Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “You did this?”

  “Of course not, Mother.”

  “Anti-Semitism!” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Well,” said her son philosophically, “you know these guys, they get off on demystifying the whole hierarchy.”

  “They threw you out?”

  “Let’s just say they made the workplace hell for me.”

  “The grinch who stole Pesach,” Maxine said.

  She told them she was tired and said she thought she’d rest a while before going back out to help May with the dishes.

  “May has plenty of help, Mother. You just get some sleep.”

  “Tell her everything tasted wonderful, a meal to remember.”

  The children came to the side of her bed. Maxine adjusted the pillows beneath her mother’s head, kissed her cheek. Frank pressed his lips against her forehead.

  “I have temperature?”

  “Temperature?”

  “That’s the last thing I did after I put you to bed.”

  “I remember,” Frank said.

  “To check to see if you had temperature.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Maxine.

  “Like clockwork,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t remember. If I did, if I didn’t. Then I’d have to go back to your room and do it again. Otherwise I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Oh, Ma, that’s so sweet,” Maxine said.

  “I’d always check to see if you had temperature.”

  “I’ll turn off the light. Try to nap.”

  “You I’d check. I’d check Frank. Marvin I’d check.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Maxine said.

  “In the hospital, even when he was dying from leukemia. Can you imagine? Did you ever? The biggest hotshot doctors, the best men in Chicago. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do for him. The doctors with their therapies, me brushing his forehead with my lips to see did he have temperature.”

  “Please, Ma,” Maxine said.

  “Maxine’s right, Ma,” Frank said. “You’ve had a long day. Try to get some rest. I can hear them in the living room, I’ll tell them to hold it down.”

  “They’re your guests. Don’t say nothing.”

  She couldn’t have napped more than fifteen minutes. She’d fallen asleep watching one of her programs on the little bedside TV and when she woke up the show was just ending.

  “Grandma? Grandma, I hear the TV. Are you up? May I come in?”

  So she didn’t know whether it was her grandson’s knock, or his voice, or the sound of the television itself that had aroused her from sleep. She was as surprised as ever by the effectiveness of a brief snooze. Yet she rarely lay down before it was actually time to go to bed, and wondered at those times, like this one, how it was a person could doze for only a few minutes but wake completely refreshed whereas she could sleep through the night, or at least a whole block of hours, yet still be as exhausted in the morning as she was when she went to bed. What an interesting proposition, she thought—old people’s science, septuagenarian riddles and the deep philosophic mysteries of experience. There should be men working on this stuff in the laboratories and universities. And, as usual, these questions were as immediately forgotten as the time it took her to think them. Which, she thought, was something else they should be working on. And immediately forgot that one, too.

  “Grandma?”

  “What?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Who’s that, who’s there? James? Is that you, Donny?”

  “It’s Barry, Grandma. Can I come in?”

  “All right, Barry.”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you, Grandmother.”

  “You didn’t. Maybe you did, I don’t know. It’s all right.”

  “Well, if I did, I’m sorry.”

  “Make the light, I can’t see you.”

  He stood in the room in the light.

  “Let me see your fingernails,” his grandmother said.

  “Grandma,” he said.

  “No, don’t pull away your hand. You know what, Barry? You got fingernails like a piano player, like a banker. A surgeon who scrubs all the time don’t have cleaner nails. What do you do, go to a beauty parlor?”

