Never Too Late for Love Read online

  BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER

  Banquet Before Dawn

  Blood Ties

  Cult

  Death of a Washington Madame

  Empty Treasures

  Flanagan's Dolls

  Funny Boys

  Madeline's Miracles

  Mourning Glory

  Natural Enemies

  Private Lies

  Random Hearts

  Residue

  The Casanova Embrace

  The Children of the Roses

  The David Embrace

  The Henderson Equation

  The Housewife Blues

  The War of the Roses

  The Womanizer

  Trans-Siberian Express

  Twilight Child

  Undertow

  We Are Holding the President Hostage

  SHORT STORIES

  Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden

  Never Too Late For Love

  New York Echoes

  New York Echoes 2

  The Sunset Gang

  MYSTERIES

  American Sextet

  American Quartet

  Immaculate Deception

  Senator Love

  The Ties That Bind

  The Witch of Watergate

  Copyright © 1995 by Warren Adler.

  ISBN 978-1-59006-091-9

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product

  of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com

  STONEHOUSE PRESS

  Contents

  Never Too Late For Love

  You'd Be Surprised How We're Related

  A Widow is a Very Dangerous Commodity

  Poor Herman

  Poker With the Boys

  The Angel of Mercy

  Tell Me That I'm Young

  Tying Up Loose Ends

  He's Going to Marry a Shiksa

  Why Can't You Be Like the Solomon Brothers?

  Just Once

  The Braggart

  At Least You Have Your Bingo

  An Unexpected Visit

  The Home

  To My Grandparents and all the generations that came after.

  PREFACE

  Those who believe that life after sixty is one long exercise in decline will discover some startling surprises in these stories. They are about people who have learned the hard lessons of a long life, people who are still thirsty for living, still searching for the laughter and the joy, still striving for the glories, wisdom and pleasures of the mind and the body, still defying time and trying their damnedest to taste the last good drop of vitality before the inevitable ending.

  Most of these stories were inspired by the sharp observations of my parents, who chose to leave the ever-changing and sometimes dangerous urban world of their youth and middle age to live out their final years in what they hoped would be a more placid and predictable environment--in their case, Florida. What they found there is not uncommon to most people in their latter years, who choose sunny climes for their last hurrahs.

  Many of the stories are bittersweet, some more bitter than sweet. The reality is that age--contrary to the view of so many in the younger generations--enhances, rather than diminishes the urge to participate in life.

  As I move into the orbit of my parents' demographics, I am more than ever convinced that age is no barrier to sex, love, passion, virtue, greed, joy, humor, laughter, wisdom and folly. These stories should offer the hope that age is not to be feared, but to be welcomed, savored and enjoyed.

  Warren Adler

  Jackson, Wyoming

  NEVER TOO LATE FOR LOVE

  When it was first organized, the Sunset Village Yiddish Club met once a week. Members talked in Yiddish, read passages from the Yiddish papers to each other and discussed, in Yiddish, those works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer that they had read during the week--in the original Yiddish, of course.

  The members enjoyed it so much that they sometimes stayed in the all-purpose room at the Sunset Village Clubhouse for hours after their weekly meetings there were over, talking in Yiddish as if the language were the only logical form of communication. Finally, the Yiddish Club had to start meeting three times a week, though most of the members would have preferred to attend every day.

  There were a great many reasons for the phenomena, their club president would tell them. His name was Melvin Meyer, but in the tradition of the club, he was called Menasha, his name in Yiddish. He had a masterly command of the Yiddish language. Both of his parents had been actors in the heyday of the Yiddish stage, when there were more than twenty Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side of New York alone, showing at least 300 productions a year.

  "There is, of course, the element of nostalgia," Menasha would tell the group pedantically, his rimless glasses imposing in their severity. "It is the language of our childhood, of our parents and grandparents. To most of us, it was our original language, the language in which we first expressed our fears, our anxieties, our loves, and the language in which our parents forged our childhood. The link with the past is compelling. And, naturally, there is the beauty of the language itself--its rare expressiveness, its untranslatable qualities, its subtlety and suppleness--which makes it something special, simply in expressing it and keeping it alive."

  To both Bill (Velvil) Finkelstein and Jennie (Genendel) Goldfarb, Menasha's words were thrilling, but merely suggestive of the depths of their true feelings. They joined the club on the same day and, they discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed. Each of their spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture; they were more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool gossiping with their friends.

  Because they had joined on the same day, they had sat next to each other and were able to start up a conversation on the subject of their first day at the club.

  "It's amazing," Genendel said when the meeting adjourned. "I haven't spoken it since my mother died twenty years ago, yet I caught every word. God, I feel good speaking that language. It brings back the memories of my childhood, my mother, those delicious Friday nights."

