Queen of the Underworld (36 page)

Emmanuel Lanning

“Oh,
no
!”

“Anything the matter?” asked Marge.

“Oh, no, no. Just having a little trouble with this pen.”

The greeter in the dark suit of course heard me and was instantly proffering apologies and a fresh ballpoint.

“We didn’t expect so many mourners. There was a very prominent write-up about the deceased in this morning’s
Star.
We’ve had to switch to one of our larger parlors.”

This larger parlor was all but filled. I slid into a chair in back next to Marge, folded my hands on the lap of my dark green shirtwaist, and tried to anesthetize my too-many feelings.

Paul and I had said our goodbyes last night; he would be driving the rental car straight from the cemetery to the airport. (“I can just make the one forty-five to Raleigh and catch the feeder to Mountain City and be at the Inn for dinner. Bev’s up there all by herself with the staff, and we’ve got forty-two guests.”)

Stella’s plain pine box on its gurney looked stark against all the floral arrangements. “She would have fit easily inside a child’s coffin,” Paul had said last night.

Paul stood beside the lectern in murmured consultation with a fresh-faced, skinny rabbi who looked, and was, young enough to be his son. (“I lucked out. One of my club members has a son a year older than you, just out of a Reform rabbinical school. Reform Jews have more tolerance for us nonpracticing types. Stella never liked synagogues because she felt they didn’t give proper privileges to women, but she told me she hoped I’d say Kaddish for her and said that if I went first she intended to say it for me.”)

Paul and the rabbi and the other male mourners wore black skullcaps that I now knew the name of. Before I came to Miami, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a yarmulke and a guayabera, so I was making some progress toward the international.

The women in this room greatly outnumbered the men. Covertly I canvassed the heads in front of me. Which of the skullcaps perched on the head of the notorious Manny Lanning? What was he doing here? Had he spoken to Paul yet?

The sartorial aspect of Paul had always had the power to render me weak-kneed, and today set a new record. The dark suit, more somber than anything I had ever seen him wear, coupled with the yarmulke, put a new kind of distance between us. Today he was a mourner and he was a Jew. How could I compete with such profundity?

I hardly dared look at him, not only because I was loath to risk another gaffe that would send him off with bad memories without my having a chance to undo the damage, but also because I feared the intensity of my feelings might become obvious to Marge, who didn’t miss much.

I had only limited preconceptions regarding funerals, since my experiences of them so far added up to the grand total of two.

In one of the five high schools I attended while tethered to the gypsy caravan of Earl’s early “career,” a boy playing chicken with a friend had smashed his car into a stone abutment, and I went with some classmates to an open-casket service at a mortuary. I was appalled not so much by the heavily made up mannikin of the boy I had barely known laid out in a dress suit and bow tie but by the number of people, including the boy’s parents, who’d commented on “how good they’d made him look.”

And several years ago I had accompanied Loney to the funeral of her best friend Cora’s paying boarder, Sam. Sam drove Cora everywhere in her car, smoked a perennial cigar, and behaved with Cora’s friends like a tolerated old spouse. Loney herself often speculated that there was “more than just boarding going on over there.” Sam’s casket was also open, with a mirror tilted so you could see his face from the entrance to the parlor. When Cora implored Loney to “come up closer and see how peaceful he looks,” Loney had begged off, saying she’d rather remember Sam as he was. Midway through the service, the minister invited any among the mourners who felt so moved “to say a few words about the departed,” and one of Sam’s brothers went on too long with an ill-timed reminiscence about a “damsel” whose “favors” he and Sam had vigorously competed for back in the Roaring Twenties.

A
FTER SOME
opening remarks of welcome, the rabbi, who had a sonorous voice for one so skinny and was remarkably in command for one so young, recalled Stella Rossignol as he had observed her on several occasions while dining with his parents at P. Nightingale’s in Bal Harbour.

“While I can’t claim to have known her in any personal sense, some people have the gift of conveying themselves simply by brushing past you, and what she conveyed to me
in essence
was this tiny blur of unstoppable energy. Once I even saw her bussing a tray, though you could hardly see her underneath it as it went past our table.”

