Mrs. Ted Bliss (23 page)

She wasn’t the only resident of Building One content to be there, happy just to stand in place, apparently with neither a desire to go back indoors nor the will to continue on the errands that had brought them outside in the first place. Those who’d come down to walk their dogs remained where they were, and so did their animals.

They marveled at the temperature, they complimented the perfect humidity. They congratulated each other on their decision to have chosen south Florida as a place to retire.

“They bottled this stuff they’d make a fortune,” one of them said.

“Put me down for a dozen cases. Money’s no object.”

“It is, but not under the circumstances.”

“Weather like this, you couldn’t
bribe
me to go inside.”

“What’s that smell? Oranges?”

“Lemons, limes. Something citric.”

“It’s like you just stepped out of the best shower you ever took.”

“It’s paradise.”

“I wish my kids were here today. They never catch the really good weather.”

“I know. Mine are always complaining, ‘Ma, it’s too hot,’ ‘It’s too cold,’ ‘Don’t it ever stop raining?’ ”

Mrs. Bliss joined in the laughter. It was true. They had a day like this once, maybe two times a year, tops.

“And not every year,” someone said as though continuing her thought, or as if she’d spoken it aloud.

What’s that all about, Mrs. Bliss wondered, startled, returned suddenly to her mission, and nervous because the atmospherics were a distraction and might hold them there until the car came for her. (If it did.) What, did she need this, a bunch of strangers standing around like they were seeing her off? (Because, Mrs. Bliss noted, most of their faces were new to her. She’d laid low the past few years, did not often go to the parties in the game room these days, was less and less comfortable shlepping along with her married friends like a fifth wheel. And with her fellow widows, so unhappy and lonely, it was even worse. She didn’t need no grief support groups.) The presence of so many onlookers made Dorothy self-conscious. And if the driver showed up—he was already ten minutes late—in an actual limousine she wasn’t entirely sure she might not just disappear into the small crowd, turn around, and go right back into the building. Louise could make up some excuse for her. Because the thought, just the thought, of these people seeing her helped into a long white stretch limo—she could picture it: the automobile with its gleaming silver wing-shaped antenna mounted on the trunk and the one-way glass that made the passengers invisible; its spic-and-span leather interior got up like a fancy motel room with its absurd built-ins—the speaker phones and cable TV and wet bar and sun lamp and a desktop you let down like a tray top on an airplane—would diminish her more than she already was, turn her pathetic, as if there were no quicker, more obvious way of pronouncing this some redletter day in the life, summing her up in the measly bottom lines of her dressed-up, shined-shoe, queen-for-a-day happiness. What, did she need it? Did she need it?

And then, suddenly, their chatter ceased. They made a collective sound of awe and wonder. The limo pulled into Building Number One’s driveway and stopped beneath the canopy.

The driver got out and walked around the immense length of the car. He was in black livery, and wore high black boots and a chauffeur’s inky cap.

He came directly up to Dorothy.

“Mrs. Ted Bliss?”

“Yes?”

“I apologize for the delay, Madam. There was construction on 163rd Street, and the traffic was backed up.”

“That’s all right,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“When ain’t there?” said the man who wanted to be put down for a case of the perfect weather. “There always is, 163rd Street is murder.”

“Dorothy,” Edna Bairn said, one of the few people Mrs. Bliss recognized, “the car is for you?”

“I’m going on a trip. He’s taking me to the airport.”

“You’re going on a trip?” said the one who thought the air smelled like oranges. “So where’s your luggage?”

Dorothy looked past the driver to the extravagant car. “What I need I’ll buy when I get there,” she said, and allowed the chauffeur to hand her into the limousine.

The penitentiary had been built on landfill along the northern, central edge of the Everglades. They had left the Tamiami Trail somewhere between Sweetwater and Monroe Station and plunged north onto a gravel road that cut through vegetation that reminded Mrs. Bliss of a kind of gigantic tropical salad. The trees here, she supposed, bore the sort of fruit whose names she recognized—guava and plantain, currant, avocado, gooseberry and huckleberry and elderberry, damson and papaya—but had never tasted or, vaguely thinking of them as somehow gentile fruits, brought home for her family. It seemed curious to her now that she had never encouraged them away from their old appetites.

She’d never been much of a sightseer when Ted was alive, and now, even on cruises, was content to play cards in her cabin or poke about in the duty-free shops searching out gifts she could bring back for her children and grandchildren. Ashore, in colonial port towns, it was all her companions could do to coax her to ride with them in an open landau drawn through the narrow cobblestone streets by a team of paired horses.

