The Sunset Gang (4 page)

"It's no sin to want more," she said suddenly in
Yiddish, the inflection of the language reassuring.

"We are in for some tough times in the near
future," Velvil said. He was thinking how the telephone lines must be
burning between his wife and their daughters.

"I am prepared," she said calmly, her faltering
resolve shored up as she watched his face. "We will help each other."

By the end of the day he had sublet a condominium and moved
some of his clothes out of the place he shared with his wife. She had sobbed
bitterly as he packed a small valise, wailing like a mourner at a graveside. I
am not dead yet, he thought to give himself courage, but he could not fully
control his pity. In ten, maybe fifteen years it will hardly matter to anyone,
he assured himself. Such a thought bolstered his courage.

They had agreed to meet at the poolside that evening.
Genendel was late. When she finally came, he noted again the puffiness of her
eyes and a deepening in the lines of her face, which even in the dim light
seemed to have assumed a gray cast. They began to walk along the path that led
around the pool.

"Your wife called me," Genendel said, her voice
breaking.

"The bitch--"

"Please, Velvil. I understand."

"Was she hysterical?"

"Worse. She accused me of being a whore, of stealing
her husband."

"The bitch. I hope you hung up on her."

"No. I listened. I listened to every word."

"It wasn't necessary."

"It was to me."

He was agitated. He balled his hands and hit them against
his thighs in frustration. They walked for a while in silence.

"Your children will be here tomorrow," she
announced.

"My children?"

"Both daughters and their husbands."

"She told you this?"

"And mine are coming too."

"How awful." He was feeling his indignation now,
searching her face in the darkness for a hint of her reaction.

"I agreed."

"Agreed?"

"When she calmed down, David got on the phone and they
decided that perhaps we should all meet."

"Together?" It would be, he told himself calmly,
a new experience. Perhaps this was what was required. One big final meeting. He
shook his head. "It is sheer madness," he said. "They'll
overwhelm us. We wouldn't have a chance against them."

"What could I say?"

"You could have said no." He willed his anger
under control. "They have no right. We are entitled to our own life, to
our own decision."

"I said that, but then your son-in-law called."

"Larry?"

"The lawyer."

"That one. You should have hung up the phone. He's the
worst of the lot. He has ten women on the string, a miserable character."
He felt fear at this effort to pry them apart. "We must resist them."

"We are going to meet tomorrow morning."
Genendel's voice broke as she said it. "How could I refuse? They're our
children. Our families."

"I have finished my duty toward them," he said,
sensing the frustration of the impending confrontation. "I have made
enough sacrifices."

"I felt we owed it to them," she said, holding
back her tears. "I knew it wouldn't be all wine and roses, but I hadn't
expected this."

"Are you sorry?"

"Not sorry," she said, the tears coming now,
"confused."

"Unsure?"

"Please, Velvil," she said, and then sniffled.
"I've been a quiet peaceful married lady for forty-four years."

"A vegetable."

"Yes, a vegetable. But this kind of aggravation is
more than I think I can take."

"When is the meeting?" he asked stiffly.

"Tomorrow morning. In a room in the clubhouse."

"My God, it is like an innocent family affair, a
family circle." He bit his lips. "I'm not coming," he said
weakly, knowing his protest was in vain.

"I promised for you."

His anger would not dissipate, and walking her back to her
car in the dark parking lot, he wondered if he had lost her. She should be
coming home with me, he told himself, gathering her in his arms, kissing her
cheeks, feeling the saltiness of her tears.

"Are you slipping away from me?" he whispered.
But she did not answer. She got into the car and drove off, leaving him lonely
and despairing in the darkness, feeling the weight of his years.

During the night he tossed in the strange bed, going over
imaginary conversations with his children and their husbands, with David, with
Genendel's children. In all of these fantasies his words sounded hollow,
unpersuasive. How can an old man talk of love? Even in his mind he sounded like
an adolescent. It was only toward morning that he discovered that the
conversations in his imagination were not conversations at all. Information was
transmitted to him, but not from him as he had been talking Yiddish. The idea
of that restored his courage and calmed him enough for him to fall into semi-slumber.

He had timed himself to be the last to arrive. They all
looked toward him, tight anxious faces masked with bitterness rising like
steam. They had set the room up like a business conference, twelve seats around
a long table. Thankfully, they had left one seat empty at the far end of the
table. Larry, his son-in-law, sat at the other end, looking very much like a
board chairman. Genendel was sitting between what must have been her son and
daughter. They resembled her. Dutifully, he kissed the proffered cheek of his
daughter Dotty, who mumbled something politely. Mimi turned her eyes away.

