Boca Mournings

by Steven M. Forman

  I heard a siren and saw two Boca police cars speeding into the parking lot. Dr. Koblentz apparently had followed my instructions. The first police car screeched to a halt behind me and Officer Matt McGrady jumped out. Matt was a friend of mine on the Boca Police Force. We taught boxing together at the Police Athletic League gym on Second Avenue and I had helped him adopt a child. He looked surprised to see me.

  “Eddie,” Matt called to me. “What’s up?”

  “Suicide,” I told him.

  “Did you see it?” He was by my side, looking at the bloody, shattered window.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I tried to stop him.”

  I told Matt the whole story, omitting the part about the KY Jelly.

  “Any idea why?”

  I looked at the medical building. “Probably a bad prognosis,” I guessed.

  I saw Claudette and Dr. Koblentz rushing toward us as a crowd formed around the death car. Everyone stared at the splattered window.

  “What happened?” I heard a young man ask.

  “Someone just blew his brains out,” another youngster replied.

  “Who was it?”

  “Nobody,” the punk decided.

  Nobody’s nobody, I thought.

  A BOCA KNIGHT’S OBITUARY

  Carl Mann, 81, a widower from Chicago, died yesterday in Boca Raton, Florida, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Mr. Mann had been fighting pancreatic cancer for a year.

  Mr. Mann was an outstanding athlete in high school, lettering in football, basketball, and baseball. He threw two no-hitters during his three-year varsity career. Upon graduating high school in 1943, Mr. Mann enlisted in the United States Army and was part of the 352nd Division that landed on Normandy Beach. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery and received a Purple Heart.

  He enjoyed a successful fifty-year career as an executive in the life insurance business.

  He was an avid golfer and a master-level bridge player.

  He is survived by his wife, Charlene, four children, and twelve grandchildren.

  My blood-work results showed no evidence of cancer. Dr. Koblentz told me I had an enlarged prostate. I was relieved. I was still somebody, at least for a while.

  “Go away,” seventy-six-year-old Sylvia Goldman screamed hysterically from behind her closed front door. “I’ll call the police.”

  Damn it. She’s out to lunch before we’re out to lunch.

  I turned the doorknob. She had forgotten to lock it again. I pushed gently against her feeble resistance and entered the house. She didn’t recognize me.

  “Sylvia, it’s Eddie,” I said softly. “We’re having lunch today. Remember?”

  “Harold, help,” she called for her husband, who had been dead five years.

  “Harold isn’t here, Sylvia,” I said softly.

  She trembled, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fainted.

  I scooped her up and carried her in my arms to the sofa.

  She weighs nothing, I thought.

  I put her gently on her back and placed a cushion under her head. I sat in the chair next to her and waited for her to come back. I had become very attached to Sylvia while she became increasingly detached from reality.

  When Sylvia was Sylvia, she was wonderful: smiling, alert, and a pleasure to be with. When Sylvia was not Sylvia, her eyes were like shuttered windows in a haunted house. I imagined tiny devils inside her head, hacking away at her brain with pick axes, which destroyed her mind, cell by cell, day by day.

  Sylvia’s eyelids fluttered, and she looked up at me.

  “I must have dozed off,” she whispered.

  I nodded, but she saw through my charade.

  “I had another episode, didn’t I?” Sylvia said, sitting up.

  I nodded.

  “Oh, Eddie,” she said despondently. “What am I going to do?”

  I first became aware of Sylvia Goldman less than a year ago. I saw her sneaking bagels and a pile of pink Sweet ‘N Low packets into her purse from the free buffet table outside the health club. She was so comically inept that I assumed everyone knew what she was doing and didn’t care. But when people have too much time on their hands there is always someone eager to make unimportant things important, and I was eventually approached to bust the little old lady.

  “You should do something about that woman,” a chubby woman in a tennis outfit reported to me one morning. She pointed to Sylvia. “She steals all the bagels.”

  “She doesn’t take all the bagels,” I replied. “She takes four a day.”

  “The food is supposed to be eaten here,” she insisted.

  “Is that a rule?”

  “It’s an unwritten rule.”

  “Can I see that in writing?”

  “She’s stealing.”

  “The food is free,” I reminded her. “How can you steal free stuff?”

  I defended Sylvia successfully until the day she stole the toaster off the buffet table. I could rationalize taking free food but not a kitchen appliance.

  “Mrs. Goldman, I was wondering what you planned to do with that toaster,” I inquired politely, following her to her car.

  She looked at the toaster.

  “I-I-I don’t know,” she said softly, and handed it to me.

  I know bullshit from bewilderment. She was bewildered.

  As I watched Mrs. Goldman drive away I was conflicted. Yes, she had inexplicably tried to steal a toaster but I knew she really wasn’t a thief. She was confused and maybe a little senile. What was the proper response from me as a security officer to a delicate situation like this? I made a tough decision.

  The next morning I went to Boca Appliances on Old Dixie to buy Sylvia Goldman a toaster. I was immediately impressed with the retro-styled Russell Hobbs 2MT model so I bought two of them . . . one for me. The model had the styling of an old Sunbeam T35 from the 1960s but had been updated with two wide slots for bagels.

