Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  He strolled down the hall to the reception area to greet her. He was startled by her size, or lack thereof. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall, although her puffy, artificially black blob of hair added an inch or two to her height. Her shoulders were narrow, her body slim and erect in a plain navy-blue skirt, a pink blouse, a maroon cardigan and flat leather oxfords with ridged antislip soles. Not that he was any judge of geriatrics, but she didn’t look eighty-eight years old. He would have guessed seventy, at most.

  She was accompanied by a slender, dark-skinned young man with a fringe of braids framing his face and a smile as big as the Staten Island ferry. “Mr. Joffe?” he said. “I’m Lyndon Rollins, and this is Ida Bloom.”

  Ron shook Lyndon’s hand, but Ida’s stern expression didn’t invite a handshake. She was of a prefeminist generation where men and women didn’t shake hands, but he knew she wasn’t some delicate blossom who required gentle handling. His research into the history of Bloom’s informed him that she’d been a powerhouse during the business’s early years, putting in as much time and labor as her husband while they built their shop into the institution it was today. Still, one look told him she didn’t want a handshake.

  He led her and Rollins down the hall to his office and inside. She gazed around and sniffed. “This is your office?” she asked, obviously underwhelmed.

  He didn’t think it was so bad. In fact, he thought it was better than Julia’s office on the third floor of the Bloom Building. True, it was smaller, and its solitary window overlooked an air shaft, but the carpeting was newer. He lacked a leather sofa, but his chairs were ergonomically designed. Ida Bloom settled into one, folded her hands primly in her lap and studied his animal posters, her gaze lingering on the picture of an orangutan, which had always seemed somehow obscene to Ron, though he wasn’t sure why. Something about the beast’s wide, flaccid lips, maybe.

  He sat at his desk and gave her his best smile. “I’m really glad you came, Mrs. Bloom. I’ve wanted to talk to you. I hope you don’t mind if I tape our conversation.”

  “Tape?” she asked suspiciously. “What do you mean, tape?”

  He pulled his tape recorder from a desk drawer and set it up. “The microphone is built in. If you speak in a normal voice, it’ll record you. Pretend it isn’t there.”

  “Why do you want to tape me?”

  “I can’t take notes fast enough,” he explained. “If I relied on my written notes, I might miss something important. Using the tape recorder means I won’t miss anything. Okay?”

  She eyed the machine dubiously, then lifted her gaze to him. “So, tape.” Her incongruously dark hair seemed plastered in place. It didn’t move when she did.

  “Thanks.” He pressed the button to turn on the machine.

  She craned her neck to view the tape as it moved from spool to spool. “It’s working now?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “It’s too small. I never knew from such a small tape recorder.”

  “Well, this one fits in my pocket, which can be handy. Shall we get started?”

  “You want to start? So start. What’s with this article, anyway?”

  What kind of question was that? How was he supposed to answer? “It’s a good article,” he assured her. “Julia saw an early draft and was pleased.”

  “So, you showed Julia.” She sniffed again. Her nostrils pinched together when she inhaled. “What did she tell you?”

  For now, he decided to let Ida ask the questions—although he wished she would phrase them to offer clues about what she was getting at. “If you mean what did Julia tell me about Bloom’s, mostly she discussed the store’s worldwide fame and the variety of its merchandise. The article isn’t going to be an ad for Bloom’s, though. It will deal with the dynamics of a family running a tightly integrated business.”

  “We have no dynamics,” Ida declared firmly.

  Ron exchanged a glance with Lyndon Rollins, whose face gave nothing away. His smile was placidly neutral.

  “We’re a very ordinary family, Mr. Joffe,” Ida insisted. “Except maybe my granddaughter Susie. You’ve met Susie?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “What did you think of her?”

  He’d thought she seemed pleasant enough. “She’s got some funny ideas for updating the display windows.”

  “What do you mean, funny? Funny ha-ha, or funny like mayonnaise goes funny if it’s kept out of the refrigerator?”

  “Funny ha-ha.”

