by Warren Adler
"This is Mrs. Schwartzman," the older man said, stumbling over his words. The woman's hands fluttered as she smoothed her house dress.
"I'll make some coffee." She moved into the little kitchen, visible through the lattice doors over the countertop, and busied herself with the coffeemaking, loudly enough to assure them that she was not listening.
Harold had, of course, drawn his conclusions instantly. The uncommon articles and photographs in the room offered confirmation.
"I was actually passing through on business," Harold said, noting that despite his tan, old age was setting its mask on his father's face.
"I hadn't expected..." Mr. Weintraub began looking through the shutters that separated the kitchen from the living room.
"I can see," Harold said, unable to hide his sarcasm, instantly regretful. Why should it annoy me? he asked himself. A twitch in his father's cheek signaled the older man's displeasure, a sign of his special kind of seething nature, which Harold observed in their early life together. They sat silently for a while until Mrs. Schwartzman brought their coffee and put it on the cocktail table.
"I promised the Fines," she said, forcing a smile. The smile was tight, too ingratiating. He noted that her lips trembled.
"No, really, Mrs.... "Harold said.
"Schwartzman," his father quickly said.
"I promised. Besides, you should have a little time together." She took her pocketbook from the top of the television set.
"You'll come back soon, Ida?"
He could see the extent of his father's anxiety now, feeling pity.
"I'll be back in a couple of hours. You know Molly. She likes to talk, and poor Sam can't talk back."
They watched as the door closed and the father reached for his coffee with a shaking hand.
"I would have explained," the older man said after he sipped and shakily replaced the coffee cup. "Who expected you to walk in like this?"
"I think it's terrific, Pop. I really do." He reached out and touched his father's sleeve. "Its just hit me too quickly." Dammit, he told himself. He was still annoyed. He still had not accepted the idea of it, but he was determined to keep that hidden.
"Better than being alone. Ida is good to me. She cooks good, takes care of me." He looked at his son and his eyes misted. "I was never happy alone, Harold. Look, your Mama and I were married forty years. She wasn't always easy to live with, but it wasn't so bad. That's the problem. Who goes first."
"Pop, if you're happy, that's all that counts." He was conscious of his own cliché.
But his father must have felt the lack of conviction.
He continued, "Your Mama was a wonderful woman, a wonderful woman." He paused.
Harold thought of the many times his mother talked about his father, privately, to him alone. "He's a good man, your father. He'll never make a lot of money. He's no ball of fire. Maybe he lets people step on him too much. And he takes it out on me when other people get him down." The words cracked through the mirror of time. He imagined he was enveloped in the softness of his mother's ample body.
But the older man's guilt would not let him be silent. "Alone is not so much fun, Harold."
"I'm happy for you, Pop. I really am."
"We have a lot in common. We never fight. Not that everything is always perfect. It wasn't always perfect with your Mama."
He looked at his gnarled, tanned father, shrunken by age, wondering obscenely, he thought, if they actually had sex, which brought him around to his own problem. He felt it harder now to broach the subject. Was it actually advice he was seeking? Or some kind of validation?
"Are you going to get married?" The idea had begun in innocence, but sounded treacherous when he said it. His father's alert brown eyes looked at him in confusion.
"Married?"
He was being observed as if he had just uttered a most preposterous remark, plumbed from the depths of stupidity and ignorance.
"And lose more on the social security?"
Harold could understand now how far out of their world he was, a traveler from another planet. "I didn't know," Harold mumbled.
"Sure you didn't know. How could you know?" At that moment, the sound of an ambulance's siren splintered the silence.
"You hear that?" his father said
Actually, Harold hadn't. Living in New York made his ears screen out the cacophony of sounds--horns, screeching brakes, shouts, screams, subway trains, sirens. Noticing now, he realized it was a kind of clarion.
"That's the Sunset Village anthem. The chances are that somebody is leaving this world."
