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

chest.
    "Remember the time we used to go to Prospect Park?"
    The father nodded. "Your mother used to say, 'Watch
the frankfurters. He'll get a bellyache.' But we never watched the frankfurters
and you never got a bellyache."
    "I can still smell the elephants." We never
talked much, even then, he was thinking, seeing in his memory the elephant's
dusty parchmentlike skin. He had joked to Janice that his parents had never
talked about the facts of life, or anything except protection. "Be careful
of your stomach." "Don't get too cold." "Look on both sides
when you cross." "Don't go near the bums in front of the candy
store." "Beware!" Be careful!" "Watch out!" What
the hell could he possibly ask this man about his own dilemma, he wondered,
feeling unable to form a single line of inquiry. They stopped at the curb while
a group of tricyclists passed, their big bottoms perched on the smallish seats.
    "It's a nice place here, Harold," his father
said.
    "As long as you're happy, Pop."
    "I remember when you were a little boy, Harold."
He said it suddenly, looking downward at the asphalt.
    "Ottisot?" He mimicked a small child. "You
were always pointing. Once we were stuck between stations on the subway and you
had to make a party and there was no place to go, so you did it in your pants
and stunk up the whole train." He chuckled and shook his head. "You
were something."
    Harold was struggling to form a clear picture of his father
in those days. He had seemed taller, broader, stronger, but the memory was more
tactile than graphic, a rough workingman's hand tightly grapsed.
    "Do you think about it ... me as a kid ...
often?" He felt his tongue bumble. "Not being a parent I just wonder,
that's all." Would he see his defensiveness?
    The father said nothing as they walked along the path that
threaded through the grass. A puff of cloud passed over the sun momentarily,
changing the coloring of the landscape.
    "Think about it?" The father smiled and shook his
head. "In this place sometimes I wonder if anybody thinks about anything
else. Every yenta in the place, male and female, brags about their children and
their grandchildren. You'd think we produced a race of rich geniuses. Not a bad
apple in the barrel."
    It was not the answer he had wanted, Harold knew. But, of
course, he had not framed the right question, the central question, because he
could not quite find the right words.
    "I've been a pretty rotten son, haven't I, Pop?"
    The older man stopped and looked upward into his son's
face. His eyes suddenly misted.
    "I said that?"
    "I'm saying it, Pop."
    "What right have you got to say such a thing?"
They resumed their walk.
    "I don't call. I don't visit often. I should be
sending you more money."
    "That's pretty terrible, Harold. I'll admit that. But
a bad son? Not my Harold. A little neglectful maybe. But a bad son,
never."
    "So what is all that crankiness I get over the
phone?"
    "If I ask you why you don't call? Why you don't visit?
What's a father supposed to say? It doesn't mean I don't love you."
    Harold could feel him watching peripherally as they walked,
embarrassed by the uncommon sentiment, knowing, he felt now, that he was
sensing his son's inner turmoil, his doubts.
    "It's also not because I don't love you, Pop."
    "What's that got to do with your not calling and not
visiting? That's a horse of a different color."
    Words, but not communication, he was thinking, wondering
why they had never crossed that Rubicon, never been really inside of each
other's heads. He thought of Janice again--the long, probing, existential
"talking out" of themselves, the avalanche of words that rolled from
unseen peaks shrouded in gray fog. And after all those words, did he really
know Janice? Janice who carried his seed, the seed of his ancestors? These were
indeed oddball thoughts for him. The seed of his ancestors. Really!
    "We used to take walks a lot together," his
father said.
    "Brooklyn in those days was a good place to
walk."
    "It was never