The Sunset Gang (6 page)

"I'll be back in a couple of hours. You know Molly.
She likes to talk and poor Sam can't talk back."

They watched as the door closed and the father reached for
his coffee with a shaking hand.

"I would have explained," the older man said
after he had sipped and shakily replaced the coffee cup. "Who expected you
to walk in like this?"

"I think it's terrific, Pop. I really do." He
reached out and touched his father's sleeve. "It's just hit me too
quickly." Dammit, he told himself. He was still annoyed. He had still not
accepted the idea of it, but he was determined to keep that hidden.

"Better than being alone. Ida is good to me. She cooks
good, takes care of me." He looked at his son and his eyes misted. "I
was never happy alone, Harold. Look, your Mama and I were married forty years.
She wasn't always easy to live with, but it wasn't so bad. That's the problem.
Who goes first."

"Pop, if you're happy, that's all that counts."
He was conscious of his own cliché.

But his father must have felt the lack of conviction.

He continued, "Your Mama was a wonderful woman, a
wonderful woman." He paused.

Harold thought of the many times his mother had talked
about his father, privately, to him alone. "He's a good man, your father.
He'll never make a lot of money. He's no ball of fire. Maybe he lets people
step on him too much. And he takes it out on me when other people get him
down." The words cracked through the mirror of time. He imagined he was
enveloped in the softness of his mother's ample body.

But the older man's guilt would not let him be silent.
"Alone is not so much fun, Harold."

"I'm happy for you, Pop. I really am."

"We have a lot in common. We never fight. Not that
everything is always perfect. It wasn't always perfect with your Mama."

He looked at his gnarled tanned father, shrunken by age,
wondering obscenely, he thought, if they actually had sex, which brought him
around to his own problem. He felt it harder now to broach the subject. Was it
actually advice he was seeking? Or some kind of validation?

"Are you going to get married?" The idea had
begun in innocence, but sounded treacherous when he said it. His father's alert
brown eyes looked at him in confusion.

"Married?"

He was being observed as if he had just uttered a most
preposterous remark, plumbed from the depths of stupidity and ignorance.

"And lose more on the social security?"

Harold could understand now how far out of their world he
was, a traveler from another planet. "I didn't know," Harold mumbled.

"Sure you didn't know. How could you know?" At
that moment the sound of an ambulance's siren splintered the silence.

"You hear that?" his father said.

Actually Harold hadn't. Living in New York made his ears
screen out the cacophony of sounds: of horns, screeching brakes, shouts,
screams, subway trains, sirens. Noticing now, he realized it was a kind of
clarion.

"That's the Sunset Village anthem. The chances are
that somebody is leaving this world."

"Why would anyone want to leave Florida? he said,
groping for humor. Harold knew he had botched things up by barreling in on them
before his father had been prepared mentally for the confrontation.

The older man smiled, sensing the break in the tension.
"You can get plenty of exercise just going to funerals," he said,
laughing and lifting his coffee cup.

Harold did the same and sipped. The liquid was tepid.
Looking about the room, he felt suddenly closed in. The air was humid, dripping
with moisture, which made him note that the air conditioning was not turned on.
Obviously to save money.

"Let's go for a walk, Pop."

The older man rose slowly and they walked into the bright
sunshine, past the white painted façades of the barracks-like buildings.
Looking into the windows he saw dark interiors occasionally brightened by a
lighted television screen. There was an appearance of cleanliness about the
place, everything neat, properly trim and orderly, so different from the fifth
and hustle of Brooklyn, where they had lived. They had had a small apartment on
the top floor of a four-story walk-up. Summers, with heat like this, they would
actually all sleep on mattresses on the fire escape. He breathed deeply, felt
the sweetness of the flower-scented air, the total absence of city smells.
Where is my childhood, he asked himself, annoyed at the sentimentality but
unable to control a tiny sob that bubbled inside and tightened his chest.

"Remember the time we used to go to Prospect Park?"

