Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  So he tried to be thorough, walking the little asshole through the evening in the penthouse, past the buffet table, the open bar where you could ask the two mixologists for any drink you could think of, no matter what, and they would make it for you, describing the abundant assortment of hors d’oeuvres that the caterers or servants or whoever they were passed around all night even after the buffet supper was laid out, until you wouldn’t think anyone could take another bite into their mouth, no matter how delicious.

  Which was why, he told Frank, he suspected there might actually be something to the old woman’s story after all.

  “I mean,” Manny said, “we don’t hear a peep from these so-called South Americans in a month of Sundays, and then, tra-la-la, fa-la-lah, they’re all over the old lady with their soft drinks and mystery meats. Do you know how many varieties of coffee there had to be there?”

  Manny had been walking him through it by induction, but Frank seemed confused.

  “Listen to me, Manny…” Frank said.

  “It ain’t proof, it isn’t the smoking gun,” Manny admitted, “but think about it, that’s all I’m asking. The ostentation. That affair. That affair had to cost them twice what we spend on our galas and Saturday night card parties all year. Who throws around that kind of money on an open house? Drug dealers! And what did he say to Mother in his very own words? ‘I’m an importer!’ ”

  “Manny…”

  “Even she picked up on it.”

  “My mother’s under a lot of pressure.”

  Then, quite suddenly, Manny lowered his voice. The bizarre impression Frank, a thousand miles off, got from his tone was that of a man to whom it had just occurred that his phone was bugged and, to defeat the device, had resorted to whispering. Frank giggled.

  Manny from the building was more hurt than shocked. Shocked, why should he be shocked? He considered the source. The little prick was a prick.

  “Hey,” Manny, still sotto voce, said, “put anybody you want on the case. It ain’t exactly as if I was on retainer. Get your high-priced, toney, Palm Beach lawyer back, the one you wanted to get Mother’s subpoena quashed. Get her. If you can talk her into even coming to Miami Beach!”

  Maybe it was because he’d been through it four times by now. Once when Dorothy had told him about it the night of the famous open house, twice when he tried to organize his thoughts about the information he’d been given, a third time when he’d explained to Maxine what her mother had told him, and now repeating the facts of the matter to Frank. But he’d raised his voice again. He’d journeyed in the four accounts from disbelief to skepticism through a rattier rattled, scattered objectivity till he’d finally broken through on the other side to a sort of neutral passion as he’d laid their cards—his and Mrs. Bliss’s—on the table during his last go-round for the benefit of the creep.

  Could it be he was a better lawyer than he’d thought? Could it be that he’d been bamboozled by all the glamour-pusses of his profession, the big corporation hotshots with their three- and four-hundred-buck-an-hour fees, all those flamboyant, wild-west criminal lawyers with their string ties and ten-gallon hats, the famous ACLU and lost-cause hotdogs who’d have defended Hitler himself if the price was right or the press and TV cameras were watching? Hey, he’d passed the same bar exams they had, and courtroom or no courtroom, had satisfied just as many clients with the careful contracts he’d drawn up for them for their real estate deals, commercial as well as residential. So maybe all there was to being a good lawyer or working up an argument was just to go over it often enough until you began to believe it yourself.

  “Well, thanks for filling me in, Manny,” Frank said. “I’ll talk it over with my sister, see what she has to say. We’ll get back to you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “And when you do,” Manny suggested slyly, “ask how she explains the car?”

  Because the fact was the ’78 Buick LeSabre was gone. One minute it had been there in the garage and the next it had vanished, a ton or so of locked-up, bolted-down metal carried off, disappeared, pffft, just like that!

  He knew well enough what he must have sounded like to them.

  A troublemaker. A busybody. Some self-important Mr. Buttinsky. And in fact, though he resented it, he could hardly blame them. Sometimes, down here, retired not just from the practice of law but from the forty-or-so-year pressure of building not just a professional life, or even a family one, but the constant, minute-to-minute routine of putting together a character, assembling out of little notes and pieces of the past—significant betrayals, deaths, yearnings, successes, meaningful disappointments, and sudden gushers of grace and bounty—some strange, fearful archaeology of the present, the Self to Now, as it were, like a synopsis, some queer, running quiddity of you-ness like a flavor bonded into the bones, skin, and flesh of an animal. Of course the curse of such guys was that they didn’t know how to retire. Or when to quit.

