Never Too Late for Love

by Warren Adler

  "We need him like a hole in the head," Itzie said when he had gone.

  Still, the game endured. Perhaps it was simply inertia, Hymie suspected, because he no longer looked forward to the game, but kept playing.

  "You look terrible," Muriel said to him one Wednesday morning.

  "I'm just a little tired." He had come in later than usual after driving over the beltway from Flatbush to Forest Hills to play at Benny Bernstein's house.

  "I think the Goldbergs are getting ready to go to Florida," Muriel said.

  "Blintzie?"

  "Their kids live in Palm Beach now."

  "He hadn't mentioned it."

  "I know." Muriel said. "I spoke to Francie. Blintzie is afraid to tell you."

  "It'll mean the end of the game."

  "That's why he's afraid to tell you. You couldn't really play three-handed poker." They would have to bring in more strangers.

  "Maybe we should go, too," Muriel sighed.

  It was time, but Hymie had been afraid to broach the subject with the boys. Maybe we're getting old, he thought. Benny's hands shook now, and Itzie was growing deaf. Blintzie was going to the bathroom more frequently, sometimes in the middle of a suspenseful game.

  "We're a bunch of alta cockers," Hymie told Muriel, emphasizing that perhaps it was time to head to Florida. Hymie was eligible for social security. They had saved a few dollars. Others were managing. Besides, if Blintzie was going, the game was over anyway. What would life be without it?

  The week before the Cohens and the Goldbergs left for Florida, the foursome had a farewell game. None of them could concentrate though, even Benny, who for forty-two years had quietly kept his mind on every card, every nuance. He could read them all like an open book. After an hour, they gave up.

  "What the hell am I going to do next Tuesday night?" Itzie said, his voice pitched higher, masking his emotion.

  "You'll find some other fish," Hymie said.

  "It took me more than forty years to psyche you guys out. I'm too old to start another con game."

  "You think that's it?" Benny asked. His hands shook as he fingered the passive deck.

  "What?"

  "That it's because we're too old."

  "Everything in life comes to an end, that's all there is to it. Even the game."

  "I never thought the game would end," Itzie said. "God, I really never thought it would end." His eyes misted.

  "I wish to hell I could persuade my wife to go to Florida," Benny said suddenly. "She won't leave the kids."

  "And Sunset Village isn't ritzy enough," Hymie said.

  "That, too," Benny admitted.

  "I hate Florida," Itzie said. "I can't stand the sun." He paused, sniffling, his eyes lowered. "Bet Solly and Mortie will be happy to see you guys. Hell, you'll start another game down there."

  "Ah, they probably have their own game already," Blintzie said.

  The Cohens and Goldbergs arrived at Sunset Village on Saturday and spent the entire weekend fixing up their condominiums, with the Krubitches and the Lebows dividing their time in helping the new couples get settled.

  "Some place, eh?" Solly said. "It's like they moved Brooklyn in a mass migration."

  "You didn't miss it?" Hymie asked. They were sitting on Hymie's back porch sipping soft drinks.

  "I missed the game," Mortie said. "I missed giving my money to Benny every Tuesday."

  "You don't have a regular game?" Blintzie asked.

  "Not really," Solly said, looking at Mortie.

  "What he means is that we play, but its not a regular game. Not like the Tuesday game."

  "Well, the game wasn't the same after you guys left." Hymie said. "We got fill-ins but it wasn't the same. And last week we played four handed.... It just wasn't the same."

  "Nothing's the same" Mortie said, a shadow crossing his face. "They have this big card room, bigger than a football field. But I don't like to play there. Too noisy. Too crowded. Not like our Tuesday game."

  "Today's Tuesday," Solly said.

  "Funny, I lost track of time," Hymie said.

  "If it wasn't for CNN, I wouldn't know what day it was," Mortie said.

  "So, what are we waiting for?" Hymie asked. Out came the cards and chips and up went the bridge table.

  "Deal," Hymie said, listening to the shuffle of the cards and enjoying the familiar movements as Solly's fingers worked the deck.

  "There they go," Muriel said to the other wives, sitting in the living room.

