The Great Lou

The Great Lou.

They didn't want her to be honored, recognized or eulogized. Her
severed head had been found in a drawer. Her nose had been hacked off,
the work of Japanese murderers. Her broken body had been taken to the
morgue. Her diamond bracelet had been found in a different room from
where the chest of drawers sat. It was a house that was two doors down
from Eloise's house. Part of a nice apartment complex that circled the
communal parking lot like a horseshoe. Eloise was 75 years old but no
one could ever think of her that way. She seemed 55, a college
professor and an old trooper of the arcade of life, the large
department stores and glamorous exhibition halls of the modern world.
She had participated in over75 professional conferences, all over the
United States. She had been to Europe and China. She never seemed at a
loss for words, but she could sometimes sound unpolished and painfully
blunt. An irate client once pulled her wig off. She often made
derogatory comments about people behind their backs. But she was always
a show stopper with her impeccable taste in clothes and her cigarette
dangling precariously from her lip and her throaty laughter and
irrepressible humor. She was always magically preserved from any real
ailment. An old trooper of the merry-go-round of life. After all these
years, "Lou" was a routine that ran of itself. A small circuit through
society, consisting of a house, a job, seniority, friends, relatives,
occasions. She no longer had to make an effort. Her circuit would not
collapse no matter who was driving it. That is why the murderers
focussed on her, as an object of prey. After her death, Eloise's life
went on the same, with an Asian, posing as the light-skinned black
woman, Eloise. The great Eloise. And now she has passed out of life,
taken off the gameboard as imperceptibly as a gentle, morning breeze.
In her luxury car and Versace clothes, she had caused many a ripple in
the parade of people and personalities. Her Xmas card, her small gift
of money (entirely inadequate for what her daughter asked of her) will
leave an empty place in her daughter's tragic life.