SEVEN

There was no guarantee he’d show up. Probably he wouldn’t. But why take chances? So when Dorothy went to bed that night she set the alarm to go off an hour earlier than it usually did. She set it to go off the same time it would if she had an appointment at the beauty parlor, or the doctor’s, or she wanted to beat the heat on a day she went shopping, or if she were going away on a trip. This way she had time for her bath and to lay out her clothes the way she wanted, and to eat her breakfast without having to rush.

She was down in plenty of time. She had time to spare, even. As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been such a beautiful day she would have gone back inside and sat down on a bench in the lobby till he came. (If he was coming.) But it was, so she was content to stay put, to get away from the air-conditioning and stand out in the wondrous weather. (If it even was weather, and not some gorgeous potion of perfect idealized memory, the luscious aromatics of a childhood spell say, Mrs. Bliss’s, Dorothy’s, charmed skin fixed in the softened, smoothed-over stock-stillness of all temperate sufficiency. If it even was weather this temperate ate sufficiency as absent of climate as a room in a dream.)

She wasn’t the only resident of Building One content to be there, happy just to stand in place, apparently with neither a desire to go back indoors nor the will to continue on the errands that had brought them outside in the first place. Those who’d come down to walk their dogs remained where they were, and so did their animals.

They marveled at the temperature, they complimented the perfect humidity. They congratulated each other on their decision to have chosen south Florida as a place to retire.

“They bottled this stuff they’d make a fortune,” one of them said.

“Put me down for a dozen cases. Money’s no object.”

“It is, but not under the circumstances.”

“Weather like this, you couldn’t bribe me to go inside.”

“What’s that smell? Oranges?”

“Lemons, limes. Something citric.”

“It’s like you just stepped out of the best shower you ever took.”

“It’s paradise.”

“I wish my kids were here today. They never catch the really good weather.”

“I know. Mine are always complaining, ‘Ma, it’s too hot,’ ‘It’s too cold,’ ‘Don’t it ever stop raining?’ ”

Mrs. Bliss joined in the laughter. It was true. They had a day like this once, maybe two times a year, tops.

“And not every year,” someone said as though continuing her thought, or as if she’d spoken it aloud.

What’s that all about, Mrs. Bliss wondered, startled, returned suddenly to her mission, and nervous because the atmospherics were a distraction and might hold them there until the car came for her. (If it did.) What, did she need this, a bunch of strangers standing around like they were seeing her off? (Because, Mrs. Bliss noted, most of their faces were new to her. She’d laid low the past few years, did not often go to the parties in the game room these days, was less and less comfortable shlepping along with her married friends like a fifth wheel. And with her fellow widows, so unhappy and lonely, it was even worse. She didn’t need no grief support groups.) The presence of so many onlookers made Dorothy self-conscious. And if the driver showed up — he was already ten minutes late — in an actual limousine she wasn’t entirely sure she might not just disappear into the small crowd, turn around, and go right back into the building. Louise could make up some excuse for her. Because the thought, just the thought, of these people seeing her helped into a long white stretch limo — she could picture it: the automobile with its gleaming silver wing-shaped antenna mounted on the trunk and the one-way glass that made the passengers invisible; its spic-and-span leather interior got up like a fancy motel room with its absurd built-ins — the speaker phones and cable TV and wet bar and sun lamp and a desktop you let down like a tray top on an airplane — would diminish her more than she already was, turn her pathetic, as if there were no quicker, more obvious way of pronouncing this some redletter day in the life, summing her up in the measly bottom lines of her dressed-up, shined-shoe, queen-for-a-day happiness. What, did she need it? Did she need it?

And then, suddenly, their chatter ceased. They made a collective sound of awe and wonder. The limo pulled into Building Number One’s driveway and stopped beneath the canopy.

The driver got out and walked around the immense length of the car. He was in black livery, and wore high black boots and a chauffeur’s inky cap.

He came directly up to Dorothy.

“Mrs. Ted Bliss?”

“Yes?”

“I apologize for the delay, Madam. There was construction on 163rd Street, and the traffic was backed up.”

“That’s all right,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“When ain’t there?” said the man who wanted to be put down for a case of the perfect weather. “There always is, 163rd Street is murder.”

“Dorothy,” Edna Bairn said, one of the few people Mrs. Bliss recognized, “the car is for you?”

“I’m going on a trip. He’s taking me to the airport.”

“You’re going on a trip?” said the one who thought the air smelled like oranges. “So where’s your luggage?”

Dorothy looked past the driver to the extravagant car. “What I need I’ll buy when I get there,” she said, and allowed the chauffeur to hand her into the limousine.

