As the three women made their way up the steps of the club house into the lounge area that preceded the main dining room, they saw Hy Marcus waiting expectantly by the door. Hy was sporting what in Boca circles was termed “a look.” All affairs at Boca Festa were black-tie optional, but most of the married men, at the promptings of their wives, and even the few single men, tended to opt for the tuxedo. They enjoyed dressing up as much as the women. As Norman Grafstein had said, the lure of the English aristocrat always beckoned. At clubs like Broken Arrow, there were even dining rooms in which black tie was favored on a regular basis, as though the members had decided to bodily transplant themselves to nineteenth-century England and play at being, if not the Duke of Windsor, then at least Queen Victoria’s favorite counselor, that charming Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli.
There were, however, always those who preferred the flashier version of black tie—more Las Vegas than Hampton Court. Hy was of this school and had chosen to deck himself in a lime-green cummerbund and matching lime-and-yellow bow tie. Carol, thought May, would have approved. She was always nagging Alan to liven up his attire. Hy was definitely lively, his good cheer manifesting itself in a veritable avalanche of anecdotes about his children and grandchildren. In between, he chose to comment appreciatively on the women’s appearance. Lila’s red dress pleased him exceedingly, but he also took admiring notice of May, whose relationship with Norman Grafstein he had decided should proceed at the same pace as his with Lila.
“May Newman is certainly looking fancy,” he exclaimed now. “Looks to me like she’s after a big fish.”
May blushed and looked down, but Hy was undeterred. “I can see that Norman Grafstein had better watch himself or he’s going to be walking down the aisle sooner than he thinks.”
“Hy, enough,” pleaded Lila, who could see that her friend was embarrassed and that the remarks were in bad taste.
“And what’s so bad about congratulating a lovely lady on making a good catch?” asked Hy gleefully. “A woman gets dressed up—a few curves don’t hurt”—he patted Lila’s hip—“and before you know it, it’s wedding bells.” He leaned forward to kiss Lila’s cheek and peer appreciatively at her exposed neckline, the sight of which fortunately seemed to distract him from postulating further on May’s marriage plans.
The four had deposited themselves on one of the sofas in the lounge to await the remaining members of their party, and while Hy chattered and Lila dutifully nodded, May and Flo watched with interest as the members of Boca Festa paraded by in their finery. Among the more notable was a woman in a red-and-gold floor-length sheath with what looked like a bustle, and a silver sequined headdress with a feather.
“I’d say we have here a cross between the races at Ascot and a popular New Orleans bordello during Mardi Gras,” Flo whispered to May. “For a woman closing in on seventy-five, that outfit takes more than chutzpah—it takes stamina.”
Mixing among the throng was Rudy Salzburg, president of the club, a dapper impresario of a man with a massive mane of gray hair and an exaggeratedly continental manner. Rudy, a former concert-level violinist in his native Hungary, had survived Auschwitz and gone on to found a chain of lucrative soft ice cream stores in New York and Connecticut. He was a man of enormous joie de vivre and know-how, and it was said that his indefatigable spirit and capacity for organizing had saved many during the direst times in the camps. An Olympic kibbitzer, he wielded his genial authority over all aspects of the life of the club, raising money for this and that, planning, gossiping, and schmoozing. It was Rudy who had spearheaded the famous father-son golf tournaments, in which members played against each other with the help of their sons, hot-shot New York lawyers and brokers. It was an opportunity for father-son bonding as well as a networking opportunity for the children (the Viacom merger was rumored to have had its beginnings at this event). Rudy was also responsible for bringing Jackie Mason to the club last year. He had been loyal to Mason during the comedian’s down years, when he had hired him to do the Ice Cream Association of America banquets, and Mason, as word had it, owed him big-time. It was also said that Rudy had engineered the Dickstein-Kornfeld bequest, though it was not beyond Rudy to take credit even if he hadn’t.
Now he wended his way toward Flo, saying a word to this one and that one as he went, finally arriving to emote that mixture of schmaltz and old-world elegance that he was known for.
