PROLOGUE: NEW YORK CITY – OCTOBER 29, 1929
1: BOCA RATON – NOVEMBER 2005 TIME AND AGAIN
2: THE FICKLE FINGER
3: IN SYLVIA’S MEMORY
4: THE BLACK HOLE
5: VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRES
6: NO VIEW AT DELRAY VISTA
7: UNACCEPTABLE OUTCOMES
8: EMOTIONS AND MOTIONS
9: WHEN EDDIE MET LOUIE
10: HEARTBROKEN
11: HOW DO YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART?
12: SETTLING ACCOUNTS
13: BOYS IN THE GAYBORHOOD
14: BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER
15: JOY FEELY AND LOUIE DEWEY
16: IZZY’S ELEVATOR
17: INSIDE BETSY BLACKSTONE
18: IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK
19: A SHOT IN THE DARK
20: THE BEGINNING OF THE END
21: YULETIDE AT LOW TIDE
22: DAYS GONE BY
23: DEATH BY BAGEL
24: THE WAY WE WEREN’T
25: WAKING WILTON MANORS – FEBRUARY 2005
26: COSSACK CLOSET CASES
27: ONE BIG UNHAPPY FAMILY
28: FINDING SYLVIA
29: JUDGMENT DAY
30: BAD THINGS – GOOD PEOPLE
31: A NOTE FROM THE DOCTOR
32: LEAVING THE STONE AGE
33: SILLY PUTTY AND THE TWO-HEADED BOY
34: SYLVIA’S PIECES
35: TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
36: HOWARD AND DEREK’S GREAT ADVENTURE
37: PLANS AND PLANES
38: THE GUARDIAN
39: A NAZI IN BUSINESS CLASS
40: WHAT DO NAZIS DREAM?
41: INSPIRATION, MEDITATION, PERSPERATION, EDUCATION
42: THE SOUND OF SIRENS AND SILENCE
43: HOLOCAUSTS HAPPEN
44: I LOVE YOU – I’M SORRY
45: MY SECOND SOUTHERN SUMMER
46: EARTH TO EDDIE
47: “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT”
48: UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
49: ONE WEEK LATER
50: THANKSGIVING – 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
A serpentine ribbon of numbers rattled from the ticker-tape machine, slithered through thirty-two-year-old Jacob Dubin’s trembling hands and descended into the snake pit of poisonous news already coiled on the floor. There was no antidote. He was dead financially and the cause of death was self-inflicted wounds.
He walked to the only window in his thirty-seventh-floor office atop the Banker’s Trust Building and opened it. Without hesitation, he sat on the sill, then swiveled his hips and legs around until his feet dangled five hundred feet above Wall Street. How long would it take him to fall? Ten seconds? Twenty seconds? Would he feel or hear anything when his head hit the pavement? He pressed his palms down on the windowsill and eased his buttocks slightly off the ledge. He leaned forward and closed his eyes. It had taken Jacob twenty-four years to put himself in this position but it seemed like only yesterday. He relaxed and leaned back. He hadn’t changed his mind. He just wanted a minute to remember.
Jacob Dubinsky had been eight years old when he left Poland in 1905 with his parents Aaron and Frieda. His mother’s older brother, Joseph Kaplansky, had immigrated alone to New York City from Warsaw in 1899 and written his sister many times to join him. His last letter sounded desperate.
Dear Frieda,
My tailor shop does good business here, but my health is so bad I can barely work. The doctor says my lungs will only get worse and I will not be able to take care of myself. I need your help. Your husband is a tailor and can do my business. There will be enough money to support all of us. You can live with me and when I die all I own is yours. I put money in this envelope for your trip. Please come soon.
Love,
Joseph
They got off the boat on Ellis Island in New York City where a disinterested immigration officer shortened their family name to Dubin and told them how to get to the east side. They located Frieda’s tubercular older brother, Joseph, at the address he had given them and moved into his one-bedroom apartment above the store. Aaron did the tailoring, Frieda nursed Joseph, and Jacob was sent to school. One month after the Dubins arrived in America, Joseph died. Aaron and Frieda continued the tailoring business while Jacob suffered at the local public school. He was good with numbers but could barely speak English and was slow to learn. Impatient teachers ignored or ridiculed him and classmates taunted him. Jacob was a sensitive boy; he became self-conscious and reclusive. His only refuge was with his parents, in the tailor shop, where he learned to work but not to play.
