She took him at his word. She bet sparingly, did not grow impatient or, at least in a conventional sense, greedy, and two years later was still in the same condo.
She was very proud of this. It became a sort of referent of her character, a means by which she took her moral temperature. Mrs. Bliss knew her stuff. The lessons of those caper crooks in movies was not lost on her, those essentially victimless-crime villains enjoined to hold their horses, to wait out the statute of limitations before they cashed in on their shady bonanzas. Always, in these shows, one or another of the partners couldn’t hold out, snapped, failed the rest, and drew down destruction on their mutual enterprise. And, since she had no other partners, Mrs. Bliss felt all the better about her self-control.
If she didn’t feel entirely honorable she had only her embarrassment to blame, her modesty; even, in a way, another aspect of what wasn’t even personality anymore so much as a matter of some long-standing tidiness of spirit. It would, after all, have required her actually to call Hector Camerando to ask him to give her the winner of a particular match, a specific race, and she could no more have abused this privilege than she could have asked her husband for extra money to run the household. Not that either of them would have refused. It was her need not to appear needy, a saving of face, that held her bets down. Indeed, if she hadn’t infrequently run into Hector Camerando — he hadn’t moved, he still lived in the Towers; Louise Munez’s information was either faulty or he’d changed his mind — she might never have placed a bet at all. Yet always on the rare occasions he saw her he chastised her for not asking for his tips. That he hadn’t forgotten his offer made him, well, heroic to Dorothy and, on these occasions, she almost always felt obliged to place a bet or, rather, allowed him to place one for her. The first time this happened she hadn’t even known she’d won until he came to her door to hand her her winnings. He gave her four hundred dollars.
“So much? Why so much?”
“It was a lock. A dead-solid certainty. The dog went off at twenty to one. I put down twenty dollars for you.”
Surprisingly, her first reaction was one of anger, her second of shame, because although she said nothing to indicate her disappointment that if it was such a certainty he could easily have put down more than twenty dollars, she knew he’d seen the momentary blister of rage on her face. “Wait,” she said. Then, to cover her confusion, she excused herself and went off to get her purse. When she returned Camerando thought she had been looking for a place to put the money; instead she began to fumble with the bills in her wallet. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to hold them up close to her face. “Here,” Mrs. Bliss said, and handed Camerando a ten, a five, and five singles.
“What’s this?” Hector said.
“The twenty dollars you put down for me.”
She knew they weren’t quits, but it was the best she could think to do at the time.
Afterward, she tried to avoid him. She really did. And, once, just as she was leaving the apartment of a Towers friend she had been visiting and she spotted him step out of an elevator and walk down the corridor toward her, she quickly reversed fields and turned back to reenter the apartment she had left just seconds before. She had moved with such agility — this would have been when she was in her early seventies — that she quite startled her friend who was still in the process of shutting the door. “Oh,” Dorothy said, “did I leave my purse here? I think I left my purse here.”
“Dorothy,” said her friend, “what’s wrong, sweetheart? You’re carrying your purse. It’s right there on your arm.”
“Is it? Oh, my,” she explained, “it’s been like that all day. I’m running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Maybe you should say something to Robins.”
“Robins?” said Mrs. Bliss. “No, it’s nothing. You don’t see a doctor because once in a while you’re absentminded.”
When she thought it was safe, she bade her friend goodbye a second time and stepped out again into the hallway. She could feel the woman watching her and turned back to look. Her friend smiled broadly and made an exaggerated gesture in the direction of the elevator as if to assure Dorothy she was headed in the right direction.
Is that how they thought of her? Like she was an idiot? She’d give them idiot. She bet she could spot most of them the names of ten people who lived in the Towers and come up with more of their buildings, floors, and apartment numbers than anyone. She could have been the damn postman here!
It occurred, of course, that she could have given that oysvorf, her friend so-called, something to think about. All she had to do was explain Camerando and why she was trying to avoid him.
Then they’d really have me going to the doctors, Dorothy thought, and giggled. Running away from some tall, dark, and handsome character who was trying to force money on her without, except for lifting her hands to receive it, her lifting her hands.
“You’re too proud,” they’d say, “introduce me!”
But she wasn’t. Too proud, that is. It had nothing to do with pride. Nor, like so many of these widowed, tummy-tucked, liposuctioned, double-dentured, face-lifted, hair-dyed, foolish old husband hunters, the Never-Too-Late brigade, was she looking for a man, or a boyfriend, or even a companion with whom she could go to a movie. In Mrs. Ted Bliss’s experience, it wasn’t true what they told you, the experts, the AARP people, all the high-powered gerontologists and aging-gracefully crowd — that desire burned a hole in your pocket even on your deathbed. Speaking personally, she hadn’t felt that way about a man since Ted, olov hasholem, had lost his life. Or even, if you want to know, since the time his cancer was first diagnosed. Well, she’d been afraid of hurting him and, more shamefully, of his hurting her, of her contracting, though she knew better, a piece of his illness.
And, if you had to know all the truth, she’d never so much as touched herself, not once, not in her whole life. So, as far as Mrs. Bliss was concerned, it was bunk, and they were full of it if they said that the sex drive in a healthy person didn’t die. What, she wasn’t healthy? She was healthy. She was plenty healthy. It was those others, the oversexed ones, who couldn’t accept that there was a time and a place for everything and went on searching for the fountain of youth long after it ceased to be appropriate.
Like her friend, who’d only have snickered and kidded her about having a fancy man if she so much as said a word about Camerando.
But even that wasn’t the reason she not only kept Hector Camerando’s name out of the picture but took actual pains to avoid him. She was saving him. He was money in the bank, something she’d set aside for a rainy day, and she was, she liked to think, playing him like some of the men in the Towers played the stock market.
