What, Frank Bliss wondered, was with this guy? He wasn’t nervous? He was still nervous, or why would he be talking so much? And what was all that Florida Confidential crap about, the Miami killing fields? What was he up to? Was he selling protection, was this some kind of special condo old-guy scam? Did every retired old-widow hand down here have some corner he worked, spraying some dark territoriality, pacing off places where he might grind his particular ax?
What the hell do I know? Well, heck, Manny, he’d felt like telling him, sure, I know all about it. That and stuff you never even mentioned, the it’s-never-too-late and lonely hearts bobbe myseh and December/December alliances. The two-can-live-cheaper-than-one arrangements. That’s what I know, old boy, so just watch where you grind your particular ax.
He reined himself in. It wasn’t that he knew his mother simply wasn’t the type. She wasn’t of course, and he thought he understood what a Chinese water torture loneliness must have put her through in the years since his father had died, but all of a sudden and out of the blue, God help him, he thought he saw his mother through Manny’s eyes, through the eyes, he meant, God help him, of another man. She had to have been six or seven years older than Manny. And despite the pride Ted had taken in his wife’s appearance, her reputation for beauty even deep into her sixties, the woman had aged. Manny, on the other hand, still seemed to be in pretty good shape. All you had to do was look at him, his tan the shade of perfectly made toast. If he weren’t married he could have had the pick of the litter. What could a guy like Manny possibly see in his mother? A man would have to be pretty desperate to want to sleep with a woman like her.
Then, another bolt from the blue, he felt blind-sided by shame. What was it in the air down here that poisoned your spirit? Why, he wondered, did he despise Manny more now that he understood there could have been nothing between them, than when he worried about the guy’s officious, overbearing manner?
It’s all this fucking humidity and sea air, he thought, some steady oxidizing of the soul.
Maxine was feeling shame, too. She realized not only how glad she was her mother didn’t want to move to Cincinnati but how happy it made her that Dorothy wouldn’t sell the condo, how nice it would be to have it after, God forbid, her mother had died. She thought of all the times Dorothy had shown her records of the certificates of deposit she was accumulating, how she rolled them over whenever they came due, reinvesting, building on the booming interest rates they were earning just now, showing where she kept her bankbooks with their stamped, inky entries like marks in a passport, proud of her compounding interest, of living within her means on social security, on Ted’s pension from the butcher’s union, the monthly benefit of a modest insurance policy he’d taken out, the miracle of money, mysteriously richer now than when Ted was alive, showing off even the rubberbanded discount coupons she cut, the fat wads of paper like a gambler’s stake, Maxine all the while superstitiously protesting, “Spend it, Ma, spend it; it’s yours. Don’t stand in the heat waiting for a bus when you have to go out someplace. Call cabs, take taxis. You don’t even have to wait outside. Whoever’s on duty at the security desk will buzz you when it comes.”
I’m such a shit, Maxine thought, pretending to change the subject, deliberately averting my eyes whenever she tries to show me this stuff, but glad of Mother’s miserliness, even, God help me, dependent on it.
“You know,” Manny was saying, “when your dad, olov hasholem, passed away I don’t think your mother had made out more than three dozen checks in her whole life. Is this true, Dorothy?”
“I never needed,” Mrs. Bliss said defensively. “Whatever I needed—for the house, for the kids—he gave me. If I needed…needed? If I wanted, he gave me. My every whim—mah-jongg, the beauty parlor, kaluki, the show.”
“Ma,” Maxine said, “Daddy kept you on an allowance?”
“He didn’t keep me on an allowance. All I had to do was ask. What? It’s so much fun to make out a check? It’s such a delight? Ted paid all the bills. Once in a while, if he ran out of checks, he gave me cash and I went downtown to the post office and they made out money orders to the gas and electric. He didn’t keep me on an allowance. All I ever had to do was ask. I didn’t even have to specify.”
“Ma, I’m teasing,” Maxine said.
“Of course,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “once Ted died I had to learn. Manny taught me.”
“Taught her,” Manny said modestly, “I showed her. I merely reminded her.”
