{"product_id":"queen-of-the-underworld-isbn-9780345483195","title":"Queen of the Underworld","description":"Here at last is the eagerly awaited new novel from New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin. Queen of the Underworld is sweeping and sultry literary fiction, featuring a memorable young heroine and engaging characters whose intimate dramas interconnect with hers. \u003cbr\u003eIn the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flees to the States to wait out what they hope to be his short-lived reign, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter. Her fierce ambition and belief in herself are set against the stories swirling around her, both at the newspaper office and in her downtown Miami hotel, which is filling up with refugees. \u003cbr\u003eEmma’s avid curiosity about life thrives amid the tropical charms and intrigues of Miami. While toiling at the news desk, she plans the fictional stories she will write in her spare time. She spends her nights getting to know the Cuban families in her hotel–and rendezvousing with her married lover, Paul Nightingale, owner of a private Miami Beach club. \u003cbr\u003eAs Emma experiences the historical events enveloping the city, she trains her perceptive eye on the people surrounding her: a newfound Cuban friend who joins the covert anti-Castro training brigade, a gambling racketeer who poses a grave threat to Paul, and a former madam, still in her twenties, who becomes both Emma’s obsession and her alter ego. Emma’s life, like a complicated dance that keeps sweeping her off her balance, is suddenly filled with divided loyalties, shady dealings, romantic and professional setbacks, and, throughout, her adamant determination to avoid “usurpation” by others and remain the protagonist of her own quest.Advance praise for Queen of the Underworld\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Queen of the Underworld will be a delight to [Godwin’s] many admirers for whom The Odd Woman and A Mother and Two Daughters remain luminous in memory, like old, dear friends. Here is the irresistibly readable Godwin voice, tender and sardonic, warmly romantic and unflinchingly funny. Godwin’s new heroine Emma Gant is as alive on the page as any ‘fictitious’ character has a right to be and when Emma takes leave of us, as she does in the startling ending of Queen of the Underworld, we miss her, and can’t help but hope that her adventures in Florida at the time of the Cuban Revolution will be continued.”\u003cbr\u003e–Joyce Carol Oates\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gail Godwin’s excellent new novel seems to me to be a muted tragedy about a soul inside the body of a modern woman navigating through the terra incognita of modern times.”\u003cbr\u003e–Kurt Vonnegut\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Here is a wonderfully engaging story that explores the growth of a young woman beginning her career as a journalist. The inner workings of Emma’s life are gracefully presented and marvelously mingled with the workings of the outer world; the combination provides a universe in which the reader is glad to reside.” –Elizabeth StroutGail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award nominee and the bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband, and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961—1963, the first of two volumes, edited by Rob Neufeld. 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. Visit the author’s website at www.gailgodwin.com.1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Now I had graduated on this bright June Saturday in 1959 and few were the  obstacles left between me and my getaway train to Miami—obstacles that  nevertheless must be cunningly surmounted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Emma, you ride in front with Earl,” said Mother, as expected. “I’ll sit  in back and reminisce a little more about my time here in Paradise.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh?” challenged Earl. “What does that make the rest of your life, then, a  comedown?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The rest of my life is still in progress,” Mother lightly countered,  making room for herself among my college leftovers that were going back to  the mountains with them. “Ask me again in thirty or forty years.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We began the winding descent out of Chapel Hill as, seven years earlier,  the three of us, with my mother’s new husband at the wheel, had begun  another descent into a new life. Only this time, they would be dropping me  off within the hour at the Seaboard Station in Raleigh. My journey as part  of this family unit would soon be at an end. Happily, my train to Miami  left at one fifteen, so a farewell lunch had been out of the question, a  circumstance diminishing that much further the chance of a last-minute  blowup with Earl.