The scene was ludicrous, he told himself in Yiddish, a
strange assemblage. He knew that the two families had briefed themselves in
advance, had hit upon a strategy and, as he had suspected, had appointed Larry
as their spokesman. Looking at the group, he was surprised at his own calm. His
eyes sought Genendel's, who lifted hers. She had been crying again, he saw,
hoping that he could will her to take heart. She looked defeated and he sensed
her indecisiveness. I am free of them all, he told himself with elation as he
took his seat.

"We felt this was the only way, Pop," Larry
began.

What a pompous ass, Velvil thought, observing him with his
coat opened and the Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from his vest. He wondered why
they hadn't brought the grandchildren. It was, after all, everybody's business.

"I don't want you both," Larry began unctuously,
"to think of this as any kind of special pressure. We are simply all in
some way involved in these decisions. What we are discussing here are two
families, children, grandchildren, and, essentially, peace of mind. We all have
a genuine interest in your mutual welfare." He paused, as if he were in
court, feeling the strength of his own authority.

Mimi sat stiffly, indignant and sour-faced, but assured and
under control. Velvil watched as David nodded.

"We all honestly feel that if we appealed to your
reason and intelligence, to your practicality and good sense, that you would
conclude that this idea is detrimental to yourselves and all of us," Larry
said.

"As far as I'm concerned they could both rot in
hell," Mimi suddenly blurted.

Larry turned to her in disgust. "You promised, Ma. You
promised." He banged the table. "We will have none of this, do you
hear?"

"They can still rot in hell." Mimi huffed and
folded her arms over her fat breasts.

"If we allow ourselves to get emotional," Larry
said, glaring at Mimi, "then we might as well adjourn this meeting. We are
here as mature adults discussing what could become a complicated problem, one
that will give us all, everyone in this room, the kind of grief that none of us
have a stomach for. We've all taken time out of our lives to see if we can
solve this problem." He looked at Velvil. "Now, Pop, my understanding
is that you wish to divorce Mom and marry this woman."

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't refer to my mother in
those terms," Genendel's son said.

"I hadn't intended anything disparaging," Larry
said quickly.

"I wish you wouldn't interrupt," Genendel's
daughter said to her brother.

"You realize, of course, Mrs. Goldfarb," Larry
said, looking at Genendel, "that you are encouraging an action that will
result not only in humiliation for your husband and my mother-in-law but
ostracism for yourself and my father-in-law."

"Now you're trying to fix blame," Genendel's son
said. He was thin like his mother, with his mother's gentle face. Velvil
wondered if he was sympathetic, a thought quickly dispelled. "I don't
agree with what they're doing, but I don't think you can fix blame."

"She's a woman," one of Velvil's daughters
interjected. "She knows that it's the woman who controls the situation.
She encouraged him."

"I resent that," Genendel's son said. "Your
father is not exactly innocent in this matter."

"They should both rot in hell," Mimi said, her
voice booming in the room. "I still say he needs a psychiatrist."

"That's for sure," one of Velvil's daughters said
huffily.

"It's that Yiddish Club," Mimi shouted.
"They should close that Yiddish Club."

"This is getting out of hand," Larry shouted and
banged on the table. He waited until they settled down again.

"You're all acting like a bunch of children."

"I think Mother's right," Larry's wife said.
"Dad needs some help."

But Velvil listened calmly, surveying, in turn, each of the
people around the table allegedly debating their fate. He looked at Genendel
again, observing her calm, which gave him courage. David Goldfarb wore a long
face, the embodiment of gloom.

"You must realize, Pop," Larry said, "that
you're being cruel to all of us. You're breaking up two families. Both of you
are. Really--" His arguments seemed to have disintegrated, his appeals
repetitive.

"Are you all right?" Velvil said suddenly to
Genendel in Yiddish.

"I'm not exactly comfortable, but I think I can bear
it."

"You see," Mimi cried, "they're talking
gibberish again."

"Please speak English, Pop," Larry said in
exasperation.

"They are all idiots, Genendel," Velvil said,
sure that his courage had returned. "Nothing they say will matter to
me."

"I feel better now too, Velvil," she said.

He imagined he could see the gray cast to her skin lift and
a new color begin.

"They're sick. It's obvious," one of Velvil's
daughters said. She looked at him, glaring. "Will you please speak
English?"

"I'll speak whatever I feel like," he said in
Yiddish.

"See! Was I right?" Mimi asked, posing it as a
general question to the group.

"In order to solve this," Larry said,
"you've got to communicate in a language we can all understand."

