Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  All this had been arranged months before, in December, and Dorothy had agreed because who knew what could happen between December and April? In December, to a woman Dorothy Bliss’s age, April looks like the end of time. She didn’t see any point in refusing. But as early as February Mrs. Bliss had begun having second thoughts.

  If he still lived in Pittsburgh, if there were a nonstop flight from Fort Lauderdale to Providence, if he still had all his old friends from the university in Pittsburgh instead of a whole new bunch of people she’d have to meet and whose names, chances were, she’d probably never even catch because, let’s face it, people all tended to arrive together on the first night of a seder and who could distinguish their names one from another in all the tummel with all their vildeh chei-eh kids running around, never mind remember them. If this, if that. But the fact was it was already late March and she had to purchase her airline tickets if she wanted to qualify for a cheap fare and escape the “certain restrictions apply” clauses in the carrier’s rule book.

  She made her reservations on USAir the same day she realized it was already late March and she had better get packing. There was a direct flight to Providence—you had to land in Washington—but no nonstop one, and it turned out it was the only flight going there, so she didn’t even have her choice of a departure time. Mrs. Bliss wasn’t afraid of flying so much as she was of landing in strange cities and having to sit in the plane while it changed crews or took on fuel or boarded new passengers. (Also, she knew about landings, how they were the trickiest part of the whole deal.) But what troubled her most, she thought, was what to take with her. She’d never been to Rhode Island and it was Frank’s first year there so he really wouldn’t be able to tell her. She found an atlas of the United States in the building’s small bookcase in the game room and looked up Providence. It was north of Chicago, north of Pittsburgh, north of New York, and all that stood between it and the rest of cold, icy New England and Canada was a wide but not very high Massachusetts.

  Mrs. Bliss had lived in south Florida since the sixties. In another year it would be the nineties. Over that kind of time span a person’s body gets accustomed to the temperature of a particular climate. Take the person out of that climate and set him down in another and she’s like a fish out of water. The blood thins out; the heart, conditioned to operate in one kind of circumstance, has to work twice as hard just to keep up in another. There were people from up North, for example, who couldn’t take the Florida heat. Their skin burned, they ran a high fever. Except on the hottest days, and even then only when she’d been waiting for a bus in the sun or carrying heavy bags of groceries back from Winn-Dixie, Dorothy didn’t even feel it. By the same token she’d noticed that in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati on visits, she needed her good wool coat on what everyone else was calling a beautiful, mild spring day.

  But who knew from Providence? So for a good two months before she left for that city Mrs. Ted Bliss studied the weather maps and read the long columns of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s temperature, the lows and the highs, and prophetically shook her head from side to side whenever she saw the dull gray cross-hatching of fronts and weather.

  So, just in case, she packed almost everything, bringing along her heaviest woolen sweaters, scarves, even gloves. Her two big suitcases were too heavy and though she hated to impose on him she called Manny from the building and asked for his help.

  “You look like you’re moving for good.”

  “I never know what to take, not to take.”

  “The summer Rosie died I went back North to see the kids. You don’t think I froze?”

  “Here,” she said, “let me help you.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll make two trips.”

  She should have waited for the van and given the driver a tip a dollar. It was like seeing some once familiar face from television who popped up again after an absence of a few years. She still recognized him, but there was something pinched about his eyes, or his mouth had fallen, or his body had become too small for his frame. Something. As if he were his own older relative. She hated to see him shlep like that.

  “You’re going to…?”

  “Frank’s.”

  For a second the name didn’t register and, even after he smiled, she felt a small stab from a not very interesting wound. Dorothy knew Manny knew Frank had not liked him much. He’d resented his mother’s dependence on the guy after Ted died. It was nothing personal. There was no funny business to it. No one, not Frank, not Dorothy, certainly not Manny, had any crazy ideas. It was a compliment, really. Frank felt bad she was all alone and a stranger had to do for her.