Now Dorothy was no fool. Just as she knew there was a time and a place for everything, she understood, without ever having come across the actual words, the notion that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood, et cetera. He might be riding high right now with his Basques and his greyhounds, but she had known plenty of his type back in Chicago, high rollers, heavy winners and losers in a thousand enterprises, men, competitors of Ted’s who followed the trends and locations like dowsers, and opened stores and businesses first in this place, then in that, who had buildings, sold them here, bought them there — wiseguys, into the rackets some of them, always with some new deal on the books, mavins one day, bankrupts the next, but make no mistake, people you had to take seriously, men who always seemed to have good reasons for what they did. Ted, who’d lost his life, had never been one of them, knock wood and thank God. He told Dorothy that what it finally came down to was a failure of nerve, and asked her forgiveness as if, in a way, he held her responsible, their three, then two, children, his family responsibilities. Only one time, during the war, when he splurged and bought the farm in Michigan where he raised and slaughtered his own cattle to sell on the black market, had he behaved otherwise. It wasn’t Dorothy, though he used her as an excuse to sell it at a loss only eleven months after he bought it. They’d made money hand over fist; he’d had no reason to sell. It was his failure of nerve and not her complaints about having to live on a place that morning to night stank of cow shit and urine and God knows what awful odors of sour milk and fermenting hay. In town, she had turned even the odd stares of the grauber yung and anti-Semites into reluctant grins with her cheery, preemptive greetings and comments and deliberately clownish ways.
What, they’d never seen Jews before? They thought they had horns, tails? They never dreamed Jews could be comely and clean? If, before going into the little village for supplies, she showered in the infrequently hot water of their primitive bathroom and got herself up in her nicest hats and dresses and furs and nylons and shoes, if she put on her makeup as carefully as she might if she’d been going to synagogue on the highest holiday, it wasn’t to flaunt her beauty or show off her big-city fashions but to defy the epithet of “dirty Jew.” She took the insult not only personally but literally, too, and, drawing on all her old, childish notions of shmutsdread and trayf, meant to get round it literally, by turning herself into a sort of sterile field. (And wasn’t that freezing Michigan village with its wood houses and all its big, powerful goyim and blond, rosy-cheeked shiksas enough like its old Russian counterparts that as soon as she saw it it was like forty years had dropped away from her just like that?) So it wasn’t just for herself that she went to these ridiculous lengths. (To avoid getting shit on them, she wore galoshes over her high heels and removed them, setting them down on the side of the road only after coming within sight of the tiny town.) On the contrary. As far as she was concerned she would have donned overalls and walked all the way into town without so much as bothering to scrape the muck from her boots. No, it was for Ted that she went to extremes, for Marvin and Frank and Maxine. To honor her mother and her father and the memory of all her Jewish relatives and all her Jewish playmates who had ever suffered some Cossack’s insult. To rub her cleanliness in the faces of the gentiles.
Who of course she thought too benighted ever to take her point, but doing it anyway, as much a victim of her own rituals and superstitions as Hector Camerando with his degree-of-difficulty reparations.
Because, for herself, he needn’t have bothered. She’d never have made it an issue between them or thrown it in his face. Sure. She hated the farm, was appalled from the first moment she’d seen it. Which was at night, so how much of its ramshackle and disrepair could she have actually seen? The darkness at the cozy edges of the candlelight was soft, a layered dark of flickering, unfocused textures. Even the chill beyond the thrown heat of their woodstove seemed a sort of complementary, necessary fiction, lending a kind of magic, olly-olly-oxen-free privilege to the room, a port-in-a-storm illusion of harbor. In the morning she could see just how close they’d actually come to shipwreck. What was wooden in the room was splintered, the fragile chairs they sat on just steps up from kindling. The homespun of the curtains that hung above their windows was so dusty it seemed clogged with a kind of powder. Only Marvin, ten or eleven at the time, was excited by their new arrangements. Four-year-old Maxine was frightened by the animal noises. The baby choked on the dust. Ted, as if he’d been born to it, was already out working the barns.
He hadn’t told Dorothy a thing. For months he’d been placing and taking mysterious phone calls at all hours. The voices, if she managed to get to the phone before Ted, were mostly unrecognizable to her. Sometimes they were even female, and once or twice she thought they may have been customers from the store. Another time she thought she distinctly recognized Junior’s voice. She’d even asked, “Junior, is that you?” but he’d hung up without answering her. Junior was Milton, Herbie Yellin’s boy. Nobody knew why he was called Junior. Dorothy had other, less polite names for him. Early on, and for only a very brief time, he’d been the single partner Ted had ever had. Dorothy had never liked him. He was married to a very nice girl and had two beautiful children, but he was a drunk, a heavy gambler, a philanderer, and flirted with every pretty woman who came into the shop. Once, before the holidays, when they’d been very busy and Mrs. Bliss was helping out behind the counter, he even tried to rub up against Dorothy in a disgusting, filthy way.
Now Dorothy wasn’t blind. All butchers were flirts. The female customers seemed to expect it and were flattered by it. (It was good for business, even.) Mrs. Bliss had a theory that she’d mentioned to Ted.
“I think butchers flirt because they’re always working with meat.”
Her husband blushed.
“That’s why, isn’t it? Ted? No, I’m serious.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Bliss. “You hit the nail on the head. Some go for the pot roasts, the rest for the chickens.”