  "Oh, those wonderful Friday nights," Velvil chimed back, his mind jogged by the previously dormant images now sprung to life--the candles, the rich rhythm of Yiddish speech, the smells of fricassee and honey cake. He looked at Genendel as someone familiar, someone that he had perhaps known in his youth, or at least someone recognizable to his spirit.

  She was smallish, thinner than his wife, Mimi, who allowed herself to run to fat. Lines were embedded in Genendel's tanned face, but when the light hit her at a special angle, the wrinkles disappeared and, with them, the years. She looked then like a young girl. When he told her this after they had become intimate in their conversation, she pursed her lips in mock disbelief and punched him lightly on the arm. But he could see she was pleased.

  "Thank God you're telling me that in Yiddish," she said. "If my David would hear it, he'd think you were flirting."

  "I am."

  She put a hand over her mouth and giggled like a school girl. It hadn't seemed possible to her that anything could occur beyond their lighthearted banter, their kibitzing in Yiddish. She dismissed such thoughts as idle, forbidden speculation. Yet they would sit for a long time after club meetings were over, discussing their lives, their children, their fortunes. At first, their exchanges were pure
ly factual, charged with details of their biographies.

  "I worked as a lawyer for the Veterans Administration and hated every minute of it," Velvil said, "but I was frightened to death." He was surprised that he told her that. He had never referred to being frightened, except to himself, normally characterizing his long term as a civil servant merely as "an easy buck with no hassle."

  What he really meant, he knew, was that he had been too scared to leave the government.

  "But I had two kids, and it was safe. So we lived in Flatbush and the kids grew up and we waited out my pension. Not very exciting. My parents had greater dreams for me, but they had scrambled so hard for money that they made me paranoid about it."

  "Are you sorry you stayed with the government so long?"

  Why is she probing my regrets, he wondered, yet understanding the special poignancy that Yiddish could inject into such inquiries.

  "Of course, I regret it. But I went through the motions for my family."

  She, too, could understand that kind of sacrifice. She also had longed for other things.

  "I wanted to travel," she said, lifting her eyes to his. He had all his hair, she noted, and part of it was still black. It was his most striking feature. A handsome man, she concluded to herself, feeling a faint stirring, a mysterious memory of yearning.

  "Once, we did go on a B'nai B'rith package tour of Israel," she continued. "I loved it, not necessarily because of my Jewishness but because it was exotic. It all looked like a movie set. David, after the first day, didn't tour. He hates touring. And I love it. That's why we never went anywhere else."

  "I love to travel," Velvil said suddenly, knowing it was true, though he had never traveled either.

  "Where have you been?"

  "Not very many places." he said. But it was important for him to be scrupulously truthful with her, like strangers meeting on a train who say things to each other that they wouldn't dare say to anyone they really knew. "In fact, no place. My wife would never leave the children."

  Sitting in the back corner of the room after the meetings adjourned, losing all sense of time, they picked through their lives with care and detail as if embroidering a tapestry.

  "I have a son and a daughter," Genendel told him. By then, their Yiddish returned to them in full force, their vocabulary amplified, dredged up from some secret place in their subconscious. They could be both fluent and subtle, the little nuances delicate but sure. "They were good kids. All that's left now is merely the loving of them."

  "Yes," he responded, his heart leaping as she struck just the right chord. "I must remember that way of putting it.... Mimi thinks there should be more, extracting the last bit of tribute, making them always feel that they haven't done enough somehow, keeping that tug of guilt in force, always taut. She whines to them constantly on the phone. I tell her she's wrong, but she insists that daughters must care more. We have two daughters. I keep telling myself I love them, but I sometimes have doubts. They are not really very nice people."

  "What a terrible thing to say."

  "It's the truth." He blushed, wondering if she sensed the special joy of telling it. He had vowed to himself that he would never express anything but the truth in Yiddish, in this special language between them.

  "Where is it written that parents should love their children and vice versa?" he pressed, the Yiddish rolling easily off his tongue.

  "It is a forbidden thought," she answered, but the idea of it intrigued her. David, her husband, had always been the sentimentalist, the worrier. It was he who fidgeted when the children didn't call at their accustomed intervals.

  "The Ten Commandments talk of honor, not love."

  "So you've become a Talmudic scholar in your old age," she bantered, a sure sign that they were growing closer, he thought.

  Finally, after it became apparent that it was getting on past the time of propriety, they said good-bye. He was conscious of his hand lingering for an extra moment in hers, followed by a light squeezing response. He walked her to the driveway and watched her as she moved into her car. Then he stood for a long time observing the red tail lights until they disappeared into the darkness.

  His condominium was close enough to walk to and, after she left, he could feel the exhilaration in his step, a springiness in his legs that seemed uncommon in a man nearing his sixty-ninth birthday. He thought of her now with great intensity. He had willed himself to think of her only in Yiddish, as if she were his special possession and he had to guard her reality in the privacy of his own thoughts. He was certain that there was something stirring in him, a dormant plant, struggling for germination beneath the soil of time.