  “So you’ve met both my granddaughters.” Ida nodded and tapped her fingers together. They were slightly bent and swollen with arthritis, but her nails were painted a pearly pink. “Sondra—you met her?”

  He nodded. “Your daughter-in-law.”

  “She told me about you. She said, maybe Susie would like you. Julia I don’t worry about. She’s got that boyfriend, the goyishe lawyer, I don’t know what’s going on with them. At least he’s a lawyer. But Susie! With the tattoo and the hippie life—I know, it’s the wrong decade for hippies, no? The wrong century. But you know what I’m talking about. She’s a poet.”

  “The world needs poets,” Ron murmured, making a mental note to ask Julia about this goyishe lawyer boyfriend. Was that the blond guy she’d kicked out of her office the day they’d found the condoms in the old desk? Or was there some other goyishe lawyer? She’d gone to NYU law school and joined a law firm while the ink was still wet on her diploma. She probably knew hundreds of goyishe lawyers. Thousands. They definitely had to discuss this.

  He realized Ida was chattering away, and forced himself to pay attention. “Susie needs a nice boy in her life. Someone like you. Stable. You work at a desk. You work with computers. She’s been friendly with someone in the store’s bagel department—not Morty, the other one. What’s his name?” she asked Lyndon.

  Her companion shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  “She brought him to the seder.”

  “I remember that. His name escapes me.”

  “A big boy, very tall.” Ida turned back to Ron. “All right, so his name is not important. But you—you work at a desk. That’s a very stable thing to do.”

  He wondered if Ida Bloom had come all the way to his office to make a match between him and Julia’s sister. The absurdity almost made him laugh out loud. “Susie strikes me as the sort of woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t need her loved ones interfering,” he said.

  “You’re such an expert? You think my family has dynamics. What do you know about Susie?”

  “Just that I don’t think she and I would be…compatible.”

  “Forget compatible. Sondra said…” Ida sighed and peered at Lyndon. “Why do I listen to Sondra? She’s always trying to stir up trouble. She should keep her nose out of other people’s business. Her nose is too small, anyway, am I right?” At Lyndon’s helpful nod, she turned back to Ron. “So. You’re not interested in Susie.”

  He didn’t have the nerve to say no flat out. “I doubt Susie would be interested in me,” he said, instead. “What I’m interested in is, why did you put Julia in charge of Bloom’s? Why did you skip over Jay and Sondra and name Julia the president?”

  “Why?” Ida seemed surprised by the question. “Because Julia is just like me, of course.”

  He stared at the old woman. Her lips curved in an unremitting scowl, her gaze pierced, her chin jutted. Julia was nothing like her.

  “Julia thinks the company is bleeding,” he said.

  Ida Bloom pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Bleeding what?”

  “It’s not growing. Profits aren’t what they should be. You’ve got a bustling business, yet it’s not making money the way it should be. This is the mystery at the heart of your store, Mrs. Bloom. Can you explain it?”

  “What are you talking? It’s doing fine.” She fiddled with one of several gold bangles ringing her bony wrists. “There are ups and downs in a retail business, always. When my parents were selling knishes from a pushcart on the sidewal
k, there were ups and downs. You think lots of people want to buy hot knishes in August? So there were downs. Then it got cold and there were ups. You’re not in retail, what do you know?”

  “I do know a fair amount about business, Mrs. Bloom.” He eyed the tape recorder to make sure the tape was moving. “I have an MBA and I write a weekly column on business and finance for the magazine.” He leaned forward slightly. “Is Bloom’s in trouble, Mrs. Bloom? Shouldn’t the store be earning greater profits?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she scoffed. “Bleeding? I never heard from such a thing.”

  “Have you talked to your accountant about the store’s performance?”

  “Myron?” She issued a disdainful grunt. “Look, you want to write a story? Don’t write a story about Myron. He’s a schlemiel. A good man, but not worth a story. Here’s the story you should write—the story of Isaac Bloom.”

  Ron lifted a pen as if waiting for her to tell that story.

  “Isaac was my husband. He came over after Krystallnacht. You know Krystallnacht? He was just a young man, and he came steerage to America. We met, we married, we took over the knishes cart and we turned it into Bloom’s. Hard work. Oy, such work we did! But here was the magic of Isaac. He could schmooze. You know what schmoozing is?”

