Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  She didn’t get such a kick out of cards anymore, and nothing, not the cruises (though she was scheduled to go on one next month and had already paid her nonrefundable deposit), not food, not the Saturday night entertainments in the game room, not movies, not television, was of much interest anymore.

  The truth of it—she should bite her tongue—was that even her family, although it would kill them to hear it, no longer interested her so much. As, at bottom, though it didn’t bother her, didn’t cause her to turn a hair, or lose a moment’s sleep over it, she was sure she no longer was of much interest to them either.

  Maybe this was why the whole family—her, Frank, Maxine, even the kids, Barry, James, Donald, Judy—were practically burning up the long distance these days, keeping in touch, wig-wagging their desperate messages of furious reassurance, that all was well, the weather fine—that they loved one another and couldn’t wait till the next time they would be together.

  She was too old to feel guilty, and supposed herself too near death to count the pennies.

  Once or twice she genuinely contemplated suicide. What stayed her hand was the fact that she wasn’t much interested in death either.

  And another time, because she was practically going batty from boredom, she went to an unfamiliar restaurant and ate a pork chop. She rather liked the flavor but didn’t think, as it had taken her seventy-four years (give or take) to eat the first, that she would ever order another.

  On still another occasion she forced herself to ride the bus not only into downtown Miami (which she hadn’t seen since the night Alcibiades Chitral bought Ted’s car), but on through the Cuban and even black neighborhoods. She didn’t get off, not even when it came to the end of the line. She paid the driver for her return fare and transferred at the big new mall downtown, where she’d never been and did not explore now, and waited for the bus that would take her back to the Towers.

  It was a week after her marathon bus ride (she hadn’t peed the whole time she’d been on her expedition, and had had to hold it in all day, not such a big deal because even on long car trips, no matter how Ted might laugh and tease her, she couldn’t bring herself to go, or do anything more than make a show of going into the Ladies, not even at the cleanest rest stops or the biggest, most modem, up-to-date Shell stations; what could she do, she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t force herself to squat over a strange toilet) when Mrs. Ted Bliss found herself by the little telephone table in a corner of her living/dining room area dialing her daughter in Cincinnati. You can imagine her surprise when a woman not Maxine picked up at the other end and said she’d reached the offices of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants. She hadn’t called the number in years. How, she wondered, had she still remembered it?

  “Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants,” the woman said. “How may I help you?”

  “Maxine?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “I think you have the wrong number,” the woman said.

  “Oh, I know,” said Mrs. Bliss. “I can’t understand it.”

  “You probably just made a mistake dialing.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bliss. “ I was his patient a few years ago. He didn’t have such a big operation back then.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Toibb. He didn’t have such a big operation. Consultants, secretaries to answer the phones, maybe nurses on call. You’re still on Lincoln Road?”

  “Yes.”

  What a piece of work is the mind, thought Mrs. Bliss. How many years had it been? Four, five? This was the trouble living in a climate where there weren’t any seasons. You were without landmarks to mark the time—record snowfalls, ice storms, heat waves. Her landmarks were all written down in her little black date book, so she never missed anyone she sent a birthday or anniversary card. (She sent out, she supposed, more than a hundred a year. Nieces and nephews she sent, grandnieces, grandnephews, cousins of all degrees she sent, mishpocheh. And though she made a check by the names of those who didn’t send her back, she wasn’t small-minded, the next year she sent a card, anyway. In Mrs. Bliss’s mind, who couldn’t read Hebrew, or, now she was a widow, go often to services, it was a way of keeping up her Judaism, the collective mazel and yontif, all the high holiday greetings of celebratory Jewish life.) But to hold some since-several-years used number in her head without any black book, this was something extraordinary. It wasn’t, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, accidental. It was bashert, maybe even psychiatric. And hadn’t she, it couldn’t be more than a couple of months ago, been thinking of Toibb?

  “So how’s Dr. Toibb these days?” asked Mrs. Bliss.

  “Didn’t you know?” said the secretary. “Toibb’s dead.”

  “Dead? He died, Holmer Toibb?”

  “Over a year ago.”

  “Over a year?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “What? He never! Murdered?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He was a physician. They killed a physician?”

  “Well, you know, technically he wasn’t a physician.”

  “He was a great healer,” Mrs. Bliss said. “A great healer.”

  “The consultants miss him. We all do,” the woman said. “I was working here only a few months when it happened. I miss him.”

  “Well, of course,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Besides being a good man, healers like him don’t come along every day. I feel sorry for his patients. What do they do now?”

  “There’s others to fill his shoes,” the secretary said. “Toibb had foresight. He was no spring chicken, you know. He studied with Greener Hertsheim. He was with him practically from the start of the movement. So he knew. He did. He knew. He had the insight and foresight to bring other practitioners into the practice and give them the benefit of his knowledge. Oh, I’m not saying he expected to be murdered. People always think that’s something that happens to the next guy. And more power to them, I say! Because what’s the use of living if all you do with your life is go around all day with a long face like a scaredy-pants? That’s no way. A person has to have more of an interest than thaat.

