The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  He remembered it clearly now. She had coaxed him into her parents' apartment. Something about fixing a fuse and she had stood up on a high chair to show him where the fuse box was, but he had been watching instead what she preferred to exhibit for his pleasure. Naturally it began the chain of events that ended in the inevitable ritual.

  "I used to watch you all the time from my window," Eileen Goldberg said. "Did you ever notice? Did you ever feel my eyes on you?"

  He wondered whether he had, recalling now through the prism of time, the memory turgid, without substance.

  "Of course," he responded--concerned now about his future, thinking only whether she would serve his need.

  "My last husband died three years ago," she said as they walked along the well-lighted path that skirted the swimming pool. He watched the shimmering play of lights beneath the soft water. The air felt light, and he could detect the scent of tropical flowers. He thought suddenly of how much he loved Florida, its weather, the sun, they joy it gave.

  "He was a fine man, a fine man, a diamond cutter, very skilled. He was very good to me. I vowed that when he died I would never marry again."

  "I only married the one time," he told her. He felt himself being oddly truthful. He had never trod down the same path twice, not with a woman, except on very rare occasions. He wondered if he and Eileen Goldberg had ever talked. But he had only been with her that once, a brief acquaintance. Through the sludge of memory came the image of her flaming pubic hair around the beet-red organ. He recalled his curiosity about it, chuckling to himself. He wondered if time had changed it any.

  "Five times," she said, holding up one hand palm outward, fingers extended, a pugnacious gesture. "I've been married five times."

  "You've been a busy woman," he said, his interest aroused, remembering her aggressiveness.

  "All in all I've been married thirty years out of the last thirty-eight. I have two children by my first marriage. Both straight as arrows, thank God. More like their father. A yalt."

  "You're probably a difficult woman to live with," he said, posing the statement as a concealed question.

  "Not difficult," she responded quickly. "Besides, one husband died, so he doesn't count. I was married to the first one for five years, but he was not much of a man. Oh, he adored me, worshiped the ground I walked on, but he had a very cold nature. It wasn't his fault, I suppose. Maybe it's my red hair." She took his hand and squeezed it.

  "And the second?"

  "You find my life interesting, Mr. Bernstein?"

  "Max."

  "My third husband was named Max." She paused. "My second husband, Henry, was the superintendent of our building."

  "Ahha."

  She poked him playfully on his forearm.

  "I know what you're thinking."

  "And I know what you did."

  She giggled.

  "It was a bit messy. He was also married but we got divorces and settled down like two lovebirds for another five years. Actually I enjoyed my life with Henry. He was a very pleasant fellow. Very warmhearted and good in other ways."

  "Then what went wrong?"

  "Money. He never made any money and I had two kids to support. So I married Max. Max Hornstein. He lived in the building, a dress manufacturer, a bachelor. I met him on one of the benches outside. He was very good to my children. It was what they call a friendly divorce. Henry was still the super."

  "You saw him after you married Max?"

  "Of course. Who was going to fix the sink?" She twittered like a young girl holding up a hand to her mouth. "Max was much older than me. A very lively man. You would never have known it."

  Her life had totally absorbed his interest as they walked slowly down the path. Near the pool, they sat down on two plastic chairs and looked into the illuminated water.

  "He was twenty-five years older than me. He was in his sixties when I married him. After ten years he became a bit of a kvetch with lots of ailments. I'm not a nurse. I just didn't have the patience."

  "So you divorced him?"

  "I didn't take a nickel. My son and daughter thought I was crazy. Sometimes I think they're right. Luckily, though, Louis came along." She snickered. "He didn't exactly come along. He owned the candy store downstairs in the building. I really enjoyed that experience."

  "So what happened?"

  "Louis was a very jealous man. He had an enormous ego and every time I waited on male customers he would fly into a rage and accuse me of everything under the sun. You know how that can get on your nerves."

