Manny was on the phone to Maxine in Cincinnati. He was at pains to explain that he was on the horns of a dilemma. It had nothing to do with tightness. Maxine had to understand that. He wasn’t tight, he wasn’t not tight. He didn’t enjoy being under an obligation; he was just a guy who was innately uncomfortable when it came to accepting a gift or even being treated to a meal. On the other hand, he didn’t particularly like being taken advantage of either, or that anyone should see him as something of a showboat, so he was just as uncomfortable wrestling for a check. All he wanted, he told Maxine, was to be perceived as a sober, competent, perfectly fair-minded guy. (He’d have loved, for example, to have been appointed to the bench, but did she have any idea what the chances of that happening might be? A snowball’s in hell! No, Manny’d said, they didn’t pick judges from the ranks of mouthpieces who all they did all day was hang around City Hall looking up deeds, checking out titles, hunting up liens.) It was a nice question, a fine point. A professional judgment call, finally.
“What’s this about, Manny?” Maxine asked over the Cincinnati long distance.
“Be patient. I’m putting you in the picture.”
“Has this something to do with my mother? Is my mother all right?”
“Hey,” Manny said, “I placed the call. I go at my own pace. Your mother’s all right, and yes, it has something to do with her.”
“Manny, please,” said Maxine.
“Listen,” he said, “the long and the short. I didn’t call you collect. I would have if I was clear in my mind I was taking the case. This is the story. Mom thinks I’m her lawyer. It’s true I represented her, but technically, since you and Frank paid the bills, I’m working for you.”
“I’m not following you, Manny.”
“What, it’s a bad connection? You I hear perfectly. You could be in the next room.
“Listen, sweetheart, maybe you should go with someone else. I may be in over my head here. It’s one thing to help out a woman, could be my older sister, to see does she absolutely have to testify, or can I get her out of it (I couldn’t, she was a material witness), then hold her hand when she goes into court, lend her moral support; another entirely when she asks me to make some cockamamy investigation of this fancy-pants South American mystery man—she says — who may or may not be involved in this whacko-nutso dope scheme operating right here from the penthouse of Building Number One.”
“A dope scheme? Another dope scheme?”
“She says,” said Manny from the building.
And then went on to run down for Maxine, and again for Frank not half an hour later when Maxine called her brother in Pittsburgh and asked him to phone the old real estate lawyer to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what was what.
“Walk me through this, will you, Manny, please? I didn’t entirely understand all Maxine was telling me.”
“Yeah,” Manny said, “I guess I wasn’t absolutely clear. Even in law school I had trouble writing up a brief. I don’t see how they do it, the trial lawyers, make their summations and offer their final arguments. I guess that’s why I never got into litigation.”
He told Mrs. Bliss’s son about the Auveristases open house. He tried to be thorough, for, to be honest, he was just the smallest bit intimidated by this young man, an author and professor who on his occasional trips to Florida to spend some time with his mother sometimes struck him as cool, distant, even impatient with the people in the Towers who were only trying to be helpful, after all. He found the kid a little too haughty for his own good if you asked him, a little too quiet. One time Manny had attempted to reassure him. “Don’t be so standoffish,” he’d said, “they’re just showing off some of their famous Southern hospitality.”
So he tried to be thorough, walking the little asshole through the evening in the penthouse, past the buffet table, the open bar where you could ask the two mixologists for any drink you could think of, no matter what, and they would make it for you, describing the abundant assortment of hors d’oeuvres that the caterers or servants or whoever they were passed around all night even after the buffet supper was laid out, until you wouldn’t think anyone could take another bite into their mouth, no matter how delicious.
Which was why, he told Frank, he suspected there might actually be something to the old woman’s story after all.
“I mean,” Manny said, “we don’t hear a peep from these so-called South Americans in a month of Sundays, and then, tra-la-la, fa-la-lah, they’re all over the old lady with their soft drinks and mystery meats. Do you know how many varieties of coffee there had to be there?”
Manny had been walking him through it by induction, but Frank seemed confused.
“Listen to me, Manny…” Frank said.
“It ain’t proof, it isn’t the smoking gun,” Manny admitted, “but think about it, that’s all I’m asking. The ostentation. That affair. That affair had to cost them twice what we spend on our galas and Saturday night card parties all year. Who throws around that kind of money on an open house? Drug dealers! And what did he say to Mother in his very own words? ‘I’m an importer!’ ”
“Manny…”
“Even she picked up on it.”
“My mother’s under a lot of pressure.”
Then, quite suddenly, Manny lowered his voice. The bizarre impression Frank, a thousand miles off, got from his tone was that of a man to whom it had just occurred that his phone was bugged and, to defeat the device, had resorted to whispering. Frank giggled.
Manny from the building was more hurt than shocked. Shocked, why should he be shocked? He considered the source. The little prick was a prick.
