The Sunset Gang (11 page)

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 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 off 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.

"Christ, do you stink," his friend told him when
he had put on the disguise for the eleventh time.

He lifted an arm and stuck his nose into the armpit.

"Now it's more authentic."

"Pheww."

Oddly, he came to look forward to this nightly round. There
was something mystical in being able to walk the streets as another person, an
old Jew, and he began to actually look forward to the stares, the ridicule, the
abuse of the children. He would stare back at them, smiling thinly, hoping they
would see the fire in his eyes and interpret it as some curse, some evil spell
that he was transmitting and from which they would suffer. I feel your pain,
old man, he would tell himself on those occasions when he caught his reflection
in the glass of a store window.

As he walked, he maintained his alertness, although he
wondered if it stemmed from the fear of the old Jew he had created or the
stalking cop that lingered within. He deliberately walked into dark and lonely
places, in alleys, down deserted side streets, behind tenements and stores,
courting attack. The sound of footsteps made his heart beat joyously, as his
body braced for an impending blow. "Go on, you bastard," he would
mumble. "Make your move."

Finally someone did make a move. It was remarkable that he
had been able to walk in this neighborhood as long as he had, a defenseless old
Jew.

The footsteps behind him were muted. The person who stalked
him obviously was wearing sneakers. The sounds stopped when he stopped, started
again when he moved. He gripped the club under his coat and walked to the
darker side of the street, pausing in the entrance of an alley, where he picked
up the top of a garbage can and pretended to be peeking inside. Listening, he
felt the person getting closer, the breathing audible. He felt the tension,
then heard the sound of the body's catapulting movement as hands reached out to
clutch at his throat. He felt himself being pushed deeper into the alley,
letting it happen, feeling the sharp pain of the initial attack. His back
crashed against a wall and he caught his first glimpse of the assailant, a
young man in his twenties, smooth skin, blond, an Irish face. He saw the glint
of the knife as it flashed, then hung in the air just below his chin. He was
calm, felt no fear, leveling his eyes on the face of the young man, his thin
Irish lips snarling.

"The gelt, kike."

"Don't kill me," Bernie squeaked.

"Da gelt, kike," the young man hissed. "You
didn't have enough last time, dummy." He smiled.

Sure, Bernie thought, all bearded Jews look alike.

"I god da gelt, sonny," Bernie squeaked, feigning
fear and holding up his hands, then lowering them, lifting his knee with all
his power and catching the young man in the groin, watching him drop, the knife
falling to the cement. He dragged the young man by the hair along the length of
the alley, stopping in the stair well in the rear of the tenement, and then
pushed the young man in front of him until he could see the frightened face
clearly in the light. The enclosure smelled of urine and garbage. Clutching the
man's windpipe, he waved the knife in front of his face, feeling the joy and power
of it.

"You vant my gelt, sonny?" he said, his voice
still squeaking. He waved the knife in front of the young man's nose. The young
man's throat hacked, the phlegm rose and was ejaculated into Bernie's false
beard, which made his fingers tighten on the windpipe. I could crush this in
five seconds, he thought, feeling the strength of his hands. He felt himself
giggle, then relax as he roughly turned the boy around and threw cuffs around
his wrists, then jabbed him in the small of the back and, when he fell, turned
him over, tied his ankles, and shoved a gag into his mouth. The young man was
obviously frightened now, the arrogance had faded from his eyes, and Bernie
smiled as he looked down at the Irish face in the half-light.

"You are a lucky mick to find this old Jew,"
Bernie said, forgetting for a moment to play his role, then remembering.
"You vont I should make you Jewish?"