Appreciative laughter.

“Stella Rossignol also created essences for others—one per customer, no two alike, as the lovely big write-up in today’s
Miami Star
phrased it. She saw each of us as one of a kind, and the great architect Morris Lapidus, who was one of her clients, said, and I quote from today’s
Star
”—he was actually reading from the clipping of my story—“Lapidus said of her: ‘Just as I imagine myself as a movie set designer when creating a hotel for my client, I see Stella Rossignol as a character designer who employs scents to help her clients define themselves.’

“Now, to help someone define himself, or herself, is no small
mitzvah.
Because the more we can define ourselves, the clearer it becomes to us where our essential powers lie and how we can best put them to use during the short span allotted us on this earth.

“Stella Rossignol went through her own ‘definition’ ordeal in her forty-eighth year, when she was interned for seven months in a French camp during the Nazi Occupation. Up until then, she had worked for a famous perfume house in Paris, as a saleswoman and copywriter. Now she found herself surrounded by the stench of latrines and unwashed bodies. But instead of despairing, she and another lady by the name of Rothschild dreamed up a game to distract them from their nausea. Both ladies had some knowledge of scent combinations and knew that the most valuable ingredients of perfumery were derived from animal excretions.

“One morning as they headed to the latrines and her friend was already retching, Stella said, and I quote again from today’s
Miami Star
write-up, ‘Listen,
amie,
what if we dilute a dash of today’s “Essence of Latrine” in fifteen milliliters of alcohol, and then we add equal parts of jasmine and tuberose?’

“And the friend laughed and made herself sniff the putrid air, and said, ‘No, that’s too sweet. We need a musky touch of ambrette’; and then Stella suggested a
shtikl
of nutmeg, and they named their first ‘fragrance’ ‘Latrine Oh Là Là.’ ”

The rabbi waited for the ripple of laughter to subside.

“After that, the ladies continued to invent scents to take their minds off their surroundings, but this ‘game,’ conceived to defy despair, revealed to Stella her own perfect pitch regarding scent. After she got her exit visa and came to this country to join her sister Trude and her nephew Paul, she would fully develop this happy talent discovered in an internment camp. Her last eighteen years in Miami Beach were spent giving others the pleasure of knowing themselves better, which in many cases led to transformations in their lives. As a matter of fact, the headline given to Stella’s story in today’s
Star
is ‘Popular Perfumer Transformed Lives.’

“May we all be so honored in our epitaphs.”

Here he unfolded a beautiful shawl with fringe and draped it around his shoulders.

“The language of the Kaddish is not Hebrew but Aramaic, the vernacular spoken by Jews in their Babylonian exile and during the days of the Second Temple, or Commonwealth. Although it is known as the Mourner’s Prayer, it contains not one reference to death. It is a prayer of praise. In reciting the Kaddish we affirm our awareness of holiness in our world. Much of our experience of divine goodness, grace, and love has come to us through those whose lives have brushed ours. We stand joined together in a great web of being. Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent, passing through us in the body of humanity and our own bodies. Please stand.

“Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’may raba . . .”

As the rabbi prayed in the plangent syllables of this strange “everyday” tongue that went back to the Babylonian exile, and the mourners answered in shorter bursts of it—the man in front of me was being particularly vociferous in his responses—I bowed my head and focused humbly on my beautiful black I. Miller pumps and suffered afresh Paul’s gentle admonishment of Saturday night: “You’ve got to remember we’re a very ancient race, Emma. We’ve learned to read the writing on the wall . . .”

After the last “Amen” had been said, I dared to look at Paul to see how he was faring. His eyes were red, but he was looking fondly at me.

“W
HAT A
wonderful tribute to Stella,” said Marge, angling her MG into the cortege forming in the parking lot. “You must be feeling pleased with your contribution.”

“I only built on what was already there in the file, your piece especially. And after all, you were the one who suggested I do the story.” Feeling generous, I added, “Even the Alma Olsen piece contributed to the overall effect because it contained that Lapidus quote.”