  How, she wondered, when she was on the plane and had finished her snack, and returned the tray table to its original upright position and drifted off to sleep as the airline’s inflight shopping catalog with all its mysterious, unfathomable tsatskes, exercise equipment, short-wave radios and miniature television sets, motivational self-help videos, garment bags, and special, impregnable waterproof watches guaranteed to a depth of five thousand feet slipped into her lap, did I get to be so smart?

  Though she declined when the hostess asked if she wanted to request a chair to meet her in Providence, she had treated herself to a ride in a wheelchair in the Florida airport even though she’d allowed herself plenty of time to get to the departure gate, and as she dozed it was of this she dreamed. Dreaming of unaccustomed, incredible comfort, dreaming right-of-way like a vehicle in a funeral procession, dreaming alternating unseen skycaps behind her who pushed her in the chair—Junior, Manny, Tommy Auveristas, Marvin, Frank, and Ted—as she sat luxuriously, dispensing wisdom, eating up their attention like a meal.

  Despite the pleasure she thought she’d taken in her dream, she woke with a bad taste in her mouth, thinking: The same thing that gives us wisdom gives us plaque.

  “How was the trip, Ma?”

  “Fine.”

  “Make any new friends?”

  “I don’t talk so much to strangers anymore.”

  “Here,” Frank said, “give me the baggage checks. I’ll have the skycap bring your bags out to the curb.”

  To Frank’s surprise, his mother surrendered the claim checks without a word.

  Mrs. Bliss was surprised, too. She dismissed any idea of the skycap’s trying to make off with her things.

  Something else that surprised her was that in the months since she’d last seen him, Frank had become very religious. He insisted, for example, that she accompany him to synagogue. And not just for the relatively brief Friday evening service but for the long, knockdown, drag-out Saturday morning services, too. Now he and May, his wife, had never been particularly observant. Their son Donny had been bar mitzvahed but the ceremony had taken place in the nondenominational chapel of Frank’s Pittsburgh university. A rabbi from Hillel had presided. The boy had been brilliant, flawlessly whipping through his Torah portion, and doing all of them proud, but Mrs. Bliss knew that afterward he didn’t bother to strap on his phylacteries, not even during the month or so following the bar mitzvah when the flush of his Judaism might still be presumed to be on him. (His grandmother had been impressed with the grace and speed he employed in getting out his thank-you notes, though, blessed as he was with a sort of perfect pitch for gratitude. Each note was bespoke, custom cut to the precise value of the gift. He did not rhapsodize or make grand promises about how a $10 check from a distant cousin would be deposited into his college fund, but would instead fix upon a specific item—film, say; a tape he wanted; a ticket to a Pirates game.)

  Both Mrs. Bliss’s sons had been bar mitzvahed, Marvin as well as Frank, but neither could be said to be very religious. When Marvin died it was Ted, not Frank, who rose before dawn every day for a year to get to the shul on time to say Kaddish for their son. When Ted died it was no one. She’d begged Frank, but he refused, a matter of principle he said. So Dorothy, who was as innocent of Hebrew as of French, undertook to say the prayers for her dead husband herself. She read
the mourner’s prayers from a small, thin blue handbook the Chicago funeral parlor passed out. It was about the size of the pocket calculator Manny from the building had given her to help balance her checkbook after Ted lost his life. She read the prayers in a soft, transliterated version of the Hebrew, but came to feel she was merely going through the motions, probably doing more harm than good. If Mrs. Ted Bliss were God, Mrs. Bliss thought, she’d never be fooled by someone simply impersonating important prayers. It was useless to try to compensate for her failure by getting up earlier and earlier each morning. God would see through that one with His hands tied behind His back. If there even was a God, if He wasn’t just some courtesy people politely agreed to call on to make themselves nobler to each other than they were.

  So Mrs. Bliss’s first reaction to her son’s new piety was mixed not just with suspicion but with a certain sort of anger.

