Never Too Late for Love

by Warren Adler

  He was being manipulative, attempting to use guilt as a weapon of last resort.

  "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 healthier 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 addressing the group. He could see Genendel smiling. "I don't think it's any of your business. Who are you to preside in judgment over our lives? What do any of you know of our lives?"

  "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 to speak 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 a low-class family. Pigs!" 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.

  "I guess some people we used to know," Genendel said, as they walked out of the room.

  YOU'D BE SURPRISED HOW WE'RE RELATED

  "Cousin Irma," Sarah whispered, as she looked again at the signature below the message on the New Year's card, tapping her finger on the edge of her coffee cup. "Who is Cousin Irma?"

  She studied the card, the postmark, "New York City" in the center of the canceled imprint and the name "Mrs. Nathaniel Z. Shankowitz" with her Sunset Village address. She searched through the imaginary archives of the family tree, both on her and her ex-husband's side, finally shaking her head in defeat.

  "Do I have a Cousin Irma?" she asked herself. It was a mystery.

  When her son called from Connecticut on the Jewish New Year, she quickly disposed of the amenities and asked him the question that was on the surface of her mind.

  "Do I have a Cousin Irma?"

  "Who?"

  "That's what I said. Your Uncle Eddie has Rebecca and Arthur and my father and mother, your grandmother, had no other relatives in this country..." She paused, shook her head and shrugged. She emitted a sigh of surrender.

  "Maybe it's the wrong address?"

  "No." She paused again. "Did your father ever have a Cousin Irma?" Even twenty-five years of divorce did not temper the unmistakable acid tone. After the divorce, Nat had always been "your father," the tone heavy with sarcasm as if he were some terrible obscenity, which he was, of course, in her mind.

  "Not that I remember," the son said. He was used to such inferences and let it pass tactfully, a posture that always annoyed her, triggering old insecurities and suspicions.

  "What would you know about him anyway?" she said, feeling her own crankiness emerge. Since the divorce, he had only seen him a few times and that was soon after he had left the house. She sensed his annoyance and knew that she had, as always, gone too far.

  "Well, it's not important" she said finally. "Look, I'm grateful you called, darling. Happy New Year and send my regards." The implication was clear. His wife wanted no part of her, an old divorcée with an only son. Who could blame her? She understood and was happy to get his periodic calls.

  Now that she got her son's call, she would be able to report that fact to the yentas around the pool and the pity would pass on to some other poor woman whose ungrateful children hadn't called on New Year's.

  "Your Barry didn't call?"

  "He called last week."

  "He didn't call on New Year's?"

  "They had company. Her people came all the way from Chicago."

  "That's an excuse?"

  It was a form of torture she really did not like to hear. It was bad enough that she had been a divorcée. Even at sixty-eight, such status had its special distinctions in the pecking order of the Sunset Village yentas. A married woman was the highest order of female, with her credentials descending in the order of the condition of her husband's health. A woman with a vigorous healthy husband was on the highest rung of yenta envy. At next to the last rung of the ladder, lower than the women with the most sickly and debilitated husbands, lower than the varying gradations of widowhood, was the divorcée, further graded by the chronology of the divorce. A woman divorced beyond twenty-five years, like Sarah Shankowitz, was just short of yenta purgatory. Purgatory, the lowest rung, was the old maid, although woman's lib had provided some measure of late respectability to the condition.

  If Sarah Shankowitz knew what was in store for her, she might never have precipitated the action that sealed her fate. She knew she had made a mistake in prompting the divorce from Nat, but she never confided that to anybody.

  "You have your pride," her best friend Mildred had advised. She lived in the apartment across the hall and every day, when the husbands and the children had gone off to work and school, they spent the morning over coffee, sharing the intimacies of their lives. Neither of them were what might be called "liberated" women. They lived their lives as their mothers did, housewives who manned the homefront while others in the family went out into the world.

  "Maybe he's getting senile early. He doesn't seem interested anymore," Sarah confided to Mildred one day. They had begun to share little secrets and, on the days when self-pity emerged in Sarah's heart, Mildred would rise to the occasion with energy and investigative zeal. Encased in fat, her big unburdened breasts resting over a bloated belly, she had an air of superior wisdom and self-satisfaction. Perhaps it was the flesh itself that gave her the illusion of solidity, but the less assertive Sarah envied her confidence and what she supposed then, her worldliness. Mildred tapped two fat fingers into a dimpled palm.

  "Show me bed trouble and I'll show you marriage trouble."

  "I'm not exactly Marilyn Monroe."

  "How long has it been?"