She would have mentioned the incident with Junior, too, but she was afraid of what might happen. Ted was a gentle man, but it wasn’t unknown for partners to use their carving knives in a fit of temper. It wasn’t Junior’s life she feared for but her husband’s. Since he’d touched her she imagined Junior capable of any outrage. If it happened again, though…
And that’s why she was so bothered by those telephone calls at all hours. Dorothy was frightened Ted might be taking up with Junior again. The gonif had stolen from them once (tricks with the books), and though Herbie Yellin, Junior’s father, had made good their losses (or Dorothy might have taken up a carving knife herself and cut him where it would do the most good), she knew he could rob them again. It was in his nature to be a thief, and not just a thief but someone who deliberately went out of his way to betray the people who were closest to him. Look how he treated his wife, or, fallen down drunk, how he must have appeared to his beautiful children. Look what he’d done to Ted, and how he ran to his daddy whenever he got too far behind in his gambling debts. Was it any wonder Mrs. Bliss didn’t want him back in their lives?
But whenever she tried to bring up the subject of the calls with Ted her husband just shrugged and denied that there was anything going on and changed the subject. Sometimes he smiled and winked, conveying that if he really was up to something it wasn’t anything she needed to worry about.
Then he sprang the farm on her!
Then he told her — it was in the old, ruined farmhouse that first night after the children had fallen asleep — that the thing of it was that it was a black-market operation. He knew he could trust her, he said. It was no big deal, he said. It was 1942, probably already the middle of the war, and time to strike while the iron was still hot. It was the first time they’d really ever had any opportunity to cash in big. Fortunes were to be made in meat. And did Dorothy remember what it was like during the Depression, how no one had the money for the better cuts of meat and the only way they’d managed to get by was by eating up half their inventory? And every independent butcher he knew was into it directly or indirectly. Some were taking under the table for monkey business with the ration books. And some were charging whatever the traffic would bear no matter how hard the OPA tried to hold prices down. And some sons of bitches had given up the butcher profession completely and had become full-time ration-stamp counterfeiters. Now that was really a dirty thing to do, and hurt the war effort, and Ted wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What he was trying to accomplish with his little operation was just to go to the source, become the source and set up his own little business. Why let big shots like Swift and Armour and Mr. Hormel Ham soak up all the profits and leave nothing over for the little guy? It was supply and demand, he said. Didn’t Dorothy know anything about supply and demand? It was how business did business, he said, and if Dorothy didn’t understand that even the war effort worked by that principle, then all he could say was that he was offering her a very valuable lesson. “Well,” Ted said, “what do you think?”
“Does Junior Yellin have anything to do with this?”
“Junior’s out of it. He found the place. Then all he did was put me in touch with the guy who owned it.”
“And took a cut, I suppose.”
“He took his commission. He’s entitled to his little commission. Even Junior Yellin has a right to live, Dorothy.”
This last was not something Dorothy entirely agreed with — the philandering, the gambling, the drunkenness, the lovely wife and beautiful kids, the funny business with Ted’s books, the funny business when he tried to try something with her — and although she knew her husband hated anyone speaking ill of his old partner (despite the fact that the no-good had cheated him), she understood that if she found out that Junior still maintained the slightest connection with this new operation, she would say something, she would have to, even if it meant spilling the beans about what had happened to her in back of the case in which the meat was displayed. (Though she understood her husband’s loyalty to Junior. She really did. It was the loyalty of family and, in a way, she shared it. The old loyalty of battle stations and circling wagons — all the closed ranks of blood. The world was humiliating enough. You couldn’t afford to live in a double-dealing world where you thought you were subject to being humiliated by partners, too. Of course old man Yellin had bailed out his boy by making restitution. Of course Ted had not broken up their partnership; of course it had been Herbie Yellin who had insisted that his son, so ruthlessly charged, so mercilessly done in by a partner who actually took the word of the accountant, an outsider, against the needs of a son who if he futzed the books did so out of necessity — those mounting gambling debts and the high price of his high nature with the floozies and bimbos he kept on the side. You came, you sprang to the defense of family. Dorothy understood this and even admired old Yellin for paying them back, then telling them off, and then insisting that it was Junior who had dissolved the partnership. Your dear ones were dear, no matter. Whatever was yours was.
(And if she’d gone to Ted that time and warned him about Junior and that what he pulled on the housewives and customers he had no compunction about pulling on Dorothy, too, then what? Would Ted have had it out with him, or would he have given her his old song and dance about how Junior was an artist, the best man in Chicago with boning knives, paring, carving knives, hacksaws and cleavers, an artist who could trim every last ounce of fat from a steak so that even the T-bones and porterhouses in their display cases, even the stringy briskets, looked like filet mignons, and you couldn’t say to an artist what you could say to an ordinary butcher? He loved her, she knew that, but she wasn’t so anxious to see push come to shove, never mind what she had told herself about carving knives and the temperaments of outraged butchers.)
It wasn’t even the discomfort of their life in the country she objected to, and certainly it wasn’t the problematic criminality of Ted’s being a black marketeer. She was innocent, and naive, and a woman of valor, but she was a wife, too, after all, and a mother with mouths to feed and babes to protect. What, she should be less than the simplest creatures, a lioness with her cubs, say, or a bear with its? So if she wished for the conclusion to the interval of their life on the farm, it was as much for the benefit of her three children as it was for her husband or for herself. Chicago represented an ideal of progress and comfort. It represented the future. Indeed, life in Michigan seemed so like life in Russia to Dorothy (though she could barely recall her girlhood in Russia) that the idea of Ted’s dumping the farm and moving the family back to Illinois seemed as much an ordeal and adventure as contemplating the journey from Russia to the New World must have seemed to her own parents. After only a few months away from the city, Chicago, raised to almost mythic stature, began to take on an atmosphere of enchantment and fable. Mrs. Bliss regaled her children with stories of how water had poured freely from every faucet in their apartment. All you had to do to fill a pitcher for lemonade was turn a tap. A pitcher for lemonade? To run a bath. To run a bath? To flush the toilet! She was a keeper of the flame, Mrs. Ted Bliss. She told them that in Chicago all the streets were paved, and the only paths you ever came across were the trails in Jackson Park or the Forest Preserves. Mail, she reported, was delivered by the postman directly to a letter box in the hall. The radio crackled with static only during thunderstorms. You could get all your programs clear as a bell.