"Why would anyone want to leave Florida?" he said, groping for humor. Harold knew he had botched things up by barreling in on them before his father was prepared mentally for the confrontation.
The older man smiled, sensing the break in tension. "You can get plenty of exercise just going to funerals," he said, laughing and lifting his coffee cup.
Harold did the same and sipped. The liquid was tepid. Looking about the room, he felt suddenly closed in. The air was humid, dripping with moisture, which made him note that the air conditioning was not turned on. Obviously to save money.
"Let's go for a walk, Pop."
The older man rose slowly and they walked into the bright sunshine, past the white painted façades of the barracks-like buildings. Looking into the windows, he saw dark interiors occasionally brightened by a lighted television screen. There was an appearance of cleanliness about the place, everything neat, properly trim and orderly, so different from the filth and hustle of Brooklyn, where they had lived. They had had a small apartment on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. Summers, with heat like this, they would actually all sleep on mattresses on the fire escape. He breathed deeply, felt the sweetness of the overscented air, the total absence of city smells. Where is my childhood? he asked himself, annoyed at the sentimentality but unable to control a tiny sob that bubbled inside and tightened his chest.
"Remember the times we used to go to Prospect Park?"
His father nodded. "Your mother used to say, 'Watch the frankfurters. He'll get a bellyache.' But we never watched the frankfurters and you never got a bellyache."
"I can still smell the elephants." We never talked much, even then, he was thinking, seeing in his memory the elephant's dusty parchmentlike skin. He joked to Janice that his parents never talked about the facts of life, or anything except protection. "Be careful of your stomach." "Don't get too cold." "Look on both sides when you cross." "Don't go near the bums in front of the candy store." "Beware!" "Be Careful" "Watch out!" What the hell could he possibly ask this man about his own dilemma? he wondered, feeling unable to form a single line of inquiry. They stopped at the curb while a group of tricyclists passed, their big bottoms perched on the smallish seats.
"It's a nice place here, Harold," his father said.
"As long as you're happy, Pop."
"I remember when you were a little boy, Harold." He said it suddenly, looking down at the asphalt.
"Ottisot?" He mimicked a small child. "You were always pointing. Once we were stuck between stations on the subway and you had to make a number two and there was no place to go, so you did it in your pants and stunk up the whole train." He chuckled and shook his head. "You were something."
Harold was struggling to form a clear picture of his father in those days. He had seemed taller, broader, stronger, but the memory was more tactile than graphic, a rough workingman's hand tightly grasped.
"Do you think about it ... me as a kid ... often?" He felt his tongue bumble. "Not being a parent, I just wonder, that's all." Would he see his defensiveness?
His father said nothing as they walked along the path that threaded through the grass. A puff of cloud passed over the sun momentarily, changing the coloring of the landscape.
"Think about it?" The father smiled and shook his head. "In this place, sometimes I wonder if anybody thinks about anything else. Every yenta in the place, male and female, brags about their children and t
heir grandchildren. You'd think we produced a race of rich geniuses. Not a bad apple in the barrel."
It was not the answer he wanted, Harold knew. But, of course, he had not framed the right question, the central question, because he could not quite find the right words.
"I've been a pretty rotten son, haven't I, Pop?"
The older man stopped and looked up into his son's face. His eyes suddenly misted.
"I said that?"
"I'm saying it, Pop."
"What right have you got to say such a thing?" They resumed their walk.
"I don't call. I don't visit often. I should be sending you more money."
"That's pretty terrible, Harold. I'll admit that. But a bad son? Not my Harold. A little neglectful maybe. But a bad son, never."
"So what is all that crankiness I get over the phone?"
"If I ask you why you don't call? Why you don't visit? What's a father supposed to say? It doesn't mean I don't love you."
Harold could feel him watching peripherally as they walked, embarrassed by the uncommon sentiment, knowing, he felt now, that he was sensing his son's inner turmoil, his doubts.