“Hey,” Manny, still sotto voce, said, “put anybody you want on the case. It ain’t exactly as if I was on retainer. Get your high-priced, toney, Palm Beach lawyer back, the one you wanted to get Mother’s subpoena quashed. Get her. If you can talk her into even coming to Miami Beach!”
Maybe it was because he’d been through it four times by now. Once when Dorothy had told him about it the night of the famous open house, twice when he tried to organize his thoughts about the information he’d been given, a third time when he’d explained to Maxine what her mother had told him, and now repeating the facts of the matter to Frank. But he’d raised his voice again. He’d journeyed in the four accounts from disbelief to skepticism through a rattier rattled, scattered objectivity till he’d finally broken through on the other side to a sort of neutral passion as he’d laid their cards — his and Mrs. Bliss’s — on the table during his last go-round for the benefit of the creep.
Could it be he was a better lawyer than he’d thought? Could it be that he’d been bamboozled by all the glamour-pusses of his profession, the big corporation hotshots with their three- and four-hundred-buck-an-hour fees, all those flamboyant, wild-west criminal lawyers with their string ties and ten-gallon hats, the famous ACLU and lost-cause hotdogs who’d have defended Hitler himself if the price was right or the press and TV cameras were watching? Hey, he’d passed the same bar exams they had, and courtroom or no courtroom, had satisfied just as many clients with the careful contracts he’d drawn up for them for their real estate deals, commercial as well as residential. So maybe all there was to being a good lawyer or working up an argument was just to go over it often enough until you began to believe it yourself.
“Well, thanks for filling me in, Manny,” Frank said. “I’ll talk it over with my sister, see what she has to say. We’ll get back to you.”
“Sure,” he said. “And when you do,” Manny suggested slyly, “ask how she explains the car?”
Because the fact was the ’78 Buick LeSabre was gone. One minute it had been there in the garage and the next it had vanished, a ton or so of locked-up, bolted-down metal carried off, disappeared, pffft, just like that!
He knew well enough what he must have sounded like to them.
A troublemaker. A busybody. Some self-important Mr. Buttinsky. And in fact, though he resented it, he could hardly blame them. Sometimes, down here, retired not just from the practice of law but from the forty-or-so-year pressure of building not just a professional life, or even a family one, but the constant, minute-to-minute routine of putting together a character, assembling out of little notes and pieces of the past — significant betrayals, deaths, yearnings, successes, meaningful disappointments, and sudden gushers of grace and bounty — some strange, fearful archaeology of the present, the Self to Now, as it were, like a synopsis, some queer, running quiddity of you-ness like a flavor bonded into the bones, skin, and flesh of an animal. Of course the curse of such guys was that they didn’t know how to retire. Or when to quit.
Hadn’t Manny run into these fellows himself? There seemed to be at least one on every floor of each building in the Towers. Tommy Auveristas himself, if he weren’t a dope-smuggling Peruvian killer, might have been such a one, an arranger of favors who insinuated himself into the life of a widowed neighbor; one of those aging Boy Scout types who offered to drive in all the carpools of the quotidian; shlepping their charges to doctors’ offices; dropping them off at supermarkets, beauty parlors, banks, and travel agents; hauling them to airports; picking up their prescriptions for them or organizing their personal affairs. Bloom in Building Three had actually filed an application with the Florida Secretary of State to become a notary public. He paid the fee for the official stamp and seal out of his own pocket and offered his services at no charge — he personally came to their condos — around the Towers complex. “Best investment I ever made,” Bloom, patting his windbreaker where the weight of the heavy kit tugged at its pocket, had once confessed to him. Manny, flushing, knew what he meant. (More than a little jealous of the secrets Bloom must know or, if not secrets exactly — these were people too old and brittle for scandal — then at least the sort of interesting detail that must surely be contained in documents so necessary to the deeds, affidavits, transfers, powers of attorney, and protests of negotiable paper, that they had to be sworn to and witnessed by an official designee of the State.) Subtly, over time, making themselves indispensable, breeding a kind of dependency, a sort of familiar, a sort of super who changed locks and replaced washers and often as not had their own keys to the lady’s apartment. A certain satisfaction in being these amici curiae to the declining or lonely, heroes of the immediate who filled their days with largely unresented, if sometimes intrusive, kindnesses. In it, Manny guessed, harmlessly, to retain at least a little of the juice spilled from the bottom of what had once been a full-enough life in the bygone days before exile, retired not just from the practice of law but of character, too, that forty-or-so-year stint of dependable quiddity, individual as the intimate smell of one’s trousers and shirts.
