South Beach

In 1975 Frances and Leon, lifelong ocean lovers, bought a condo on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach; they were 75 and 82. The one-bedroom ocean-front apartment was in an eleven-story building, illegally built right on the beach, between Fourth and Fifth Street. You could always see and hear the ocean and Frances would often point out the front window and say, “Just look at my ocean.”

The flat was affordable on the couple’s modest income because the South Beach renaissance had barely begun and the stretch below Fifth Street was on the dangerous side. Occasional alcoholics and drug addicts slept on the street or beach and sometimes hung around the building entrance. The couple spent most of their outdoor time at the pool or on the beach and in the water. Frances shopped for food bargains at the little Cuban markets on Collins Avenue and Leon went to his desk in a nearby realtor’s office where he prepared income taxes, mostly for small businessmen who had no records except for paper bags full of receipts.

Having been brought up in Yiddish-speaking households they were very much at home with the Jewish atmosphere in South Beach. Old couples rocked on the front porches of the decrepit three-storey Art Deco hotels opposite Lummus Park. In the evenings, when it got a little cooler, small groups of the spryer residents would gather beneath the palms in the park with their mandolins and concertinas. They played and sang traditional Yiddish songs as well as labor and left-wing protest songs from the thirties and forties, including “Los Cuatros Generales,” maybe the only Spanish they had heard before moving to Florida from Brooklyn and The Bronx.

The Cuban face of South Beach was congenial enough, too. During his 25 years in the area Leon had gradually acquired some small residential properties in downtown Miami, all of them rented to Cuban immigrants. He was a good landlord, and his tenants would often send him home with empanadas, pastelitos and other Cuban goodies when he came to collect the rent. Many of the old Jewish residents complained a lot about all the Spanish they heard in the stores and on the buses, but Frances and Leon got a kick out of it.

In the summer of 1990 their son Gene, a pathologist, had retired and returned to Charlottesville after fourteen years in Boston. He and his wife, Jane, were working on rehabilitating their old house that had been rented out during the years they were away. A week after getting back to Charlottesville they drove down to Miami in response to the news from Gene’s brother, Roger, that Leon had died at 97 after three years of progressive dementia.

The plan was for Gene and Jane to put Frances on a flight to Kennedy, where Roger would pick her up and take her to his home in Long Beach. She would stay there for several months until the renovations were finished in Charlottesville. Then she would move to Charlottesville and stay until she was ready to go back to Miami. Roger said that Frances sounded depressed, not at all the sparkling, voluble person who charmed everyone she met.

“Just give me some pills and let me die.  I have nothing to live for and I don’t want to be a burden on you and Roger.” Frances’s long face and barely audible voice were distinctly uncharacteristic as she lay in bed propped up on a couple of pillows. She was barely able to stagger to the bathroom and took what little food she ate in bed.

Gene and Jane had just finished reading William Styron’s Darkness Visible in which he recounted in detail the symptoms of his deep depression and subsequent recovery. Gene extracted a kind of litany from the small book. Several times a day he would tell Frances “ I’ll give you the pills if you still want them after you get over this depression. Suicidal thoughts are a symptom of depression, so you have to wait until you get better before you make your decision.” That would satisfy her for a few hours, but then he had to repeat it all over again. Actually, Gene didn’t know what would be needed to do an effective job and didn’t know how he would get the necessary pills. Long ago he had decided not to get a Drug Enforcement Administration registration that would allow him to prescribe controlled substances; that way he couldn’t accommodate relatives, friends and neighbors who might have asked for narcotics or barbiturates.

On the morning of the flight booked for New York Gene got up from the sleep sofa in the living room at around six, looked into Frances’s room and saw an empty bed. Frances had talked about drowning herself in the ocean as an alternative to pills. Given her feeble state Gene couldn’t believe that she could have gotten across the wide beach to the ocean, so he went down to the pool, fully expecting to find her in it. He wasn’t sure whether she’d be floating or would have sunk to the bottom. She wasn’t there so he went out to the beach on a long shot but didn’t see her or anyone else on the sand or in the water. There were no lifeguards on duty to ask about Frances, but the Beach Patrol headquarters was close by, so he went there and was taken very seriously by the guard in charge who volunteered to inform the police.

After phoning Roger to let him know about the change in plans, there was nothing to do but wait for the details of the bad news. A little after one o’clock, the police called to say that Frances had been found floating way out in the ocean, quite alive. She was in the emergency room of a nearby hospital being treated for hypothermia but was otherwise in good condition.

“I tried and tried”, she kept saying, “but I couldn’t sink. The ocean was like a lake.  I really wanted to drown, but I wasn’t getting anywhere and I was getting very cold. So when the fisherman came by in his motor boat I let him pull me out. I still don’t want to live. Just let me die.” 

“Keep talking like that,” Gene whispered, “and they’ll have you in a locked ward for observation for three days. If that’s what you want, tell it to the psychiatrist who’s coming to see you as soon as he can get here.”

On the way home Frances was a bit gleeful about how she had conned the psychiatrist. “I told him it was a big mistake, a silly impulse.  I have two wonderful sons and seven beautiful grandchildren to live for.  He bought the story, so here I am.” A few days later Frances did get on a plane to New York and by winter had returned to Miami after prolonged stays in Long Beach and Charlottesville.

Frances managed very well on her own for most of the next five years and had many good visits in Long Beach and Charlottesville where family and friends always enjoyed her wit and charm. But worsening problems with her arthritis made it clear, even to her, that she would have to give up her independent life in the apartment. The plan was for her to divide her time between Long Beach and Charlottesville. Assisted living was out of the question. At one point during Leon’s decline she had checked herself into one of the better facilities in Miami. When Jane and Gene drove down for one of their visits and found her there she said, “Get me out of here. At eight o’clock they come around with a cold breakfast. At noon they bring some kind of lunch and at five it’s a flavorless dinner. Who can live like that?”

The final plan was for Roger to fly down to Miami and accompany Frances back to Long Beach. On the appointed morning Roger called Gene to say that Frances’ Hungarian neighbor had found her dead in bed. Despite the neighbor’s strong Magyar accent, Roger managed to understand that the emergency squad people had called the police because some empty pill bottles had been found on the bedside table. Nothing more came of it. Frances was cremated, and when her ashes were deposited in “her ocean” they sank immediately.