Mourning Glory by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online Page B

rejected
or ignored in the past. brodsky's memorial chapel. On either side of the name
was a Star of David.
    Mrs. Burns's advice suddenly replayed in her mind, bringing
a smile to her lips. She felt a kind of hysterical giggle build in her chest.
The advice, even the ethnic specificity, was one of the more enduring and
amusing spoken clichés of the mating game. Under ordinary circumstances it
would be taken as a joke. But Mrs. Burns did not have a shred of humor in her
bones. Her advice was neither satire nor trivia. She meant it with all the
force of her convictions.
    Nevertheless, it was unthinkable and ghoulish, a long way
from her own frame of reference. But it did set her to wondering if she could
ever be so cold-blooded, so calculating and amoral, to pursue this bizarre
course of action. And if she did, would she have the resourcefulness, the
acting ability, the blatant insincerity required to make a success out of such
a strategy? She doubted it. And yet, despite its outlandishness, it did suggest
a tantalizing opportunity.
    It surprised her that she didn't reject the possibility out
of hand. Did it mean she would have to suspend her own sense of herself, her
so-called dignity, a quality growing more and more illusory with each passing
moment? And would the expenditure of energy be worth the candle? She imagined
platoons of desperate single women of uncertain age with the same idea.
    Almost as if she were driving in a trance, she pulled into
the parking lot of the Brodsky Memorial Chapel. It was totally filled and she
was forced to exit the lot, which meant, in her present suggestive state, that
fate had solved the problem for her. But when she reached the exit, a man
wearing a Star of David armband waved the car to the left and another also
wearing an armband gestured insistently that she park in the space he was
designating.
    Choices were being made for her, she decided. Destiny was
intervening, she thought foolishly, guiding her actions. She got out of the car
hesitantly, not knowing what to do next.
    "This way," another man said. He, too, wore the
official armband, and she found herself going with the flow. People were mostly
silent and appropriately somber. A man at the door asked whether she was here
for the Farber or the Schwartz funeral. The couple ahead of her said Farber and
she nodded and followed the couple up a flight of heavily carpeted stairs to a
darkened chapel crowded with silent, respectful mourners.
    Still following the couple, she moved to a seat on a long
polished bench and sat down next to the woman. Gloomy organ music played in the
background.
    "Molly was a wonderful person," the woman
whispered to her.
    "The best," Grace said, afflicted with an
accelerating desire to escape. Unfortunately, she was seated in the center of
the row and there was no way to leave now without attracting attention.
Instead, she resigned herself to the situation, as if she were watching a
documentary entitled Jewish Funeral.
    She observed that the people did look different than she
had seen at her mother's funeral in Baltimore, although many of their faces
bore the familiar stamp of Mediterranean origin under their suntans. There
were, of course, the regional differences of more colorful clothing and the
absence of drab female papal groupies in somber black. The mourners, too, were
better groomed than their Baltimore counterparts, which reflected both income
and geographical disparity.
    There were, of course, vague similarities of ritual,
although the Catholics hands-down offered more ornate spectacle, costuming,
mystery and audiovisual effects than this grim, unadorned auditorium.
Catholics, she told herself, gave great funerals. But then, wasn't their
ceremony more of a bon voyage to a glorious heavenly resort reached through a
corridor lined with angels with white wings playing long trumpets, which led to
golden gates manned by St. Peter himself? Where, after all, did the spirit of
dead Jews go? Was there a