  Hadn’t Manny run into these fellows himself? There seemed to be at least one on every floor of each building in the Towers. Tommy Auveristas himself, if he weren’t a dope-smuggling Peruvian killer, might have been such a one, an arranger of favors who insinuated himself into the life of a widowed neighbor; one of those aging Boy Scout types who offered to drive in all the carpools of the quotidian; shlepping their charges to doctors’ offices; dropping them off at supermarkets, beauty parlors, banks, and travel agents; hauling them to airports; picking up their prescriptions for them or organizing their personal affairs. Bloom in Building Three had actually filed an application with the Florida Secretary of State to become a notary public. He paid the fee for the official stamp and seal out of his own pocket and offered his services at no charge—he personally came to their condos—around the Towers complex. “Best investment I ever made,” Bloom, patting his windbreaker where the weight of the heavy kit tugged at its pocket, had once confessed to him. Manny, flushing, knew what he meant. (More than a little jealous of the secrets Bloom must know or, if not secrets exactly—these were people too old and brittle for scandal—then at least the sort of interesting detail that must surely be contained in documents so necessary to the deeds, affidavits, transfers, powers of attorney, and protests of negotiable paper, that they had to be sworn to and witnessed by an official designee of the State.) Subtly, over time, making themselves indispensable, breeding a kind of dependency, a sort of familiar, a sort of super who changed locks and replaced washers and often as not had their own keys to the lady’s apartment. A certain satisfaction in being these amici curiae to the declining or lonely, heroes of the immediate who filled their days with largely unresented, if sometimes intrusive, kindnesses. In it, Manny guessed, harmlessly, to retain at least a little of the juice spilled from the bottom of what had once been a full-enough life in the bygone days before exile, retired not just from the practice of law but of character, too, that forty-or-so-year stint of dependable quiddity, individual as the intimate smell of one’s trousers and shirts.

  Poor shmuck didn’t know what to count as a billable hour. Finally decided as he went around eating his liver waiting on the cold day in hell for Frank or Maxine to get back to him—ha ha, hoo hoo, and next year in Jerusalem—that all he’d say, if they asked, which they wouldn’t, was that all he ever was was a small-timer, a lousy little Detroit real estate lawyer, and that until their mom he’d never put in a minute of pro bono in his life and that this was his chance, Frank, my pleasure, Maxine, though he might call them collect once in a while to keep them posted. No no, that wasn’t necessary, he already had a large-screen TV, he already had a fine stereo, he already had a Mont Blanc pen, but if they insisted, if it made them more comfortable, then sure, they could give him dinner once the dust settled and Mother was easy again in her heart.

  As it happened, he didn’t have to wait long after all. Frank and Maxine were there not long after he’d placed his first phone call to the DEA people.

  He looked them up in the Miami Southern Bell white pages. Quite frankly, he was surprised
that they were actually listed. The CIA was listed, too. So was NASA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This brought home to Manny from the building that law degree or no law degree, senior citizen or no senior citizen, Golden Ager or no Golden Ager, just exactly what a naive babe-in-the-woods he actually was. He even had second thoughts about his mission. Here he was, proposing to go up pro bono against possible drug lords, dances with assholes, with nothing to be gained except the thrill of the chase. He was a married man, he had grandchildren, responsibilities. He and his wife were hosting the seder this year, ten people. Flying down—his treat—his graduate student daughter-in-law, his thirty-eight-year-old, out-of-work, house-husband son and their two vildeh chei-eh; his sister and brother-in-law—also in Florida, Jacksonville not Miami—and a couple of old people from South Beach one of the Jewish agencies would be sending over—a matched pair of personal Elijahs. (It was his wife’s idea; Manny hated the idea of having strangers in his home, no matter how old they were.) So it wasn’t as if he needed the additional aggravation.

