Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo: Flagler St., Miami, 1951. Note the coincidence of McRory's Department Store, at right.)

         I was born into a tropical never-never-land of pink stucco and Jewish retirees and towering palms, on July 20th, 1951, at around two in the afternoon, seven years to the day after Colonel von Stauffenberg failed to extinguish the Führer via bomb, and precisely eighteen years before another colonel, Neil Armstrong, made his contribution to history terrestrial and lunar. Outside the Holy Trinity hospital on my July 20th were Florida’s nodding palms, hypercolored flora, Mussolinian architecture, massive cloudbanks, and sweltering skies. In an hour or two, the daily ten-minute thunderstorm would come and go, leaving behind stifling humidity and wide puddles, some containing cottonmouths or alligators washed in from the Everglades. In nearby canals, the dark torpedo-shapes of manatees drifted among the water plants. Inside the hospital, along with the other patients, were my mother; I, just born; a doctor and/or nurse; and, possibly, my father. I stress possibly because Dad’s habit of absenteeism at crucial or delicate moments was becoming ingrained. If he’d had anything to say about it, the family motto (actually not too bad as it is: Dominus Providebit, “The Lord Will Provide”) would have been “When the Going Gets Tough, the Boylans Bugger Off.” He prided himself on sidestepping life’s sticky patches (and sometimes pretended he had when he hadn’t: see D-Day).

     Florida, for all its exotic glories, was not a place tailored to my parents’ souls. It made them restless, but they persevered for awhile, and I grew up there for long enough to remember the cicada-loud nights, the sickly sweetness of the local flora, the explosive but short-lived rain, the ever-present humidity (all repeated in my current semitropical home). Despite her getting published a few times in the Miami Herald, my mother’s journalistic career languished. So, determined to hold high some sort of brightly-colored banner in her life, she acquired a pilot’s license and for awhile flew gamblers and high rollers in a leased Piper Cub over to Havana, Cuba, then a kind of Caribbean Las Vegas, for the high times and decadence later so vividly recreated in words by Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Infante’s Inferno and on film by Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather, Part II. (What Mum did while her passengers were frolicking at the Tropicana I never learned; probably drank coffee at Havana airport, for my mother’s appetite for adventure was easily sated, and there was always a comfortable bed at the end of her roads less traveled.) But then she found out that her pilot’s license did not entitle her to carry passengers, and, sensing legal snafus, Dad interposed his manly self between her and further folly. Such adventures were risky as well as expensive, he said, no doubt more concerned about the embarrassment of being hauled into court than about the legality of the thing. Anyway, Mum gave up flying and became a full-time hausfrau, while Dad went on doing whatever he did, quite successfully, at the Radio Corporation of America. Then, just when things looked rosy, I had to come down with a case of acute appendicitis that, thanks to a bungled operation, turned into near-fatal peritonitis from which I miraculously recovered—and “miraculously” is no exaggeration. One of the doctors was overheard by my understandably distraught parents to say “poor kid, he’s had it” as they wheeled me into the operating room. My blood pressure, you see, was down around corpse level, and there was no detectable pulse. Three weeks later, minus an appendix, I returned unsteadily to the family house at 931, Swan Avenue and was promptly lunged at outside the front door by a cottonmouth or water moccasin that had blown in from the Everglades during one of Miami’s daily tropical downpours and was trying to vent its irritation on the nearest human. It missed, fortunately. Dad decapitated it with a shovel, quite heroically if you ask me because the bastard seemed to extend halfway around the block, like a sea serpent from The Arabian Nights. I’ve had dreams about it ever since.

    Perhaps this confluence of near-disasters decided Dad that a change would be as good as a feast. He’d risen high enough at the RCA to get sent to Paris, and it was from there, on an impulse, that he summoned Mum and me across the Atlantic on the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth, sailing from New York to Cherbourg via Southampton, in September of 1956.  (Ironically, he'd sailed across on the same liner, in '44, when it was a troopship in the service of the allied navies.)