Joey Goldman had grown up in a tenement in Queens. His wife, Sandra Dugan, had lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. Their home in Key West was therefore the fulfillment of a fantasy held by cramped apartment dwellers everywhere. It was mostly open space and windows. Glass doors slid aside to welcome in a safe and mild world. Skylights tracked the weather and the progress of the sun and moon. You stepped into that house and you felt sheltered but not trapped. There were plenty of ways to get out again. Their backyard felt bigger than it really was. The shimmer from the pool somehow seemed to stretch the space above it. Patches of color — soft blue skyflower, flame red nicotiana — coaxed the eye from place to place. Small groupings of furniture created a cozy array of places to sit. In one of those groupings, poolside, an old man was reclining with a chihuahua on his lap. The man had white hair, still quite thick, tinged with yellow at the upturning edges. He had black eyes set well back in their sockets and an enormous but stately nose that shaded one side of his face as if it were a sundial.
