Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “But you know,” Dorothy said, “when you really stop and think about it, it’s not that much different from eggs.” She stopped and thought about it. “There are all kinds of ways of making eggs, too.

  “Well,” Mrs. Bliss said, “the long and the short is that chicken is a very popular dish. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like it. We were saying that, and then one of the girls—she’s in this room now—wondered how many chickens she must have made for her family in her life. She thought it had to be about a thousand chickens. But she was way off. Way off. I didn’t want to embarrass her so I kept my mouth shut, but later, after we got home, I took a pencil and worked it out. Figure you make chicken twice a week. Say I’ve been making it for 53 years. It’s probably more. I must have helped my mother make it when I was a girl, but say 53 years. If there are 52 weeks and 365 days in a year, that’s 104 chickens a year. You times 104 by 53 years, you get 5,512 chickens. I didn’t do that in my head. I worked it out on a gin rummy score sheet when we got home. I never forgot the number, though. When I told Ted, you know what he said? He said ‘I knew she was wrong. She had to be. I moved more chicken than anything else in the store.’ Ted was a butcher. He had a meat market on Fifty-third Street.”

  “Which one is she?” Tommy whispered.

  “Is who?”

  “The dope who thought she made only about a thousand chickens.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass her.”

  “No,” he said, “go on. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word of honor.”

  “Maybe they ate out more than we did,” Mrs. Bliss said, “maybe she hasn’t been cooking as long.”

  “Still…” Tommy Auveristas said. “You can tell me. Come on.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Ted Bliss, who hadn’t laughed so hard in years, said slyly, “if you promise not to tell.” Auveristas crossed his heart. Mrs. Bliss took a moment to evaluate this pledge, shrugged, and indicated he lean toward her. “It’s that one,” she said softly, “Arlene Brodky.”

  “Arlene Brodky?”

  “Shh,” Mrs. Bliss warned, a finger to her lips.

  The gesture made her feel positively girlish. It was as if forty-odd years had poured out of her life and she was back in Chicago again, in the dress shop, gossiping with the real salesgirls about the customers, their loony employer, passing confidences among themselves like notes between schoolmates. Frivolous, silly, almost young.

  She had come to see the penthouse. She couldn’t have articulated it for you, but it was simply that interest in artifact, some instinctive baleboosteh tropism in Mrs. Ted Bliss that drew her to all the tamed arrangements of human domesticities. She had never expected to enjoy herself.

  Maybe it was the end of her mourning. Ted had been dead more than three years. She’d still been in her forties when Marvin died, and she’d never stopped mourning him. Perhaps thirty years of grief was enough. Maybe thirty years stamped its quitclaim on even the obligated life, and permitted you to burn the mortgage papers. Was she being disloyal? He’d be forty-six, Marvin. Had she been a better mother than a wife? She hoped she had loved everyone the same, the living and the dead, her children, her husband, her parents whom God himself had compelled her to honor and, by extension, her sisters and brothers, her relations and friends, the thirty years dredging up from the bottom of her particular sea all the sunken, heavy deadweight of her overwhelmed, overburdened heart.

  Still, it was one thing not to keep kosher (or not strictly kosher), and another entirely to have caught herself actually flirting. She could have bitten her tongue.

  Dorothy was not, of course, a particularly modern woman. She had been alive at the time others of her sex had petitioned the franchise from dubious, reluctant males and, though she’d been too young to rally for this or any other cause, the truth was she’d have been content to leave it to others—to other women as well as to other men—to pick the federal government, or even vote on the local, parochial issues of daily life. She had never, for example, attended a P.T.A. meeting when her children were young or, for that matter, spoken up at any of the frequent Towers Condominium Owners Association meetings. On the other hand, neither did she possess any of the vast scorn reserves some women called upon to heap calumny on those of their sisters they perceived as, well, too openly pushy about their rights.

