Never Let Them See You Cry (27 page)

The woman never said a word.

“Take it easy,” he told her. “I want to talk to you. Think it over. Don't do this. Let me talk to you. Wait.” He wanted to talk until he could grab her with both hands. The woman paid no attention and squatted into a diving position. There was no time. She began to lower herself between the two-by-fours, like someone descending into a pool. Alfau, the father of four small children, scrambled out onto the two narrow beams.

He hated going out there. He teetered, balanced, catlike, with each foot on a four-by-four-inch beam jutting several feet off the sheer side of the complex. “I had to either let her do it or make my try. If I didn't try I would have felt guilty the rest of my life.” She was suspended in the air, holding on to the beams with both hands. He lunged for her wrist and caught it as she let go. For heart-stopping moments she swung back and forth in space, four floors above the street, as he clutched her left wrist with one hand. Then she wrenched away in a half-twist and was gone.

Alfau closed his eyes and yelled for an ambulance. “She twisted out of my hand,” he said. “It was terrible, having her slip away like that. She didn't want to be saved. The look on her face…”

Sometimes just surviving is heroic.

No one can tell me that Rose Bennett is not a hero. In her prime, she and her handsome husband, Navy Lieutenant Commander Daniel J. Bennett, traveled the globe in the service of their country. “I loved the Navy life,” she told me the first time we met.

He retired in 1957, and they settled in Miami. His retirement pay ended with his life when he died of cancer in 1974. I met Rose Bennett in February 1984, after she had been brutalized, beaten, threatened with death, bound and robbed in her own home, for the third time in three weeks.

Intruders had forced their way into her rented frame cottage in downtown Miami nine times in six months. A sympathetic cop called me to report the latest outrage.

Caught in a nightmare of terror and violence, the frail, eighty-year-old, ninety-four-pound widow was living her twilight years in fear, fighting a daily battle to survive.

She lived on $175 a month from Social Security and had dwelled in the same house for twenty-five years. The building was scheduled for demolition in a few months. Her rent was $185 a month, and when I asked how she got by, she shyly explained that she was “thrifty.” She was still a proud woman, a Navy wife.

She was too embarrassed to tell me what I learned later: that she foraged for food among the discarded cartons behind a nearby supermarket, that she dined on salads from overripe, bruised and spoiled fruit and vegetables, that she carefully collected damaged and outdated canned goods dumped behind the failing store, scheduled soon to close its doors.

She survived by doing odd babysitting or housework jobs, returning deposit bottles and checking pay phones for forgotten change. She had no phone herself, thanks to intruders who broke into the house repeatedly. “The first thing they do is cut or rip out the wires,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“I had some nice friends before the riot and the crime wave,” she said, “but they all picked up and moved away.” Her best friend, a retired nutritionist, was killed by muggers.

She was lucky herself to be alive. Burglars who invaded her home in the past had not been as violent. “When they broke in when I was home,” she said, “they were meek and apologetic”—until recently.

She had heard a noise during the night of January 30, walked into her living room and encountered two strangers who had ripped out a screen and climbed in a window. The one with the fishing knife punched her in the face and forced her to remove her clothes. “If you're naked, you can't chase us,” he told her. They ransacked the entire house, tearing apart her possessions.

Two weeks later, at five
A.M
., a window shattered. One of the robbers had come back. He hurled her to the floor, cut her eye, bloodied her face, bruised her forehead, tied her hands and legs and stuffed a shirt in her mouth. He threatened to kill her, then ransacked the house. She gave police a detailed description, down to his missing front tooth. Officers were touched by the plight of this alert and bright woman. They asked why she did not seek welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing or other benefits.

“I don't want to bother the welfare people,” she said. “It weakens people to give them too much help. I like to work and be resourceful.”

Crime-lab expert Ralph Garcia called the Veterans Administration and other agencies seeking help. Feminist Roxcy Bolton called Senator Paula Hawkins's office, and aides promised to investigate. Three days later, neighbors heard Rose screaming—the robber had returned. He threw her to the floor, tied her with an extension cord and began rummaging through her belongings. A neighbor, herself six times a burglary victim, ran to a service station to call police.

They arrived in time. The robber was filling his bicycle basket with the loot: Rose Bennett's dishes. Her face and eyes still bruised and swollen from the earlier assault, she had been battered again. She sought no medical treatment. “They'd make a federal case out of it and bill me for a couple of thousand dollars,” she said. She treated her eye injuries herself, with witch hazel. “I knew he was dangerous and ruthless,” she said. “He is a vicious and cruel man. I sure hope they won't let him out again.”