  "It must be Tuesday," Francie Goldberg said.

  It wasn't until Benny Bernstein had a stroke that they finally added a fifth player. Somehow he had persuaded his wife to move to Florida and, luckily, the builder added a few medium-rise elevator buildings, fancier than the barrack-like apartments the others lived in. The stroke affected only his legs, and he walked slowly, with an odd halting gait. His hands still shook, but his card sense was remarkably intact.

  "Well, there goes extra cash," Hymie said, as Benny scooped up the first pot.

  "The shark has come home."

  "God, I missed you guys," Benny said. "It was hell. And you know what I believe?" He paused and looked at each of them, in turn. "I would never have had that stroke if we had continued the game."

  "You trying to make us feel guilty, schmuck?" Solly said.

  "I don't care what you say. I believe it."

  "Poor Itzie," Blintzie said suddenly.

  "He'll be here," Benny said. "Give him time."

  "But he hates Florida."

  "He'll be here."

  "Look at him," Hymie laughed. "We leave him alone for a few months and he becomes a fortune teller."

  Itzie and his wife arrived in Sunset Village the following winter. Itzie sported a hearing aid now.

  "I still hate Florida," he announced, as he sat down to play on the first Tuesday after his arrival. "The sun is about the most disgusting sight I ever saw."

  "Who needed you?" Hymie said.

  "You needed me," Itzie said. "The game is always better with six."

  "The perfect number," Benny Bernstein said, arranging his cards and contemplating his hand.

  "He's still winning?"

  "Why not? We supported him for forty-five years."

  "Forty-seven," Mortie corrected.

  And so the game continued. They didn't play in the card room, but instead rotated between apartments. The game seemed to have come full circle.

  "You should have seen Brownsville," Itzie told the others one evening. "I went back just before I came down here. I just drove through it with the windows and doors locked. It's all gone. Hoffman's is boarded up and old-man Silverstein's garage is caved in. It's all gone, finished."

  "I don't ever want to go back," Hymie said.

  "I cried like a baby," Itzie continued.

  They noticed Blintzie Goldberg's eyes failing when he mistook the Jack of Clubs for the Queen of Spades insisting, at first, that he was right.

  "You should have your eyes examined," Hymie said. He hadn't meant it to be sarcastic or sinister, but Blintzie flushed a deep crimson, protesting that there was nothing wrong with his eyes. The doctors thought otherwise. Blintzie was going blind. He had always had diabetes, but his insulin shots were becoming less effective and, as his sight got worse, they had to help him identify the cards quite often.

  "It breaks my heart," Hymie told Muriel one night after he returned from the game. "Itzie can barely hear. Benny's hands shake so much he has all he can do to hold his cards, and Mortie keeps popping little white pills for his heart."

  Hymie sighed and tried to go to sleep.

  "But the worst is Blintzie," he continued. "One of us has to drop out of every hand to help him play his cards. We whisper his hand to him and he whispers back on how to play. He's absolutely the worst player, even when his eyes worked."

  One morning, Blintzie's wife came to Hymie's and Muriel's apartment. She had been crying, and her gnarled arthritic fingers clutched a moist handkerchief.

&
nbsp; "He can't see anymore," she said.

  "That bad?"

  "The worse part is that he thinks he's a burden." She dissolved into tears, her shoulders shaking. "Now he wants to quit the game."

  "Quit the game?"

  "He told me," she said. "Somebody has to tell him what cards he has."

  "I'm not sure he knew when he could see," Hymie said, hoping the humor might soothe her. She smiled thinly, accepting the warmth of it.

  "I'm afraid if he quits, he'll just give up," Francie said.

  Hymie patted her arm.

  "It's no trouble for us," Hymie said. "None at all."

  Not a word of protest had been raised by any of them. Somehow the game got played, though Blintzie's decisions were always bad ones and none of them would dare interfere. It wouldn't, after all, be fair.

  One Tuesday, near the end of the game, Blintzie suddenly groaned and his sightless eyes watered.

  "There's something I got to say," he said. They had expected it, but not this quickly.

  "I've cheated." Blintzie said, his fingers clutching the edge of the table. The men looked at each other. Hymie put a finger over his lips.

