Queen of the Underworld (43 page)

On the Saturday morning I accompanied Candice McGee to the Boca Raton fashion show, I had left some dishes to soak in Alma’s kitchen sink. During the hours of our happy outing (that day the society editor became the closest thing I had to a Broward collaborator), a dripping faucet did its worst. By early afternoon the men downstairs came home to find their ceiling leaking. Red-faced and furious, they were waiting for me when I got back.

“If we’d been ten minutes later, twelve yards of priceless silk brocade would have been ruined!” said one.

“Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry. I feel terrible. But at least the silk brocade wasn’t ruined.”

“No thanks to
you
!” snarled the other.

At last I had met my neighbors.

T
WO
“T
ODAY’S
Chuckles” I had thought worth copying into my “Go, Tar Heels!” notebook:

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.”

“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”

I
T LOOKED
as if the future of the Queen of the Underworld—if the Queen of the Underworld was to have a future—would be left up to me.

“Eavesdrop to your heart’s content,” Bisbee had said when I expressed my wish to overhear Ginevra telling her side of the story to the late Miss Edith. “Make it up . . . pursue your fascination while it’s hot . . . just don’t expect to have it run in the
Star.
” No word from Bisbee: maybe he was overwhelmed with his new responsibilities as Pompano bureau chief, or maybe he was embarrassed on my behalf by my abrupt exile to Broward. Or—who knows?—maybe he was finally getting his novel down on paper. Though I doubted it.

What if Ginevra were just suddenly to disappear? Walk out on her marriage, vanish? Where would she go? Perhaps it turned out that she had really loved the Mafia uncle all along and had gone to join him in Italy. I pictured him as something like Paul, only on the other side of the law. Or she might confide in the new friend she’d made, the young journalist: “You’ve made me realize I’ve got to get out or I’ll die.” And the young friend would pull out a card from her wallet—Major Erna Marjac. (“For many young women, we offer the only hope of independence.”)

Could an ex-madam, even if she was still in her twenties, be accepted into the U.S. Army? I would have to research that. Maybe even consult Major Marjac.

Everyone would get new names, of course. Miss Edith was already Edna and Ginevra was Delfine. Maybe I would name the Mafia uncle Paolo. And what would Emma be called? It had to be a name that combined happily with a “-ness” suffix, as in “Emma-ness.”

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.

M
Y 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

G
AIL
G
ODWIN
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.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
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