April 8, 2010--Snowbirding: “If He Wasn’t Dead Already, I Could Kill Him”

“With gold selling for $1,100 an ounce, why do I need these earrings, which I never wear?”

Rona was raising a reasonable question. She did have that pair of hoop earrings which I don’t think I ever saw her wear during the thirty years we’ve been together. “I’m sure you’re right, you don’t wear them; but it feels a little tacky to me to go to one of those We Buy Gold places. You know, the ones in almost every shopping plaza here that have guys in Uncle Sam suits standing out by the road trying to get you to pull in.” Rona was smirking at my pretentiousness.

“I’m serious. These places give me the creeps. The other night on TV, during the local news, I saw one of these gold-buying places advertising that they not only buy rings and old watches but also dental gold. Gold teeth! If we went to sell your earrings there and someone was selling his gold teeth it would male me feel as if I was in a Nazi concentration camp. You know, like at Dachau where they . . .”

“Why is it that everything reminds you of the Nazis? That happened more than 60 years ago. Of course it was terrible, barbaric, but isn’t it time to lighten up?”

“Of course you’re right. I am making selling gold sound worse than I’m sure it is.”

“So you agree then? For me to sell those earrings? I could go by myself, of course, but I think we’d do much better negotiating prices if you were also there.”

“You think we’d have to do that? Negotiate, I mean.”

“We’re not talking Tiffany’s.” That I clearly understood, “But rather that place up Federal Highway called ‘Goldfinger’ or the one in Boynton Beach called ‘Old Golds.’ You know. Named after the cigarettes.”

“I know the places. Very clever names,” I said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Rona then added without looking me in the eye, “And I also brought to Florida your Uncle Ben’s gold watch band. You know, the one his friend Danny gave him as a gift after Ben bought himself that Patek Philippe. The watch your father inherited after he died.”

“But didn’t we agree we’d keep it as a remembrance of Ben—it was the only really spiffy thing he ever bought for himself.”

“The watch, of course. That is and always will be special and we’ll pass it on to someone in our family, telling them how important a family heirloom it is. But the band is different. Remember the Tourneau people told us a leather band is classic and we bought a really nice one for the watch?” I did recall that. “And they said about the gold band that it was a very nice and generous gift, but for that watch, inappropriate.”

“You still have it? The band, I mean.”

“Of course, what would I have done with it?”

“I suppose what we’ll do now—try to sell it for the gold. At $1,100 an ounce, after everyone’s cut, we should get, what, at least 50 bucks?”

“I assume more, but fifty dollars is still fifty dollars.”

“As long as we don’t go to Goldfingers. I hate James Bond movies and so that I couldn’t bear. And as long as no one in the store is selling his teeth.”

“That’s a deal!” And with these conditions agreed upon, we exchanged high-fives.

The next morning, after coffee at the Owl, we headed up Federal Highway in search of just the right place for us. I insisted, after we passed a store that had hired a clown to lure business, that we would look for a more dignified situation. “Maybe up near Palm Beach,” I ventured. “There’s no way that that crowd would go to a gold buyer who hired a clown or a chicken.”

And sure enough, before too long, Rona spotted a place in a high-end shopping plaza with a discrete sign—Fine Estate Jewelry. Gold Bought. And below that, even more discretely, Highest Prices Offered. Perfect!

After we were buzzed in a young man with a British accent slid over to us to ask if he could be of assistance. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit and an immaculate shirt with crisp French cuffs—both unusual for informal South Florida except for staffs at funeral homes. I was duly impressed.

“We have a few pieces that I think are 14 carat,” Rona whispered. She was looking in the direction of a woman at another counter who was being helped by another young man, similarly attired. It must, I thought, be a version of a uniform. They were deep in conversation and Rona did not want to even unintentionally break their concentration. In places such as this, either selling or buying expensive jewelry or gold, privacy was to be respected.

“Let me take a look,” our perfectly-groomed young man offered.

Rona rummaged discretely in her pocketbook for the small Baggie in which she had the earrings and Ben’s watchband. I noticed, as she spread them on the black velvet pad on counter, that the tiny pile also included the perhaps-gold pin New York University gave her after ten years of service. I was surprised to see that there; and, knowing universities’ lack of true generosity, I suspected she would find that it was at best gold plated and that that would bring her disappointment.

“If he wasn’t dead already, I could kill him.”

Where was that coming from? Who said that? I wondered with a start. How uncharacteristic to hear something like this in such a luxurious place. This was more a setting for whispers, small gestures, and subtle exchanges. The staff, after all were wearing jackets and ties!

“If I told him a thousand times, I told him once, ‘Morris,’ I would say to him. His name was Morris. ‘Morris,’ I would say, ‘If it’s too good to be true, it’s true.’ Anyway, something like that.”

This was coming from the elegantly dressed, bejeweled woman at the other counter. “He would make fun of how I said these kinds of things, but he understood. He ignored me and made fun of me, but,” she said bitterly, “whatever he pretended, he understood.”

