Queen of the Underworld (31 page)

We hail your name in song and story,

Would that we knew more to tell.”

A god-struck Queen,

Pet raven on your arm

Converts your king

And lures us hence from harm;

Your dream of lilies in a field

Replaced the frogs on France’s shield.

Name Saint of our beloved school

On fair hill stately set

Mysterious Queen, though you entice me yet,

I fain would fare thee well.

—Emma Gant, ’55

Even as my pen rushed across the page, doubled back to cross out, tried a different scan, a better rhyme, I could hear Mother Patton, principal of the high school, revising over my shoulder:

“I can assure you, Emma, we don’t think of our chapel as
gloomy . . .

“You will need to capitalize ‘His’ if you mean God’s deep air. You don’t? Then whose? Are you implying the
bird
owns the air?

“That raven she’s holding, by the way: I know of no hagiography that mentions Saint Clothilde having a pet raven. Falconry is more of a king’s hobby.

“And the frogs definitely have to go. They set the wrong tone. We know Saint Clothilde had a vision of lilies and that’s how King Clovis’s banner came to have fleurs-de-lis instead of toads—in ancient France the toad symbolized protection against armed attacks. Yes, I agree, ‘toad’ is an ugly word in a poem, but ‘frog’ has other unfortunate implications, it’s a slur word for the French people. You’ll need to rework those lines, Emma.”

But I didn’t have to change a damn thing, because the poem belonged to me. That was one advantage of nonpublication. By then, the troubling afternoon had darkened into supper hour, my roommate had prayed herself out of her stomachache, and both of us in better moods walked uptown in the Halloween weather for hamburgers and coffee at Harry’s Grill.

T
HOUGH
I had no school memories of the eighteen-year-old Marisa Velázquez strolling through the grounds of St. Clothilde’s, her every appearance leapt boldly out at me as I leafed through the yearbook she had brought back with her from Cuba. Someone—not hard to guess who—had
colored
all the Maria Teresa Velázquezes throughout the black-and-white pages of
Le Flambeau 1951:
the senior portrait with pearls, the secretary of the Pan American Club, the member of the Glee Club and the Children of Mary Sodality, the subcaptain of the Tennis Team. It was a child’s job, but that of a careful child, who kept within the lines and had a flair for realism in skin tone and clothing, considering her limited palette of crayons.

18.

“Y
OU’RE DIFFERENT,
” P
AUL SAID.

“But you were with me last Sunday and today’s only Saturday. How could I be different in less than a complete week?”

“That’s what I was asking myself.”

“In what way am I different?”

“You’re not a college girl anymore. That’s as far as I’ve got.”

I kept quiet. I knew he’d share his insight as soon as he found words for it.

He was by no means the wreck Bev had prepared me for. He looked tired and older, but not red-eyed or bereft. He was more like someone who’s had a serious setback and in a thoughtful manner is assessing the damage.

We were in a booth at Wolfie’s on the Beach. Paul had hot tea in a glass fitted into one of those metal holders, but so far he hadn’t touched it, whereas I had sipped my iced tea down to the ice level. He expected me to eat, it made him happy, and though not enough time had elapsed for me to be truly hungry again, I chose the hefty-sounding Reuben, which was still only just a sandwich, which I could cut into pieces and consume slowly. After a cursory glance at the menu Paul settled for a lox and farmer cheese omelet (“Tell the chef to make it dry, please”) and some rye toast on the side.

He had driven his rental car straight from the airport to his house to take a shower before coming to get me. So typically Paul. His clothes were fresh Paul-clothes, the dark gray Lacoste today, with his silky silvery jacket. His signature scent, created by Stella, emanated from those little sunken notches above his collarbone where I liked to bury my face. Had he choked up when splashing it on? The salt-and-pepper hair was slightly ragged at the nape of the neck, but he had just informed me that his next stop was the barber. (“Meanwhile you can case the shops on Lincoln Road.”)

I had been all prepared to comfort him, whereas here he was sitting across the table puzzling out in what way I was different since last Sunday.

Things had gotten off to an unpropitious start when he picked me up at the Julia Tuttle. As I stepped off the elevator, Lídia was just sinking her claws into Paul, who was waiting near it.