  Especially after Frank made them all sit through the long seder supper, unwilling to dispense with even the most minor detail of the ritual meal. He didn’t miss a trick. Everything was blessed, every last carrot in the tsimmes, each bitter herb, every deed of every major and minor player, one grisly plague after the other visited by God upon Egypt. It was a Passover service to end all Passover services. Indeed, Mrs. Bliss had a hunch that there wasn’t a family in all Providence, Rhode Island, that evening that hadn’t finished its coffee and macaroons and gotten up from the table before the Blisses were midway through their brisket and roast potatoes.

  May seemed imbued with more baleboosteh spirit and just plain endurance than Dorothy could imagine herself handling during even the old golden glory days in Chicago with the gang. She wore her out, May, with her hustle and bustle. And for at least a few minutes Mrs. Bliss actually considered herself the victim of some clumsy, stupid mockery. As a matter of fact she was almost close to tears and, though she slammed down her will like someone bearing down on the brakes with all her weight and just managed to squeeze them back (she wouldn’t give Frank—or May, who might have put him up to this—the satisfaction of volunteering to help clear away the dishes), she could almost feel the strain on her face and only hoped that no one noticed. She sat through the remainder of the meal with an assortment of smiles fixed to her face like makeup.

  When it was finally done she was one of the first to pile into the living room, and found a place for herself in the most comfortable chair. She took some great-grandchild onto her lap like a prop and started to rock the kid, who was already half asleep.

  I’m going to get away with this, she thought. I’m going to act like everyone here expects me to act and come away scot-free without giving a single one of them the satisfaction of believing they ever got to me.

  And would have, too, if her pious son hadn’t seen through to the depths of her heart.

  “Something wrong, Ma?” Frank said in a low voice at the side of her chair.

  “You’re the spiritual leader here,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you tell me.”

  Her son looked genuinely puzzled, even hurt. He’d been a good boy. Quick in school, responsible, considerate to the family, never demanding on his own behalf—they had to remind him that what he wore was wearing out and that he needed new clothes; they had to ask him what he wanted for his birthday; throughout high school they raised his allowance before he ever asked—she’d never had occasion to punish him, or even to yell at him. Her heart went out to him. This was the young man who couldn’t do enough for her, who was always on the lookout for special gadgets to make her life more comfortable and, though he seldom wrote, called even when the cheap rates weren’t in effect. He called as if long distance grew on trees.

  So of course she was sorry she had spoken harshly. Of course she could have bitten off her tongue rather than speak without thinking or cause him pain.

  Only she hadn’t spoken without thinking. She’d been thinking for a long time, for years as a matter of fact, whether she knew it or not. And though this was hardly the time (the first night of Passover when the Jewish people sat down together to celebrate their deliverance), and certainly not the place for it (her sole surviving son’s new home where he’d be making a new life, which, let’s face it, he was no spring chicken, so how many new lives could he expect to make for himself from now on, and his mother didn’t think he’d be asked to take another job so quick), there were plenty of good reasons to get what had been eating at her and eating at her off her chest.

  “What?” he said, following her down the hallway as she sought the spare room where they’d put her up as if it were a neutral corner.

  “What?” he repeated. “What?”

  “You’re so religious,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “How come you couldn’t say Kaddish for your father? How come I had to depend on Manny who volunteered to say it for him?”

  “Ma.”

  Maxine was standing in the doorway, looking in; George, her husband, was.

  “I begged you,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Oh, Ma,” Frank said.

  “No. A stranger. A stranger you despised, that you humiliated in my home, my guest—you saw him, Maxine, you were a witness—that you gave him five dollars that time like you were throwing him a tip.”

  “Five dollars?”

  “You don’t remember the pocket calculator?”

  “Come on, Ma. He makes me nervous. Sticking his nose in everywhere it don’t belong. All right, maybe I wronged him, I admit it. How is he, anyway? I haven’t seen him in years. I’m sorry if I hurt his feelings. If you want, I’ll write him an apology. I’ll call him up. We’ll make friends.”

