Never Too Late for Love (32 page)

He felt comfortable with Mrs. Ginzberg. He liked her.
Sometimes they played rummy. Sometimes they talked. But when she seemed to
indicate a physical advance, he drew away. It had been a long time since he had
any sexual relationship with Barbara. Desire had simply disappeared. Not that Barbara
had missed it. Indeed, he imagined that she was thankful that she no longer had
to endure him.

Now that Mr. Greenstein was gone, no meal in their
apartment was ever served without Mrs. Greenstein's presence. She was at
breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, and Barbara spent every waking minute with her.
He said nothing, looked away when Mrs. Greenstein looked at him, ignoring her
completely.

Barbara, of course, noticed everything in connection with
her mother. And because there was no longer any pretense, she apparently felt
secure enough to broach the subject.

"One kind word," she berated him. "Why can't
you give her one kind word? After everything she did for us, after all her
goodness?"

He decided not to answer any questions put to him on that
subject. He had been reading the paper and now lifted it higher to block any
view of her.

"You've got no heart, Jack." she cried. "No
heart at all. The woman lost her husband. I'm the only thing she has in her
whole life."

"Good for you," he mumbled. But her ears were
sharp. She pushed the paper aside and stared at him, fuming.

"You're an ungrateful bastard," she said. He
picked up the paper, smoothed it and began to read again.

"Bingo. That's all you know. Bingo." Barbara
cried.

She slept in her mother's apartment a few times a week on a
regular basis. He did not question it, but because there was only one double
bed in Mrs. Greenstein's apartment, he could envision them, mother and
daughter, locked in some maternal embrace. It seemed obscene.

"Do you think I'm normal?" he asked Mrs. Ginzberg
one night. He called her Edith, her first name, by then.

"Normal?"

"I hate my mother-in-law," he said. "I mean
I really hate her."

"So what's so abnormal?" She had a fine sense of
humor.

"And because of her, I think I hate my wife and,
maybe, because they both smothered them early in their lives, I may also hate
my children." He shrugged. "No. I don't hate my children."

"I hated my mother-in-law," Edith announced.
"But later I realized that it was because I was jealous of her, that she
had more influence over Charley."

"Did she?"

"Yes."

"But that's wrong."

"What could I have done?" She looked at Jack.
"What could you have?"

"I don't know."

"You could have left her."

"I did. In my soul, I left her. In my heart, I left
her."

"But you're still with her, at least physically,"
Edith said. He knew what she meant.

"I'm getting older," he said. "I'm in the
sixties." She had moved close to him and he let her kiss his lips and
stroke his neck. He felt some vague stirrings, something he had not felt in
years.

"We could try," she said.

"It doesn't hurt to try," he agreed. They kept
the lights off in the bedroom and got into bed together. They hugged each other
and she kissed him very hard and caressed him where he had not been caressed in
recent memory.

"See," Edith said when they had made love
successfully. "A good woman does a good job."

Later they lay in bed and talked and she told him that this
was the first time she had been with a man in fifteen years.

"Did I feel like a sixteen-year-old girl?" she
asked herself playfully. "A little bit, maybe."

"I know that I felt like a sixteen-year-old boy."

Occasionally, when Barbara would sleep at her mother's,
Jack would slip off and sleep with Edith Ginzberg, but the tension of possible
discovery made him restless and he decided it would be better to keep things
going the Bingo way.

Once or twice a week, they would spend the entire Bingo
time in bed together. Other times, they would talk, play cards, be with each
other. It became a regular routine, and Barbara rarely questioned him.

She spent evenings with her mother, who was declining
swiftly and needed much personal care. He ignored it entirely, even when his
wife would justify her actions vocally.

"It's the least I can do. After what she did for us.
I'm willing to sacrifice. I really am." It was a regular soliloquy, but it
took on a new dimension as Mrs. Greenstein began to fail. She was reaching
ninety.

"At least you have your Bingo." There was a note
of self-pity in her tone, but he ignored her. The one thing he would never let
her take away from him was his Bingo.

"Could you imagine her reaching ninety," Jack
told Edith on the day after his mother-in-law's birthday. She was in a
wheelchair and Barbara had ordered a birthday cake and had helped her mother
blow out all the candles.

"You'll kill my mother," Jack said. "That's
what I heard two weeks after my marriage. You'll aggravate her to death. Now
she's ninety and I wish I had." Edith put a finger over his lips.

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.

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 for
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 an 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.

"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.