Mrs. Ted Bliss (34 page)

And it was just this, Mrs. Bliss saw (and explained to Junior Yellin), that as much as age was at least part, and maybe most, of the cause that had contributed to the breakdown and deterioration of what could only be called “the spirit of the Towers.”

“Well, sure,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “what then? You don’t see that even the dumbest of us didn’t understand we were barking up the wrong tree? A person don’t take up chess, deep-sea fishing, and the tango just because there’s a sign-up sheet in the game room. You got to have a better motivation than that. You got to have a calling. You ask me, the recreational therapeusisists have it bass ackwards. Fresh interests in life? Who has the time? All right, okay, we got the time. We do. What’s missing is the energy. Piecemeal, this has to have its effect. Piecemeal, this has got to lead to the conclusion that no matter how hard you work you’re never going to be any according to Hoyle or Bobby Fischer or Gussie Moran. Piecemeal, you lose the will to put in the time practicing or do your homework or just show up for the weekly meetings. There ain’t enough left in the class to make up a pair for what would have been the gala at what would have been the end of the term.

“So this is one of the ways the neighborhood changes and gets to put a damper on the spirit of the Towers.”

The old therapeusisist blushed.

“Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “with you it’s only business. You’re no more to blame than the art teachers and French cooking specialists we used to bring in. It wasn’t their fault we dropped out like flies.”

“Because,” Junior Yellin said shyly, “it just so happens I’ve taken up an interest of my own. I read an article about it in the Sunday paper. It was very interesting. Right, you might say, down my alley.”

“What?” Dorothy asked.

“I read up on it first.”

“What?” she said. “What?”

“In fact, I thought it might be something we might do together. We’d get some fresh air out of it if nothing else and, if we ever got lucky, maybe something even more substantial.”

“What already? What?”

Then he told her about the metal detector. His trip to the library to see could he find them evaluated in back issues of
Consumer Reports, Consumer Guide.

“You’d be surprised, they can be very complicated. Did you know that they work by means of radio waves? I mean, when you come to think the whole planet’s like some enormous orchestra that plays this ongoing set that never takes a break. It just keeps on blasting out the music of its treasures—all its locked-up silvers and golds and other precious metals. All its buried iron-padlocked chests and trunks, caskets and hidden, bundled safes. Earth’s hush-hush, top-secret knippls and pushkes.”

His voice was hoarse, his eyes wide and oddly lively, as if his pupils had been dilated. He was as excited as she’d ever seen him. No, he had
never
been so excited.

“You’ve seen them. Haven’t you seen them, Dorothy? Old guys in the park in the grass combing the lawn as if they were sweeping it with a broom or going over it with a vacuum cleaner?”

“Sure,” she said, “I always wondered what they found. Bottle tops, beer cans, old tins of Band-Aids?”

“Oh, no, Dorothy,” Junior Yellin said. “There’s caches of valuable stuff everywhere, the world littered with stash like carpet laid down by pirates. Rare coins and crashed ransoms, stolen goods like a scavenger hunt dreamed up by gangsters.”

“It was a hobby, a fad,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “You don’t see it no more so much.”

“What, are you kidding me? Maybe up north, maybe the fields are played out in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but down here, down here it’s still practically a natural resource. Only cordless phones outsell the metal detector in the greater Miami Radio Shacks.”

“This is true?”

“Cross my heart.”

“I don’t see it so much no more,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“You don’t see it so much no more because you don’t get out so much no more.”

“I get out.”

“Where? To a Jewish-style restaurant for the Early Bird special? To the movie in the strip mall for the rush-hour show? Where, where do you go, Dorothy? When was the last time you been to the beach?”

“I got a pool on the roof, what do I need the beach?”

“Entirely different story.”

“What, I should lay in my bathing suit on a blanket in the sand with a portable radio? A woman my age?”

“I’m not arguing, I’m just saying. Anyway, don’t change the subject, I want you to come in on this with me.”

“Come in on this what?”

“Metal detectors. What else have we been talking about?”