  “How is he? He’s old. Like everyone else. And don’t write him, don’t call him up. He probably forgot. What’s done is done. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “What’s done is done? If what’s done is done, how come you introduce a topic I haven’t thought about in years? If what’s done is done, how’d you happen to drag this particular Elijah into my house with you in the first place? Come on, Ma, is this really about Manny? Is it really even about my father?”

  “Oh, you’re such a smart fella, Frank. You’re such a fart smeller,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “I haven’t heard that one since I was a little girl,” Maxine said. “Daddy used to say that one all the time.”

  “My father said it, too. I think it was the only joke he knew,” George said.

  “That’s old,” said one of Frank’s new Rhode Island colleagues, “that’s an old one.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “family business is being conducted here.”

  “Sorry,” the colleague said, “I came for my son.”

  He reached out to the child Mrs. Bliss had been rocking in her lap in the living room. The little boy had apparently followed her into the room with Frank.

  “ ‘Fart smeller, fart smeller,’ ” the kid squealed, “Great-Grandma Dorothy called Great-Uncle Frank a fart smeller.”

  Why was he calling her his great-grandmother? Who were these strange children, these outlanders, who apparently just latched on to the nearest, most convenient old lady and assumed some universal kinship? How could parents let their kids get away with stuff like that? Didn’t they realize how patronizing it was? It made Mrs. Ted Bliss feel like someone’s Mammy. (Though she felt for the child, too. How needful people were to belong, to be cared for.)

  Her grandson Barry had squeezed into the room with the others. The auto mechanic slapped his tochis and guffawed.

  “You mind your manners, Grandmother,” Barry said, “or we’ll have to wash out your mouth with soap. Strictly kosher for Passover. Ha ha.”

  “Please,” Mrs. Bliss said, and again she was close to tears.

  “Mama, what is it?” Maxine said.

  “Give her some air, for God’s sake,” George said, and began to shoo people from the room.

  It was a good idea, Mrs. Bliss thought. Why hadn’t someone thought of it earlier? “Yes,” Mrs. Bliss said, “give me some air. Stand back there,” she giggled, “make
room. Oh,” she said, “I’m so full. Everything May put out was delicious. The brisket was sweet like sugar, she’ll have to give me her recipe. But so much? You could feed an army.”

  “A question is on the table, Mother, I think,” Frank said.

  “What question was that?” Mrs. Bliss asked wearily, sorry she’d taken her disappointment public.

  “Is this really about Manny? Is this really about Dad?”

  “No,” she said, her long life draining from her in buckets, “it’s really about why you never said prayers for your brother.”

  Maxine made a noise as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

  Frank moved toward the door of the first-floor guest room they’d set up for the old woman, shut it, and turned back again to his mother.

  “Just what kind of son of a bitch do you think I am?” he demanded.

  “I don’t think that,” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Hypocrite then. I mean, Jesus, Ma, do you really believe I’m that scheming and political? Do you actually think that just because some damn zealot decided to drag my name into an op-ed column in the New York damned Times that legitimates his crazy charges?”

  “Charges? There are charges? What did you do, Frank? Are you in trouble? Do you need a lawyer?”

  “I got a lawyer, Ma. Manny from the building’s on retainer.”

  “Manny from the building?”

  “He’s kidding you, Mother,” Maxine said. “Frank, you’re scaring her half to death.”

  “What’s going on?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “She doesn’t know?” Frank asked Maxine. “I mean her son is famous and she doesn’t even know?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mother, Frank left Pittsburgh because—”

  “Was driven out of Pittsburgh,” Frank said.

  “—some political correctness jerk did this high-powered deconstructionist job on him. He said Frank deliberately eschewed the Zionist movement and swung over to Orthodox Judaism to privilege the word of the father over the writings of the son.”