The penitentiary had been built on landfill along the northern, central edge of the Everglades. They had left the Tamiami Trail somewhere between Sweetwater and Monroe Station and plunged north onto a gravel road that cut through vegetation that reminded Mrs. Bliss of a kind of gigantic tropical salad. The trees here, she supposed, bore the sort of fruit whose names she recognized — guava and plantain, currant, avocado, gooseberry and huckleberry and elderberry, damson and papaya — but had never tasted or, vaguely thinking of them as somehow gentile fruits, brought home for her family. It seemed curious to her now that she had never encouraged them away from their old appetites.

She’d never been much of a sightseer when Ted was alive, and now, even on cruises, was content to play cards in her cabin or poke about in the duty-free shops searching out gifts she could bring back for her children and grandchildren. Ashore, in colonial port towns, it was all her companions could do to coax her to ride with them in an open landau drawn through the narrow cobblestone streets by a team of paired horses.

“Oh that,” Dorothy would say, “that’s for the tourists.”

“And what are you, Dorothy, a native?”

“We should hire a guide and let him take us around in a taxi.”

“And deal with two shvartzers?”

“Shh,” Dorothy said.

But she was oddly moved by the journey today, the sight of such ancient, lush significance on either side of the tremendous car that skated over the loose gravel on the slender little road like some sleek, fearless, predatory beast, its flanks mere inches from the edges of what in places seemed more path or trail than road, brushing the rough saw grass that grew along the queer, amorphous, indeterminate earth like clumps, paddies of unfamiliar geography.

Thinking, this is how they took him to prison. These are the last things he saw before they threw him in jail.

Though she knew he hadn’t been “thrown” into jail, that he had too much influence, too much imagination and power, that even now, behind walls and locked up in a cell, they let him take calls (it had been the next day she’d heard from Chitral, the day after she’d made her wish known to Camerando), and let him put calls through, to arrange to send drivers with gracious notes and imaginary roses.

“Oh,” she told the chauffeur, “that reminds me,” she said, inspired, “I never thanked you for bringing me those beautiful roses.”

“What beautiful roses would those be, Mrs. Bliss?”

“Why the roses you brought with you last week when you delivered that letter to the Towers.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but the first time I was to the Towers was when I picked you up this morning.”

Amazed, thinking, oh, two drivers!

Thrilled retroactively who’d never met a man who hadn’t impressed her, swept away by men, not in any sexual or romantic sense but rendered dumbstruck by all the ways they seemed to fill up the world (so overwhelmed by them that she had had trouble with the notion of disciplining her male children, this so apparent to the two boys that even when they were still quite small they behaved in front of their worried, vulnerable mother like visitors in a sick room), stunned by their stature and brisk efficiency (their perfect businesslike forms built for a power and efficacy that spread through their bodies like steam pushed through a radiator, their unadorned flesh not expended in breasts or useless piles of complicated hair, and even their privates out in the open, functional as hand tools), by their willingness to go forth and wrest bread and victory from their lives in the world, clear down to changing a tire or starting a fire from scratch or handling the money or initiating love, by their gruff and bluff and boldness, and all the rest of their dangerous, hung-out, let-loose ways.

Awed by the driver, too, overcome with wonder and admiration by the sureness with which he negotiated the fragile, narrow gravel road, the toxic-looking swamps — logjammed, she was sure, with alligators — on either side of the winding, puny spit which they did not so much travel as traverse. He must be a convict, Mrs. Bliss thought. Probably a trustee or something. Which just goes to show, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Wouldn’t you have to be as smart as you were probably brave to know how to walk the fine line between the guards with the guns on the watchtowers and the vildeh chei-eh killers, kidnappers, and bank robbers in the prison yard? If that wasn’t man’s work she didn’t know what was. And if that wasn’t going forth and wresting bread and victory from his life in the world, then she didn’t know what it was. It’s a man’s world, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and between you, me, and the lamppost, he’s welcome to it.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Mrs. Bliss, “you’re from the federal penitentiary, too?”

The driver may not have known she was addressing him. They were the first words she’d spoken since she’d asked about the roses.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He spoke very softly. She might not have been able to hear him in an open room, but in the big airtight automobile his voice was startlingly clear, even intimate.

“You work there,” she said.

“I’m a con. I live there.”

“Oh,” she said, “you live there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s none of my business, you’ll excuse me for prying, but what did you—”

“Forgery. I forged things.”

“Oh,” she said, “you forged things.”

“Passports. Liquor and drivers’ licenses; when the elevator was inspected.”

“Oh, I don’t think I could do that. It must take so much skill. I’d get caught.”

“I got caught,” said the convict.

