(And if she’d gone to Ted that time and warned him about Junior and that what he pulled on the housewives and customers he had no compunction about pulling on Dorothy, too, then what? Would Ted have had it out with him, or would he have given her his old song and dance about how Junior was an artist, the best man in Chicago with boning knives, paring, carving knives, hacksaws and cleavers, an artist who could trim every last ounce of fat from a steak so that even the T-bones and porterhouses in their display cases, even the stringy briskets, looked like filet mignons, and you couldn’t say to an artist what you could say to an ordinary butcher? He loved her, she knew that, but she wasn’t so anxious to see push come to shove, never mind what she had told herself about carving knives and the temperaments of outraged butchers.)
It wasn’t even the discomfort of their life in the country she objected to, and certainly it wasn’t the problematic criminality of Ted’s being a black marketeer. She was innocent, and naive, and a woman of valor, but she was a wife, too, after all, and a mother with mouths to feed and babes to protect. What, she should be less than the simplest creatures, a lioness with her cubs, say, or a bear with its? So if she wished for the conclusion to the interval of their life on the farm, it was as much for the benefit of her three children as it was for her husband or for herself. Chicago represented an ideal of progress and comfort. It represented the future. Indeed, life in Michigan seemed so like life in Russia to Dorothy (though she could barely recall her girlhood in Russia) that the idea of Ted’s dumping the farm and moving the family back to Illinois seemed as much an ordeal and adventure as contemplating the journey from Russia to the New World must have seemed to her own parents. After only a few months away from the city, Chicago, raised to almost mythic stature, began to take on an atmosphere of enchantment and fable. Mrs. Bliss regaled her children with stories of how water had poured freely from every faucet in their apartment. All you had to do to fill a pitcher for lemonade was turn a tap. A pitcher for lemonade? To run a bath. To run a bath? To flush the toilet! She was a keeper of the flame, Mrs. Ted Bliss. She told them that in Chicago all the streets were paved, and the only paths you ever came across were the trails in Jackson Park or the Forest Preserves. Mail, she reported, was delivered by the postman directly to a letter box in the hall. The radio crackled with static only during thunderstorms. You could get all your programs clear as a bell.
It was the public schools, however, that were the city’s greatest asset. The different grades weren’t all jammed together in a single room, and the children didn’t have to share books. Also, she whispered, in Chicago, it was the goyim who were the exception, and there was a synagogue every three or four blocks.
In the end, though, it wasn’t Mrs. Ted Bliss’s relentless dislike for their farm that sent them back to Chicago. It was that failure of nerve that Ted simultaneously took responsibility for and ventriloquized over to Dorothy that drove them off.
It was the rustlers. He admitted as much to Dorothy.
“Rustlers?”
“What, you think these spindly, broken-down sparrows that pass for cattle around here were hand cared for by Farmer Brown or old McDonald on Michigan Avenue feedlots? They’re runts of the litter rustled off the wrong side of a rancher’s tracks by gangster gangsters in cahoots with gangster cowboys in cahoots with their gangster rancher bosses who winked their eyes and left instructions to leave the gate open.”
She had never heard him so passionate about anything. It was how Ted’s high-roller, go-for-broke pals back in Chicago talked, the mavins and machers butting in on the lines outside shows and in fancy restaurants.
It was his failed nerves whistling in the dark.
“I tell you, Dorothy, Junior Yellin himself couldn’t trick those beeves out into anything resembling anything respectable as steak or maybe even just ordinary hamburger.”
Of the toughs and heavy-lifter moving-men types who came every week or so to drop off their living, stolen, scrawny cattle in exchange for Ted’s slaughtered and dressed beef carcasses, the various rounds, rumps, ribs and roasts, shanks, flanks, chucks, and other moving parts of meat, her husband would whisper, shuddering, that they were the real black marketeers, an almost anonymous, dark lot of men who seemed only a few steps up the evolutionary scale from the very animals in which they dealt. They were the rustlers; dominant males of the herd, they were the ones who with something almost like instinct had a nice feel for just which sacrificial cows and steers the ranchers who owned them and collected insurance on them when they disappeared through those now several times cahooted unlocked gates least minded losing.
They were ugly customers and unnerved Mrs. Bliss, too, whenever they appeared on their rounds. To expedite pickups and deliveries they enlisted Mr. Bliss into helping them with the transfers, transforming her handsome husband, once not only president of the Hyde Park Merchants’ Association but a prominent member, too, of the Council of the Greater South Side Committee for Retail and Growth—a tribal elder of sorts, if not by nature himself one of the flashy, loudmouth speculators and get-rich-quick bunch, then a solid burgher of a man, at least someone who had the ears of the loudmouths, a man whose approval and interest in them they openly sought and even vied for. And now look at him, Mrs. Bliss secretly thought, down on the farm, a good two-hundred-plus miles from the city of Chicago, bowed almost to the breaking point under the weight of the sides of slaughtered meat he carried, the wet, red blood not only staining his white protective aprons beyond the point where his wife could ever get them clean again but the shirt he wore beneath them, and the undershirt he wore beneath that, too.
