Mrs. Ted Bliss (28 page)

But then, she thought, she’d have had to buy
all
of them garages.

He pulled an uncomfortable-looking slatted wooden chair (like the chair in the bed-and-breakfast that Frank and May had found for them the time she and Ted visited London during Frank’s sabbatical year) up to the side of his grandmother’s bed and sat down.

“So how are you, Grandmother?”

Mrs. Bliss started to laugh. Barry looked hurt.

“No, no, Barry. It’s just, when you asked, you reminded me.”

“What of?”

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf?” sang Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Oh,” Barry said, “yeah. Sure.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “
I’m
the big bad wolf. What did you bring me?”

“Questions,” Barry said meekly.

“The better to see you with. The better to hear you with. The better to eat you with, my dear.”

“About my dad,” Barry said.

She’d never been one to carry on. She didn’t make fusses, wasn’t the sort of person who liked to impose. Outside the family, for example, she knew she made a better hostess than a guest. And if she had once been beautiful or vain, then the beauty and vanity were aspects of those same hospitable impulses that went into her lavish wish to please, to be pleasing to others. She wasn’t stoic or invulnerable. If you pricked her, she bled, if you tickled her she laughed, de da de da. It was just that same baleboosteh instinct to clean up after herself, the blood; to cover her mouth demurely over the laughter. It was some Jewish thing perhaps, a sense of timing, knowing when to make herself scarce.

No one, she thought, understood the terrible toll Ted’s death had inflicted upon her. Maybe the stewardess on the airplane that time, maybe the woman in City Hall to whom she’d tried to explain the problem about the personal property tax on Ted’s Buick LeSabre. But the grief she felt when he died, that she still felt, never mind that time heals all wounds, was a thing not even her children were aware of (and to tell you the truth was more than a little miffed about this, not because they were blind to her pain so much as that their blindness gave her a sense that whatever they’d once felt about Ted’s death had gone away), though she wouldn’t have let them in on this in a million years. It wasn’t that she meant to spare them either. They were her kids, she loved them, but maybe they didn’t deserve to be spared. It wasn’t even a question of why she spared them. It was
what
she spared them. Mrs. Bliss’s loss was exactly that—a loss, something subtracted from herself, ripped off like an arm or a leg in an accident. It was the deepest of flesh wounds, and it festered, spilled pus, ran rivers of the bile of all unclosed scar, all unsealed stump. How could she ever ask anyone to look at something like that?

But Barry, with his grief for his father, for himself, was a different story altogether.

“He loved you, Barry. I never saw a prouder father. You were tops in his book. Tops.”

Barry watched his grandmother carefully.

“You were,” she said. “No father could have been closer to his son. He cherished you.” She turned, facing him on her side, her weight uncomfortably propped on her forearm, the edge of her thin fist. “Lean down,” she whispered.

Barry moved toward her, stretching tight his still buttoned suit jacket. “Yes?”

“It’s a secret,” she said. “Don’t tell your cousins, it would hurt their feelings. Marvin got more naches from you than Aunt Maxine and Uncle Frank got from all your cousins put together.”

“Really? No.”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Bliss. “It was written all over his face whenever you came into a room. Or maybe you’d just left and I’d come in and I’d say, ‘I just missed Barry, didn’t I, Marvin?’ Sure, I could tell,” she said, “it was like a big sign on his face.”

“I don’t remember,” Barry said.

“You were a kid, a baby. What were you when your father, olov hasholem, got sick, eight, nine?”

“He died just before my tenth birthday.”

“That’s right. And before that he was in and out of hospitals for months at a time for an entire year. The hospital wouldn’t allow visitors your age, and when he was home he was too sick to play with you. Except on those few days he seemed to be feeling a little better we tried to keep you away from him. We thought it was best that a child shouldn’t see his daddy in those circumstances. We were trying to do what was best by both parties. Maybe we were wrong. We were probably wrong. What did we know? Did we have so much experience? Were we so knowledgeable about death in those days?”

She was as moved by what she said as Barry himself, but then, olov hasholem, she knew that both of them, maybe all three of them, deserved better, that a debt was owed to what really happened.