  There was something still essentially pink in Mrs. Bliss’s soul, some almost vestigial principle in the seventyish old woman, not of childhood particularly, or even of girlhood, so much as of femininity itself, something so obscurely yet solidly distaff in her nature that she was quite suddenly overcome by the ancient etiquette she thought females owed males, something almost like courtship, or the need to nurture, shlepping, no matter how silly she knew it might sound—to Auveristas as well as to herself—the old proprieties of a forced, wide-eyed attention to a man’s interests and hobbies from right out of the old beauty-parlor magazines.

  Right there, in his penthouse, within earshot of anyone who cared to overhear, she said, “Your home is very beautiful. May I be so bold as to ask what you gave for it? What line of work are you in?”

  “Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you?” Tommy Auveristas said evenly. “I’m an importer.”

  It wasn’t the implied meaning of his words, nor his distance, nor even the flattened cruelty of his delivery that caused the woman to flinch. Mrs. Bliss had never been struck. Despite her fear of Mrs. Dubow from her days in the dress shop, though she knew the old dressmaker was mad and perfectly capable of violence; the alimony she paid her husband had been awarded because of physical harm—she couldn’t remember what—she’d inflicted, and her memories of being chased about the shop had always been bordered in Dorothy’s mind by a kind of comedy. She’d experienced Mrs. Dubow’s rage then, and remembered it now, as having taken place in a sort of silent movie, something slapstick and frantically jumpy and Keystone Kops about all that futile energy. So all it could have been, all that had lunged out at her so unexpectedly to startle her was hearing Alcibiades Chitral’s name, and hearing it moreover not from the mouth of any of her retired, Jewish, star-struck friends but straight out of the suddenly cool, grim lips of her South American host. It was the way the two DEA agents had spoken to her in the garage, in that same controlled, despising banter of an enemy. She had sensed from the beginning of the evening that she was somehow the point of the open house, even its guest of honor (as far as she knew it was the first time any Towers Jew had set foot in a penthouse), and in light of all the attention she’d received from the moment she entered she’d felt as she sometimes did when she was feeding her family a meal she’d prepared. Tommy Auveristas had practically exclaimed her name the minute he saw her. He’d introduced her around, excused himself if he had to leave. He had kissed her hand and paid her compliments and brought her food. He was all ears as she prattled on about the degree of kosher she kept, listened as she counted her chickens.

  He did not strike her as a shy or reticent man. She was an old woman. He could have easily answered her question, a question she knew to be rude but whose rudeness he’d have written off not so much to her age and proprietary seniority as to the feeling of intimacy that had been struck up between them during all the back-and-forth of their easy exchange. He could have told her the truth. What would it hurt him? He had nothing to lose. If anything the opposite. The higher the price the more she’d have been impressed. Up and down the Towers she’d have gone, spreading the word about the big shot in Building One.

  Who did Mrs. Bliss think she was kidding? Offended? No offense intended. No, and none taken. Of that she was positive. It was her second question that had set him off, the one about what line of work he was in, if you please.

  She had, she saw, overestimated her celebrity. It may have given the gang a thrill and she certainly, as she’d once heard her son-in-law say about serving on the jury during the trial of an important rock star, that he’d “dined out on it for months,” a remark Mrs. Bliss thought so witty and catchy that
she found herself repeating it each time anyone offered her a glass of tea or a slice of coffee cake.

  Still, though she knew he must have had a reason for spending all that time with her (almost as if it were Auveristas who’d been doing the flirting), all that sitting beside her on the sofa, never once inviting anyone to join them but instead rather pointedly continuing their conversation every time someone sidled up to the couch, even if they were holding a plate of food, or a hot cup of coffee, she now understood that he wasn’t pulling on her celebrity—he was indifferent to the fact that her picture had been in the paper, or that people wanted to interview her, or that her testimony had been heard on TV.