“Oh, Junior,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I think you got a bug up your ass with these metal detectors. If you want one so bad why don’t you just go out and buy it?”

Here Junior Yellin looked down at his shoes. Suddenly, and to his great disadvantage, he seemed years younger, almost childish, the expression on his face at once sheepish and serene and, for Dorothy, triggering vague memories of if not of similar occasions then at least of times when she had seen this peculiar amalgam of defeated triumph and victorious shame, the scared pyrotechnics of someone narrowly escaping a threat to his life, say, like someone getting away with murder in a near fatal collision of his own making. It was, Mrs. Bliss realized, the look of one whose prayers have been undeservedly answered.

“Well,” he said, looking up, “you know me, Dot. I always feel I have to have a partner.”

It was true, and she suddenly remembered the look. It had been there when old man Yellin bailed him out after Junior had worked over Ted’s books, and there it was again when his father had settled his gambling debts, all the times he had sprung to his son’s defense, made good on his losses, the thriving, striking codependency of his thievery, principle standing firm in the defense of what was only finally family. Yes, it was true. He
had
needed partners. Ted. The Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Consultants gang. Even, for a time, Hector Camerando, whose name he did not know and refused to hear. And now Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Are they very dear?” she asked.

“No, no, not at all. There’s different models of course. There’s low end and high end, but they’re all pretty reasonable. They go for between thirty-nine to a hundred ninety-nine dollars. There’s a good one put out by Radio Shack for about eighty-nine dollars.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Sensitivity,” he said. “You’re paying for power. The cheaper ones usually just pick up iron, the pricier jobs have a finer discrimination. But even the eighty-nine-buck jobs work in up to two inches of water.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Fools rush in, Dot.”

“If we do this,” said Mrs. Bliss, “what would we be looking for?”

“Like you said, the sky’s the limit, kid.” He looked at her solemnly, levelly, and uttered the remark as soberly as if he were offering inside information.

What he couldn’t know, of course, was that Mrs. Bliss had no use for inside information, or for his project, or even (it could have been the differential in their ages) for the limitless opportunities of young Junior’s sky. If she did this thing she would do it, quite simply, because, as he said, he needed a partner. He’d been a baby even when he was a young man. Now that he was an old one he was an even bigger baby.

Not for old time’s sake, not because he was one of the last direct living connections to her dead, beloved husband. Not out of sentimentality, and not out of any need for companionship, but simply because he was too used to his character and, partnerless (though much of his banter with Nathan Apple was pure snow job, he’d been caught at least a little short by her refusal to allow him to move in with her), he would flounder and wither and die.

She made a further show of interest by throwing faint demurrers in his path.

“Oh, no, Dorothy, quite serious people are engaged in this activity. Policemen in police departments hunting spent bullets and shells, actual murder weapons—guns, knives, and hatchets.”

“I hope we don’t find anything like that.”

“And lose out on the reward money?”

“Just the same,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Treasure hunters,” Junior mused. “Archaeologists. Prospectors.”

At Yellin’s insistence they bought two devices. So they could halve the size of their sites. So they could double their efficiency. Nor was he content to buy one of the cheaper models. He argued more bang for the buck and quite agreeably forked over two hundred dollars for Radio Shack’s deluxe detector. Mrs. Bliss, who felt she’d done her part by agreeing to go in with him in the first place, was not to be bullied into buying something beyond her price range. This was Junior’s hobby-horse, not hers, and if he chose to ride it in some Cadillac of metal detector, Mrs. Bliss was content to go with a perfectly serviceable Buick LeSabre. She bought the one for eighty-nine dollars, batteries not included.

Despite what he’d said she had no idea how the things worked, so naturally she was a little surprised when he came by for her that first day in one of the various off-road vehicles to which he seemed to have such unlimited access. He handed her a trowel, a small shovel, a sort of short-handled hoe.

“What’s this?” Mrs. Bliss asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yellin said, “we’ll settle up later.”

“No,” she said, “what is this? We’re digging a garden?”