  "Maybe a month." Actually, she remembered, she had lied by half. "But he works so hard," Sarah had added quickly. "He comes home an
d sleeps in the chair." Nat was a cutter in the garment district. "It's not easy."

  "That's no excuse."

  "Maybe he should see a doctor. He might have just lost his pep."

  "They don't lose their pep so easily," Mildred said cryptically.

  "To tell you the truth, I don't really care that much about it."

  "What has that got to do with the price of fish in Canarsie?"

  "But you noticed?"

  "Certainly I noticed." Despite her confidences, she still maintained a delicacy when it came to sex. Perhaps, Sarah thought, she had confided too much, but now that the floodgates were open, Mildred persisted.

  "I make sure my Sam is always interested."

  "How do you do that?"

  Mildred smiled, her jowls tightening. Sarah found it difficult to think of her in that context, especially since Mildred was such a big woman and Sam so slight.

  "I don't give away trade secrets."

  But the matter became a constant inquiry and Sarah could not bring herself to lie about it.

  "Not yet?"

  "No." She would twist and untwist her fingers. Seeking something to do, she would pour more coffee, which only made her more nervous than she was.

  "You know it could be another woman?" Mildred said one day, lowering her voice as if the walls could eavesdrop. It was, of course, a seed planted. That had been the farthest thought from Sarah's mind. Other women were not in the range of her experience. She had been married at eighteen, twenty years ago. Life was making a living, making ends meet, taking care of her son, cleaning the house, going shopping every day for food, talking to Mildred. And on Sundays, they would go to his mother's, Friday nights to her parents'. Occasionally, they would go out to eat Chinese food or to the movies. Other women? That was only on the soap operas.

  But despite her skepticism, the idea was loose in her mind, rattling around like clicking marbles, causing her to look at Nat in some new way. She watched him snoring in his chair and could not conceive of such a thing.

  He wasn't exactly Cary Grant himself, with his bald pate, pale skin and hawklike nose, although she once had thought him very attractive.

  Besides, he was rarely out of her sight. Except for the twice-a-month meetings of his Veterans' group, he was always home at the regular time, tired, a bit-forlorn, but home. Of course, there was the once-a-month union meetings but those, too, were part of the regular routine. Mildred was crazy she decided. My Nat, a philanderer? It was an absurdity. Yet the idea persisted.

  Finally, one night in bed, she became mildly aggressive, moving toward his sleeping body and attempting a furtive caress. It was, of course, contrary to all the tenets of her upbringing. A woman waits. A woman submits. Nat merely gulped, shrugged her away and continued his snoring.

  "He rejected me," she told Mildred the next day, having been up the rest of the night, turning a bleak future over in her mind.

  "I think you got trouble, Sarah," Mildred responded, the hint of dire foreboding in her tone. She crossed her fat arms over her ample bosoms, clucked her tongue, and shook her head from side to side. Nothing more needed to be said. Sarah was an object of pity.

  "So what should I do?" She felt the tears well in her eyes, and Mildred's bulk swam in the mist.

  "Talk. You got a tongue," Mildred scolded, her disgust at Sarah's passivity and helplessness unmistakable.

  "And suppose it's true?"

  "You'll cross that bridge when you come to it."

  That night after she had finished the dishes and her son sat down at the table to do his homework, she went into the living room and shook Nat awake. Startled, he opened his eyes and looked at her, first with annoyance.

  She must have seemed compelling, because his attitude quickly changed to alertness.

  "I want to talk to you, Nat," she said, standing over him, rubbing her moist hands along the sides of her flowered housedress, stained with the recent soap suds.

  "Now?"

  "Now."

  "So talk."

  "What's going on?" She felt her courage leaving her as she assessed what she thought was guilt in his response. Maybe she should leave it alone, she thought, but the image of Mildred and her remembered sternness persisted. He didn't answer and turned his eyes to the ceiling in an attitude of exasperation.

  "I'm pooped. I worked hard all day. Goldstein was a son-of-a-bitch. The patterns were two inches off. I don't need this aggravation." It seemed an overreaction at first. After all, no accusations had, as yet, been made.

  "Something's going on," Sarah probed, wishing Mildred could see her, feeling her strength gather.

  "There's nothing going on." He had answered too swiftly, she thought. Then he paused, looked quizzical. "What should be going on?"

  "You know." She imagined her gaze was intimidating, the rebuke forbidding but clear.

  "What do I know?"

  "You think I'm stupid, huh Nat? Dumb stupid Sarah. That's what you think." Her hands were on her hips."Well, I got eyes." She pointed to her eyes. "I got ears." She pointed to her ears. "I got instincts." She pointed to her head. Then she drove her finger into his chest.