He made no real friends but his parents were too preoccupied to notice. When he graduated high school at eighteen he spoke accented English and had learned enough about accounting to help his parents manage the business. Eventually, Dubin Tailors became successful enough for the family to rent a two-bedroom apartment above the store.
Jacob was hard-working but lacked his parents’ passion for the business. He went through the motions of caring but he didn’t care. He made a good appearance, always handsomely dressed in clothes he helped make. But underneath the custom clothing he was still the frightened, persecuted schoolboy from the Old Country, who felt he didn’t belong in the New World.
One night, walking alone in New York City, he wandered aimlessly into a night club and found what he thought he had been looking for: the Roaring Twenties. His first cocktail emboldened him and the attention of beautiful women energized him. He was soon hopelessly addicted to the lifestyle and couldn’t get enough. He began staying out late at night, arriving late for work, and trying hard to become someone he was not. His parents noticed the changes in Jacob but blamed it on his age and the age they were living in. He would outgrow it, they thought, but he never did.
Five hundred feet above the ground, the wind buffeted Jacob’s hair, ruffled his shirt, and blew his necktie like a flag. But he sat absolutely motionless, still thinking of his parents and wondering why hadn’t he listened to them? Why had he made such stupid mistakes . . . like confusing love with lust?
It happened on a booze-filled night, in the afterglow of having sex at a petting party with a woman he barely knew. She was beautiful. She was exotic. She was rich and exciting. She was everything he was not and she had made love to him with passion. He was overwhelmed. He asked her to marry him. She laughed.
Her name was Ethel Bengloff, the headstrong, incredibly spoiled daughter of Wall Street scions Abraham and Rachael Bengloff. The young woman didn’t take Jacob’s proposal seriously until she casually mentioned it to her elitist parents . . . who took it very seriously. They said they were mortified that their daughter would even keep company with a rag man’s son and they ordered her to never see him again. Ethel reacted with typical defiance and to spite her parents she accepted Jacob’s proposal. She didn’t love him. She wasn’t even sure she liked him. She just loved getting her way.
When Frieda and Aaron Dubin met Ethel Bengloff they urged Jacob not to marry her. They could tell immediately that Ethel and Jacob weren’t in love and were only using each other to get something they thought they wanted. They were certain such a marriage couldn’t last.
The wedding took place at Algonquin Hotel in September of 1920. Jacob remembered that night as the beginning of the end.
Jacob looked down from the ledge into the five-hundred-foot abyss and thought of his father-in-law: The Walrus.
To Jacob, Abraham Bengloff had the comical look of a bull walrus. He had thick skin, a plump body, a bushy mustache, and sleepy eyes. But Jacob knew that a bull walrus had the power to kill a polar bear and there was nothing comical about that. Within months of the wedding The Walrus had offered Jacob enough money
to convince him to leave the “embarrassing rag business” and to join Bengloff Financial as an analyst.
“You’ll never be your own man,” Aaron warned his son when Jacob told him about Bengloff’s offer.
“Maybe I wasn’t meant to be my own man,” said the frightened little boy from Poland.
Jacob did extremely well at Bengloff Financial, earning large profits for the company and the respect of his peers. But despite his success he was never fully accepted or respected by the Bengloff family. He became increasing resentful of their rejection and after only one year of marriage he wanted out. He realized he had sold himself too cheaply and that he could not buy the Bengloffs’ love and respect at any price. He detested Rachael and Abraham Bengloff for their hubris and despised their daughter for her selfish indifference. Only when he made love with his wife did he enjoy being with her. But even that blessing became a curse when she became pregnant with twins.
Then there was the fire.