“Oh that,” Dorothy would say, “that’s for the tourists.”

“And what are you, Dorothy, a native?”

“We should hire a guide and let him take us around in a taxi.”

“And deal with
two
shvartzers?”

“Shh,” Dorothy said.

But she was oddly moved by the journey today, the sight of such ancient, lush significance on either side of the tremendous car that skated over the loose gravel on the slender little road like some sleek, fearless, predatory beast, its flanks mere inches from the edges of what in places seemed more path or trail than road, brushing the rough saw grass that grew along the queer, amorphous, indeterminate earth like clumps, paddies of unfamiliar geography.

Thinking, this is how they took him to prison. These are the last things he saw before they threw him in jail.

Though she knew he hadn’t been “thrown” into jail, that he had too much influence, too much imagination and power, that even now, behind walls and locked up in a cell, they let him take calls (it had been the next day she’d heard from Chitral, the day after she’d made her wish known to Camerando), and let him put calls through, to arrange to send drivers with gracious notes and imaginary roses.

“Oh,” she told the chauffeur, “that reminds me,” she said, inspired, “I never thanked you for bringing me those beautiful roses.”

“What beautiful roses would those be, Mrs. Bliss?”

“Why the roses you brought with you last week when you delivered that letter to the Towers.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but the first time I was to the Towers was when I picked you up this morning.”

Amazed, thinking, oh,
two
drivers!

Thrilled retroactively who’d never met a man who hadn’t impressed her, swept away by men, not in any sexual or romantic sense but rendered dumbstruck by all the ways they seemed to fill up the world (so overwhelmed by them that she had had trouble with the notion of disciplining her male children, this so apparent to the two boys that even when they were still quite small they behaved in front of their worried, vulnerable mother like visitors in a sick room), stunned by their stature and brisk efficiency (their perfect businesslike forms built for a power and efficacy that spread through their bodies like steam pushed through a radiator,
their
unadorned flesh not expended in breasts or useless piles of complicated hair, and even their privates out in the open, functional as hand tools), by their willingness to go forth and wrest bread and victory from their lives in the world, clear down to changing a tire or starting a fire from scratch or handling the money or initiating love, by their gruff and bluff and boldness, and all the rest of their dangerous, hung-out, let-loose ways.

Awed by the driver, too, overcome with wonder and admiration by the sureness with which he negotiated the fragile, narrow gravel road, the toxic-looking swamps—logjammed, she was sure, with alligators—on either side of the winding, puny spit which they did not so much travel as traverse. He must be a convict, Mrs. Bliss thought. Probably a trustee or something. Which just goes to show, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Wouldn’t you have to be as smart as you were probably brave to know how to walk the fine line between the guards with the guns on the watchtowers and the vildeh chei-eh killers, kidnappers, and bank robbers in the prison yard? If that wasn’t man’s work she didn’t know what was. And if that wasn’t going forth and wresting bread and victory from his life in the world, then she didn’t know
what
it was. It’s a man’s world, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and between you, me, and the lamppost, he’s welcome to it.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Mrs. Bliss, “you’re from the federal penitentiary, too?”

The driver may not have known she was addressing him. They were the first words she’d spoken since she’d asked about the roses.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He spoke very softly. She might not have been able to hear him in an open room, but in the big airtight automobile his voice was startlingly clear, even intimate.

“You work there,” she said.

“I’m a con. I live there.”

“Oh,” she said, “you
live
there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s none of my business, you’ll excuse me for prying, but what did you—”

“Forgery. I forged things.”

“Oh,” she said, “you
forged
things.”

“Passports. Liquor and drivers’ licenses; when the elevator was inspected.”

“Oh, I don’t think I could do that. It must take so much skill. I’d get caught.”

“I got caught,” said the convict.

Mrs. Bliss didn’t answer. Yes, he got caught, but he proved her point. Men were more gifted than women. They could make a fire, rotate the tires, and forge important papers, too.

What men did took nerve and a steady hand. It took brains and courage. Here was this nice, polite, and, as far as Mrs. Bliss could tell, very bright young man who had managed so well in the penitentiary that he had not only worked his way up to trustee but had climbed so high in the system that they trusted him to drive a great powerful limousine all the way out of his prison in the high Everglades, down the gravel road to the Tamiami Trail, across to Miami, and up to the Towers in Miami Beach. He was a man. He was brave; he had nerve. At any time during his journey he could have stepped on the gas and made his escape by outdistancing anybody who might have given him chase. But he was a man, he knew better. He knew it would be other men who would be sent out to find him.