The father nodded. "Your mother used to say, 'Watch
the frankfurters. He'll get a bellyache.' But we never watched the frankfurters
and you never got a bellyache."

"I can still smell the elephants." We never
talked much, even then, he was thinking, seeing in his memory the elephant's
dusty parchmentlike skin. He had joked to Janice that his parents had never
talked about the facts of life, or anything except protection. "Be careful
of your stomach." "Don't get too cold." "Look on both sides
when you cross." "Don't go near the bums in front of the candy
store." "Beware!" Be careful!" "Watch out!" What
the hell could he possibly ask this man about his own dilemma, he wondered,
feeling unable to form a single line of inquiry. They stopped at the curb while
a group of tricyclists passed, their big bottoms perched on the smallish seats.

"It's a nice place here, Harold," his father
said.

"As long as you're happy, Pop."

"I remember when you were a little boy, Harold."
He said it suddenly, looking downward at the asphalt.

"Ottisot?" He mimicked a small child. "You
were always pointing. Once we were stuck between stations on the subway and you
had to make a party and there was no place to go, so you did it in your pants
and stunk up the whole train." He chuckled and shook his head. "You
were something."

Harold was struggling to form a clear picture of his father
in those days. He had seemed taller, broader, stronger, but the memory was more
tactile than graphic, a rough workingman's hand tightly grapsed.

"Do you think about it ... me as a kid ...
often?" He felt his tongue bumble. "Not being a parent I just wonder,
that's all." Would he see his defensiveness?

The father said nothing as they walked along the path that
threaded through the grass. A puff of cloud passed over the sun momentarily,
changing the coloring of the landscape.

"Think about it?" The father smiled and shook his
head. "In this place sometimes I wonder if anybody thinks about anything
else. Every yenta in the place, male and female, brags about their children and
their grandchildren. You'd think we produced a race of rich geniuses. Not a bad
apple in the barrel."

It was not the answer he had wanted, Harold knew. But, of
course, he had not framed the right question, the central question, because he
could not quite find the right words.

"I've been a pretty rotten son, haven't I, Pop?"

The older man stopped and looked upward into his son's
face. His eyes suddenly misted.

"I said that?"

"I'm saying it, Pop."

"What right have you got to say such a thing?"
They resumed their walk.

"I don't call. I don't visit often. I should be
sending you more money."

"That's pretty terrible, Harold. I'll admit that. But
a bad son? Not my Harold. A little neglectful maybe. But a bad son,
never."

"So what is all that crankiness I get over the
phone?"

"If I ask you why you don't call? Why you don't visit?
What's a father supposed to say? It doesn't mean I don't love you."

Harold could feel him watching peripherally as they walked,
embarrassed by the uncommon sentiment, knowing, he felt now, that he was
sensing his son's inner turmoil, his doubts.

"It's also not because I don't love you, Pop."

"What's that got to do with your not calling and not
visiting? That's a horse of a different color."

Words, but not communication, he was thinking, wondering
why they had never crossed that Rubicon, never been really inside of each
other's heads. He thought of Janice again--the long, probing, existential
"talking out" of themselves, the avalanche of words that rolled from
unseen peaks shrouded in gray fog. And after all those words, did he really
know Janice? Janice who carried his seed, the seed of his ancestors? These were
indeed oddball thoughts for him. The seed of his ancestors. Really!

"We used to take walks a lot together," his
father said.

"Brooklyn in those days was a good place to
walk."

"It was never boring."

The implication was clear and he did not pursue it. It
occurred to him then why he could not frame the central question, the fulcrum
on which both ends of the presumed advice might teeter. They simply had never
transmitted meaningful things between them through words. What could he say?
Hey, Pop, Janice is going to kill your grandchild on Friday. Or: I knocked up
this girl, but don't worry, there'll be no fallout on me.

"Let me ask you a question, Pop," he finally
said, stopping and digging the toe of his shoe in the carpet of trimmed grass.
"You worry a lot about me?"

