Boca: A Novel

By Rebecca Irving

Katharine Epstein, a sixty-one-year-old woman, had lived her life in the lap of luxury. She was born into money. Her father was a successful New York attorney in a white-shoe law firm and her mother was from a prominent Protestant American family. Katharine fell in love with a handsome Jewish medical student, Laurence Epstein, when she was in her late teens and ultimately married him. Laurence's parents were religious and were Holocaust survivors. They lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Laurence had a sister who left home at the age of eighteen.

After Katharine and Laurence married, Laurence's sister gave birth to an illegitimate boy whom she planned to give up for adoption. Katharine and Laurence adopted and raised the boy, Daniel. The couple also had three other children: Gwen, Elliott and Richard. Laurence and Katharine had been married for over
forty years when Laurence died. A daunting, posthumous letter from Laurence is delivered to Katharine and her family by her father-in-law the evening before her husband's burial, exposing long-held family secrets.

The novel is about Katharine and her family, and the emotional journey she travels from the time her husband dies to the revelations after his death. We see her metamorphosis as she is faced with many challenges. This riveting family saga exposes murder, deceit and greed, and the pressures of wealth, family life, love and truth. The story delves into the soul of human character by exploring family relationships, sexuality, sibling rivalry, illness, homosexuality and life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 19, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462816439

Rebecca Irving

REBECCA IRVING lives with her family on the Eas End of Long Island and in New York City. Boca is the first in a series of novels.

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Rebecca Irving

A Novel

Boca

Copyright © 2003 by Rebecca Irving.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All dialogue, names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Xlibris Corporation

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

www.xlibris.com

20142

Contents

Prologue

Chapter I

Before the Letter

Chapter II

The Letter

Chapter III

The Aftermath

Chapter IV

The Disclosure Statement

Chapter V

Th e Betty Factor

Chapter VI

Richards Loneliness

Chapter VII

My Grandson

Chapter VIII

The Beach, Betty and Daniel

Chapter IX

Th e Storm

Chapter X

Hymie and Lenas’ Funeral

Chapter XI

Th e Trip to Atlanta

Chapter XII

Th e Evening in Atlanta

Chapter XIII

Back in Boca

Chapter XIV

Th e Day After the Wedding

Chapter XV

The Class Action

Chapter XVI

Gay Pride

Chapter XVII

Boca

GLOSSARY

Dedication

To my mother, always.

Acknowledgments

This novel would not have been published without the support of certain people. I am particularly grateful to Lani Adler, Esq. for her expertise, to Richie Heller for his cover design, to Jennifer Foulk for her layout, to Kerrick Jones for all of his production assistance, and to Katie, Mary Ann and Edith for their clear vision throughout the publishing process. Thanks also to my sisters. I am deeply thankful to my husband for his love and support. Finally, I express my love for my child who makes the sun shine, always.

Family Tree

20142-MILL-layout.pdf

Prologue

Pain, loss, passion and love. One never knows when the match will strike, but I do know now that I have the capacity to endure. So much has happened during the last few months that it is difficult for me to tell my story. I am comforted to be on my estate in Boca, although I miss my apartment on Sutton Place. Though I sometimes long to return to familiar surroundings, I yearn for a new episode in my life.

Boca is my world now. As the waves break along the sand and I contemplate the meaning of life, I am struck by all the changes around me. Change is perhaps the only true constant in life. It has certainly reared itself in my life, in my children’s lives, and in the world around me. The fall of communism, space exploration, the bombing in Oklahoma City, September 11, 2001, the war in Iraq, and the cloning of human life. Life means change and I accept the challenge to adapt. But what a challenge it is!

Chapter I

Before the Letter

Laurence had been a wonderful husband, provider, father and physician throughout his life, but everything came to an end on October 4, 1990, when I buried my soulmate and lover of so many years. The funeral was merely a tribute that had to be—to the many years that had passed during our marriage and the lives of so many people whom Laurence had touched during his lifetime.

Our eldest daughter, an oncologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, mustered enough composure to eulogize her father at his funeral. Although I am her mother and many years her senior, I am still puzzled about how the loss crippled my functioning, yet rallied strength in her to address all those who attended the service. Gwen’s speech was moving. As I sat with my three other children, I realized that this episode was just one more, and the last, that I was sharing with my husband. The eulogies were many. As I listened, I became overwhelmed by the pain that I was experiencing at the moment and the pain I had experienced during the past year and a half of my husband’s illness. The afternoon finally passed. Gwen and her three siblings took control. By late afternoon, my final sojourn with Laurence was over.

Richard

Laurence had wanted a fourth child twenty-two years ago after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. My reaction was that he could not father another child. I did not even want another child at the time. My life was beginning to settle down and I dreamt of enjoying everything we had achieved together. Furthermore, I did not imagine that I could even conceive a child at forty-five. Not only was age a consideration, but so was my weight. While I was not sickly or grotesquely overweight, I was a lifelong participant in weight control programs. Although I would never admit it to my husband, I knew that I was at least fifteen pounds overweight, which was hidden during daylight hours with my Chanel suits and expensive wardrobe. I would, and still to this day, continue to buy couture that enhances my figure.