  "I know," he said. He watched her profile in the light, the tiny nose, the high forehead under the fringe of red curls and the puddle of flesh that the lower part of the face had become. His eyes followed the profile onto her heavy bosom, remembering her figure then, the alabaster whiteness of her skin. Why is she telling me all this, he wondered, feeling the magnetism of her femininity.

  "I got rid of Louis as fast as I could. Then, of course, I married Herman. I was very happy with Herman. You wouldn't know it to look at him. He had fire. I used to tell him that his eyes burned like the diamonds he cut. Too bad we only had a few years. I think I might have been faithful to Herman if he had lived." She hadn't meant to say it, Max knew, but it had come out and there was no taking it back, not in this moment of shared intimacy between them. It was odd, how suddenly close to her he felt.

  "What could I do?" She sighed and patted his hand. He felt the hairs stand up on the back of it and a familiar sensation in his loins.

  "I'm irresistible," she said. "I don't know why it is. God made me that way, I guess."

  "I know what you mean," he whispered, gripping her hand and pressing it to his lips. I have found her, he thought. His eyes misted, remembering his brother's words.

  "I am coming home with you," he said.

  "Of course." She shrugged, lifting her face to his, waiting for the inevitability of his kiss.

  The Braggart

  It was not that Molly Berkowitz was intolerant of other people bragging about their children. She always listened patiently, with attentiveness, hiding her heartache and pain. Invariably, the braggarts talked endlessly about their successful children--doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, daughters who had either married well or made it big in the business or professional world.

  She imagined that she hid her desperation well. What use did it do to trample on someone else's joy because of her own pain. In that sense, she felt herself wise. Besides, she was a widow and to criticize what to many was the single crowning glory of their lives might jeopardize her friendship with the group. And the life of a lonely, friendless widow in Sunset Village could be a true purgatory. So she held her tongue, and bore her heartache as she listened to her friends recount the victories and glories of their children.

  "My Barry opened another store last week. He called me and sent me another hundred dollars as a good-luck gift. He now has fifty stores." It was Emma Mandel talking, a never-ending avalanche of braggadocio.

  "How wonderful," Molly Berkowitz would respond.

  But Emma's story would set off a chain reaction as, one after another, Molly would be treated to a hurricane of repetitive one-upmanships from her group.

  "My Joycie has become a full professor," Helen Goldstein would say smugly, tipping her nose skyward in a pose of superiority. You can't buy intellect with money, she seemed to be saying, requiring a blatant response from an unabashed materialist, usually Dolly Cohen, who, along with Emma, was one of her closest friends.

  "My grandson Larry got his car last week, a Mercedes," she would say smugly. "All my grandchildren get a Mercedes when they pass their driver's test."

  "How wonderful," Molly would respond, forcing a smile of shared joy.

  "And when they're twenty-one, they get a trip to Europe for three months."

  "How wonderful."

  "And when they marry, my Bruce gives them a house in Scarsdale and sets up a trust fund for their children."

  "Do they have children w
hen they get married?" one of the women would interject, winking at the others, breaking the tension in Molly.

  "They don't have children," another wag among the yentas would wisecrack--usually one of the other women who also bragged about her children. "They buy their children in Saks." Then, after a pause: "In the section next to better dresses."

  "Wait. Wait until they get old. They'll have everything. There'll be nothing to look forward to."

  "When their teeth go, they'll put in a false set with diamonds, so when they smile people should know how much they got." The women laughed.

  "They should tell that to Sam Fine."

  "I couldn't picture Sam in diamond teeth."

  "What's wrong!" Emma said. "If you've got it, flaunt it."

  "Really, girls," Dolly Cohen would admonish them, although she was obviously secretly proud to emphasize Emma's point. "What is my Bruce going to do with it? Take it with him?"

  "He might give it to you," someone said.