It was the public schools, however, that were the city’s greatest asset. The different grades weren’t all jammed together in a single room, and the children didn’t have to share books. Also, she whispered, in Chicago, it was the goyim who were the exception, and there was a synagogue every three or four blocks.
In the end, though, it wasn’t Mrs. Ted Bliss’s relentless dislike for their farm that sent them back to Chicago. It was that failure of nerve that Ted simultaneously took responsibility for and ventriloquized over to Dorothy that drove them off.
It was the rustlers. He admitted as much to Dorothy.
“Rustlers?”
“What, you think these spindly, broken-down sparrows that pass for cattle around here were hand cared for by Farmer Brown or old McDonald on Michigan Avenue feedlots? They’re runts of the litter rustled off the wrong side of a rancher’s tracks by gangster gangsters in cahoots with gangster cowboys in cahoots with their gangster rancher bosses who winked their eyes and left instructions to leave the gate open.”
She had never heard him so passionate about anything. It was how Ted’s high-roller, go-for-broke pals back in Chicago talked, the mavins and machers butting in on the lines outside shows and in fancy restaurants.
It was his failed nerves whistling in the dark.
“I tell you, Dorothy, Junior Yellin himself couldn’t trick those beeves out into anything resembling anything respectable as steak or maybe even just ordinary hamburger.”
Of the toughs and heavy-lifter moving-men types who came every week or so to drop off their living, stolen, scrawny cattle in exchange for Ted’s slaughtered and dressed beef carcasses, the various rounds, rumps, ribs and roasts, shanks, flanks, chucks, and other moving parts of meat, her husband would whisper, shuddering, that they were the real black marketeers, an almost anonymous, dark lot of men who seemed only a few steps up the evolutionary scale from the very animals in which they dealt. They were the rustlers; dominant males of the herd, they were the ones who with something almost like instinct had a nice feel for just which sacrificial cows and steers the ranchers who owned them and collected insurance on them when they disappeared through those now several times cahooted unlocked gates least minded losing.
They were ugly customers and unnerved Mrs. Bliss, too, whenever they appeared on their rounds. To expedite pickups and deliveries they enlisted Mr. Bliss into helping them with the transfers, transforming her handsome husband, once not only president of the Hyde Park Merchants’ Association but a prominent member, too, of the Council of the Greater South Side Committee for Retail and Growth — a tribal elder of sorts, if not by nature himself one of the flashy, loudmouth speculators and get-rich-quick bunch, then a solid burgher of a man, at least someone who had the ears of the loudmouths, a man whose approval and interest in them they openly sought and even vied for. And now look at him, Mrs. Bliss secretly thought, down on the farm, a good two-hundred-plus miles from the city of Chicago, bowed almost to the breaking point under the weight of the sides of slaughtered meat he carried, the wet, red blood not only staining his white protective aprons beyond the point where his wife could ever get them clean again but the shirt he wore beneath them, and the undershirt he wore beneath that, too.
“Ted, what goes into one pocket from this black market,” Dorothy would tell him, “goes right out the other with what I spend in Clorox and Rinso.”
“Dorothy, it’s almost 1943. It’ll only be a year the war will be over.”
But Ted Bliss’s formula for a short, three- or four-year war was off the mark, of course.
It was November, and the news from the fronts was bleaker and bleaker. Loss of life in the Pacific and Africa was already too heavy. In Europe, our troops hadn’t really engaged the enemy yet. What happened when they finally did was awful to contemplate. What might have been acceptable in a lightninglike war where you got in and got out was one thing, but to continue to be what not even a year ago the papers had already begun to describe as a “war profiteer” was not something Ted Bliss particularly relished, never mind he was making money hand over fist. Also, word was getting out that the quality of his meat (even though everyone knew there was a war on, and that the government was buying up the best cuts for the boys) was going downhill fast. Plus his real fear of the toughs with whom he had to do business. And his fear, too, of the G-men whose pledge it was to shut down operations like his, find the perpetrators, lock them up and throw away the key.
Him? He did these things? The Hyde Park Merchants’ Association prez? Some merchant. The merchant of Venice!
Also, there was no denying the fact of how uncomfortable he’d made Dorothy and the children by shlepping them out to the sticks and making them live in East Kishnif the better part of a year.
“I’m going to sell this place,” he announced to his family one day in late March.
“You are?” Dorothy said.
“Just as soon as I get a reasonable offer.”
“That’s swell, Dad,” his son Marvin said. “I really miss my friends back in Chicago. I don’t fish. You won’t let me hunt. There’s nothing for a boy my age to do up here.”
“Well, you’ll be home soon enough. I’m sorry. I didn’t look before I leaped. I just didn’t think. I didn’t realize how unhappy I was making you all. I thought you’d adjust, but, well, you didn’t. So I’ll wait till I find the right buyer who will give me my price, and then just sell the place.”
Marvin and Maxine ran up to their father, threw their arms around his neck and kissed him. “Oh, Daddy,” Maxine said, “it’s just exactly what I wished for.” Ted Bliss hugged his two children, then leaned over and pulled Frank up on his lap. The toddler squealed in delight.
“Well, Dorothy,” her husband said, “did I give you what you wished for, too?”