  Ron nodded.

  “Isaac, he could schmooze anyone into buying anything. A woman would come into the store thinking she wanted to buy only a quart of borscht, he’d say, ‘Mrs. Zaretsky, what a lovely scarf. So how’s your son? He still has that cough? Hot, wet cloths on his chest, that’ll break up the phlegm. What do the doctors know? Hot, wet cloths, I’m telling you.’ And the next thing, Mrs. Zaretsky is buying a challah, some pickles, a pound pastrami. That was the way Isaac was. He used to say it didn’t matter what you sold, as long as you were paying attention to who you were selling it to.”

  “The people I’ve talked to imply that you were the brains behind the store.”

  “I was,” Ida agreed. “But Isaac was the heart. You can’t sell if you don’t have heart.” She ruminated for a minute, her bullet-hard eyes aiming at him. “So, you think the heart of my store is bleeding?”

  “You tell me, Mrs. Bloom.”

  “My son says Julia worries too much, she fusses over details. You know so much about business, what do you think?”

  Ron paused to consider his answer. “What you’ve got, Mrs. Bloom, is a very insular company. You’ve got family running the place, along with a couple of outsiders so close they might as well be family, too. There’s no objectivity at work in the way Bloom’s is run.”

  “Julia’s the objectivity.”

  “She’s trying to figure out why the store isn’t doing better.”

  “She told you to put that in the article?” Ida waved at his pad, as if there were any question which article he might put it in.

  “Actually, no. She told me to keep it out of the article. And I hope I can, Mrs. Bloom. But—”

  “What kind of article is this, anyway? You want to write bad things about Bloom’s, am I right? Like those silly magazines that always have bad things about perfectly nice actors and actresses, that they’re on drugs, they’re breaking up their marriages, they cheat on their taxes, their titties are falling out of their dresses, all kinds of bad things. You’re going to put in your magazine that we’re insular. What is that, anyway? I thought it was something to do with diabetes.”

  Explaining insulin wasn’t worth the effort. “It could be that the family is sparing you,” he suggested. “According to Jay and Sondra, you’re not all that involved in the running of the store anymore—”

  “I’m the CEO,” she announced. “What does that stand for again, Lyndon?”

  “Chief executive officer,” he supplied.

  “That’s right,” she agreed, nodding resolutely. “Chairman of the board. If the store is bleeding, someone’s supposed to tell me. Certainly they should tell me before they tell you, some reporter who wants to write bad things about my family.”

  “I don’t want to write bad things,” he insisted. It wasn’t his fault that bad things sold more magazines than good things. “I don’t understand why Bloom’s isn’t earning profits hand over fist. The store is always full of shoppers. The quality of the merchandise is excellent. Do you think someone is skimming?” he asked. “Myron, maybe?”

  “Myron doesn’t know from skimming. No one is skimming.”

  “Deirdre? Do you suppose she might have a reason to want revenge?”

  “Everybody’s got a reason,” Ida said flatly.

  If she knew Deirdre had been her son’s paramour, she gave no indication.

  “I came here to make sure you wrote a nice story and put in something about my Isaac, may he rest. I didn’t come here so you should write bad things about insular and skimming.”

  Ron didn’t remind her that she’d come to try to sell him on Susie. “I’ll include everything you said about Isaac,” he assured her. “But in the meantime, Julia says merchandise is disappearing.”

  Ida suddenly sat forward, reached across the desk and clamped a surprisingly strong hand over Ron’s. “My granddaughter will suffer if you write bad things.”

  Her protectiveness toward Julia appealed to him. “I intend to write the truth, Mrs. Bloom,” he told her. “I don’t want to do anything to make Julia suffer.”