“I write large,” Mrs. Bliss said. “The hardest part was leaving enough room to write the figures out in longhand. And fitting the numbers into the little box.”
“All she needed was practice. She caught right on,” Manny said.
“Not with the stubs,” Mrs. Bliss said. “ ‘Balancing my check book,’ ” she said formally, looking at Manny. “It was like doing homework for school. Farmer Brown buys a blue dress on sale at Burdines for eighteen dollars and ninety-five cents. He has five hundred and eleven dollars and seven cents on the stub.”
“His previous balance,” Manny said.
“Yeah,” Dorothy said. “His previous balance.”
“Don’t worry,” Manny reassured, winking at them. “I went over it with her.”
“Not now,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“No,” Manny said, “not for a long time.”
“Not since he showed me how to work the computer.”
“Ma, you have a computer?”
“She means a calculator. I picked one up on Lincoln Road at Eckerd’s for under five bucks.”
“It works on the sunshine. Isn’t that something? You never have to buy batteries for it.”
“Solar energy,” Manny said.
“Solar energy,” Mrs. Bliss said. “It’s lucky I live in Florida.”
Frank didn’t know how much more of this he could take. What was it, a routine they’d worked out? Even Maxine was starting to feel resentful.
“He wrote out the hard numbers for me in spelling on a little card I keep in the checkbook. Two. Ninety. Nineteen. Forty. Forty-four. Other hard numbers. Eighty with a ‘g.’ ”
“Five bucks?” Frank said to Manny.
“Sorry?”
“The calculator. Five bucks?”
“Under five bucks.”
“Here,” her son said, and pushed a five-dollar bill into Manny’s hand. What was wrong with Frank? She had to live with these people. What did they think? Why didn’t they think? Did they think that when one was off in Cincinnati and the other in Pittsburgh her life here stopped, that she lived in the freezer like a pot roast waiting for the next time one of them decided to visit or they spoke on the telephone? They were dear children and she loved them. There was nothing either of them did or could do that would stop that, but please, give me a break, my darlings, Mother doesn’t stand on the shelf in a jar when you’re not around to help me, to take me out on the town, or let me look at my grandsons. I have my errands. I go to my various organizations and play cards, ten percent of the winnings to charity off the top. We gave ORT a check for more than six hundred dollars this year. How do they think I get to these places? Do they think I fly? I don’t fly. I depend on Manny from the building. On Manny and on people like him. Even when the game is right here, in a building in the Towers, and the men walk along to escort the women, not just me, any widow, at night, in the dark, to the game, to protect us because security can’t leave their post, so no one should jump out at us from behind the bushes to steal our pocketbooks or, God forbid, worse comes to worse. I know. What am I, stupid? What could Manny or five more just like him do in a real emergency? Nothing. Gomisht. It’s just the idea. Like when Marvin—olov hasholem, olov hasholem—he couldn’t have been much older than Maxine’s James is now and wouldn’t lay down his head, never mind sleep, unless I left on a light in the room so if the apartment on Fifty-third caught on fire he could find his slippers and wouldn’t have to walk barefoot on the floor in a burning building. Kids are afraid of the crazi
est things. Oh, Marvin, Marvin! At least you had the sense to be afraid. That wasn’t so crazy even if there never was a fire. When the time came and you got sick you burned up plenty, anyway. We’re not so stupid after all. Older than James and so much younger than your mother is now, I’m also afraid of the dark, of danger and horror from the bushes. Isn’t it strange? When Ted was still alive I’d go anywhere by myself. Even after his cancer was diagnosed and he was laying in the hospital I’d wait alone outside for the bus after visiting hours were over and never thought twice about it. Who knows, maybe worry cancels out fear, maybe just being anxious about something makes you a little braver.
God, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, please don’t let him make a scene, just let him put the five dollars into his pocket as if everybody understood all along it was a legitimate debt. Don’t let anyone get up on his high horse, please God. Good. Good for you, Manny, she thought, when Manny accepted the money, you’re a mensh.
“I’m sorry,” said Manny, “I don’t have any change.”