  She’d been giving him the business about his nails all these years, ever since he first became a mechanic in a garage. It was true, his nails were immaculate, his hands were. There wasn’t a drop of dirt on them. They were rough, but pink as a girl’s. Ted had ribbed him, too. Now, though, she saw his small, sly, proud smile and Mrs. Bliss was a little ashamed of herself, and sorry for her grandson. How he must have worked on them, buffing and polishing and soaking them, it wouldn’t surprise, in warm emollients and lotions. Soft, buttery waves of a thin perfume rose off his fingertips like distant, melting light refracted in a road illusion. It was terrible, she realized, the lengths to which he must have gone to rub away all the appearance of failure, and Mrs. Bliss understood as suddenly and completely as she’d awakened to the laws of old people’s science how it was with poor Barry, in thrall, pursued by the reputations of his brilliant, successful cousins—Judith, Donald, James. And now it occurred that she didn’t remember ever seeing him in anything less formal than a jacket and tie since he was a child. At cards, at family gatherings, on picnics, Barry was the one who always showed up overdressed. She wondered if he even owned a sport shirt and had never seen him in a bathing suit. And though none of his clothes seemed particularly good or fashionable, they were as carefully chosen to create an impression (or counterfeit one) as if they had been made to his measure.

  Poor Barry, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Poor fatherless Barry. Who, for all that he went about dressed to the nines, leading with his perfectly manicured screen actor’s fingernails, seemed somehow covered up, masked, as though the carefully groomed hands were only part of a magician’s practiced, deliberate distractions, some noisily flourished razzle-dazzle that deceived no one and, indeed, there was something depressingly coarse about him, like a man with an awful five o’clock shadow. There was something loud and awful too about the conservative colors of even his darkest suits, which were always too black, a step removed from patent leather, or too brown, like woodstain on cheap suites of furniture. If Mrs. Bliss, a woman whose habits and heart did not allow herself to pick and choose between the members of her family, had let her guard down long enough to admit of a particular favorite, of all her grandchildren Barry might well have received the lion’s share of her love, been chief beneficiary of the small store of her dedicated, egalitarian treasury. Indeed, if she could admit to the world what, even with both hearing aids turned up to their highest volume, barely registered on her consciousness (her still, small voice small still), she might have allowed herself to acknowledge that Barry took pride of place, said, “To hell with it!” and gone ahead and bought him that garage he was saving for.

  But then, she thought, she’d have had to buy all of them garages.

  He pulled an uncomfortable-looking slatted wooden chair (like the chair in the bed-and-breakfast that Frank and May had found for them the time she and Ted visited London during Frank’s sabbatical year) up to the side of his grandmother’s bed and sat down.

  “So how are you, Grandmother?”

  Mrs. Bliss started to laugh. Barry looked hurt.

  “No, no, Barry. It’s just, when you asked, you reminded me.”

  “What of?”

  “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf?” sang Mrs. Ted Bliss.

  “Oh,” Barry said, “yeah. Sure.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m the big bad wolf. What did you bring me?”

  “Questions,” Barry said meekly.

  “The better to see you with. The better to hear you with. The better to eat you with, my dear.”

  “About my dad,” Barry said.

  She’d never been one to carry on. She didn’t make fusses, wasn’t the sort of person who liked to impose. Outside the family, for example, she knew she made a better hostess than a guest. And if she had once
been beautiful or vain, then the beauty and vanity were aspects of those same hospitable impulses that went into her lavish wish to please, to be pleasing to others. She wasn’t stoic or invulnerable. If you pricked her, she bled, if you tickled her she laughed, de da de da. It was just that same baleboosteh instinct to clean up after herself, the blood; to cover her mouth demurely over the laughter. It was some Jewish thing perhaps, a sense of timing, knowing when to make herself scarce.

  No one, she thought, understood the terrible toll Ted’s death had inflicted upon her. Maybe the stewardess on the airplane that time, maybe the woman in City Hall to whom she’d tried to explain the problem about the personal property tax on Ted’s Buick LeSabre. But the grief she felt when he died, that she still felt, never mind that time heals all wounds, was a thing not even her children were aware of (and to tell you the truth was more than a little miffed about this, not because they were blind to her pain so much as that their blindness gave her a sense that whatever they’d once felt about Ted’s death had gone away), though she wouldn’t have let them in on this in a million years. It wasn’t that she meant to spare them either. They were her kids, she loved them, but maybe they didn’t deserve to be spared. It wasn’t even a question of why she spared them. It was what she spared them. Mrs. Bliss’s loss was exactly that—a loss, something subtracted from herself, ripped off like an arm or a leg in an accident. It was the deepest of flesh wounds, and it festered, spilled pus, ran rivers of the bile of all unclosed scar, all unsealed stump. How could she ever ask anyone to look at something like that?