  "You think you're fooling me?"

  The finger pressed hard into his chest and he winced. "Whaddymean fooling?" He was being defensive now, and she suspected now that he was hiding something. "A woman knows," she said. It was Mildred's line, almost Mildred's voice.

  He pushed her finger away and stood up, pacing the floor, moving his fingers through his hair. She recognized the gesture. My God, I think Mildred was right, she thought, her heart sinking. It had gone too far. She watched him pacing the floor.

  "All right," he said finally. "So it's true."

  "Its true?"

  She could not reconcile his admission to her expectations. She was prepared for a denial. It wasn't possible. She felt her knees grow weak and the blood drain from her head. It was one thing merely to suspect. But to know was hell. He looked at her and opened empty palms, a picture of abject surrender. "I hadn't meant it to happen."

  "I don't want to hear it."

  "You don't think I'm ashamed?"

  "It's too late."

  "Too late?"

  "How can I live with it?"

  "What can I say?"

  Her strength was returning, but on waves of self-pity, white caps of anger. "I've been a good, a faithful wife. A good mother. I worked hard. I kept a clean house. I cooked. I saved." Her voice rose. Nat put a finger over his lips, his eyes looking toward the kitchen. "You disgraced me. You disgraced your son," she hissed.

  Their son, hearing the raised voices, had come into the living room. Nat turned to him and pointed, in the direction of the kitchen.

  "Go do your homework. We're having a discussion."

  "You're making too much noise."

  "Go ahead. Tell it in front of him. Sure. Talk in front of him. Why not? Let him know what kind of a man his father is."

  "Go back to your homework," Nat pressed their son.

  "No. Stay here," Sarah shouted. "Listen to your wonderful father. Let him tell it in front of you about his escapades."

  "Would you please go back to your homework?"

  "Don't. Stay!" Sarah screamed.

  It seemed to go on interminably with the son looking bemused, rotating his gaze from mother to father, like a wind-up toy, fixed in one spot, with only the head being able to pivot.

  "If you don't go, I'll go," Nat finally said. The boy stood rooted. Finally, Nat stalked off to the closet, got his hat and coat, and stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him, shaking some bric a brac off the shelves.

  "See," she said. "That's the kind of man your father is." Then she burst into tears and the confused boy went back to the kitchen.

  She stayed up all night, listening for his footsteps in the hall. But they never came. Once, she put on her coat over her nightgown, went downstairs and stood in the vestibule watching for him. The streets were empty and soon the cold seeped into her bones and she w
ent upstairs again.

  "You have your pride," Mildred said the next morning. Sarah's hands shook as she lifted the coffee cup to her mouth. "Believe me, I know my onions when it comes to men." Her round fat face seemed to glow with satisfaction.

  "Now what?" Sarah asked. She was totally disoriented. It was the first time since her marriage that her morning had any break in its normal routine. Her ears were still turned to the hallway. She dared not think where he had spent the night.

  "He'll come crawling."

  "He will?"

  "Wait."

  "And then?"

  "Then you let him crawl. But not right away. He's got to suffer first."

  "Suppose he doesn't."

  "He will." She said the words with finality as she thickly buttered another piece of toast and stuffed it daintily into her puffed face.

  After two days and no word, no crawling, Sarah called Nat at the shop.

  "Well," she said, anger rising as she heard his voice.

  "Well, what?"

  "What do you mean, 'Well, what?'"

  "You don't know what I mean?"

  "No, I don't know what you mean."

  "What's going to happen? That's what I mean."

  The phone was silent. She felt him searching for words. But her anger would not contain itself. Why wasn't he crawling?

  "You can go to hell," she said, slamming down the phone, running across the hall to Mildred. She was in the bathtub, a blob of gelatin stuffed into a white mold.

  "I told him to go to hell," she cried.

  "Good."

  She stood there in the steaming bathroom, watching Mildred soap her huge belly, which looked like another whole person in the tub with her.

  "Well, what happens now?" she asked, sitting on the toilet seat, clenching and unclenching her fingers.

  "How should I know?" Mildred looked up at the ceiling, obviously annoyed at the violation of her privacy. Sarah started to say something, but no words came out.

  "I think he's gone for good," she said after a long pause, the sense of defeat overwhelming.

  "Good riddance," Mildred said, flapping water over her flesh to remove the soap from her belly.

  A week later, he came to the apartment and removed his clothes. He must have been watching the front of the apartment house waiting for her to leave on her daily shopping chore. He also left a brief note: "I'll send you money every week."