Dewey's Nine Lives

The second bump came a few years later. Lynda had long since settled into a comfortable life: twenty years in her town house, seventeen years as a divorced mom, sixteen years managing a successful catering business, ten years with her beloved Cookie. After twelve years of fund-raisers, she had donated more than a million dollars to St. Mary’s hospital, which used the money to open a traumatic brain injury unit for children—the only such specialized unit on the East Coast. The next year, Lynda organized a fund-raiser for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which had not only killed her aunt but was now affecting one of the soap opera stars who had been instrumental in helping her fund-raisers: Michael Zaslow. He had been fired by Guiding Light after his condition was revealed, and, as his health deteriorated rapidly, he told his wife that his biggest regret was not being able to see the friends he had made on that show one last time. Thirty-five of those friends showed up to see him at Lynda’s benefit, which raised more than twenty-six thousand dollars. Michael Zaslow died ten days later.

But even as she enlisted the help of her close-knit family and friends, as she always had for a worthy cause, Lynda knew her life was changing. With her father semiretired, the catering business downsized its work space and staff, adding to Lynda’s workload and putting an end to her fund-raisers. Her daughter was growing up and would soon be out on her own. Her grandmother died, and the family sold the house where Lynda had spent so many wonderful afternoons with grapevines, canned tomatoes, and a matriarch who never turned anyone away, from WPA highway builders to down-on-their-luck strangers in need of a cup of joe. It was as if her death closed the book on Lynda Caira’s Bayside, a community that had long ago paved over most of its orchards and grape arbors, and where nobody talked to strangers anymore—much less invited them inside for a meal. For decades the original immigrants had been leaving, squeezed by newer immigrants and refugees from the City, as the locals called Manhattan, looking for affordable places to live. As the century closed on the old Bayside, Lynda Caira cashed out. She sold her town house for more than ten times what she had paid for it in 1973 and bought a three-bedroom, two-story, stand-alone Victorian in Floral Park.

Floral Park was only seven miles away, but for Lynda Caira, it was another world. Bell Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in her old section of Bayside, was crowded with garish signs, electrical wires, and four lanes of honking traffic. Floral Park’s two-lane main thoroughfare, Tulip Avenue, was lined with independent stores fronted by orderly wooden signs: the bakery, the candy shop, the little independent supermarket, the lawyer’s office on the second floor. Founded by a flower seed wholesaler in 1874, who named all the streets after flowers, Floral Park was incorporated as a township in 1908, an occasion celebrated by a white-steepled library at one end of Tulip Avenue and the centennial gardens at the other. Every year, the front lawn of Memorial Park featured a Christmas tree, and a crowd always turned out to watch the lights come on, followed by hot chocolate at the Catholic church next door. A Christmas tree on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens? With hot chocolate? Nevah.

For Lynda, Floral Park was heaven, a tree-lined Norman Rock-well town literally one foot across the line from the messy sprawl of outer Queens. Sure, you had to drive thirty miles in any direction to escape the nonstop sprawl of New York City, but here within that maze of highways and apartment blocks was a tiny patch of middle-class, Midwestern Americana. A place with block parties and green lawns, where children rode bikes while the adults ate hot dogs to the sounds of “Light FM” radio. It was a place where she could hang a “Sunny Days” wreath on the door of her gingerbread-trimmed Victorian and tend purple daffodils and black-eyed Susans in her finely turned flower beds. At the end of Floral Boulevard was a grand schoolhouse, straight from the first decade of the twentieth century. On the far side of the neighborhood, behind a thin strip of trees and a bird sanctuary—a bird sanctuary!—sat Belmont Park racetrack, home of one of the three biggest horse races in the world, the Belmont Stakes. On summer weekends, the echo of the race announcer was a pleasant murmur behind the hum of lawn mowers and the bouncing of basketballs.