Never Too Late for Love
Read Never Too Late for Love Online
Authors: Warren Adler
Tags: #Aged, Florida, Older People, Fiction, Retirees, General, Action and Adventure, Short Stories (Single Author), Social Science, Gerontology
BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER
Banquet Before Dawn
Blood Ties
Cult
Death of a Washington Madame
Empty Treasures
Flanagan's Dolls
Funny Boys
Madeline's Miracles
Mourning Glory
Natural Enemies
Private Lies
Random Hearts
Residue
The Casanova Embrace
The Children of the Roses
The David Embrace
The Henderson Equation
The Housewife Blues
The War of the Roses
The Womanizer
Trans-Siberian Express
Twilight Child
Undertow
We Are Holding the President
Hostage
SHORT STORIES
Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden
Never Too Late For Love
New York Echoes
New York Echoes 2
The Sunset Gang
MYSTERIES
American Sextet
American Quartet
Immaculate Deception
Senator Love
The Ties That Bind
The Witch of Watergate
Copyright © 1995 by Warren Adler.
ISBN 978-1-59006-091-9
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com
STONEHOUSE PRESS
To My Grandparents and all the generations that came after.
Those who believe that life after sixty is one long
exercise in decline will discover some startling surprises in these stories.
They are about people who have learned the hard lessons of a long life, people
who are still thirsty for living, still searching for the laughter and the joy,
still striving for the glories, wisdom and pleasures of the mind and the body,
still defying time and trying their damnedest to taste the last good drop of
vitality before the inevitable ending.
Most of these stories were inspired by the sharp
observations of my parents, who chose to leave the ever-changing and sometimes
dangerous urban world of their youth and middle age to live out their final
years in what they hoped would be a more placid and predictable environment--in
their case, Florida. What they found there is not uncommon to most people in
their latter years, who choose sunny climes for their last hurrahs.
Many of the stories are bittersweet, some more bitter than
sweet. The reality is that age--contrary to the view of so many in the younger
generations--enhances, rather than diminishes the urge to participate in life.
As I move into the orbit of my parents' demographics, I am
more than ever convinced that age is no barrier to sex, love, passion, virtue,
greed, joy, humor, laughter, wisdom and folly. These stories should offer the
hope that age is not to be feared, but to be welcomed, savored and enjoyed.
Warren Adler
Jackson, Wyoming
When it was first organized, the Sunset Village Yiddish
Club met once a week. Members talked in Yiddish, read passages from the Yiddish
papers to each other and discussed, in Yiddish, those works of Sholem Aleichem
and Isaac Bashevis Singer that they had read during the week--in the original
Yiddish, of course.
The members enjoyed it so much that they sometimes stayed
in the all-purpose room at the Sunset Village Clubhouse for hours after their
weekly meetings there were over, talking in Yiddish as if the language were the
only logical form of communication. Finally, the Yiddish Club had to start
meeting three times a week, though most of the members would have preferred to
attend every day.
There were a great many reasons for the phenomena, their
club president would tell them. His name was Melvin Meyer, but in the tradition
of the club, he was called Menasha, his name in Yiddish. He had a masterly
command of the Yiddish language. Both of his parents had been actors in the
heyday of the Yiddish stage, when there were more than twenty Yiddish theaters
on the Lower East Side of New York alone, showing at least 300 productions a
year.
"There is, of course, the element of nostalgia,"
Menasha would tell the group pedantically, his rimless glasses imposing in
their severity. "It is the language of our childhood, of our parents and
grandparents. To most of us, it was our original language, the language in which
we first expressed our fears, our anxieties, our loves, and the language in
which our parents forged our childhood. The link with the past is compelling.
And, naturally, there is the beauty of the language itself--its rare
expressiveness, its untranslatable qualities, its subtlety and
suppleness--which makes it something special, simply in expressing it and
keeping it alive."
To both Bill (Velvil) Finkelstein and Jennie (Genendel)
Goldfarb, Menasha's words were thrilling, but merely suggestive of the depths
of their true feelings. They joined the club on the same day and, they
discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed.
Each of their spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed
absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture; they were
more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool gossiping with their
friends.
Because they had joined on the same day, they had sat next
to each other and were able to start up a conversation on the subject of their
first day at the club.
"It's amazing," Genendel said when the meeting
adjourned. "I haven't spoken it since my mother died twenty years ago, yet
I caught every word. God, I feel good speaking that language. It brings back
the memories of my childhood, my mother, those delicious Friday nights."