  Mrs. Bliss was not a particularly suspicious woman. Well, that wasn’t entirely so. She was, she was a suspicious woman. She’d never trusted some of her husband’s customers when he’d owned the butcher shop, or his tenants in the apartment house he’d bought. On behalf of her family, of her near and dear, there was something in Dorothy that made her throw herself on all the landmines and grenades of all the welshers and four-flushers, lie down before all the ordnance of the deadbeats and shoplifters. “Dorothy,” Ted had once said to her, “how can you shoplift meat?” “Meat nothing,” Mrs. Bliss had replied, “the little cans of spices and tenderizers, the jars of A.1. Sauce on top of the display cases!”

  This was like that. Tommy Auveristas was like Mrs. Ted Bliss. He was watching her carefully.

  “Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you? I’m an importer,” he’d said, and with that one remark brought back all the dread and alarm she’d felt from the time she learned she had to testify against the man who’d bought not only Ted’s car but the few square feet of cement on which it was parked, too. Feeling relief only during the brief interval between Chitral’s sentencing and the day the federal agents came to bind up Ted’s car in metal as obdurate as any Alcibiades Chitral would be breathing for the next hundred years. The dread and alarm merely softened, its edges blunted by the people who had invited her to tour their condominiums. And only completely lifted for the past hour or so when she had ceased to mourn her husband. (Not to miss him—she would always miss him—but, pink polyester or no pink polyester, lay aside the dark weeds and vestments of her spirit and cease to be conscious of him every minute of her waking life.)

  Now it was a different story. Now, with Auveristas’s icy menace and sudden, sinister calm like the eye of ferocious weather, it was a ton of bricks.

  Mrs. Ted Bliss had always enjoyed stories about detectives, about crime and punishment. On television, for example, the cops and the robbers were her favorite shows. She cheered the parts where the bad guys were caught. It was those shoplifters again, the case of the missing A.1. Sauce, the spice and tenderizer capers, that ignited her indignation and held her attention as if she were the victim of a holdup. (Not violence so much as the ordinary smash-and-grab of just robbers and burglars, looting as outrageous to her as murder. This infuriated her. Once, when thieves had broken into the butcher shop and pried their way into Ted’s meat locker, making off with a couple of sides of beef, she had described the theft to the policeman taking down the information as the work of cattle rustlers. It was Dorothy who had encouraged her husband to buy a revolver to keep in the store; it was Dorothy who went out and purchased it herself and presented it to him on Father’s Day when he had balked, saying owning a gun only invited trouble. And though Ted hadn’t known this, it was Dorothy who took it along with her when they went around together collecting the rent money from their tenants in the building in the declining neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side.) So Mrs. Bliss suddenly saw this attentive, handsome hand-kisser in new circumstances, in a new light.

  Now he leaned dramatically toward her.

  “It must be very hard for you,” Tommy Auveristas said tonelessly.

  “What?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “For you to have to see it,” the importer said. “The LeSabre. Turning away when you have to walk past it in the garage. As if it were some dead carcass on the side of the road you have to see close up. A machine that gave your husband such pleasure to drive. That you yourself got such a kick out of when you rode down from…was it Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “North Side? South Side?”

  “South Side.”

  “Did he follow baseball, your husband?”

  “He rooted for the White Sox. He was a White Sox fan.”

  “Ah,” said Tommy Auveristas, “a White Sox fan. I’m a White Sox fan.”

  “Did you get the White Sox in South America?”

  “I picked them up on my satellite dish.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So much pleasure. Driving down the highway, listening to the Sox games on the radio in the Buick LeSabre. So much pleasure. Such happy memories. And now just a green eyesore for you. You turn your head away not to see it. It makes you sad to pass it in the underground garage. Locked up by the government. When they come down to visit kids stooping under the yellow ribbons that hang from the stanchions. Daring each other closer to it as though it was once the car of some mobster. Al Capone’s car. Meyer Lansky’s.”

  Dorothy held her breath.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Bliss, do you want it out of there? It has to be terrible for you. Others are ashamed, too. I hear talk. Many have said. I could make an arrangement.”