Rona is better than I at ignoring these kinds of conversations, but voyeur that I admittedly am, while she continued to show the young man her gold pieces and he ran the laser and chemical tests to determine if they were in fact gold and if so of what kind, I edged closer to the women to listen in on what else she might say about Morris.

“’How can it be true,’ I said to him, as I said a thousand times at least, ‘how can it be that while everyone else is going up and down,’ I meant their money in the market, ‘how can it be with him it always goes up?’ He would say to me, ‘Just go to Worth Avenue and let me worry about money. I make it; you spend it.’

“And that was true,” she continued her confession to the salesman, “He was right about that. That’s where we began and that’s where we ended. Him making and me spending. Like that poem.”

“By Wordsworth, I think” the young man said. “From his sonnet. About getting and spending.”

“Yes, that’s the one. I love poems. They say so much with so few words. And for Morris, that’s where he ended. Getting but at the end with no money left, floating in the swimming pool. Face down. I found him like that. In his sweat suit. A heart attack they said he had. I didn’t let them do an autopsy, but I can assure you that he had a strong heart.”

She paused to compose herself. “A broken man. No longer a man really. With nothing left of what he most valued. More than his own children and grandchildren. Much less me!” She spit that out.

“’Don’t worry,’ he said when he talked with me, ‘I’m taking care of you. You’re still my little girl.’ My friends thought that was so sweet. Married almost sixty years and he still considered me his little girl.”

The salesman smiled at her, but she ignored that, “There is nothing sweet about a nearly 80-year-old woman being compared to a little girl. It was how he disregarded me, dismissed me, and avoided taking me seriously. Nothing sweet about it at all. And you call this taking care of me? All I have from that taking-care-of are these.” She gestured with contempt toward the pile of necklaces and earrings and broaches.

“But at least I have them and a few other good things that maybe I can get enough money for before I too wind up in my version of the swimming pool.” She dabbed a tissue at her eyes and shrugged.

“The last thing I want to do is go live with my children. They have offered to take me in—I of course also have to try to sell the house. At least that part of it that isn’t owned by the bank. He did that too. Mortgages on top of mortgages. To give to that man. That beast. To invest. Which is a joke. There were no investments. Just that pontoon scheme.” The young man chose not to correct her.

“I of course said no to my son and his wife. They have their life and I have what’s left of mine. And now there is just this.” She ran her hands again through the mound of jewelry. “But thank God at least for that. Otherwise I’d be out on the street or packing groceries at Publix. One of our friends, he’s 75, that’s what he’s doing. He’s a bag-boy at Publix. With the Haitians. Can you imagine?”

I stared across the shop as the gold buyer placed her jewelry on a small scale. “And another thing,” she said, turning to look off into space so as not to be a witness as he weighed and measured the remains of her life, “though I knew what was happening, what was going to happen, and though I did try to get him to listen to me, to really take care of me and us, as anger built in me, and it did, it did—I knew that what I understood was happening was, as I said, was too good to believe—still I never thought to leave him, to insist on my share of what we had accumulated, to protect myself. I stayed, I stifled myself, all long knowing what was happening and what I was doing to myself, I stayed for one reason, no two, for two reasons. Because he was my husband, and in my way I continued to love him and, though I’m sure you can’t understand, because I wanted to take care of him.”

The young man had finished his assessment of the gold she had brought in to sell and wrote a number on a card and passed it across the counter to her. She switched to her reading glasses, which hung from her neck on a gold chain. I could see her fingering that chain as if to wonder if maybe she should put that too on the scale. She looked with sadness at the card, shrugged her shoulders again, and nodded yes, as if to say, “What else can I do? I have little else left. Of my jewelry and everything else that has been my life.”

But she said, so softly this time, and without anger, that I had to strain to hear most of what she said. “Isn’t that ironic? How he all the while . . . he was taking care of me, and as it . . . out he wasn’t; and then how I thought I was . . . care of him, which I too wasn’t.”

The young man asked if she wanted cash or a check. Still not facing him, as if talking to no one but herself, she indicated she would prefer cash. “Who knows . . . at the bank. They . . . I’ll take cash please. Yes, that would be better.” She continued to stroke the chain that held her reading glasses. And her pearl necklace.

Rona pulled me away from my eavesdropping, though I strained to continue to listen to her final words. “Look,” she said, waiving a fist of cash in front of me, “Five hundred and fifty dollars! For the earrings, the watchband, and my NYU pin. That too turned out to be gold. 14 carat. And you said we’d be lucky to get fifty.”

Noticing that I was distracted and not paying full attention to her, “She tugged on my shirt, “Did you hear what I said? How much money they gave me for that handful of gold?”

“I did,” I said, still only paying half attention.

“What’s going on with you?”

“I can’t believe what I just heard?”

“Heard?”

“From her.” I nodded in the direction of where the Palm Beach matron was still at the other counter. I leaned closer to Rona, and whispered, “She just asked him how much he would give her for Morris’, I mean her husband’s two gold teeth.”