Assignment:

Miami Beach, Fla. – Precious few were there that Tuesday morning to mourn for Billie Sicard.

Only 11 people signed the funeral-home register. The officiating minister, Dr. William W. Swift of Miani Beach’s All Souls Episcopal Church, had never met the woman.

“I get a lot of these services where the funeral home calls, and I go,” he says.

In accordance with her wishes, Billie Sicard had been entombed privately four days before in the mausoleum at Woodlawn Park Cemetery. If anyone cared to say a few prayers for her soul, she had decided, they would have to do it without her.

Alive or dead, there was just no use trying to get Billie Sicard to come out.

On June 18, the house at 2767 Sunset Drive on Miami Beach’s Sunset Island No. 1 was sold at public auction. The winning bid was $226,000.

It is in this house that Billie Sicard was found dead, in bed, on Oct. 19, 1979. She was 71. The cause of death was atherosclerotic heart disease. Vic La Chance, the island’s postman and almost the only person with whom Billie Sicard exchanged day-to-day pleasantries, noticed she had not picked up her mail for several days. He notified officials of the Sunset Islands 1 and 2 Association. They called police.

Inside the house, they found a nightmare.

“There was what amounted to a pathway leading from the front door to the stairway and another pathway leading to the left side of the living room where there was a table with a phone on it and a chair,” says Lyle D. “Don” Holcomb Jr., the attorney for the estate who has spent much of the last two years trying to unravel the threads of Billie Sicard’s life.

“Every other foot of space was crammed with card tables and cardboard boxes all piled high,” Holcomb says. “There were boxes and clothing and toys and stacks of mail piled on the TV set and on the sofa. Seed catalogs and unsolicited mail were all piled together. Stuff that we all throw away. Only she didn’t throw anything away.

“It was the mustiest, moldiest place. You literally could not move. There were whole cans of pennies…. The boy threw pennies into every drawer. His toys were in almost every drawer.”

The boy is Billie Sicard’s only child. George Montgomery Sicard. He died in 1954 of a brain tumor. He was 12. After her husband left her in the mid-1940s, Billie Sicard had only one preoccupation in this life: little George.

Little George’s death left Billie Sicard imprisoned inside a vacuum. She was 34 when she bore him, and she had become a totally devoted mother. From the day he was born, she saved everything that attested to his existence – h is shorn curls, the copper engraving plate for his birthday from Tiffany and Co., calling cards, his report cards.

In 1945, back when you could still buy a magnetic fish pond for $1 and a cowboy gun set for $2, it was nothing for Billie Sicard to spend more than $50 at a time shopping for toys. One day – Dec. 14, 1948 – she bought little George $262.64 worth of toys. She wanted him to have a fine Christmas.

Mother and son slept in the one main bedroom – she in her double bed, he in his walnut four-poster. She bought him a bicycle. Then she bought him three or four more. When he was about 10, she bought him a 1941 Packard convertible. There are pictures of him standing beside it. There are also other pictures. Little George under the Christmas tree with a miniature medieval castle and some stuffed animals. Little George posed by a living room window with a pet cocker spaniel. Little George on his sickbed, his body contorted by the effects of his illness. Little George in his coffin.

One of the stories they tell on Sunset Island is that after little George died in a New York City hospital, Billie Sicard brought his body home and had a wake for him at the house. They say that when the funeral director came to collect the boy’s body, his mother locked the door and refused for several days to give it up.

Don Holcomb had Billie Sicard’s house cleaned up as much as possible before last month’s auction. Workers carted away the debris of her life and her obsession by the truckload. They got rid of the 40 boxes of unworn shoes and most of the hundreds of dresses found hanging – many with price tags still attached – only shower rods and the backs of doors.

But they could not erase quite all the poignant evidence of her preoccupation with this child.

George Sicard’s Scout uniform hangs in the downstairs closet. His Mickey Mouse bedroom slippers lie in a corner of a room upstairs. And drawn in red crayon on one wall of Billie Sicard’s bedroom is his childish sketch of a train. She never washed it off. And when she had the room painted, she ordered that that one corner of that one wall be left untouched. They painted around little George’s choo-choo train.

It is not possible to pinpoint exactly when Billie Sicard began to fade away from life, when she began to let her obsessions – and the memorabilia that went with them – overwhelm her. She had always been a pack rat. She had begun saving grocery lists in the 1940s. By the early 50s, she was accumulating newspapers by the pile. By the 60s, she had stopped throwing away junk mail.