  Personally, if you want to know, like a lot of the people down here, the strangers from South Beach, and even Mrs. Ted Bliss herself, Manny was a little terrified of the very idea of Florida. Hey, who’s fooling who? Nobody got out of this place alive. It was like that place in Shakespeare from whose bourn no traveler returned.

  Was that why he did it? Was that why? Him and all the other old farts, the buttinskies and busybodys, that crew of Boy Scouts, shleppers, and superannuated crossing guards—all that gung-ho varsity of amici curiae? For the last-minute letters their good deeds might earn them? Not the thrill of the chase at all, finally, so much as the just pure clean pro bono of it? Was that what all that tasteless, vaudeville clothing they wore was all about—their Bermuda gatkes and Hawaiian Punch shirts? Their benevolent dress code like the bright colors and cute cuddlies calming the walls on the terminal ward of a children’s hospital.

  So he placed that first phone call to the agency. Getting, of course, exactly what he expected to get, talking, or listening rather, to a machine with its usual, almost infinite menu of options. “Thank you for calling the Drug Enforcement Agency. Our hours, Monday to Friday, are blah blah blah. For such-and-such information please press one; for such-and-so please press two; for so-and-such please press three; for…” He listened through about a dozen options until the machine, he thought a bit impatiently, told him that if he was calling from a rotary phone he should stay on the line and an operator would get to him as soon as it was his turn. (Manny was fascinated by the DEA’s choice of canned music.) It had already been established that he was naive, a babe-in-the-woods, but he was no dummy. He realized that no one calling the main number of the DEA on that or any other day would have any better idea than Manny had from the various choices, which went by too swiftly anyway, which button to press, that they would all be staying on the line. He hung up, called again, and, for no better reason than that it was the number of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s building, pressed one.

  He explained to some employee in the Anonymous Tips Department that he was interested in finding out why a certain party’s car that had been last seen in the parking garage of this particular address he happened to know of had been suddenly been removed from the premises.

  “Who is this?” asked the guy in Anonymous Tips.

  “A friend of the family.”

  “Unless you can be more specific…” the bureaucrat said.

  He was Mrs. Bliss’s counsel now and acting under the Midwest real estate bar association’s scrupulous injunction to do no harm. He didn’t want to get his client in Dutch. And he was terrified, a self-confessed, small-time old-timer from the state of Michigan who’d earned his law degree from a night school that shared not only the same building but often the same classrooms with a local business college, so that it had been not just his but the experience of several of his classmates, too, that they frequently met the girls they would marry there, striking up their first halting conversations with them during that brief milling about in the halls between classes, the seven or eight minutes between the time Beginning Shorthand or Advanced Typing was letting out and Torts or Contracts was about to start up, an ideal symbiosis, the future secretaries meeting their future husbands, the future lawyers, the future lawyers courting their future wives and secretaries, but something the least bit provisional and backstairs about these arrangements, so that, well, so that there was a sort of irremediable rip in the fabric of their confidence and courage. Which explained his hesitancy and pure rube fear, and made Manny appreciate the nice irony of his having been connected to a division of the agency that dealt under a promise of the condition of anonymity. But didn’t mitigate a single inch of who he was. In fact, all the more fearful when he gazed down at his brown old arms coming out of the colorful, short-sleeved shirt he wore, the deep tan of a younger, healthier, sportier man, tan above his station, as if there were something not quite on the up-and-up about his appearance. How many Jews, Manny wondered idly, could there even be in the DEA?

  And how could he be more specific when what he needed to hear was something he didn’t even want to know?

  But he was on the clock, even if it were only a courtesy clock. He came suddenly out of his withering funk, inexplicably energized, inspired. “Put me through to the fella drives that late-model, silver Maserati as a loaner,” Manny demanded sharply.

  “Yeah,” said a man, “this is Enoch Eddes.” The voice was hesitant, suspicious, perhaps even a little fearful. Manny guessed it was unaccustomed to taking phone calls from members of the public.

