by Warren Adler
His Bingo nights were the happiest in his life, Jack decided. They weren't very cautious either and he knew that some of Edith's neighbors knew of his situation and looked at him curiously when he arrived at her apartment every night precisely at seven and left at eleven.
"'Here comes Mr. seven-eleven,' they must be saying," he said to himself whenever he passed one of her yenta neighbors on his way to her apartment.
"Do you think they'll tell?" Edith would ask.
"Who would believe it?"
Mrs. Greenstein died suddenly one evening at eight while watching "Murder She Wrote." Barbara was sitting on the couch, watching with her mother, as she did every night. She heard the brief gurgle and her mother's head slumped over her chest. If it hadn't been for the odd gurgle, she might never have noticed because the old lady often slept in that position.
"My Mama," Barbara cried. She knew the woman was dead and ran for the telephone to have Jack paged at the clubhouse.
"It's an emergency," she told the operator. "Page him at the Bingo. I'll wait." After a long five minutes, the operator's voice returned.
"I'm sorry, he doesn't answer the page."
"That's ridiculous. Did you page him in the Bingo room? My mother just died."
The operator repeated the paging process, but by the time she came back on the phone, Barbara had lost patience, knocking on the door of one of the neighbors. As always, Jack had taken his car to Mrs. Ginzberg's place.
"Please," she pleaded. "I must get my husband. My mother just died. He's at the Bingo."
Mr. Cohen, the neighbor, who also was watching "Murder She Wrote," responded to her plea and drove to the clubhouse. Because Barbara was too distraught, Mrs. Cohen volunteered to go to the Bingo room to summon Jack Katz. She returned in less than 15 minutes.
"He's not there." she informed Barbara.
"Not there?'
"I asked everybody. They didn't even know a Jack Katz. He's a regular, I told them. How could they not know him? You told me he played every night for two years."
"They never even heard of him?"
"Never," Mrs. Cohen shrugged.
"I can't believe it. I'm going myself."
Barbara's eyes were red with dabbing at her tears. She had left her mother dead in the wheelchair.
With Mrs. Cohen following, she burst into the Bingo room. Her hair was unkempt, her clothes awry, her complexion ashen. There were nearly a hundred people playing, listening intently as numbers were called and displayed on a big board in front of the room.
"Jack!" she screamed. People looked up from their boards, annoyed at the interruption. She strode to the front of the room and searched the faces in the crowd.
"Where's my Jack? Jack Katz. He's one of your regulars." She turned to the man who was picking little numbered balls from a cage.
"Never heard of him."
"Jack Katz," she cried.
"Never heard of him," the man repeated, turning his eyes from her.
"But he's been here every night for two years."
The man shrugged and she stood watching the faces of the people, ignoring her now, intent on the numbers that flashed on the board.
"How do you know he was here?" the man asked between picks into the cage. "Did he ever win a prize?"
She had been too anxiety-ridden to be rational, but the question stirred her sense of logic. No, she had never seen a prize. Along the wall, she noticed a vast array of prizes. The man watched her.
"We give them away every night."
"You better come along." It was Mrs. Cohen, gently nudging Barbara to leave the room, which they did finally when it was apparent that Jack wasn't in the Bingo room.
"I'll call the undertaker for you," Mrs. Cohen said, following Barbara into her mother's apartment. The old lady's body, ashen now, seemed solidly frozen upright in the wheelchair. Only her head had moved. Barbara sat on the couch and looked at the lifeless figure.
"What should I do now?" she asked quietly. There was, of course, no answer, and she collapsed in tears.
Jack arrived later than usual. He had a wonderful evening. Edith and he had made love and he could still smell her perfume as he walked in the door of his apartment and reached for the light switch. Almost before the light snapped on, he felt Barbara's presence. She had been sitting in the dark. Her eyes were puffed, her face bloated.
"She died," Barbara said. "Mama died."