  "I wouldn't take it," Dolly Cohen insisted. Pride was the only thing that made the bragging palatable, a vindication. Molly knew what pride meant. It was the source of her pain. Her children could hardly be bragged about. They were total failures, economically, and, it seemed, emotionally. Her daughter, Alma, was in the throes of a bitter divorce from her third husband, and her son, Harry, was a taxi driver in New York, scratching to make a living, not even owning his own cab.

  Many a night she had cried herself to sleep thinking of their condition, wondering where she and Al had gone wrong. We worked day and night in the grocery store, she would rationalize, wondering if that had been the real reason, knowing in her heart that it couldn't be. They had always been present to provide advice and love to their children, who also helped in the store. What had they done to make their children turn out so bad? Her mind spent hours dwelling in the past, groping through the early days, sifting and evaluating decisions that might have pointed to the wrong direction. Where had Al and she gone wrong? They had always stressed education, and though they had been foreign-born, they had forced themselves to improve their English so that their children might not be ashamed of their accents. Al never did succeed in eliminating his, but that was because he arrived in America as a teen-ager and his speech patterns were already fixed. Al was fifteen years older than she, a good man, a devoted husband and father. She bitterly regretted not having been more forceful when Harry wanted to quit high school--at least that was the illusion she liked to live with. Actually she had raised hell and invoked every tactic of persuasion she knew: hysterics, guilt, dire warnings, threats.

  "Without education you're a nobody in this country, a nobody," she had cried. And when that admonishment had no effect, she used other tactics.

  "You're breaking my heart," she had said, meaning it.

  For Harry, the die was cast and World War II came as a welcome relief for him, although he had to beg for his parents' consent because he was only seventeen when he enlisted. Molly could never erase that time from her consciousness, as if it were a trauma. Harry had gone overseas with the first wave of the AEF to Ireland and had served all over Europe, and although he was a military policeman and generally in the rear of the combat zone, she had worried about him constantly. Perhaps, she thought, it was this fact of her worrying so much about Harry that had started Alma down the wrong path. She had been a pretty little thing with genuine reddish-blond hair and green eyes and a figure that had matured earlier than her mind. She had, Molly knew, mistaken lust for adoration, even love, and no amount of explanation ever managed to get that point across.

  It came as a shock to her to discover that her daughter was not a virgin at fourteen. It was during the war--Harry had been overseas two years by then--and Alma, a freshman at Erasmus Hall High School, seemed a normal adolescent. She would kiss her mother and father every day before she left for school, warming their hearts. She is a good girl, a wonderful girl, they told themselves proudly.

  The explosion of that illusion seemed to mark the sealed fate of her hopes for her children. She had been busy with a customer when the telephone call came, the ring persistent from the back of the store. Surely a customer, she thought as she excused herself and rushed to answer the phone. An angry voice screeched into her ear.

  "Am I speaking to Mrs. Berkowitz?" the voice snapped.

  "This is Mrs. Berkowitz." Her heart lurched. She thought perhaps it was someone with word about Harry.

  "Will you keep your whore away from my daughter?"

  "What?" Molly was confused, yet relieved to find it was not about Harry. Obviously this was the wrong number.

  "I want you to keep Alma away from my daughter."

  "Alma?"

  "This is Mrs. Kugel, Marilyn's mother."

  Of course, Marilyn, one of Alma's friends. She would remember what came next for the rest of her life.

  "I work all day. Today I came home sick. I found them in my apartment. They were in bed with boys."

  There seemed no logic in the conversation, in the revelation. Her Alma? There must be some mistake. Her tongue froze in her mouth.

  "She has ruined my daughter. I saw them. I nearly vomited."

  "You are mistaken," Molly managed to whisper.

  "I saw them!" the woman shouted. Molly felt weak in the knees. Cold sweat poured from her armpits. Her little girl? It was impossible. Then Mrs. Kugel had hung up.

  The confrontation with Alma was the first of many, the beginning of an endless chain, always accompanied by tears and hysterics and, when Al was alive, with threats of "telling your father." Always, the confrontations ended with confessions, tears, and exhaustion.