Rose Bennett cleaned up the mess and the breakage—again. Gone to thieves were her radio, her costume jewelry, her wristwatch and a cuckoo clock she and her husband had bought abroad. “You cherish those things and hate to lose them,” she said wistfully, without a trace of self-pity. She proudly showed me photos of her dashing husband in his white uniform. “He was so handsome,” she said. “He looked a lot like Gary Cooper.” His ashes sat on a shelf in a box covered by a small American flag. They met in Norfolk, Virginia, and married in 1932. He had joined the Navy in 1928 and retired after twenty-nine years. They had no children. If he had retired today, she would be eligible for 55 percent of his retirement salary. But no survivors' benefit plan was in effect when Lieutenant Commander Daniel J. Bennett retired.

“It's amazing how she's survived on so little food,” Roxcy Bolton said. “She is a classic example of a military wife who has served her country and served her husband and this is how she lives out her last days on earth. This is the way it all ends.”

Roxcy said she would seek to have an ID card issued entitling Rose to care at Homestead Air Force Hospital. Medical care “would be wonderful,” Bennett said hesitantly. “Are you sure they don't mind old people there?”

Her refrigerator was empty that day, except for a chunk of moldy cheese. “It's fun to do housework,” she said. “As long as I'm busy, I'm happy. There isn't a thing I need. All I want is protection from burglars.” Asked if she had advice for other military widows in similar circumstances. Rose did not hesitate: “Get a job,” she said. “They would be happiest if they got a job and worked instead of worrying about a pension. People are always happiest when they are active and working. People shouldn't have their hands out. We can be self-supporting up to a hundred years old. You can sit in a wheelchair and sell newspapers.” Her father, a Philadelphia businessman, she said, “left all his money to the needy, not the greedy. He knew I was the type who didn't need money, a chip off the old block. I can make it.”

After her story in the
Herald
, volunteers hammered boards over the windows of her rented cottage to keep out intruders. Strangers stocked her empty pantry with food, others sent prayers, letters and money. Two women brought dishes and a warm nightgown. A retired major sent a hundred-dollar check.

I was delighted. Rose was not. “I'm okay now,” she complained, “and I don't need any more help. It isn't fair for me to take things from people who need them for themselves.”

Senator Paula Hawkins's aide said bills that would have helped all the Rose Bennetts “were filed at least four times since 1972” but never made it out of committee.

Some time later, after not seeing Rose for months, I called the police officer who had helped find her a new place to live. I asked how Rose Bennett was. Dead, she said, brusquely. She had returned from a long vacation, gone by to see Rose and was told by a neighbor that she had died.

Shocked and saddened, I wanted to know what happened. I could find no record, no death certificate, so I knocked on doors in the neighborhood where she had lived last. No one knew anything. One woman said she thought Rose had moved to an apartment near Twelfth Street.

I drove through the neighborhood, looking for people to ask and trying to figure out what to do next. The weather was hot and steamy, and few people were out on the street. I saw a pedestrian a block away, a neatly dressed woman pushing a supermarket cart. Tired and ready to give up, I noticed how the woman resembled Rose. As I drove closer, it looked even more like her. I stopped alongside. It was Rose Bennett!

We hugged and sat on a bus bench to talk. She could not stay long, she said, because she was very busy. She had an appointment somewhere. No, she said, she did not need a thing. Everything was fine.

Rose Bennett does not rescue people from burning buildings, or swim the rapids to save someone or perform any other daring feats—but no one can tell me that Rose Bennett is not a hero.

Sometimes just surviving is heroic.

Heroism is the shortest-lived profession on earth
.

—W
ILL
R
OGERS

Some people do not believe in heroes.

Despite all that happened, Ann Siegel believes.

Thieves smashed the plate-glass window and stole the displays from her small handbag-and-jewelry shop in Surfside. Another time they hacked a hole in the roof and looted the place. Then a man with a gun invaded the shop one Tuesday night at eight and demanded her money. She fled, screaming, into the street.

Jeff Miller, twenty-one, was walking by. “I thought she was being beat up or hurt. I ran to see what I could do.”

The gunman cleaned out the cash register, took Ann Siegel's purse and sprinted down an alley. Miller chased him. A foot apart, in the dark, the robber spun around and shot Miller in the neck at point-blank range. The slug left powder burns on his throat, missed his carotid artery by a fraction of an inch and exited his back. The gunman got away.