Poor shmuck didn’t know what to count as a billable hour. Finally decided as he went around eating his liver waiting on the cold day in hell for Frank or Maxine to get back to him — ha ha, hoo hoo, and next year in Jerusalem — that all he’d say, if they asked, which they wouldn’t, was that all he ever was was a small-timer, a lousy little Detroit real estate lawyer, and that until their mom he’d never put in a minute of pro bono in his life and that this was his chance, Frank, my pleasure, Maxine, though he might call them collect once in a while to keep them posted. No no, that wasn’t necessary, he already had a large-screen TV, he already had a fine stereo, he already had a Mont Blanc pen, but if they insisted, if it made them more comfortable, then sure, they could give him dinner once the dust settled and Mother was easy again in her heart.
As it happened, he didn’t have to wait long after all. Frank and Maxine were there not long after he’d placed his first phone call to the DEA people.
He looked them up in the Miami Southern Bell white pages. Quite frankly, he was surprised that they were actually listed. The CIA was listed, too. So was NASA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This brought home to Manny from the building that law degree or no law degree, senior citizen or no senior citizen, Golden Ager or no Golden Ager, just exactly what a naive babe-in-the-woods he actually was. He even had second thoughts about his mission. Here he was, proposing to go up pro bono against possible drug lords, dances with assholes, with nothing to be gained except the thrill of the chase. He was a married man, he had grandchildren, responsibilities. He and his wife were hosting the seder this year, ten people. Flying down — his treat — his graduate student daughter-in-law, his thirty-eight-year-old, out-of-work, house-husband son and their two vildeh chei-eh; his sister and brother-in-law — also in Florida, Jacksonville not Miami — and a couple of old people from South Beach one of the Jewish agencies would be sending over — a matched pair of personal Elijahs. (It was his wife’s idea; Manny hated the idea of having strangers in his home, no matter how old they were.) So it wasn’t as if he needed the additional aggravation.
Personally, if you want to know, like a lot of the people down here, the strangers from South Beach, and even Mrs. Ted Bliss herself, Manny was a little terrified of the very idea of Florida. Hey, who’s fooling who? Nobody got out of this place alive. It was like that place in Shakespeare from whose bourn no traveler returned.
Was that why he did it? Was that why? Him and all the other old farts, the buttinskies and busybodys, that crew of Boy Scouts, shleppers, and superannuated crossing guards — all that gung-ho varsity of amici curiae? For the last-minute letters their good deeds might earn them? Not the thrill of the chase at all, finally, so much as the just pure clean pro bono of it? Was that what all that tasteless, vaudeville clothing they wore was all about — their Bermuda gatkes and Hawaiian Punch shirts? Their benevolent dress code like the bright colors and cute cuddlies calming the walls on the terminal ward of a children’s hospital.
So he placed that first phone call to the agency. Getting, of course, exactly what he expected to get, talking, or listening rather, to a machine with its usual, almost infinite menu of options. “Thank you for calling the Drug Enforcement Agency. Our hours, Monday to Friday, are blah blah blah. For such-and-such information please press one; for such-and-so please press two; for so-and-such please press three; for…” He listened through about a dozen options until the machine, he thought a bit impatiently, told him that if he was calling from a rotary phone he should stay on the line and an operator would get to him as soon as it was his turn. (Manny was fascinated by the DEA’s choice of canned music.) It had already been established that he was naive, a babe-in-the-woods, but he was no dummy. He realized that no one calling the main number of the DEA on that or any other day would have any better idea than Manny had from the various choices, which went by too swiftly anyway, which button to press, that they would all be staying on the line. He hung up, called again, and, for no better reason than that it was the number of Mrs. Ted Bliss’s building, pressed one.
He explained to some employee in the Anonymous Tips Department that he was interested in finding out why a certain party’s car that had been last seen in the parking garage of this particular address he happened to know of had been suddenly been removed from the premises.
“Who is this?” asked the guy in Anonymous Tips.
“A friend of the family.”
“Unless you can be more specific…” the bureaucrat said.
He was Mrs. Bliss’s counsel now and acting under the Midwest real estate bar association’s scrupulous injunction to do no harm. He didn’t want to get his client in Dutch. And he was terrified, a self-confessed, small-time old-timer from the state of Michigan who’d earned his law degree from a night school that shared not only the same building but often the same classrooms with a local business college, so that it had been not just his but the experience of several of his classmates, too, that they frequently met the girls they would marry there, striking up their first halting conversations with them during that brief milling about in the halls between classes, the seven or eight minutes between the time Beginning Shorthand or Advanced Typing was letting out and Torts or Contracts was about to start up, an ideal symbiosis, the future secretaries meeting their future husbands, the future lawyers, the future lawyers courting their future wives and secretaries, but something the least bit provisional and backstairs about these arrangements, so that, well, so that there was a sort of irremediable rip in the fabric of their confidence and courage. Which explained his hesitancy and pure rube fear, and made Manny appreciate the nice irony of his having been connected to a division of the agency that dealt under a promise of the condition of anonymity. But didn’t mitigate a single inch of who he was. In fact, all the more fearful when he gazed down at his brown old arms coming out of the colorful, short-sleeved shirt he wore, the deep tan of a younger, healthier, sportier man, tan above his station, as if there were something not quite on the up-and-up about his appearance. How many Jews, Manny wondered idly, could there even be in the DEA?