“A treasure garden, what else?” Yellin smiled. “What, you thought this was a magnet? That all you have to do is run it over the ground and it picks stuff up like a Hoover?”

As a matter of fact that pretty much was what she thought and, feeling how foolish she must seem to him, blushed.

Junior grinned and tried to explain how the metal detector was actually a kind of transmitter that sent out waves. These were amplified, converted into signals that were then reflected back to the instrument. Listening to him, hearing him out, patiently trying to absorb the information he attempted to hand down from the superior heights of his male, mechanical inclination and intuitions, Mrs. Ted Bliss gave up years, returned in seconds to the trusting, contingent condition of her brief girl- and maidenhoods, her extensive marriage, much of her almost as extensive widowhood. Yellin might have been some faintly ill-willed Manny teaching her the art of balancing checkbooks, the two DEA agents violating her husband’s car, Holmer Toibb giving her homework assignments, a Hector Camerando laying down the who’s whos and what’s whats, or Alcibiades Chitral describing for her the limits of her humanity. He might have been Rabbi Beinfeld alerting her to bold, arcane death escapes, tricks of the trade. He might, God bit her tongue, have been a sort of Frank, or for that matter, any man who’d ever rushed in to instruct her—even her beloved Ted.

Junior Yellin was like any other man. She was old, and couldn’t hurt his feelings.

As Yellin explained she remembered the year in Michigan, the last time she’d been a farmer. Well, farmer’s wife, actually, with her chores (which she didn’t mind) and discomfort (which she did), and proposed that she first go upstairs to change into more suitable clothes.

“But you look fine,” Junior objected, anxious to start.

“I thought it was magnets,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I thought it would be more like fishing than digging and pulling.” Before he could object further Mrs. Bliss turned and walked back into Building One. Upstairs, she improvised a costume she thought more suitable for the work that lay in front of her. She exchanged her wedgies for a pair of Isotoner slippers and took off her polyester pants suit and put on a long, loose-fitting sun dress with a white blouse. She found some light cotton gardening gloves (from her days as a landlord’s wife), and finished off her outfit with a big, white, wide-brimmed straw hat beneath which she fitted a large silk scarf that she drew down the sides of her face and tied under her chin.

“Excuse me, Dorothy dear,” Junior Yellin said when she returned to the strange vehicle, “but you look like a fucking beekeeper.”

Because even though she’d lived in Florida for all these years she was terrified of the sun.

As frightened of it as one living above a fault line, or on the side of a dormant volcano, or in the direct path of tornado activity, the Florida sun an object of dread and superstition to her, some poisonous sky augury like an ominous arrangement of planets. Moving to Florida had been her husband’s idea and, when they first started their forays into Miami Beach back in the fifties, often with other couples and always over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the winter warmth after the bitter Chicago cold had been an agreeable novelty. During the days they shopped or played cards under immense beach umbrellas and ordered sandwiches and bottles of pop from the towel boys. At night they shuffled from hotel to hotel catching the shows, Sophie Tucker a headliner, Jack Carter, Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett. They were hardly aware of the sun and, after the first time or two when one or another of the group suffered bad sunburns, they gradually learned to budget the time they spent outdoors, which hours of the day were the safest to go.

Living there all year round was something else altogether. You made a different accommodation, an accommodation, Dorothy understood, which was no accommodation at all but more like surrender, as one’s life in an inner city, say, would be like surrender, a life that couldn’t be budgeted, lived around the times the hooligans were not in the streets, but had to be plunged into daily and at all hours, inescapable as air. Unless you turned yourself into a kind of invalid.

As I have, I have, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, astonished at herself, to realize what she was doing even as she permitted herself to be helped into Junior Yellin’s borrowed dune buggy. This was one of those machines that tended to tip over. She had seen a story about them on “60 Minutes,” how their odd centers of gravity made them dangerous to ride in. With their twin roll bars the machine looked vaguely like a stripped Conestoga. Dorothy at eighty-two and Junior in his late seventies had, between them, to be at least one hundred sixty years old. To anyone who saw them riding in such a young person’s toy they would seem ridiculous.