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But still I was on my guard, for already he was making those engorged  throat noises that preceded a sermon. I did not dare glance back at Mother  for fear of catching her eye. An exchanged look of sympathy or, God  forbid, a mutual smirk might still explode everything sky-high, as it had  done plenty of times before. My job was to look respectfully attentive  without rising to his bait. I folded my hands in my lap and faced front,  focusing on the road ahead. Windows on both sides were open to let in the  breeze, and the capricious little whomp-whomps of hot air provided a  divertimento against Earl’s opening sally and helped me keep my own  counsel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sacrifices had been made. If I would ever stop to think about other  people. Empathy and gratitude not my strong suits. Had never known what it  was to apply myself on a daily basis. Hadn’t been required of me. Had been  raised to think that the world revolved around me and that I could coast  along without making much of an effort. Not completely my fault. Had been  indulged too much for my own good by teachers as well as family. But now I  was going into the real world where I would have to knuckle under and  deliver the goods like everybody else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Though why you should choose to go off half-cocked to a place like Miami  remains a mystery to your mother and me. Your dean told us the Charlotte  Observer wanted you, but he said you’d had your heart set on Miami ever  since you went down for that interview at Christmas. I said, well, we were  the last to know she went to Miami for Christmas. She told us she was  staying in the dorm to catch up on her work. We didn’t learn the truth  till February.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Damn and blast you, I thought. You have a single conversation with my  dean, who adores me, and you make me out a liar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I didn’t want to say anything to anyone until I knew I had the job,” I  cautiously replied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I told the dean, she doesn’t even know anybody in Miami—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t know anybody in Charlotte, either, I refrained from saying.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “She knows Tess,” put in Mother from the backseat. Tess was her old  college roommate from Converse. “Tess will be meeting her train tomorrow  morning.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “So why didn’t she stay with Tess at Christmas, when she went down for  that interview?” His voice had edged up a decibel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, I guess she wanted to stay with someone else at Christmas,” Mother  neutrally suggested.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course I had told them, after the fact, with whom I’d stayed. Or rather  I had presented an acceptable configuration of the way in which this  family I had worked for last summer had offered me hospitality. Not that  any configuration of the Nightingales would ever be acceptable to Earl.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, I guess there’s just no accounting for some people’s taste, but to  move down there to be with that tribe . . .” Menacing pause before the  refrain: “When her dean said the Charlotte Observer would have taken her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The voice rolled on, but so, I congratulated myself, did the car. Every  mile we achieved was one mile nearer to my release. We had not veered off  the road or had a flat tire and nobody had backhanded me to start a black  eye for my first day at work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Think of it as a scene early in a novel, I told myself: The stepfather  picks one last fight with the daughter who has not appreciated him. The  mother in the backseat, wedged among her daughter’s boxes, knees tucked  under her like a college girl, is forgiving of the wild little breezes  that mess up her hairdo because they mute his voice. There will be plenty  more of it to listen to on their long drive back to the mountains. Whose  novel was this going to be? Not the stepfather’s; the writer might never  grow the empathy for that one. Not the mother’s, either, though it catches  in the daughter’s throat to see the youthful way the older woman is  clasping her knees, wrapped in her own memories of Chapel Hill, when she  still expected to get everything she wanted. If it was going to be the  daughter’s, there would be some choked-back sobs in the mother’s embrace  at the train station, one last stoic offering of the daughter’s mouth for  the imposition of the stepfather’s kiss, and then they would be gone on  the next page.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When, as a last-minute taunt, Earl, in the act of setting down my  suitcases inside my roomette, asked if I thought I had “money to burn” for  this exclusive little compartment with its own washroom and pull-down bed,  I suppressed the perfect comeback that it was indeed a “burnt offering” of  my graduation monies to thank the gods for my escape from him. At long  last I had learned that it was never too late for a black eye when saying  goodbye to certain people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Alone in my luxury cubicle, I relaxed for the first time in months,  allowing the train’s diesel engine to take over the job of getting me to  my destination. Woods pinked with afternoon June light alternated with  tobacco fields and tin-roofed drying barns. As we shot through a dreary  little hamlet, a character offered herself for my perusal: a girl born and  raised in this flyblown place who had dreams of going somewhere and one  day wakes up on her deathbed, a forgotten old maid who has never left  town, and hears this very train hurtle by. She feels the diesel cry in the  marrow of her bones and in her last conscious moment believes she is  aboard. She savors all the sweetness of having gotten out, and she expires  with a rapturous smile on her face for no one to see but the undertaker.