“Ah, Mr. Nightingale, our dear Emma here has told us your sad news—we heard it from her last night when she returned to the party—after she wrote your aunt’s
noticia
for the newspaper. My son Alejandro, the manager, has gone out on an errand, otherwise he would join me in offering our condolences. Do you know, I myself once visited Stella Rossignol in her little shop over on the Beach! I went with someone who was having a personal formula made up for her and she urged me to choose one for myself. Your delightful aunt was extremely (
ess-TREME-ly
) patient with me. We tried many combinations from that adorable little cabinet of hers until she finally said to me,
‘Je ne suis pas une sorcière, Madame, mais je vous parie quand même’
—we were speaking in French—‘I am not a sorceress, but I can tell you all the same: you are an original. Your only
parfum
is a certain soap.’ And she named the soap, a Spanish one which I order from abroad. I was extremely impressed! ‘You may not be
une sorcière,
’ I told her, ‘
mais vous avez une nez formidable!
—you have a formidable nose!’ ”

If Lídia had been getting her revenge on me for leaving her party early, she couldn’t have done a better job. She made it sound as though (a) I belonged to
them
now, and (b) that I couldn’t wait to get back to the party after fulfilling my chore of writing Stella’s obit. This before I’d even had the chance to tell him about the feature.

Paul continued to study me, but not in a critical way. I didn’t think my “difference” had anything to do with Lídia’s preemptive assault. In fact, he’d said as soon as we were in the car, “The lady comes on strong, doesn’t she?”

As we drove to the Beach (“You hungry?”), I’d told him about my feature on Stella, which would be running on Monday—“That’s in addition to the obit”—and he’d covered my hand with his. “You never cease to amaze me,” he said.

Last Sunday, after having been apart for half a year, he had covered my hand exactly like that as we drove to the Beach. “How is it you are always better than I remember?” he had asked.

“And how is it you are always more important to me than I remember?” I was about to respond, but didn’t. It might sound as though I devalued him in his absence, when what I meant was that each time we got back together I was reminded, with a shock of surprise, how deeply I could feel for someone.

Now he was shaking his head and smiling faintly.

“What?” I asked.

“The fights those two used to get into.”

“Who?”

“My mother and Stella. After Stella got out of occupied France and came to live with us in Miami Beach.”

“What did they fight about?”

“Oh, they stuck to a pretty standard menu, but they never lost their appetite for it. Family matters, for the most part. Which sister had been the more favored. My mother was the beauty and Stella was the brains, so this fight had several outcomes, depending on which parent was being accused of favoring beauty or brains. Then there was the bigger bone of contention: who was to blame for their mother’s running away. This also had a variety of outcomes, depending on the emphasis.”

“She really ran away?”

“When Stella was twelve and my mother ten. Left a note saying not to try and find her, she wasn’t worth it.”

“What did the father do?”

“Depended on the fight my mother and aunt were having. He hired detectives, was convinced of foul play, never stopped looking for her. Or he wrote her name in the Book of the Dead and destroyed her letters to the girls. Or he himself sent her away and paid her to stay away.”

“Was she a bad mother? A bad wife?”

“Ah, that’s material for another fight.” At last Paul sipped his tea. “Phew. I’ve let this go cold. She was fifteen years younger and her parents were Silesian garment workers. She ran away to the big city of Leipzig and got a job in a department store and married the owner. Then, thirteen years later, she ran away again. And that led to the next item on the menu: which sister got off easier putting up with the father afterwards. As my mother eloped to the States when she was nineteen, Stella usually won that fight because she stayed in Leipzig and helped run the store until she was in her thirties and took off for Paris.

“Of course the prize fight was always over which sister had suffered the most for being Jewish.” For the first time he laughed, showing those small, level teeth with no fillings, recalling to me that first day when he came to Earl’s house to interview me and I entertained him with my story of the tough maître d’ who’d fire a waitress if she asked her table “Who gets the fish and who gets the chicken?”

