The Sunset Gang (10 page)

"You're not Max Bernstein?" the woman asked
finally. Her hair was dyed red but he could tell by her lightly freckled
bone-white skin that she was an authentic redhead. He detected a flicker of
memory in her greenish eyes.

"Why do you ask?" he said. He could not resist
the propensity to be flirtatious.

"You look like Max Bernstein."

"Max Bernstein yesterday? Or Max Bernstein
today?"

"Like forty years ago."

"You mean when I was twelve?"

The woman laughed, throwing back her head. There was a
puddle of fat around her chin that shook like jelly. It was the gesture that
recalled her vaguely.

"You remind me of Max Bernstein."

"Sometimes I remind myself of Max Bernstein."

"You are, aren't you?"

"I was when I shaved this morning."

She reached out and touched his shoulder.

"I'm Eileen Goldberg."

"Eileen Goldberg?" He repeated the name, his mind
rifling through a list of women's names like a computer.

"Brooklyn. I was in college. We lived next door."

"Of course, Eileen Goldberg." He recalled now.
The father had walked in on them. Milly had gotten all upset. Was this the one
she divorced me over? He remembered. She was a college girl then, slender,
affectionate, very affectionate, and an absolutely natural redhead. She was
blushing, perhaps reading his thoughts.

"I'm a widow," she said suddenly, as if it were
the accepted introduction to identify immediately one's availability.

Why not? he thought and stood up. Her blush receded,
although her cheeks were still rouged with two circles of red. He withheld his
own availability label. He wanted to be certain of his choice.

"So what have you been doing for the last forty
years?" she asked, as they began to walk outside.

"The same thing I was doing when I last saw you."

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.

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 when 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.

One night the telephone in Molly's condominium angrily
intruded on her sleep. With a pounding heart and shaking fingers she reached
for the instrument and, gasping, mumbled into the receiver. There was no fear
greater than a telephone call in the night with its urgent message of disaster.
My children, she thought, and was secretly relieved when she heard Emma
Mandel's frantic voice.

"Please, Molly. You must come," she cried.

"What is it?"

"Please, Molly."

Throwing a housecoat over her nightgown, she rushed out of her
condominium and walked quickly to Emma's place in the next court. The night was
warm and humid and the effort caused a thin film of perspiration to gather on
her upper lip. A brief glance at the clock in her bedroom had told her it was
three A.M. She was not surprised to see Dolly Cohen rushing from another
direction and they converged at Emma's front door. They nodded at each other
and Molly knocked lightly. The unlocked door gave way under her knock.

Emma was seated in the living room, her ample body paunchy
in its old-fashioned satin nightgown. A single lamp threw a yellow light over
the room, dominated by an oil painting of her son, and furnished with expensive
antiques that he had sent her from all parts of the world. They knew the
history of each item. It had been drummed into their brains through repetition.