Mrs. Bliss didn’t answer. Yes, he got caught, but he proved her point. Men were more gifted than women. They could make a fire, rotate the tires, and forge important papers, too.

What men did took nerve and a steady hand. It took brains and courage. Here was this nice, polite, and, as far as Mrs. Bliss could tell, very bright young man who had managed so well in the penitentiary that he had not only worked his way up to trustee but had climbed so high in the system that they trusted him to drive a great powerful limousine all the way out of his prison in the high Everglades, down the gravel road to the Tamiami Trail, across to Miami, and up to the Towers in Miami Beach. He was a man. He was brave; he had nerve. At any time during his journey he could have stepped on the gas and made his escape by outdistancing anybody who might have given him chase. But he was a man, he knew better. He knew it would be other men who would be sent out to find him.

“You know,” said Mrs. Bliss when they had gone a few more miles, “you wouldn’t believe it to look at me but a long time ago in Chicago I used to carry a gun.”

“You did, ma’am?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “My husband owned a building on the North Side. It wasn’t a good area. I took it with me when we collected the rents.”

“I’m damned,” the driver said.

“I never took it out of my purse. Not once. These were very rough people. You know why I did it?”

“Why?”

“I thought I could save my husband’s life,” Dorothy said and, so quietly she didn’t think he’d notice, she started to cry.

“Look there,” the driver said some minutes later. “That’s where all the magic happens. I’m home.”

The guards at the gate didn’t need to see identification. They didn’t even ask her her name. They didn’t bother with the driver either, just waved him on through as though he were pulling up to discharge a guest in front of the entrance to a hotel. When he stopped before what Mrs. Bliss took to be some sort of administration building he got out of the limo and came around to Dorothy’s side to open her door and help her out. Now she was there she wondered why it had seemed so important to come.

“It’s a big roomy car and very comfortable,” Dorothy said, “but three hours in a closed automobile is a long time to sit. I wonder could I stretch my legs a few minutes before I go in?”

“Stand around in the yard? It’s your call, Mrs. Bliss, but not all these guys are as civil as yours truly. Not everyone here is in for a victimless crime. Ain’t all of us forgers, what I’m saying.” He winked. “Some of these characters ain’t seen a woman in a long time.” Quite suddenly Mrs. Ted Bliss was alarmed. She was well into her seventies and what he said seemed one of the cruelest, most patronizing things anyone had ever said to her. So much for men’s bravery and nerve. Mrs. Bliss felt quite ill and turned to enter the building. The driver touched her arm as if to stop her. “Hey, no, I’m kidding,” he said. “It’s like they say in the papers. The place is a country club. You see anybody with his back on a bench lifting weights? You see a single tattoo, or some bull con make eye contact with some cow con? No, Mother, you stay outside and enjoy the fine weather, I’ll go tell Señor Chitral you’re here.”

Before she could object the man had disappeared. Terms, things, conditions, had certainly changed, but Mrs. Bliss could not have said what or how. Of course she felt odd standing by herself out in the prison yard — she was sure that’s what it was; dozens of men dressed in what, despite the neat, neutral appearance of their cheap, open white dress shirts, tan slacks, and inexpensive loafers, could only have been uniforms, loitered or strolled about the quadlike yard like students at a university between classes — but not in the least vulnerable, as safe, really, as she would have felt at the Towers. (And it was a fine day. It seemed strange to Mrs. Bliss that they could have stepped into a car three hours ago and stepped out again three hours later into the same fine weather. This was a penitentiary at the edge of a swamp. How could it have the same climate as the world?) She hardly believed she was in a prison among desperados and villains. People conducted themselves in perfectly ordinary, orderly, civilized ways. They might indeed have been scholars discussing the issues and topics, illuminating for one another the ramifications and fine points. Dorothy wondered if the inmates had “quiet” or “free times” imposed on them like children at summer camp, say, or if this was the way they walked off their lunches. There couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty of them about, perambulating what were more like kempt grounds than anything as sordid as a prison yard. She wondered if the rest of the population might not voluntarily have gone back to their cells — rooms? — to nap or write letters. It certainly wasn’t what she expected, or like anything she’d seen in the movies. Yet it was a prison yard. She saw guards with rifles, with guns in holsters, and all the rest of power’s lead and leather paraphernalia. They weren’t on the tops of walls in little tollbooths on watchtowers, though, but walked about, almost mingling with their prisoners. If anything should happen, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the guards would be in one another’s way. Everybody would be in everybody else’s line of fire. Yet neither guards nor inmates seemed particularly wary. Individuals greeted each other easily, indifferent as old acquaintances, almost, she thought, the way residents of one Towers high rise might say good morning and ask after someone else’s health who lived in a different building. What they didn’t show you in the movies was how ordinary it all was, the simple, edgeless decency of people who had been arbitrarily thrown together. Or was this simply the cream of the crop, the best a place like this had to offer?

