Queen of the Underworld (25 page)

How seriously was he injured? Would I still want him if he was maimed or blind? Would Alex offer to drive me to the airport to catch a night flight to Carolina?

If he was already dead, wouldn’t it show goodwill to fly to Carolina anyway to comfort Bev and Aunt Stella? Could I get away without letting Mother and Earl know I had been thirty miles away?

As Bev began speaking to me on the phone, I was so caught up in my forebodings that when she said “We’ve had an unexpected loss, Emma,” I was already en route to the airport in Alex’s car, struggling to hide my grief until I was alone on the plane. But then I heard her say that Stella had suffered a massive stroke on Thursday and died an hour ago. “It’s just as well. She would have been helpless, she would have hated it.”

Paul would be accompanying his aunt’s body back to Miami on the noon plane.

“Jews are supposed to go into the ground quickly, that’s the tradition, even though by law everybody has to be embalmed now. We were wondering, Emma, if you could get something in tomorrow’s
Star,
so Stella’s friends and clients will know about the funeral. It’s at noon on Monday at Fisher’s, with burial immediately after at North Shore, next to Paul’s mother. I’ve never seen him so torn up. He was much closer to Stella than to his mother. He stayed all last night at the hospital and earlier today was making arrangements for bringing Stella back to the Inn and hiring round-the-clock nurses. Which she would have detested, she was such an independent little
berrieh.
”

“Little what?” So that’s why Paul didn’t call on the night of my birthday.

“A woman who can do everything better than everyone else, including taking care of herself.”

If Stella had been locally prominent—or locally notorious, like Ginevra Brown—there would still be time to squeeze something in by deadline, but the standard obits had been locked into their trays for hours. Yet I heard myself promising I’d go over to the newspaper right away and see what could be done.

“In the worst case, Bev, it will have to be in Sunday’s
Star.
But people spend more time browsing through their Sunday paper, so more of her friends would be likely to see it on Sunday.”

“That’s a point. I’ll tell Paul you said that.”

“Still, I’ll see what I can do tonight. I’m heading over to the
Star
as soon as we hang up. At least I can write it and have it ready to go.”

“Paul was hoping you’d write it. Keep an eye on him, will you, Emma? He admires you so, and you seem to appreciate him. Someone has to stay here and run the Inn, with our new chef starting. Paul’s determined to start clearing out her house. She left it to him, along with all her Old World furniture and her thousands of
tchotchkes
that will have to be disposed of—he knows better than to bring them home. And then there are all those little bottles and essences and funnels she used for her perfume business. I hate to think of him facing all that
stuff
alone. I would consider it a real
mitzvah,
Emma, if you could spare him some time this weekend.”

“I was about to offer. Stella was very good to me when I first came to work at the Inn.”

“Oh, yes, the week of the black eye. That’s when I was having my surgery in Miami. Paul told me all about it, the way you looked when you got off the bus and the lie to everyone about the bad cold and all Stella’s packs and potions. He said he didn’t have the heart to send you back, you were such a nice kid. And he was right.”

“I’ll keep the weekend free. Tell him to call me as soon as he gets in.”

“Bless you, child.”

A
LEX’S MOTHER
was leaning over the front desk, lecturing him about something in rapid Spanish.

“Everything all right, Emma?” he called rather plaintively as I emerged from the booth.

I gave him a breezy flip of my fingernails and ducked into the open elevator.

In 510, I hung up my new blouse to keep it fresh for Paul, slipped back into my workday shirt, and grabbed my purse and notepad. In the hallway, I waited impatiently for the slow elevator to return. It seemed stalled on the top floor. I headed for the staircase, remembering the panicky Spanish-speaking exodus during the tornado. All that was left was to get through the lobby without Lídia pouncing, or Alex insisting on walking me to the
Star
because it was after dark. How had this happened? In less than a week I found myself kicking against brand-new familial demands and constraints from people who weren’t even my family.