So she told him the truth: that in that last awful year of his life he was too sick for pride, for favorites, big bright smiles, or any other sign unconnected to his pain and suffering, too sick for the least little bit of happiness, or, on even those rare, blessed days of unlooked-for remission presented to him like a gift, for gratitude, let alone having enough strength left over, or will, or determination, or drive, for anything as rigorous as love, or even common, God forgive me, fucking courtesy.

It was different then. This was not only before death with dignity, it was before pain management. It was the dark ages when doctors and nurses didn’t always play so fast and loose with the morphine, and patients had to wait on the appointed, exact minute of their next injection like customers taking a number at the bakery. So when Dorothy sat with him in the hospital that year, always putting in at least five or six hours a day and often pulling ten, or more even, on the days when Marvin—olov hasholem, olov hasholem, olov hasholem—was out of his head, chained up and screaming at his torturers like a political prisoner, she felt the pain almost as keenly as he did, fidgeting, uselessly pressing her lips to his head to feel the fever, kissing his cheeks, wiping his face down with wet, cool cloths in an effort to console him, even as he thrashed his head and neck and shoulders about, forcefully (who had no force) trying to escape, throw her off, shouting at her, actually cursing her, this good tragic son (whose tragedy was, for Mrs. Bliss, suddenly, sourly, obscurely underscored by the three- or four-year seniority his wife had over him in age, so that, if he died, he would seem, young as he was, even younger, and even more tragic) who’d never so much as raised his voice to her before; yes, and felt his relief, too, as her son’s vicious pains gradually subsided when he received the soothing sacrament of the morphine, but, exhausted as she was, not only not daring, not even willing to sleep during the three and then two and then one good hour of respite that the drug provided lest she miss one minute of what, despite all those hours of her visits to the hospital in the last year of Marvin’s life, she still managed to fool herself into believing was the beginning of his cure.

They never got used to it. Not Ellen, not Ted, not Dorothy or Frank or Maxine, spelling, relieving each other on the better days and, on the just-average-ordinary, run-of-the-mill lousy ones only long enough to dash down to the cafeteria for a bite or out to the waiting room to grab a smoke or to the vending machines for a soft drink or cup of coffee, while on the five-star, flat-out rotten ones they never even got that far, but chose instead, like captains of doomed, sinking ships to stay with their vessels, who if they could not go down with them could at least bear witness. So that Marvin became at last not their son or brother or husband at all but some all-purpose child, the rights to whose death they collectively demanded. They
never
got used to it. Why should they? When they never even got used to the diagnosis?

A cracked rib? What was the big deal about a cracked rib? All right, it was uncomfortable. It was painful to draw a deep breath, and you had to walk on eggshells when you climbed the stairs, and be very careful not to make any sudden movements if you wanted to save yourself from a painful stitch, but a cracked rib? How serious could a cracked rib be if all they did for you was tape up your chest? It was like breaking a toe where
maybe
they might go to the trouble of fixing it in a little splint while the bone went about the business of healing itself. It was a nuisance, of course it was, no one denied it, but serious? Come on! It was about as life threatening as a black eye, except that with a black eye you always had the added humiliation of explaining it away, trying to put it in the best light.

All right,
two
cracked ribs, the second following about a week after the first one got better, and Marvin unable to explain how he got it except to tell the doctor he felt this wrenching pain as he was bending over to lift a bag of Ellen’s groceries out of the backseat to carry into the house for her. But tests?
Tests?
Okay, the X ray they could understand, but sending the poor man off to the hospital for blood tests Dr. Myers said he didn’t have a way to take and have analyzed in his office quickly enough?

It was probably nothing of course, but just to make certain, be on the safe side.

His mother went white when she heard and Ellen’s pleas for her not to interfere, and to let Myers take care of it and just stay out of the doctor’s hair and not act like some ignorant greenhorn while they waited for the results.

Ignorant greenhorn? I’m his mother!