"I didn't call this meeting," Velvil said in
Yiddish. He could see Genendel smiling. "I don't think it's any of your
business. Who are you to preside in judgment over my life? What do you know of
my life?"

"Of course," Genendel said in Yiddish. "They
have no right." She looked around the room. "None of you have any
right."

"What are they saying?" Larry said and stood up.
"Is there anyone here who knows what they're saying?"

"I know what we're saying," Velvil said, feeling
the joy in his strength, in his freedom.

"And I know what we're saying," Genendel said.

"This is impossible," Genendel's daughter
shouted, turning to her mother.

"I didn't ask you to come," Genendel said,
continuing in Yiddish.

"I can't stand this," Mimi shouted, standing up.
She put a hand over her throat as if she were in agony.

"See what you're doing to her," one of his
daughters said, holding her mother's free hand.

"She's only acting," Velvil said. "Can't
they see that?"

"They know it," Genendel said. She stood up.

"Where are you going, Mother?" Genendel's daughter
shouted.

"That bitch. That whore," Mimi shouted.

"Who are you calling a whore, you fat pig?"
Genendel's daughter said.

"They're mockies," one of Velvil's daughters
shouted.

"A whore..." Mimi cried, forgetting about her
assumed frailty, pointing her finger at Genendel, then at her husband.
"Rot in hell. Both of you."

"My conscience is clear," Genendel said quietly.

"We can still make the Cycling Club, Genendel,"
Velvil said quietly.

"A wonderful idea," Genendel responded. She moved
toward him, reaching for his arm. They stood now together at the end of the
table, looking at the faces of their families.

"Please," Larry persisted. "If you will all
sit down..." But neither of them was listening.

"Who are these people?" Velvil asked, as they
turned and proceeded toward the door, arm-in-arm.

"Nobody I ever knew," Genendel said as they
walked out of the room.

It annoyed Isaac Kramer exceedingly when anyone called him
Isaac. His real name, in his mind, was Itch. He had been known as Itch for
sixty of his seventy-two years, ever since his grandfather, in his broken
Yiddish-English got up from his nap in a bad mood after Itch had put a baseball
through his bedroom window.

"Dot Izzy gibt mir an Itch."

Someone had heard the remark, probably his sister Fanny, and
from then on, in that mysterious way that nicknames are born, he had become
Itch. Since he had lived in only two neighborhoods during his entire lifetime,
not counting the shtetl in Kozin, Poland, or the hold of the USS
St. Louis
,
he had had no trouble in establishing his real name. In Brownsville, where he
had spent forty years of his life, and in Brighton Beach, where he had spent
the last thirty-one, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to have
addressed him by any other name but Itch.

Now that he had moved to Sunset Village and was getting his
mail addressed to Isaac Kramer, everybody seemed to be calling him Isaac. It
was as if the yentas had peeked into the cellophane panel of his envelopes and
spread the word to the four corners of Sunset Village. His wife of fifty years,
Sadie, a round, jolly, good-natured woman, sympathized with his problem.

"How could they know you're Itch? On the records in
the office it says Isaac. In the bulletin announcement it says Isaac and on the
door-plate they gave us it says Isaac."

"I'll send in a retraction and get a new plate
made," he said morosely. He was having trouble enough adjusting to his
selling the cleaning store without such an identity crisis.

"I hate Florida," he would say to Sadie.
"There was no need to sell the store."

"You wanted to drop dead in that store, in the heat
from that cleaning machine and the presser? You remember how my legs would
swell up in the summer?"

"I wasn't ready."

"The doctor said you were ready."

"What did he know?"

Sadie did have one friend who had left for Sunset Village
the year before, but it turned out that, not being a working woman, her friend
had become an expert game player, mah-jongg, canasta, hearts: Sadie, on the
other hand, who had worked all her life in a cleaning store helping Itch, was
just learning to play the games. Every afternoon she would go to the clubhouse
for lessons while he sat by the pool or took the car across Lake View Drive to
the shopping center, where he stood around and looked in the windows and watched
the strange people do their shopping. Outside of Sunset Village, where everyone
was Jewish except for the help, who were either "schwartzes or shiksas or
scootchim," the world was very strange-looking indeed, the world of goyim.

"Where did you go, Itch?"

"I took the car to the shopping center."

"Again?"

"I like to watch the goyim."

"You should make friends," Sadie pleaded.
"That will eliminate the Isaac problem."