  “Enoch Eddes, the repo man?”

  “What the fuck!”

  “Enoch, Enoch,” Manny said as though the man had just broken his heart.

  “What the fuck,” Enoch said again, a little more relaxed this time, gentled into a sort of compliance, Manny supposed, by the faintly compromised argot of Manny’s thrown, ventriloquized character. Vaguely it felt good on him, like those first few moments when one tries on new, perfectly shined shoes in a shoe store, but Manny knew he couldn’t maintain it or hope to keep pace with this trained professional. In a few seconds it would begin to pinch and he would revert to his old Manny-from-the-building self.

  So he swung for the fences. He had to.

  “Enoch,” he said, “please.”

  “Who is this?” the DEA guy said.

  “Hey,” Manny said very softly, “hey, Enoch, relax. I’m a repo man, too. Tommy Auveristas has turned you over to me.”

  “Who?” Eddes asked, genuinely puzzled, totally, it seemed to Manny, without guile or affectation, nothing left of his own assumed character and more innocent than Manny could ever have imagined, as innocent, perhaps, as he’d been when he’d eaten his breakfast in his suburb that morning, when he’d hugged his kids and pecked his wife on the cheek, his own shoes pinching first and crying uncle in his surprised stupidity. “Who did you say?”

  “I think,” said Manny from the building, “I may have reached a wrong number,” and hung up.

  Later, Manny told Mrs. Ted Bliss’s children, they’d all have a good laugh over it. And by the way, he told them, smiling, they were off the hook and didn’t owe him dinner after all.

  “Dinner?” Frank said.

  “Well, I didn’t do anything to earn it, did I? What did I do, place a couple of phone calls to the Drug Enforcement Agency? Please. It’s nothing. You see, Frank, you see, Maxine, did I lie? Did I? I am a friend of the family. Just another good neighbor even if I’m not from South America and all I ever was was a Detroit real estate lawyer. It was my pleasure. It really was. I don’t say I wasn’t nervous. I was plenty nervous. You don’t live in the greater Miami area, you don’t know. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen reports on TV, all those Haitian and Cuban boatload exposés, the drug wars and race riots, the spring break orgies and savings and loan firesalers, all the Portuguese man-of-war alerts—unless you live down here and take the paper you have no idea what g
oes on. There are migrant workers not an hour away who live in conditions South African blacks would not envy. I’m telling you the truth, Maxine and Frank. You think it’s all golf and fishing and fun in the sun? You have a picture in your head of beautiful weather, round-the-clock security guards, and moderate-priced, outside cabins on three-day getaway cruises to the islands. What the hell do you know?”

  Maxine rather enjoyed listening to him. He was a silly, heavily cologned, pretentious fool, but at least he was on the scene down there, a self-proclaimed stand-up sort in her mother’s corner. If he knew too much about her business, well, who else did the woman have? She wouldn’t hear of selling the condo and coming to live with them in Cincinnati. God knows how many times Maxine had invited her to. It was exasperating. If she didn’t want to be a burden, she would have understood. If she treasured her independence. If she’d made friends with whom she was particularly comfortable. But keeping the place up so that when she died Frank and Maxine and their dead brother Marvin’s fatherless children should have an inheritance? A roof over their heads? This was a reason? Not that Maxine wasn’t secretly glad—and not so secretly, she’d discussed it with George—that Dorothy refused to take her up on it, but let’s face it, her mother was getting to an age when sooner or later—probably later, her health, knock wood, was pretty good but there were no guarantees—something would have to give. A way would have to be found to deal with her physical needs. Manny from the building was a nice enough guy, but let’s face it, fair-weather friend was written all over him. And why shouldn’t it be? He had a wife, Rosie, who was decent enough, and God knows she’d always seemed willing to put herself out, but quite frankly had to be at least a little conflicted where Maxine’s mother was concerned. And who could blame her, all the time he’d spent with her in the year since Alcibiades Chitral’s trial?