Jane Austen in Boca (25 page)

Both unawareness and hypervigilance with respect to death are possible in the context of Boca Festa. Just as the club buffet table offers dishes to suit all palates, so does the community support numerous viewpoints on the subject. Since the fragility of human life is everywhere on display in the form of walkers, hearing aids, and an abundance of wrinkles, one can think about mortality all the time, if one is so inclined. By the same token, a certain smooth, airbrushed quality characterizes club life, making it possible to ignore death just as completely if that happens to be one’s preference. It helps that there are always new residents to replace the old. Friendships are severed—Mrs. Schatz no longer inhabits pod 8—but Mr. Cohen, who owned a shoe store in Queens where you remember once buying a pair of sandals, moves into her apartment and is an excellent companion.

Flo Kliman was of a philosophical turn of mind, and had thought about the fact of death at some length. She had lost many people in her life—her parents, her brother and sister, her husband, and more friends than she could count—and though sometimes she would fall into a musing, wistful state, a kind of dreamy sadness in thinking about the many people whom she loved who had died, her tendency by and large was not to dwell on them. Doing so depressed her, not only in making her miss these people whom she could not see again but also in reminding
her that she, too, would die someday, probably sooner rather than later. She had concluded that no one could live with the sense of mortality constantly in mind, and that it was necessary to forget oneself, as much as possible, in living. Flo liked to quote Voltaire’s remark that “we are all condemned to death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve,” and, in more serious moods, to refer to Hamlet’s famous declaration: “If it be not now, yet it will come, if it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come.” She had quoted this to Lila once, who, irritated at what she took to be Flo’s pretentious side, had given a succinct translation without knowing it. “Hamlet, shamlet, we’re all going to die sometime, so we might as well accept it.”

Flo was a confirmed atheist, and she had no patience with the way some of her friends, no more pious than she was, gingerly skirted the issue, calling themselves agnostics. The euphemisms for death—references to “passing away,” “passing over,” “having gone to a better place,” and so forth, also favored among Boca Festa residents—struck her as annoying efforts to evade or prettify what she saw as a simple passage from being to nothingness. When confronted with death, her tendency in general was to laugh. “It’s not death in itself I find funny,” she explained to May and Lila, who often took her to task for her attitude, “but the circumstances around it.” She had taken pleasure, for example, in hearing that Clara Zucker had kicked the bucket while leaning over the Chanel counter in Bloomingdale’s. And she had delighted in the irony that Yael Levy, who had suffered from emphysema for years, succumbed after exposure to smoke at a barbecue. Life, Flo thought, was absurd, and death was likely to reflect this. She had once told May that she had come up with a spin-off of Clue, the popular murder-mystery board game. “In my game,” said Flo, “we deduce who died through knowledge of the pod number and the activity in which the individual was occupied at the time of death: cards, golf, shopping, eating, and
so forth.” May said she found nothing funny about Flo’s idea.

If Flo Kliman had looked for a tale of death fitted to her particular taste in humor, she could not have done better than that of Hy Marcus. She learned about it on a Friday morning. She had arranged to meet May and Norman in the clubhouse lounge at eleven, where Amy and her friends were scheduled to continue their filming. Separate interviews with May and Norman had already been done, in which each had given personal background on themselves and described how they felt about each other. Amy had a gift for drawing out her subjects. She took a gossipy, confiding tone that Flo said made her sound like a young Barbara Walters, albeit with a pierced nose. Flo was looking forward to seeing Amy draw Norman and May out further, and to watching the coy responses of the couple, who were enjoying their time on camera as it paralleled their developing feelings for each other.

Flo had been sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the
Times,
whiling away the hour until she had to meet her friends, when Lila walked in. Lila had never been known to walk in without knocking before.

“What’s wrong?” said Flo as her friend lowered herself shakily into the chair opposite. “You look terrible.”

“Oh, Flo,” wailed Lila, “you’re not going to believe this.”

“Try me,” said Flo. “I’ll believe it.”

“Well, first, I should tell you …” She eyed Flo nervously.

“Hy is dead.”