  Dorothy, breathless, looked around the room. If she hadn’t been afraid it would knock her blood pressure for a loop she’d have stood right up. If she’d been younger, or braver, or one of the knockout, gorgeously got-up women at the party, she’d have spit in his eye. But she was none of those things. What she was was a frightened old woman sitting beside—she didn’t know how, she didn’t know why or what—a robber.

  Frozen in place beside him, not answering him, not even hearing him anymore, she continued to look desperately around.

  And then she saw him, and tried to catch his eye. But he wasn’t looking in her direction. And then, when he suddenly did, she thrust a bright pink polyester arm up in the air stiffly and made helpless, wounded noises until, with others, he heard her voice and stared at her curiously until Mrs. Ted Bliss had the presence of mind to raise her polyester sleeve, waving him over, her lawyer, Manny from the building.

  THREE

  Manny was on the phone to Maxine in Cincinnati. He was at pains to explain that he was on the horns of a dilemma. It had nothing to do with tightness. Maxine had to understand that. He wasn’t tight, he wasn’t not tight. He didn’t enjoy being under an obligation; he was just a guy who was innately uncomfortable when it came to accepting a gift or even being treated to a meal. On the other hand, he didn’t particularly like being taken advantage of either, or that anyone should see him as something of a showboat, so he was just as uncomfortable wrestling for a check. All he wanted, he told Maxine, was to be perceived as a sober, competent, perfectly fair-minded guy. (He’d have loved, for example, to have been appointed to the bench, but did she have any idea what the chances of that happening might be? A snowball’s in hell! No, Manny’d said, they didn’t pick judges from the ranks of mouthpieces who all they did all day was hang around City Hall looking up deeds, checking out titles, hunting up liens.) It was a nice question, a fine point. A professional judgment call, finally.

  “What’s this about, Manny?” Maxine asked over the Cincinnati long distance.

  “Be patient. I’m putting you in the picture.”

  “Has this something to do with my mother? Is my mother all right?”

  “Hey,” Manny said, “I placed the call. I go at my own pace. Your mother’s all right, and yes, it has something to do with her.”

  “Manny, please,” said Maxine.

  “Listen,” he said, “the long and the short. I didn’t call you collect. I would have if I was clear in my mind I was taking the case. This is the story. Mom thinks I’m her lawyer. It’s true I represented her, but technically, since you and Frank paid the bills, I’m working for you.”

 
; “I’m not following you, Manny.”

  “What, it’s a bad connection? You I hear perfectly. You could be in the next room.

  “Listen, sweetheart, maybe you should go with someone else. I may be in over my head here. It’s one thing to help out a woman, could be my older sister, to see does she absolutely have to testify, or can I get her out of it (I couldn’t, she was a material witness), then hold her hand when she goes into court, lend her moral support; another entirely when she asks me to make some cockamamy investigation of this fancy-pants South American mystery man—she says—who may or may not be involved in this whacko-nutso dope scheme operating right here from the penthouse of Building Number One.”

  “A dope scheme? Another dope scheme?”

  “She says,” said Manny from the building.

  And then went on to run down for Maxine, and again for Frank not half an hour later when Maxine called her brother in Pittsburgh and asked him to phone the old real estate lawyer to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what was what.

  “Walk me through this, will you, Manny, please? I didn’t entirely understand all Maxine was telling me.”

  “Yeah,” Manny said, “I guess I wasn’t absolutely clear. Even in law school I had trouble writing up a brief. I don’t see how they do it, the trial lawyers, make their summations and offer their final arguments. I guess that’s why I never got into litigation.”

  He told Mrs. Bliss’s son about the Auveristases open house. He tried to be thorough, for, to be honest, he was just the smallest bit intimidated by this young man, an author and professor who on his occasional trips to Florida to spend some time with his mother sometimes struck him as cool, distant, even impatient with the people in the Towers who were only trying to be helpful, after all. He found the kid a little too haughty for his own good if you asked him, a little too quiet. One time Manny had attempted to reassure him. “Don’t be so standoffish,” he’d said, “they’re just showing off some of their famous Southern hospitality.”