Mrs. Ted Bliss (17 page)

“Just what I wished for. You really did, Ted. Hey, thanks a million,” said Dorothy, who knew his nerve had failed and just why, and who had been counting the minutes and hours and all the days, weeks, and months till it would.

And who knew, too, who knew nothing of business and wouldn’t even learn to write a check for at least another forty or so years that he’d already found his buyer, and that it was Junior Yellin, and that whatever the price was they agreed on would be many thousands of dollars less than what Ted had given for it in the first place.

So Hector Camerando was
her
black market. But one she would hold in abeyance for a while yet, not out of the same cop fear and nerve failure to which Ted, olov hasholem, had been subject (and which she didn’t hold against him, honest to God she didn’t, not for one minute), but because, exactly like Ted, she was waiting for her price, too. And she had to wait because, quite simply, she didn’t know what it was yet.

Had Frank or Maxine wanted for money she’d have withdrawn cash from her S&L and given it to them, whatever they needed. And if they needed more than she had in her account would have closed the account and withdrawn it all, and pressed the money on Camerando, begging him on their behalf to lay it off on the safest, surest, high-odds, long-shot greyhound race or jai alai game he could find, and put it all down for her kids. And if she lost, she lost, he wouldn’t hear boo from her. She wasn’t, she’d have told him, the most educated person, and wasn’t, she’d have admitted, a woman with anything like the sort of knowledge of the world a person her age by rights should be expected to have, yet as God was her witness she’d never bother him again, even though she knew going in there were confidence games—this could be one, she understood that—different scams that occurred, that suckers were born every minute, that you couldn’t get something for nothing, that even widows and orphans were vulnerable, especially widows and orphans, often the first to get hurt, but no matter, if worse came to worst, all he could expect from her was gratitude, thanks for having gone to the trouble.

Though thank God they didn’t. Frank or Maxine. Want for money. They had enough. If not rich then certainly comfortable. Even, comparatively speaking, well-to-do. Her son was chairman of the sociology department at the university. Throw in the royalties from the sale of his textbook (more than three hundred university adoptions to date, plus the book was practically required reading and was on almost all the freshman sociology course reserve lists, plus there were copies in almost all the public libraries, plus there were plans for the book to go into a third edition) and you had all the makings of a nice nest egg. Maxine was no slouch either. Her husband had been with the same insurance company for many years and in virtually every one of them was in the running for its highest-earning agent.

So there was plenty to be thankful for, touch wood. The children all had their health. They weren’t lame, they had no blood or muscle diseases, they didn’t smoke or take drugs, and they were all careful drivers. Donald was smart as a whip, on the dean’s list at his school. Judy was pretty. James, who worked for his father, was learning the business. Barry was an automobile mechanic, but to look at his fingernails you wouldn’t guess it in a million years. So maybe he wasn’t as book smart as his cousins—well, look who’d raised him after poor Marvin died—but he was good with his hands, well, he got that from Ted, and Mrs. Bliss would bet you anything he’d have his own shop one day. Not like most garages, but spic and span, and who’s to say, maybe he got that from his grandmother. Well, they were all good kids, she had nothing to complain of in
that
department. They were all of them making their way.

She didn’t play favorites. If she had them she’d never admit it, or ever acknowledge, even to herself, which grandchild she’d miss most if all, God forbid, were suddenly taken away. In the love department she was strictly a stickler, steady in her loyalty as the biggest patriot. That was one reason, over the years, she sent everyone the same gift. Never mind age, grades, the value of the dollar, never mind anything, everybody got the same, fair and square, even Steven, no exceptions. What was good for the goose was grease for the gander. Long ago, before Ted passed even, she’d developed a sort of sliding scale based on the particular occasion. Bar and bat mitzvahs, twenty-five dollars; Hanukkah gelt, five dollars; birthdays, ten; grade school, high school, and college graduations, eighteen (for life and luck). For their weddings she gave all her children and grandchildren one hundred dollars, for their anniversaries fifty. Everything equal, no one should think they had an advantage over anyone else.