  "I've been doing it for years," Blintzie said. "And now my conscience is beginning to bother me. You guys have been so damned good to me, so patient. I can't see a goddamned thing, and I know I'm ruining the game."

  "The last part is bullshit," Hymie said.

  "You've always been a blind poker player," Benny said.

  "Well, you guys have been the blind ones," Blintzie protested. "It's begun to bother me and I want you to know that I didn't do it deliberately."

  "The least you could do is tell us how you did it?" Itzie asked.

  "That, I'll never tell." Blintzie said. The confession seemed to have eased his burden.

  "All I can say," Benny said with a wink, "is that whatever you did, it couldn't have been so bad. You lost anyway. Now, if I cheated, that would be something else."

  "I just wanted you to know," Blintzie said.

  "Somebody deal, please," Mortie cried impatiently. "You guys are getting like a bunch of old yentas."

  Benny Bernstein's second stroke complicated the game even further. It affected his hands and his speech, and he had to be moved in a wheelchair. One of the men would pick him up at his apartment and wheel him to the game while another would act as a seeing-eye dog for Blintzie. The person who stayed out for each hand now would not only have to whisper the hand to Blintzie but play the hand for Benny, following his whispered instructions. Unfortunately, Mortie's heart condition was too aggravated by Blintzie's playing to make him an effective assistant, and Itzie was too deaf to hear the proposed options.

  This meant that only Solly and Hymie could be dealt out.

  "Why don't you stop already?" Muriel asked one Tuesday when Hymie returned from the game.

  "Stop the game?" He looked at her as if she was crazy.

  Actually, except for the hardship of playing, there was no change in the rhythm of the game. Benny always won. Blintzie invariably lost, though Benny occasionally made an error on purpose to let Blintzie win a hand. But no one ever mentioned it, and the game continued.

  One Tuesday while playing seven-card stud, Benny's head slumped over his chest, a gurgle came from his throat, and he expired quietly. It came at an odd time for Benny, as he had just asked that his final raise be made. Solly was acting for both him and Blintzie, and Hymie was in the game. It was a big pot, and Hymie had just called Benny's raise, convinced that his Kings over full house beat both Blintzie's possible straight flush, which seemed an obvious bluff, and Benny's possible Jacks over full house. Hymie was relishing the possibility of winning, on the heels of three weeks of losing.

  "I think Benny's gone," Solly said searching for Benny's pulse on a vein in his neck.

  They looked at the slumped figure in the wheelchair. Even Blintzie's sightless eyes turned toward him. They were playing in Hymie's kitchen, and the room was quiet except for the steady purr of the air conditioner. No one stirred and Hymie had the sensation that they were frozen in a kind of eternal tableaux, like the picture of them that had appeared in the Sunset Village newspaper over the caption "Fifty Year Poker Game: Longest Ever."

  "My God," Mortie exclaimed. He was the first to stir, reaching into a pocket for his pill box. "Benny dead?"

  There were a pile of chips in the center of the table, and the three hands lay in front of the three players.

  "We better call his wife," Itzie said.

  "Not until we know," Blintzie said, his eyes roaming uselessly around the table. Hymie was silent, the shock of Benny's sudden death engulfing him.

  "He'd want it that way," Blintzie said.

  "We owe him that," Mortie agreed.

  "I call," Blintzie cried.

  "And me," Hymie said.

  Solly slowly lifted Benny's cards.

  "I'm sure Benny would have wanted it that way," Solly said. He knew, of course, what cards were in the hole.

  "Four Jacks" he called, looking at Benny's immobile face, growing swiftly gray.

  "He had all the luck," Blintzie said, feeling for his cards and turning them over.

  "Lucky bastard," Hymie said, his voice cracking.

  They put Benny's last pot in the open coffin in the funeral parlor, where it laid overnight before the funeral.

  "Who knows?" Hymie said, "Where he's going, he may need the chips." He wanted to laugh, but his reflexes wouldn't respond. Even Itzie, always quick with a wise crack, could only shake his head.

  They skipped the game the following Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Then a month went by. None of the guys mentioned it.