  In the forties and fifties, toasters were produced primarily for white-bread America. But as babies boomed the bagel business bloomed, and Russell Hobbs supplied the increasing demand with the 2MT. Now I was a proud owner of one but I had to figure out how to give Sylvia her Russell Hobbs without confusing or insulting her. I wasn’t even sure if she would remember me or the incident at the clubhouse. I decided to do the considerate thing. I would trick her.

  I took one of the boxed 2MT toasters to a mailing store where I had it wrapped and addressed to Boca Heights Country Club - Sylvia Goldman - Contest Winner, and I personally delivered it to her modest house in Boca Heights. It was eleven o’clock in the morning when I rang her bell. She opened the door with a bright smile and shinning eyes but didn’t recognize me.

  “Sylvia Goldman?” I asked with a smile.

  “That’s me,” she said, looking at the big box. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “It came to the main office to your attention. Did you enter a contest?”

  “I get calls for contests all the time.”

  “Well, you’re a winner.”

  She clapped her hands like a little girl then looked concerned. “It’s so big,” she said.

  “Would you like me to help you open it?” I volunteered.

  “Yes,” she said, accepting my offer.

  She let me into her house and led me to the kitchen where I put the box on a counter.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, with a cute tilt of her head and a smile.

  “I’m with security,” I said. “My name is Eddie.”

  “Well, thank you, Eddie.” I loved her smile.

  She must have been a beauty.

  She was delighted when I took the retro-toaster out of the box.

  “It’s beautiful,” she told me. “I don’t have a toaster.”

  We set up the 2MT and admired the design.

  “It reminds me of when I was young,” I said.

  “I don’t remember being young,” she said, slowly shaking her head.

  Strange.
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  “Do you want to test toast a bagel?” I asked.

  “I-I-I don’t have a bagel,” she said.

  I looked around the kitchen. No bagels. I went to the refrigerator and opened the door. No bagels. Sylvia watched me. When I opened the stand-up freezer section, a plastic bag containing four frozen bagels tumbled out and landed on my foot. Another bag of bagels followed, then another and another. I looked in the freezer. There were five shelves, stacked with plastic bags of bagels. Each bag held four bagels; a morning’s haul. Some bags contained frost, a clue to their age.

  “You have bagels,” I said, taking one from a bag and returning the rest to the freezer.

  “Of course, I do,” she said.

  Okay.

  I put half the bagel in each oversized toaster slot and tested the defrost feature. It worked. I set the bagel-toasting adjustment and within minutes we had a beautiful browned bagel. We sat at her kitchen table, ate, and talked.

  I told her a little about myself, my work, and my late wife.

  “I married my high-school sweetheart,” I informed her.

  “I think I did, too,” she said, uncertainly.

  Oh boy.

  When I was leaving, she was smiling.

  “It was so nice to meet you, Eddie,” she gushed. “I don’t get much company.”

  “No family?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I could visit you again?”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “I won’t forget,” she said, pointing an index finger at her temple.

  She forgot. The next morning she took the customary four bagels and several Sweet ‘N Low packages from the free buffet, and I was certain she didn’t recognize me. I decided to learn more about Sylvia Goldman.

  Through my administrative contacts in Boca Heights I learned that Sylvia’s bills were paid promptly by her late husband’s trust fund. A local lawyer named Sanford Kreiger was trustee. I contacted him.

  We agreed to meet that afternoon at St. Andrews Country Club, where he lived.

  The young security guard checked my ID and I checked his name tag. “Where you from, Tito?” I asked.

  “Jamaica,” he said with an island accent and a friendly smile. “You know how to get to the clubhouse, Mr. Perlmuttah.” He handed me back my ID.

  “Do you think it’s my first time at a fancy club, Tito?” I asked.

  “No, suh,” he said respectfully, and lifted the security bar automatically.

  “Well, it is,” I smiled. “Where’s the clubhouse?”

  Tito laughed and handed me printed directions.

  As I rolled in, Tito called to a black gardener. “Hey, Santos. You see that guy?”

  “In dat MINI Cooper?” Santos yelled back.

  “Yeah,” Tito said. “Dat’s a funny munh.”

  “Dat’s a funny car.” Santos had a high-pitched laugh.

  I parked a distance from the clubhouse, not wanting to embarrass my host with my MINI.

  Sanford Kreiger met me at the front door. He was slim and short like me, with a full head of well-groomed silver hair. I guessed he was in his early seventies. We sat in large sofa chairs in the lounge and ordered coffee.

  “Why is Boca Heights investigating Sylvia Goldman?” Kreiger asked.

  “Broken Heights isn’t investigating her,” I said. “I am.”

  “Why?” He raised his eyebrows dubiously.

  “I’m a friend of hers.”

  “She never mentioned you,” he told me.

  “She never mentioned you, either.”

  He smiled and looked away. “I can’t talk about personal matters,” he said.

  “I want to discuss her mental condition.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” he said, “but I know a little about her Alzheimer’s. Her late husband, Dr. Goldman, kept me informed. She has a disease of the brain created internally by an imbalance in her system. Basically, plaque is growing on her brain.”

