Mrs. Ted Bliss (25 page)

Later, when she had time to think about it, Dorothy had to wonder (though she knew she’d never know) if he’d gone to all this trouble and shlepped her all that way just to get her to buy him lunch and take her for the hundred dollars she’d insisted on pressing on him.

In the cafeteria there, she looked at him in wonder.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Bliss said, “it’s just that, well…”

“What?”

“You hear about ‘country clubs.’ Just today the driver who brought me said this place is a country club.”

“What’s he know about it?”

“Well, he’s a criminal,
too,
” she said in his defense. “I mean
he
has a record,
he
was arrested.
He
had a trial, and when the jury found him guilty
someone
sentenced and sent him here.

“Anyway, it isn’t at all what I expected. It’s just that you hear about these places, and everyone says that we’re soft on crime and about coddling the criminals. It’s on all the talk shows. I’m pretty old,” she said. “Not that I know it all or anything, but I’ve lived long enough to know at least a thing or two, and what I’m saying is that when you hear all this stuff—soft-on-crime this and country-club that, it’s a little like the jingles I used to hear for laundry powder on the radio. After a while you don’t believe it anymore and think that someone is just trying to sell you something.”

“And?”

“And? And so naturally I’m a little farmisht, mixed up. It’s not like in the movies, it’s not like on TV. Out where I was waiting for you? Before that nice man, the guard—what was his name, Bill?—came up, I thought I heard a band playing, and when I looked around to see where the music was coming from I saw these people blowing in trumpets and banging on drums, the last of them marching and turning the corner at the other side of the building. I mean, they were prisoners, too, right?”

“They play in the prison marching band.”

“A prison marching band! Alevai! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“What?”

“I mean that’s wonderful. I mean if you got to be here for a hundred years, then I’m pleased it’s a country club and you got a prison marching band. I mean it’s exactly like you said to me, ‘At least you got a nice day to be outside.’ ”

“Outside?”

“Well, no, not outside, I don’t mean outside. In a place like this, I mean.”

“You like it.”

“In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have imagined such a spotless toilet,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I wouldn’t have imagined Jell-O molds, or an airplane, or everybody’s nice clothes.”

“So you feel a little better about that subpoena.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.” This was after she had bought his lunch but before she pressed her check for a hundred dollars into his hand when the driver came by to take her home. “It’s only a little later than the middle of the afternoon,” she said, “and you’ve already delivered your letters and have the rest of the day off. In a little while you’ll probably have even more privileges. You’ll work your way up to a trustee like the driver.”

“I’m already a trustee,” Alcibiades Chitral said. “Everybody’s a trustee. They make us trustees when we get here, right after they delouse us and give us our nice uniforms.”

“Everybody’s a trustee?”

“Every kidnapping, tax cheating, counterfeiting, serial killing mother’s son of us. Everyone starts off with his pieces intact. It’s like checkers or a game of Monopoly. You lose by attrition. So sure, everybody’s a trustee. This place. This place is some place this place. It’s the clowns with the longest time who get the wear and the tear. Sure, we’re
all
trustees. Only it’s not like the Towers, Mrs. Bliss. It’s a retirement community in reverse. Oh, yeah,” Chitral said bitterly. “I’m through for the day. I start at nine and knock off at two. Only, you know what my job was the year I came? I stuck in the video, started it, and rewound the tape when it was through. Your limo driver is here a couple of months, maybe. Tops, a couple of months, and he’s off the grounds more than he’s on them. Sometimes the warden sends him to Tallahassee, gives him chits for meals and a motel, a few bucks walking-around money, and has him bring back fresh rolls the next day. All the leisure’s up front, my dear Mrs. Bliss, and the cons who made that toilet of yours shine so, pull K.P. and do the lifting, are all old men who work around the clock and have been here thirty years.

“A hundred years. Thanks to you I’m doing a century of time here, lady!”

He wanted me to feel terrible, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought. He wanted me to feel terrible, and that’s why he sent for me. He wanted me to feel terrible, the son of a bitch.

And then, for the first time not just that day but since he was sentenced, she understood exactly why she’d wanted to see him. She knew the reason she was there.

But so much had happened, she had so much new information.