  "No more game?" Muriel asked one night.

  Hymie hesitated. "I hate four-handed poker," he whispered, turning away to hide his tears.

  THE ANGEL OF MERCY

  They called her "the Angel of Mercy," and there was no mistaking the sarcasm. They observed her on her daily rounds, a bent-over snip of a woman, with piano legs that made one wonder how she was able to get around in the first place, matted gray hair over which she wore a yellow bandanna, and a faded old-fashioned black dress, a little shiny with use. She wore sensible but quite ugly laced shoes, a necklace, obviously a piece of Yemenite jewelry that someone might have brought her from Israel, and she always carried her pocketbook, a heavy brown thing, by the handle so that it hung down to her knees.

  Not even her closest neighbor on the ground-floor row of condominiums had ever been inside of her place, seeing it only from the outside, as the woman opened or closed her door. She caught sight of a rather overstuffed but threadbare couch and an upholstered chair with stiff doilies pinned to its backrest and arms. While she never really got close enough, the neighbor had the impression--just the impression--that the place smelled a trifle unclean, musty and old. But this could have been the impression that the woman herself gave. It was hard to tell how she might have looked as a girl, or even a middle-aged woman, since old age had shaped and gnarled her so completely. The Florida sun had tanned her deeply lined face, which looked like a muddy-colored brier, and only the fact that she smeared a deep-red lipstick too generously on her cracked lips and put two circles of rouge on her cheeks provided evidence of a still-lingering feminine vanity.

  It was unfortunate that she gave such an impression, for she hardly thought of herself as eccentric, and the sick and infirm that she visited daily, sometimes five or six in a day, actually began to look forward to her visits. They, too, had formed bad first impressions and were always surprised when she first showed up, wondering, after seeing her ancient face, whether she was the harbinger of death. This, in itself, was neither strange nor morbid, because in a community like Sunset Village, death was an ever-present specter, actually a friend who seemed to be watching everyone from some balcony in the heavens, observing all the aged Jews and trying to decide who goes next.

  Maybe it was something genetic, something buried in the Jewish psyche, the thing that gave th
e world so many Jewish comedians, but, at least here in Sunset Village, death was treated somewhat as a joke, a kind of embarrassment, like a cuckolded husband in a French farce. That was probably why a sick person, lying supine in his bed gasping for air, could actually smile when he saw this little bent-over woman appear and draw out of her huge pocketbook a cellophane-wrapped bag of candies tied with a tiny red ribbon.

  "Well, it's all over now," a patient would say when she left. "The Angel of Mercy has arrived?" But when she came again and the patient was still alive, she was treated with somewhat more respect and might even be offered tea and cakes, which she rarely refused.

  "You feel better, Mr. Brodsky?" she would ask, parting her over-red lips in an odd grin.

  "I feel wonderful, Mrs. Klugerman. I'm already in the undertaker's cash-flow projections." Mr. Brodsky had been an accountant, and the Angel of Mercy assumed that this might be a joke, so she smiled more broadly.

  "Why should you make them rich?" she would say. Such a remark would provide the patient with a key to the Angel of Mercy's character and would, despite his first impression, cheer him.

  Sometimes a healthy spouse, child or other relative would be annoyed at the woman's constant visits.

  "She's a ghoul. I understand she spends her entire day visiting the sick."

  "So what's wrong with that?" the patient would say.

  "Ghoulish, that's all."

  "She annoys you?"

  "It's weird."

  "If you're flat on your back, it's not so weird."

  In a place like Sunset Village, with most of the population well over sixty and growing older, the sickbed activity was, if the term could be applied in connection with Yetta Klugerman, frenetic. There she would go, ploddingly along, using the little open-air shuttle bus to get around, visiting her wards. She never left the premises of Sunset Village. This meant that she could choose from three types of patients: the not-very-sick, the post-operative, and the terminal.

  The odd thing about her visits was, from the patients' point of view, that she revealed very little about herself and her history. This was odd in Sunset Village, where everyone at that stage in life had a history. She was friendly, humorous, gentle, even loving, but when she left there was never any completed picture about her; it was as though she were an apparition.