Maxine looked down at the carpet and prayed her brother wouldn’t tell the man he could keep it or make some other smart remark, like it was for his trouble or something.
Frank wondered why he could be such a prick sometimes and was immensely relieved when Manny didn’t make a fuss. He’d seen the awful look on his mother’s face when he’d forced the money into the old man’s hand. It was too late to undo what he’d done. Maybe it would be all right, though. Maybe it was enough that he should be seen playing Asshole to the other’s mere Big Shot.
Manny bit his lower lip and, preparing to rise, leaned forward in Mrs. Bliss’s furniture.
“Well, guess I better be moseying along,” said Manny from the building.
“There’s coffee, there’s cake,” Dorothy said.
“Muchas gracias, but Rosie’ll wonder what’s happened to me.”
“Do what you have to,” Dorothy said, not so much resigned as quite suddenly disappointed and saddened by the heavy load of face-saving in the room, all that decorous schmear and behavior. Why couldn’t people talk and behave without having to think about it or count to ten? Why couldn’t it be like it used to be, why wasn’t Marvin alive, why wasn’t Ted? Why wasn’t what was left of the gang—the real gang, not the bunch down here with which she had to make do, the real gang, the blood gang, her sister Etta, her sister Rose, the boys (grandfathers now), her younger brother Philip, her younger brother Jake; Ted’s deceased brothers, her twin in-laws, Irving and Sam, their wives, Joyce, the impossible Golda, their children, grown-ups themselves, Nathan and Jerry, Bobby, Louis and Sheila, Eli and Ceil; all her dead uncles, her dead uncle Oliver, her dead uncle Ben; Cousin Arthur, Cousin Oscar, Cousin Charles, Cousin Joan, Cousins Mary and Joe, Cousins Zelda and Frances and Betty and Gen; Evelyn, Sylvia, David, Lou and Susan, Diane and Lynne, Cousin Bud—all that ancient network of relation, all that closed circle of vital consanguinity, and all the broken connection in the great Chicago boneyard, too, shtupped in the loam of family, a drowned mulch of death and ancestry, an awful farm of felled Blisses and Plotkins and Fishkins, all of them, the rest of that resting (may they rest, may they rest, may they rest) lineage and descended descent; the real gang, down here? At ease in their tummel and boosted noise. Shouting, openly quarreling, accusing, promoting their voluble challenges, presenting all their up-front, you-can’t-get-away-with-thats in their pokered and pinochled, kaluki’d, gin- and Michigan-rummy’d bluster (and on one famous, furious occasion, Sam, her brother-in-law, so distracted by rage he actually stormed out of his own house, vowing that until Golda received an apology from the entire family he would never sit down to play a game of cards with them again) for, on a good day, a good day, at most a two- or three-dollar pot.
Because family didn’t have to be nice to each other, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Because they didn’t always have to dance around tiptoe on eggshells. Because Golda never got her apology, and Sam did too sit down with them again to play cards. And the very next time, if she remembered correctly!
They didn’t even have to love each other if you want to know. Just being related gave them certain rights and privileges. It was like being born in Canada, or France, or Japan. Herman, her sister Rose’s ex, she’d written off. When they got their divorce he’d been revoked, like you’d cancel a stamp. Even though she’d rather liked Herman. He’d been a kidder. Mrs. Bliss, in her good humor, was a sucker for kidders.
But nice as Manny was, kind to her as he’d been, dependent on him as she would always be, and even though he was Jewish, and a neighbor, and a good neighbor, who shlepped for her and treated when she and Rosie and Manny went out together, to the show or for a bite to eat afterward, he just wasn’t related. He was only Manny from the building, and if Dorothy had been protective of his feelings where Frank and Maxine were concerned, it was because push shouldn’t have to come to shove in a civilized world, in Florida, a thousand miles from her nearest distant relative. Because Mrs. Ted Bliss knew what was what, was practically a mind reader where her children were concerned, as certain of their attitudes as she’d been of their temperatures when she pressed her lips to their foreheads or cheeks when they were babies. She knew Frank’s outrage that this stranger had moved in on her troubles, understood even her daughter’s milder concern. Didn’t Dorothy herself feel buried under the weight of all the blind, indifferent altruism of Manny’s professional courtesies? So she knew all right. Nobody was putting anything over on nobody. Nobody. Which was probably why all of them had backed down, why Maxine just watched the carpeting and Manny just stuck the five dollars into his pocket and Frank held his tongue when Manny told him that he had no change.
