Queen of the Underworld (19 page)

To up the ante, Earl had appended two postscripts in his pert block-print handwriting. Following his favorite quote to annoy me with, “I count only the sunny hours” (Hazlitt’s “On a Sun-Dial,” from
A Treasury of English and American Verse
), came one of his typical out-of-left-field rebukes: “Pick up the phone occasionally and make your mother and grandmother happy.”

A
FTER DISPATCHING
Earl’s card to the bathroom wastebasket, I took a few deep breaths before embarking on the arrangement of my flowers. Paul was not here, but his roses were. Not tonight, but next weekend we would be sipping our Beefeaters and eating our New York strip steaks and snuggling together afterwards in the “ambassador’s” quarters over at P. Nightingale’s, where poor Alex lost less money gambling in the winter season because no IOUs were accepted there. (Why was Alex bringing his
mother
back from Palm Beach?)

Meanwhile Paul loved me, I was his darling, he might well be thinking of me right now, almost 6:30 p.m., which he knew was the time of my birth. It was also when the doors opened for dinner at the Nightingale Inn and Paul put the march from
The Bridge on the River Kwai
on the stereo and stood by the door in one of his elegant suits, greeting the guests as they filed in.

Here’s the first rose, a red one, for you, Mr. Nightingale, gent extraordinaire. You gave me the courage to come to this city, you restored my faith in men.

And, well, maybe a red rose for my father. Without Preston Gant’s biological contribution, Paul would have no Emma to send flowers to. Thank you, Father, for charming my mother, at least long enough to get me under way.

What
right
had Jake Rance to be so rude? Driving me back to the Julia Tuttle, he had lashed out savagely when I asked, mainly to seem interested in Korea and his Pulitzer, about the significance of the thirty-eighth parallel: “How uninformed women are! You never know any
facts.
You were how old in 1953, sixteen? Where
were
you? What were you thinking of? Didn’t you ever pick up a newspaper or hear people talk?”

Now a yellow rose for Paul. The first time I saw him he was wearing a yellow polo shirt. Last June, I had answered an ad for a waitress at a “small family resort” on Lake Henderson, thirty miles outside Mountain City, and he had come to the house—Earl and Mother’s—to interview me. The waitress job at the plush resort in Blowing Rock had fallen through at the last minute, and I was willing to take anything with room and board to get me out of the range of Earl’s temper and his nightly prowls.

I was in the front yard, reading a library copy of
The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (The Early Years)
and watching my little half sister and half brother splash in their plastic wading pool while Mother, seven months pregnant with a third child, took a nap indoors.

A dark green Buick station wagon with wood panels drew up in front of the house and a middle-aged man with tawny skin and cropped crinkly gray hair rolled down his window. “Is this the Gant house?” he inquired in a soft nasal drawl.

“It’s the Brady house, actually,” I said, rising from the deck chair, “but you’re in the right place. I’m Emma Gant.”

He stepped out of the wagon, a trim Levantine figure in pleated silvery trousers, yellow Lacoste shirt tucked neatly inside his alligator belt, and black-and-white spectator shoes.

“I’m Paul Nightingale.”

We shook hands. The sophisticated scent emanating from him was a universe away from the college-boy brands I was familiar with.

“So you worked for the peerless McCord last summer at Blowing Rock. I’ve seen him in action over at the Deauville during the winter season. I have a modest establishment on the Beach myself.”

“He wrote me in May that Blowing Rock had been sold and the new owners weren’t hiring college kids anymore,” I said. “He’s gone back to Europe because of the terrible winter in Miami; nobody made any money.”

“It was the worst winter in tourist history.”

“Did you have a bad winter at your place?”

“No, we had a fair season, but thank you for asking. My place on the Beach is a supper club, mostly locals who know one another and want a good steak and some light entertainment. When it hit forty degrees, we turned on the heat and opened the cloakroom. The ladies were tickled to have a genuine excuse to get out their minks. Too bad about McCord. The spectacle of him setting his long legs in motion and sailing across a dining room with his tasseled menus was something to see. You must know your stuff if he trained you. Our Nightingale Inn will be small potatoes for you.”