“Just what I wished for. You really did, Ted. Hey, thanks a million,” said Dorothy, who knew his nerve had failed and just why, and who had been counting the minutes and hours and all the days, weeks, and months till it would.
And who knew, too, who knew nothing of business and wouldn’t even learn to write a check for at least another forty or so years that he’d already found his buyer, and that it was Junior Yellin, and that whatever the price was they agreed on would be many thousands of dollars less than what Ted had given for it in the first place.
So Hector Camerando was her black market. But one she would hold in abeyance for a while yet, not out of the same cop fear and nerve failure to which Ted, olov hasholem, had been subject (and which she didn’t hold against him, honest to God she didn’t, not for one minute), but because, exactly like Ted, she was waiting for her price, too. And she had to wait because, quite simply, she didn’t know what it was yet.
Had Frank or Maxine wanted for money she’d have withdrawn cash from her S&L and given it to them, whatever they needed. And if they needed more than she had in her account would have closed the account and withdrawn it all, and pressed the money on Camerando, begging him on their behalf to lay it off on the safest, surest, high-odds, long-shot greyhound race or jai alai game he could find, and put it all down for her kids. And if she lost, she lost, he wouldn’t hear boo from her. She wasn’t, she’d have told him, the most educated person, and wasn’t, she’d have admitted, a woman with anything like the sort of knowledge of the world a person her age by rights should be expected to have, yet as God was her witness she’d never bother him again, even though she knew going in there were confidence games — this could be one, she understood that — different scams that occurred, that suckers were born every minute, that you couldn’t get something for nothing, that even widows and orphans were vulnerable, especially widows and orphans, often the first to get hurt, but no matter, if worse came to worst, all he could expect from her was gratitude, thanks for having gone to the trouble.
Though thank God they didn’t. Frank or Maxine. Want for money. They had enough. If not rich then certainly comfortable. Even, comparatively speaking, well-to-do. Her son was chairman of the sociology department at the university. Throw in the royalties from the sale of his textbook (more than three hundred university adoptions to date, plus the book was practically required reading and was on almost all the freshman sociology course reserve lists, plus there were copies in almost all the public libraries, plus there were plans for the book to go into a third edition) and you had all the makings of a nice nest egg. Maxine was no slouch either. Her husband had been with the same insurance company for many years and in virtually every one of them was in the running for its highest-earning agent.
So there was plenty to be thankful for, touch wood. The children all had their health. They weren’t lame, they had no blood or muscle diseases, they didn’t smoke or take drugs, and they were all careful drivers. Donald was smart as a whip, on the dean’s list at his school. Judy was pretty. James, who worked for his father, was learning the business. Barry was an automobile mechanic, but to look at his fingernails you wouldn’t guess it in a million years. So maybe he wasn’t as book smart as his cousins — well, look who’d raised him after poor Marvin died — but he was good with his hands, well, he got that from Ted, and Mrs. Bliss would bet you anything he’d have his own shop one day. Not like most garages, but spic and span, and who’s to say, maybe he got that from his grandmother. Well, they were all good kids, she had nothing to complain of in that department. They were all of them making their way.
She didn’t play favorites. If she had them she’d never admit it, or ever acknowledge, even to herself, which grandchild she’d miss most if all, God forbid, were suddenly taken away. In the love department she was strictly a stickler, steady in her loyalty as the biggest patriot. That was one reason, over the years, she sent everyone the same gift. Never mind age, grades, the value of the dollar, never mind anything, everybody got the same, fair and square, even Steven, no exceptions. What was good for the goose was grease for the gander. Long ago, before Ted passed even, she’d developed a sort of sliding scale based on the particular occasion. Bar and bat mitzvahs, twenty-five dollars; Hanukkah gelt, five dollars; birthdays, ten; grade school, high school, and college graduations, eighteen (for life and luck). For their weddings she gave all her children and grandchildren one hundred dollars, for their anniversaries fifty. Everything equal, no one should think they had an advantage over anyone else.
Well, almost everything equal. To a certain extent (this puzzled the kids, but she never explained her reasons) she made individual exceptions. Barry, for example, had never gone to college. Should he be penalized for not graduating, which would put him eighteen dollars behind his cousins forever? At thirty-four, brilliant Donald was still a bachelor. Wasn’t that heartbreak enough, did he have to suffer financially, too? So, to make a long story short, the upshot was that when she saw him she sometimes slipped Barry a few dollars on the side until he was even with the rest. And she gave Donald extra money, too, a hundred more than his married brother and cousins, and so on and so forth until everybody was all caught up with everyone else. She kept strict accounts and recorded every transaction in a little black date book. You’d think she was saving receipts for the IRS. To tell the truth, it was a big pain in the neck but, what the hell, it was only money, and what else did she have to do?
Though she had a secret fear that she lived with constantly: Suppose one of them should die before their next mitzvah? How could she make it up to them for all the birthdays, anniversaries, and whatnot they would never live to enjoy? How could she even calculate what she owed them? And it occurred to Dorothy that that’s what wills were for, the very idea of inheritance — not to leave your money so that it could be divided up after you died, or pay grief bribes to the survivors. No, not at all. It was to participate, after you died, in their celebrations, to live on in their accomplishments and special occasions. Maybe that was what death and the afterlife were all about. Didn’t a person make a list of the presents they received, of who sent this and who sent that, just so they could write a thank-you note afterward? People never threw those lists away, they kept them always. Dorothy did. To this day she could tell you, just from referring to her papers, who had given them a particular tablecloth or bedspread or pair of candlesticks, whatever, when they were married. Maybe all immortality came down to was the lists you got put down on when you gave away a present.