“You know,” said Mrs. Bliss when they had gone a few more miles, “you wouldn’t believe it to look at me but a long time ago in Chicago I used to carry a gun.”

“You did, ma’am?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “My husband owned a building on the North Side. It wasn’t a good area. I took it with me when we collected the rents.”

“I’m damned,” the driver said.

“I never took it out of my purse. Not once. These were very rough people. You know why I did it?”

“Why?”

“I thought I could save my husband’s life,” Dorothy said and, so quietly she didn’t think he’d notice, she started to cry.

“Look there,” the driver said some minutes later. “That’s where all the magic happens. I’m home.”

The guards at the gate didn’t need to see identification. They didn’t even ask her her name. They didn’t bother with the driver either, just waved him on through as though he were pulling up to discharge a guest in front of the entrance to a hotel. When he stopped before what Mrs. Bliss took to be some sort of administration building he got out of the limo and came around to Dorothy’s side to open her door and help her out. Now she was there she wondered why it had seemed so important to come.

“It’s a big roomy car and very comfortable,” Dorothy said, “but three hours in a closed automobile is a long time to sit. I wonder could I stretch my legs a few minutes before I go in?”

“Stand around in the yard? It’s your call, Mrs. Bliss, but not all these guys are as civil as yours truly. Not everyone here is in for a victimless crime. Ain’t all of us forgers, what I’m saying.” He winked. “Some of these characters ain’t seen a woman in a long time.” Quite suddenly Mrs. Ted Bliss was alarmed. She was well into her seventies and what he said seemed one of the cruelest, most patronizing things anyone had ever said to her. So much for men’s bravery and nerve. Mrs. Bliss felt quite ill and turned to enter the building. The driver touched her arm as if to stop her. “Hey, no, I’m kidding,” he said. “It’s like they say in the papers. The place is a country club. You see anybody with his back on a bench lifting weights? You see a single tattoo, or some bull con make eye contact with some cow con? No, Mother, you stay outside and enjoy the fine weather, I’ll go tell Señor Chitral you’re here.”

Before she could object the man had disappeared. Terms, things, conditions, had certainly changed, but Mrs. Bliss could not have said what or how. Of course she felt odd standing by herself out in the prison yard—she was sure that’s what it was; dozens of men dressed in what, despite the neat, neutral appearance of their cheap, open white dress shirts, tan slacks, and inexpensive loafers, could only have been uniforms, loitered or strolled about the quadlike yard like students at a university between classes—but not in the least vulnerable, as safe, really, as she would have felt at the Towers. (And it
was
a fine day. It seemed strange to Mrs. Bliss that they could have stepped into a car three hours ago and stepped out again three hours later into the same fine weather. This was a penitentiary at the edge of a swamp. How could it have the same climate as the world?) She hardly believed she was in a prison among desperados and villains. People conducted themselves in perfectly ordinary, orderly, civilized ways. They might
indeed
have been scholars discussing the issues and topics, illuminating for one another the ramifications and fine points. Dorothy wondered if the inmates had “quiet” or “free times” imposed on them like children at summer camp, say, or if this was the way they walked off their lunches. There couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty of them about, perambulating what were more like kempt grounds than anything as sordid as a prison yard. She wondered if the rest of the population might not voluntarily have gone back to their cells—rooms?—to nap or write letters. It certainly wasn’t what she expected, or like anything she’d seen in the movies. Yet it
was
a prison yard. She saw guards with rifles, with guns in holsters, and all the rest of power’s lead and leather paraphernalia. They weren’t on the tops of walls in little tollbooths on watchtowers, though, but walked about, almost mingling with their prisoners. If anything should happen, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the guards would be in one another’s way. Everybody would be in everybody else’s line of fire. Yet neither guards nor inmates seemed particularly wary. Individuals greeted each other easily, indifferent as old acquaintances, almost, she thought, the way residents of one Towers high rise might say good morning and ask after someone else’s health who lived in a different building. What they didn’t show you in the movies was how ordinary it all was, the simple, edgeless decency of people who had been arbitrarily thrown together. Or was this simply the cream of the crop, the best a place like this had to offer?