Laurence was very much a man and often asserted his virile self. His manhood was at stake with the issue of his prostate surgery. If he wanted another child, he had to plan for it. He merely advised me that if I wanted to, I could join him at the sperm bank to be present to know how the specimens would be identified in case he did not survive the operation. I did not protest. At that time I thought I would eventually have my way. There was no harm in having my husband assert his manhood one week before his cancer operation. I was also intrigued by how the cataloguing of donors’ specimens was done. That was enough for me.

I accompanied Laurence for all the wrong reasons, but he never knew. After the operation, we learned that extensive radiation therapy was the protocol and Laurence did not mention the child again. For two weeks, that is, until he left the hospital.

And then it began, day in and day out during his recuperation. If you want to help me with my healing, then you would commit to the insemination, he ranted. I was outraged. The man I loved was emotionally blackmailing me. I would never do that to him. We had three beautiful, healthy children and I only cared about my husband completing his treatments and recovering. Why was this happening to me?

If I continued to ask that question I would only wallow in self-pity, so I merely addressed the issue at hand, a tactic I had adopted through the years. I eventually realized that if I tried the insemination and it did not take, Laurence would not be able to blame me. The realization did not strike me at first. I am, and always have been, slow to manipulate. But, as I heard my husband banter about how wonderful it would be for us to have another child, I began to plot the only way out.

It finally dawned on me. I would tell Laurence that I tried the insemination and it did not work. I made an appointment with our long-trusted friend and my gynecologist, Dr. Charles Thompson, but he would not be part of my plot. Charles took the position that Laurence was his best friend and had referred many patients to him over the years. He refused to go along with my scheme. I felt abandoned by the man I thought was also my friend.

I loved my husband and still wanted to please him. Although I had originally gone to his friend’s office with the notion of deceiving Laurence and talking Charles into helping me, I decided to make an about-face and try. I even committed to try that afternoon. And I did try that afternoon and for eight weeks thereafter, twice a week, but nothing took. Laurence was devastated and I noticed his despondency. During these weeks, I became intrigued with the idea of whether, in fact, I could conceive again. I finally summoned the courage to ask Charles Thompson to consider artificial insemination with another man’s sperm, notmy husband’s, but without telling Laurence. After all, Charles ran a sperm bank in addition to his busy gynecological practice. He agreed.

Weeks went by and I told Laurence that I was proceeding on course with the insemination. Laurence was keenly aware of the medical technology but was preoccupied at the time with his own treatments. He was happy enough to know that I was trying to conceive his child without him. He was also very weak from his radiation. He frequently inquired about my doctor visits but short responses seemed to satisfy him. I managed to accompany him to all his doctor appointments and after I took him home, I would go on with my experiment while he was resting.

I demanded the background of the donor from Charles and decided that I would only be inseminated with sperm from a man with the same ethnic background and coloring as Laurence. I believed that if the biological father was Caucasian, Jewish, and had dark hair, the chances were far better that my husband would never learn my secret than if the donor was Latino or Irish. I am, and have always been, practical.

I gave birth to Richard on Groundhog Day of that year. Laurence never knew our fourth child was not his; nor did anyone else, except Charles Thompson. This was a secret never to be shared, or so I thought.

Richard was a beautiful child. He is now twenty-two. He towers over his two brothers, as he did over Laurence ever since he was fifteen, but he has blonde hair! He could pass for a relative and is very much like Laurence in personality. He is aggressive and bright, yet sensitive if you dig really deep. Richard is a gem.

Daniel

Daniel was the third child we were blessed with. As with many blessings, there are prices to pay. Laurence has a sister, Betty, who is now fifty-two years old. As a young girl, Betty harbored a lot of resentment against her parents and her brother, for different reasons. Her hostilities against Laurence are easier for me to understand. He was her older brother, the tall, handsome one, the boy wonder (who, in an Orthodox Jewish family, is considered to be so special), the achiever, the doctor. She was short, overweight and refused to attend yeshiva when she was a child. In her mind, her parents loved her brother more than they loved her. That was not true, I was told, but it was her reality. Although Betty loved Laurence, she resented him.

The hostility that Betty bore for her parents was much deeper. Betty’s parents were immigrants. Her mother was born on a Polish farm in Lumza Gebernia and her father was born in Minsk, Russia. They both struggled to get to America, each on their own. Their stories are what novels are written about. Hymie and Lena met in Williamsburg, New York, and were married when Lena was seventeen and Hymie was sixteen. He was a tailor and she was a seamstress. They opened a tailor shop on their wedding day on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Essex Street. They all lived in a three-room flat above their shop where Lena and Hymie live to this very day.

Laurence was their firstborn. Betty was born five years later. I am told she was a beautiful baby. As a girl, Betty was enrolled in a girl’s yeshiva on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the age of ten, she announced that she no longer wanted to attend. This created a tremendous rift between Hymie and Lena, but the girl could not be convinced otherwise. Lena, a pious woman, did not condone her daughter’s wishes, but she understood them and loved her child. Betty’s independent spirit reminded her of her own father. Hymie despised the chutzpah of his ten-year-old. But Lena convinced him to be tolerant, and for that matter, what harm would be done if the girl went to public school for just a year or two until she got it out of her system? Hymie reluctantly agreed. As the months went by, her parents realized and acknowledged, although never to each other, that Betty would never return to the yeshiva.