  "But why?" To Molly this had always been the central question, the eye of the enigma. Was it something we have done? she wondered.

  "I don't know, Ma."

  "Is there something wrong, something missing?" It had seemed such a monumental sin in those days, and she had concluded that the sense of right and wrong was somehow missing in her daughter's make-up.

  "I don't know, Ma."

  At great expense she had taken her daughter to psychiatrists, thinking she was being very modern and understanding, but it hadn't helped. Nothing helped and as her daughter's promiscuity advanced and she became the talk of her school and the neighborhood, Molly had no choice except to accept the fact of her daughter's behavior.

  What it had led to was three broken marriages, although she was happy that one of them had produced a lovely grandchild, a beautiful boy, gentle and polite, whom she had practically raised. And yet, despite all the heartache and disappointments and the obvious failures of her children, she still loved them and they still loved her. An emotional upset, invariably involving some man, always brought Alma running to her mother. She was in her midforties now and although the cute little figure had thickened and the blonde hair now required the help of dyes, she still retained, Molly thought, vestiges of attractiveness.

  "I've botched things up, haven't I, Ma?" she would say when she had settled in at her mother's condominium after the drive from up north. Molly sat beside her on the couch holding her hand.

  "You're still my daughter, Alma."

  "Thank God for that. I'm gonna change, Ma. I'm gonna put it all behind me now."

  "I know, darling."

  "No. Really, Ma. This time I'm going to get it together." She would look at her mother and tears would begin to flood her eyes. "We haven't made you very proud, have we, Ma?"

  She could remember then, the pain inflicted by her friends.

  "Your kids are just a couple of losers," Alma would say, wallowing in self-pity, searching for the needed kind word.

  "I have two of the sweetest children in the whole world," Molly would respond, watching the words soothe, like medicine.

  "And I have the most wonderful mother."

  It was, of course, her secret pride. And while she would not dare confess it to her friends, she knew that, despite their failures, her children still came to her for emotional repair. My
children still need me, she told herself proudly.

  Harry would visit her every few months, taking the bus from New York. He always arrived exhausted, more tired than the visit before, although he tried to put on a brave face. He was over fifty now, paunchy and bald, with deep black circles under his eyes.

  "I look like hell, don't I, Ma?" he would say as Molly watched him eat the chicken she had roasted in anticipation of his visit. His wife, Natalie, never visited, nor did Molly ever inquire the reasons. Harry had enough troubles, she thought.

  "A few days in the sun and you'll feel better."

  "I wish I could live here permanently, Ma," he would confess, biting into the chicken like a man assuaging a terrible hunger. When he had finished the meal, he would light a cheap cigar and stretch out on the couch in the living room.

  "New York's a jungle. I was robbed three times last month alone. Pushing a hack is like riding around in hell."

  "You should do something else."

  "What the devil else am I good for. I've got no skills. No education. And no luck. Ma, if Natalie didn't work, I couldn't make it. How's that for laughs? Some reward, eh? I fought for this goddamned country when they needed me. And now all I get is a good swift shove in the butt."

  "Maybe you could find a job down here," Molly would say, searching for ways in which to comfort her son.

  "Are you kidding?" he would say, closing his eyes. "What the hell would I do for a living?"

  Before he left, Molly would always thrust a handful of money into his hand.

  "What's that for?" he would say, staring dumbly at the bills.

  "I can't give my son a present?"

  He would put the money in his pocket and shake his head.

  "I'm an old woman, Harry. What does it matter?" He would take the money, perhaps out of superstition, as if it represented some talisman, something to renew his hope.

  She never complained of her children's failure to her friends although she felt that they did surmise her pain and that their knowing did not prevent them from bragging about their children's success. Nor did it interfere with their friendship. Widows at Sunset Village had a great deal in common, not just the loss of their mates. They needed each other to ease the loneliness and help ward off the occasional bouts of despair.