“Flo Kliman, your beauty is breathtaking,” he pronounced with his thick Hungarian accent, kissing her hand and placing his other hand on his breast.
“As dapper as ever, Rudy. I see another success,” said Flo, casting her eyes around the room. There was no denying that Rudy had a talent for making a large and festive statement. He had hired Ellen Rabinowitz (the Neiman Marcus decorator), and he was not above adding a few touches of his own. The hearts from the chandeliers, for example, were pure Rudy. At some point in the evening, he would undoubtedly take out his violin and play the old favorites with the throbbing glissando that put the native New Yorkers in mind of that Lower East Side culinary bastion, Moskowitz and Lupowitz—now, sadly, like so much else, gone.
Rudy’s special attendance on Flo was owing to the little known fact that she, too, was a benefactor of Boca Festa. Soon after moving down, she and her husband had donated ten thousand dollars for renovation of the card room. Eddie Kliman intended, in retirement, to spend a large portion of his time playing pinochle and gin rummy, the games of his halcyon childhood years in Brooklyn. With a hefty sum accumulated from a lucrative career in real-estate law, he had decided to make the Boca Festa card room, a shabby corner off the club dining room with a sixties-era shag rug and no windows, into a bright and airy breezeport where card-playing could be pursued in style. It was just like Eddie to put money into something so essentially frivolous and fanciful, and Flo had thoroughly supported the idea, especially since a larger sum had been donated to the University of Chicago library in her name.
Eddie had died before the renovation was complete, though not before a few ill-timed investments had deprived him of the larger part of his fortune. His last regret, before succumbing to the stroke that finally killed him, was that he’d been seduced by the bull market when he should have known better.
“It’s a lesson,” he said, his voice slurred from the stroke. “I was greedy.”
Flo assured him that he was the least greedy man she knew and that she had more than enough to live on, what with the bonds, the remaining good investments, and her pension. “Besides,” she said, “I’m grateful not to be rolling in dough since I’m saved the trouble of figuring out how to spend it.” It helped Eddie in his final hours that he believed her. She had never had a talent for spending money.
Still, the card room gave Flo pleasure in its tribute to the whimsical side of Eddie’s nature and to those earlier days when they could afford such openhandedness. Flo never played cards herself, but when she missed Eddie, she liked to wander into the room and contemplate the scene there. Invariably, the men sat congregated together at one table, the women at another, each group engrossed in play. The gender demarcation was mysterious. All other pastimes in Boca Festa were entirely gender-integrated, but cards held to some deeper, more atavistic tendency, reminiscent of old-world davening. The room was perhaps a vestigial remnant of the Orthodox shul in which men and women were kept apart. This may have been why Eddie had never pressured Flo to play: His pleasure had been in a man’s game where he and his friends could escape, if only briefly, from the vise of their wives’ control.
A small gold plaque near the door noted discreetly that the room was “the generous gift of Florence and Edward Kliman.” Few noticed the plaque, and Flo certainly never pointed it out, but Rudy knew and, in the manner of all impresarios, was not one to forget. He had the solid, European sense to believe that where once money had come, more might follow. Flo was not about to disabuse him of the notion. She liked the special attention he paid her because of it, and the room had been worth the
last gasp of their disposable income, as far as she was concerned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AS FLO AND MAY SAT WAITING FOR NORMAN AND STAN, DORothy and Herb Meltzer paused to chat. His barrel-chested, lilli putian frame was stuffed into a tuxedo, making clear to those who might not have understood it the mechanism behind the lightning-flash transformation of Clark Kent into Superman. Had Herb suddenly flexed his chest and broken through the outer garments to reveal a skintight body stocking beneath, it would hardly have seemed surprising given his aura of barely contained energy. Though he was pushing eighty, one could still see why Herb, former owner of a successful moving business on the Lower East Side, had been rumored to be able to carry a piano single-handedly up four flights of stairs.