And why Dorothy, who hated decorum and standing on ceremony, welcomed it then.
And why, above all, Dorothy was thankful to God that Manny was leaving, without his coffee, without his cake. So he wouldn’t have to be in the same room with Frank even just only thinking to himself, Why the little pisher, the little pisher, the little no goddamn good pisher! And Mrs. Ted Bliss wouldn’t have to yell at Manny and ruin it for herself with him forever, goodbye and good luck.
FOUR
Nothing had been decided. Even during the little visit to Miami Maxine and her brother had undertaken after Manny’s all but incoherent telephone calls and the alarms they set off regarding her state of mind. To Frank’s assertion that the lawyer was probably not only a troublemaker but a shyster into the bargain, his sister said that even if he were she doubted he’d made up Tommy Auveristas’s end of the conversation.
“Meaning?”
“Frank, she’s a housewife. All she knows is ‘Tips from Heloise’ and how you get nasty stains out of the toilet bowl. She’s my mom and I love her, but she doesn’t have the imagination to make up that crap.”
“So what are you saying, Maxine, that this Manny guy is actually onto something, and that Mother’s in trouble with south Florida’s criminal element?”
“No. Poor Manny hasn’t a clue, but I think Mother’s in trouble all right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guest of honor at Mr. Big’s house party? The guest of honor? A helpless old lady in a pink polyester pants suit among all those diamonds, furs, and high-fashion shoes? And that he practically never left her side the whole evening? Or that he hung on her every word? The never-ending saga of Mama’s epic recipes? And what about the part where he tore into the help because he spilled food on the rug when he came up beside her sealed-over ear and startled her? Come on Frank, he fed her? Or told her he was a Sox fan? This is good evidence? This is the bill of particulars she presented to Manny?”
“Well,” Frank said, “he told her he was an importer. You know what that could mean down here.”
“Sure. That he buys and sells bananas. Frank, listen to me, the strongest card in her suit, the strongest, is the car, the LeSabre in the parking lot, and there could be a hundred forty explanations for that. And all that talk about his tone, Tommy whatsisname’s
sinister menace.”
“He scared the shit out of her, Maxine.”
“She’s deaf, Frank. The woman is deaf.”
“What are you doing, Max? What are you trying to say?”
“She never goes downtown. At night…at night she hardly ever leaves the building unless she has an escort even if it’s only to cross over to the next condominium.”
“Hey, she’s nervous. Her husband is dead. She’s frail and vulnerable.”
“She’s a suspicious old lady.”
“She doesn’t have a right to be?”
“Frank, she bought Daddy a gun!”
“Oh, please,” said her brother.
“She carried it in her purse when they collected the rents. ‘Just in case,’ she told me one time, ‘just in case.’ ”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case anything. I don’t know. If they called a rent strike, if they demanded new wallpaper.”
“You think she still has the gun?”
“Who knows?”
“You want us to confront her?” Frank asked. “Jesus, Maxine, why start up? We’re both of us out of here tomorrow. If she feels more comfortable with a gun around the place I don’t think that’s so terrible. She’d never use it.”
“As a matter of fact,” said his sister, “I don’t believe she even has that gun anymore. I mentioned it to point out her state of mind before Daddy even died.”
“So what are you getting at? You want to go one-on-one with Tommy A., take the bullshit by the horns?”
“I think she ought to talk to somebody,” Maxine said.
“Talk to somebody.”
“See someone.”
“You mean like a shrink? Can you really picture our mother going through analysis?”
“No,” Maxine said, “of course not. Just to have somebody to talk to. You see how she relies on Manny.”
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