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Could such a woman still exist in the late nineteen-fifties, even in rural  North Carolina? Why not? Maybe I would write this existential pastorale  with its O. Henry–ish ending in the evenings when I got home from my  newspaper job. It was the sort of thing that might get me published in a  literary quarterly, especially one of the Southern ones, which abounded in  stories about trains passing and nothing much ever happening at home. My  plan was to become a crack journalist in the daytime, building my worldly  experience and gaining fluency through the practice of writing to meet  deadlines. Then, in the evening and on weekends, I would slip across the  border into fiction, searching for characters interesting and strong  enough to live out my keenest questions. My journalism would support me  until I became a famous novelist. Perhaps I would become a famous  journalist on the side, if I could manage both.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I began to lower myself into the environs of the old maid’s unlived life  until I started feeling queasy. Despite my desperate desire to be  published, I knew this was a warning signal to get out of there. Letting  yourself be trapped in the wrong story was another way of succumbing to  usurpation. Goodbye, old girl, someone else will have to tell your boring  tale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I took first call for the dining car and sat down to a spotless white  tablecloth and a red rosebud in a silver vase. Perfect icons for my new  beginning. Like an antidote to my ditched character back in the roomette,  a smart, suntanned woman in an Army officer’s uniform slowly materialized  through the haze of my nearsightedness. Her gaze lit on me, she murmured  something to the waiter, and the next thing I knew she was asking if she  might join me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Please do.” I heard myself switching into my well-brought-up mode, even  though I had been counting on dining alone and savoring my getaway some  more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Her brass name tag read “Major E. J. Marjac.” She introduced herself as  Erna Marjac. When I said “Emma Gant,” she remarked on the similarity of  our first names, which would have annoyed me had she not had such a warm  smile (and beautiful teeth in the bargain) and had she not looked so  straightforwardly charmed by the prospect of having dinner with me. By the  time she had ordered from the menu, without the usual female  shilly-shallying, I knew I envied her self-command and I resolved to use  this opportunity to further my development.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She asked where I was headed, and I said I was going to Miami to be a  reporter on the Miami Star.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Really? You seem so young. I thought you were a student.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I was until noon today. I just graduated from the university at Chapel  Hill.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She laughed, exposing the beautiful teeth again. “You aren’t wasting any  time, are you? We ought to celebrate. May I treat you to some wine, Emma?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Thank you, that would be nice.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Major Marjac signaled the waiter. “What would you like?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh, whatever you’re ordering will be fine.” Having grown up in  beer-and-bourbon land, I hadn’t a clue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, since we’re both having red meat, a half bottle of this Côte du  Rhône will go down well. If we’d chosen the chicken, I would have  suggested the Blue Nun.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My first lesson in wines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She told me she’d just completed a very successful recruiting tour and was  heading for some R \u0026amp; R with a friend in Pensacola before reporting back to  duty at Fort McClellan in Alabama.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What do you do on a recruiting tour?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I show a film about the opportunities the Army offers to women today and  then I have interviews the rest of the day. I’m very good at assessing  character and signing up the best ones, but this time I broke my own  record. Thirty-seven young women from fifteen states will be reporting for  duty at Fort McClellan by the end of the month.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I might have been number thirty-eight, I thought, had I not had my hiring  letter from the managing editor of the Miami Star tucked in my purse. But  then, of course, I wouldn’t have been on this train.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Major Marjac’s character-assessing gaze gave me a stamp of approval.  “You’re fortunate, Emma, you started ahead of the game. But for many young  women, we offer the only hope of independence.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Over wine and dinner she told me stuff about code breaking and weaponry,  and about the physical ordeals the new recruits would undergo: gas  chambers and such. I strained hard to retain everything in case I decided  at some future point to write a story about a girl in her last year of  high school, desperate to escape her circumstances: she passes this window  with a sign, army recruiting women today, and inside is handsome Major  Marjac with her welcoming smile.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When we said goodbye—she would be getting off at Jacksonville before  dawn—the Major gave me her card.