He knew he felt elation, release, but he did not want to add to her grief. Too bad for her, he thought.
"And you weren't at the Bingo. I had to call the undertaker myself."
"That's good," he said. "They took the body away?"
She nodded.
"Have you called the children?"
"No."
"I'll do it." He went to the table where the telephone was and put on his half-glasses.
"They didn't know you at the Bingo."
"They didn't?"
"You never go to the Bingo. You never went to the Bingo."
"They said that?" Jack asked, not expecting an answer. Actually, he felt no remorse or contrition. Nor fear. He just didn't care about her response to his absence from the Bingo room.
"Where do you go?" she asked. She was crying softly now and it was difficult to hear her words.
"To the Bingo," he said, turning toward her. "My Bingo."
He pitied her. She was alone now. He knew how it could hurt. He knew, too, that the nightmare, his nightmare, was over. Had he waited for this moment, he wondered?
"What will I do now without Mama?" she asked. She was thinking of herself, he realized. He went into the bedroom, took out a piece of luggage and quickly packed a portion of his wardrobe.
When he came through the living room, she was still sitting there as he had left her, crying lightly. She looked up with disinterest and indifference as she had always looked at him.
"Where are you going?" she asked. The reality of her mother's death, he could see, had not yet penetrated.
"To the Bingo," he said and, without looking back, closed the door behind.
"You need a suitcase for Bingo?" she asked.
He looked at his wife. He felt nothing. He wanted to laugh and made a joke.
"For the prizes," he replied. "I expect to be a big winner."
He turned and left the apartment without looking back.
AN UNEXPECTED VISIT
Whenever Harold Weintraub drove through the imposing brick gates of Sunset Village, past the fancy colonial gatehouse, which could summon up images of verboten wasp country clubs, he would smile and shake his head. Under all these trappings, he told himself--the big showy clubhouse, the neatly clipped Florida grass, the little blue ponds and dredged canals, the gaily painted shuttle buses, the tricycles with their pennants crinkling in the breeze--lay, at least in his own mind, the unalterable fact that this was merely a dumping ground for aged Jewish parents of a certain working-class social strata. They were the Jews who never really made it big, a counter stereotype, a far cry from the usual "goyishe" perceptions of the rich kike who knew how to make all that money.
But this time through the gates, Harold Weintraub wasn't smiling, nor did all those philosophical musings interfere with his concentration on finding his father's condominium. They all look alike, he told himself with exasperation, as he maneuvered the rented car over the high slowdown bumps and squinted at the street signs. He hadn't even bothered to telephone his father, which would not be unusual in itself becase he hated to talk to his father on the phone, even under ordinary circumstances. The instrument had become a conduit of hostility, the conversations a frustrating exercise in noncommunication.
"Hey, Pop. It's Harold."
"Whoopee."
"How are you doing?"
"Three months, Harold?"
"You going to start again, Pop?"
"Three months?"
"If that's all you're going to say, I'll hang right up."
"I can't understand. A boy doesn't call his father fo
r three months."
"Pop, it's long distance."
"When are you going to come down?"
"Maybe in February."
"That's what you said last February."
"I'm busy as hell, Pop."
"Sure."
"Really."
"Three months. Not to pick up the telephone."
He maneuvered the car into a court, then, noting the unfamiliarity, backed up onto the main road again. In the five years since his father had come down to Sunset Village from Brooklyn, after his mother had died, he had been here exactly three times, spending no more than four hours straining for conversation, until the atmosphere became stultifying and, he sensed, even his father had enough and was itching to get on with the rhythm of his life. There was a certain ritualization about each visit. The mandatory visit to the clubhouse and the pool to "show him off" to his father's cronies, male and female, all of whom resembled each other.
"My son, Harold. This is Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzman. Mr. Pomerantz. Mr. Berkowitz."
"So good-looking." he would hear one of the yentas whisper.
"A professional?"