Itch had never known real loneliness or boredom before. His
life had always been filled with people. But now, spending so much time alone,
he wondered about the people with whom he had spent his early life. Perhaps, he
thought, that was what getting old meant, looking backward. What did he have to
look forward to? Long days under the hot sun sitting around the pool watching
the yentas or hanging around the shopping center watching the goyim. He was,
for the first time in more than fifty years, just hanging around. That was it.
The idea of it recalled another time, another place, when he had just hung
around, but he was not lonely then. In his memory it was quite wonderful and he
could name the names of everyone who hung around with him in front of Jake's
Candy Store on the corner of Dumont and Saratoga avenues.

He could see their faces clearly and could smell the smells
that came from the open counter, the chocolate syrup, the pretzels, the
cigarettes that Jake sold--two for a penny--from an open cigar box. Jake had
one finger missing and washing out soda glasses made his scar redden, but his hand
functioned well and he could pick up money swiftly, using his fingers as a
claw.

Nobody used the name their parents had given them, at least
not in the Anglicized version. There was Solly and Ritzy and Heshy and Moishe
and Chick and Sonny and Beebie and Mischa. They had stood in a cluster, like
peanut brittle, in rain or shine, usually sitting or standing around Jake's
outside soda box.

"Wanna go to the ball game Sunday?"

"Naw."

"Go into the city?"

"Naw."

"Wanna play some rummy?"

"Naw."

"Anybody got a date?"

"Naw."

They had been working for a few years by then--as
messengers, shop helpers, store clerks--and most of what they earned used to go
to their parents, whose one unalterable preoccupation was making ends meet now
that their families had moved out of the Lower East Side to the comparative
country atmosphere of Brownsville. It may have been that they were really short
of funds and couldn't go anywhere, or simply that they had no desire to leave
that spot, to leave each other. He could not remember being bored and the
conversation was always lively, especially about sports and women. It was,
after all, where he had learned the facts of life. God forbid his father should
have told him anything! Not that he had ever told his own children. They'll
learn like I learned, he had told himself. In front of the candy store. It was
not the mechanics of sex he was talking about but the feeling about life, the
extras that he meant. He had never finished high school and his education, his
college, began at Jake's Candy Store.

"You can always tell how sexy a woman is by the way
her mouth is." That was Solly, and women were his particular expertise.

"Yeah," someone would say, as if to acknowledge
the fact and urge Solly on.

"That tells the way they're built down there. Look for
the thick-lipped ones and you know you'll be getting something. Stay away from
the thin-lipped ones with the wide broad smiles."

"There are always exceptions."

"Never," Solly would say with great authority.
"Take it from me."

Solly's face could float into his memory and hang there
like a full moon, the features distinct, the slicked-back black hair in the
style of Valentino, the thin mustache, the high cheekbones and olive skin. He
was handsome and therefore what he said about women gave him a special
authority.

"I'm going to screw myself to death," he had
said, a kind of confession. "It is the only thing worth dying for."

Recalling them now, forty-five years later, was like seeing
old movies, he thought as he sat by the pool with his eyes half-closed, fearful
that some sound or odd occurrence would break his concentration. Sometimes he
would summon up Mischa, skinny Mischa, who had worn forelocks and a yarmulke
until he was nineteen years old, and was then a messenger boy for Wall Street,
which was the only identification he would give his occupation.

"I told them my name was Mike Leary. They don't hire
yids even for messengers." With his fiery red hair and pale-green eyes he
could pass for an Irishman.

"They don't do nothing on Wall Street. Not the people
with the money. They stand around and look at ticker tape until noon, then they
go to their clubs for lunch and come back red-faced and drunk. At two o'clock
they're gone."

He had taken to opening the newspapers to the financial
sections and reading the Wall Street finals.

"Up four points. What a way to make money. The goyim
have us by the batzim. We're schmucks. Schmucks."

"Lehman Brothers is Jewish," someone said.

"And what about Rothschild."

Mischa would look at them and purse his thin lips until the
blood had drained from them.

"You dumb sheenies. The yechis are just as bad."

They all nodded. Everyone knew who the yechis were: the
German Jews. They had come to America early and couldn't stand the greenhorns
from Eastern Europe, their kind. Mischa had money on the brain.

Thinking of "brain" recalled Chick, who had no
sign of that organ. But he had muscles, huge biceps from hauling ice all day at
the ice plant on Livonia Avenue, cutting chunks out of thick walls of ice with
a pick, then hooking them with an ice claw and hurling them onto the trucks and
carts that lined up in front of the platform. Summers, he would doff his shirt
and stand stiffly in the group, muscles bulging, his deep chest tanned and
rippling, tight pants molding his buttocks. He didn't speak very often, and
when he did it was mostly smiles and mumbling and agreeing to do what someone
else had wanted.

"Wanna go get a knish?"

"Great."

"Wanna go to the movies?"

"Sure."