They greeted Dorothy, too, some of them, inmates as well as guards, and inquired, solicitous as clerks in department stores, if they could help her.

“Oh, no,” Dorothy told them, “thank you, I’m just waiting for somebody.”

They were charming, charming. Of course, Chitral had been charming, too.

A guard came up to her.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I understand you’re here to see someone. It could be a while. Bob Gorham’s fixing to practice his touch-and-go’s in a few minutes. He’s got a beautiful day for it. Why don’t you come watch? Rodge’ll let you know when your party shows up.”

“Rodge?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“It’s Roger. Rodge is just what they call me,” a second guard said.

“Come on,” the first guard said, “runway’s round the side of this building.”

Mrs. Bliss went with him. Most of the convicts were headed in the same direction. It wasn’t a long walk and the guard was careful to set his pace to Mrs. Bliss’s. In minutes they were within sight of the runway. “We can stop now,” the man said. “We’ll be able to see just fine from right here. Plus this way, when your party comes, you won’t have so far to walk back.”

“That wasn’t far,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Well, I know it,” the guard said, “but…I’ll be honest with you. You promise not to tell?”

“Tell what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bob’s a square shooter. Well, for someone of the criminal classes, I mean. But the true facts of the case is that this is the first time he done this without his flight instructor riding shotgun. There’s always the possibility that him and fate could run afoul. From here you get a good enough first-rate view, but you’re still standing far enough back and to the side of the airstrip that if he loses control or his engine stalls and his plane, God forbid, drops out of the sky you’ll be protected.”

“This happens?”

Could happen, could happen, but it won’t. One-in-a-million,” he said dismissively.

Mrs. Bliss was reminded of Hector Camerando and his talk of long shots and locks and fixes. What, did most people live beneath such heavy protection? Mrs. Bliss couldn’t remember when she hadn’t played cards. Poker, bridge, the rummy variations. But for her, for all of them, the stakes had always been the coffee and coffee cake, the sweets and kibitzing and gossip and conversation. She couldn’t remember the size of the biggest pot she’d ever taken or even, over the years, whether she’d won, lost, or broken even. Perhaps she was foolish, she thought, not to keep better records.

But then, about fifty yards away, she saw a man in an inmate’s vaguely preppy uniform, wearing goggles and a tight, old-fashioned cloth aviator’s cap on his head, climb into the cockpit of a small, single-engine plane. A moment later Mrs. Bliss heard him start up the engine.

“But isn’t he a prisoner?” Dorothy said.

“Bob Gorham? Five to ten years’ worth. He’s got but months to serve before he’s up for parole, but shoot, I guess he was bored.”

“You mean it’s only a few months until he gets out and he’s taken up flying?”

“Got a beautiful day for it. Beautiful day.”

“The government pays a professional instructor to teach him to fly?”

Heck no,” the guard said. “Taxpayers’d never stand for nothing like that. No, ma’am, there ain’t no professional instructors. We had a guy here used to drop dope on the beaches. Flew his own plane. That con taught another con and that con taught the next. And so on and so forth. It’s a wonderful program.”

“Where do the planes come from?” Mrs. Bliss said, although she knew the answer before she asked the question.

“Government confiscates them,” the guard said levelly, and looked the woman straight in the eye.

He knows about the LeSabre, Mrs. Bliss thought, shuddering in the perfect weather.

Then the plane, gathering speed, started to move down the runway. Soon it was in the sky. She watched it turn in a wide arc, bank, and come in for a landing. It touched down and immediately took off again. Mrs. Bliss’s stomach tightened. Her throat burned with bile. Far off, the convicts cheered each time Gorham took off and touched down.

“What if he tries to escape?”

“Escape?” the guard said. “Escape? Lordy ma’am, his tank ain’t filled with but fifteen minutes’ worth of gas.”

She was thinking locks, fixes, and long shots. She was thinking fifteen minutes of gas in the tank and that there couldn’t be more than seven minutes’ worth left. She was thinking about the guard’s one-in-a-million and, for a moment, hoped against hope that if it had to happen, she’d still be standing there when it did.

Rodge was not with him when Chitral came up to her.

It had been years since she’d seen him but it might have been only a few months ago. That’s how little he’d changed. If anything, he looked not youthful but as if age had refined his best features. His skin, once ruddy, was tan, and his white wavy hair had lost some of its coiffed character and now looked faintly roiled, roughed up. Even his black, bushy eyebrows didn’t seem faded or thinned out but culled, less a suggestive Latin caricature. Though still a large man, he seemed sparer, healthier. Dorothy had forgotten how white his teeth were when he smiled. He still had the Cesar Romero good looks but they seemed, against the adjusted colors of his fresh adaptations, somehow more trustworthy.