  "You come home so late from those meetings, Bill," his wife would mumble as he slipped in beside her. He never succeeded in not waking her.

  "We're working on a special project," he said.

  "So late?" Then she would hover off, snoring lightly.

  When it became apparent that three days a week was not enough time for them, Velvil suggested that the two couples socialize.

  "Have you told her about me?" Genendel said, looking at him curiously. She wondered why she said it in that manner, as if they were engaging in a conspiracy.

  "No," he answered. "And you?"

  "I tell David about the club and its activities," she answered.

  She knew she was growing tense about her feelings concerning Velvil, but she could not stop them, nor did she care to for that matter.

  The couples met at Primero's for dinner. It was a Sunday, so they had to wait in line for nearly an hour before being seated. Perhaps it was the wait that soured the meeting.

  "We were ahead of them," Mimi told the headwaiter as another group passed ahead of them, her lips tight with anger. She could not abide being bested.

  "They were a fiver," the headwaiter said. His arrogance deserved a challenge.

  As always, Velvil was embarrassed when his wife did this. He poked her in the small of the back.

  "Don't poke me. He could seat four very easily at a table for five. God forbid he should lose one lousy meal," she said loudly, knowing that the headwaiter would hear.

  "Mimi, please."

  "You should be telling him," she snapped. "Why should I have to fight with him?"

  "It's all right, really," David Goldfarb said. He was a smallish man, bald with a fringe of white hair around his pate and a benign, kindly look on his face.

  "It's not all right," Mimi said, huffing and continuing to direct a withering gaze at the headwaiter. "You don't squeak, you don't get the oil."

  Velvil looked hopelessly at Genendel.

  "I'm sorry," he said in Yiddish.

  "It's all right," she responded in Yiddish.

  By the time they were finally seated, the wait and the altercation with the headwaiter had put them all in a gloomy mood, particularly Mimi, who could not let it go.

  "They take advantage," she said, tapping the table with her forefinger. "You let them get away with it once, they take more advantage."

  "Why don't we forget about it and enjoy the meal?" Velvil suggested. It was simply her way, he tried to tell Genendel with his eyes; she is not a bad woman, really. But he wondered if that was true.

  "You like it here in Sunset Village?" Velvil asked David, who was either not very talkative or simply cowed by Mimi's performance.

  "Actually, it's not bad," he answered. "Not bad at all."

  "He has his regular gin game. He likes the sun and the pool." Genendel patted her husband's hand in a gesture of reassurance.

  A flash of anger stabbed through Velvil. She must have seen his frown and quickly withdrew her hand.

  "So you really like the Yiddish Club?" David asked after a long stretch of embarrassed silence.

  "It's really quite wonderful," Velvil said, smiling at Genendel.

  "It could be Greek to me," Mimi said. "It seems like an odd waste of time, keeping a dead language alive."

  "It's not dead at all," Velvil said, annoyed at her obtuseness.


  He suddenly realized that he was no longer rationalizing her actions. Watching her, he felt her bitterness. Did she know? he wondered. Could she feel it?

  "Yiddish is quite beautiful, really," Velvil said, watching Genendel. "She's not always this bad," he said suddenly in Yiddish. "I'm sorry it's not working out. It wasn't a very good idea."

  "All right," Genendel responded in Yiddish. "At least we gave it an honest try."

  "What are you two jabbering about?" Mimi said, with a mouthful of salad.

  "We're illustrating the possibilities of the language," Velvil said.

  "It's still Greek," Mimi said, spearing some lettuce leaves.

  "Actually, I like the sound of it," David said. He was a pleasant man, very bland and eager to please. But he looked frequently at his wristwatch, as if he were anxious to depart.

  When the entrees came, the conversation turned to the couples' children, a common denominator when all else failed. Velvil winced, knowing what was coming.

  "My girls married well," Mimi said, directing her gaze at Velvil as if in rebuke. "But then they set their hearts on it. Bill always worried too much about security. They're always fighting among themselves, all the time, but underneath it all, they love each other. I'm sure about that. They both live in Scarsdale. Huge houses. They each have three kids, all doing well."

  Not the pictures, Velvil thought in Yiddish. Please not that. He saw her pocketbook on the floor beside her, a vile time bomb.

  "She's going to show you pictures in a second," he whispered to Genendel in Yiddish.

  "That's not polite, Bill," Mimi said, glancing at him briefly but continuing her story without missing a beat. "Everything they touch turns to gold. One thing the girls knew was how to choose well. I taught them that." She reached for her pocketbook, took out her half glasses, perched them on her nose, and reached into the crowded interior of her bag.

  "Must you start with the pictures?" Velvil said, feeling the food congeal into a lump in his stomach.

  "He hates when I start with the pictures," Mimi said, taking out a sheaf of pictures and handing them over to the Goldfarbs, who took them politely and seemingly with great interest.