For a time after little George died in 1954, she seemed to make an honest effort to keep going. At Lindsey Hopkins Adult Education Center, she took classes in clothing construction and design, textile painting, short-story writing, tropical crafts, photography and ceramics. For a time, as a volunteer, she drove blind people to doctor’s appointments.

She became a life member of the Miami Beach Woman’s Club. She studied gardening. She was president of one or two garden clubs and helped organize others. She became a respected master flower-show judge and the winner of countless prizes for her own floral arrangements.

“She was always a kind of shy person,” says June Wood of Miami Beach, who knew her both in the woman’s club and the garden club. “One of the last times she was out was in the mid-70s when I entertained the garden club at my house. Toward the end, we didn’t see her at all.”

She was born Alice Brown on Aug. 4, 1908, in Whiting, Kan. Her father, W.T., was an organizer for the railroad telegraphers union and one of the 54 founders of the Izaak Walton League, the national conservation organization. Her mother was Margaret Jane Allen. Little Alice was Margaret and W.T. Brown’s only child. It is thought she was called Billie after an older brother who did not survive infancy.

After her father died, Billie and her mother came to live with an uncle in Chicago. Billie earned a nursing certificate at Englewood Hospital and a graduate certificate in pediatric nursing at Chicago Lying-In Hospital.

Like her father, Billie Brown was tall and big-boned. In old age, she would weigh as much as 300 pounds, but in photographs taken in the 20s and early 30s, she is as pretty as a silent-movie heroine.

Sometime in the 1930s, probably after her mother died in 1934, Billie Brown came to Florida to nurse George Sicard, a handsome, divorced millionaire reputed to have a fondness for strong drink.

When her term of employment ended, Billie Brown wrote Sicard a letter saying she hoped they would meet again sometime.

“It must have worked,” says Don Holcomb. “They seem to have eloped.”

They were married July 28, 1935, in Elkton, Md., and took a honeymoon round-the-world cruise on the Empress of Britain. Sicard’s parents gave their new daughter-in-law a $500 gold mesh purse, and the couple fell into the Sicard tradition of spending summers on Cape Cod and winters in South Florida.

Billie and George Sicard lived together until 1947. Why he left her is speculation. One story says he was in love with another woman. Another says he was tired of competing with his own son for his wife’s attention.

“George was nice fellow,” remembers Arvida Corp.’s John Shuey, a Sunset Island neighbor. “But she was a funny gal. Really crazy.”

On Aug. 7, 1947, Billie Sicard made headlines in the Miami Herald when Circuit Court Judge George E. Holt granted her the deed to the house and $1000 a month separate maintenance. In her suit, in which she also asked unsuccessfully for $250 a month child support, Billie Sicard claimed she was destitute. She said her husband’s holdings, by contrast, included $900,000 in stocks and bonds, $500,000 in property in and around New York City, the Sunset Island house and income from a $2-million trust fund.

George Sicard died in Massachusetts in 1969 of a coronary occlusion. He was 67. Billie Sicard found out he was dead when his support checks stopped. He did not leave her a sou, but she filed for dower – in those days one-third of an estate before debts – and got it.

For the last 20 years of George Sicard’s life, he and Billie squabbled constantly by mail – mostly about money. George wrote to a Miami Beach friend that he would never visit South Florida again. Yet they were never divorced, and for all her life, Billie Sicard referred to herself as Mrs. George Goodyear Sicard.

One of the few people she tolerated during her last years was a former Miami Beach woman who recently moved to Martin County, Fla.

“Billie was a lovely person to those she liked,” she says. “She was always lovely to me and very outgoing.”

In the last year of Billie Sicard’s life, this woman persuaded Mrs. Sicard to go with her to a flower judges’ symposium in Boca Raton, Fla., so they could keep their master judges certificates up to date.

“We roomed together,” she says, “and I remember I got so provoked. She said, ‘I don’t believe I’ll go to the session,’ and I said, ‘Why, Billie, we’ve made such an effort to get here,’ and she eventually with with me. She needed someone to lean on. And to her the little boy was alive yet when you were with her.”

But in the end, Billie Sicard simply could not manage any more.

“She knew she needed help,” says her friend. “She just didn’t know how to ask for it.”