  “You said you were who?”

  “Mrs. Ted Bliss,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “And you were Holmer’s patient?”

  “It’s been a few years.”

  “We’d still have your records. He kept very good records. That was his interest.”

  “My records?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Well, the notes poor Toibb made on you.”

  “Did they catch them?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Do they know who did it?”

  “They haven’t closed the case yet. The detectives still come in from time to time. Do you know what I think? I think you should ask to see one of the consultants.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you did ring this number. And as you say, ‘It’s been a few years.’ And you were his patient. And you thought so well of him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear what happened.”

  “He was very highly respected.”

  “I don’t understand how he could have been murdered and I never heard about it. Was it in the papers? Was it on the news?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” this odd but quite friendly woman said, “they’re keeping it quiet. It’s how they’ve chosen to operate on this one. They’re waiting for someone to slip up. They always slip up.”

  “Detectives come in? What do they want? What do they do there?”

  “Oh, they just nose around. And we cooperate. Well, as much as we can. You understand. But not to worry. The therapeusisist/ client relationship is sacred.

  “I really think you should make an appointment for a checkup,” the woman said ominously.

  Mrs. Bliss’s first thought when she hung up was to get in touch with Manny. He was the one who’d given her Toibb’s name in the first place. The difficulty was she was reluctant to call him. They still saw each other of course. In a community as tight-knit as the Towers they could hardly have avoided running i
nto each other, but the fact was Manny had taken up with other widows by now. With widowers, too. With anyone, really, to whom he could play Dutch uncle, all that wide-eyed, teeming lot of poor, tempest-tossed masses and tired, yearning, wretched refuse.

  Really, Dorothy thought, in a kind of way it was as if she’d passed through a sort of second immigrant phase and, sloughing Manny from the building, taken out final papers. In unconsciously turning to Toibb, for example, deciding to go first class with her troubles, take them professional.

  Of course she missed Manny. And when she saw him these days, and the helpless, troubled people who looked to him for support, it was quite as if she had dropped into an old neighborhood where she’d once lived. She often longed to tell him how she was doing, and to thank him. He had helped her, he really had, and she could never repay him, but now, in her new, unfocused, listless dispensation, Mrs. Ted Bliss had gone offshore so to speak, moved beyond the three-mile limit of Manny’s weak jurisdictionals. Which isn’t to say she didn’t occasionally feel flashes of a vestigial jealously, short twinges of a peculiar envy, not, she hoped, knew, because others now basked in the attention of the real estate lawyer who, with the death of his wife, had been thrust into an abrupt, sudden eligibility.

  Rosie had passed away two years before from a massive coronary explosion.

  Mrs. Bliss had gone to the funeral services and, afterward, to offer her condolences to the new widower. Manny’s condominium wasn’t large enough to accommodate so massive a shivah and they’d had to move it downstairs into the game room. Dorothy, no one, had ever seen anything like it. Not to take anything away from Rosie (though she was a decent, patient woman, everyone knew who the real star of the family was), but the tribute was to Manny. But, Rosie, Manny, those seven days of shivah would come to represent the benchmark of mourning in the Towers, possibly in all Miami Beach. Mrs. Bliss had approached the grieving widower, still a wide, relatively youthful and handsome man—he couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than Dorothy—oddly even more virile and distinguished-looking beneath his three- or four-day stubble like a loose gray veil of grief. “Oh, Manny,” Dorothy had said, “I’m so sorry. Listen,” she’d said, “if there’s anything I can do, anything.”

  “I know, Dorothy. Thank you,” he said. And added, “You know what this means? It’s taught me a lesson. You’re up, you’re down. Life’s like a wheel of fortune. See, see how the tables have turned?”

  Though they hadn’t, not really. Manny was still like some Johnny-on-the-spot with the men and women. If anything, he volunteered even more of his time now Rosie was dead than when she was alive. He’d even been singled out by a rabbi as one of the “just men,” one of those holy three dozen on earth who helped keep the good order of life. He was still, that is, on call, but these days Mrs. Ted Bliss had passed out of the range of his influence and was not at all envious of those people who were the beneficiaries of Manny’s new second wind, the brighter, even warmer glow of his radiating goodwill, so much as, well, a little sorry for them. They had more sharply defined needs than she, a different order of need—acute, short range, easily dealt with, like heat exhaustion, say. All they needed was to be pulled into the shade, given water, have cool, wet cloths applied to their temples and brows.

  Mrs. Ted Bliss, on the other hand, had passed over into a new state of being, existed on a plane different from grief, out of reach of cumulate time’s ministering comforts and platitudes. Why, she, she had lost not only husband and family and self and appetite (that savored, one-shot pork chop for which she would never again feel a yen) but all urge and interest. The baleboosteh part of herself complete, her house at last in order, and order at last seen for what it finally was: the rule of regularity, habit ground down to the trim, plain, ugly shipshape of the deadened dinky, like all that long, perpetually cared for rectangularity in the Chicago boneyard. Urge and yen and craving subsided, absent from her life. Life absent from her life. So that all she could muster for this season’s batch and crop of bereft, forlorn survivors was a pinch of indignation, as if they were suckers of heartbreak, rubes and rookies who hadn’t seen nothing yet.