“Ted, what goes into one pocket from this black market,” Dorothy would tell him, “goes right out the other with what I spend in Clorox and Rinso.”
“Dorothy, it’s almost 1943. It’ll only be a year the war will be over.”
But Ted Bliss’s formula for a short, three- or four-year war was off the mark, of course.
It was November, and the news from the fronts was bleaker and bleaker. Loss of life in the Pacific and Africa was already too heavy. In Europe, our troops hadn’t really engaged the enemy yet. What happened when they finally did was awful to contemplate. What might have been acceptable in a lightninglike war where you got in and got out was one thing, but to continue to be what not even a year ago the papers had already begun to describe as a “war profiteer” was not something Ted Bliss particularly relished, never mind he was making money hand over fist. Also, word was getting out that the quality of his meat (even though everyone knew there was a war on, and that the government was buying up the best cuts for the boys) was going downhill fast. Plus his real fear of the toughs with whom he had to do business. And his fear, too, of the G-men whose pledge it was to shut down operations like his, find the perpetrators, lock them up and throw away the key.
Him? He did these things? The Hyde Park Merchants’ Association prez? Some merchant. The merchant of Venice!
Also, there was no denying the fact of how uncomfortable he’d made Dorothy and the children by shlepping them out to the sticks and making them live in East Kishnif the better part of a year.
“I’m going to sell this place,” he announced to his family one day in late March.
“You are?” Dorothy said.
“Just as soon as I get a reasonable offer.”
“That’s swell, Dad,” his son Marvin said. “I really miss my friends back in Chicago. I don’t fish. You won’t let me hunt. There’s nothing for a boy my age to do up here.”
“Well, you’ll be home soon enough. I’m sorry. I didn’t look before I leaped. I just didn’t think. I didn’t realize how unhappy I was making you all. I thought you’d adjust, but, well, you didn’t. So I’ll wait till I find the right buyer who will give me my price, and then just sell the place.”
Marvin and Maxine ran up to their father, threw their arms around his neck and kissed him. “Oh, Daddy,” Maxine said, “it’s just exactly what I wished for.” Ted Bliss hugged his two
children, then leaned over and pulled Frank up on his lap. The toddler squealed in delight.
“Well, Dorothy,” her husband said, “did I give you what you wished for, too?”
“Just what I wished for. You really did, Ted. Hey, thanks a million,” said Dorothy, who knew his nerve had failed and just why, and who had been counting the minutes and hours and all the days, weeks, and months till it would.
And who knew, too, who knew nothing of business and wouldn’t even learn to write a check for at least another forty or so years that he’d already found his buyer, and that it was Junior Yellin, and that whatever the price was they agreed on would be many thousands of dollars less than what Ted had given for it in the first place.
So Hector Camerando was her black market. But one she would hold in abeyance for a while yet, not out of the same cop fear and nerve failure to which Ted, olov hasholem, had been subject (and which she didn’t hold against him, honest to God she didn’t, not for one minute), but because, exactly like Ted, she was waiting for her price, too. And she had to wait because, quite simply, she didn’t know what it was yet.
Had Frank or Maxine wanted for money she’d have withdrawn cash from her S&L and given it to them, whatever they needed. And if they needed more than she had in her account would have closed the account and withdrawn it all, and pressed the money on Camerando, begging him on their behalf to lay it off on the safest, surest, high-odds, long-shot greyhound race or jai alai game he could find, and put it all down for her kids. And if she lost, she lost, he wouldn’t hear boo from her. She wasn’t, she’d have told him, the most educated person, and wasn’t, she’d have admitted, a woman with anything like the sort of knowledge of the world a person her age by rights should be expected to have, yet as God was her witness she’d never bother him again, even though she knew going in there were confidence games—this could be one, she understood that—different scams that occurred, that suckers were born every minute, that you couldn’t get something for nothing, that even widows and orphans were vulnerable, especially widows and orphans, often the first to get hurt, but no matter, if worse came to worst, all he could expect from her was gratitude, thanks for having gone to the trouble.
Though thank God they didn’t. Frank or Maxine. Want for money. They had enough. If not rich then certainly comfortable. Even, comparatively speaking, well-to-do. Her son was chairman of the sociology department at the university. Throw in the royalties from the sale of his textbook (more than three hundred university adoptions to date, plus the book was practically required reading and was on almost all the freshman sociology course reserve lists, plus there were copies in almost all the public libraries, plus there were plans for the book to go into a third edition) and you had all the makings of a nice nest egg. Maxine was no slouch either. Her husband had been with the same insurance company for many years and in virtually every one of them was in the running for its highest-earning agent.
So there was plenty to be thankful for, touch wood. The children all had their health. They weren’t lame, they had no blood or muscle diseases, they didn’t smoke or take drugs, and they were all careful drivers. Donald was smart as a whip, on the dean’s list at his school. Judy was pretty. James, who worked for his father, was learning the business. Barry was an automobile mechanic, but to look at his fingernails you wouldn’t guess it in a million years. So maybe he wasn’t as book smart as his cousins—well, look who’d raised him after poor Marvin died—but he was good with his hands, well, he got that from Ted, and Mrs. Bliss would bet you anything he’d have his own shop one day. Not like most garages, but spic and span, and who’s to say, maybe he got that from his grandmother. Well, they were all good kids, she had nothing to complain of in that department. They were all of them making their way.
