Jane Austen in Boca

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  There was a low hum of voices as the last guests seated themselves and whispered to their neighbors, trying to get a handle on what was going on. Suddenly a hush fell over the assemblage, the back doors of the activity room opened, and the bride entered to a surprised murmur. Lila’s aqua gown trailed slightly on the floor (she had stopped short of a train, though the idea had occurred to her). She had enlisted the services of a professional makeup artist, and her face appeared smooth and glossy in the manner of Loretta Young in her later years. Flo thought the look smacked of the mortuary but could hear whispers of admiration from some of the throng.

  As for Hy, who stood opposite Flo and May on the other side of the chuppa, he had a strangely formal appearance—almost as though he were impersonating someone else. Owing no doubt to Lila’s intervention, he had abandoned the lime-green cummerbund and tie, and was wearing a conventional cutaway. Holding himself stiffly, his chest pushed forward, his head held high in deference to the occasion, he looked deceptively dignified. He might have been a foreign diplomat or the maître d’ of a luxury restaurant. It was amazing, thought Flo, what the help of a tailor and the absence of speech could do for a man. The couple had taken on the look of one of those shimmery senior couples out of a made-for-TV movie or an episode of The Golden Girls.

  Presiding was a young rabbi, formerly a junior rabbi in a temple in Livingston, New Jersey, who had just taken over the congregation of the Reform temple in West Boca. His predecessor, who had been greatly admired, had decided to leave the rabbinate to devote himself full-time to his real-estate interests. This new rabbi had an air of audacious greenness about him. He was a very with-it rabbi, according to those in the know, and was in the habit of playing his guitar at Shabbat services. Today he had been asked to leave his guitar at home, and seemed at a loss for what to do with his hands. He was the kind of young Jewish man whose youth seems his most marked characteristic—one still saw the loose-lipped face of the bar-mitzvah boy and JIFTY regional leader. One wondered whether such an elderly couple could indeed be legally married by one so young; did the striking disparity in age invalidate the vows? Yet the rabbi had a loud, aggressive confidence, as if daring anyone to challenge his grasp of the prayers or his handling of the prayer book, which he carried with a cavalier recklessness that made some of the guests fear he might suddenly throw it to someone across the room. His yarmulke, heavily embroidered in blue-and-gold thread, sat jauntily, slightly to one side, on his bushy black hair. He chanted loudly in Hebrew, overemphasizing words here and there rather like a Hebraic newscaster. Finally he paused and gazed at the couple as though drinking in the pleasure their particular union afforded him.

  “We have here two people,” he said in the familiar rabbinical singsong that seems to become more pronounced the closer one gets to Unitarianism. “We have here two people who have had the good fortune to find each other at a time of life so often marked by loneliness, financial burden, and dependence. When many must see their physical capacities diminished and their accomplishments dismissed by a young, uncaring world, these two can cleave to each other. Here are a man and a woman who have found love again even when other loves have been sundered from them. Here are two people who have not been afraid to seek fulfillment at a time when so often fulfillment is deemed complete, the book closed on that chapter of life’s experience. Mark the fruit of that search: a handsome couple, the pride of their children and grandchildren. May their marriage be a time of ripening friendship, even as the throes of passion fade and dissipate—a new beginning when so much has been concluded already, a last walk down the passage before the door closes forever. Let this aging Romeo and Juliet light up the world with their love.”

  “Did he really say what I thought he said,” whispered Flo, “or has my Alzheimer’s finally set in?”

  “Shh …” said May, trying not to laugh. “No one is listening to what he’s saying. It’s the tone they’re after.”

  “The tone, of course. We must soak it in, before the door closes forever….”