I was in luck. Lídia was gone and Alex was engaged at the switchboard. I slunk out successfully, the clackety-clack of my heels beating a solitary tattoo along the after-dark Miami sidewalks. My shoe soles felt closer to the pavement than ever, but I couldn’t have the shoes resoled until I had a second pair, and payday wasn’t till next Friday.

An evening crew of reporters, many of whom I hadn’t seen before, populated the newsroom, and one of them was ensconced at my desk. The only familiar face was that of Marge Armstrong, bent over some layout pages inside the women’s glass cage. She gave me such a friendly wave that I stopped in the doorway to say hi.

“Emma, what are you doing here on a Friday night?” She wore jeans and a tee shirt and a terry-cloth turban from which some damp gray curls escaped.

“A friend just died. I promised the family I’d try to get something in the paper so people would know the funeral was on Monday here in Miami. But my desk has been usurped.”

“Plenty of room in here. Come keep me company. Dear me, was this friend someone your age?”

“Oh, no, she’s the aunt of some people I worked for last summer. They run a summer hotel in North Carolina, and in the winter they have a nightclub in Bal Harbour. The aunt came over from France during World War Two and started a perfume business on the Beach. She made individual scents for people.”

“You don’t mean Stella Rossignol.”

“You know her?”

“I’m a faithful customer. How strange. During my swim this evening, I was thinking, It’s time I phone Stella and get a refill of my lotion. Then I remembered she goes away in the summer.”

“She was up in North Carolina, helping out at the Inn. She had a stroke last night and hung on until today. Her nephew is bringing the body to Miami on the morning plane.”

“I’m so very sorry. Did you know her well, Emma?”

“She was sort of a fairy godmother and confidante to me when I worked at their Inn last summer. I guess there’s not much chance of getting something about the funeral in tomorrow’s paper.”

“If she had been the mayor, or even an alderman, yes.”

“That’s what I told the family. But at least I can write up the obit now and check it with Fisher’s and it’ll be ready to go for the Sunday paper.”

“More folks will see it on Sunday anyway.”

“That’s what I told the family.”

“You’ll find a substantial file on her in the morgue. I did a piece on her myself in the late forties when I was filling in temporarily over here and trying to dream up features to make the
Star
hire me. A friend smelled wonderful and I said, ‘What
is
that?’ and she said, ‘There’s this darling little European woman has a shop over on the Beach—you go in, it’s like going to a fortune-teller. She asks you questions and while you’re talking she plucks out vials and asks you to sniff them and describe your associations, and a week later you pick up a bottle of your very own scent. She sold perfume for Guerlain in Paris and during the Occupation she was in a French concentration camp with one of the Rothschild women. She’s like a chic little witch. You ought to interview her.’

“So I hightailed it over to the Beach and mentioned my friend’s name and asked Stella to let me interview her. She said, ‘Why not let me interview you first,
chérie
? Let me create a scent for you. Then, if you like, you may describe what I do.’ She said the scent would be on the house, but I explained that the
Star
was rigorous against anything that could be construed as payola. I paid for my scent and it certainly wasn’t cheap. She made me an ‘unguent,’ as she called it, because if you’re a sun worshipper like me the carbon in a perfume’s alcohol can damage the skin. I haven’t used anything else since, but I guess now I’ll have to. You know, there
was
a witchy something about Stella that made you assume she’d just go on and on, like her fragrances, until she evaporated into the Great Atmospheric Scent.

“Anyway, the women’s editor was impressed with the feature and hired me full-time, and if I do say so myself it was an entertaining piece. Stella was one of the first custom perfumers in this country, it turns out. After I became women’s editor, we ran a full-page spread on her, with mug shots of her prominent clients. She had a waiting list by then.”

I went to the morgue and pulled Stella’s file from the
R
’s, then, in a jolt of remorse, back-stepped to the
N
’s and, for the first time, extracted Paul’s envelope. It was surprisingly thin. Almost as if my weeklong negligence had diminished it. How could I have waited so long to look him up? Too obsessed with fatter envelopes in the
N
drawer: the burgeoning documentation of Norbright’s enviable rise. Even Tess’s modest archive of social ups and downs was thicker than Paul’s.