She was only a helpless old woman, and this place, for all its collegiality, for all its laundered kemptness and, she suspected, quasimilitary, quarters-bounced-on-the-beds baleboss, was so unrelentingly masculine, that she had to proceed slowly, carefully. But even if it weren’t, even if she’d been talking to her mother, to her sisters, even if she were speaking to her own children it would have been difficult for her to blurt out what was on her mind. Even, for that matter, if it had been Ted. There was only one to whom she might have broached the subject sucking at her heart, and he, may Marvin rest, she would never see again.

So she had to sidle up to it, deflecting real concerns with minor ones.

“Tell me,” she said, “would you happen to know if by any chance that car you bought from me is on the property?”

“The property?”

“The grounds, the facility, the installation, whatever name this place goes by. Because the guard told me that that airplane some convict taught your friend to fly was confiscated. Maybe that’s how they do things. Maybe that VCR you started out on originally belonged to some other jailbird. Maybe the limousine did. And television sets and all the trumpets and drums and everything else around here are hand-me-downs, too. Maybe that’s how the government saves its money. By never throwing anything out. Anything! Neither the, what-do-you-call-them, big-ticket items, nor all the drek and chozzerai. By, what-do-you-call-it, recycling everything.
Everything!

“So, well, naturally, I thought of the Buick LeSabre. I mean, well, even you admired its air-conditioning and electric door locks and windows. The FM and AM. You gave me over and above the blue book value. It drove like a top, you said.”

Whatever she decided about sidling up to her subject, stepping gingerly, refusing to introduce the real, though till now undiscovered reasons that brought her, that motivated her to speak with circumspection, Mrs. Bliss was surprised to discover she had lost her temper. It wasn’t the real offensive yet, but the noise she made, the gauntlet she flung down, startled poor Chitral.

“So what do they do with it? How do they use it? Ted used to pick up the White Sox. On all of our drives, on all of them, the thing he loved most was to pick up the Sox games on the radio. Is that what you do? Is it? Because if it
is
what you do I could almost forgive you. Only I’m sure it’s not. So what
do
they do? Use it for parts?”

“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” Chitral said, “why are you upset? Pardon me, but I’m certain this can’t be good for you. Pardon me, but I think you should make an effort to calm yourself. I assure you, Mrs. Bliss, I assure you, Dorothy, your car isn’t on the premises. I don’t know what happened to it. Probably they auctioned it off. That’s what the government usually does with the property it confiscates.

“If you watch the papers, every once in a while they take out an ad back in the section where people post those little disclaimers about how they’re no longer responsible for some other party’s debts. It’s the law, they’re required to do that, and if you wanted you could actually go out and bid on it yourself. Just as if it were an ordinary estate sale and not some piece of evidence they once used to deprive a person of his liberty for a hundred years.

“That’s one thing the government does with the property it seizes,” Chitral said. “The other thing it might have done was have it shredded in the hammermill and sold for scrap.”

It didn’t matter that Mrs. Bliss was still angry or that she despised this man. It didn’t matter that his answer to her question about Ted’s car had been laced with intentional mockery and cruelty. If she was nervous of her anger, if she was reluctant to confront him, if she was reticent or shy, shamed, or even a little embarrassed by what she had to do, it was the nervousness, anger, reticence, reluctance, shyness, shame, and embarrassment of someone turning state’s evidence, or of one thrown hither and you by contradictory principles. On the one hand, there was her loyalty to Ted, on the other her long recruitment and service to a talismanic trust in the temperament, nature, and credibility of men as a pure idea. When she spoke it was as if she were betraying her country.

“Did you have so much disrespect for me you had to use me? What was I, your, what-do-you-call-it, pigeon?”

It was almost as though Alcibiades had anticipated her question, almost as though he’d prepared for it, and now aced it like a student who’d been up all night cramming for an exam.

“Disrespect? No,
no
disrespect. On the contrary, out of my sense of your honor. Your softness and sweetness and priorities. My belief in the reliability of your taste.”

“My
taste,
” Mrs. Bliss, chided for years by her children for the absence of that attribute, the frugality of clipped discount coupons piled up and banded in her kitchen drawers like the mad money of a miser, scolded for the meanness of her saving ways, how there were slipcovers like so much plastic rainwear on all the furniture and how even the tanks and lids of her toilets were swaddled in bulky terry cloth as if to keep them dry, and her reinforced shower curtains (always decorated with marine life blatant as cartoons, sea horses like armored, gothic font riding their perfect verticals, smiling caricatures of fish about to bite down on cheerful hooks) thick and heavy as tarp, said scornfully.