  “Was Dr. Goldman an expert on Alzheimer’s?” I asked.

  “He was an expert on all forms of mental illness,” the lawyer said.

  “Did he treat Sylvia himself?” I asked.

  “I can’t discuss that with you.” Kreiger said.

  “How long were you his lawyer?”

  “Over twenty years,” he said, “but I knew Harold most of my life. We grew up in the same area in New York. He was eight years older.”

  “What was he like as a person?” I wanted to know.

  “He was a very unique individual,” Kreiger said, “and he was a genius. At one time, he had a very promising, high-profile position in his field. But he dropped out of the big time without explanation and became a professor at some obscure college. I never knew why.”

  “Sylvia told me she and Dr. Goldman were high-school sweethearts.”

  He smiled and looked away. “I can’t talk about that,” he said professionally.

  “Why not?”

  “Doctor’s orders,” he smiled. “Besides, I didn’t meet Sylvia until long after they were married. Why is this information important to you?”

  “I want to help her.”

  “Prying into her past won’t help.”

  “The woman has no memory of her childhood,” I said. “Why?”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “Was Dr. Goldman trying to hide something?”

  “Her privacy, I assume,” Kreiger told me. “He was very protective of his wife.”

  “Well, he can’t protect her now,” I reminded him.

  “He’s protecting her from you right now, isn’t he?”

  “Okay. I guess he is. But what if she becomes incapacitated?” I asked.

  “There are provisions in his will for that.”

  He stood up, indicating our meeting was over.

  “I’m going to continue to look into this,” I promised.

  “I won’t try to stop you.” He shrugged. “I just can’t help you.”

  It was time for me to come through for Sylvia.

  When Sylvia became Sylvia again she got up from the sofa. I escorted her outside.

  “I like your new car,” she told me twentieth time.

  “Thank you, Sylvia,” I said patiently. “We’re going to the Ale House on 441, right?”

  “Yes. I love the spinach dip there,” she said.

  She ate three chips the last time.

  We chugged past the security gate and I saw a green right traffic arrow turning yellow at Yamato Road.

  Make that light.

  I accelerated and made a screeching right turn onto Yamato just as yellow turned red.

  Yes! I congratulated myself as the front right tire of the MINI slammed into a pothole, and bounced out. The right rear tire followed.

  “Shit,” I exclaimed as we bounced out again.

  Sylvia got whiplashed and yelped.

  At Yamato I pulled onto a grassy knoll.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said quietly. “What happened?”

  “Pothole,” I told her. “Damn thing has been there for months. I forgot. Sorry.”

  I got out of the MINI and checked the car. The right rear hubcap was dented but everything seemed intact.

  When I got back in the car Sylvia said, “Drive carefully and watch your language.” We both laughed.

  At the Ale House, I watched Sylvia mishandle her spinach dip. Her first scoop resulted in a chip fracture.

  I took a fresh chip, dipped it adeptly, and handed her the prize.

  “I wish I could do that,” she said.

  “I wish I could eat that,” I said, envying her while I took a bite of my tasteless veggie burger. “But I have to watch my diet.”

  “Why? You look good.” She patted my arm.

  “My doctor told me to watch what I eat.” I confided in her. “My HDL is bad.”

  “What’s HDL?”

  “Cholesterol.”

  “Bad cholesterol.”
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  “No, HDL is good cholesterol,” I tried to explain.

  “Your good cholesterol is bad?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there bad cholesterol?”

  “Yeah, LDL.”

  “Is your LDL bad, too?”

  “No. It’s good. Can we talk about something else?”

  “You could ask how I’m feeling.”

  “Okay. How are you feeling?”

  “Don’t ask,” she shook her head.

  Sylvia!

  “My internist says I have fibromyalgia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Everything hurts but nothing is wrong,” she explained.

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It’s not good. And my back hurts,” she went on. “I have spinal stenosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A narrowing of the spine,” she explained. “I get numbness in my legs.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s bad, and I need two new knees.”

  “Do your knees hurt?”

  “I don’t know. My legs are numb.”

  Stupid question.

  “I have tendonitis in my rotator cuff,” she continued.

  “What’s a rotator cuff?”

  “Muscles and tendons in the shoulder,” she said, pointing. “I have plantar fascia, too.”

  “I’m afraid to ask where that is,” I said.

  “It’s in the foot,” she said. “I’m a mess, head to toe.”

  “Your head looks fine,” I tried.

  “My hair is thinning.”

  “How’s your hearing?”

  “What?”

  “Sylvia,” I sighed. “Does anything feel good?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Being here with you.”

  “I wish my mother had said that to me when I was a kid,” I told her.

  “I don’t remember my mother,” Sylvia said.

  “I know.” I patted her hand. “You told me your husband analyzed your condition as infantile amnesia.”

  “My husband, Harold, was a very famous psychiatrist, you know,” she informed me for the hundredth time. She took a quick deep breath as if she had just remembered something. “Did I tell you I dreamed about the two-headed boy again last night?”