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.)
