The Sunset Gang (15 page)

"I'm worried about Mrs. Klugerman."

Perhaps it was his paleness and the look of anxiety on his
face, but Max Shinsky's wife swung into action on the telephone to investigate
the disappearance of Yetta Klugerman.

"You're right, Max," she said later. "Nobody
has seen her."

Later that day he went back to Mrs. Klugerman's condominium
and rang the buzzer for a long time. He also banged on the door, despite the
fact that he could clearly hear the sound of the buzzer. Then he called out her
name in ever-increasing crescendos.

"Mrs. Klugerman! Mrs. Klugerman!"

A door opened beside him. It was Mrs. Klugerman's neighbor,
someone he had talked to earlier.

"I don't think she's home. I haven't heard a
sound," she said.

"You think we should call the management?" he
asked.

"Maybe she went away."

"Where?"

"To visit. How should I know?"

"All of a sudden?

"I think maybe we should call the management,"
Max said and quickly walked to the end of the court and took the little trailer
to the management office. A woman with harlequin glasses on a chain and
blue-gray hair smiled at him, showing slightly yellow teeth.

"You got a record of Mrs. Klugerman leaving?" he
asked, giving her the name and address of the Angel of Mercy.

"You're the third person today that has asked,"
she said. "No, we haven't heard anything."

"Then I think you had better open her place."

"I'll have to talk to Mr. Katz."

"Of course," he said, wanting to add "and
hurry," but he lacked the courage. He was now afraid of what he might find
behind her closed door. He watched the woman with the bluegray hair dial the
phone and speak to someone on the other end.

"Yes, of course. I'll go myself." She nodded into
the phone, then hung up.

"I knew he'd approve," she said.

"This happens often?" he asked as he climbed
beside her into the Sunset Village station wagon.

"When you have this many old people and lots of them
living alone, you have to expect it." She seemed indifferent, looking at
him through faded blue eyes, the harlequin glasses hanging over her thin chest.

"Found one last week," she said, gunning the
motor and then accelerating out of the parking lot. "Had been dead for
three weeks. It was actually the odor that prompted our going in there."
He felt his stomach turn. "Actually it's a tremendous complication in
terms of the estate. Sometimes we can't find the children or any heirs. It
makes it rather difficult, considering the condominium fees." He sensed
her feeling of superiority over him. Old shiksa, he thought contemptuously.

She parked the car in front of Mrs. Klugerman's condominium
and searched in her pocketbook for a ring of keys. Then perching her glasses on
her nose, she observed the numbers on the keys, singled one out, knocked and
waited, then inserted the key in the lock. Max felt his heart beating. Could he
explain to anyone what he was feeling? The door opened and the woman flicked a switch,
lighting up the interior.

The odor was heavy, but it was the familiar one of musty
dampness. The bedroom was sparsely furnished, a narrow sagging bed with an
embroidered foreign-looking bedspread. In the living room, was an upholstered
chair, with starched doilies pinned to the backrest and arms, and a little
formica table. There were no pictures on the walls, no books, no television
set, no radio, no photographs. There was a battered unpainted chest, a few
sparse articles of clothing, but no visible make-up tubes or vials, or
medicines. In the closet there was, however, a large cardboard box filled with
little cellophane bags of candy. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was empty.
There was no sign of food and the shelves of the cabinets contained only a few
chipped dishes and cups.

"Well, that's a relief," the woman said, after he
had inspected the premises. "She's probably gone on a trip. It's quite
obvious that she's not living here now."

"Yes," he said, "that's quite obvious."
But he dared not explore the thought further. He needed time, he told himself.

The woman went through the door before him and as he moved
the door back, he unlatched the lock in the doorknob. He closed the door after
him and fiddled with it to illustrate that he was checking it.

"Make sure it's locked," the woman said as she
got into her car.

"I'll walk," he said, waving her on, watching her
drive to the main road. When she had turned the corner, he opened the door of
the condominium again and slipped into the darkened living room. He did not
turn on the lights. Sitting down on the chair, he put his head back and let his
eyes become accustomed to the darkness. He sat there for a long time, calm, not
frightened.