  But Barry, with his grief for his father, for himself, was a different story altogether.

  “He loved you, Barry. I never saw a prouder father. You were tops in his book. Tops.”

  Barry watched his grandmother carefully.

  “You were,” she said. “No father could have been closer to his son. He cherished you.” She turned, facing him on her side, her weight uncomfortably propped on her forearm, the edge of her thin fist. “Lean down,” she whispered.

  Barry moved toward her, stretching tight his still buttoned suit jacket. “Yes?”

  “It’s a secret,” she said. “Don’t tell your cousins, it would hurt their feelings. Marvin got more naches from you than Aunt Maxine and Uncle Frank got from all your cousins put together.”

  “Really? No.”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Bliss. “It was written all over his face whenever you came into a room. Or maybe you’d just left and I’d come in and I’d say, ‘I just missed Barry, didn’t I, Marvin?’ Sure, I could tell,” she said, “it was like a big sign on his face.”

  “I don’t remember,” Barry said.

  “You were a kid, a baby. What were you when your father, olov hasholem, got sick, eight, nine?”

  “He died just before my tenth birthday.”

  “That’s right. And before that he was in and out of hospitals for months at a time for an entire year. The hospital wouldn’t allow visitors your age, and when he was home he was too sick to play with you. Except on those few days he seemed to be feeling a little better we tried to keep you away from him. We thought it was best that a child shouldn’t see his daddy in those circumstances. We were trying to do what was best by both parties. Maybe we were wrong. We were probably wrong. What did we know? Did we have so much experience? Were we so knowledgeable about death in those days?”

  She was as moved by what she said as Barry himself, but then, olov hasholem, she knew that both of them, maybe all three of them, deserved better, that a debt was owed to what really happened.

  So she told him the truth: that in that last awful year of his life he was too sick for pride, for favorites, big bright smiles, or any other sign unconnected to his pain and suffering, too sick for the least little bit of happiness, or, on even those rare, blessed days of unlooked-for remission presented to him like a gift, for gratitude, let alone having enough strength left over, or will, or determination, or drive, for anything as rigorous as love, or even common, God forgive me, fucking courtesy.

  It was different then. This was not only before death with dignity, it was before pain management. It was the dark ages when doctors and nurses didn’t always play so fast and loose with the morphine, and patients had to wait on the appointed, exact minute of their next injection like customers taking a number at the bakery. So when Dorothy sat with him in the hospital that year, always putting in at least five or six hours a day and often pulling ten, or more even, on the days when Marvin—olov hasholem, olov hasholem, olov hasholem—was out of his head, chained up and screaming at his torturers like a political prisoner, she felt the pain almost as keenly as he did, fidgeting, uselessly pressing her lips to his head to feel the fever, kissing his cheeks, wiping his face down with wet, cool cloths in an effort to console him, even as he thrashed his head and neck and shoulders about, forcefully (who had no force) trying to escape, throw her off, shouting at her, actually cursing her, this good tragic son (whose tragedy was, for Mrs. Bliss, suddenly, sourly, obscurely underscored by the three- or four-year seniority his wife had over him in age, so that, if he died, he would seem, young as he was, even younger, and even more tragic) who’d never so much as raised his voice to her before; yes, and felt his relief, too, as her son’s vicious pains gradually subsided when he received the soothing sacrament of the morphine, but, exhausted as she was, not only not daring, not even willing to sleep during the three and then two and then one good hour of respite that the drug provided lest she miss one minute of what, despite all those hours of her visits to the hospital in the last year of Marvin’s life, she still managed to fool herself into believing was the beginning of his cure.