"He's a toy manufacturer," his father would say. "You know the game 'Foreign Policy?'"
"Adult games, actually," Harold would say politely.
"A big shot," his father would say, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, happy in his moment, a kind of triumph, parading his progeny. "To me, they're toys."
Invariably, the conversation would drift toward his marital status, as if he were an old-maid schoolteacher, a familiar image for his father, who spent thirty years as a carpenter for the New York school system.
"All right, Harold, I'm sorry I asked," the old man would retort--the subject, Harold knew, was always on the surface of his father's mind.
"Actually, I'm living with a girl," Harold told him on his last visit. They had been walking along the edge of the road and the old man had stopped and turned his tanned face to his son, narrowing myopic eyes.
"Living with?"
"It's not that my honor is at stake, Pop. It's the accepted way. Neither of us want marriage. Believe me, it's better. When you can't stand each other any more, you split."
The old man shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe it's better."
They resumed their walk. Harold waited for the inevitable.
"Jewish?"
"As a matter of fact, no."
The old man shrugged again.
"A shiksa," he said, rubbing it in, thinking of how Janice's obviously Irish face would stand out like a beacon in this place.
"You can't find a nice Jewish girl and settle down?" his father said angrily.
He could see the old man's face flush beneath the tan. "I am settled."
"And children. What about children?"
"Who the hell wants kids?"
"There you may have a point," his father said, sticking a gnarled finger near his nose. Then the old man's shoulders sagged and they walked slowly back to his place without a word.
But he wouldn't go without an explanation, and when they got back to his father's place, he felt the need to say more.
"Pop"--he said it gently--"times have changed. It's different now. Freer. Women, too, want this kind of freedom. That's not to say that someday I won't get married and have kids. There's no need for commitment. Janice. Her name is Janice. We care for each other. We have a lot in common. She's twenty-six, with a great job. Hell, she even shares expenses. Look, I'll be thirty-seven on my next birthday. I've got time, lots of time."
"I got no time," his father said.
Harold remembered the conversation, even through his concentration, as he searched for his father's place, cursing the builder and his mass-produced look-alike two-storied product, the barracks architecture, the sameness. He parked in front of a small structure around which people were clustered. It was the laundromat. Eyes turned toward him. He was obviously an event. Men and women came toward him. He held out a piece of paper with his father's address on it, like a greenhorn immigrant lost in the middle of Times Square.
"About a quarter of a mile in that direction," a gray-haired man said. He wore a sour expression. A woman in a flowered house dress stood beside him.
"What's his name?"
"Weintraub."
"Weintraub. Weintraub," the woman mused aloud. "Harry Weintraub?"
"Morris."
"He used to be in the fish business in Philadelphia?" the woman asked. The gray-haired man rolled his eyes skyward and lifted his hands, palms upward.
"No. Morris Weintraub. The New York Weintraub," the younger man said.
"A quarter of a mile that way," the gray-haired man said, motioning toward the woman with his hand as if she were suffering from body odor.
"From Philadelphia?" he heard the woman ask again, as he stepped back into the car.
Kuchlefel, he thought, remembering an expression of his mother--Yiddish slang that meant a spoon in everybody's pot. Odd how that world still survived, in his mind, in these people. He followed the road slowly, watching for bumps, stopping while a train of tricycles passed, the older men and women chatting as they rode by, smiling like kids in organized play at a summer camp.
What the hell was he doing here? he wondered. In the middle of the week. Away from his office in the middle of the week.
He actually felt the compulsion to go at 3 a.m. as he tossed in bed, hearing Janice's even breathing beside him. He quietly slipped out from under the covers and padded to the living room, fished into the cigarette box, lighting up and inhaling, something he had not done for years. It went down harsh, and he stifled a cough.
"I forgot," Janice said simply. She had broken the news to him at dinner and he had felt the lamb chop turn to lead in his stomach.
"How can you forget?"
"Believe me. It's easy."
"It's like playing Russian roulette."