And how could he be more specific when what he needed to hear was something he didn’t even want to know?
But he was on the clock, even if it were only a courtesy clock. He came suddenly out of his withering funk, inexplicably energized, inspired. “Put me through to the fella drives that late-model, silver Maserati as a loaner,” Manny demanded sharply.
“Yeah,” said a man, “this is Enoch Eddes.” The voice was hesitant, suspicious, perhaps even a little fearful. Manny guessed it was unaccustomed to taking phone calls from members of the public.
“Enoch Eddes, the repo man?”
“What the fuck!”
“Enoch, Enoch,” Manny said as though the man had just broken his heart.
“What the fuck,” Enoch said again, a little more relaxed this time, gentled into a sort of compliance, Manny supposed, by the faintly compromised argot of Manny’s thrown, ventriloquized character. Vaguely it felt good on him, like those first few moments when one tries on new, perfectly shined shoes in a shoe store, but Manny knew he couldn’t maintain it or hope to keep pace with this trained professional. In a few seconds it would begin to pinch and he would revert to his old Manny-from-the-building self.
So he swung for the fences. He had to.
“Enoch,” he said, “please.”
“Who is this?” the DEA guy said.
“Hey,” Manny said very softly, “hey, Enoch, relax. I’m a repo man, too. Tommy Auveristas has turned you over to me.”
“Who?” Eddes asked, genuinely puzzled, totally, it seemed to Manny, without guile or affectation, nothing left of his own assumed character and more innocent than Manny could ever have imagined, as innocent, perhaps, as he’d been when he’d eaten his breakfast in his suburb that morning, when he’d hugged his kids and pecked his wife on the cheek, his own shoes pinching first and crying uncle in his surprised stupidity. “Who did you say?”
“I think,” said Manny from the building, “I may have reached a wrong number,” and hung up.
Later, Manny told Mrs. Ted Bliss’s children, they’d all have a good laugh over it. And by the way, he told them, smiling, they were off the hook and didn’t owe him dinner after all.
“Dinner?” Frank said.
“Well, I didn’t do anything to earn it, did I? What did I do, place a couple of phone calls to the Drug Enforcement Agency? Please. It’s nothing. You see, Frank, you see, Maxine, did I lie? Did I? I am a friend of the family. Just another good neighbor even if I’m not from South America and all I ever was was a Detroit real estate lawyer. It was my pleasure. It really was. I don’t say I wasn’t nervous. I was plenty nervous. You don’t live in the greater Miami area, you don’t know. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen reports on TV, all those Haitian and Cuban boatload exposés, the drug wars and race riots, the spring break orgies and savings and loan firesalers, all the Portuguese man-of-war alerts — unless you live down here and take the paper you have no idea what goes on. There are migrant workers not an hour away who live in conditions South African blacks would not envy. I’m telling you the truth, Maxine and Frank. You think it’s all golf and fishing and fun in the sun? You have a picture in your head of beautiful weather, round-the-clock security guards, and moderate-priced, outside cabins on three-day getaway cruises to the islands. What the hell do you know?”
Maxine rather enjoyed listening to him. He was a silly, heavily cologned, pretentious fool, but at least he was on the scene down there, a self-proclaimed stand-up sort in her mother’s corner. If he knew too much about her business, well, who else did the woman have? She wouldn’t hear of selling the condo and coming to live with them in Cincinnati. God knows how many times Maxine had invited her to. It was exasperating. If she didn’t want to be a burden, she would have understood. If she treasured her independence. If she’d made friends with whom she was particularly comfortable. But keeping the place up so that when she died Frank and Maxine and their dead brother Marvin’s fatherless children should have an inheritance? A roof over their heads? This was a reason? Not that Maxine wasn’t secretly glad — and not so secretly, she’d discussed it with George — that Dorothy refused to take her up on it, but let’s face it, her mother was getting to an age when sooner or later — probably later, her health, knock wood, was pretty good but there were no guarantees — something would have to give. A way would have to be found to deal with her physical needs. Manny from the building was a nice enough guy, but let’s face it, fair-weather friend was written all over him. And why shouldn’t it be? He had a wife, Rosie, who was decent enough, and God knows she’d always seemed willing to put herself out, but quite frankly had to be at least a little conflicted where Maxine’s mother was concerned. And who could blame her, all the time he’d spent with her in the year since Alcibiades Chitral’s trial?
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 craziest 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.