Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  Still, knock wood, she had to admit that for someone who was almost a very old lady a lot had been spared her. A lot. Not that she was counting her blessings. What, are you kidding? What blessings? All right, the kids, even with their little handful of troubles, and she had what to eat, shelter, places to go, reasonably good health, kayn aynhoreh, even enough money so she didn’t really want for anything, but most people had those things. Except maybe for the good health part, almost everyone in the Towers did.

  So why, after she had made that accidental call, did she feel so suddenly fearful and bereft? Why had she had to run to the toilet with the same sort of nervous diarrhea she hadn’t experienced since she had worked in the dress shop for Mrs. Dubow when she was a girl? All right, Toibb, a man she actually knew, had been murdered. But so ill at ease? Come on, she’d lost closer every year, and now, at this time of life, every few months practically. In Chicago, the gang was falling by the wayside all over the place, losing their battles to cancer, to heart attacks, to all the dread whatnot of old age. (Even not so old, Irving’s boy, Jerry, and Golda’s kid, Louis, both dead of AIDS, and though nobody said it out loud, Betty, her distant forty-year-old third- or fourth-remove old maid cousin was thought to be HIV positive.) “I’m telling you,” her sister Etta had said when Dorothy had gone north for their sister Rose’s funeral last year, “it’s getting to be like there was a war.” It was at that funeral, so poorly attended—their death-thinned gang—that Mrs. Bliss decided that enough was enough, and that next time she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get on an airplane and fly to Chicago to see someone else she loved shoveled into the ground, particularly if such a sad occasion should take place in winter, or summer either for that matter. In spring, maybe. Indian summer. But she’d been living in Florida too long now. She couldn’t take cold weather, or wear herself out in hot, shlepping so many miles, with suitcases, with the formal, constrictive clothing you were expected to wear on such occasions. (People who didn’t live there didn’t understand. They thought you were putting on airs, pretending to make out you were better than other people, finer, but it was a scientific fact that once your system got accustomed to the Miami climate it wasn’t so easy to go back to a harsher one. And anyway, even at her sister Rose’s funeral, so poorly attended, not everyone was dead. Believe me, plenty stayed away just from being fed up with death. No love was lost between Dorothy and Golda. No matter how hard Ted pooh-poohed the idea, Mrs. Bliss was convinced her brother-in-law’s wife cheated at cards. (She’d caught her at it.) Yet, considering she was already in mourning for the fairy, how could she blame Golda for taking a rain check at Rose’s funeral? She didn’t need her as a reference of course, but Golda’s example had been good experience for Dorothy. Besides, to whom was she answerable these days? Her children and grandchildren. If, God forbid, her brothers should die, her surviving sister, but let’s not kid anybody here, she would certainly be taking the weather into account. Beyond the tight half dozen of her two children and four grandchildren there were no guarantees. None. She hadn’t played favorites, she’d been a loyal family member, but she was depleted and you drew the line somewhere or you died. Then what would happen to that tight dozen? So, though she thought she’d never live to see it, she wrote off Ted’s side of the family completely, she wrote off most of her own right down to her great-grandchildren. To tell you the truth, she thought that if anything maybe she was a little late in coming around to this thinking. I mean, just look how poorly attended Rose’s funeral had been.

  Spared a lot or not, if you lived long enough all that drek you thought you’d been spared caught up with you. And then some! Because now look what she’d been hit with out of the blue.

  Look here what they were threatening the spotless baleboosteh. The strange woman at Miami Therapeusis with her dark hints about Toibb’s murder, and the case is still open, and we have your records and we think you should come in for a checkup.

  Threats? At her age? Just when she thought she had cleared all her decks? What did they want from her, anyway? Her good name?

  SIX

  “I have an appointment? Dorothy Bliss?”

  “Have a seat, Mrs. Bliss, a therapeusisist will be with you in a minute. While you’re waiting, if you can fill out these forms, dear. Do you have a pencil?”

  “Medicare covers this?”

  “It doesn’t cost anything to fill out the form.”

  “There’re four pages here.”

  “Fill out what you can.”