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Slip this into your wallet, Emma. If things don’t meet your expectations  at the Star, drop me a line. With your college degree you could go  straight into officers’ training.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I asked the porter to make up my roomette for sleeping and was in bed  before dark, swaying with the train’s motion, mellow from Major Marjac’s  Côte du Rhône. When I was in my pajamas, I raised the shade again so I  could get the maximum benefit from the experience, lying straight as a  mummy in my little coffin-bed of rebirth, hurtling through one town after  another where people steeped like old tea bags in their humdrum lives,  speeding farther away by the minute from Earl-dom and all the other  bottlenecks I had narrowly squeezed through.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It both gratified and goaded me that I had come across to an observant  recruiter as one of those sleek, fortunate ones who “started ahead of the  game.” Wasn’t that the image that I had cultivated? Yet, when so much lay  hidden, I got no credit for my struggle, did I? When Major Marjac had  proudly confided, “Weaponry is opening up to women in an unprecedented  way,” I couldn’t help inventorying my own arsenal to date, the weapons  best suited to my personality under duress: guile, subter-fuge,  goal-oriented politeness, teeth-gritting staying power, and the ability,  when necessary, to shut down my heart. Forces had been mobilizing inside  me for the past eleven years to do battle with anything or anybody who  might try to usurp me for their own purposes again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Usurp” had become my adversarial verb of choice ever since I had seized  upon it from a History of Tudor England course to trounce my archenemy,  the dean of women, in my Daily Tar Heel column. (“With her latest  Victorian edict, Dean Carmody has, quite simply, usurped the rights of  every Carolina coed.”) After that column, perfect strangers would call out  familiarly as I crossed the campus: “Hey, Emma! Any-body been usurping you  lately?” I delighted in the powers of the Fourth Estate. My twice-weekly  column, “Carolina Carousel,” carried a mug shot of me with flying hair,  cagey side glance, and my best don’t-mess-with-me smirk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And the more I meditated on it, the more the “usurp” word compounded in  personal meanings. Not just kingdoms and crowns got usurped. A person’s  unique and untransferable self could, at any time, be diminished, annexed,  or altogether extinguished by alien forces. My soon-to-be twenty-two years  on this earth had been an obstacle course mined with potential or actual  usurpers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Since day one, it seemed, I had been confronted by them in one form or  another. After my alcoholic father crashed his car fatally into a tree on  the day of my birth, Mother’s Alabama cousin, a childless woman married to  a rich man, tried to annex me. The offer included my widowed mother, but  my grandmother Loney was not part of the package—the cousin thought Loney  was “too undemonstrative”—and so Mother had to decline.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Next came a string of suitors who were willing to take on a little girl to  get the attractive, sexy mother, but not willing to take on the  grandmother, so once again I was spared. Next came World War II, four  years during which my mother’s job as a reporter on the Mountain City  Citizen sufficiently engaged her libido. She covered the Veterans Hospital  overflowing with wounded soldiers straight from the battlefront,  interviewed visiting celebrities, reviewed books, and even contributed the  occasional seasonal poem. But then the war ended and the men came home and  wanted their jobs back and three of them wanted my mother. She chose the  one my grandmother and I liked least, an oversensitive bully who brought  to the match his overflowing trousseau of sermons and insecurities. After  great storms of tears and reproaches between the women, my grandmother was  left behind in our old apartment and I found myself part of a new family  in a worse apartment on the other side of town, with new rules to follow  and new things to worry about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Earl immediately began his campaign to remove me from my “snobbish”  grandmother’s influence altogether. It took three years for him to get us  out of Mountain City, but at last he succeeded, which meant plucking me  out of my beloved St. Clothilde’s, to which I had won a full high school  scholarship the year before. Thus at the end of ninth grade, when I was  going on fifteen, we packed up and drove out of our mountains, to begin  our strange migrant years of “transferring” up and down the East Coast,  gradually adding more human beings to our family   mix, while Earl discovered, or his bosses discovered for him, that he was  temperamentally unsuited to a career in chain store management.  