Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  “That’s silly,” Ted Bliss said. “How was it Ellen’s fault? This was something going on in his blood.”

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

  They accepted the diagnosis, they just never got used to it. Just as, God forgive her (though she knew better and had known better even at the top of her anger and denial as she pronounced her awful thoughts about Ellen to Ted), to this day she couldn’t get past the idea that if his wife had taken better care of him, if all of them had, her son might be alive today.

  So it was his death she never got used to.

  Mrs. Bliss wasn’t ignorant greenhorn enough not to understand the nature of her son’s disease. The white cells were amok in his blood, she told him. The chozzers gobbled up the red cells like there was no tomorrow. They had a picnic with him.

  “I never gave in to them,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “It wasn’t the easiest thing because, let’s face it, your mother was right, I am a greenhorn. What did I know about blood counts? About platelets? Did I know what a leukocyte was?”

  So she made it her business. Not just to sit there. Not just to feel his fever or wipe his brow. She made it her business to study the numbers, to live and die by the numbers. Just like her son, olov hasholem, and learned to work the proportions between the white cells and red cells as if she were measuring out a recipe. And thought, If she knew, if she understood…

  “Because I never believed he would die,” Mrs. Bliss said. “This I never believed.”

  And spoke to Myers. And asked if everything that could be done was being done. Because didn’t she read in the papers and see on TV that breakthroughs happened all the time, that cures for this and cures for that were just around the corner? She wanted him to tell her where, in the city, they were doing the best work. The city? The country, the world! Myers, God bless him, was a good man but very conservative. Maybe not, Mrs. Bliss thought, up on everything. He told her, ‘Dorothy, dear, he’s too sick to be moved.’

  “ ‘So if he lays still he’ll get better?’

  “ ‘Dorothy, he’s not going to get better.’

  “You think I accepted that? You think Grandpa or your mother did? We looked it up, we asked around, and what everyone told us was that if, God forbid, you had to be sick the best place to be was the University of Chicago hospital. So that’s where we put him, in Billings, where they were doing advanced work in the field, experimental, giving special treatments which the insurance company wasn’t willing to pay for, and where Myers himself wasn’t even on the staff, where he had to have special permission—wait a minute, it wasn’t a pass—where he had to have reciprocity, reciprocity, just for permission to look in on him.”

  So that’s where they moved him, and called in the highest-priced Nobel prize specialists to let them have a go at him.

  “But you know? It wasn’t they didn’t know what they were doing. They tried the latest chemotherapies on him. One drug Marvin was the first patient in the state of Illinois to receive it. And there were definite benefits. His white count never looked better.

  “Only…

  “Only…”

  “Only what, Grandma?”

  “Barry, he was dying.”

  “Oh, Grandma,” he said.

  “We didn’t know what to do.” Mrs. Ted Bliss sighed.

  “Oh, Grandma.”

  “That was when we were there practically around the clock. The room was so crowded you almost couldn’t breathe. We didn’t even spell each other anymore. If we went out now it wasn’t for a bite or to get a cup of coffee. It was to give the air a chance to recirculate.”

  “Oh, Grandma.”

  She went out to the waiting room this one time. She didn’t pick up even a magazine. There was a newspaper. She hadn’t seen a paper in days. The headline was in letters as thick as your arm. She looked but couldn’t take any of it in. She remembered thinking, Something important has happened, but what it was, or who it had happened to, she still couldn’t tell you. The year was a blur. The only current event she could remember was her son.

  “There was a man in the waiting room. I’d seen him before, so naturally I thought he was a close friend or relative of one of the other patients on the floor. Though I’d never said a word to him. Listen, I didn’t look at a magazine, I couldn’t take in a headline. You think I was in the mood to make small talk with a stranger?”

  She must have been crying. Sure, she must have been crying, because all of a sudden the man got up from where he was sitting and crossed the waiting room to where Dorothy was.

  “ ‘How’s your son today, Mrs. Bliss,’ he says, ‘not so good?’

  “I’d never spoken to him. How did he know my name? How did he know I was Marvin’s mother? He could have been reading my mind. He introduced himself, he gave me his card.”