I took both aunt and nephew to a library table and, in an act of contrition, read every word of Paul’s clippings before I went to work on Stella. It was soon done. All were from “Nightlife with Marty Lang” columns, which ran in the
Star
every day except Sunday. A subhead, “Old Friends to Shmooze at New Bal Harbour Club,” announced the opening of P. Nightingale’s “just in time for the 1951 Season. Hosts
Paul Nightingale,
a local boy, and his glamorous wife, Beverly, want a congenial meeting place where old friends can get together for a good steak, dancing, and entertainment from comedians of the
Lenny Bruce
ilk.”

This was the longest entry, the only one with its own subhead. The other clippings, five in all, were announcements of Borscht Belt “head-liners” at P. Nightingale’s, their unrecognizable names hurriedly wedged between unrelated items like “
Herb Shriner,
currently at the
Fontainebleau,
has leased an apartment at the new Southgate Apartments on Miami Beach” and “
Jackie Heller, Eden Roc
show host, was a classmate of
Martha Raye’s
in one of
Benny Davis’s
learn-while-you-work travel units.”

I felt the spirit of Moira Parks training her thick smoked lenses on the world of newsprint, as watchful of every name, from the gaudily famous to the most obscure, as God of each sparrow, tenaciously keeping track of us all with her scissors.

She might have been looking over my shoulder as I replaced Paul’s meager mentions in chronological order and returned his envelope to the
N
drawer before turning my full attentions to Aunt Stella.

Miami Beach Perfumer
Creates Custom Scents

By Marge Armstrong
Star
Writer

“You don’t choose your perfume on an impulse, like a pastry in the bakery,” says Stella Rossignol, the chic, petite perfumer on South Miami Beach who creates a unique fragrance for each of her clients.

“And never,
never
assume that the bewitching scent worn by the woman across the room will smell the same on you. If you do,
chérie,
you are courting disaster, because each person’s body chemistry is completely different.”

The jealousy animal began to stir as I read the interview that had earned Marge her full-time job just as Norbright’s exposé of the religious-relic hoax had launched his investigative career.

Compared to Lucifer’s cocky, egocentric voice, Marge’s style was practically transparent: you saw and heard Stella without Marge’s personality coming between you. Here, in this lead feature in the
Star’
s Home Section, as it was called back in 1948, was Paul’s beloved aunt, a person with whom I had spent hours and hours, who had applied her magic poultices to my black eye, intermittently coaxing confidences from me and sharing highlights of her colorful history. It was her voice, her gestures, her Yiddish and Gallic witticisms. Yet I was reading things about her I hadn’t known, or else had listened to with half an ear and hadn’t had the curiosity to draw out of her. In Marge’s piece, she came across as a more significant person, and consequently I seemed less significant because, despite all the time I had spent with Stella, I couldn’t have written it.

For instance, Stella’s imprisonment in the French internment camp for Jews had turned her preoccupation with personal smell into an obsession, which she later passed on to her nephew Paul. I knew this, as I knew she had made friends in the camp with the woman “who was a Rothschild.” But the game Stella and her friend had dreamed up to distract themselves from the nauseating stench of the camp, a game that served as a crucible for Stella’s olfactory skills, well, it killed me to admit that she had alluded to this game a number of times. And each time I had passed up the opportunity to probe for the salient details that had given Marge’s portrait of Stella both its shape and its vividness.

Both women had previous experience of scent combinations, Stella having worked for Guerlain both as floor saleswoman and as a copywriter, and her friend having studied organic chemistry in Paris before joining the family’s wine business. Both were aware that the most lasting and costly ingredients of perfumery were derived from the excretions of animals: civet from the civet cat, ambergris from the sperm whale, musk from the deer, and castoreum from the beaver. The scents of these excretions were foul by themselves, but contributed crucial base notes to the most enchanting perfumes.

“One morning, as we were setting out for the latrines, I said to my friend, who was already retching: ‘
Écoute, amie,
what if we dilute
un petit soupçon
of today’s Essence of Latrine in fifteen milliliters of alcohol, and then we add equal parts of jasmine and tuberose?’