by Warren Adler
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 © 1977 by Warren Adler.
ISBN 978-1-59006-099-5
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
Contents
Yiddish
Itch
An Unexpected Visit
The Detective
God Made Me That Way
The Braggart
The Demonstration
The Angel of Mercy
Poor Herman
The Home
To my mother and father and their generation,
unsung but glorious
Yiddish
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, the 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 would sometimes stay in the all-purpose room in the Sunset Village Clubhouse, where the meetings were held, for hours after they were over, talking in Yiddish as if that language were the only logical form of communication. Finally they had to increase the meetings of the Yiddish Club to three times a week, although 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 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 and they were showing at least three hundred productions a year.
"There is, of course, the element of nostalgia," Menasha would explain to 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 had joined the club on the same day and, they discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed. Their respective spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture. Besides, they were much more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool yenting with their friends.
Because they had joined on the same day, they had, out of the kinship of newness, 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 had said when the meeting had 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 had responded, his mind jogged by the 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 perhaps that he had known in his youth or at least someone recognizable to his spirit. She was smallish, thinner than his wife Mimi, who had 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're flirting."
"I am."
She put a hand over her mouth and giggled like a girl. It had not seemed possible to her that anything could occur beyond their lighthearted banter, their kibitzing in Yiddish. She dismissed such thoughts as idle and forbidden speculation. And yet they would sit for a long time after the meetings were over, discussing their lives, their children, their fortunes. At first their exchanges had been purely factual, filled with the details of their biographies.
"I worked for the Veterans Administration as a lawyer, and hated every minute of it," Velvil had said, "but I was frightened to death." He was surprised to have told her that. He had never referred to being frightened except to himself, 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 had also longed for other things.
"I wanted to travel," she said, lifting her eyes to his. He had all his hair, she noted, and a 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 packaged B'nai B'rith tour of Israel. 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, although he, too, had ne
ver traveled.
"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 had 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 because she had 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 had pressed, the Yiddish rolling easily off his tongue.
"It is a forbidden thought," she responded, 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 had become apparent that it was getting on past the time of propriety, they said good-by. 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 the 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 the 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 four of them socialize.
"Have you told her about me?" Genendel said, looking at him curiously. She wondered why she had said it in quite that manner, as if they were engaging in a conspiracy.
"No," he had answered. "And you?"
"I tell David about the club and its activities," she answered. She knew she was growing wise about her feelings concerning Velvil, but she could not stop them, nor did she care to.
The couples met at Primero's for dinner, as they had taken two cars. It was a Sunday so they had to wait on line for nearly an hour before they could be seated. Perhaps it was the wait that had soured the meeting.
"We were ahead of them," Mimi told the headwaiter, her lips tight with anger. She could not abide being bested.
"They were a fiver," the headwaiter said. His arrogance had deserved a challenge.
As always when she did this, Velvil was embarrassed. 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 you 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 had 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, particuarly 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 said. 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 had simply been 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, her words. 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 mouth full 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. He looked frequently at his wristwatch as if he were anxious to depart.
When the steaks came, the conversation turned to the couples' children, the 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.
"She's going to show you pictures in a second," he whispered to Genendel in Yiddish.
"That's not polite, Bill," Mimi said, glancing at him briefly but continuing her story without missing a beat. "Everything they touch turns to gold. One th
ing the girls knew was how to choose well. I taught them that." She reached for her pocketbook, took out her half glasses, perched them on her nose, and reached into the crowded interior of her bag.
"Must you start with the pictures?" Velvil said, feeling the steak congeal into a lump in his stomach.
"He hates when I start with the pictures," Mimi said, taking out a sheaf of pictures and handing them over to the Goldfarbs, who took them politely and seemingly with great interest.
"I think it's disgusting," Velvil said in Yiddish.
Genendel ignored his comment. He discovered why after they had viewed Mimi's pictures. David Goldfarb reached for his wallet and drew out a few faded colored Polaroid prints.
"That's my son Marvin, the orthodontist. And there's Greta, who runs a boutique on Madison Avenue."
"She's divorced," Genendel said.
"Every time I think about it I get sick to my stomach," David Goldfarb said suddenly. One felt his anger and frustration.
"It's her life," Genendel said gently.
"One of my daughters was on the verge once," Mimi said. "But I told her: 'Dotty, if you divorce Larry I'll never speak to you again. You have the children to consider, my grandchildren.' That was ten years ago. Today they're still together, happy as two peas in a pod."
"What she doesn't know doesn't hurt her," Velvil said in Yiddish.
"Will you stop that jabbering, Bill? Can't you see it's impolite?"
"I'll speak as I damn-well please," he said in Yiddish, watching her irritation increase.
"See? He does it just to make me angry," Mimi said while cutting into her steak.
Genendel watched, signaling with her eyes. You had better stop, he imagined she was saying.
Perhaps it was the stark comparison between the two women that in the end triggered the intensity of his emotion. By the time they had finished dinner and parted with politeness and empty promises of "getting together" again, he was certain that he had spent his entire adult life in a bargain with the devil. Turning it over in his mind, in Yiddish of course, his wife of forty-five years seemed a gross, unfeeling monster. Perhaps I am imagining this, exaggerating her weak points, ignoring her essential goodness, he thought. After all, he told himself, he was no bargain and she had put up with him all those years. The idea filled him with such guilt that he abandoned even his most secret Yiddish thoughts, reverting to English, trying to remember with difficulty all the good things that she had brought him over the years. He even forced himself to be affectionate when they finally went to bed after the eleven-o'clock news. He reached out for her and cupped a hand over a breast, feeling the hardness begin. Mimi seemed so startled by the act and the obvious reaction of his body that she did not shrug him away as swiftly as usual.
