He swam for about half an hour and when he returned to the beach he found that he had been pulled a long way north by the current and he had to trudge back along the beach to his hotel, where he took a shower in fresh water downstairs and dried off. Then, up in his room, he put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants and sat down on the bed and made a call.
“Hello?” A black guy.
“Listen, have you seen Sara Mead around?”
“Who is this?”
“A friend of hers.”
“Well, I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“She said I could call this number.”
“Did she say a lot about me?”
“She didn’t say anything about you.”
The black guy just breathed for a while.
“What’s her name again?”
“Sara Mead.”
“Okay, that one ain’t around.”
“Do you know where I could reach her? This is important.”
“I heard she’s in Nassau.”
“Nassau?”
“Yeah, Nassau. Hey, and listen, if you happen to see her before I do, call me, hear? And I’ll come right over and kick the shit out of her.”
“Why?”
“Huh?”
“Why do you want to kick the shit out of her?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just call me, hear?” The black guy hung up.
Bobby went downstairs and stood on the veranda, and saw Max Lorman wave to him. Max was seventy-six years old and had lost his wife two years before. He was a very formal man, always wearing a matching jacket and tie when he took the air on the veranda. Tonight he was wearing his plaid jacket and tie, with white duck pants and black-and-white shoes. He sat alone, as usual, apart from the rows of chairs and the card players and kibitzers, and Bobby went over and sat next to him.
“Bobby, something funny happened to me today,” Max said. “I was talking to some newcomers and they refused to believe that trolley cars were still running on Miami Beach in 1938. They laughed at me. But you remember, don’t you?”
“Sure, I remember,” Bobby said.
Max chuckled. ‘”Newcomers,” he said. “They think everything was always the same around here as it is right now. The trolley cars turned at Second Street and went past the Leonard Hotel and then circled back to Fifth Street and then from there went back on over the causeway to Miami.”
“The County Causeway, of course,” Bobby said.
Max grinned appreciatively. “Correct, the County Causeway,” he said. “It wasn’t renamed the MacArthur Causeway until the war. And in between trolleys there was the jitneys.”
“That’s right, in between trolleys there was the jitneys,” Bobby said.
“Newcomers just refuse to take you seriously when you try to tell them anything about the way Miami Beach used to be,” Max said. “They refuse to take you seriously when you try to tell them we used to be able to play the horses right there on the beach at First Street. Remember that board room they had right on the beach in the thirties, Bobby? You could come in there in your bathing suit and all covered with sand and everything and nobody said nothing. And there would be a guy up on a stepladder writing in the entries at the Fair Grounds or Aqueduct or wherever they happened to be running at the time, on this big blackboard. The minimum bet was fifty cents and there was a free lunch. No cops to worry about. They could care less in those days. You could just as well have been sitting around Bache & Company as far as those cops were concerned. But these newcomers just look at you when you tell them stuff like that. Tell them that up past Fortieth Street in 1939 there was still only private homes along the beach and see what kind of a reaction you get. Tell them that in 1942 Bal Harbor was just a great big Army camp and see what kind of a reaction you get. But you remember, don’t you, Bobby?”
“Sure, I remember,” Bobby said.
“All that stuff,” Max said dreamily. Then he looked at Bobby. “Say, how old were you in 1942, anyway? I’ll bet you were just a little kid, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I remember all that,” Bobby said.
Suddenly Max stood up and excused himself, saying that he had to heed the call of nature. He had to heed the call of nature about every half hour or so, because of his kidneys, which was why he never could stray too far from the Seabreeze.
Bobby had dinner at a little restaurant on Washington Avenue that had a sign in the window saying, The Best Arroz con Pollo on Miami Beach. Then he went on down to the First Street pier. Halfway out on the pier was Senior Citizen Friendship Corner Number One, where about twenty seniors were sitting on the rows of wooden benches listening to a very old guy named Mr. Haber who was up on the stage singing into a dead microphone. The cold wind, which was turning colder all the time, was broken somewhat by the green concrete doghouse behind the stage where Officer Al Deutsch of the Miami Beach Police Department, who was in charge of the evening programs at Friendship Corner Number One, stored the microphone and the amplifiers and the flags when they were not in use. Officer Al, middle-aged, seriously overweight, sweating heavily in spite of the cold wind up there on the stage between the big American flag on the left and the small Israeli flag on the right, in his full uniform and harness, was trying frantically to get the microphone back into operation. But all he could seem to get out of it was an occasional piercing shriek. Mr. Haber, coming to the end of his Jerome Kern medley, either didn’t know that he didn’t have any mike or didn’t care, but his thin voice could barely be heard over the pounding of the waves under the pier.
Just as Mr. Haber wound up, Officer Al finally fixed the microphone.
“All right, everybody,” Officer Al said, “Let’s really hear it for Mr. Haber, who had to work under extremely difficult conditions tonight but still turned in another fabulous performance!”
There was almost no applause but Mr. Haber bowed deeply and thanked everyone anyway. Then Officer Al introduced the next performer, Mrs. Feldman, who wore a long white summer dress embroidered with tiny pink flowers, and blue tennis shoes with white ankle socks. She sang a very short song in Yiddish and was followed by Mrs. Rimsky in a lime-green pantsuit who sang a very long song in Polish and tried to get everybody to come in on the chorus, with no success.
After that, Officer Al took over the microphone and wrapped up the program. “Okay, I guess that’s all for tonight,” he said. “Except to say that I think I can speak for us all when I say that we had an excellent time and certainly enjoyed all the fabulous entertainment. So everybody stay warm and keep out of trouble so I don’t have to come around and arrest you, and, hopefully, we’ll all see each other here again next Wednesday.”
Al Deutsch and Bobby Mead had gone to Shenandoah Junior High together. Then Al had played center on the Miami High teams on which Bobby had played halfback. Now one was a cop who had never made it and the other was a used-car dealer who had never made it.
Bobby helped Al put away the microphone and the amplifiers and the flags and then they went out to the end of the pier, where the old Cubans and Jews were fishing, and leaned against the wall looking at the lights along the coast. Even on a filthy night like this the fishermen had total concentration. The fact that the wind was blowing half a gale and they were wet to the skin from the flying spray meant nothing to them. They kept on reeling in and squatting down in the lee of the wall to bait their hooks and then throwing out their lines again as if they were getting paid a hundred dollars an hour to do it.