“We had to make these tiny diagrams on our order pads,” I said. “If Mr. McCord ever overheard a waitress asking her table ‘Who gets the chicken and who gets the fish?’ she was down the mountain in a flash.”

Paul Nightingale laughed. He had small, even teeth with no fillings.

“Out of the twenty of us who started with him,” I went on, hell-bent on landing this job, however small-potatoes it was, and getting out of Earl’s clutches, “eleven of us survived the training week. Only eight of us lasted out the whole summer.”

Mr. Nightingale was looking more and more delighted with me.

“Wouldn’t you like to bring your visitor in?” Mother, finished with her nap, had called from the porch.

T
HERE WERE
four red roses, two yellow, two coral, two pink, one white, and one mauve. The florist’s random selection from the day’s offerings? (“He said a mixed bunch, might as well get rid of some of these stragglers.”) Or had Paul specified how many of each color? I wouldn’t put it past him, the man who knew to the ounce how much gin you needed before your shrimp cocktail came. I fantasized that I was tapping into his private code. What, for instance, if not my bruised face, could this single mauve rose represent in our shared history?

My heart still sank when I remembered Paul Nightingale’s recoil at the sight of me when I stepped off the Trailways bus from Mountain City the morning after our interview.

“Christ, kid, how did you get that shiner?”

“Oh, saying goodbye to my stepfather.” I tried to keep it light, but I could see he was shocked by the sight of me. This was not what he had come to pick up from the Lake Henderson bus station and take back to his “family hotel” to wait on his guests.

“Let me understand this,” Earl had begun the night before, his throat already engorged with the tension that heralded a conflict. “You prefer to wait tables at a kike ‘family’ hotel, when you could stay in your own home in comfort and lighten your mother’s load and get paid a substantial weekly allowance by me. Those Miami Jews will run you ragged and then stiff you and you’ll come bellyaching to me at the end of the summer that you didn’t make any tips and can’t go back to school.”

“Please, Earl”—my mother, resorting to her peacekeeping role—“we’re not even sure it
is
a Jewish hotel. And Mr. Nightingale seemed a gentleman in every respect.”

“Hell, if his name is Nightingale, mine is goddamn Woody Woodpecker. And everybody knows Lake Henderson has been ruined by the Jews.”

“Well, I’m going all the same,” I said. I folded a sweater and laid it carefully in my suitcase. “I don’t care whether his name is really Nickelbaum or Noodleberger.”

Stop now, while you’re ahead, a well-known inner voice urged—in vain. “Whatever his name is, he’s more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be.”

WHAP.

R
ED, RED,
yellow, and now the mauve. As Enrique Ocampo had predicted, my flower
composición
was “disappearing” the dowdy vase. The dusky purple added a lugubrious note to the festive hues of its companions, reminding me that my shiner from Earl, as unpropitious as it had seemed that day, had set up the ideal circumstances for Paul’s and my affair.

“Kid, I can’t take you to the Inn looking like this,” my new boss had said, driving us past the entrance to the Nightingale Inn. “But I don’t relish the idea of sending you back to Mountain City on the next bus.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

He was driving slowly around a lake choked with water lilies. “Here’s what I’m going to propose, then.” He turned off the main road. “All this property used to be a girls’ camp,” he explained as we bumped along a rutted dirt road winding between clusters of abandoned cabins. We passed through a tunnel of towering rhododendron until the road ended in front of a solitary cabin with new porch furniture and venetian blinds.

“My aunt Stella fixed this up for me,” he said, idling the motor. “It’s supposed to be my hideaway, where I can come to collect myself and make payroll. I’m going to suggest you stay here until that shiner fades. Then you can join the rest of my staff up at the Inn. As I told your mother, the young people have a wing all to themselves. The cabin’s amenities are pretty basic, but it’s peaceful and you look like you could use a little peace. I’ll send Stella down, she’s a wizard with skin, she worked for Guerlain in Paris before the Occupation. Now she creates custom scents for her Miami clients. We’ll just say when I picked you up at the bus station you had a bad cold, so we quarantined you here. If that’s agreeable to you.”