But was this a reason to go to Camerando? To put together in her old old age enough cash to go on some last big spending spree so that, over and above what she provided for them in her will, she could make one last grand gesture presenting them, not just her children, their husbands, their wives, their children, their husbands, their wives, and so on and so forth, but the entire family, her sisters and brothers, Ted’s, their loved ones, all that extended mishpocheh, with some unlooked for, even uncalled for, auf tzuluchan gift. On the occasion of what? Celebrating what? Why, there wouldn’t even be a list they could mark it down on! How, she wondered, would she even fix on a figure what to send? If she gave Frank, say, x number of dollars, it wouldn’t be hard to fix on the sum that would be proper to give to Maxine, but after that it got trickier. After a certain point love and blood didn’t come in easily discernible fractions, and after another it couldn’t be understood not even if you had all the decimal places in the world to work with!
So her children, who were pretty well fixed and already had enough money, were out, and the grandkids who were all of them making their way, even poor Barry (but she wouldn’t play favorites), were.
This was the problem with holding what Mrs. Bliss didn’t even know was called a “marker,” though she well enough understood that someone like Camerando would expect her to call it in. It wasn’t transferable, and it wasn’t negotiable. It was like holding onto frequent flier miles when you couldn’t make up your mind where to go and weren’t sure if you were up to the trip even if you had a destination.
She obsessed on it, and almost felt like going back to Toibb, her recreational therapeusisist, to see what she should do. Maybe she could spend Camerando’s money on some new interests. Though unless someone like Toibb told her what that might be, she had no new interests. The hard thing, the really rock-bottom tragic thing, was she had no old interests either. She supposed she was in her early seventies now, give or take those two or three irrecoverable, unretrievable years of Mrs. Bliss’s life her mother had so shamelessly given up to the immigration official. Years, she now understood, she might have used to better advantage, planting incipient interests, resources she could, in this twilight, or dusk, or full dark night of her life, have drawn upon now — learned to drive, perhaps, or read better books so she could use a library card, or gotten more out of the papers, reading the editorials even, the columns…anything, really, kept a diary, or written her thoughts down in letters.
She didn’t get such a kick out of cards anymore, and nothing, not the cruises (though she was scheduled to go on one next month and had already paid her nonrefundable deposit), not food, not the Saturday night entertainments in the game room, not movies, not television, was of much interest anymore.
The truth of it — she should bite her tongue — was that even her family, although it would kill them to hear it, no longer interested her so much. As, at bottom, though it didn’t bother her, didn’t cause her to turn a hair, or lose a moment’s sleep over it, she was sure she no longer was of much interest to them either.
Maybe this was why the whole family — her, Frank, Maxine, even the kids, Barry, James, Donald, Judy — were practically burning up the long distance these days, keeping in touch, wig-wagging their desperate messages of furious reassurance, that all was well, the weather fine — that they loved one another and couldn’t wait till the next time they would be together.
She was too old to feel guilty, and supposed herself too near death to count the pennies.
Once or twice she genuinely contemplated suicide. What stayed her hand was the fact that she wasn’t much interested in death either.
And another time, because she was practically going batty from boredom, she went to an unfamiliar restaurant and ate a pork chop. She rather liked the flavor but didn’t think, as it had taken her seventy-four years (give or take) to eat the first, that she would ever order another.
On still another occasion she forced herself to ride the bus not only into downtown Miami (which she hadn’t seen since the night Alcibiades Chitral bought Ted’s car), but on through the Cuban and even black neighborhoods. She didn’t get off, not even when it came to the end of the line. She paid the driver for her return fare and transferred at the big new mall downtown, where she’d never been and did not explore now, and waited for the bus that would take her back to the Towers.
It was a week after her marathon bus ride (she hadn’t peed the whole time she’d been on her expedition, and had had to hold it in all day, not such a big deal because even on long car trips, no matter how Ted might laugh and tease her, she couldn’t bring herself to go, or do anything more than make a show of going into the Ladies, not even at the cleanest rest stops or the biggest, most modem, up-to-date Shell stations; what could she do, she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t force herself to squat over a strange toilet) when Mrs. Ted Bliss found herself by the little telephone table in a corner of her living/dining room area dialing her daughter in Cincinnati. You can imagine her surprise when a woman not Maxine picked up at the other end and said she’d reached the offices of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants. She hadn’t called the number in years. How, she wondered, had she still remembered it?
“Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants,” the woman said. “How may I help you?”
“Maxine?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“I think you have the wrong number,” the woman said.
“Oh, I know,” said Mrs. Bliss. “I can’t understand it.”
“You probably just made a mistake dialing.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bliss. “ I was his patient a few years ago. He didn’t have such a big operation back then.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Toibb. He didn’t have such a big operation. Consultants, secretaries to answer the phones, maybe nurses on call. You’re still on Lincoln Road?”
“Yes.”
What a piece of work is the mind, thought Mrs. Bliss. How many years had it been? Four, five? This was the trouble living in a climate where there weren’t any seasons. You were without landmarks to mark the time — record snowfalls, ice storms, heat waves. Her landmarks were all written down in her little black date book, so she never missed anyone she sent a birthday or anniversary card. (She sent out, she supposed, more than a hundred a year. Nieces and nephews she sent, grandnieces, grandnephews, cousins of all degrees she sent, mishpocheh. And though she made a check by the names of those who didn’t send her back, she wasn’t small-minded, the next year she sent a card, anyway. In Mrs. Bliss’s mind, who couldn’t read Hebrew, or, now she was a widow, go often to services, it was a way of keeping up her Judaism, the collective mazel and yontif, all the high holiday greetings of celebratory Jewish life.) But to hold some since-several-years used number in her head without any black book, this was something extraordinary. It wasn’t, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, accidental. It was bashert, maybe even psychiatric. And hadn’t she, it couldn’t be more than a couple of months ago, been thinking of Toibb?