Of course, Mrs. Bliss thought, I already sold him the car and don’t have to bargain with him now.

“Dorothy,” he addressed her when he spoke, not “Señora” or “My dear Mrs. Bliss.” This seemed appropriate, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. My testimony helped put him away for a hundred years. That ought to set up at least something of a bond between us.

“I apologize for making you wait,” he said, “but as you may well imagine”—his arm took in the prison yard and its buildings, the cadre of armed guards and their wards, even the small plane just now touching down to the accompaniment of applause and a cheerful, unfeigned approval for Bob Gorham’s perfect three-point landing—“we don’t set our own schedules or march to our own drummer here.”

“That’s all right,” Dorothy said, “I didn’t wait long. Sometimes I have to wait more than forty minutes for a bus. Those schedules aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.”

“At least you have a nice day to be outside,” Alcibiades Chitral said.

“Yeah,” said Mrs. Bliss, “by us, too.”

Chitral nodded solemnly. Dorothy solemnly smiled.

“Well,” said Alcibiades.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

Why, he’s as embarrassed as I am, she thought, and felt this small nausea of disappointment. He’d sent a car to pick her up and bring her all this way. He’d written her the most fluent letter she’d ever received. He’d spoken of the genius of the law and said things she barely understood. He wanted to see her, he wrote, and suggested that a visit between them was not out of the question but merely inadvisable. He’d mentioned mysterious roses. So Hector Camerando or no Hector Camerando — after all, Dorothy thought, Chitral was the one in jail for a hundred years and had nothing to fear from a free Camerando, unless the dog track and jai alai were even stronger medicines than actual drugs — she’d supposed he had things to tell her. Long ago, through Manny, if he even ever passed it on, she’d made a promise that, if he ever wanted her to, she’d visit him, so why wouldn’t she assume there were certain things he wanted to get off his chest? Because as God was her witness she’d been having plenty of second thoughts about why she had wanted to come in the first place.

“Hey,” said the guard who’d taken charge of Mrs. Bliss, “look at me horning in on your visit. I’ll just get out of your way.”

“Thanks for looking after her, Bill.”

“No problem, Alcibiades,” he said, and fell in with a group of prisoners just then passing by. In their white shirts, tan slacks, and loafers, they reminded Dorothy of college glee clubs she’d seen on the television. A couple of convicts had clapped their arms around Bob Gorham’s shoulders. He was still wearing his aviator’s cap.

“Hell of a landing there, Bob,” Chitral called out.

“Thanks, pardner,” Bob Gorham said, “glad you could come.”

“You have a couple of letters waiting for you,” Alcibiades said. “I left them on your bunk.”

The prisoners passed on, leaving Chitral and Mrs. Bliss by themselves. It was a little awkward. Then Chitral asked Mrs. Bliss if she’d eaten.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I’m not very hungry.”

“Because there’s a cafeteria.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Are you sure?” Chitral asked. “They do a swell bread and water.”

Mrs. Bliss stared at him. “Look,” she said, “they subpoenaed me. I was subpoenaed.”

“Of course,” Chitral said. “Of course you were, Dorothy.”

“So long as you understand that.”

“Oh, I do.”

“Well,” said Dorothy.

“Well,” said Chitral.

Mrs. Bliss, conceding still more than what she had already conceded, let him in on something. “I have,” she said, lowering her voice even though no one was about, “to go to the washroom.”

“You didn’t go?”

“No.”

“Not since you got here?”

“No.”

“Not since you stopped for coffee?”

“We didn’t stop for coffee.”

“You never pulled into a gas station?”

“No,” she said.

“Not since you left the Towers this morning?”

“I already told you,” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, “I was subpoenaed by the government.”

“Oh,” said Alcibiades Chitral, “you think you were subpoenaed!”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Bliss. “There’s a cafeteria? They must have a rest room. I’ll find it myself.”

“No, wait,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have, but she stopped dead in her tracks. They moved about the yard dressed like announcers at a golf tournament, they learned to pilot airplanes on maybe two dollars’ worth of gas, and the guards seemed more like park rangers than policemen, but this was still a federal penitentiary where they could lock men up for a hundred years. There was no telling what such men might do to you when they knew they had nothing to lose. And if she could find the ladies’ on her own that didn’t mean she didn’t need someone to stand just outside the door like a lookout even if she was an old woman because, after all, everybody knew, didn’t they, that rape and perversion had more to do with violence and control than ever they had to do with sex, and if she had to depend on Alcibiades Chitral, a man, she now realized, who evidently still begrudged her the testimony that helped send him into the swamp for another ninety-some-odd years, he was still, or at least had once been, a neighbor, and who else could you turn to in a time of need if not to a neighbor? He would be her Manny from the building in the Everglades, and she stopped dead in her tracks while she waited for him to catch up.