If Herb put one in mind of a well-known cartoon figure, Dorothy evoked one less familiar. Her complexion, the color of aged mahogany, stood in violent contrast to an aggressively white gown. She was one of those women for whom sunbathing remained an unalterable rite that no amount of basal-cell skin cancer and no barrage of 60 Minutes specials on “The Sun: A Killer” would ever cause her to forsake. It did not faze her in the least that her skin had the consistency of rawhide. She had always been tan, she would continue to be tan. Like Sadie Litman in pod 5 (Fairways), who, despite the extensive no-smoking restrictions recently instituted at the club, continued unapologetically to smoke like a chimney, Dorothy was one of a group of Boca Festa residents who remained blithely confirmed in age-old habits, even as their neighbors shed these habits, clucked disapprovingly, and voiced exaggerated concern for their health.
In truth, Sadie, Dorothy, and their ilk were viewed as courageous, iconoclastic souls and were admired. Deep down, everyone had doubts about the litany of health hazards that seemed to have been devised to whittle down the few pleasures that remained to them during their twilight years. Everyone secretly believed that their gifted and talented children were keeping those coveted ounces of red meat from passing their lips and those golden rays of sun from penetrating their pores in a malign plot to punish them. Inevitably, whenever a Boca senior visited some young doctor (who they knew as sure as they looked at him didn’t call his mother half as often as he should) who told them to reduce their salt intake, they followed his advice (especially if he had an Ivy League diploma) but maintained a profound skepticism that such a little vantz, hardly as old as their Richie, was doing much more than playing doctor. Of course, in some quarters, the ability to lower one’s intake of salt and sugar became a source of pride and achieved the status of a senior competitive sport. But this was mild compensation for the pleasures that had to be bypassed in exchange.
“Isn’t it stunning?” pronounced Dorothy, waving a cocktail shrimp the size of a tennis ball in the direction of the red velveteen drapes near the door of the dining room. “Hasn’t Rudy outdone himself?”
Lila, May, and Flo agreed, while Hy, squinting at Dorothy’s brown-speckled bosom, cracked a joke to Herb about the damage the event was going to do to their yearly dues. Roz Fliegler had also stepped up to the group. “The potato pancakes are exquisite,” she said, moving her fork dexterously on the small plate to carve a morsel from the crisp pancake and deposit it gingerly into her mouth without damage to the carefully applied double layer of lipstick pencil and gloss that gave that orifice the appearance of a particularly exotic tropical fish. “But keep away from the chopped liver,” she warned in a theatrical whisper. “Too much salt.”
It was at that moment that Flo saw Norman and Stan make their appearance at the lounge door.
Norman was dressed impeccably in black tie, his tuxedo fitting his large, imposing body like a glove. Many years ago, in the course of his dealings with quality department stores up and down the East Coast, he had come to an appreciation of the importance of cut and fit in a man’s suit. He had always known that he did not possess the most felicitous proportions—with arms and legs too long for his body and a tendency to run to fat toward the midriff. But once he discovered that careful buying in the best men’s departments could camouflage these defects and show him to advantage, he made it his business never to scrimp when it came to his wardrobe. He had grown successful in business under the well-known dictum “Dress British, think Yiddish,” and over the years had acquired his own salesmen at both Brooks Brothers and J. Press in Manhattan, where his measurements were kept on file and revised yearly. Every other year, he had a suit made to order by Felix, J. Press’s veteran tailor, a refugee with an obsessive dedication to perfecting the line of a seam. He had more ties than he could count, and a particular devotion to bow ties that he ordered from the Ben Silver catalog straight from Charleston, He was, in short, a dandy, though a dandy in the best, unobtrusive English style.
Tonight Norman had dusted off his J. Press tuxedo, last worn more than three years ago at a charity fund-raiser in North Jersey that he had attended with his wife. Had he had more time, he would have made the trip to New York City for Felix to make alterations, for he found that with age his body had a tendency to get lumpy in new places. Norman had noted that while women seemed obliged to get face-lifts and liposuction as they aged, men had the advantage of simply making a visit to their tailor to smooth themselves out—another instance, he acknowledged, of the double standard to which his daughter, the feminist, had awakened him. But though he would have liked to have Felix work his magic on the jacket, it still, all things considered, fit him nicely. He looked, as he saw himself reflected in May’s admiring gaze, very well indeed.