  They never got used to it. Not Ellen, not Ted, not Dorothy or Frank or Maxine, spelling, relieving each other on the better days and, on the just-average-ordinary, run-of-the-mill lousy ones only long enough to dash down to the cafeteria for a bite or out to the waiting room to grab a smoke or to the vending machines for a soft drink or cup of coffee, while on the five-star, flat-out rotten ones they never even got that far, but chose instead, like captains of doomed, sinking ships to stay with their vessels, who if they could not go down with them could at least bear witness. So that Marvin became at last not their son or brother or husband at all but some all-purpose child, the rights to whose death they collectively demanded. They never got used to it. Why should they? When they never even got used to the diagnosis?

  A cracked rib? What was the big deal about a cracked rib? All right, it was uncomfortable. It was painful to draw a deep breath, and you had to walk on eggshells when you climbed the stairs, and be very careful not to make any sudden movements if you wanted to save yourself from a painful stitch, but a cracked rib? How serious could a cracked rib be if all they did for you was tape up your chest? It was like breaking a toe where maybe they might go to the trouble of fixing it in a little splint while the bone went about the business of healing itself. It was a nuisance, of course it was, no one denied it, but serious? Come on! It was about as life threatening as a black eye, except that with a black eye you always had the added humiliation of explaining it away, trying to put it in the best light.

  All right, two cracked ribs, the second following about a week after the first one got better, and Marvin unable to explain how he got it except to tell the doctor he felt this wrenching pain as he was bending over to lift a bag of Ellen’s groceries out of the backseat to carry into the house for her. But tests? Tests? Okay, the X ray they could understand, but sending the poor man off to the hospital for blood tests Dr. Myers said he didn’t have a way to take and have analyzed in his office quickly enough?

  It was probably nothing of course, but just to make certain, be on the safe side.

  His mother went white when she heard and Ellen’s pleas for her not to interfere, and to let Myers take care of it and just stay out of the doctor’s hair and not act like some ignorant greenhorn while they waited for the results.

  Ignorant greenhorn? I’m his moth
er!

  Of course you are, Ma, and I’m his wife, and I’m as scared as you are, believe me, but I don’t want the whole world in on this. It would only terrify Marvin if he found out.

  The whole world, the whole world? I’m his mother. What did he say, the doctor?

  Let’s take it one step at a time.

  Let’s take it one step at a time? And you didn’t ask questions? You didn’t press him?

  I pressed him, I pressed him. Okay? I asked him what’s the worst-case scenario.

  What is?

  Leukemia. Blood cancer. Are you satisfied?

  Leukemia. Oh God, oh God, oh my God.

  Myers didn’t say it was leukemia. What he said was that was the worst-case scenario. We have to wait for the tests, we have to take it one step at a time.

  Leukemia. Oh my God oh God oh my God, my son has leukemia.

  “He doesn’t have leukemia,” Ellen said. “We have to wait for the tests.”

  But of course that was just what he would have, Mrs. Bliss knew. Since when does a perfectly healthy young man crack a rib from picking up a bag of groceries out of the backseat of a car? It just doesn’t happen. And when the results finally came back—and it wasn’t that long; what took time were all the additional tests they added on to those initial ones they sent him off to the hospital for—the reports from hematology, the pathologist’s opinions—and it was leukemia, Mrs. Bliss, God forgive her, couldn’t quite absolve her daughter-in-law from at least a little of the responsibility for her son’s illness. Who asks a man who’s just recovered from a painfully cracked rib to stoop over and pick up a heavy bag of groceries for her? What was she, a cripple? She wasn’t saying that that’s what caused him to come down with the disease, but maybe if she’d shown a little more consideration, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry, if she’d waited until he was a little stronger, Marvin wouldn’t have cracked another rib and his body would have had a better chance to heal, and the leukemia might never have happened.