In those gypsy years of Earl’s and Mother’s, I felt like someone kidnapped  from my rightful environment and tethered to a caravan of someone else’s  descent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In my last year at St. Clothilde’s, when our ninth grade had been   immersed in David Copperfield, Sister Elise, a svelte, scholarly young nun  recently transferred from Boston, read us a letter the adult Dickens had  written to a friend, describing his terrible experience of being sent to  work in a blacking factory at age twelve. It was for less than a year,  while his family was bankrupt and living in debtors’ prison, but, Sister  Elise   informed us in her Back Bay accent, it left a scar (“skaah”) on Dickens  forever, even after he had become rich and world famous and was   surrounded by an adoring family of his own. No words could express,  Dickens had written to his friend, the secret agony of his young soul as   he sank into this low life, pasting labels onto blacking bottles for six  shillings a month in a rat-infested warehouse with urchin boys who  mockingly called him “the little gentleman.” Snatched from his studies  with an Oxford tutor, obliged to pawn all his books (The Arabian Nights,  his favorite eighteenth-century novels), the young Dickens felt his early  hopes of growing up to be a distinguished and learned person crushed in  his breast. All that he had learned and thought and delighted in was  passing away from him day by day. His whole nature, he wrote to the friend  who, Sister Elise told us, was to become his first biographer, had been so  pene-  trated with grief and humiliation that even now he often forgot in his  dreams that he had escaped it all and was famous, caressed, and happy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now I, too, knew that constant sinking feeling of losing ground. Each day  seemed to put more distance between me and where I thought I should be by  this time, had Earl not entered our lives. Had I stayed on at smart,  rigorous St. Clothilde’s, I would be polishing my already sterling record  to a high sheen and—as many of my classmates would go on to do—would  graduate with a nice bouquet of scholarship offers from top colleges,  including Sister Elise’s own Radcliffe. Whereas, tethered to Earl’s  itinerant career, I had to start all over again each year in a new high  school (once I did two schools in a single year), make my qualities known  as quickly as possible, and pray I could claw my way into a college, any  college, somehow. Very early on in our life together, Earl had announced  that even if he could afford to send me, which he certainly couldn’t, he  wouldn’t, because his own parents, who could have afforded it, hadn’t  offered to send him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His backhandings and beatings and sneaky nocturnal raids on my   person accrued with my advancing teens. Like the slave owners in the  not-so-distant past, he unctuously assumed it was his right to do as he  pleased with the flesh under his care. No season went by without a bruise  on my face for “answering back.” I grew accustomed to awakening in the  dark to find him kneeling beside my bed, engaged in one of his proprietary  gropes beneath my nightgown. If I cried out, he would shush me  sanctimoniously. Did I want to wake the baby, the babies? I’d been moaning  in my sleep again, he said, and he’d only come to check.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    During my last year of high school I wrote a masterful begging letter to  Mother’s rich cousin in Alabama, the one who had wanted to annex me and  Mother, and she agreed to pay for one semester at a time at a junior  college for girls in Raleigh. If I kept up my grades, there would be  another semester, “but after two years, darling, you’re on your own.” The  implication being that two years would give any diligent girl time to  either win a scholarship to the state university or find a husband to  support her. Already at seventeen the rich cousin had snared her future  millionaire, as she had more than once pointed out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had no difficulty making the grades at the junior college and winning a  scholarship to the journalism school at Chapel Hill, but that still left  the summers to get through. I had to make money to cover expenses, and the  job had to be somewhere that provided room and board so I could avoid  Earl’s nightly prowls. The first summer, I lifeguarded at a girls’ camp;  the second, I waited tables at a plush resort in Blowing Rock. The final  summer, between my junior and senior years, I waited tables at the  Nightingale Inn, a Jewish family hotel thirty miles from Mountain City. By  this time, Earl and Mother were back in Mountain City, Earl having gone  into the construction business with his father. And since their little  house was now burgeoning with offspring, I was allowed to sleep unmolested  across town beside Loney, the “snobbish” grandmother, in her  lavender-scented four-poster bed when I “came home” to visit my family  during college breaks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And that, Major Marjac, is the behind-the-scenes résumé of the young woman  you met on the train who “started ahead of the game.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As I stepped down onto the platform of the Miami depot, there was Tess,  who had been my mother’s college roommate at Converse until Tess dropped  out her freshman year to go home to Florida and become Miss Miami Beach.  The last time I had seen Tess was when I was seven and she came to stay  with us in Mountain City to recuperate from ruining her life. I was  surprised to see she was the same platinum-blond goddess I remembered. In  a recent letter to Mother she had announced that her looks were completely  gone and she was saving for a face-lift. But why was she wearing her white  uniform and stockings and nurse’s shoes on Sunday? She gathered me to her  bosom like her own lost child and lavished effusions against my cheek in a  whispery little-girl voice totally incongruous with her adult beauty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Emma, sweet, you’re here at last! Even prettier than the picture your  mother sent, which she didn’t need to. I would have recognized you  anywhere. Your ‘Emma-ness’ is exactly the same.