“No!” said Flo. It was hard to know what to say. “That’s terrible!” was certainly too strong and would have seemed disingenuous. On the other hand, “That’s good!” would not have been right, either. Though there was no denying that Flo was glad to think that Lila was no longer attached to Hy Marcus, death seemed an extreme way of severing the connection. Hy, after all, had never done anything to her, short of irritating her exceedingly over dinner.

“It’s true!” said Lila. “It happened last night. It was …” She paused. “Sudden.”

“What do you mean?” said Flo, for whom a good story was always welcome. “How did he die?”

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Lila paused again. “I count on you to be discreet, but you can tell May if you want to.” She shifted a bit in the chair, and Flo leaned forward expectantly.

“We had come back from the clubhouse,” said Lila carefully. “Hy had had a large meal: two servings of roast beef, baked potato with butter and sour cream, then dessert. It was makeyour-own sundae, with the hot fudge and the butterscotch—too much, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“It isn’t?” said Flo.

“No,” said Lila, “it’s not really relevant to the story So we go back to the apartment and I notice that he’s not acting tired but he’s not talking either, which is unusual for Hy. If he’s not tired, he’s usually talking, and if he’s not talking, he’s usually tired.”

Flo nodded. This seemed an accurate description of Hy Marcus.

“So we go in and I start to go to my room, and he says, ‘Not so fast, you sexy thing, you.’ That’s what he said. I remember perfectly because, as you can imagine, it gave me a shock. He started unbuttoning his shirt and he said, ‘I have a surprise for you, you sexy thing.’ “

“Oh God,” groaned Flo. But Lila was not about to be interrupted now that the morbid trajectory of her story was under way.

“So he says to me, ‘Take off those clothes, we’re going to do it.’ I say, using a reasonable tone, ‘Hy, please, it hasn’t worked in the past.’ But he says, ‘Now is different; I took the pill.’ “

“Oh God!” said Flo again, putting her head in her hands.

“So what could I do?” continued Lila. “I told him that I thought perhaps we should wait. It was late, he’d had a big meal,
I was tired. But he was jumping around like a monkey. He said it was my wifely duty and so forth, and got very insistent. So I thought, Better to get it over with”—she took a breath—”so I get into bed and he takes his clothes off. His
shlong
was, well—surprising—”

“Lila!” exclaimed Flo.

“I just want to give you a sense,” said Lila. “So he starts in very vigorously.
Very
vigorously. The shaking was”—she searched for a metaphor—”like high speed on the blender.”

Flo groaned.

“And then it stopped. Like you’d pressed ‘off.’ Still; nothing. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. It’s not unheard of, you know. Mort was always very fast, and fell asleep in a snap. But,” said Lila meaningfully, “he wasn’t asleep.”

“I see,” said Flo.

“He was dead.”

“So I gathered,” said Flo.

Lila sighed. “So that’s the story. I’ve called his kids; they’re coming down. He wanted to be buried down here. His son is taking care of everything.” She paused, then added, “Steven told me about the will. I’m nicely taken care of. I should be relieved.”

Flo nodded expectantly. Lila seemed to have more to say.

“It’s not like we were married for fifty years,” she continued. “It hasn’t even been two months. And it’s no secret that I married to be comfortable.” She paused. “It was a marriage of convenience.”

Flo waited.

“And to tell the truth, he was an annoying man. He got on my nerves. He got on everyone’s nerves.”

“He was,” agreed Flo, “annoying.”

“But he wasn’t a bad man,” Lila shot back, as though Flo had missed the point. “He wasn’t Prince Charming, I’ll grant you, but he wasn’t bad. There are a lot worse.”

“That’s true,” agreed Flo, trying to keep up with her friend’s reasoning. “There are certainly worse.”

“And he had a lot of life. He had what they call joie de vivre: joy in living. It’s a quality that you don’t always see. Mort, for example, didn’t have it. Mort might as well have been underground for all the life he had. Hy had life—and he gave me the chance to live.” Her voice had become soft, wistful. “It’s hard to imagine him dead.”

Flo thought of Hy Marcus. It was indeed hard to imagine that antic and voluble man eliminated from the game of life.