  “This last page. It looks like a petition.”

  “We’re a grass-roots movement, we’re lobbying Congress with the acupuncturers and hypnotists.”

  Dorothy removed the petition from where it was stapled at the back of the other forms and handed them to the receptionist.

  “You’re not standing with us, dear?”

  “Ich hob dich in drerd,” Mrs. Bliss cursed her sweetly.

  “Is this your first visit then, dear?”

  “Two or three times a few years ago once.”

  “It shouldn’t be long now.”

  Dorothy sat back down on the leatherette sofa where she’d filled out the forms the woman had handed her. “There’s no magazines,” she said.

  “I keep them back here, dear. Otherwise, people walk off with them.”

  “They do?”

  “You’d be surprised. Or cut out recipes, or rip whole articles from them even. Would you care to look at a magazine?” she asked suspiciously.

  Mrs. Bliss wondered if this was the same one she’d spoken to on the phone. It didn’t sound like her, but she was getting so deaf it was all she could do to distinguish a man’s voice from a woman’s these days. For the most part she depended on the little whistle a woman’s higher pitch set off in her head. It was the queer combination of intimacy and attitude that reminded Dorothy of that other one. She asked her outright.

  “That must have been Iris. Iris is with another client now. You’ll probably see Milt.”

  “Milt.”

  “Milt’s one of the best. He bought in as a partner.”

  No one came in, no one came out. Magazineless, Mrs. Bliss sat in the empty waiting room. The one who wasn’t Iris had turned back to do whatever it was she’d been doing before Mrs. Bliss had first given her her name. “I have to do my billing now,” she said. The old woman, who could see her at her desk, was surprised to notice that she worked on an old manual typewriter, a portable, not even a heavy upright. She used carbon paper, and typed hunt-and-peck with only her pinky, forefinger, and thumb. Every time she made a mistake she pulled the sheets of typing paper out of the roller, crumpled them, and tossed them into a wastebasket. Then she made a big deal about setting the carbons and fresh paper into perfect alignment and inserting them in the platen.

  In the twenty-five or so minutes that Mrs. Bliss waited the phone didn’t ring once, and the girl made out only one bill. Then she kicked back and picked up one of the magazines she kept with her in her tiny cubby of an office and idly turned its pages. Either the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants was experiencing a slow period just now, or the fact of Toibb’s unsolved murder was scaring clients away. (As it had scared Mrs. Bliss into coming back again.) She wondered if recreational therapeusis still made the all-night call-in shows, or if it, too, had gone the way of all flesh as had the great days of the chiropractor/M.D. wars, the fluoridation/pure drinking-water ones. Though she still slept with her radio turned on all night, she was too deaf to take in very much of what was actually being said.

  “I’ve been here almost forty minutes,” Mrs. Bliss said suddenly, going up to the little counter that separated the waiting room from the girl’s office. “Where’s Milt?”

  “He went out for a sandwich,” the one who wasn’t Iris said.

  “I had an appointment.”

  “It’s not down here that you asked to see anyone in particular. We penciled you in for who was available. Iris is busy, Milt’s out to Wolfie’s
for a sandwich. It shouldn’t be—See, what did I tell you? That was Milt’s buzzer. He signaled he’s back in his office.”