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Though Tess tended to flatter everybody, her remark gave me a jolt of  elation. I made up my mind to adopt this concept of “Emma-ness” as a  talisman against those loss-of-self times that flattened me. She still  wore Joy, the perfume her husband had chosen for her. What did she have to  do without in order to buy it for herself now?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We tussled over who would carry the heaviest of my suitcases. She  prevailed, and dragged her way fetchingly ahead of me to a baby blue  Cadillac DeVille. She had not lost her slim, curvaceous figure, my mother  would be glad to hear. Or would she?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You have to be wary of this humidity, Emma, until your blood has a chance  to thin. Also, we’ve been having this spate of damp weather, which doesn’t  help, either.” Tess was puffing by the time she allowed me to help her  heft the big suitcase into a carpeted trunk that could have held three  more sets of luggage. “This is Hector’s new car. He insisted I take it to  meet you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How generous of him.” On leaving the train, I hadn’t noticed the  humidity, but as soon as Tess drew my attention to it I could feel it  sapping my energy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After ruining her life, Tess had gone to vocational college and was now  nurse-assistant to Dr. Hector Rodriguez, a dental surgeon in Coral Gables.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh, Hector is the most generous man in the world. His patients call him  Doctor Magnánimo. He’s always giving things away and he’ll see you on the  weekend if you’re in pain, which is why I have to head back to the office  after we get you settled at your hotel. He’s starting a root canal this  afternoon for a man who’s in agony.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Doctor Magnánimo,” I echoed, trying to copy the sexy way she lightly  tongued the back of her front teeth for the first n.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “See, Emma, you sound like a natural already! So many of their words are  the same as ours, only with this little extra flourish on the end. You’ll  pick up Spanish in no time in Miami.” (Tess pronounced it “My-AM-uh.”)  “There are lots of Cubans and more coming over all the time, professional,  well-bred people like Hector and his wife, Asunción, although they left a  while ago to get away from Batista. The ones arriving now are coming  because Fidel has let them down. But you know all about that, you’re going  to be a reporter on the Star.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “As soon as they wrote to say I had the job, I subscribed to the paper.  I’ve been reading it cover to cover since February, everything from  Castro’s land grabs to the big Miami society weddings.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Damn, blast, shit, hell, Emma. Why didn’t you stop at Castro? But Tess  neither flinched nor looked sad, as though she didn’t recall herself being  the star of one of those big society weddings. Her perfect Grecian profile  went right on smiling as she steered serenely down a wide avenue, the  skirt of her crisp uniform tugged up to reveal her shapely  white-stockinged thighs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Hector said you must be just phenomenally smart, to land a job like this  right out of college. Everybody wants to be a reporter for the Star. I  said yes, you were, just like your mamma. I can’t wait for you to meet  Hector. And Asunción, too, of course.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well, I don’t know about phenomenally,” I said. The way she had dutifully  tacked on Asunción made me ponder whether Doctor Magnánimo might be more  to her than just a generous boss.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But mostly I was occupied with keeping myself intact in this new  environment. My guerrilla antennae were on full alert, sensing new threats  and opportunities pulsing at me as we skimmed along streets lined with  palm trees and sea grapes and modest pastel bungalows with those slatted  glass windows that keep the heat and rain out. In this tropical city I  would have to wear lighter clothes; more of my body would be on display  for new critics as well as new potential gropers. There would be levels of  sophistication to tap into without revealing my ignorance, levels far more  demanding than Major Marjac asking me about wine. There would be new  brands of wickedness undreamed of by someone arriving overnight from a  sheltered Southern university existence. And usurpers a million times  subtler and smoother than Earl.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I think you’re going to like your hotel,” Tess was saying. “It has a pool  and it’s only a few blocks from Miami Avenue. You’ll be able to walk to  work in your heels. We were able to get you the special monthly rate  because the manager, Alex de Costa, is Hector’s patient. Alex was being  groomed to take over his grandfather’s hotel in Havana, but when things  got shaky down there, the grandfather had the foresight to sell out in  time and buy the Julia Tuttle here. It was a little run-down, but he’s  reno-vated it in","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303787122917,"sku":"NP9780345483195","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345483195.jpg?v=1767735278","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/queen-of-the-underworld-isbn-9780345483195","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}