“But surely, Stella— I mean, Stella was in a
camp
—”

“That was always my mother’s opening shot. ‘You think, Stella, just because you were the one who was in
the camp
—’

“And then Stella’d jump in with
her
lines: ‘I know, I know, Trude-
lein
—only seven months in that
bubkes
camp, who am I to complain? A few shit smells, a little dose of daily fear, a nice mattress of straw, so what? Mere
bubkes
! While you in this free country,
pauvre petite soeur,
are still being tortured by those disrespectful signs in the windows of
goyisher
hotels.’

“When the hair really started to fly they’d switch to German and up the ante until Stella would draw herself up and assert her dignity as the elder sister and say in English, ‘Listen, Trude, it’s time I stop being a
borderkeh,
I’m crowding you and Paul in your nice apartment.’

“And she’d put on her French suit and one of her scarves and go off to look for a place of her own. And as soon as she was out the door my mother would start to cry. ‘Run after her, Paul,’ she’d say, ‘she’s my sister, she’s the only family I have left in the world.’ ”

“And you were how old?”

“Twenty-four. Night manager at the Miramar and still living with my mother. I wasn’t in uniform yet. Pearl Harbor was still to come. You were, let’s see, four years old.”

“So, you ran after her?”

“I didn’t have to run very far. She’d be waiting for me at the deli around the corner. ‘You want tea or root beer,
chéri
? I advise the tea. Hot tea on a hot day cools the body.’ Of course, I’d have the root beer, hot tea was for older ladies. Stella was all of forty-eight at the time. Now I’m almost there myself, and you know what?” Paul raised his tea glass in a sort of toast and now I could see the sorrow in his face. “She’s right. Only I’ve let this tea get cold.” He signaled a passing busboy. “Would you please ask our waiter to bring us refills on our drinks?”

“And would she then go look for a place?”

“After we’d had our
petit déjeuner,
as she called it, Stella’d have the prune Danish with her tea and I’d have the almond Danish with my root beer. We pounded a lot of pavement before she found her little hacienda on Espanola Way.”

“The place she’s been in ever since.” Both of us, I noticed, were still using the present tense for Stella.

“She knew it was for her the minute she saw it, though by then Espanola had turned into the opposite from what old Roney, the big developer back then, had envisioned. Somewhat the same story as my club in Bal Harbour—the developer has a vision, but reality turns it into something else. Some vacationing friends from New York had told Roney that what Miami Beach needed was an artistic quarter with a foreign atmosphere, like Greenwich Village, or Montmartre in Paris. So Roney hires an architect to make Espanola Way look like an old Spanish village. He builds a couple of hotels, some apartment buildings and shops, all small-scale, with stucco façades and wrought-iron balconies and red-tiled roofs, gaslights, the whole works. He even hires Spanish-looking girls to drift about with shawls and fans. My mother and her cronies had a good laugh because most of these dark-eyed beauties were local Jewish girls. But he’d got half of the street built and the businessmen still weren’t biting, so he dropped the project and transferred his energies to creating his masterpiece, the Roney Plaza.

“Espanola Way went to seed fast. During Prohibition, it was mostly bootleg operations posing as news shops and shoeshine parlors. Stella’s little corner building had been designed to be either a fancy shop with an upstairs apartment or a Spanish bistro with a walled patio, but when we saw the Realtor’s For Sale or Rent sign in 1941, the windows were broken and the floors were full of trash and worse. It was demoralizing just to stand outside.

“But Stella, she looked through the broken windows at the ripped-out staircase and the dog turds and said, ‘I can have my flat upstairs and my shop down here.’ It was the first I’d heard mention of a shop. We’d assumed, as soon as she had her naturalization papers, Stella’d get a job maybe as a buyer in a store like Jordan Marsh, with her fashion sense and French airs. I asked what kind of shop, she tells me she hasn’t decided. Antiques or cosmetics, maybe a combination of both. ‘Anything’s possible,’ she said. ‘After you’ve been as good as dead, Paul, you stop making difficulties for yourself in your imagination and just get on with what you’d like to do next.’ I date the change in my life to when she said that. She made it sound so sensible and easy. My mother, you see, was always imagining the worst and then being, well, almost let down when it failed to happen. So why not just cut the dire imaginings out of the deal and take the chance and bet on something you’d like to do next?