Stan Jacobs, by contrast, was hardly a clotheshorse. He had never owned a tuxedo in his life, and never intended to buy one. Tonight he had on a simple gray suit, which, though almost twenty years old, was hardly worn. As an English professor, he had had very little use for one, especially since a large part of his career had been spent during the heyday of a more relaxed academic era, when blue jeans and flannel shirts were the norm for professors as well as students. Since his daughter had married Mark Grafstein in an elegantly informal ceremony on Martha’s Vineyard, even that auspicious occasion had required him only to wear white duck pants and a sports jacket. Flo would have liked to have found Stan’s gray suit, oxford shirt, and rep tie objectionable, and she did sense in them a certain condescension toward the festivities at hand. But she had never been a fan of male formal attire. A tuxedo, she felt, had a tendency to make every man, with the exceptions of Fred Astaire and Sean Con-nery, look like a headwaiter. It was hard for her to admit, but the person whom she liked least was dressed more to her taste than anyone else at the dance.
The two men approached the group, and Roz, Herb, and Dorothy parted like the Red Sea to make way for them. Roz gave Norman a very thorough once-over and emitted a regal “Excuse me” as he passed her. During the introductions, she reached out a hand, diva style, and pronounced, “Charmed, I’m sure,” in an accent that vaguely recalled the forties Hollywood ingenue. Though born in the Bronx and generally sporting a very flat, nasal articulation, Roz sometimes affected a different style of speech, one part Claudette Colbert and two parts Barbara Stanwyck. Lunch with friends might garner a simple “Pass the budda,” with a kind of bellyflop at the end, but when she was with strangers whom she wanted to impress or a man with possibilities, it suddenly became “Would you kindly pass the buhtah”—with a lilting consonant in the middle and a kind of mock-British vocable at the end.
The accent had come out in force tonight with the appearance of Norman Grafstein. As she presented her hand gingerly, her long nails arched forward like a friendly cougar proffering a paw, she cast a glance down at Norman’s left hand to note the appearance of the wedding ring. The continued wearing of the ring during widowhood was seen by most Boca Raton women as a sign of sensitivity, and men earned extra points for it—assuming, that is, that the old ring could eventually be pried off and replaced by a new one.
Last widowed three years ago, Roz was between boyfriends at the moment and was what Flo liked to call “on the prowl.” Though she was ta
lked about for her predatory style, Roz was also much envied among the widows of Boca, who never ceased to wonder at her ability to land men. That she had been left a fortune by her first husband, the laudromat king, was discreetly ignored in discussions of her romantic success. She had been married twice and engaged again, a sudden fatal illness canceling the third wedding even as the caterer had begun to draw up the menu. No doubt she would soon find another prospect, though she liked to say she was in no rush and could afford to be picky: “I want a tall man, and I like a full head of hair,” she was known to announce, even in the presence of her son (who was five-three and as bald as a cue ball).
In the Boca Festa locker room, after her tennis and before her massage, Roz was in the habit of expounding on her romantic conquests to anyone interested in hearing (and there were women who got out of the sauna to listen):
“First, I’m not shy,” she explained. “It’s a plus to be outgoing, especially since most men are shy and need you to draw them out. Second, I laugh at their jokes. Some aren’t so funny, but I laugh anyway. I learned this from my mother. She said, ‘Laughter is the best aphrodisiac’—and she was right. Third, I have a good nose.” She pointed to the rather amorphous appendage at the center of her face. “A Jewish girl must never underestimate the importance of a good nose. As I told my daughter-in-law on the subject of my granddaughter, if you’re not born with one, I don’t care what it costs—get one.” The women in the locker room nodded at this advice. It seemed to make sense.
But Norman showed no particular inclination to get on better terms with Roz’s nose. Instead, he turned his attention to May, who was sitting demurely, asking Stan about his plans for a garden this year. Stan’s interest in the subject gave his face an uncharacteristically gentle appearance.
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