Mrs. Ted Bliss (27 page)

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.”

“You did this?”

“Of course not, Mother.”

“Anti-Semitism!” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Well,” said her son philosophically, “you know these guys, they get off on demystifying the whole hierarchy.”

“They threw you out?”

“Let’s just say they made the workplace hell for me.”

“The grinch who stole Pesach,” Maxine said.

She told them she was tired and said she thought she’d rest a while before going back out to help May with the dishes.

“May has plenty of help, Mother. You just get some sleep.”

“Tell her everything tasted wonderful, a meal to remember.”

The children came to the side of her bed. Maxine adjusted the pillows beneath her mother’s head, kissed her cheek. Frank pressed his lips against her forehead.

“I have temperature?”

“Temperature?”

“That’s the last thing I did after I put you to bed.”

“I remember,” Frank said.

“To check to see if you had temperature.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Maxine.

“Like clockwork,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t remember. If I did, if I didn’t. Then I’d have to go back to your room and do it again. Otherwise I couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh, Ma, that’s so sweet,” Maxine said.

“I’d always check to see if you had temperature.”

“I’ll turn off the light. Try to nap.”

“You I’d check. I’d check Frank. Marvin I’d check.”

“Oh, Ma,” Maxine said.

“In the hospital, even when he was dying from leukemia. Can you imagine? Did you ever? The biggest hotshot doctors, the best men in Chicago. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do for him. The doctors with their therapies, me brushing his forehead with my lips to see did he have temperature.”

“Please, Ma,” Maxine said.

“Maxine’s right, Ma,” Frank said. “You’ve had a long day. Try to get some rest. I can hear them in the living room, I’ll tell them to hold it down.”

“They’re your guests. Don’t say nothing.”

She couldn’t have napped more than fifteen minutes. She’d fallen asleep watching one of her programs on the little bedside TV and when she woke up the show was just ending.

“Grandma? Grandma, I hear the TV. Are you up? May I come in?”

So she didn’t know whether it was her grandson’s knock, or his voice, or the sound of the television itself that had aroused her from sleep. She was as surprised as ever by the effectiveness of a brief snooze. Yet she rarely lay down before it was actually time to go to bed, and wondered at those times, like this one, how it was a person could doze for only a few minutes but wake completely refreshed whereas she could sleep through the night, or at least a whole block of hours, yet still be as exhausted in the morning as she was when she went to bed. What an interesting proposition, she thought—old people’s science, septuagenarian riddles and the deep philosophic mysteries of experience. There should be men working on this stuff in the laboratories and universities. And, as usual, these questions were as immediately forgotten as the time it took her to think them. Which, she thought, was something else they should be working on. And immediately forgot that one, too.

“Grandma?”

“What?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Who’s that, who’s there? James? Is that you, Donny?”

“It’s Barry, Grandma. Can I come in?”

“All right, Barry.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you, Grandmother.”

“You didn’t. Maybe you did, I don’t know. It’s all right.”

“Well, if I did, I’m sorry.”

“Make the light, I can’t see you.”

He stood in the room in the light.

“Let me see your fingernails,” his grandmother said.

“Grandma,” he said.

“No, don’t pull away your hand. You know what, Barry? You got fingernails like a piano player, like a banker. A surgeon who scrubs all the time don’t have cleaner nails. What do you do, go to a beauty parlor?”

She’d been giving him the business about his nails all these years, ever since he first became a mechanic in a garage. It was true, his nails were immaculate, his hands were. There wasn’t a drop of dirt on them. They were rough, but pink as a girl’s. Ted had ribbed him, too. Now, though, she saw his small, sly, proud smile and Mrs. Bliss was a little ashamed of herself, and sorry for her grandson. How he must have worked on them, buffing and polishing and soaking them, it wouldn’t surprise, in warm emollients and lotions. Soft, buttery waves of a thin perfume rose off his fingertips like distant, melting light refracted in a road illusion. It was terrible, she realized, the lengths to which he must have gone to rub away all the appearance of failure, and Mrs. Bliss understood as suddenly and completely as she’d awakened to the laws of old people’s science how it was with poor Barry, in thrall, pursued by the reputations of his brilliant, successful cousins—Judith, Donald, James. And now it occurred that she didn’t remember ever seeing him in anything less formal than a jacket and tie since he was a child. At cards, at family gatherings, on picnics, Barry was the one who always showed up overdressed. She wondered if he even
owned
a sport shirt and had never seen him in a bathing suit. And though none of his clothes seemed particularly good or fashionable, they were as carefully chosen to create an impression (or counterfeit one) as if they had been made to his measure.

Poor Barry, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Poor fatherless Barry. Who, for all that he went about dressed to the nines, leading with his perfectly manicured screen actor’s fingernails, seemed somehow covered up, masked, as though the carefully groomed hands were only part of a magician’s practiced, deliberate distractions, some noisily flourished razzle-dazzle that deceived no one and, indeed, there was something depressingly coarse about him, like a man with an awful five o’clock shadow. There was something loud and awful too about the conservative colors of even his darkest suits, which were always too black, a step removed from patent leather, or too brown, like woodstain on cheap suites of furniture. If Mrs. Bliss, a woman whose habits and heart did not allow herself to pick and choose between the members of her family, had let her guard down long enough to admit of a particular favorite, of all her grandchildren Barry might well have received the lion’s share of her love, been chief beneficiary of the small store of her dedicated, egalitarian treasury. Indeed, if she could admit to the world what, even with both hearing aids turned up to their highest volume, barely registered on her consciousness (her still, small voice small still), she might have allowed herself to acknowledge that Barry took pride of place, said, “To hell with it!” and gone ahead and bought him that garage he was saving for.