  His name was Rabbi Solon Beinfeld, and if she hadn’t been holding the card in her hand she’d never have believed he was a rabbi. He looked more like a lawyer, or a businessman, or even one of the doctors. He didn’t even look particularly Jewish to her if you want to know. And he could have been reading her mind again because he explained how he was the official chaplain for all the Jewish patients in Billings Hospital. She asked him, well, if he was the chaplain how come when she saw him he was always sitting in the waiting room.

  “ ‘Patients are often self-conscious. Sometimes I embarrass them. And though I’m here to listen to them, or counsel them, it’s always an awkward situation. The waiting room is where I pray for them.’

  “And you know, Barry, when he said that that’s the first time I really believed he was a rabbi, or even a chaplain. I mean, there we were, in Billings Hospital on the Midway campus of the University of Chicago, with all its high-powered specialists. What was I expecting, that he’d be dressed like a Hasid in a big black hat and have a long beard and side curls with tzitzit peeking out from under his vest? The only thing that surprised me was that he wasn’t wearing a long white lab coat.”

  He wanted to know if she was Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed.

  He was a rabbi, a man. She wanted to please him.

  “I bentsh licht,” she said, and looked down modestly. He waited for her to go on. “In Russia,” she admitted, “girls didn’t always get a Jewish education. I don’t read the Hebrew.”

  Suddenly he seemed uneasy, and Mrs. Bliss put two and two together. It was awkward, he’d said. He was there to listen to patients, to counsel them. What could he tell Marvin, to what would he listen—his cries and whimpers, his demands for injections?

  He was there in the waiting room praying for her son, praying for Marvin and he was right, she was embarrassed. She’d put two and two together. More than from the evidence of his only intermittently improved blood counts or his brief pain-free periods when he seemed not only better but actually perky, or from those rarer and rarer times when the blood seemed returned to his cheeks (the red returning blood cells from the higher and higher doses of the heroic new devastating chemotherapies and almost steady transfusions he was getting now) all the more bright for the flat, colorless palette of his pale illness, it was her knowledge of the chaplain rabbi’s prayers for her son that depleted her hope, and made her want to die.

  “You know something I don’t know, Chaplain?” Mrs. Bliss asked almost viciously.

  “No,” he said sadly, “I think you know everything.”

  He was not only a man, he was a rabbi, and despite her heartbreak, Mrs. Bliss still wished to please him.

  “It was all I could do not to let myself cry out in front of him. I knew he was a rabbi. I knew it was his business and that this was the way he made his living, just like Grandpa was a butcher and you’re an automobile mechanic,” she told her grandson. “Still, it was all I could do not to run away from him or stop myself from howling in the street.

  “I didn’t completely trust Myers? I wanted a second opinion? All right, here it was. The chaplain practically praying over your father’s body right out in t
he hall!

  “It was too much to ask. What, I shouldn’t break down? I wasn’t entitled? Character is a terrible thing,” she said. “Who knows who knew what back there in Marvin’s room? If I screamed now they’d hear me and come running to see. Maybe your father himself would hear me and know how it was with him. Because it’s true what they say, ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’ What right did I have to take that away from anybody just because I’d put two and two together and understood he was a goner?

  “Character is a terrible thing. Because all it is is habit.

  “So instead of screaming, I started to moan.

  “ ‘Marvin!’ I moaned. ‘Marvin, Marvin, Marvin! Oy Marvin. Marvin, my poor precious baby!’

  “ ‘Shah!’ the rabbi says. ‘Shah! Shah!’ And actually touches his finger to my lips. I couldn’t have been more amazed than if he’d kissed me!

  “ ‘Shah!’ he says again, quiet now. ‘Shh, shh.’

  “ ‘He’s my son,’ I say.

  “ ‘Don’t call his name.’

  “ ‘Don’t call his name? Marvin’s my oldest. He’s going to die. I shouldn’t say Marvin?’

  “ ‘Don’t say his name!’ It’s a command. This guy is commanding me not to cry out the name of my dying baby.

  “ ‘Your boy,’ he says, ‘what is this fellow’s Hebrew name?’