  “Then don’t put in anything about this—the bleeding, the diabetes, all that stuff.” She released his hand and settled back in her chair. “You know so much about business, you think the store should make more money? Tell me how. New windows? Susie’s doing new windows. Computer? Jay does computer. Low fat? Sondra thinks we need more low-fat foods. She’s always on a diet. So fine, introduce low-fat foods into the inventory. But you can’t make a low-fat bagel, I’ll tell you. Bagels already have no fat.” Her gaze met Ron’s, steady and challenging. “You’re such an expert, you tell me. Nobody ever skimmed from my store. So what else would make these problems you think we’ve got?”

  “I haven’t reviewed your store’s finances, Mrs. Bloom. I can’t begin—”

  “You talked to everyone. You know.” Her eyes hardened, almost accusing. “You think Julia doesn’t know how to run the store? She doesn’t have the heart, she doesn’t have the brain, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Of course not.” But how could he know for sure?

  “So, you’ll come,” Ida was saying.

  “I’ll come where?” Once again he had to scramble to catch up to her.

  “You’ll come and figure out why Julia thinks the store is bleeding.”

  She nodded to Rollins, and he rose and helped her to her feet. Ron sprang to his feet, as well.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “My store could be bleeding, and you’re worried about ideas? Come and tell me what’s wrong, Mr. Hoo-ha Business Expert. If the store has a problem, someone has to tell me what it is. Jay won’t. Sondra won’t. Julia doesn’t know. So you’ll come.”

  If she was serious about letting him investigate Bloom’s finances, he could write the truth about Bloom’s—and help Julia, too. He had one week to get the piece finished and on Kim’s desk. Why not review the store’s records and turn the article into what his editor wanted it to be?

  “You find a problem,” Ida challenged him, “and I’ll nominate you for that prize, what’s it called? The Plotzer Prize.”

  “The Pulitzer,” he corrected her.

  “That’s the one. Let’s go, Lyndon. I need to get back to the store and find out if it’s bleeding. You come with us,” she ordered Ron.

  “I can’t. I’ve got…work,” he said vaguely, because the only work he had was the Bloom’s article.

  “So you’ll get your work done later. Come.” She hooked her hand around his elbow and pulled him away from his desk. If she looked no older than seventy, her grip felt no older than a twenty-five-year-old’s. “First we’ll fix Bloom’s, and then you’ll write your story. And maybe you could
talk to Susie a little, see how things go. Not that I’m pushing, but it wouldn’t kill you to talk to her.”

  There was a crisis in the deli-meats cooler. A trucker whose first language was Latvian had dumped a delivery of Camembert and Roquefort in with the meats. Bloom’s wasn’t strictly kosher, but sensitivity to the laws of kashruth meant not tossing cheeses in with the meats.

  As president, Julia had overseen the removal of the cheeses. She’d calmed down a few fretful elderly customers, including one wizened man who shouted at her that if only he were dead he could be rolling over in his grave right now.

  Julia was not going to discard the cheeses or the meats—or, for that matter, the cooler. She assured the man who wished he were dead that she’d have a rabbi come in to say a prayer over the meats, and that mollified him. He didn’t move from the bin, though. Evidently he intended to remain in place until the rabbi arrived.

  She had no idea how to summon a rabbi on such short notice. Returning to the third floor, she called through Deirdre’s open door, “Do you know a rabbi?”

  The minute the words escaped her, she clapped her hand to her mouth. Why would Deirdre, of all people, know a rabbi? And why was Julia hollering through open office doors? Had the culture of Bloom’s permeated her that thoroughly?

  Deirdre slipped her feet into her spike-heeled shoes and stood, straightening each long limb until she loomed over Julia. “I have a variety of rabbis in my files,” she said. “You want Orthodox, Reformed, Hasidic or Zionist rabble-rouser?”

  Julia gazed up at her and experienced a soul-deep shudder of understanding. No wonder her father had fallen for Deirdre: not because of her gangly appearance, her toothy smile, her wispy red hair and her eyes the color of unripe crabapples. Not because he’d wanted an illicit thrill, or because he’d experienced an uncontrollable urge to liberate himself from the constraints of his marriage, but because Deirdre had a variety of rabbis in her files. For that alone, Julia was half in love with the woman.

  “We need a blessing said over the meat in the deli-meats refrigerator,” Julia told her.