  Oy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oy and oy. Oy, oy, a thousand times oy!

  How come then, she thought, that such acceptance and coming to terms was so disquieting, so unsettling when everything the complete baleboosteh could hope for was to have all her decks cleared, squared away, every last hospital corner pulled taut and smooth, as if what life had been all about was preparation for some final white-glove inspection? What, she didn’t think in terms of a life in the barracks? But, surely, that’s what so much of hers had been all about. And now it was as if she’d been presented with a statement, some red-tape thing, complicated, governmental, bureaucratic, vaguely whiplashed through interagency (Part A’s uncertain relationship with Part B), like Ted’s Medicare bills almost a year after he died—THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL—until one day one arrived inexplicably stamped Paid in Full.

  So that if they had pressed her she could almost have told them, “Girls, they tell you time heals all things? Time heals nothing. What, you think you’re unhappy now? You think because your husband is gone this is the worst, the storm that breaks the camel’s back, water in the basement and climbing the stairs, that it’s up over the lip of the threshold and coming in under the door in the hall, that it’s destroyed the linoleum and already lapping the wall-to-wall, licking high up the legs of the dining room chairs, the mahogany sideboard and credenza, that it’s covered the tiles, and slipping down the side of the tub like dirty bathwater, is above the box spring and even with the mattress, is inside the chest of drawers with your things like stockings and underwear left to soak overnight in the bathroom basin.

  “Or that the final slap in the face is when the insurance claim comes back marked ‘Sorry, not covered, act of God’?

  “You think?

  “You think so?

  “Or from all that pile-on and pile-on of tsuris, the kids’ bad grades and the death of friends, your own decline, the failure of beauty, of memory, incontinence, shortness of breath, the inability not just to climb steps but to cross the room without pain?

  “And that that’s the worst that can happen, one by one, or served up like so many courses at a dinner? Or that that is?

  “You think, you think so? Well, all I can say is wait till next year! Because didn’t I already tell you you ain’t seen nothing yet? No, no, no, girls, there’s no such thing as a rock bottom to bottom!”

  Though to tell the truth, she wouldn’t have told them a word. They couldn’t have dragged it out of her.

  Meanwhile, there was still something on Mrs. Ted Bliss’s plate. Something left over that, though she knew, or thought she knew, to leave well enough alone, she continued to worry like a loose tooth.

  It was what that awful woman had said, the secretary, or nurse, or maybe consultant herself, whatever she was who’d answered the phone when she rang Maxine and her head had accidentally dialed the wrong number and put her through to the Greater Miami Recreational Whoosis where Toibb had once had his practice—that he’d been murdered in some high, hush-hush covered-up crime and, more ominously yet, that they still held her records, whatever notes Toibb had written down when she’d spoken to him. She remembered his surprise (remembered it the very second the women mentioned the killing) when he found out she’d known Tommy Auveristas—“Tommy Overeasy” Dr. Toibb had called him—as if he’d discovered both shared some incredibly exotic, important secret that had raised her in his eyes to some new visibility; and recalled now, too, Hector Camerando’s sudden arousal to the bait, that at the time she hadn’t yet known was bait, when she’d asked him if he knew Auveristas, and how the pay dirt she thought she’d hit had suddenly exploded into his audacious assertions, like a stream of wild oaths, of the power and influence he held in south Florida, and that, moments later, had declined into all those favors and markers he’d thrust into her hands and whic
h, for years, he practically begged her to call in, and which, for years, she just couldn’t bring herself to do, seeing it now, suddenly, as out of the blue as Overeasy’s name (that’s how Mrs. Bliss thought of him now, too) had years before let loose all that skyfull of pay dirt like a gusher of crude, uncapped connection, and which only now she had begun to sort out.

  Mrs. Bliss, God bless her, was an old woman now. For a Jew her age she’d been spared a lot. She hadn’t lost anyone close in the Holocaust. Indeed, only very, very distant relatives of relatives, people whose names were vaguely known to her but whom she had never met. It was outrageous that anyone should have gone into Hitler’s ovens, of course, but that she and her family had been spared was, for Dorothy, one of the few proofs she had that there was a God. On the other hand, fair was fair, He didn’t exactly have an exemplary character. Hadn’t He cooked poor Marvin’s goose for him? Didn’t He run His own damn ovens? Hotter than Hitler’s! Leaving a mother’s heart to boil over when He laid His dirty hands on her child. Marvin was lying next to Ted in that old cold, queer Chicago cemetery this very minute. Every time she thought of that it pushed a chill through Dorothy’s system even in the Florida shvitz. Why, it was like a ghost story. Marvin had been in the ground even longer than Ted. In a way, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that made him not only her husband’s senior but her own as well, and had transformed the boy into a sort of ancestor, a death veteran. And that was another proof there was a God. Such magic, such fooling around in the supernatural.