“So how’s Dr. Toibb these days?” asked Mrs. Bliss.
“Didn’t you know?” said the secretary. “Toibb’s dead.”
“Dead? He died, Holmer Toibb?”
“Over a year ago.”
“Over a year?”
“He was murdered.”
“What? He never! Murdered?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He was a physician. They killed a physician?”
“Well, you know, technically he wasn’t a physician.”
“He was a great healer,” Mrs. Bliss said. “A great healer.”
“The consultants miss him. We all do,” the woman said. “I was working here only a few months when it happened. I miss him.”
“Well, of course,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Besides being a good man, healers like him don’t come along every day. I feel sorry for his patients. What do they do now?”
“There’s others to fill his shoes,” the secretary said. “Toibb had foresight. He was no spring chicken, you know. He studied with Greener Hertsheim. He was with him practically from the start of the movement. So he knew. He did. He knew. He had the insight and foresight to bring other practitioners into the practice and give them the benefit of his knowledge. Oh, I’m not saying he expected to be murdered. People always think that’s something that happens to the next guy. And more power to them, I say! Because what’s the use of living if all you do with your life is go around all day with a long face like a scaredy-pants? That’s no way. A person has to have more of an interest than thaat.
“You said you were who?”
“Mrs. Ted Bliss,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“And you were Holmer’s patient?”
“It’s been a few years.”
“We’d still have your records. He kept very good records. That was his interest.”
“My records?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Well, the notes poor Toibb made on you.”
“Did they catch them?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Do they know who did it?”
“They haven’t closed the case yet. The detectives still come in from time to time. Do you know what I think? I think you should ask to see one of the consultants.”
“Why?”
“Well, you did ring this number. And as you say, ‘It’s been a few years.’ And you were his patient. And you thought so well of him.”
“I’m sorry to hear what happened.”
“He was very highly respected.”
“I don’t understand how he could have been murdered and I never heard about it. Was it in the papers? Was it on the news?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” this odd but quite friendly woman said, “they’re keeping it quiet. It’s how they’ve chosen to operate on this one. They’re waiting for someone to slip up. They always slip up.”
“Detectives come in? What do they want? What do they do there?”
“Oh, they just nose around. And we cooperate. Well, as much as we can. You understand. But not to worry. The therapeusisist/ client relationship is sacred.
“I really think you should make an appointment for a checkup,” the woman said ominously.
Mrs. Bliss’s first thought when she hung up was to get in touch with Manny. He was the one who’d given her Toibb’s name in the first place. The difficulty was she was reluctant to call him. They still saw each other of course. In a community as tight-knit as the Towers they could hardly have avoided running into each other, but the fact was Manny had taken up with other widows by now. With widowers, too. With anyone, really, to whom he could play Dutch uncle, all that wide-eyed, teeming lot of poor, tempest-tossed masses and tired, yearning, wretched refuse.
Really, Dorothy thought, in a kind of way it was as if she’d passed through a sort of second immigrant phase and, sloughing Manny from the building, taken out final papers. In unconsciously turning to Toibb, for example, deciding to go first class with her troubles, take them professional.
Of course she missed Manny. And when she saw him these days, and the helpless, troubled people who looked to him for support, it was quite as if she had dropped into an old neighborhood where she’d once lived. She often longed to tell him how she was doing, and to thank him. He had helped her, he really had, and she could never repay him, but now, in her new, unfocused, listless dispensation, Mrs. Ted Bliss had gone offshore so to speak, moved beyond the three-mile limit of Manny’s weak jurisdictionals. Which isn’t to say she didn’t occasionally feel flashes of a vestigial jealously, short twinges of a peculiar envy, not, she hoped, knew, because others now basked in the attention of the real estate lawyer who, with the death of his wife, had been thrust into an abrupt, sudden eligibility.
Rosie had passed away two years before from a massive coronary explosion.
Mrs. Bliss had gone to the funeral services and, afterward, to offer her condolences to the new widower. Manny’s condominium wasn’t large enough to accommodate so massive a shivah and they’d had to move it downstairs into the game room. Dorothy, no one, had ever seen anything like it. Not to take anything away from Rosie (though she was a decent, patient woman, everyone knew who the real star of the family was), but the tribute was to Manny. But, Rosie, Manny, those seven days of shivah would come to represent the benchmark of mourning in the Towers, possibly in all Miami Beach. Mrs. Bliss had approached the grieving widower, still a wide, relatively youthful and handsome man — he couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than Dorothy — oddly even more virile and distinguished-looking beneath his three- or four-day stubble like a loose gray veil of grief. “Oh, Manny,” Dorothy had said, “I’m so sorry. Listen,” she’d said, “if there’s anything I can do, anything.”
“I know, Dorothy. Thank you,” he said. And added, “You know what this means? It’s taught me a lesson. You’re up, you’re down. Life’s like a wheel of fortune. See, see how the tables have turned?”
Though they hadn’t, not really. Manny was still like some Johnny-on-the-spot with the men and women. If anything, he volunteered even more of his time now Rosie was dead than when she was alive. He’d even been singled out by a rabbi as one of the “just men,” one of those holy three dozen on earth who helped keep the good order of life. He was still, that is, on call, but these days Mrs. Ted Bliss had passed out of the range of his influence and was not at all envious of those people who were the beneficiaries of Manny’s new second wind, the brighter, even warmer glow of his radiating goodwill, so much as, well, a little sorry for them. They had more sharply defined needs than she, a different order of need — acute, short range, easily dealt with, like heat exhaustion, say. All they needed was to be pulled into the shade, given water, have cool, wet cloths applied to their temples and brows.
