The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  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.

  She looked up at them as they entered. Her eyes were puffed with tears. A pile of wet tissues lay on the end table beside her.

  "What is it, Emma?" Molly asked, understanding well herself this pose of despair.

  "We're here, Emma," Dolly said, taking her hand in her own and patting it.

  They sat down on either side of her as Emma dissolved into tears, her body racked with sobs as she struggled to catch her breath.

  "We're here, Emma," Molly said, certain that her friend had just received a terrible emotional blow.

  "Is it Barry?" Dolly asked. "Did you hear from your son?"

  Emma managed to control her sobbing for a moment, time enough to shake her head in the negative.

  "Are you sick?" Dolly asked. "Does something hurt you?"

  Again Emma shook her head in the negative. The questioning and the closeness of her friends seemed to soothe her. She gripped their hands and Molly felt the moisture of the tearstained tissue. The tears rolled down Emma's cheeks as she sought to control the heaving in her chest.

  "It's all right now, Emma," Molly said, squeezing her hand. "Your friends are here."

  They waited while she slowly quieted down. Molly watched the pendulum of an antique clock move smoothly behind the glass in its base. She had spent many hours in this lavishly appointed room.

  "Everything is genuine," Emma had often bragged.

  "There, don't you feel better now?" Dolly asked, glancing at Molly and nodding. "She better now."

  "I could see she feels better now," Molly said.

  Emma nodded, disengaging her hands and reaching for the tissue box beside her. With the clean tissue, she rubbed away the wet tears and blew her nose.

  "I was lonely," she said, sniffling, her speech still interrupted by involuntary heavings in her chest. "I feel so--"

  "Nonsense," Dolly said. "What are friends for?"

  "I couldn't sleep and I was just sitting there in the dark." Emma's chest heaved again. "And I was so frightened."

  "There's nothing to be frightened of now, Emma," Molly said. She knew the affliction, the sudden fear, the terrible onslaught of anxiety, as if a great black ugly bird were suddenly thrashing about in the room.

  "It came over me suddenly. I felt I was going to die."

  "Now that is silly," Dolly said.

  But they all knew that was not being silly.

  "I needed someone," Emma said. "I cried out in the darkness for David. My husband, David. He's been gone for ten years." The tears came again.

  "It's all right now," Molly said, looking toward the drawn blinds, hoping for a sliver of light. The big black bird could not stand the light, could not hide in the brightness of the sun. She knew the terror that the night could hold.

  "I wanted to call my Barry," Emma sobbed. Then she was silent for a moment, perhaps gathering her energy for the long wail that followed, a familiar sound at funerals. The friends reached out and held her hands again.

  "I wanted my Barry," Emma cried. "If only I could have called my Barry."

  "We're here," Dolly said.

  "We're here," Molly repeated.

  They watched her as she fought to control herself again. After a while her chest stopped heaving and the wailing ceased.

  "You should have called him," Molly said gently. "It would have made you feel better." She had always called her children when she felt frightened and blue and they would talk to her until she felt better and could poke fun at her silliness. And her children would call her when they felt the same way, at any hour of the day of night, sometimes collect, which she didn't mind.

  "He'd think I was crazy," Emma said, recovering.

  "But he's your son," Molly said, sorry now for having probed. For a moment she thought she had set her off again, but Emma was in control now, although vulnerable, her guard down.

  "I used to call him," she confessed, her lips trembling, "but then I stopped."

  "You stopped?" Molly was puzzled. She looked at Dolly, who turned her eyes away.

  "He flew down a psychiatrist from New York."

  "A psychiatrist?" Molly said, startled.

  "He must have thought I was crazy."

  "It doesn't mean you're crazy if you see a psychiatrist," Molly said.

  "What did the psychiatrist say?" Dolly asked.

  "Nothing. I didn't let him in the place."

  "What did Barry say to that?"

  Emma paused, crumpling her wet tissue and reaching for another. "He said I needed help and that I was foolish for not seeing him and that he had spent lots of money to send him down. He said the man charged seventy-five dollars an hour."

  "My God," Molly said.

  "It cost a thousand dollars," Emma said. The remark seemed to signal her returning strength.

  "At that price, maybe you should have seen him," Dolly said.

  "What was he going to tell me?"

  "They are doctors, Emma," Dolly said. "Perhaps he might have helped."

  "Like they helped Mrs. Margolies. Put her in an institution. I told him that all I wanted to do was talk to him, that it made me feel better."

  "Do you feel better now?" Molly asked gently.

  "Much," she said. She reached out and held her two friends by their hands. "It's so good to have someone," she said, the tears beginning again, rolling down her cheeks. But they were tears of gratefulness, not of fear. Molly felt her own tears begin.

  "Look, now she's crying, too," Dolly said, her voice cracking, her tears beginning. They all reached for the tissues at the same time.

  "We're making a river here," Molly said, feeling laughter begin in herself as she dabbed at her eyes.

