Mrs. Ted Bliss (41 page)

Commit yourself, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and decided she would fire off a telegram of her own, offering her congratulations to the bride and groom and announcing her intentions about the party.

Which was easier said than done.

About an hour after she phoned in her message, Western Union called to apologize. They were sorry, the operator told her, but at this point they weren’t accepting nonessential civilian communication between the United States and the cruise ships in that area of the Atlantic. Both telegraphic and all two-way air traffic had been put on hold while the weather emergency was still in effect. If she wished, she could cancel her message or, if she preferred, they’d file it with the rest of their backlog and send it first-priority once the ship was out of harm’s way.

“Harm’s way?”

“Once they’re sure which direction this fella’s gonna jump,” said the male operator at the other end of the line.

Even more out of hunch than superstition, Mrs. Bliss told Western Union to cancel altogether. She’d call back when the coast was clear.

But maybe it
was
superstition. It made her nervous (it always had) to fix on a specific date too long before its time. Even when she’d organized Maxine’s wedding she had postponed making the arrangements for as long as she could. Don’t get her wrong, she was crazy about George, she was rooting for their marriage, and it had nothing to do with losing the deposit or anything like that. It was only that Mrs. Bliss felt there was something just a little too cocksure about making long-range plans. Man proposes, God disposes. Something like that.

And now, too, something spooky about that out-of-harm’s-way business. She was familiar with the phrase. It was something they always dragged out in wartime, impending crisis. She didn’t like the sound of it, and though Western Union had been very polite and explained to her about keeping the traffic lanes open between Ellen’s boat and the land, once the United States was dragged into it, everything started to seem much too important and official sounding. The United States?

Mrs. Bliss turned on the television to see if they’d interrupt a program for a special news bulletin. Sure enough, she didn’t have long to wait. They cut away to an expert standing by at the National Hurricane Center and then leapfrogged to another expert at the U.S. Meteorological Survey in Atlanta, Georgia. Both men seemed very excited. Andrew’s winds were gusting from between 100 and 130 miles per hour and had been unofficially clocked as high as 185 miles per hour. If it didn’t veer to the east it was expected to hit the Bahamas with heroic force sometime in the middle of the night. It would be, both the Atlanta and Coral Gables guys agreed, the mother of all hurricanes. Already, all ships in the area had been instructed to change course in the hope of either outrunning or evading the storm that was moving along at about 25 knots. She didn’t know what a knot was exactly, but the experts couldn’t get over it. Between them they had over fifty-seven years in the weather business and neither could remember a storm packing such high wind velocities to travel at such a speed toward whatever would turn out to be its ultimate destination. Because usually the more furiously a hurricane’s winds revolved about its eye the more moisture it picked up from the sea and the heavier it became. The heavier it was the slower it traveled toward impact. This one, though, this one was a horse of a different color, and may the good Lord have mercy on whatever got in its way!

Mrs. Bliss, hooked, watched all the channels for the latest developments. Again and again she saw the same experts talking to each of the anchors on the major networks. Idly, she wondered if these experts were paid extra for going on the different shows. Officially, she supposed, they were civil servants. Probably, if it happened, they were paid under the table.

Even the local meteorologists were having a field day. They put their Skywatch and Doppler Weather Alert and Skywarn and Instant Color Weather Radar systems into play, all their latest, fancy, up-to-the-minute machinery. Their jackets were off, their collars and ties undone, their sleeves rolled up. Only the civil servants, Mrs. Bliss noticed, shvitzed in their buttoned, inexpensive, dress code suits, but everyone, from the TV meteorologists to the experts at the National Hurricane Center and U.S. Meteorological Survey served up a kind of short course on hurricanes. Vaguely, Mrs. Bliss was reminded of the lectures delivered by the community college professors who used to come to the Towers game rooms to talk about their disciplines.

