Madness Under the Royal Palms Read Online Free PDF Page B

marginal people who live in the creases and edges of Palm Beach, getting by in tiny cottages or efficiencies, driving bicycles and pretending that they do so by choice. I assumed that Keller was in that group, and since he was playing on the court directly in front of me, I watched him for a while.
    One can tell a great deal about a person by the way he plays. From what I saw on that court, I assumed that this was a man who once stood high up in the world. He was in his sixties and was playing a powerful, determined game against an opponent half his age who turned out to be his brother-in-law Wolfgang Keil.
    I asked my friend if he knew anything about Keller. Herb said he played against him, and I should play him too. Keller, it turned out, was hardly impecunious. He was a commercial real estate magnate worth tens of millions of dollars who lived in an estate on the Intracoastal Waterway in the North End. “He complains about his young wife a lot and how she nags him,” Herb said. “But you know one day we were playing and these little kids from the Day School came marching by out to the play field, and old Fred just stopped playing and pointed out there and said, ‘That’s my Fredchen. He’s my son. I love him so much. You have to come over and see this beautiful kid.’ It was touching and kind of strange.”
    Few people living in Palm Beach go back as far in the area as Keller did. He arrived in West Palm Beach in 1957 with his first wife, Blanch, and his adopted son, Brian, from his wife’s previous relationship.
    Keller was born Fred Bohlander on Long Island in 1934, the only son in a family of German immigrants who believed in Aryan racial superiority. His carpenter father taught his only son that “we of northern European heritage have intellectual genetic advantages over other races…[and] that we Germans are superior to others.” His people had come up with an efficient way of dealing with the mentally retarded by “culling the herd,” but that would never be accepted in America. Fred got tired of the constant kvetching of the Jews about the Holocaust when no one talked about how his people had suffered, the firebombing of Dresden, the atrocities in Russia, where German soldiers were held prisoners years after the end of the war.
    Fred envisioned himself as the noble patriarch of a Germanic family, with a loyal, obedient wife and a brood of strong, stalwart children, all of whom looked up to the patriarch with deference and respect. He had been working as a surveyor on the St. Lawrence Seaway in upstate New York for the Perini Corporation when he met his first wife. Blanch Witherell was a telephone operator and had a son, Brian, who had been born out of wedlock. She was a tall, healthy, Teutonic-looking woman. “I simply felt that Blanch was good breeding stock for a future family because I had these genetic notions that I was brought up with, and she had produced a son and was physically tall and well-proportioned,” Fred wrote in his unpublished memoir.
    Fred liked the fact that he would get a ready-built family. He and Blanch married and moved down to Florida, where he worked for the same company as an assistant project engineer. They lived in a little house in northern West Palm Beach.
    Palm Beach residents think of West Palm Beach as their warehouse, a dispirited repository of hospitals, electronics emporiums, funeral homes, antiques stores, fast food, and everything too déclassé or ordinary for their refined precincts. That is an unfair judgment on a town that has its own fascinations, but just a few blocks east of the Intercoastal Waterway lie some of the most desperate slums in the nation. To those who stop their Rolls or Mercedes at the traffic lights a few blocks across Flagler Memorial Bridge, there is always a risk of a holdup; and those who for some bizarre reason turn left into the impoverished community might be stripped of their jewelry and money.
    One evening Fred stood looking across