Late on a hot day in August of 1922, a fire at Dubin Tailors destroyed the entire building, trapping Jacob’s parents in the back room. They died from smoke inhalation before the flames reached them. Their charred remains were found side by side. The fire department blamed the blaze on spontaneous combustion caused by cleaning solvents stored too close to dirty clothes. But Jacob blamed himself for not being there to protect them and he buried himself under an avalanche of guilt.
In 1923, the twin boys were born and strongly resembled the Bengloffs’ side of the family. Ethel didn’t want to be a mother and after Jacob’s parents died he was emotionally incapable of being a father. Ethel’s mother assumed the responsibility of raising her grandsons. She hired two full-time nannies and supervised everything. The twins would be in the Bengloff image . . . of that there was no doubt.
Ethel and Jacob became like strangers to each other, sharing only the same house. She was drinking heavily and eventually started seeing other men. Jacob didn’t care. Other men could have her . . . but not until he was ready, not before he proved to the world that Frieda and Aaron Dubin’s son was as good as anyone and that they had not died in vain. He devised a plan to beat the Bengloffs at their own game. He would secretly open an account at another Wall Street firm, analyze and trade stocks with his limited resources, eventually make enough money to establish Dubin Investment . . . and destroy Bengloff Financial. He would show them all. He put his plan in action shortly after the twins were born.
Using his gift for numbers, Jacob decided that public utility stocks were greatly undervalued and he began slowly accumulating a position in that industry. Year after year, from 1923 to 1929, Jacob Dubin amassed a fat portfolio of utility securities and watched them skyrocket in value while his personal affairs continued to plummet. He stayed out late, drank too much, and avoided his family. Ethel did the same. On those rare occasions they were together they would attack each other with the vitriolic gibberish of the very drunk. One night, the fighting turned physical. She slapped him, he slapped her. They wrestled each other to the floor in front of a roaring fireplace. Somehow their flailing and fighting led to fornicating, which they both regretted as soon as it was over. Weeks later they regretted it even more. Ethel was pregnant again.
In the 1920s, abortions were socially unacceptable for people like the Bengloffs and dangerous for anyone. Reluctantly Ethel had a third child, a girl, late in the summer of 1929. Once again the baby was relegated to the supervision of Grandma Bengloff, who hired a new nanny . . . and life went back to business as usual.
Unfortunately for Jacob, business would never be usual again. In the fall of 1929, the Massachusetts Public Utility Commission refused Edison Electric’s request to split its stock. The commission also announced that there would be investigations into the highly-leveraged utilities industry. Utilities declined five billion dollars in value almost overnight and Jacob was ruined. His investments and his life were now worth less than nothing.
He looked to his left at the windows of his father-in-law’s enormous corner office and shook his head sadly. The market collapse would hurt the old Walrus but not destroy him as it had destroyed Jacob. What a fool he had been to think he was as good as the man in the corner office.
Jacob had no way of knowing that his secret trading account had never been a secret at all. He never imagined that the gentlemen of Wall Street would keep his father-in-law constantly informed of his private activities or that the old man would mimic Jacob’s successful strategy. He couldn’t fathom anyone copying the rag man’s son.
He readied himself on the ledge and closed his eyes. Instead of seeing only darkness, the vision of his three-month-old daughter crossed his mind. He regretted that he would never get to know her. She was the only pure thing in his life . . . still too young to be contaminated by the Bengloffs.
“Maybe I could save her,” Jacob thought . . . and then he slipped and fell.
Jacob turned his body quickly and reached for the windowsill. His fingers grasped the inside of the ledge and he held tight. He scraped the toes of his shoes wildly against the wall trying to find a foothold. His fingers grew numb and his arms ached but he kept pulling and kicking until he managed to haul his chest onto the window ledge. He leaned forward and tumbled head first into the safety of his office. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving. He gasped for breath. He was soaked in sweat and his body ached. After a few minutes he got up, staggered to his desk, and slumped in his chair. It was a miracle he was still alive. There must be a reason.
Inspired, he reached for pen and paper and began to write feverishly. He wrote to his wife about her selfishness and the deadly virus of greed in her family. He told her he intended to save their daughter by taking her away with him. Thoughts poured through the tip of his pen like blood from an open vein. He signed the letter with an exuberant flourish, folded it in an envelope, and put it in his shirt pocket.