  After a while, Emma stood up. "I'm better now," she announced while walking to the window and drawing the blinds. Dawn had come. They could see the first pink and red signs of the rising sun.

  "Now can we go and get some sleep?" Dolly asked. Molly nodded. The huge black bird had disappeared.

  When she got back to her condominium, she lay down and looked at the ceiling. Then she picked up the phone and dialed her daughter.

  "My God, you scared the hell out of me."

  "I just wanted to talk to you. I just wanted to hear your voice."

  "Sure, Ma," Alma said.

  "I missed you, that's all. I was lying here and decided how much I missed you."

  "Me too, Ma."

  They talked for a few minutes.

  Then Molly said, "It's long distance. I better hang up."

  "You feel better?" Alma said.

  "Much better." She paused for a moment. "I love you, my darling."

  "Me too, Ma."

  She hung up, lay quietly for a few moments, then dialed her son. />
  "Did I wake you?"

  "Wake me. Hell no, Ma. I'm just going to sleep. Pushed a hack all night."

  "Did you have good business?"

  "Not bad, Ma."

  "Wonderful."

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm terrific. I just missed you that's all."

  "Great, Ma. It's nice to be missed."

  "You be a good boy, Harry."

  "I'm always a good boy."

  "It's long distance, Harry. I just called to hear your voice."

  "Sure, Ma, anytime."

  She hung up, and pulled the covers up to her chin waiting for sleep to come. It arrived quickly and she slept soundly until noon.

  The Demonstration

  The Six Day War had afforded Bernie Bromberg the greatest moment of his life. He was still on the force then, counting the days when his thirty-year hitch would be over and he would be able to retire from the bone-aching misery that the job had become.

  He was dead certain in his heart that he had never advanced in the Irish-dominated NYPD because he was Jewish. It was, he told himself, better than breadlines and he had sought refuge with the police department while the depression was in full swing. At the time he considered himself lucky to have made it, attributing that luck to a political fluke, which probably demanded that some token yids be recruited to keep the sheenies off the mayor's back.

  He had learned over the years to cope with the abuses heaped on him by his Irish fellow cops, although occasionally the cup of his wrath boiled over. This, of course, had not helped his career, or so he believed. That was why in 1967 he was still a uniformed patrolman with the 8th Precinct in Greenwich Village. Believing that he had been discriminated against somehow eased the pain of being passed over for promotion all those years.

  "The mick bastards," he would rant whenever his name had not appeared on a promotion list or he had received a reprimand or other kind of put-down from one of his captains. "Why should they give the little kike a break?" Actually he was six foot four in his stocking feet and even he admitted to himself his annoyance with his own characterization.

  "But Harvey Levinson was promoted," his wife Mildred would protest. Generally she agreed with his assessment of the anti-Semitism of his colleagues, but figuring that Jews were smarter, even her Bernie, she felt that his perpetual nonpromotion might be blamed partially on his own actions.

  "What do you know? Harvey Levinson is an ass-kisser."

  "But Harvey Levinson got promoted."

  "I won't kiss any Mick ass for no love nor money." He would fly into an uncontrollable rage that sometimes lasted for days. Even when it subsided within him, he continued to act as if he were still enraged, just to prove to Mildred how devastating her remarks had been. The fact was that there were a number of Jews who had moved upward in the force. Show Jews, he had called them. Big shots in the Shamrun Society, a group formed by Jewish cops as a means of self-protection.

  Even before he had applied to the force, when he was living with his parents in their one-bedroom tenement in East New York and sleeping with his brother Jack in the studio bed in the living room, he had been convinced that all goyim hated Jews with little or no exceptions. The employment agencies hated Jews, the personnel people of the big companies hated Jews, police and firemen and politicians hated Jews, and even German Jews, who, he decided, barely qualified as Jews, hated Jews.

  Since most of his life was lived in the company of Jews, the teeming ghettos of the Lower East Side and later East New York, he had not far to look to find affirmation. And, certainly, there was ample proof in nearly six thousand years of diaspora.

  "If they loved us we'd still be where we started from, in Palestine."

  "I don't care if they love us," his brother Jake would respond. "All I want is for them to leave us alone."

  "They'll never leave us alone."

  Whenever Bernie ventured outside of the ghetto, outside of the orbit of Jews, he imagined he was quite sensitive to "their" ways, their hidden innuendos and code words.

  "Grin and bear it," Jake had said when he had returned after a fruitless search for a job, convinced that he had not gotten it because he was Jewish. Jake was then going to City College, which was filled with Jews, and his experiences, therefore, were not as brutal.

  When Bernie had applied for the police force he had done so in desperation, absolutely convinced that he would be rejected. His mother and father, who could not speak English and who viewed policemen with the same suspicion they had viewed officers of the Czar in the days at the shtetl, were convinced that their son had gone "meshuga."

