Madness Under the Royal Palms Read Online Free PDF

sits between the private Palm Beach Day School and the public elementary school in the middle of town. When I had a game in the morning, I saw the big yellow buses bringing in brigades of kids from West Palm Beach, while a parade of Bentleys, Rolls, Lexuses, and BMWs dropped off the private school children in their uniforms of blue and white.
    The public school students are bused in from across the Intracoastal Waterway. Only a few live on the island, and these are the children of servants and other workers. The two schools share the same playing field, but the children never play together. The public school is a string magnet school with a fine orchestra that sometimes gives concerts at the Palm Beach Day School, but other than that, the two schools have no contact.
    The Day School teachers are often excellent, and they try to teach the children about the world beyond Palm Beach, but it is difficult. Ten-year-olds have their hair colored and go in for weekly manicures and pedicures. The private school children learn how to judge another person by his clothes, his car, and his address. Many of them are brought up more by nannies than mothers, and only toddled out occasionally to be displayed to dinner guests like a new bibelot. Many of the children, especially those who are the chil dren of divorce, have their own therapists with whom they discuss their problems.
    They live on their own island of children within the island of Palm Beach. If things go according to plan, they go to prep school and then to the Ivy League, and from there perhaps to Wall Street. As long as they live in this pocket of privilege, they are smart and adept, but step across the bridge into what most people call America, and they are confronted with a world about which they know almost nothing.
    The Seaview Courts have far more affinity with the public school than with the elite private academy. For two hundred dollars a year, a town resident can play every day on both the excellent clay courts and equally good courts at the Phipps Ocean Park Tennis Center in the South End. It is the best bargain in Palm Beach, but few who play at the restricted B&T or the Everglades would be seen here. The wealthiest islanders either play at their clubs or on their own private courts.
    One afternoon Herb Gray and I were having a game at Seaview. Herb is one of the first people I met in Palm Beach, and he is one of my closest friends. He grew up a poor kid in the Dorchester ghetto of Boston, and in 1998 sold his medical supply company for $131 million, out of which he netted $20 million. He had parceled out stock to many employees, a number of whom became millionaires. He is a philanthropist whose gifts the Palm Beach Daily News never acknowledges, and that is the way he wants it. Herb is an art collector with a passionate interest in Boston Expressionists from the twenties. He volunteers twice a week as a pharmacist at Good Samaritan Hospital. His wife, Marylou, a nurse, volunteers as well, and when she is in their Boston home, she runs a weekly soup kitchen. Herb and Marylou do not go to charity balls. His name has almost never been in the Palm Beach paper, except when he won the town senior tennis championship. He lives within an almost totally Jewish social world, yet most of those in the haute Boston Jewish world on the island have no idea who he is.
    After our match, Herb and I were having yet another of our intense conversations when Fred Keller pulled up on a rusty, decrepit bicycle. The man and machine were perfectly matched. Six-foot-two Keller wore putrid-colored, threadbare surfing shorts, a ratty T-shirt, a white bonnet, and grungy tennis shoes. The mismatched tennis balls he brought with him he had picked up on the tennis court on a previous outing. The beard that covered his angular, narrow face made him look like one of the siblings on the old Smith Brothers licorice cough drops box, albeit one with a gray beard.
    There are a number of impecunious,