He never asked "What's playing?" but was always
content to simply be there in front of Jake's with the rest of them, standing
around and listening. He had his role, though. Occasionally a group of
garlic-smelling Italian kids would come down from their neighborhoods on the East Side, feeling tough and acting surly, and showing off to each other about how brave
they were to be acting up in a Jewish neighborhood.

"Sheeny bastard," one of them might mumble, not
quite meant to be fully audible, but highly articulate to sensitive Jewish
ears.

"You said what?" someone from the candy store
would say.

"I said nuttin."

"Yeah, he said nuttin."

"I heard sheeny."

"You heard nuttin."

One of the group would step out from under the canvas
awning.

"You stinking little garlic-smelling wop shits. Get
back to pig town where you belong."

You could see the anger building in the Italian kids and
the desire to show their courage to each other. But just at that moment someone
would cry: "Chick, go tell them what they can do." And Chick would
move slowly toward the boys, tall and stiff, shoulders immense, biceps bulging
under his rolled-up sleeves.

"Somebody say something about sheenies?"

That was enough, of course, to head off confrontations, and
Chick would come back under the awning and someone would say: "You did
good, Chick," and he would nod and wink with satisfaction, sure that he
had earned his role with the group.

Sometimes these thoughts, this nostalgia, brought forth
great pain to Itch, because the days had moved on and somehow the days in front
of Jake's Candy Store had come to an end. He could never quite put his finger
on why it happened. Surely, it could have gone on forever. They all might have
married, stayed in the same neighborhood, and spent their off-hours from work
and family life hanging around in front of Jake's, and grown old that way.

But not all would have grown old. Not Ritzy. No one ever
knew what Ritzy did exactly, except that it was something to do with
prohibition and the mob, something that none of them dared talk about in front
of him. He drifted in and out of the group, showing up with better and flashier
clothes each time. He looked odd and out of place but satisfied with himself
standing there in front of Jake's in his pin-stripe suit and wide-brimmed hat,
and silk tie and starched shiny collar. Sometimes he came with a cane and
spats, but despite all this finery he was still one of the group, and even
though he had lots of folding money by then, he did not flaunt it but bought
his cigarettes two for a penny, just like the rest of them. His real name was
Herman Futterman, and he had never even finished elementary school.

"Who's the ritzy one?" Jake, who owned the candy
store, had asked one day. It was Herman, of course, and the name stuck. It had
come to him a bit late in life but he was content. Before that he had been
Hummy.

Ritzy was the first one to die. The time of the candy store
was over, but somehow they were still in touch, although some of them had moved
away to different neighborhoods. The
New York World
had printed a
picture of the blood-spattered car and three unidentified bodies lying within
under the caption "Gang War Casualties" and his name, Herman
"Ritzy" Futterman, twenty-five, was the first one mentioned. What
that had meant was that he had announced to his friends in the mob that his
nickname was Ritzy and apparently it stuck there as well.

All the boys from the candy store went to the funeral. Some
had wives by then. He could not remember whether Sadie had been with him. Ritzy
was not part of her world. The funeral home was crowded with many strange
faces, part of Ritzy's world, so foreign to them. There were lots of flowers,
incongruous in a Jewish funeral home. All the boys from Jake's had chipped in
for a big basket of fruit that they had sent to Mr. and Mrs. Futterman's
walk-up near Pitkin Avenue.

There was, he remembered, lots of crying and carrying on at
the funeral. Now, forty-five years later, he could still feel the lump in his
throat and the effort of will to keep his eyes from flooding over. Mrs.
Futterman was wailing loudly and although he had been to many, many funerals
since that time, the sound of Mrs. Futterman's wail was indelible in his inner
ear.

Although by then they had not been regulars at the candy
store, somehow they all drifted toward it the night of the funeral, after those
that were married had taken their wives home.

"I can't believe it," someone said, as they
lounged against the battered soda box with the peeling Coca-Cola sign.

"He ran in a fast crowd."

"I hope they buried him in his spats."

"Were you thinking that, too?"

They had all been thinking that, he was sure. Even now he
could feel his eyes swimming in tears behind his sun-heated lids as he thought
of that first death.

But he could temper the sadness of that remembrance by
countering it with thoughts of Beebie, Bernie Bernstein. B.B. None of them had
middle names, only Yiddish counterparts. Beebie was the smallest of the group,
but no one dared call him Peewee or Shorty since that would throw him into a
dangerous frenzy, a violent fit. Except for that, Beebie was a hilarious
prankster, the jokemaker and wisecracker. The mimic and critic. He detested his
sister and every day brought forth a new catalogue of the hilarious crimes he
had committed against her.