Mrs. Bliss was satisfied that whoever cleaned the place didn’t do a bad job, and if the pervasive smell of Pinesol bounced off the tile like the odors in a high school — the room smelled exactly like the lavatory in Maxine’s old high school back in Chicago — at least the toilet seats were clean, and there was plenty of toilet paper, even extra rolls if it should happen to run out, and Mrs. Bliss had the place to herself. She locked herself into a stall and quite comfortably peed. She even managed to move her bowels, and felt a certain pride in the civilized ways the government used her tax dollars. When she was done she washed up at one of the sinks and stepped outside.

Chitral was talking to an extremely well-groomed prisoner dressed in clean, just-pressed pants, a fresh white shirt, and loafers that practically sparkled. He introduced Mrs. Bliss.

“You’re Mrs. Ted Bliss? Really? I’m pleased to meet you. Al speaks of you often.”

The prisoner moved off.

“You’re sure you don’t want to grab something in the cafeteria? It’s right here,” Chitral said. “It’s a good place to talk.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “if I’m not keeping you.”

“No, of course not,” he said, “I’m one of the prison mailmen. I’ve already done my rounds. There’s nothing on my plate until lockup, and that’s not for another seven hours.”

She selected fruit salad in Jell-O, some buttered toast, and a tall glass of iced coffee. Abashed, Chitral admitted that it was the end of the month and that he hadn’t much money left in his account and permitted her to pay for both of their snacks.

“I feel just awful about this,” he said, “but, to tell you the truth, those roses I sent set me back.”

“I never got roses.”

“What, you never…Are you certain?”

“I’m sent so many flowers I can’t keep track?”

“Not all red this time,” he explained, “a mixed assortment. Yellow roses, white, purple, blue.”

“No. No roses.”

Chitral seemed crestfallen, anguished, but when he spoke, it was in the spare, furious, explosive gasps and outrage of someone who could no longer hold his breath. “Cheats! Liars! Crooks!” Though he was not shouting, Mrs. Bliss touched the controls of her hearing aid. “Now listen to me,” he said, calming down, “were you home when the messenger delivered my note?”

“I was at home but he left it with the girl.”

“The security guard? Louise?”

“You know Louise?”

“I’ve seen her and I know her mother. She’s a very strange girl.”

Mrs. Bliss remembered how frightened she’d made her. “I asked her about the roses. She started to cry. Really,” Mrs. Bliss said, “she’s very honest. She wouldn’t steal the roses.”

“No,” Chitral said, all anger gone out of him, “you’re probably right. This place,” he said suddenly, “this place with its civility, with all its spic-and-span toilets and you-could-eat-off-the-floor amenities, with all its flying lessons, music rooms, and bridge tournaments, you forget where you are, you really do. You forget where you are and who you’re with. Of course you never got my roses. After passing through the hands of all the brokers, go-betweens, skimmers, and middlemen around this place, what’d be left? The stems and thorns? Jesus,” he moaned, “seventy-five bucks! Who’d I think I was dealing with? Some greenhouse established 1857? Everyone takes out his percentage of the roses. I’m sick about it. Just sick.”

Later, when she had time to think about it, Dorothy had to wonder (though she knew she’d never know) if he’d gone to all this trouble and shlepped her all that way just to get her to buy him lunch and take her for the hundred dollars she’d insisted on pressing on him.

In the cafeteria there, she looked at him in wonder.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Bliss said, “it’s just that, well…”

“What?”

“You hear about ‘country clubs.’ Just today the driver who brought me said this place is a country club.”

“What’s he know about it?”

“Well, he’s a criminal, too,” she said in his defense. “I mean he has a record, he was arrested. He had a trial, and when the jury found him guilty someone sentenced and sent him here.

“Anyway, it isn’t at all what I expected. It’s just that you hear about these places, and everyone says that we’re soft on crime and about coddling the criminals. It’s on all the talk shows. I’m pretty old,” she said. “Not that I know it all or anything, but I’ve lived long enough to know at least a thing or two, and what I’m saying is that when you hear all this stuff — soft-on-crime this and country-club that, it’s a little like the jingles I used to hear for laundry powder on the radio. After a while you don’t believe it anymore and think that someone is just trying to sell you something.”

