
OTRA muñeca
?”

“Tilda tiene dolor de cabeza,”
the girl replied in her solemn, gravelly voice.

“
Sí,
our Tilda is upstairs with a headache,” said her mother. “Tilda has the headaches and Manuela, she has
las pesadillas,
the bad dreams. The dolls suffer for our whole family, thanks to our wise Luisita here.” She stroked her daughter’s hair with the same soothing motion that the child had used in stroking the doll’s. “Do you know, Emma—may I call you Emma, yes?—I have our yearbook from St. Clothilde’s, I brought it with me from Cuba.
Le Flambeau,
from fifty-one, is upstairs in our suite.”

“Oh, really?” I needed to get in touch with the city desk. Was Bisbee still on duty?

“Perhaps we can look at it together. If we are still here. We go from day to day, everything depends on that
engañador
Fidel. Do you know, he has taken Enrique’s mills in Oriente. And they were at Belén together! That is my husband over there, listening to the radio. Alejito has been so kind, he has given Enrique a temporary job as night clerk so we can pay our bill. We could take out nothing but our clothes from Cuba.”

Luís strutted about, relaying the latest tornado bulletins. I strained to hear while attending to Marisa Ocampo, who had attached herself to me like a long-lost best friend.

North Miami hardest hit: up beyond Fifty-ninth Street, houses and stores blasted apart, cars and boats overturned, flying glass everywhere . . .

“Do you know, Emma, I have memorized my class roll from St. Clothilde’s . . .”

“Oh, really?”

Dazed and bleeding people wandering the streets . . . ambulances loaded with the injured speeding to the closest hospitals . . .

I needed to get to Jackson Memorial. It was my beat now. My Miami map was in my purse, along with my spiral-bound notepad. I would walk the twenty-something blocks, if necessary.

“Yes, is true! When I have the
insomnio,
I recite the roll: Adelaide Attwater, Caroline Bell, Sue Ann Carruthers, Patty Delaney, Francesca Ford—I remember all the names. And usually I am asleep before Velázquez.”

Alex de Costa arrived just as I was heading out the door. He was appalled that I intended to walk all the way to Jackson Memorial.

“There are wires down! Wait five minutes and I will drive you.”

He consulted with Luís about damage sustained, spoke individually to guests, announced that he had met a Florida Power & Light crew working nearby and the Julia Tuttle could expect to have power restored any minute. “We got nothing like the devastation in North Miami.”

It was the first time I had seen him in his proper role of manager, rather than desk clerk or bootblack, and I was impressed and a mite attracted, watching him take charge, smoothly switching between languages like a diplomat. I was surprised and flattered that he had offered to leave his post to drive me to the hospital. He and Enrique Ocampo consulted seriously about something, from their gestures it appeared to be about the huge royal palm swaying precariously over the pool, and then we were off in his rattly Mercedes sedan.