"Do I worry about you?" The older man smiled.

"Why do you always answer a question with a
question?"

"Why not?"

"Seriously, Pop." Perhaps his father had expected
a smile and a chuckle, but he knew his face appeared anxious and that his
father saw it.

"What else have I got to worry about?"

"A question again?" He paused. "Now you've
got me doing it."

"I worry about you, Harold. I also worry about my
health. You see such terrible things here. I worry about being alone. I worry
about your Mama, wherever she is, she should only be happy. But, most of all, I
worry about you."

"Why?" It was, he knew, the central question,
boiled down into a single word and he knew before it had come what the answer
would be.

"Because you're my child."

They resumed their walk in silence, passing a group of
chunky women sitting on a bench, their legs crossed at the ankles.

"The yentas are inspecting," the older man said.
"You should wear a sign saying this is the son of Morris Weintraub."

"But that would take the fun out of it."

"Who cares?" the older man said. Beads of sweat
had formed on his upper lip. "Let's go back."

As they walked, Harold pondered why he had come, why the
idea of Janice's abortion had shook him up. Why? That had been, in the end, the
question. And he had received the answer. He felt the elation of resolution. It
was as if his soul had been let out of its cage. The sky had cleared; the sun,
brightening and relentless, washed over them. He felt a burning on the back of
his neck.

In the apartment, his father cleared the coffee cups and
put them in the sink.

"Ida is very neat."

He remembered his mother, a blowzy woman, who always seemed
to wear clothes that were stained. The dishes were always chipped, the
silverware mismatched. She had been an abominable housekeeper although neither
he nor his father had noticed it then. He reached for his jacket and threw it
over his arm. His father was agitated by the sudden movement.

"So soon?"

"I told you I wast just passing through. I wanted to
see you is all."

The older man wiped his hands on his pants and came toward
the son, who reached down and kissed his cheek, feeling the bristles against
his lips. The father gripped his son's forearm and squeezed it.

"You're okay, Pop," Harold said. He felt his eyes
moisten again.

"Be a good boy, Harold."

He started for the door and turned.

"And give Ida my love. If she's okay by you, she's
okay by me."

"And next time, bring your girl friend. Let's really
give the yentas a megillah."

In the car he felt lightheaded, joyous, and drove over the
slow-down bumps too swiftly. His head bounced against the car roof and he
laughed at himself and let out an Indian yell. No way they're goin' to do in my
kid, he assured himself, trying to frame the way he would put it to Janice:
Let's make it all legal, babe. Do the happy-ever-after bit. Jesus, he thought
what a lousy way to put it.

On the way home, he treated himself to a first-class ticket
and let the stewardess splash away with the champagne until he felt the warm
inner glow that he imagined enhanced his feeling of celebration. He munched
ravenously on the filet mignon.

"More champagne?" the stewardess asked.

"Why shouldn't I?" he said, and giggled.
Questions with questions. The stewardess smiled, exuding plastic joy.

It was already dark and the champagne buzz had dissipated
as he reached their East Side apartment. He was still buoyant and the brief
anxiety that once in New York he would change his mind had passed. He let
himself in with his key, feeling the tension rise, knowing at once that she was
already home. He could see the reflection of the bedroom lamp and the triangle
shaft of light that it threw on the white shag carpet of the living room. He
tossed his jacket on a chair and walked into the bedroom, where she lay,
pillows propped, the
New York Post
on her lap, lifting her face to his.
He sat beside her on the bed, he kissed her on the lips, tasting, knowing he
gave off the scent of imbibed champagne.

"I had a party on the plane," he said. "In
celebration."

"Of what?"

"Us."

"The two of us."

"No." He poked a finger and gently hammered at
the tip of her nose. "The three of us."

Her eyes opened wide for a moment, then blinked.

"That's over," she said, shrugging.

"What's over?"

"It." She winced and he noticed that she was
pale. "It has been eliminated."

"But--" He felt the airplane food begin to float
in his stomach.