“And?”

“And? And so naturally I’m a little farmisht, mixed up. It’s not like in the movies, it’s not like on TV. Out where I was waiting for you? Before that nice man, the guard — what was his name, Bill? — came up, I thought I heard a band playing, and when I looked around to see where the music was coming from I saw these people blowing in trumpets and banging on drums, the last of them marching and turning the corner at the other side of the building. I mean, they were prisoners, too, right?”

“They play in the prison marching band.”

“A prison marching band! Alevai! Kayn aynhoreh!”

“What?”

“I mean that’s wonderful. I mean if you got to be here for a hundred years, then I’m pleased it’s a country club and you got a prison marching band. I mean it’s exactly like you said to me, ‘At least you got a nice day to be outside.’ ”

“Outside?”

“Well, no, not outside, I don’t mean outside. In a place like this, I mean.”

“You like it.”

“In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have imagined such a spotless toilet,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I wouldn’t have imagined Jell-O molds, or an airplane, or everybody’s nice clothes.”

“So you feel a little better about that subpoena.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.” This was after she had bought his lunch but before she pressed her check for a hundred dollars into his hand when the driver came by to take her home. “It’s only a little later than the middle of the afternoon,” she said, “and you’ve already delivered your letters and have the rest of the day off. In a little while you’ll probably have even more privileges. You’ll work your way up to a trustee like the driver.”

“I’m already a trustee,” Alcibiades Chitral said. “Everybody’s a trustee. They make us trustees when we get here, right after they delouse us and give us our nice uniforms.”

“Everybody’s a trustee?”

“Every kidnapping, tax cheating, counterfeiting, serial killing mother’s son of us. Everyone starts off with his pieces intact. It’s like checkers or a game of Monopoly. You lose by attrition. So sure, everybody’s a trustee. This place. This place is some place this place. It’s the clowns with the longest time who get the wear and the tear. Sure, we’re all trustees. Only it’s not like the Towers, Mrs. Bliss. It’s a retirement community in reverse. Oh, yeah,” Chitral said bitterly. “I’m through for the day. I start at nine and knock off at two. Only, you know what my job was the year I came? I stuck in the video, started it, and rewound the tape when it was through. Your limo driver is here a couple of months, maybe. Tops, a couple of months, and he’s off the grounds more than he’s on them. Sometimes the warden sends him to Tallahassee, gives him chits for meals and a motel, a few bucks walking-around money, and has him bring back fresh rolls the next day. All the leisure’s up front, my dear Mrs. Bliss, and the cons who made that toilet of yours shine so, pull K.P. and do the lifting, are all old men who work around the clock and have been here thirty years.

“A hundred years. Thanks to you I’m doing a century of time here, lady!”

He wanted me to feel terrible, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought. He wanted me to feel terrible, and that’s why he sent for me. He wanted me to feel terrible, the son of a bitch.

And then, for the first time not just that day but since he was sentenced, she understood exactly why she’d wanted to see him. She knew the reason she was there.

But so much had happened, she had so much new information.

She was only a helpless old woman, and this place, for all its collegiality, for all its laundered kemptness and, she suspected, quasimilitary, quarters-bounced-on-the-beds baleboss, was so unrelentingly masculine, that she had to proceed slowly, carefully. But even if it weren’t, even if she’d been talking to her mother, to her sisters, even if she were speaking to her own children it would have been difficult for her to blurt out what was on her mind. Even, for that matter, if it had been Ted. There was only one to whom she might have broached the subject sucking at her heart, and he, may Marvin rest, she would never see again.

So she had to sidle up to it, deflecting real concerns with minor ones.

“Tell me,” she said, “would you happen to know if by any chance that car you bought from me is on the property?”

“The property?”

“The grounds, the facility, the installation, whatever name this place goes by. Because the guard told me that that airplane some convict taught your friend to fly was confiscated. Maybe that’s how they do things. Maybe that VCR you started out on originally belonged to some other jailbird. Maybe the limousine did. And television sets and all the trumpets and drums and everything else around here are hand-me-downs, too. Maybe that’s how the government saves its money. By never throwing anything out. Anything! Neither the, what-do-you-call-them, big-ticket items, nor all the drek and chozzerai. By, what-do-you-call-it, recycling everything. Everything!

“So, well, naturally, I thought of the Buick LeSabre. I mean, well, even you admired its air-conditioning and electric door locks and windows. The FM and AM. You gave me over and above the blue book value. It drove like a top, you said.”

Whatever she decided about sidling up to her subject, stepping gingerly, refusing to introduce the real, though till now undiscovered reasons that brought her, that motivated her to speak with circumspection, Mrs. Bliss was surprised to discover she had lost her temper. It wasn’t the real offensive yet, but the noise she made, the gauntlet she flung down, startled poor Chitral.