“And to tell you the truth,” sighed Lila, a tear rolling slowly down her powdered cheek, “I miss him.”

H
Y
M
ARCUS’S FUNERAL WAS NOT UNLIKE MANY FUNERALS THAT
occur on a regular basis in West Boca. There were a nice number of people: the son and daughter and their families, dressed in black suits and linen dresses from Saks; a few old friends; and a showing from Boca Festa that included Hy’s card partners and a few who had known Hy from casual encounters in the dining room or on the grounds. There were also the standard number of funeral “regulars.” This group made a point of attending funerals to get a feel for the proceedings much in the way prospective brides look in on other people’s weddings to get ideas for their own. There are limits to this analogy, of course. Although some of the regulars were seen to take notes on casket presentation, flower arrangements, testimonial speeches, and so forth, for the most part, the choice to attend the funerals of relative strangers must be put down to the desire to bask in the certainty that one was not being buried oneself.

May, Flo, and Lila sat together near the front of the room where Hy’s casket, thankfully closed, gave a far more dignified and imposing presentation than Hy had ever done in life. May and Flo had decided that they would sit with Lila to give her moral support. She still appeared confused and shaken by how quickly she had gone from newlywed to widow.

The young rabbi, the same one who had presided over Lila and Hy’s wedding, had once again been commandeered to perform. He appeared no less young than before, though buoyed
by the fact that he could claim an earlier connection with the deceased. It gave him a sense of continuity that he lacked in most of the events at which he officiated.

“I married him,” said the rabbi sonorously, “I bury him. So is the cycle of life. We live, we joy, we prosper, we wither, we die. The cycle cannot be evaded, neither can it be avoided.”

“Neither evaded nor avoided?” Flo couldn’t help whispering, though May gave her a look.

“It is with a special sadness, then,” continued the rabbi, “having so recently seen joy kindled anew on the face of Hy Marcus, to now be saying farewell. Yet I do so, with the steadfast conviction that Hy Marcus is now on a long and blessed journey, his soul winging its way to be one with
Adonai.”

The rabbi continued with more of the same for quite a while. When he was done, Hy’s son spoke about how his father had always encouraged him and his sister to pursue their dreams and never stinted in supporting them, either psychologically or financially He spoke briefly. Before sitting down, he noted that his father’s oldest friend was present and wanted to say a few words.

An old man came forward. He had a cane and he looked something like Hy. He stood for a moment and peered out at the assembled mourners.

“I met Hy,” he said, “when I was ten years old. We used to play together, stickball after school. Hy was an excellent stickball player. I also recall that we played marbles. I won all of Hy’s marbles. He was a good loser and never complained. Later, in high school, we were still friends, and after that, we continued to keep in touch. Hy went into the hat business with his father and his brother, Michael. He worked hard to support his family. He was a devoted and loving husband to Minna—married for forty-six years—and when he met Lila”—the old man nodded to Lila where she sat between her friends—”he felt he had gotten
a new lease. Hy was proud of his children and his grandchildren,” the man continued. “I don’t think I ever met a man who was so proud of his children.” Hy’s children bowed their heads. They felt the full force of their father’s pride, and were moved by it now that they didn’t need to cringe under it. “He thought they were worth a million,” continued the man, “and he used to say they should be—he put a million into their education.” There was relieved laughter—everyone appreciated a glimpse of Hy as they remembered him, and the chance to escape the feeling, which the speech had so far engendered, that they had not done him justice. “Hy was a good man, Hy was a decent man,” intoned the speaker. “He worked hard all his life to provide for his family, and he never, to my knowledge, denied them anything. He enjoyed life and was grateful for the gifts of life. He was my oldest friend,” the man concluded quietly. “I’m sad he’s gone.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

“Y
OU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS,” ANNOUNCED
L
ILA A FEW
days after Hy’s funeral. For the second time in a week, she had opened Flo’s door and walked in without knocking. Something, thought Flo, must have happened on the dramatic order of Hy’s death to have precipitated this second instance of passionate trespassing. “Sit down,” said Lila, “you’re going to be shocked.”