"It's also not because I don't love you, Pop."
"What's that got to do with your not calling and not visiting? That's a horse of a different color."
Words, but not communication, he was thinking, wondering why they never crossed that Rubicon, never been really inside of each other's heads. He thought of Janice again--the long, probing, existential "talking out" of themselves, the avalanche of words that rolled from unseen peaks shrouded in gray fog. And after all those words, did he really know Janice? Janice who carried his seed, the seed of his ancestors. These were indeed oddball thoughts for him. The seed of his ancestors. Really.
"We used to take walks a lot together," his father said.
"Brooklyn in those days was a good place to walk."
"It was never boring."
The implication was clear and he did not pursue it. It occurred to him then why he could not frame the central question, the fulcrum on which both ends of the presumed advice might teeter. They simply had never transmitted meaningful things between them through words. What could he say? Hey, Pop, Janice is going to kill your grandchild on Friday. Or: I knocked up this girl, but don't worry, there'll be no fallout on me.
"Let me ask you a question, Pop," he finally said, stopping and digging the toe of his shoe in the carpet of trimmed grass. "You worry a lot about me?"
"Do I worry about you?" The older man smiled.
"Why do you always answer a question with a question?"
"Why not?"
"Seriously, Pop." Perhaps his father expected a smile and a chuckle, but he knew his face appeared anxious and that his father saw it.
"What else have I got to worry about?"
"A question again?" He paused. "Now you've got me doing it."
"I worry about you, Harold. I also worry about my health. You see such terrible things here. I worry about being alone. I worry about your Mama, wherever she is, she should only be happy. But, most of all, I worry about you."
"Why?" It was, he knew, the central question, boiled down into a single word and he knew before it had come what the answer would be.
"Because you're my child."
They resumed their walk in silence, passing a group of chunky women sitting on a bench, their legs crossed at the ankles.
"The yentas are inspecting," the older man said. "You should wear a sign saying, 'This is the son of Morris Weintraub.'"
"But that would take the fun out of it."
"Who cares?" the older man said. Beads of sweat had formed on his upper lip. "Let's go back."
As they walked, Harold pondered why he had come, why the idea of Janice's abortion had shaken him up. Why? That had been, in the end, the question. And he had received the answer. He felt the elation of resolution. It was as if his soul had been let out of its cage. The sky cleared; the sun, brightening and relentless, washed over them. He felt a burning on the back of his neck.
In the apartment, his father cleared the coffee cups and put them in the sink.
"Ida is very neat."
He remembered his mother, a blowzy woman, who always seemed to wear clothes that were stained. The dishes were always chipped, the silverware mismatched. She had been an abominable housekeeper, although neither he nor his father noticed it then. He reached for his jacket and threw it over his arm. His father was agitated by the sudden movement.
"So soon?"
"I told you I was just passing through. I wanted to see you is all."
The older man wiped his hands on his pants and came toward the son, who reached down and kissed his cheek, feeling the bristles against his lips. The father gripped his son's forearm and squeezed it.
"You're OK, Pop," Harold said. He felt his eyes moisten again.
"Be a good boy, Harold."
He started for the door and turned.
"And give Ida my love. If she's OK by you, she's OK by me."
"And next time, bring your girlfriend. Let's really give the yentas a megillah."
In the car, he felt lightheaded, joyous, and drove over the slow-down bumps too swiftly. His head bounced against the car roof and he laughed at himself and let out an Indian yell. No way they're goin' to do in my kid, he assured himself, trying to frame the way he would put it to Janice: Let's make it all legal, babe. Do the happily-ever-after bit. Jesus, he thought, what a lousy way to put it.
On the way home, he treated himself to a first-class ticket and let the flight attendant splash away with the champagne until he felt the warm inner glow that he imagined enhanced his feeling of celebration. He munched ravenously on the filet mignon.
"More champagne?" the flight attendant asked.