The girl thrived in the public school environment. She was bright and brought new ideas, literature and music into the Epstein home; she opened a new world to her family that, quite frankly, they should have been grateful for. But, for the day and times, Betty’s behavior was unacceptable. When she graduated from high school, she announced that she was going to be an artist and would be leaving home to move to Berkeley, California. Lena was devastated and Hymie was embarrassed about what the neighbors would think. Girls of her age were to marry, have children and become good wives.

Lena understood her child. At the same time, she had hoped that Betty would adapt to the Orthodox way of life. She wanted her to fall in love and marry. Lena never discouraged Betty from her art work even though her sculpture was provocative, different and avant garde. Hymie, on the other hand, was not tolerant. He had spent seventeen years making excuses for his daughter in the community. She was a continual heartache to him and he still could not believe that she was his child.

The girl was given a modest sum of money on her eighteenth birthday and she set out for Berkeley. She communicated with her mother, barely spoke to her brother when she telephoned and never spoke to her father nor even asked about him. Betty shared only those parts of her life with Lena that she felt her mother could tolerate and comprehend. And Betty highlighted those parts of her life that she knew her mother could be proud of. Betty invited her

mother to Berkeley to visit and to attend her first art exhibit at the Institute of Fine Arts, but Hymie forbade Lena from going. Betty understood.

Betty was nineteen and Laurence was twenty-four when he and I married. I had given birth to Gwen one year after we were married, when I was twenty-one. We lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea district in a brownstone off Eighth Avenue. Laurence was in medical school and I worked in a laboratory at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village to earn extra money. When Betty was approaching her twenty-fifth birthday, she wrote to Lena and told her that she had given birth to a beautiful boy, Daniel, out of wedlock. She explained that she had no intention of keeping the child and she would not say who the father was. She wrote that the boy was in the process of being adopted by a minister and his wife in the San Francisco bay area and she was confident that the child would be well provided for.

Lena dared not tell Hymie. She frantically called Laurence and came to see us alone the very evening that she received Betty’s letter. She sobbed, gulped for air and sobbed some more. Lena even drank a quarter of a bottle of cognac and then announced that she had the answer to the problem, that it came to her from God, but we had to first promise that we would say yes to her demand before we were told what was going to be asked of us. We had to promise never to speak of it with Hymie. It was to be a bond among the three of us: Lena, Laurence and me.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table that evening, spellbound. What could this woman expect and ask of me? Was I to immediately summon the courage to assert myself with her? Lena and I were worlds apart and we both knew it. She never approved of me because I would never be good enough for her son. After all, I wasn’t born a Jew. I just sat at the table and timidly nodded my assent to her unreasonable and unconscionable demand. Laurence simply nodded his head also.

Lena announced that Laurence and I should fly to Berkeley, adopt Betty’s baby and bring him home to Manhattan. Lena reached into her large, black plastic handbag and removed a makeup case that contained a stash of cash amounting to twenty thousand dollars. She cried and told us that she had saved the money since she came to America for a rainy day. This was beyond rain; it was a hurricane. She wept, Laurence and Katharine, please find a good American lawyer and do what must be done. After all, we are family and I cannot desert my first grandson, please help us.

I was outraged. How could this be happening to me? My parents would think that I had lost my mind, and my sisters would confirm that fact. But, at the same time, part of me thought that the idea was full of intrigue and it would be a way for me to ingratiate myself with Lena for the rest of my married life. Laurence immediately told his mother, We will do what you ask of us as long as, and only if, Katharine agrees. I was infuriated by his response because he had not spoken to me privately about what Lena had to say. We had never had an argument in all the years that we had known each other and since the day that we were married. I felt rage in between my bones and boiling in my blood. I excused myself, went into the long narrow bathroom, turned on the faucet and the shower, and began to cry. How could all this be happening to me—a beautiful girl, and a young mother, all at a time when my world was so perfect? My mother would never understand and she and my father would probably stop supporting us if we went through with this. What should I do?

Suddenly, as the fog from the shower thickened and I could no longer breathe, I shut off the water and stormed back into the kitchen. Enough was enough. I shouted, I can’t answer immediately because as you both know, my family is supporting us while Laurence is on scholarship to medical school! Gwen’s expenses and all our living costsare being underwritten by my mother and father! We can’t agree to what Lena asks of us until we speak to my parents! I reminded both mother and son that Betty would also have to be consulted even if my parents agreed with the idea. Lena cried and begged. She said, Katharine, please understand. You should speak to your parents and I surely want you to, but please remember that whatever they say, I am a desperate woman. I don’t want to lose my grandchild. I am sure your mother will understand.

I telephoned my parents, who lived uptown at 830 Park Avenue and asked them to come to our home, immediately!

We waited in