“It’s very generous of you. And don’t worry, I heal pretty quickly from this kind of thing.”

He gave me a sharp glance and seemed on the verge of asking me something, but didn’t.

“I’m going to do a good job for you as soon as I’m presentable,” I said.

“I haven’t the least doubt of it.” He switched off the ignition. “I’ll go in with you and remove my things. My wife Bev was in such pain just before we flew her down to Miami for the hysterectomy that she wanted our room to herself up at the Inn.”

Thanks to the resilience of my young skin, and to Aunt Stella’s comfrey poultices and cosmetic arts, I was on the job within the week. Yet, also thanks to her, I never did move up to the employees’ wing at the Inn. I forged an immediate bond with this independent little wrinkled fashion plate, with her French scarves and scents, and her curious amalgam of Gallic and Yiddish witticisms. While she ministered to my face, we exchanged pivotal chapters from our past struggles. My black eye naturally led into the saga of my decadelong campaign to escape Earl-dom. Which elicited Stella’s tale of how she had escaped bourgeois life with her department-store-owning father in Leipzig after her younger sister Lily ran away to America with one of the salesclerks. (“Poor Ernst was not at all comme il faut, and he was a
schmendrick
in the bargain, but he rescued Lily from Leipzig; they even produced darling Paul between them before Ernie perished from a burst appendix. But who was going to rescue
me
from the family store? I had to think fast or surrender my fate to my father’s will. You see, Poppa had decided that I was to take over the business.”)

I
T WAS
Stella’s judgment, at the end of her ministrations to me, that I was too mature to be herded into dormitory quarters with the “boychiks and girlchiks” up at the Inn. “She’s going to be a writer,” she told Paul, “and she needs her privacy.”

Whenever I indulged myself in connecting the dots of my fate as it was unfurling, I had to wonder how much my remaining in the cabin had contributed to Paul’s and my love affair. It would have happened sooner or later, I was sure, because there was a mutual attraction from the beginning. But, just as Earl’s whack had necessitated my temporary asylum in the cabin, Stella’s suggestion that I stay on there certainly expedited things.

The story got around that I had begun a novel and that Stella and Mr. Nightingale had turned over the cabin to me so I could write during my off-hours. This gave me a certain mystique among the other college help, who were eager to go out and party as soon as serving hours were over. When Bev returned from Miami after recuperating from her hysterectomy, she added her respectful enthusiasm to my literary ambitions, meanwhile teaching me how to walk and to pin up my hair in a French twist like hers.

One of the two remaining red roses would commemorate the inauguration of my idyll with Paul. Still hiding out with my black eye, I had asked him to bring me the second volume of
Felix Krull
from the library when he drove into Mountain City for supplies. He had returned looking as crestfallen as a father who has failed his child.

“Kid, I couldn’t get it for you because there
isn’t
a volume two. Mann died before he got a chance to write it, the librarian said. She sent this, though; I hope you haven’t read it.” It was a much-tattered copy of
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.
I said I hadn’t, and went on to thank him profusely. A new look flickered across his face. He tripped over the doorsill as he backed out of the cabin.

That was as far as it went. But a few days later, after it had gone a lot further, he told me that’s when it had begun for him. “I saw your disappointment and how you decided to lie about the other book so I wouldn’t feel bad. Also I was touched that you didn’t know he hadn’t finished it, a smart kid like you. Like with the shiner, I wanted to protect you. But now I also knew I wanted to make you happy. If it had been in my power, I would have produced that second volume out of thin air so I could bring you the rest of your story.”

I
WAS
about to unplug the third red rose from its capsule when my phone rang.

“I was just putting in a red rose to commemorate the first time you kissed me in the cabin,” I would say. Though it was unlikely he could get away to call me when the guests were still filing in to dinner.

But it was only Tess, full of excitement, wanting to know how I’d weathered the tornado.

“Well, a big royal palm fell into the pool, and our power was out for a while, but I went right over to—”

However, Tess plunged into her own adventures before I could embark on mine. “Julio and Genio’s bungalow had extensive water damage, so we’ve been busy all day transferring some important equipment they were storing for us to dry locations.”