Exhausted but excited, Jacob hurried to the private elevator that took him safely to the ground floor. He ran from the building onto Wall Street and breathed deeply. He was euphoric. Finally, his life had purpose.
He threw back his head, held out his arms, and looked up jubilantly - just in time to see the bulging red face of Abraham Bengloff falling from the sky at a hundred miles an hour at the end of his suicide jump. Neither Dubin nor Bengloff heard the sickening sound of their skulls exploding, nor did they see the gruesome sight of their brains, blood, and bones splattering the austere walls of Wall Street like human shrapnel.
On the same day that Abraham Bengloff jumped off a New York City skyscraper, Ferris Dewey jumped off the Atlantic City Steel Pier.
Bengloff jumped because he had lost everything, Ferris Dewey jumped because he had nothing to lose.
Bengloff jumped with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Dewey jumped with the weight of Dixie the Diving Horse between his legs.
Every summer thousands of people gathered to watch Dixie and her professional riders plunge head-first into the diving pool at the bottom of a forty-foot-high tower. But on this blustery fall afternoon the Boardwalk was deserted, the clouds were the color of slate, the wind was erratic, and the platform swayed dangerously. The little man on the tower was too drunk to notice the danger and shouted in his brogue, “I’m Ferris Dewey, and I’m the greatest fookin’ horsback diver in the whole fookin’ world.”
Ferris Dewey was not a horse-back diver. He was a stable boy, who had been shoveling shit against the tide since the day he was born in 1901. He was the descendant of Irish immigrants who had fled Ireland in 1847 during the Great Potato Famine and settled in the deadly New York slum called Five Points. Irish gangs with names like the Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits terrorized the streets, and disease ate away the neighborhood. Sullivan Dewey, Ferris’s great-grandfather, fled the Five Points to avoid being drafted by the Union Army during the Civil War. He stopped running when he reached Atlantic City where he settled down and married a local woman. They produced more Deweys who in tu
rn produced more Deweys, and eighty-two years later one of those Dewey descendants was standing on top of the world . . . preparing to jump off.
Ferris bravely pulled himself onto Dixie’s bare back and slid off the other side, landing on his head. “Fook it,” he chuckled, staggering to his feet and pulling Dixie’s ear playfully.
“Hold still, old girl,” he said, and kissed her nose.
Dixie snorted, raising her long face, and nudging the little drunk, nearly knocking him off the platform.
Dewey laughed. “Useta seein’ me at yur otha end with me shovel, aincha dahlin?”
He pulled himself onto Dixie’s back again and went halfway over the other side, held on for a moment, then fell on his head again. This time he just lay on the deck and laughed at himself. Dixie prodded him with her nose. She was born to fly and was anxious to take off.
“I’m coming sweetheart,” Dewey said, struggling to his feet. “Hold your horses.”
He finally managed to pull himself upright on Dixie’s back.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he tipped his cap to the empty boardwalk. “Your attention, please.”
He pulled his hat tightly down on his head, waved to the nonexistent crowd, grabbed Dixie by the mane, and urged her over the edge. Horse and rider descended together until Dewey let go of the mane and held out his arms like Jesus on the cross. He flew off the horse’s back, did half a flip in the air, and landed awkwardly, off-target, on a cresting wave. Dixie hit the pool perfectly and survived to dive another day, but twenty-eight-year-old Ferris Dewey broke his neck and died the way he had lived . . . totally out of control. He left a wife and an infant son to survive if they could.
BING!! A bullet slammed into my right shoulder. BANG! My left leg was hit. BOOM! A baseball bat bludgeoned both my knees and I went down. I was an easy target kneeling motionless in the snow and another bullet punched my right shoulder knocking me over. I fell on my side.
I struggled for consciousness.
My stomach was on fire.
Get up before it’s too late.
I struggled to my feet and opened my eyes. There was no blood, no wounds, and no snow. I was standing next to my bed, naked, wet with the sweat of a bad dream. I had a painful erection. I had to pee. I walked to the bathroom and stood at the toilet waiting and remembering.
Boca Mournings Page 1