"Mrs. Klugerman," he whispered, listening.
"Mrs. Klugerman," he repeated, feeling the first faint bursts of
elation. "I know you're here, Mrs. Klugerman." He sat there for a
long time, until he could see through the thin strips of the closed blinds that
darkness had come. Then he got up from the chair, walked to the door, and let
himself out.

"Thank you, Mrs. Klugerman," he said as he closed
the door. He was certain that she had heard his voice.

She had first noticed him from across the huge cardroom of
the main clubhouse, a side view, faintly familiar, but it did not cross her
mind again until she had sat at the little poudreuse in the bedroom of her
condominium rubbing off her make-up. She had always mused, daydreamed,
fantasized in front of the mirror while putting on her make-up or taking it
off.

Sometimes she would suddenly make a wrong dab and this
would recall her to herself. Which was what she had done that evening, as she
rubbed the cleanser a little too vigorously and had gotten some into her eye.
It was then that she realized the connection between the profile in the
cardroom and her memory of Heshy Feinstein. The shock of recognition made her
hands shake briefly and she found she could not continue efficiently with the
removal of her make-up.

She looked at her face, ravaged by age. By living, she told
herself. But she could not identify it at all with the vivid image of Heshy
Feinstein in her mind. For this memory of Heshy was not at all lost in the mist
of more than fifty years. It had been retrieved so often, an oasis of joy in
the arid desert of what her life had become, that it still had retained its
shimmering intensity. Heshy Feinstein! He had been the one unalterable
condition of her inner life, her secret life--although once she had confided to
her daughter, Helen, that there had been a man, a boy really, who had made her
body ache with longing for him.

She could remember exactly since at the time they were
sitting shiva for Herman, only seven years before. Herman with whom she had
spent forty-five faithful years of marriage, of coldness, too, although her
children would never ever know that. Only Herman knew, because he had suffered
from her indifference since the first night of their marriage, from the moment
of her hysterical exaggeration of her simulated virginity. What an act it had
been. "It took me three days to get married." Herman had always told
their friends with a laugh, although she had known in her heart that they were
never really married, not in that way at least.

"I have always been a good and unfaithful wife,
Helen," she had told her daughter, who by then was impatient to get back
to Chicago and her life there.

"Sure, Ma."

"Your father was a good man, a wonderful person."

"You think I don't know that, Ma? He was lucky to have
such a terrific woman."

"I feel so bad for him," she said, but her
meaning, she knew, was lost to her daughter. Their marriage bed had been as
cold as ice. She hadn't even done her duty by him and she hoped in her heart
that he had found someone to relieve his needs, some woman somewhere who could
get rid of his tensions and send him back to her.

"I was not a good wife, Helen," she had said. Her
daughter had only nodded. They had been sitting shiva for four days and it was
boring Helen, she was sure, hearing all those reminiscences of a long marriage.
What else was there to do, but talk about the dead father, the dead husband,
and their memories of him? She dared not say to her daughter that Herman was
quickly slipping from her memory, and if it wasn't for the picture of him on
the piano to remind her of his features, she might not have been able to
assemble them in her mind.

"Once there was another man," she had said.

"You had another boy friend?" Helen seemed
interested as they sipped coffee.

"He was absolutely gorgeous--a marvelous, brilliant
boy."

"You're kidding, Ma."

"Heshy Feinstein."

"Heshy?"

"In Brownsville, in those days, the Yiddish and
English was totally mixed up. His name was Harvey but no one called him Harvey
except the teachers at school. He wore knickers and he was six feet tall when
he was seventeen years old and I was sixteen. He was going to Boys' High School
and I was going to Girls' High School and we both used to take the subway
together. He lived behind us on Douglas Street and, I knew him since we were
eight or nine. But it wasn't until I was sixteen that we discovered each
other."

"My God. My name could have been Feinstein," her
daughter said.