"Yeah," she said with heavy sarcasm. "God damned diaphragm. Ah diden know wad luv can do," she mimicked.
"How was I supposed to know?"
Her eyes misted. She reached out and patted his arm.
"It's my fault, kid. A stiff cock and my memory turns to glop."
"Jesus. It's not funny."
"I'm not laughing," she sighed. "No sweat. I'll have the thing vacuumed and that will be that."
"Our kid?"
"It's my body." She looked at him archly. "Hey, which side are you on? I'm the Catholic, remember."
"How long has it been?" He must have looked very serious, reflective. A brief frown, perhaps a sudden tug of truth, wrinkled her face like crinkled paper. Feeling his own embarrassment, he checked himself from making any further clinical inquiries. But it was too late. She had caught his drift.
"I'm four weeks over. The home test is positive. It's well within the limits of an easy abortion. It's just a few hours out of my day and a little rest, that's all. I'll take off Friday and be back to work Monday. So I'll louse up our weekend." They had planned a country drive. She chucked him under the chin. "Look, kid. It happens."
He took her in his arms and kissed her hair, watching his own face in the mirror behind her. He felt his unhappiness and pressed her closer.
"I love you," he whispered.
"Jeezuz," she said, moving apart and watching his eyes. "It's not the end of the world."
That was precisely the point of his own uneasiness. He sat up half the night and chain-smoked, mulling it over. My kid, he thought, picturing a young boy, perhaps as he had been. It was then that he thought of his own father and the gnarled workman's hands that he had clutched on endless walks through parks and zoos and parades and circuses. This is stupid, he told himself when dawn poked through the edges of the blinds and, smashing out the cigarette, he crawled into bed quietly beside her. She slept peacefully. Perhaps it didn't matter.
But the idea of it would not go away. As a faraway abstraction, abortion had always seemed right, attractive actually, because it foreclosed on the complication of unwanted progeny. It's a
n option, a choice, he told himself, arguing that it was a sensible approach to a biological problem. My God, he told himself, deliberately keeping himself stiff beside her, that's not the issue. It's my damned kid.
In the morning, he told her that he was going to go down to visit his father for the day. She looked up quickly, doughnut poised in mid-air, dripping coffee drops on the front page of The New York Times.
"He OK?"
"I think so. I'm feeling a little pang of guilt, I guess. Haven't seen him for nearly two years. It's a light week anyway. What the hell? It's only a day."
"Nice Jewish boys," she said sprightly, a broad smile breaking.
Was she as concerned? What did the abortion mean to her? He wanted to ask, but felt himself waiting for something, a message, a signal. It never came, only the brief rustle of the paper as she turned the page.
He followed the directions and finally recognized his father's street, confirming the numbers. Mr. Weintraub lived on the upper story of the two-story building. After parking the car, he took off his jacket and, holding the loop, swung it over one shoulder. As he stood before the green door waiting to rap the door knocker, he wondered why his heart was beating so fast. He'll go straight through the roof, he smiled, banging on the knocker.
He heard a movement inside, the shuffling, and the door was opened slowly. A gray-haired woman in a flowered house dress stood before him, waiting for a response.
"I'm sorry." He stepped back to look again at the number on the door. "I must have got it wrong somehow. I'm having a devil of a time finding my father's place."
"Who?" She seemed a little hard of hearing.
"Morris Weintraub."
"Morris?"
He heard a toilet flush and a door click open.
"You called me, Ida?" He heard his father's voice from inside the apartment. Then his father was beside the woman, looking at him, squinting into his eyes.
"Pop." Harold moved beside him and kissed him on the cheek. The old man grabbed his forearm.
"Harold!" He seemed beside himself with joy. He looked at the woman beside him. "This is my Harold."
He felt a long pause, a hesitation, as he stood in the center of the living room, knowing that his father was assembling his thoughts, preparing himself as he had seen him do over the years.