  May and Flo had been placed at the Boca table. Since most of the guests were relatives or representatives of an earlier life, the number from Boca could be relegated to one table. They sat with two widowers, card-playing friends of Hy’s, who kept saying over and over that they hoped this wouldn’t spoil their Sunday games. Also at the table were Lila’s upstairs neighbor and her husband, who seemed obsessively focused on putting a claim on the centerpiece, and her Tuesday golf partner, a woman who seemed composed of bones barely covered with darkly tanned and wrinkled skin, who kept sending platters back to the kitchen to have the dressing, butter, and sauce removed. “I want,” she said to the harried waitress, “a plain piece of fish with nothing on it. Do you understand? Nothing!”

  There was also a younger woman—in her forties—who had supervised Lila’s stint as a volunteer floral arranger for the Jewish Federation banquet. Known by the Boca set as a genius with flowers, she had built a lucrative career as a floral consultant for Boca charities, where she helped a bevy of artistic matrons construct the centerpieces for important affairs. She was dressed in high Boca style—an elaborate gold-and-silver tie-dyed evening T-shirt and multilayered, sequined silk skirt carefully mismatched with the top. Her nails were very long and very purple, and her face was made up in strong earth tones. She was judged to be stunning and carefully scrutinized by the female guests, who could recall her outfits at previous occasions. She had done Lila’s flowers gratis, a fact that had been disseminated widely, and she was busy talking to the couple interested in the centerpiece on how they might best care for it to assure maximum longevity.

  Lila and Hy were making rounds while a photographer snapped their picture. When they arrived at Flo and May’s table, the flower arranger began to applaud and the rest of the table entered in, all except Flo, who pretended to be fishing for her napkin under the table. Lila grabbed her friends by their arms and pulled them off into a corner.

  “Finally I can relax,” she sighed.

  “It’s beautiful,” said May, “just what you wanted.”

  “It is,” said Lila. “I know Flo disapproves, but I needed to get it out of my system. You don’t know what it’s like to have been married to a miser all your life. Hy is a generous man. I can excuse a lot in exchange for generosity.”

  “Mazel tov,” said Flo—she could never dislike Lila for long.

  “Nothing will change with us,” Lila assured them. “Hy wants our lives to continue just as before. We’ll have our separate schedules. Did I tell you we’re moving into the three-bedroom next to Hy’s old place? He says now that there are two of us, we need more room. He has no objection to my having my own bedroom or my going out with the girls, as he says, whenever I want. I’m even planning to take that literature course with you in the spring. The only difference is that now I can relax. And guess what? I even like his children. They have a surprising amount of sense considering”—she laughed—”their father. I can’t complain.”

  With that, she was off to pay her respects to the next table. May and Flo looked at each other.

  “To each her own,” said Flo, lifting her glass of champagne with the strawberry fastened to its side, and sloshing some on the sleeve of her taffeta cocktail dress. “What the hell, I’ll never wear this thing again,” she said. “To the fairy godmothers!” She clicked May’s glass.

  “To us,” said May wistfully.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  FOLLOWING THE WEDDING, LILA AND HY LEFT FOR A TEN-DAY honeymoon trip to Italy. It was a Club ABC Tour. Club ABC, headquartered in Bloomfield, New Jersey, is a popular tour operator for the North Jersey set. Since West Boca residents tend to hail from that region, it continues to do a brisk business with a Florida clientele. Billed as a club because of its nominal membership fee, it offers trips to a variety of foreign destinations and boasts a lot of bang for the buck: Airfare, high-quality hotels, and breakfasts are always included. Available on arrival at the destination are personable
local guides trained to lead expeditions to local synagogues and discount stores and to generally tolerate the demands of Jewish seniors. To “go ABC” (jocularly said to be an acronym for “All But Christians”), whether to Italy, England, Greece, or Turkey, means that one’s needs will be attended to in style and one won’t have to pay an arm and a leg in the process. Thus, it is common to hear of an octogenarian with a walker on a strict low-salt diet talking about his trip to the cisterns in Istanbul with ABC, or praising the expertise of ABC’s Georgio in getting a special price on gold chains on the Via Veneto. Dear friends have been made on ABC trips, made all the dearer when it is discovered that the individuals involved live only two pods away from each other in the same retirement complex.