"Oh, those wonderful Friday nights," Velvil
chimed back, his mind jogged by the previously dormant images now sprung to
life--the candles, the rich rhythm of Yiddish speech, the smells of fricassee
and honey cake. He looked at Genendel as someone familiar, someone that he had
perhaps known in his youth, or at least someone recognizable to his spirit.
She was smallish, thinner than his wife, Mimi, who allowed
herself to run to fat. Lines were embedded in Genendel's tanned face, but when
the light hit her at a special angle, the wrinkles disappeared and, with them,
the years. She looked then like a young girl. When he told her this after they
had become intimate in their conversation, she pursed her lips in mock
disbelief and punched him lightly on the arm. But he could see she was pleased.
"Thank God you're telling me that in Yiddish,"
she said. "If my David would hear it, he'd think you were flirting."
"I am."
She put a hand over her mouth and giggled like a school
girl. It hadn't seemed possible to her that anything could occur beyond their
lighthearted banter, their kibitzing in Yiddish. She dismissed such thoughts as
idle, forbidden speculation. Yet they would sit for a long time after club
meetings were over, discussing their lives, their children, their fortunes. At
first, their exchanges were purely factual, charged with details of their
biographies.
"I worked as a lawyer for the Veterans Administration
and hated every minute of it," Velvil said, "but I was frightened to
death." He was surprised that he told her that. He had never referred to
being frightened, except to himself, normally characterizing his long term as a
civil servant merely as "an easy buck with no hassle."
What he really meant, he knew, was that he had been too
scared to leave the government.
"But I had two kids, and it was safe. So we lived in
Flatbush and the kids grew up and we waited out my pension. Not very exciting.
My parents had greater dreams for me, but they had scrambled so hard for money
that they made me paranoid about it."
"Are you sorry you stayed with the government so
long?"
Why is she probing my regrets, he wondered, yet
understanding the special poignancy that Yiddish could inject into such
inquiries.
"Of course, I regret it. But I went through the
motions for my family."
She, too, could understand that kind of sacrifice. She also
had longed for other things.
"I wanted to travel," she said, lifting her eyes
to his. He had all his hair, she noted, and part of it was still black. It was
his most striking feature. A handsome man, she concluded to herself, feeling a
faint stirring, a mysterious memory of yearning.
"Once, we did go on a B'nai B'rith package tour of Israel," she continued. "I loved it, not necessarily because of my Jewishness but
because it was exotic. It all looked like a movie set. David, after the first
day, didn't tour. He hates touring. And I love it. That's why we never went
anywhere else."
"I love to travel," Velvil said suddenly, knowing
it was true, though he had never traveled either.
"Where have you been?"
"Not very many places." he said. But it was
important for him to be scrupulously truthful with her, like strangers meeting
on a train who say things to each other that they wouldn't dare say to anyone
they really knew. "In fact, no place. My wife would never leave the
children."
Sitting in the back corner of the room after the meetings
adjourned, losing all sense of time, they picked through their lives with care
and detail as if embroidering a tapestry.
"I have a son and a daughter," Genendel told him.
By then, their Yiddish returned to them in full force, their vocabulary
amplified, dredged up from some secret place in their subconscious. They could
be both fluent and subtle, the little nuances delicate but sure. "They
were good kids. All that's left now is merely the loving of them."
"Yes," he responded, his heart leaping as she
struck just the right chord. "I must remember that way of putting it....
Mimi thinks there should be more, extracting the last bit of tribute, making
them always feel that they haven't done enough somehow, keeping that tug of
guilt in force, always taut. She whines to them constantly on the phone. I tell
her she's wrong, but she insists that daughters must care more. We have two
daughters. I keep telling myself I love them, but I sometimes have doubts. They
are not really very nice people."
"What a terrible thing to say."
"It's the truth." He blushed, wondering if she
sensed the special joy of telling it. He had vowed to himself that he would
never express anything but the truth in Yiddish, in this special language
between them.
"Where is it written that parents should love their
children and vice versa?" he pressed, the Yiddish rolling easily off his
tongue.
"It is a forbidden thought," she answered, but
the idea of it intrigued her. David, her husband, had always been the
sentimentalist, the worrier. It was he who fidgeted when the children didn't
call at their accustomed intervals.
"The Ten Commandments talk of honor, not love."
"So you've become a Talmudic scholar in your old
age," she bantered, a sure sign that they were growing closer, he thought.
Finally, after it became apparent that it was getting on
past the time of propriety, they said good-bye. He was conscious of his hand
lingering for an extra moment in hers, followed by a light squeezing response.
He walked her to the driveway and watched her as she moved into her car. Then
he stood for a long time observing the red tail lights until they disappeared
into the darkness.