Miller staggered from the alley, collapsed on the sidewalk and was taken to a Miami Beach hospital. Ann Siegel, sixty-one, followed. “I'm glad it was me instead of you,” he told her.

“He is an absolutely lovely, darling boy,” she said. “I feel so bad. Here is a man who could have minded his own business like all the others who didn't get involved.” She remained at the hospital emergency room for hours.

Before he was shot, Jeff Miller had been looking for a job to earn traveling money back to Chicago. In town only three days, he was alone and broke in a strange city, with no place to stay, stranded by friends who left without him. Now pain and medical expenses joined his other troubles.

Ann Siegel brought him concern, gratitude and home-baked cookies.

“She is one of the best people I ever met,” he said. Hurting, with no feeling in his right shoulder, he displayed no bitterness. “Miami is wonderful,” he said, “but it's an odd city. It's sad. Say hello to somebody, and they grab their purse and hang on. People shouldn't have to live in constant fear.”

The
Herald
story ran alongside a touching photo of Ann Siegel hugging the boyish young man as he sat smiling in his hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown and the look of a homeless puppy being cuddled, eyes half-closed in contentment.

He cried the day the story appeared, because he suddenly had more friends than he ever knew. “It's incredible,” he whispered, still groggy from medication, “that people care.”

The Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach invited him to recuperate for a few days after his release from the hospital. “They invited me to stay at the hotel. They're gonna pick me up in a limousine,” he told me disbelievingly. “I never rode in one before. I'll be the poorest person there.” Hotel officials offered to arrange transportation back to Chicago or help him find a job in Miami. “I like to work. I don't like to sit around. I want to start life over,” he said eagerly, “get a good job and a nice place to stay and maybe go to school.”

His mother was dead, he said, and he had grown up in foster homes. Jeff Miller's future promised to be brighter than his past.

Readers offered rooms, plane tickets and money to help pay his medical bills. Words of praise and encouragement came from politicians and show-business personalities.

The lead singer of the legendary Ink Spots sent a hundred dollars and invited Miller and Siegel to be his guests at the group's dinner show at a local hotel. Surfside merchants collected $450. “What he did was nothing short of committed,” wrote a member of the Dade County Citizens Advisory Committee, enclosing a check.

The Fontainebleau limo whisked him in style from the hospital to his luxury suite, a three-hundred-dollar-a-day penthouse with an ocean view.

That was when things began to go awry, Siegel recalled later. “The Fontainebleau was the biggest mistake. It went to his head.” Miller lolled about his celebrity suite, wondering, she said, “if the president is going to call me.” Flashing his new-found fortune, he bought rounds of drinks for total strangers and ran up a ninety-dollar tab for a single room-service meal. Hotel officials soon tired of their guest.

Siegel talked a woman friend into taking Miller into her home. The young hero soon vanished, along with the woman's television set. Siegel told no one, fearing that people would not help the next person in need.

Fame and fortune faded fast. Next time Jeff Miller hit the headlines he was back in Illinois and on his way to prison. Arrested for a candy-store burglary, he had been released on bond. Two days later, police caught him red-handed, inside a closed stereo store. A judge told him he was going to do time.

Back in Miami where he had won the hearts of a crime-weary public, where he was wined and dined and bathed in the fickle spotlight of publicity, police began to doubt aloud if he ever had been a hero.

“He was a floater, a bum,” Surfside Police Officer Warren Corbin said. “The whole thing smelled.” He said he had always had the suspicion, never voiced, that Miller himself might have been involved in the robbery of Ann Siegel's store, shot by mistake by an accomplice.

Sentenced to five years, Miller reminisced with Illinois reporters about his short-lived celebrity. “I was on all the major television stations in Miami. The big newspapers—I was in all of them. I was getting money from everywhere. It was beautiful. It was too much.”

Maybe it was.

Nevertheless, Ann Siegel remained steadfast. “I will remember his birthday and Christmas. I will let him know that there is someone who still really cares.” She refused to believe the speculation that Miller was involved in the robbery. He was a true hero, she said. “I swear by it. Nobody else would come to my aid, and he did.”

The doubts reminded me of something Miller had said to me in Miami, at the height of his glory. “To me, a hero is like Superman,” he said. “It doesn't exist. It's only in Hollywood.”

I would not agree.

Neither would Ann Siegel.