She didn’t play favorites. If she had them she’d never admit it, or ever acknowledge, even to herself, which grandchild she’d miss most if all, God forbid, were suddenly taken away. In the love department she was strictly a stickler, steady in her loyalty as the biggest patriot. That was one reason, over the years, she sent everyone the same gift. Never mind age, grades, the value of the dollar, never mind anything, everybody got the same, fair and square, even Steven, no exceptions. What was good for the goose was grease for the gander. Long ago, before Ted passed even, she’d developed a sort of sliding scale based on the particular occasion. Bar and bat mitzvahs, twenty-five dollars; Hanukkah gelt, five dollars; birthdays, ten; grade school, high school, and college graduations, eighteen (for life and luck). For their weddings she gave all her children and grandchildren one hundred dollars, for their anniversaries fifty. Everything equal, no one should think they had an advantage over anyone else.
Well, almost everything equal. To a certain extent (this puzzled the kids, but she never explained her reasons) she made individual exceptions. Barry, for example, had never gone to college. Should he be penalized for not graduating, which would put him eighteen dollars behind his cousins forever? At thirty-four, brilliant Donald was still a bachelor. Wasn’t that heartbreak enough, did he have to suffer financially, too? So, to make a long story short, the upshot was that when she saw him she sometimes slipped Barry a few dollars on the side until he was even with the rest. And she gave Donald extra money, too, a hundred more than his married brother and cousins, and so on and so forth until everybody was all caught up with everyone else. She kept strict accounts and recorded every transaction in a little black date book. You’d think she was saving receipts for the IRS. To tell the truth, it was a big pain in the neck but, what the hell, it was only money, and what else did she have to do?
Though she had a secret fear that she lived with constantly: Suppose one of them should die before their next mitzvah? How could she make it up to them for all the birthdays, anniversaries, and whatnot they would never live to enjoy? How could she even calculate what she owed them? And it occurred to Dorothy that that’s what wills were for, the very idea of inheritance—not to leave your money so that it could be divided up after you died, or pay grief bribes to the survivors. No, not at all. It was to participate, after you died, in their celebrations, to live on in their accomplishments and special occasions. Maybe that was what death and the afterlife were all about. Didn’t a person make a list of the presents they received, of who sent this and who sent that, just so they could write a thank-you note afterward? People never threw those lists away, they kept them always. Dorothy did. To this day she could tell you, just from referring to her papers, who had given them a particular tablecloth or bedspread or pair of candlesticks, whatever, when they were married. Maybe all immortality came down to was the lists you got put down on when you gave away a present.
But was this a reason to go to Camerando? To put together in her old old age enough cash to go on some last big spending spree so that, over and above what she provided for them in her will, she could make one last grand gesture presenting them, not just her children, their husbands, their wives, their children, their husbands, their wives, and so on and so forth, but the entire family, her sisters and brothers, Ted’s, their loved ones, all that extended mishpocheh, with some unlooked for, even uncalled for, auf tzuluchan gift. On the occasion of what? Celebrating what? Why, there wouldn’t even be a list they could mark it down on! How, she wondered, would she even fix on a figure what to send? If she gave Frank, say, x number of dollars, it wouldn’t be hard to fix on the sum that would be proper to give to Maxine, but after that it got trickier. After a certain point love and blood didn’t come in easily discernible fractions, and after another it couldn’t be understood not even if you had all the decimal places in the world to work with!
So her children, who were pretty well fixed and already had enough money, were out, and the grandkids who were all of them making their way, even poor Barry (but she wouldn’t play favorites), were.
This was the problem with holding what Mrs. Bliss didn’t even know was called a “marker,” though she well enough understood that someone like Camerando
would expect her to call it in. It wasn’t transferable, and it wasn’t negotiable. It was like holding onto frequent flier miles when you couldn’t make up your mind where to go and weren’t sure if you were up to the trip even if you had a destination.
She obsessed on it, and almost felt like going back to Toibb, her recreational therapeusisist, to see what she should do. Maybe she could spend Camerando’s money on some new interests. Though unless someone like Toibb told her what that might be, she had no new interests. The hard thing, the really rock-bottom tragic thing, was she had no old interests either. She supposed she was in her early seventies now, give or take those two or three irrecoverable, unretrievable years of Mrs. Bliss’s life her mother had so shamelessly given up to the immigration official. Years, she now understood, she might have used to better advantage, planting incipient interests, resources she could, in this twilight, or dusk, or full dark night of her life, have drawn upon now—learned to drive, perhaps, or read better books so she could use a library card, or gotten more out of the papers, reading the editorials even, the columns…anything, really, kept a diary, or written her thoughts down in letters.
Mrs. Ted Bliss Page 13