His condominium was close enough to walk to and, after she
left, he could feel the exhilaration in his step, a springiness in his legs
that seemed uncommon in a man nearing his sixty-ninth birthday. He thought of
her now with great intensity. He had willed himself to think of her only in
Yiddish, as if she were his special possession and he had to guard her reality
in the privacy of his own thoughts. He was certain that there was something
stirring in him, a dormant plant, struggling for germination beneath the soil
of time.
"You come home so late from those meetings,
Bill," his wife would mumble as he slipped in beside her. He never
succeeded in not waking her.
"We're working on a special project," he said.
"So late?" Then she would hover off, snoring
lightly.
When it became apparent that three days a week was not
enough time for them, Velvil suggested that the two couples socialize.
"Have you told her about me?" Genendel said,
looking at him curiously. She wondered why she said it in that manner, as if
they were engaging in a conspiracy.
"No," he answered. "And you?"
"I tell David about the club and its activities,"
she answered.
She knew she was growing tense about her feelings
concerning Velvil, but she could not stop them, nor did she care to for that
matter.
The couples met at Primero's for dinner. It was a Sunday,
so they had to wait in line for nearly an hour before being seated. Perhaps it
was the wait that soured the meeting.
"We were ahead of them," Mimi told the headwaiter
as another group passed ahead of them, her lips tight with anger. She could not
abide being bested.
"They were a fiver," the headwaiter said. His
arrogance deserved a challenge.
As always, Velvil was embarrassed when his wife did this.
He poked her in the small of the back.
"Don't poke me. He could seat four very easily at a
table for five. God forbid he should lose one lousy meal," she said
loudly, knowing that the headwaiter would hear.
"Mimi, please."
"You should be telling him," she snapped.
"Why should I have to fight with him?"
"It's all right, really," David Goldfarb said. He
was a smallish man, bald with a fringe of white hair around his pate and a
benign, kindly look on his face.
"It's not all right," Mimi said, huffing and
continuing to direct a withering gaze at the headwaiter. "You don't
squeak, you don't get the oil."
Velvil looked hopelessly at Genendel.
"I'm sorry," he said in Yiddish.
"It's all right," she responded in Yiddish.
By the time they were finally seated, the wait and the
altercation with the headwaiter had put them all in a gloomy mood, particularly
Mimi, who could not let it go.
"They take advantage," she said, tapping the
table with her forefinger. "You let them get away with it once, they take
more advantage."
"Why don't we forget about it and enjoy the
meal?" Velvil suggested. It was simply her way, he tried to tell Genendel
with his eyes; she is not a bad woman, really. But he wondered if that was
true.
"You like it here in Sunset Village?" Velvil
asked David, who was either not very talkative or simply cowed by Mimi's
performance.
"Actually, it's not bad," he answered. "Not
bad at all."
"He has his regular gin game. He likes the sun and the
pool." Genendel patted her husband's hand in a gesture of reassurance.
A flash of anger stabbed through Velvil. She must have seen
his frown and quickly withdrew her hand.
"So you really like the Yiddish Club?" David
asked after a long stretch of embarrassed silence.
"It's really quite wonderful," Velvil said,
smiling at Genendel.
"It could be Greek to me," Mimi said. "It
seems like an odd waste of time, keeping a dead language alive."
"It's not dead at all," Velvil said, annoyed at
her obtuseness.
He suddenly realized that he was no longer rationalizing
her actions. Watching her, he felt her bitterness. Did she know? he wondered.
Could she feel it?
"Yiddish is quite beautiful, really," Velvil
said, watching Genendel. "She's not always this bad," he said
suddenly in Yiddish. "I'm sorry it's not working out. It wasn't a very
good idea."
"All right," Genendel responded in Yiddish.
"At least we gave it an honest try."
"What are you two jabbering about?" Mimi said,
with a mouthful of salad.
"We're illustrating the possibilities of the
language," Velvil said.
"It's still Greek," Mimi said, spearing some
lettuce leaves.
"Actually, I like the sound of it," David said.
He was a pleasant man, very bland and eager to please. But he looked frequently
at his wristwatch, as if he were anxious to depart.
When the entrees came, the conversation turned to the
couples' children, a common denominator when all else failed. Velvil winced,
knowing what was coming.
"My girls married well," Mimi said, directing her
gaze at Velvil as if in rebuke. "But then they set their hearts on it.
Bill always worried too much about security. They're always fighting among
themselves, all the time, but underneath it all, they love each other. I'm sure
about that. They both live in Scarsdale. Huge houses. They each have three
kids, all doing well."
Not the pictures, Velvil thought in Yiddish. Please not
that. He saw her pocketbook on the floor beside her, a vile time bomb.