“Alma phoned me from Lauderdale this morning. She’s taking an indefinite leave of absence—her mother in Wisconsin has cancer—and she wanted to know if I could spare someone from my team to fill in for her at the Broward bureau. I told her my ‘team’ was scarcely a team just now, with my star player off on her honeymoon, the society columnist on vacation, and the homemaking editor going in for knee surgery on Wednesday. Poor Alma, I had to disappoint her.”

Shit, here it came. Blindsided by my benefactor. By Wednesday I might find myself in Marge’s glass cage, calling up housewives to get their key lime pie recipes, typing up housekeeping tips:

Here’s How to Keep Mildew
From Usurping Your Closet

I gave what I hoped sounded like a sympathetic sigh, praying that the next thing out of her mouth would not be an invitation to take up the slack on her depleted team.

My prayer seemed to be answered. Marge dropped the subject of Alma Olsen cold and in a livelier tone returned to our present journey together.

“I was impressed with that young rabbi, weren’t you? I liked the way he added his own midrash-like interpretation to your words about essences and definitions. I’m no stranger to Jewish funerals, but I learned a few things today. Great turnout, too. Did you happen to notice the man in front of us praying so loudly? That was the infamous Manny Lanning, the gambling-syndicate king. I’d heard he’d come back from Cuba. I wonder if Stella created a scent for
him.
I’ll bet she enjoyed herself if she did.”

“You recognized him?”

“He’s an old familiar face in the columns of the
Star.
And I saw him in person once. He had some business at the courthouse and my father pointed him out. Father was a circuit court judge.”

W
E WERE
a smaller group at the cemetery. The same greeter in the dark suit passed out laminated cardboard fans, compliments of the funeral home, as we took our places on folding chairs under the awning. Most of the fans were already in motion against the stifling midday heat. They pictured an evocative ocean sunset with a cluster of palm trees in the foreground. If your loved one couldn’t be buried on the Beach itself, your keepsake fan might gradually blur that fact in your memory. Under the picture was the motto “Fisher’s Funeral Home, Inc., Serving Dade Families of all Faiths since 1910.” On the back was the Jewish Mourner’s Prayer, each verse printed in phonetically spelled Aramaic, followed by an English translation. For Christian burials there undoubtedly would be another set of fans with the Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm. And perhaps there would be a third set for the religiously disinclined, with verses from Kahlil Gibran or Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Once again we sat directly behind the loudly praying man, whom I could now study—and even sniff—at close range, knowing it was Manny Lanning. There was nothing sleazy about him. He dressed like the kind of person who would insist on signing his name in black ink with his own expensive fountain pen. He was smallish and trim in body, with a fleshy face. His thick black hair under the yarmulke had recently been barbered, and, given that he was at least fifteen years Paul’s senior, most likely dyed. His well-cut lightweight charcoal suit belonged in the same club as those worn by Mr. Feeney and the other brass when they headed out to lunch. The only item of questionable taste was the pinky ring with a large diamond on his left hand, with which he fanned himself.

The back of his neck gave off a musky scent. If it had been Stella’s custom creation for him, what a pity she couldn’t be here to tell us about the “interview” preceding it.

(“Now,
Monsieur,
please tell me a little bit about yourself.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m in the sporting business. I founded a cartel here on the Beach, built it up from scratch, to make things run smoothly for people who like to, you know, place bets, throw a few dice, pin their hopes on a little ball running around a wheel.”

“A man who feels at home with risk,
n’est-ce pas?
”

“Oh, yes, plenty of risk involved in my business. My job, you might say, is to bring organizational clout to these games, streamline the business angle.”

“
S’il vous plaît,
take a sniff of this little vial.”

“Mmm. Nice. What’s it called?”

“Perhaps first you will tell me what associations it brings to your mind.”

“Oh, something dark and classy . . . mysterious . . . maybe a yacht gliding into port with its lights off and its engines cut.”

“You are a poet,
Monsieur. Voilà,
I think I’ve got it!”

“Got what?”

“Your base note. The most lasting part of the fragrance; we call it also the dry-out note. A very important beginning: we build your middle and top notes on it. Now,
Monsieur,
what does
this
little infusion bring to mind?”