  “ ‘Marvin’s Hebrew name—’ ”

  “ ‘Don’t say his name! Is this chap’s Hebrew name Moishe?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘Moishe,’ ”

  Which is when Beinfeld explained it to her.

  When a person is supposed to die, he told her, God sends out the Angel of Death to look for the person. Now the Angel of Death is the stupidest of all the angels, and sometimes, not always, he can be fooled. Doctors often fool the angel with certain operations, or at times with special medicines. He’s a stupid angel, yes, but not a complete idiot. He’s been around the block and he’s picked up a thing or two. Only the thing of it is that of all God’s angels he’s not only the stupidest but the busiest. He hasn’t got time to hang around trying to figure out how to undo all that the doctors have done for sick people with their operations and special medicines. Which is why certain patients go—swoosh—just like that, and others, like Moishe, linger on for a year or more.

  All he had to go on, Beinfeld told her, was a list of names. In certain respects he wasn’t all that much different from a postman who has to match up the name of the addressee with the name on the mailbox.

  “ ‘This party of whom we were speaking,’ the rabbi says, ‘tell me, he has a middle name?’

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘Whisper it to me.’

  “ ‘Sam. Shmuel.’

  “ ‘Harry,’ he says. ‘Good. In Hebrew, Herschel.’ ”

  So Beinfeld changed his name. They went into Barry’s dad’s room, and Dorothy introduced him and explained to everyone what was going to happen. It may have been the first time the chaplain had ever seen who he’d been praying for. He made out a paper. He even had the hospital type up a different band and put it around Moishe Herschel Bliss’s wrist. They did a new card at the nurses’ station and substituted it for the one on the door outside his room. Beinfeld turned the clipboard around at the foot of the bed holding you know who’s chart on it. Then the rabbi offered up prayers around the bed to spare the invalid’s life.

  Mrs. Bliss hadn’t had a Jewish education; by her own admission she didn’t know Hebrew, and though she had no understanding of what Beinfeld was saying, she caught him repeating Moishe Herschel’s “name” throughout the course of his prayer. Well, she could hardly have missed it, could she, because each time he said it he seemed to say it more loudly as though the Angel of Death were not only stupid but maybe a little deaf, too.

  He signaled the family out of the sickroom and instructed them that if they had to call Marvin by name they call him Moishe Herschel, or Marvin Harry, never Moishe Shmuel or Marvin Sam.

  “ ‘Excuse me, Rabbi,’ your grandfather said.

  “ ‘Yes?’

  “ ‘That prayer you prayed.’

  “ ‘Yes?’

  “ ‘Didn’t you pray it to God?’

  “ ‘To God, yes. To God.’

  “ ‘And this Angel of Death, ain’t he God’s angel?’

  “ ‘Of course. God’s angel. So?’

  “ ‘So,’ ” said Ted Bliss, “ ‘don’t the left hand know what the right hand is doing?’ ”

  Which took the wind out. Out of his grandmother, too.

  “Except,” Mrs. Bliss said, “I was his mother. Didn’t I make a fuss with Myers? Didn’t I go over his head to put Marvin into Billings? Where they were doing the advanced work, the special, experimental treatments? We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do? So maybe what that chaplain rabbi was trying to do on a spiritual level was just as much in the experimental stage as what those doctors were trying to do on the scientific one. We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do?”

  “Oh, Grandma.”

  “Only I could never say it,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “Only I could never say it, say Moishe Herschel. He was my first-born, he was my son. I couldn’t call him different.”

  “You called him Marvin?”

  “I didn’t call him anything,” she said, and wept while her grandson tried to comfort her.

  Later that night, when the guests had all gone home, and the house was quite dark and everyone was sleeping, Mrs. Bliss woke from her sleep. She was very thirsty. She put on her house slippers and, making no noise lest she rouse somebody, went to the kitchen. She meant to get a glass of water at the sink and had to turn on the light to see what she was doing. She was astonished. May had made no effort to wash the dishes. Mrs. Bliss would have started them herself but was afraid, one, that she’d make too much noise and wake them up upstairs and, two, that May would take it as a reflection on her housekeeping when she came down the next morning to find everything cleaned and put away. Mrs. Bliss took pride in being a model mother-in-law. She stayed out of people’s way, kept her opinions to herself, she didn’t interfere.