It was very impressive, lulling, too, in a peculiar way, rather like the gardening, cooking, and home improvement shows she sometimes watched—programs for young homemakers: furniture stripping, interior decoration, foreign cooking. Before she knew it she was as involved in the science of these powerful storm systems as ever she’d been in an actual entertainment show, absorbed in all the interesting bits and pieces—the gossip of tempest. She learned, for example, that hurricanes could be two hundred to three hundred miles in diameter, that they were nurtured by low pressure fronts and rose in the east and moved west (just like the
sun, just
like the sun! worried Mrs. Ted Bliss) on the trade winds, that an eye of a hurricane was about twenty miles in diameter and traveled counterclockwise from between ten and fifteen miles per hour as the winds blew it along above the sea, sucking up the warm, evaporating ocean. She learned that storm clouds, called
walls,
surrounded the eye, that it was these that caused the most damage, kicking up dangerous waves, called
storm surges,
that forced the sea to rise several feet above normal. Especially destructive at high tide, they brought on terrific, murderous floods.

Every hour or so astonishing pictures of Hurricane Andrew were beamed down to Miami Beach from satellites orbiting the earth. Mrs. Bliss watched, hypnotized, as the photographs collected themselves from a blur of vague dots and electronic squiggles and slowly resolved into clear, enhanced portraits of brutal, rushing power.

Gradually, as hard news started to trickle in (they were talking about a shift in the storm now, how it might miss the Bahamas altogether and then, gaining force, move toward the East Coast, and were even beginning to speak of the storm of the century) the meteorological anecdotes trailed off and they were speculating about momentum, land-fall, and drew thick black lines in Magic Marker, superimposing them on maps as if they were composing best-case/worse-case scenarios, or complicated plays in athletic contests. The wind speeds were stunning, frightful. No one had any idea how many ships might already have been impacted, turned on their sides, spinning like bottles.

Mrs. Bliss thought of the honeymooners, her heart in her mouth.

The storm was moving at thirty-one knots now, an incredible speed. Someone gave the equivalent of a knot to a land mile, and Mrs. Bliss got out Manny’s calculator and tried to work out what thirty-one knots was in real space. She got something like sixty-eight miles per hour and knew she’d made a mistake. No catastrophe could come on that fast. The end of the world couldn’t come on that fast.

Her heart was in her mouth, her fingers were crossed. Her heart was in her mouth and her fingers were crossed for the honeymooners, for anyone out there on that ocean.

It was very exciting, more exciting than the greyhounds. She bit her tongue and tried to take the thought back. But it was. It
was
more exciting than the greyhounds. Junior and Ellen racing wind, zigging and zagging through all the choppy minefields of an enemy air, Nature’s mortal fender benders, all its angered give-no-quarters. Was will in this, wondered Mrs. Ted Bliss, indifferent, merciless will like the thing of a thug, a sort of vandalism? Though, finally, she didn’t really believe it, any of it, as she didn’t really believe in God. Only force was in this, a slasher and a burner, making widows and orphans, murdering sons.

More exciting than the greyhounds. Force merely the mechanical rabbit, a towed, insentient tease. Why waste your time? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, who, years past, had been on a ship or two herself, who’d wondered during each day’s required safety drill, What, I’m getting off this big ship and going into one of those flimsy, tiny lifeboats? What, in
that
vast sea?

So it never even crossed her mind to pray for them. She was for them, for Ellen and Junior; she was behind them one hundred percent, but she wouldn’t pray for them.

They were lost, the two of them, somewhere behind the lines of Western Union where neither she nor anyone else could get to them. For what it was worth they had her blessing, though she knew as soon as she gave it what it was worth. You laid your life down for people but you had to be close enough so it would do them some good.

And now (it was August 23; she’d started watching on the twenty-second and fallen asleep in front of the television) they had changed their tune, the weathermen.

The storm had grazed the Bahamas anyway, leaving four dead, and was on its way to Florida, maybe the Keys, maybe farther up the coast. They had changed their tune and were singing a different song. The hurricane was coming, the hurricane was coming to America. Vicious Andrew was serving and the ball could be in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s court any time now. It was 287 miles from Florida and the boys were into a different mode. They were giving instructions where to stand if the hurricane hit. (It was
exactly
like those safety drills on the cruises.) And Mrs. Bliss could never keep it straight in her head what you did in a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane.

