Read Online The Sunset Gang by Warren Adler - Free Book Online Page A

too
quickly." Dammit, he told himself. He was still annoyed. He had still 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 had 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: of 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 had been prepared mentally for the confrontation.
    The older man smiled, sensing the break in the 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 fifth
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 flower-scented 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