  Lila and Hy had chosen the three-city deluxe Italian package, which upgrades the four-star hotels offered in the standard package to five stars. Lila had never been abroad and, heady with her newfound monetary security, was intent on going whole hog. But this was no mere sybaritic holiday Starved as she was for the life she had missed, she was serious about gathering knowledge and worshiping at the shrine of culture.

  To this end, she read voraciously in preparation for the trip, clipping articles and assiduously marking guidebooks. Once arrived at their destination—after inspecting the hotel room to ascertain that room size and amenities were as promised—she went to work. She proceeded to see the sights with fierce and concentrated energy. While Hy and the other men sat in outdoor cafes, smoking cigars and talking about the best routes from Boca to New Jersey, Lila and a group of like-minded women spent their days climbing the stone steps of cathedrals and peering at madonnas. All the while, they pelted their long-suffering guides with questions about everything, from the meaning of religious iconography to the fine points of cleaning stained glass.

  The energy and inquisitiveness of the elderly Jewish female traveler can be a source of wonder and surprise to the uninitiated. Local guides comment on it all the time, and are known to up their coffee intake and go to bed earlier than usual in preparation for the demands placed upon them by ABC patrons. While a church, a museum, a lunch, and perhaps some light shopping will be fine for another tour group, an ABC group will not be satisfied with such insubstantial fare and will demand at least two more museums and, if possible, a trip up a narrow side street, not generally visited by tourists, to see either an esoteric monument not in the guidebooks or some wizened artisan making rare baubles that can be bought at a discount. Local guides are forever astonished to have a blond-haired seventy-year-old yenta in a sun visor inquiring about a classical frieze that she read was absconded from some Roman temple in the fifth century, brought to a certain local site, and placed in a special crypt, open only between twelve and two during the last two weeks in August—the reason, she will explain, why she booked her trip when she did. Incidents of this kind happen all the time with ABC patrons, and are compounded by a scrupulous attention to the accurate billing and delivery of amenities as promised. What keeps the guides coming back, given the stress such behavior is likely to generate, is the fact that if you perform well, you not only receive a generous tip but are likely to be invited to a grandchild’s bar mitzvah or receive yearly mailings of polo shirts, belts, and homemade pound cake on your birthday.

  The enormous energy that women like Lila bring to the act of sightseeing might be seen to derive from energy once employed in household management and child-rearing. Yet such an equation fails to make clear the amount of raw power involved. For at the height of domestic exertion, women of this kind tapped into energy storehouses far greater than a given task might seem to warrant. If, for example, one could harness the wattage used in the single feat of shopping for a daughter’s bat mitzvah dress (a task whose difficulty is compounded by the fact that the daughter is a carbon copy of the mother, only operating in direct resistance to her), it would no doubt be possible to run a small corporation, map a good portion of the human genome, or supply power for a moderately sized city like Detroit. AH of which is to say that Lila was doing a very thorough job getting the three great Italian cities under her belt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  FLO WAS VERY DIFFERENTLY ENGAGED IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING the Marcus wedding. After the encounter with Rudy in the club lounge, Mel seemed to have become scarce. She had had a call the next day on her answering machine in which he said he was going to be out of town for a while. He’d been offered a lucrative consulting job in Washington—or was it New York?—that he couldn’t afford to turn down. This would force him to put on hold his plans to move to Boca Festa.

  Was it a shock? Truth be told, no. Flo felt that she had had intimations, though she’d tried to put them out of her mind. There was no denying that the man had charmed her and that she had enjoyed the attention. But looking back, she realized that the seeds of doubt had been planted quite early, during the trip to the casbah, with its detour to the stretch house in Naples. Mel’s friend had not sat well with Flo. She had tried not to see what she had unconsciously known in her heart: that the two men were, as one used to say, “in cahoots.” She was thankful that her affections had never really been engaged. The whole incident only served to prove what had long been her maxim: It was better to get your romance between the covers of a book, where you could choose the very best. Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina—now, there was a relationship worth getting on the edge of your seat for.