Of course you are, Ma, and I’m his wife, and I’m as scared as you are, believe me, but I don’t want the whole world in on this. It would only terrify Marvin if he found out.

The whole world, the whole world? I’m his mother. What did he say, the doctor?

Let’s take it one step at a time.

Let’s take it one step at a time? And you didn’t ask questions? You didn’t press him?

I pressed him, I pressed him. Okay? I asked him what’s the worst-case scenario.

What is?

Leukemia. Blood cancer. Are you satisfied?

Leukemia. Oh God, oh God, oh my God.

Myers didn’t
say
it was leukemia. What he said was that was the worst-case scenario. We have to wait for the tests, we have to take it one step at a time.

Leukemia. Oh my God oh God oh my God, my son has leu
kem
ia.

“He doesn’t have leu
kem
ia,” Ellen said. “We have to wait for the tests.”

But of course that was just what he would have, Mrs. Bliss knew. Since when does a perfectly healthy young man crack a rib from picking up a bag of groceries out of the backseat of a car? It just doesn’t happen. And when the results finally came back—and it wasn’t that long; what took time were all the additional tests they added on to those initial ones they sent him off to the hospital for—the reports from hematology, the pathologist’s opinions—and it
was
leukemia, Mrs. Bliss, God forgive her, couldn’t quite absolve her daughter-in-law from at least a little of the responsibility for her son’s illness. Who asks a man who’s just recovered from a painfully cracked rib to stoop over and pick up a heavy bag of groceries for her? What was she, a cripple? She wasn’t saying that that’s what caused him to come down with the disease, but maybe if she’d shown a little more consideration, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry, if she’d waited until he was a little stronger, Marvin wouldn’t have cracked another rib and his body would have had a better chance to heal, and the leukemia might never have happened.

“That’s silly,” Ted Bliss said. “How was it Ellen’s fault? This was something going on in his blood.”

“Leukemia. Oh my God, oh my God, my son has
leukemia.
”

They accepted the diagnosis, they just never got used to it. Just as, God forgive her (though she knew better and had known better even at the top of her anger and denial as she pronounced her awful thoughts about Ellen to Ted), to this day she couldn’t get past the idea that if his wife had taken better care of him, if all of them had, her son might be alive today.

So it was his death she never got used to.

Mrs. Bliss wasn’t ignorant greenhorn enough not to understand the nature of her son’s disease. The white cells were amok in his blood, she told him. The chozzers gobbled up the red cells like there was no tomorrow. They had a picnic with him.

“I never gave in to them,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “It wasn’t the easiest thing because, let’s face it, your mother was right, I
am a
greenhorn. What did I know about blood counts? About platelets? Did I know what a leukocyte was?”

So she made it her business. Not just to sit there. Not just to feel his fever or wipe his brow. She made it her business to study the numbers, to live and die by the numbers. Just like her son, olov hasholem, and learned to work the proportions between the white cells and red cells as if she were measuring out a recipe. And thought, If she
knew,
if she
understood…

“Because I never believed he would die,” Mrs. Bliss said. “This I
never
believed.”

And spoke to Myers. And asked if everything that could be done was being done. Because didn’t she read in the papers and see on TV that breakthroughs happened all the time, that cures for this and cures for that were just around the corner? She wanted him to tell her where, in the city, they were doing the best work. The city? The country, the world! Myers, God bless him, was a good man but very conservative. Maybe not, Mrs. Bliss thought, up on everything. He told her, ‘Dorothy, dear, he’s too sick to be moved.’

“ ‘So if he lays still he’ll get better?’

“ ‘Dorothy, he’s not going to get better.’

“You think I accepted that? You think Grandpa or your mother did? We looked it up, we asked around, and what everyone told us was that if, God forbid, you had to be sick the best place to be was the University of Chicago hospital. So that’s where we put him, in Billings, where they were doing advanced work in the field, experimental, giving special treatments which the insurance company wasn’t willing to pay for, and where Myers himself wasn’t even on the staff, where he had to have special permission—wait a minute, it wasn’t a pass—where he had to have reciprocity, reciprocity, just for permission to look in on him.”