  "A Jewish cop?" his boyhood friends had snickered. "One look at your pekel without its hat and they'll throw you into the East River."

  "I got a choice," Bernie Bromberg told them. "I could be a cop or a robber."

  Those first years had not been easy. Because of his height and the generally accepted stereotype that Jews were little mousy people, he had been spared direct abuse from the streets, although his fellow cops had not been as kind. They told jokes about Izzy the Kike, and invariably qualified their anti-Jewish remarks with a look at Bernie Bromberg.

  "I don't mean you, Bromberg. You're a white Jew." Or: "Look, Bromberg, you can't help what you're born into." Or: "Bernie, let's face it there are good kikes and bad kikes."

  Mildred would say, "Be tolerant. That's the way they think."

  "Why can't a person be a person?" Bernie would respond. "Why do they have to always put a label on them?"

  In a way, too, he was considered somewhat exotic by his fellow cops, and certainly the precinct authority on the mysterious matter of Jewish people.

  "Hey, Bromberg," a captain might say, "you're a Jew. How do you pronounce 'Yom Kippur'?"

  He would spell the words out phonetically, patiently: "Y-o-o-m-e K-y-p-o-o-r."

  "Sounds like a fish."

  "Screw you," he would mumble under his breath.

  He had not over the years escaped violence in connection with his Jewishness. It always happened, though, when he was tired and his level of tolerance had been strained. Like the time before the war, when he found an orthodox Jew bloodied and unconscious in an alley on his beat. Ordinarily the man would have been an object of ridicule, even to Bernie, with his long "payis" and shiny, smelly black beaver hat. The man had obviously been soliciting funds among the stores and businesses in the neighborhood, doing it without a license, of course, and being very obnoxious in his methods. Bernie himself had hated to see men looking so foreign and dirty on their rounds, because, as everyone knew, one crummy Jew reflected on the rest of them.

  But seeing the man unconscious in the alley--his graying beard speckled with blood and his eyes and forehead bruised by the attacker--incited Bernie to great rage and he vowed to find the attacker with whatever means he could, fair or foul. He brought the matter to his captain, who looked at him through small blue Irish eyes and shook his head.

  "He had it coming," the captain told him. "He was soliciting without a license."

  "He was mugged," Bernie mumbled, but it was not the mumble of protest. By then, he had learned to practice the look of humility.

  "Hey, Bernie. He was a seedy old kike bandit. Maybe it will get him off our turf."

  As he had done so many times in the past, Bernie Bromberg fumed inwardly, feeling the incongruous pain of alliance with the man, despite his contempt. Somehow the hate he felt for the captain and for all those on the force and on the street who had bared their fangs at the Jews spurred him to an act that he had never thought himself capable of performing.

  He visited a secondhand clothing shop on the East Side and for less than ten dollars bought himself a replica of the old man's clothing. Then, for another ten dollars, spent in a theatrical shop off Times Square, he bought a beard and some extra hair for forelocks. He had a friend from the old neighborhood working in a jewelry store on Eighth Street who allowed him to hide the clothes and false beard and forelocks in back of the store. When he was of
f duty, he put on the clothes and prowled the area where the man had been mugged.

  "You're crazy, Bernie," his friend had told him when he first saw him in the outfit."

  "I'm gonna get the bastard."

  "You're crazy."

  He put out his hand and assumed an old man's stance.

  "Got a poor dollar for the Lubevitcher Yeshiva."

  "You're a schmuck," his friend said, throwing a nickel in Bernie's hand and doubling up in laughter.

  He had persuaded the captain to give him a straight two weeks of day duty, and the captain, perhaps from some strange tug of Celtic guilt, had acquiesced. Every night after he had pounded his beat, he slipped into his friend's store, changed into the outfit of the ancient shtetl Jew and retraced the same paths he had followed during the day. Under his dirty coat, he carried his club and his piece.

  At first it felt strange to be in this disguise with people eyeing him curiously. He could even hear snickers of ridicule as he passed. Sometimes he caught sounds of hatred, cruel gibes, and occasionally small children danced around him and threw dust in his face, to which he refused to react since it would blow his cover.

  After three nights of this, he was finally forced to explain it to Mildred.

  "I can't believe it, Bernie. What difference does it make?"

  "It makes a difference."

  "What?"

  He was hard pressed to be able to explain his action. He felt the eloquence of a response in his heart, but he could not summon up a convincing argument, as if it were simply expected of a Jew to understand. But Mildred didn't understand. Instead, she pouted, refused to speak to him, and denied him the pleasure of her body.

  "It's no big deal anyway," he would say angrily, when she shrugged him away in their bed. What it told him, though, was that his hate was stronger than love.

  He had been making his rounds for ten nights and, aside from petty annoyances from children and hurled curses and laughter from adults, he was able to move without hindrance. It was a tiring chore. His legs ached and his feet were swollen and sore, and his sweat and the grime from the street had increased the smell of the garments.