  A week later, Flo was on her way to meet May at the porch restaurant when she suddenly bumped into Mel near the main pool. He was speaking to Dorothy Meltzer and Roz Fliegler, and excused himself and took her aside. He smiled warmly and showed his usual ingratiating manner, but she discerned a forced note in his voice, and noticed that his eyes traveled over her head as he spoke, as if keeping track of what was going on at the pool nearby.

  “I came over to look for you and to apologize for my disappearance. I’ve been swamped ever since our last talk. Back and forth, up and down. There’s the job in Washington, and then some additional work with a small firm here in Boca. Nothing fancy, but it’s a favor to a friend. You know how it is when they ask you; you can’t turn them down. I must say, I miss our tête-à-têtes.” As he spoke, he waved to Roz and Dorothy, as if to say that he’d be joining them again in a moment. “Anyway,” he continued in a sprightly tone, “the work in Washington has some perks attached. They want me to put my two cents in on a PR plan they’re pitching for Jamaica or Bermuda—one of those vacation spots, it doesn’t matter, the stuff we do is pretty boilerplate—and they say, out of appreciation, they’ll spring me for a trip over to wherever—St. Croix, St. John’s. Now, that’s the kind of place I’d like to retire to. The islands, I must say, have it all over the west coast of Florida. Plenty of open beach and solitude. Plenty of space to write.” Flo nodded politely, agreeing that the islands would be just the place for him, then excused herself, saying she had an appointment that, delightful as she found his company, she just had to get to. He showed no unwillingness to let her go.

  What, she wondered to herself as she hurried off to meet May, had she once seen in this man?

  And that was the last, quite literally, that she had seen of him. She hoped it would remain the last. It pleased her to note that she did not miss him. She was now determined to rely on her own resources—to spend her time playing tennis with the club pro, taking meals at the clubhouse with May, and sitting by the pool reading Mary Gordon’s latest novel. Flo realized that Gordon’s Catholic guilt relaxed her because it made her Jewish guilt seem light-hearted by comparison. It was always nice to think that someone’s else’s family was crazier than yours.

  Flo also found diversion in her ever-lively correspondence with Amy She had to admit that the computer, on which this correspondence was transacted, had become a necessary adjunct to her life. Blaming computers for killing off books was an accusation that she had long made to her son, the dot-com millionaire. But a computer had arrived, despite her protestations, a year ago as his birthday present to her—a
gift, she thought at the time as she extracted the thing from its miles of bubble wrap, that clearly reflected his unconscious hostility. As part of the gift, Jonathan had also sent a personal Internet “trainer,” who showed up at the door in a black turtleneck and dark glasses, announcing that he had been instructed to get her up to speed, no matter how long it took. It did not take long. In no time, she was surfing the Web, participating in a nineteenth-century literature chat group, and e-mailing Amy about the latest Eric Rohmer movie and the moral issues surrounding Woody Allen’s marriage to his quasi-stepdaughter. Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, she would sign on to Instant Messenger and find that her great-niece (screen name: womanwarrior) was on-line, too, and it was like wandering into a coffee shop at two A.M. and finding your best friend there. In the end, she humbled herself and admitted to Jonathan that she’d been wrong: The computer was a delightful diversion and a vast, if unsifted, resource for information.

  In this way, Flo’s days passed pleasantly enough.

  For May, however, it was another story. It bothered Flo to see that her friend was depressed, try as she might to hide it. Not being a reader and having no interest in tennis or golf, May had little to occupy her time. This had never been a problem for her before. She had busied herself cooking and cleaning the apartment, taking walks, and going shopping for gifts for her grandchildren. But lately these pastimes had seemed insufficient. She was by turns restless and lethargic, eager to do something but not interested in doing anything in particular. She was, concluded Flo, unhappy, and when May reported that Carol had invited her to come up for a few days and celebrate Adam’s eighth birthday, she urged her friend to go.