“Yes, señora. Your very dependable taste, your naïveté like a racial trait. Excuse me, lady, I like you. I do more, I admire and cherish you, and wish in my heart the tables were turned, that I had not cast my lot with the adventurers, or been born with this piratical soul like a birth blemish. Oh, I’m a cliché of a fellow, and if I don’t feel conspicuously ill-used you may mark that down—I do—to a failure of impatience on my part, to a sort of, well, lazy eye, some high romp of the blood. You, please, Mrs., you mustn’t misunderstand me, are like a paraplegic. You, your people have the gift of sitting still, I mean. Had you been here when we came to the New World we’d have made you slaves, stolen your gold and smashed your temples. We’d have wiped out your mathematics and astronomy and forbidden you access to your terrible gods. No offense, ma’am, but there’s something loathsome and repellent to persons like me in persons like you. Perhaps your passivity—I bear you no grudge, Widow Bliss, I’ve no bones to pick with your kind—is at odds with our conquistador spirit, something antithetical between our engagement and the Jew’s torpid stupor, his incuriosity and dead-pan, poker-faced genius for suffering, like a cartoon kike’s stoicism struck in a shekel. You were
born
sticks-in-the-mud. Why, if it weren’t for people like me, like Pharaoh and Hitler, the Cossacks and Crusaders, and whoever those kings were who kicked you out of France and England, the diaspora would never have happened. The diaspora? Shit, señora, your people would never have learned to cross the street!

“So of course you were a pigeon! You were pigeon and dupe, scapegoat and laughingstock—a little menagerie of sacrificial lamb, cat’s-paw, and gull. Of
course
you were!

“Oh,” he said, “I’ve offended you. Entirely unintentional, dear. You’ve mistaken my meaning. Haven’t I already said I admire you? Didn’t I speak of the Jew’s charms—his patience and innocence and naïveté and passivity? Even the imperfect posture of your people’s priorities has its charm. The anti-Semites get it wrong with their wild, extravagant claims—all that international-banker crapola and Trilateral Commission hocus-pocus, all those cabala riffs and lame spew about controlling the media. The illuminati this and Protocols of the Elders of Zion that. No, they’ve tin ears for Jews, Jew baiters do. They go on forever with their Zionist conspiracies and Israeli lobby and Jerusalem-Hollywood nexus. My God, Mrs. Bliss, they can’t even drum up a convincing case for your stringing up Jesus!

“Haven’t I already said I cherish you? Don’t I admire your sweetness and softness, your honor and taste? Yet you ask why I chose you.

“Well, I’ll tell you. I chose you because you were available, a surefire target of opportunity.
I did you because there were seat covers in your husband’s automobile! I did you because you’re descended from a great race of babies!
”

Now she’d heard everything, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Twice in her long life she’d sensed herself slurred, once when they’d owned the farm in Michigan and in the deepest part of winter, dressed to the nines, she’d walk to the village on the simplest household errand, then again when the DEA agents had come into the garage in Building Number One and made cracks while they cordoned off Ted’s car. But even on those occasions none of the townspeople had ever said a word to her about her religion and, years later, not even the agents (who she felt had been using Manny, talking through him so Mrs. Bliss could overhear what they said) had mentioned Jews. If she’d felt herself personally derided those times perhaps the reason was she’d felt outmanned, outgunned in the presence of so much sheer, overwhelming Americanism. Even as a child in Russia, Dorothy had merely heard of pogroms. She’d never even seen a Cossack. What she knew of anti-Semitism she knew by hearsay, word-of-mouth. It was rather like what she knew of ghosts and haunted houses.

This was something else. It was the last thing she’d expected, and for all that Alcibiades Chitral had couched his attack in different terms, taking care to distinguish himself from the ordinary Jew-hater and seemingly apologize to her as he went along, she knew she was getting it all, being hauled up on all the charges he could think of. She was having, she thought, the book thrown at her. By Alcibiades Chitral’s lights it was as if Dorothy Bliss had been found guilty and sent up for a hundred years.