  So she decided to get her drink of water and go back to bed. Except every surface was covered with dirty dishes, she couldn’t see a clean glass anywhere. So she went to the cabinet where she thought her daughter-in-law might keep her everyday water glasses. She reached overhead and opened the cabinet.

  It was filled with unused Yortzeit candles, glasses filled almost to their brims with a dry white wax and they must, Mrs. Bliss thought, forgiving them all, have been waiting on the anniversaries of everybody’s death.

  And still later that night, when she’d drunk her fill from the cold water tap in May’s kitchen, when she’d quenched her thirst and slaked at least a little of her disappointment at the remarkable though oddly reassuring sight of the well-stocked cupboard of all those candles, and she was once again back in the perfectly comfortable bed in the perfectly comfortable little first-floor guest room Frank and May had set up for her, you’d think, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, I’d be able to sleep. You’d think, she thought, that after what I told Barry about his father’s last days, it would be like a weight off my back. She saw that the poor kid hadn’t known bubkes, and speculated that it was probably a sin to keep things from people who needed to know them more than you needed the distraction and comfort you got from not having to explain everything. It was a kind of protection racket they ran on each other, but the only ones they protected were themselves. Even Marvin, olov hasholem, had been kept in the dark about what was what with him and was never brought up to speed on how he was really doing. They conducted themselves that year like they were managing a cover-up. Did this one know what that one knew? How could they keep so-and-so from finding out such-and-such? It wasn’t power they sought, advantage, only the control of information, charging themselves with a sort of damage control.

  And she still couldn’t understand why Frank ha
d become so religious, or what the real story was—throw out the flim-flam—why—a man his age—had ever left Pittsburgh. She was, there in the dark, in the dark, Mrs. Bliss was, about her children’s lives. As much as they were in the dark about hers. People were through with each other before they were through with each other, and explaining yourself was just too much trouble. How could she tell them, for example, that Junior Yellin was back in her life, or that they’d been talking about going on a cruise together some day, staying on the seafront property of Caribbean resort hotels, or that maybe, to cut down on costs, they’d been thinking about sharing the same cabin, the same room? How could she speak of the Toibb mystery, or of Hector Camerando and what he’d offered to do for her, or ever hope to explain why, after what he’d put her through, or laid on the line what he thought about Jews, she’d given Alcibiades Chitral the hundred dollars, or her visit to the prison, or the question of the roses, or even, for that matter, her conversation with the driver who took her into the Everglades? Or so much as hint at the crush a woman her age could have on Tommy Auveristas, or the fact that Manny was no longer in a position to help her, their trusted, very own envoy and in loco parentis guy in south Florida? They wouldn’t have understood anything, anything. They wouldn’t have understood, she didn’t herself, how even peripheral people—Louise Munez, Rita de Janeiro—had taken up the space in her life that they had once rightfully occupied. Not anything, none of it, nothing, anything at all, as in the dark about her life in south Florida as she was about theirs in any of the half-dozen places they lived their own mysterious lives.

  NINE

  Dorothy was surprised by the paltry turnout of mourners at Manny from the building’s funeral. Compared to the great hosts of people only three or four years earlier who’d not only come to the chapel to pay their respects when Rosie lost her life but come out again the following day for the funeral service and gone on to the cemetery itself, many of them on walkers or in wheelchairs, to witness the burial proper, Manny’s obsequies were not merely negligible, they were all but intangible. Rosie’s shivah had broken house records. So, of course, did Manny’s, but from the wrong end of the telescope. One of the few people who showed up at Manny’s apartment—notices had been posted in each of the Towers’ game rooms—for Manny’s pathetically small farewell party looked around and remarked to the young man who’d opened the door for him, “Jeesh, this seems to be just about the coldest ticket in town, don’t it?” It was unfortunate that the person to whom he made the remark was Manny’s only attending relative, and when he was informed, by Mrs. Bliss as it happened, to whom he had passed his comment, he could have bitten his tongue in half.