by Warren Adler
"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.
Itch
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.
"I put stuff in her soda that made her pee purple and she screamed like hell." He roared with laughter. It was odd how even now Itch could remember these transgressions. Beebie had put itching powder in her brassiere, a live mouse in her underwear drawer, and once he had sneaked in when she was necking on the couch and made sounds with his rubber-band farter, but his giggling finally gave him away. Itch could never ever hear a fart without thinking of Beebie. Thinking of Beebie could balance the pain of Ritzy.
"What did you do all afternoon?" Sadie would ask after she had returned from her card lessons and was preparing their dinner.
"Went to the shopping center. Then sat by the pool."
"I'm really learning canasta," she would say. "And I'm making lots of friends." She would pause, and he knew what was on her mind.
"Did you meet anyone?"
He hadn't, of course. He had been too busy with the boys in front of Jake's Candy Store. But how could he tell her that?
"A few people."
"Wonderful." She did not pry. Perhaps she knew, he thought.
It began to worry him that he might not be able to sustain the entire rest of his life by thinking about the boys in front of Jake's Candy Store, an idea which increased both his anxiety and his distaste for this retirement life. When he had his store, he was busy all day and most
of the night and that had given his life some purpose.
As Sadie became more and more interested in games, she became less and less interested in the chores of the house. He began to do the vacuuming and the cleaning, as well as the shopping. Sometimes he would even prepare the meals.
"They wanted to go another round," she would say when she arrived home. "I didn't want to. But they're all widows. I said I have my husband, but I couldn't leave the game."
"It's all right," he said. He genuinely wanted to see her happy. He wondered if seeing her happy made him happy. Finally he told himself that this was possible. He had always worked to make other people happy, his wife, his children, his mother and father.
He had left the chore of doing the wash to her and twice a week she would go to the little brick house which was the laundromat. She had always done the wash--almost by common silent consent, like choosing the side of the bed they each slept on and maintaining it all their lives. That had simply been her job, her role.
The games, however, began to take up more and more of her time, and one day she piled the wash in the basket and patted him on the forearm. "You put in two quarters for the washer and two quarters for the dryer." And she had left.
He stood looking at the dirty clothes for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, then lifted the basket, smiling to himself. "I made my living with schmattas. Now I'll do my retirement with schmattas."
He walked to the little brick house in which there was a line of washers against one wall and a line of dryers along the other. It was eleven o'clock and he noticed that most of the people who were there were men. There seemed more men than the number of machines that were running, but he ignored that and put his wash in one of the empty machines and, carefully reading the directions, set the machine going by dropping in two quarters.
"You wait five minutes, then you put in soap," a man said behind him. He was a thin man with gray hair and a sunken chest, and when he smiled he revealed gaping holes along his gums.
"I never did this before," Itch said.
"Well, you now got a new hobby."
"I don't know if I'll be doing this all the time."
