Jane Austen in Boca by Paula Marantz Cohen Page A

received an e-mail the day before from her great-niece Amy with the succinct demand, “Send recipe for borscht ASAP.” From anyone else, such a message would have seemed bizarre, but knowing her great-niece as she did—which is to say, knowing that she could as easily be competing in an Eastern European cooking class as trying to impress a Russian boyfriend—Flo simply went about fulfilling the request, assuming that she’d get the background in subsequent e-mails. She herself had never made borscht in her life, but tracking down information was her stock and trade, a fact that Amy had long understood and taken advantage of. In this case, May Newman was the obvious place to go for what was needed, and Flo now stood waiting while her friend riffled through a stack of possible recipes.
    “Just pick one!” Flo ordered in exasperation while May considered the relative merits of this one and that one. “We’re not writing a dissertation here.”
    “Be patient. I don’t tell you how to do your work,” responded May with a certain defiance. “Here.” She handed a recipe card to Flo. It was, she declared proudly, the simplest and most dependable borscht recipe to be found anywhere; Amy couldn’t go wrong with it.
    Flo took the card, squeezed her friend’s hand, and sighed. She had gotten the recipe for her niece, but she had not been as successful with the other part of her errand. She had not managed to prepare May for possible disappointment from Norman Grafstein. May was simply too nice to take a hint.

CHAPTER TWENTY
    A FEW DAYS AFTER THEIR Y OUTING, F LO WAS AWAKENED BY A very early phone call.
    “What are you doing today?” It was Mel Shirmer.
    “Let’s see,” responded Flo. “I was going to work a bit on my novel, perfect my cure for cancer, and then, possibly, whip up a gourmet meal for fifty.”
    “Good. Then you’ll have time to come with me to the cas bah.”
    “Well,” ruminated Flo, “I do like Charles Boyer”
    “Then you
will
come with me to the casbah?”
    “It depends where the casbah is,” said Flo warily. “There are places I definitely won’t go. If the casbah is Disney World, for example, count me out. I don’t do cute with anyone over six.”
    “I assure you, my
liebchen,
that the casbah is not Disney World,” said Mel. “More than that, I will not say.”
    “Should I take a bathing suit, oh mysterious guide?”
    “Of course, and a little overnight case as well, in the event we should want to linger. The casbah, you see, has many attractions.”
    Flo was a bit nonplussed by the prospect of an overnight stay, but she put a toothbrush and an extra pair of underwear into the bag with her bathirig suit and towel—just in case, as she put it smirkingly to herself. She was old enough to find her own tricks of self-deception amusing.
     
     
    It was a beautiful day when Mel pulled up in his Corvette convertible. Flo considered the Corvette a ridiculous car, and she believed a convertible of any sort was dangerous and should be kept out of the hands of people over sixty. But with Mel, somehow, she made an exception. He had the romance of the maverick about him, and the car did not seem like an affectation so much as a natural extension of his personality. Had he shown up on a motorcycle, no doubt she would have accepted this, too, and climbed on behind him without giving it a thought.
    “I feel like I’m seventeen, being whisked away to play hooky by the high-school quarterback,” said Flo, looking at Mel’s handsome profile as they sped off
    “Not football, I’m afraid, swimming—the Jewish contact sport. I wanted to play football, only my mother wouldn’t let me. I was too precious, she said. She held my price very high, you see, which spoiled me for hard labor.”
    “The standard recipe for the Jewish prince,” observed Flo. “But you seem to have accomplished a great deal, all things considered, and turned out better than most.”
    “I don’t know about that,”