  Dorothy put down to her deafness that she had heard no buzzer. Often, in the Towers, people would literally lean against the buzzer at the entrance to her condo for minutes at a time before she passed by the hall door close enough to hear it. Frank, who’d shown a late-blooming, surprising mechanical aptitude, had recently installed into his mother’s telephones lights that flashed whenever the phone rang. He had an illustrated catalog from the Center for Independent Living with maybe three or four hundred separate listings of aids for people who had a use for their special gadgets because of a handicap. He would clip them out of the catalog and send them from Pittsburgh to his mother in Miami Beach with a short note: “For your consideration, Ma: These are for the bath. The bar screws into the tile, you can let yourself down in the tub and hold it to pull yourself up. The friction strips bond to the bottom of the tub with a watertight sealant so you don’t slip. I can put them in the next time I come down. Let me know what you think. Love, Frank.” “I don’t remember if you still have that whistling teakettle. This works for coffee or tea. It whistles when the water comes to a boil if you’re making tea or by fixing it at the coffee setting when you make coffee. Give me the word and I’ll have it sent out. Love, Frank.” He called her at least twice a week, but except for these clippings and his brief explanations rarely wrote. He didn’t bother with birthday, New Year’s, or even Mother’s Day cards, so Dorothy was touched by these proofs that he thought of her and filed them away in her bedroom closet on the same shelf she kept her photograph albums. The reason she usually turned down these gadgets was that she had no wish to parade her infirmities before every Tom, Dick, or Harry who might stop by for a cup of coffee or ask to use her toilet. The lights on the phone were something else again. People knew she was deaf, and anyway how often did the phone ring on the rare occasions when someone was in her apartment?

  Still, when the not-Iris one indicated that Milt was back in his office, she wondered how many times she had missed visitors by not having some special sort of light that flashed throughout the condo when people were at the door? Nah, she thought, it wasn’t worth the convenience if you had to live out your life in a rigged environment.

  “I didn’t see anyone come in, even.”

  “Oh, he didn’t come in here,” the girl said. “Milt’s office is next door. This is Iris’s suite. The consultants use it as a waiting room for all the clients. As you go out, it’s the first door on your left.”

  Milt’s name wasn’t on the door, or a legend to indicate that it was part of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants organization. Indeed, it didn’t even have a number, and for what was supposed to be an office in an office building was about as anonymous as a spare bedroom in an apartment building.

  Dorothy’s first thought was that Toibb could have been murdered here, or behind any one of the blank-looking doors up and down the long corridor.

  There wasn’t a buzzer. She wondered if she should knock first or just open the door and go in. She wondered if she should go in at all. And was about to turn, was in fact already partway around and starting to move off when the door opened and she was confronted by a large, broad man standing in the doorway, his head with its dark, thick hair inclined downward as he rifled through some papers on a clipboard that appeared—she recognized her blunt handwriting—to be the forms Mrs. Bliss had filled out in GMRTRC’s waiting room.

  How did they work that one, Dorothy wondered.

  “Come in,” the man said and, assuming her compliance, was already headed toward a chair behind a desk Mrs. Bliss instantly recognized as the same one Holmer Toibb had sat behind years before.

  How can I know this? she asked herself, and she answered, How did my fingers know his number when I was dialing Maxine that time?

  “Dorothy, what’d you do with the petition?” Milt said, still gazing downward and looking very closely, like someone terribly nearsighted, for that last sheet she had pulled from the back of the forms.

  “I decided not to sign it.”

  “Why? It’s important.”

  “I didn’t want to get involved,” she said, staring straight at him and pointedly addressing him as Junior.

  Because as it happened, “Milt” was Junior Yellin, né Milton, Ted’s former partner, Herbie Yellin’s kid. “Milt” was Junior Yellin, the new nickname crowding out the older one. He was Junior Yellin, the butcher book futzer. That Junior Yellin. The Junior Yellin turned realtor and, later, farmer in his own right when he bought back her dead husband’s spread (if that’s what you called a black-market slaughtering house) for a fraction of what Ted had given him for it in the first place. Junior Yellin, the handsome gutter boulevardier and drunk, gambling man and philandering father of two who’d once felt up Mrs. Ted Bliss herself right there in her husband’s shop when she was helping out behind the counter, behind her behind behind Ted’s back before Ted’s customer.

  She blushed to remember it, felt a sort of intense, localized internal heat slide through her face that only grew warmer as she realized that even with their shared history he didn’t know her from Adam.

  She couldn’t have said which humiliated her more, that he hadn’t recognized her, that she should be consulting someone she knew to be a crook who over the years had cost her family thousands, or that she was in the presence of the only man beside her husband ever to have confronted her sexually in the whole history of her life as a woman.