She ignored the remark. Her own name had been Goldberg.
Frieda Goldberg. At least Herman had brought her the name Smith, though God
knew where that came from.

"His father wanted him to be a doctor. He was
excellent in science, always doing experiments on his back porch."

"Did he become one?"

"I never found out."

"You haven't seen him since?"

"Not once. We moved to Eastern Parkway. It was only a
few miles away, maybe four five subway stops. But I never saw him again."

"Weird," Helen said.

"Heshy's father owned a grocery store and he wanted
him to be a doctor."

"Do you ever wonder about him?"

"Not often," she lied, knowing that it had been
the single obsession of her life.

Naturally she had left out all of the important parts,
although she would have loved to confide in her daughter. But she worried that
her daughter would hate her for what she had done to her father. I feel so
sorry for Herman, she told herself often. Even now, before the mirror, as her
mind searched its secret screen for pictures of Frieda Goldberg and Heshy
Feinstein.

He had been shaking the pear tree in his father's yard and
gathering the pears in a bucket for Mrs. Feinstein to make stewed dessert. She
had watched him from the little rusty swing in her own yard, making fun of his
efforts, especially when one of the pears hit him on the head.

"It's not funny. It hurts like the blazes."

"Poor Heshy."

He walked over to her and nodded his head and she had
looked into the shiny curly sweet-smelling hair. He took her hand and put it on
the lump that was growing there and she felt it gently.

"That doesn't tickle," he said. Yet she knew, at
that moment, as her finger touched the hard nub of that lump that something had
passed between them and nothing was ever the same from that time on. She opened
the fingers of her hand and moved them like fish in the bulrushes of his curly
hair, feeling goose flesh rise on her hands and legs and a strange feeling deep
inside her and in that place between her legs. It was odd how that memory had
never dimmed the first signal that something was happening between them, and
yet there were things that happened only yesterday that she had trouble
remembering.

Was it really Heshy Feinstein she had seen in the cardroom,
or some apparition? It would not have been the first time that a stranger's
face would loom out at her suddenly in a crowd and she would wonder if it was
Heshy's face. Sometimes she would hide. Other times she had actually followed
the person, until she discovered her error.

She could also recall, dredge up from her memories, the
first sensations, the feelings, the kisses, the delicious gropings, and, of
course, that first time on the old couch on her own back porch in the middle of
that summer of the big polio scare. It was the great mystery of her life why
she could never, after Heshy, experience such sensations, that joyous release
of feelings that came from somewhere deep within her. Why had it disappeared so
completely when she left Brownsville? It was as if a dark curtain had come down
on her life and she had experienced all the physical joy of a lifetime in a
single year.

She could even remember the tension of their subterfuge,
the ruses and, as they became more intimate, the agony of worry over the coming
of her period. Heshy was as paranoid as herself, even though he would be sure
to always carry protection in his wallet. But even these anxieties would never
interfere with the greed for each other, the joy-giving of their lovemaking. It
was, of course, more than just the physical thing, and they could not hide
their love from their parents, to whom it became a terrible source of concern
and alienation. The harassment was open, bitterly frank, opening deep
animosities between the families.

"My Heshy's too young," his father would
remonstrate as Frieda's parents sat together watching the man's growing anger
and his wife's less articulate bitterness.

"So is Frieda."

"It's ridiculous. It makes no sense. It will ruin my
son's medical career if he has to worry about supporting a wife and maybe
children. There has got to be an end to this."

They could hear their parents clearly through the vents in
the cellar, where they had fitted themselves out a place among a suite of
cast-off furniture. The cellar had a back door that led to the yard, and above
them they could hear every movement and sound, every creak of danger in the
house.

"At it again," he had said, but she was not
listening. Instead, she was concentrating on the joy that was spilling over and
trying to be silent as she bit her fist and felt the suffusion of her inner
pleasure and his own climactic movement. Even in the afterglow they could not
escape the sounds of their parents' bitterness.

"Somebody has to move away," Heshy's father
shouted. "I can't. I have a business."

"Well, I like it here," her father yelled.