"Why shouldn't I?" he said, and giggled. Questions with questions. The flight attendant smiled, exuding plastic joy.
It was already dark and the champagne buzz dissipated as he reached their East Side apartment. He was still buoyant, and the brief anxiety that, once in New York, he would change his mind, had passed. He let himself in with his key, feeling the tension rise, knowing at once that she was already home. He could see the reflection of the bedroom lamp and the triangle shaft of light that it threw on the white shag carpet of the living room. He tossed his jacket on a chair and walked into the bedroom, where she lay, pillows propped, the New York Post on her lap, lifting her face to his. He sat beside her on the bed, kissed her on the lips, tasting, knowing he gave off the scent of imbibed champagne.
"I had a party on the plane," he said. "In celebration."
"Of what?"
"The two of us."
"No." He poked a finger and gently hammered at the tip of her nose. "The three of us."
Her eyes opened wide for a moment, then blinked.
"That's over," she said, shrugging.
"What's over?"
"It." She winced and he noticed that she was pale. "It has been eliminated."
"But..." He felt the airplane food begin to float in his stomach.
"Why louse up a weekend?" she said. "It was a good day for it. Why leave things hanging?"
He got up from the bed, turning his face quickly. He did not want her to see his pain. He walked into the kitchen, ran water from the tap, and drank two glasses swiftly. Perhaps, he thought, there was something inside of him he was trying to drown.
THE HOME
Sophie Berger's troubles began when she slipped on the bathroom floor and broke her hip. The pain was excruciating, but she managed to drag her body to the telephone in the living room and call her daughter in Miami Beach.
"Sandy, I'm lying on the floor in the living room. I fell in the bathroom and I think I broke something."
"My God, Mama. Hang up and call an ambulance. I'll be right over."
She called an ambulance, which arrived half an hour later. She also called her two best friends, Mildred Klepkes and Suzy Friedken, who ran over quickly. They were dressed to go out t
o the movies, the event for which Sophie Berger was preparing at the time of her accident. The two friends eased her to the couch and put a housecoat over her naked body. Then they gave her three aspirins, which helped Sophie a little, but she could tell from the swelling near her hip that something had definitely broken.
"They'll put me in a home now," Sophie cried, knowing that her tears were not necessarily a result of her pain. She could live with that, she knew.
"Don't be morbid, Sophie. It's probably only a sprain," Milly said, shaking her gray curls and tightening her lips.
"I know it's a hip," Sophie said.
"So it's a hip," Suzy Friedken said. "Sally Moskowitz broke her hip. And she's fine now."
"She was in a walker for six months," Sophie said.
"But she's fine now."
"She had a husband," Sophie said, hearing the familiar sound of the ambulance's siren, the Sunset Village anthem.
The attendants put her gently on a stretcher and began wheeling her out. She felt a needle prick on the side of a buttock.
"Call Marilyn and Leonard," she said to her friends. Then she looked up at the attendant and asked, "Where am I going?"
"To the Poinsettia Beach Memorial Hospital."
"Where else?" she whispered, feeling a softness descend as they put her into the ambulance.
She had been correct in her self-diagnosis. It was as if years of hypochondria had prepared her for this moment. When she awoke the next morning, she learned that they had put a pin in her hip and she would have to be in the hospital for ten days. Sitting beside her, silhouetted against the bright Florida morning sun, was her daughter, Sandy, who lived in Miami Beach. She vaguely recalled having seen her the night before as they wheeled her into the operating room.
"You feeling OK, Ma?" Sandy asked. Sophie felt her lips. They had taken out her false teeth and she imagined what her face must look like.
"I'll live," she answered, feeling the bare gums, hearing with distaste the slurring of her words.
"It's very common," her daughter said, moving out of the sun's stream, revealing her worried look, the brave-martyr expression on her face.
Sophie knew how she felt, pain and love and guilt all mixed up. She is thinking about the "home," Sophie thought, understanding.