  Was this some new fraud (not that this time around he’d set up as a recreational therapeusisist; she knew of course that that was a fraud, but his failure to acknowledge his name by so much as a blink)? Was the new fraud the complete annihilation of his own old self? Was he wiping his slate? Would he no longer carry baggage for his former Chicago, Las Vegas, and Michigan farm-cum-abattoir lives? Without quite realizing why (and all this—her surprise at discovering him, her complicated humiliation and shame, her new wonder—taken in in an instant), Mrs. Bliss was overcome by a depression and sadness unlike anything she’d ever known—unlike mourning, unlike bad news, unlike trouble, unlike the recent, piecemeal unraveling of her old confidence and well-being, and the remains of the kickless, disinterested life she allowed herself to play out in her kickless, disinterested exile.

  It was almost as if, she made a stab at explaining herself to herself, she were not so much furious at as jealous of this new man. He’d been Milton Yellin; he’d been Junior; was now Milt—all his a.k.a.’s subsumed in discrete avatars: butcher, flirt, bum, partner-in-bad-faith, black marketeer, and, now, recreational therapeusisist in a long white coat like an actual doctor’s. But no. Now she looked closer. It wasn’t a doctor’s white lab coat at all. It seemed rougher, heavier. Why the son of a bitch, it was one of his old butcher’s jackets!

  Mrs. Ted Bliss glared at him, the flush of shame she’d felt earlier when she remembered his having groped her gone now and the warmth converted into a sort of angry energy as she collected the features of her face rather like a telescope collects light, and attempted to project them at him as she willed him to recognize her.

  Whatever she was sending, Milt wasn’t receiving, and for a moment Dorothy wondered whether she had the right man and, for another moment, worried that, even if she did, whether she were so very changed, her good looks so lost to her that she might have appeared now like someone damaged in an accident or burned in a fire.

  “It’s Dorothy,” she said.

  “Yes, Dorothy, I know,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

  “No,” she said, “Dorothy Bliss. Ted’s wife.”

  The butcher/therapeusisist looked at her closely, almost examined her.

  He don’t look so changed, but he’s old, she thought. His eyesight ain’t good and he’s too vain to wear glasses. Whatever shame she’d felt, whatever anger, she relented. Pity broke the fall of her resentments, she buried her hatchets.r />
  “Teddy Bliss?” he asked, astonished, and, or at least Dorothy thought so, overcome by something closer to real fondness than genuine nostalgia. “My Teddy Bliss? Oh, God, Dorothy, sit, sit. It’s been a thousand years.”

  “More than forty,” Mrs. Bliss said, and now it was Junior who was blushing, perhaps remembering the precise terms of their queer old relationship. She thought there was a sort of moisture behind his eyes. What, was he going to break down and blubber? It was several seconds before he spoke. “I was sorry to hear about his death,” Junior Yellin said (for it was as Junior, not Milt, that he spoke). “I was shocked, shocked. I was out of town and couldn’t get to a phone. Did you get my card?”

  No, she didn’t get his card. She didn’t get it because he’d never sent one. She knew because she had painstakingly written out thank-you notes to everybody who had. She still had every letter and condolence card anyone had ever written to her when Ted died. They were filed away in shoe boxes in the same closet she kept her photograph albums, and Frank’s little notes, and all her other personal papers.

  “It must have been awful for you. Well I know from my own dad, cancer’s no picnic.”

  “Yes, I heard,” said Dorothy. “You have my condolences.”

  “Yeah, he was a good man, the greatest dad a kid could have. Well, you know. You probably recall when I had some trouble with Ted’s books that time. My behind could really have been in a sling if Dad hadn’t been there for me. He was a great dad, a great dad. Between you, and me, and the lamppost, he was a greater dad than I was a kid. You’re not contradicting me, I see. The motion carries.

  “Hey, will you just listen to me? Going on about my troubles, my tragic flaws and little circumstances. Looks like I haven’t learned anything over the years, looks like I’m not only back at square one but that I never left it. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Dot—does anyone else still call you that?—the reason why is square one’s where I live. It’s practically my home town, square one. Square one zip, visitors plenty. I’m not ashamed to say this on myself even if I am a fellow almost in his seventies.