"Just keep your son away from my daughter," her
mother screamed. "She's too good for him anyway."

Whereupon they would shut out the sounds with the palms of
their hands and proceed again to reach out for this mysterious thing that had
brought them together.

They were, of course, being young, hardly interested in
consequences. They felt they could continue to be clever in their subterfuge
and even her mother's hesitant probings about the state of her virginity were
deflected, leaving her mother in little doubt that she was still intact.

"Surely you trust your own daughter. You think I'm
going to jeopardize my life?" In those days an unwanted pregnancy was a
stigma from which there was little recovery. Not even a lifetime could erase
the damages it would cause, and this scared them the most, especially when they
knew they had tempted fate.

"I want you as close to me as is humanly
possible," she had cried more than once, slipping off his condom.

"My sweet beautiful wonderful darling love."

But what might have not been seen was sensed and it was
soon announced by her father that they were moving to Crown Heights, a neighborhood about ten miles away.

"It just can't go on like this, Frieda. You're too
young. He's too young. Mr. Feinstein might be a horrible person, but he's
right. Maybe if we moved away and you saw him less often. Maybe then."

"I won't go!" she had cried.

"You'll go."

"I'll run away. We'll elope. I'll get pregnant."

She could see her father's face flush a deep red which
frightened her because she truly loved him, a gentle man who when risen to
anger could be irrational and sometimes violent.

"I don't really mean that, Papa. Don't think what you're
thinking." That calmed him. Heshy was far harder to placate.

"When are you moving?"

"Tomorrow."

"The bastards. They wouldn't even give us time to
prepare."

"Prepare what?"

"To get the hell away from them. To get married. You
think I can possibly live without you?"

"And me without you?" She remembered her
shoulders suddenly shaking hysterically and his valiant efforts to soothe her
until he too was crying, their tears mingling. Even now she could taste the
salt in them, a taste never to be duplicated in her lifetime. In the cellar
they clung to each other. They had gone so far to risk exposure that that night
miraculously, or so she believed, they stayed together without discovery and
were back in their respective rooms by morning. It was a night whose pain was
to remain with her, a kind of symbol of the highlight of her life. In the
aridity of her later years she had marveled at the sheer physical wonder of it,
those hours together, intertwined, never uncoupling, as if a moment apart would
destroy them both. They had long since explored the mysteries of themselves. No
secrets of their bodies or minds escaped their mutual probings.

"I will love you forever and forever and
forever." She could still hear the sound, the rhythm and timbre of his
voice, strong and assured, as it thrilled her, promised her.

And she also had said, "They will never tear us apart.
No one will ever tear us apart."

And in a way they hadn't since the memory had never
disappeared nor lost its magic, even now, as she looked into the mirror
detesting the sagging lines of her face, the drooping skin around her eyes, the
jowls, though she liked to think that she looked ten years younger than her
sixty-eight years.

She got into her nightgown without a glance at her body,
which also had run to sag and flesh, but since it was of little interest,
except for the state of its basic health, she didn't care. She flicked on the
"Johnny Carson Show" and when she grew drowsy she flicked it off
again and slipped into a heavy dreamless sleep.

But the next morning, after she had dressed, made her
breakfast, and cleared away the dishes she remembered her brief recognition.
When the telephone rang, she knew it was Minnie, who was wondering when she
would be ready to go to the pool, their daily ritual.

"Not today, Minnie," Frieda said.

"You don't feel good?"

"I have a headache." Poor Herman, she suddenly
thought, remembering the thousand times she had used that excuse.

"You always have a headache," he had said angrily
as he tossed in the bed, turning his back to her.

You give me a headache, she had wanted to say, but to her
credit, she agreed, she had never said it. Not out loud, at least.

When she was sure Minnie had left for the pool, she went
outside and, taking her tricycle, pedaled to the management office to make the
inquiry which she knew was inevitable. Might as well get it over with.

"There are three Harvey Feinsteins," the
middle-aged shiksa clerk with the blue-gray hair said. Her harlequin glasses
hung on a jeweled chain around her neck.