Well,
almost
everything equal. To a certain extent (this puzzled the kids, but she never explained her reasons) she made individual exceptions. Barry, for example, had never gone to college. Should he be penalized for not graduating, which would put him eighteen dollars behind his cousins forever? At thirty-four, brilliant Donald was still a bachelor. Wasn’t that heartbreak enough, did he have to suffer financially, too? So, to make a long story short, the upshot was that when she saw him she sometimes slipped Barry a few dollars on the side until he was even with the rest. And she gave Donald extra money, too, a hundred more than his married brother and cousins, and so on and so forth until everybody was all caught up with everyone else. She kept strict accounts and recorded every transaction in a little black date book. You’d think she was saving receipts for the IRS. To tell the truth, it was a big pain in the neck but, what the hell, it was only money, and what else did she have to do?

Though she had a secret fear that she lived with constantly: Suppose one of them should die before their next mitzvah? How could she make it up to them for all the birthdays, anniversaries, and whatnot they would never live to enjoy? How could she even calculate what she owed them? And it occurred to Dorothy that that’s what wills were for, the very idea of inheritance—not to leave your money so that it could be divided up after you died, or pay grief bribes to the survivors. No, not at all. It was to participate,
after you died,
in their celebrations, to live on in their accomplishments and special occasions. Maybe that was what death and the afterlife were all about. Didn’t a person make a list of the presents they received, of who sent this and who sent that, just so they could write a thank-you note afterward? People never threw those lists away, they kept them always. Dorothy did. To this day she could tell you, just from referring to her papers, who had given them a particular tablecloth or bedspread or pair of candlesticks, whatever, when they were married. Maybe all immortality came down to was the lists you got put down on when you gave away a present.

But was this a reason to go to Camerando? To put together in her old old age enough cash to go on some last big spending spree so that, over and above what she provided for them in her will, she could make one last grand gesture presenting them, not just her children, their husbands, their wives, their children,
their
husbands,
their
wives, and so on and so forth, but the entire family, her sisters and brothers, Ted’s,
their
loved ones, all that extended mishpocheh, with some unlooked for, even uncalled for, auf tzuluchan gift. On the occasion of what? Celebrating what? Why, there wouldn’t even be a list they could mark it down on! How, she wondered, would she even fix on a figure what to send? If she gave Frank, say, x number of dollars, it wouldn’t be hard to fix on the sum that would be proper to give to Maxine, but after that it got trickier. After a certain point love and blood didn’t come in easily discernible fractions, and after another it couldn’t be understood not even if you had all the decimal places in the world to work with!

So her children, who were pretty well fixed and already had enough money, were out, and the grandkids who were all of them making their way, even poor Barry (but she wouldn’t play favorites), were.

This was the problem with holding what Mrs. Bliss didn’t even know was called a “marker,” though she well enough understood that someone like Camerando would expect her to call it in. It wasn’t transferable, and it wasn’t negotiable. It was like holding onto frequent flier miles when you couldn’t make up your mind where to go and weren’t sure if you were up to the trip even if you had a destination.

She obsessed on it, and almost felt like going back to Toibb, her recreational therapeusisist, to see what she should do. Maybe she could spend Camerando’s money on some new interests. Though unless someone like Toibb told her what that might be, she
had
no new interests. The hard thing, the really rock-bottom tragic thing, was she had no old interests either. She supposed she was in her early seventies now, give or take those two or three irrecoverable, unretrievable years of Mrs. Bliss’s life her mother had so shamelessly given up to the immigration official. Years, she now understood, she might have used to better advantage, planting incipient interests, resources she could, in this twilight, or dusk, or full dark night of her life, have drawn upon now—learned to drive, perhaps, or read better books so she could use a library card, or gotten more out of the papers, reading the editorials even, the columns…anything, really, kept a diary, or written her thoughts down in letters.

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?”