And giving words to the wise about provisions, supplies, laying them in. She didn’t
have
a flashlight, she didn’t
have
batteries, matches, candles, cases of mineral water. She didn’t
have
a portable radio. She didn’t
have
a first-aid kit, she didn’t
have
a generator. What she had were Ellen’s cans of minced game, her oddball teas and organic chowders—all Ellen’s reeds and straw. What she had was wild rice for the enemas. What she had was a freezer full of doggy bags of her own leftover, uneaten meals.

She was glued to the television reports. And the thing kept on coming and kept on coming. She stayed glued to the television, the only times she left it were when she went to the bathroom. (She didn’t
have
a full tub of bathwater for washing the dishes.) Or into the kitchen to eat. (Eating, as she told herself, while she still could, while the stove still worked and her can opener was still driven by electricity.) There was a small radio on one of her countertops, and she listened to it as she waited for her eggs to boil, her coffee to heat up, her bread to toast. The hurricane was on every station but the edge was off. She missed the experts, couldn’t take the news as seriously when it came in from disc jockeys, or supplied grist for call-in talk shows. This was why she brought her food back into the living room/dining room area and sat down to eat it in front of the TV set.

And now they were showing a video of the damage in the Bahamas. Awful, terrible. Roofs blown off houses, boats overturned. Hurricane Andrew had caught them with their pants down.

The hurricane would hit the coast of Florida sometime during the early hours of August 24. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. As advanced as weather forecasting was, they told each other, it was still in its infancy, an inexact science, almost an art form. They had the equipment, their scientific, state-of-the-art tools—their radar and weather balloons and eye-in-the-sky satellites, even their own daring, dashing flying squadrons of “Hurricane Hunters” in modified airborne AWACS with all their glowing jewelry of measurement, finely tuned as astronomers’ lenses and instruments. Yet even the experts acknowledged the final, awful unpredictability of their art, how their knowledge was humbled before all the intricate moving parts of climate. They trotted out the one about the butterfly beating its wings in Africa. They trotted out the moon and the tides. They trotted out God and force. It might or it mightn’t. They hedged their bets and settled for their “best guesstimates.”

All that could be done, they admitted, was hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

This wasn’t the first time Mrs. Bliss had waited for a hurricane to happen. There’d been warnings and alerts every few years since the Blisses had first come to Florida. There’d been one in the late fifties, when she and Ted were there as tourists. The management of the ocean-front hotel where they were staying announced during the dinner show—the comedian, Myron Cohen, was entertaining—that a great storm was expected and that everyone should proceed to the children’s huge playroom in the basement of the hotel to wait it out. There was no need to panic, they should make their way downstairs in an orderly fashion. The checks for their dinners had already been taken care of by the hotel. Myron Cohen would be along to join them and kibitz. Everyone applauded. It was one of the things Dorothy and Ted liked best about Miami Beach, the sense of some deep-pocket hospitality it gave off—fresh flowers in the room and a basket of fruit on the table when you checked in, a personal handwritten note from the manager, then, not fifteen minutes later, a follow-up phone call, were they satisfied with the room, did they like their view, would they permit the management to send up a complimentary drink and a small assortment of hors d’oeuvres. Even, months later, another personal note. Did Ted and Dorothy intend to return next year, would they like their old room—he gave the number of the room—again? The hurricane had passed them by that time. Cohen had never been funnier. The camaraderie while they waited for something terrible to happen to them was something to see. And other times, too. And always they had gotten away with murder. The only time anything significant happened was when a hurricane, diminished by bumping into Cuba and scraping along some of the Keys, had grazed on up the coast until it was at last downgraded to a tropical depression. The storm was still powerful enough to produce gale-force winds and over four inches of rain on Mrs. Bliss’s balcony, three iron balusters of which had been knocked loose as teeth that had eventually to be pulled and replaced. Their patio furniture, which never completely dried out or lost its strong musky mildew, they gave to Goodwill.