Mrs. Ted Bliss, on the other hand, had passed over into a new state of being, existed on a plane different from grief, out of reach of cumulate time’s ministering comforts and platitudes. Why, she, she had lost not only husband and family and self and appetite (that savored, one-shot pork chop for which she would never again feel a yen) but all urge and interest. The baleboosteh part of herself complete, her house at last in order, and order at last seen for what it finally was: the rule of regularity, habit ground down to the trim, plain, ugly shipshape of the deadened dinky, like all that long, perpetually cared for rectangularity in the Chicago boneyard. Urge and yen and craving subsided, absent from her life. Life absent from her life. So that all she could muster for this season’s batch and crop of bereft, forlorn survivors was a pinch of indignation, as if they were suckers of heartbreak, rubes and rookies who hadn’t seen nothing yet.
Oy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oy and oy. Oy, oy, a thousand times oy!
How come then, she thought, that such acceptance and coming to terms was so disquieting, so unsettling when everything the complete baleboosteh could hope for was to have all her decks cleared, squared away, every last hospital corner pulled taut and smooth, as if what life had been all about was preparation for some final white-glove inspection? What, she didn’t think in terms of a life in the barracks? But, surely, that’s what so much of hers had been all about. And now it was as if she’d been presented with a statement, some red-tape thing, complicated, governmental, bureaucratic, vaguely whiplashed through interagency (Part A’s uncertain relationship with Part B), like Ted’s Medicare bills almost a year after he died — THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL — until one day one arrived inexplicably stamped Paid in Full.
So that if they had pressed her she could almost have told them, “Girls, they tell you time heals all things? Time heals nothing. What, you think you’re unhappy now? You think because your husband is gone this is the worst, the storm that breaks the camel’s back, water in the basement and climbing the stairs, that it’s up over the lip of the threshold and coming in under the door in the hall, that it’s destroyed the linoleum and already lapping the wall-to-wall, licking high up the legs of the dining room chairs, the mahogany sideboard and credenza, that it’s covered the tiles, and slipping down the side of the tub like dirty bathwater, is above the box spring and even with the mattress, is inside the chest of drawers with your things like stockings and underwear left to soak overnight in the bathroom basin.
“Or that the final slap in the face is when the insurance claim comes back marked ‘Sorry, not covered, act of God’?
“You think?
“You think so?
“Or from all that pile-on and pile-on of tsuris, the kids’ bad grades and the death of friends, your own decline, the failure of beauty, of memory, incontinence, shortness of breath, the inability not just to climb steps but to cross the room without pain?
“And that that’s the worst that can happen, one by one, or served up like so many courses at a dinner? Or that that is?
“You think, you think so? Well, all I can say is wait till next year! Because didn’t I already tell you you ain’t seen nothing yet? No, no, no, girls, there’s no such thing as a rock bottom to bottom!”
Though to tell the truth, she wouldn’t have told them a word. They couldn’t have dragged it out of her.
Meanwhile, there was still something on Mrs. Ted Bliss’s plate. Something left over that, though she knew, or thought she knew, to leave well enough alone, she continued to worry like a loose tooth.
It was what that awful woman had said, the secretary, or nurse, or maybe consultant herself, whatever she was who’d answered the phone when she rang Maxine and her head had accidentally dialed the wrong number and put her through to the Greater Miami Recreational Whoosis where Toibb had once had his practice — that he’d been murdered in some high, hush-hush covered-up crime and, more ominously yet, that they still held her records, whatever notes Toibb had written down when she’d spoken to him. She remembered his surprise (remembered it the very second the women mentioned the killing) when he found out she’d known Tommy Auveristas—“Tommy Overeasy” Dr. Toibb had called him — as if he’d discovered both shared some incredibly exotic, important secret that had raised her in his eyes to some new visibility; and recalled now, too, Hector Camerando’s sudden arousal to the bait, that at the time she hadn’t yet known was bait, when she’d asked him if he knew Auveristas, and how the pay dirt she thought she’d hit had suddenly exploded into his audacious assertions, like a stream of wild oaths, of the power and influence he held in south Florida, and that, moments later, had declined into all those favors and markers he’d thrust into her hands and which, for years, he practically begged her to call in, and which, for years, she just couldn’t bring herself to do, seeing it now, suddenly, as out of the blue as Overeasy’s name (that’s how Mrs. Bliss thought of him now, too) had years before let loose all that skyfull of pay dirt like a gusher of crude, uncapped connection, and which only now she had begun to sort out.
Mrs. Bliss, God bless her, was an old woman now. For a Jew her age she’d been spared a lot. She hadn’t lost anyone close in the Holocaust. Indeed, only very, very distant relatives of relatives, people whose names were vaguely known to her but whom she had never met. It was outrageous that anyone should have gone into Hitler’s ovens, of course, but that she and her family had been spared was, for Dorothy, one of the few proofs she had that there was a God. On the other hand, fair was fair, He didn’t exactly have an exemplary character. Hadn’t He cooked poor Marvin’s goose for him? Didn’t He run His own damn ovens? Hotter than Hitler’s! Leaving a mother’s heart to boil over when He laid His dirty hands on her child. Marvin was lying next to Ted in that old cold, queer Chicago cemetery this very minute. Every time she thought of that it pushed a chill through Dorothy’s system even in the Florida shvitz. Why, it was like a ghost story. Marvin had been in the ground even longer than Ted. In a way, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that made him not only her husband’s senior but her own as well, and had transformed the boy into a sort of ancestor, a death veteran. And that was another proof there was a God. Such magic, such fooling around in the supernatural.
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?