“So what do they do with it? How do they use it? Ted used to pick up the White Sox. On all of our drives, on all of them, the thing he loved most was to pick up the Sox games on the radio. Is that what you do? Is it? Because if it is what you do I could almost forgive you. Only I’m sure it’s not. So what do they do? Use it for parts?”

“My dear Mrs. Bliss,” Chitral said, “why are you upset? Pardon me, but I’m certain this can’t be good for you. Pardon me, but I think you should make an effort to calm yourself. I assure you, Mrs. Bliss, I assure you, Dorothy, your car isn’t on the premises. I don’t know what happened to it. Probably they auctioned it off. That’s what the government usually does with the property it confiscates.

“If you watch the papers, every once in a while they take out an ad back in the section where people post those little disclaimers about how they’re no longer responsible for some other party’s debts. It’s the law, they’re required to do that, and if you wanted you could actually go out and bid on it yourself. Just as if it were an ordinary estate sale and not some piece of evidence they once used to deprive a person of his liberty for a hundred years.

“That’s one thing the government does with the property it seizes,” Chitral said. “The other thing it might have done was have it shredded in the hammermill and sold for scrap.”

It didn’t matter that Mrs. Bliss was still angry or that she despised this man. It didn’t matter that his answer to her question about Ted’s car had been laced with intentional mockery and cruelty. If she was nervous of her anger, if she was reluctant to confront him, if she was reticent or shy, shamed, or even a little embarrassed by what she had to do, it was the nervousness, anger, reticence, reluctance, shyness, shame, and embarrassment of someone turning state’s evidence, or of one thrown hither and you by contradictory principles. On the one hand, there was her loyalty to Ted, on the other her long recruitment and service to a talismanic trust in the temperament, nature, and credibility of men as a pure idea. When she spoke it was as if she were betraying her country.

“Did you have so much disrespect for me you had to use me? What was I, your, what-do-you-call-it, pigeon?”

It was almost as though Alcibiades had anticipated her question, almost as though he’d prepared for it, and now aced it like a student who’d been up all night cramming for an exam.

“Disrespect? No, no disrespect. On the contrary, out of my sense of your honor. Your softness and sweetness and priorities. My belief in the reliability of your taste.”

“My taste,” Mrs. Bliss, chided for years by her children for the absence of that attribute, the frugality of clipped discount coupons piled up and banded in her kitchen drawers like the mad money of a miser, scolded for the meanness of her saving ways, how there were slipcovers like so much plastic rainwear on all the furniture and how even the tanks and lids of her toilets were swaddled in bulky terry cloth as if to keep them dry, and her reinforced shower curtains (always decorated with marine life blatant as cartoons, sea horses like armored, gothic font riding their perfect verticals, smiling caricatures of fish about to bite down on cheerful hooks) thick and heavy as tarp, said scornfully.

“Yes, señora. Your very dependable taste, your naïveté like a racial trait. Excuse me, lady, I like you. I do more, I admire and cherish you, and wish in my heart the tables were turned, that I had not cast my lot with the adventurers, or been born with this piratical soul like a birth blemish. Oh, I’m a cliché of a fellow, and if I don’t feel conspicuously ill-used you may mark that down — I do — to a failure of impatience on my part, to a sort of, well, lazy eye, some high romp of the blood. You, please, Mrs., you mustn’t misunderstand me, are like a paraplegic. You, your people have the gift of sitting still, I mean. Had you been here when we came to the New World we’d have made you slaves, stolen your gold and smashed your temples. We’d have wiped out your mathematics and astronomy and forbidden you access to your terrible gods. No offense, ma’am, but there’s something loathsome and repellent to persons like me in persons like you. Perhaps your passivity — I bear you no grudge, Widow Bliss, I’ve no bones to pick with your kind — is at odds with our conquistador spirit, something antithetical between our engagement and the Jew’s torpid stupor, his incuriosity and dead-pan, poker-faced genius for suffering, like a cartoon kike’s stoicism struck in a shekel. You were born sticks-in-the-mud. Why, if it weren’t for people like me, like Pharaoh and Hitler, the Cossacks and Crusaders, and whoever those kings were who kicked you out of France and England, the diaspora would never have happened. The diaspora? Shit, señora, your people would never have learned to cross the street!

“So of course you were a pigeon! You were pigeon and dupe, scapegoat and laughingstock — a little menagerie of sacrificial lamb, cat’s-paw, and gull. Of course you were!

“Oh,” he said, “I’ve offended you. Entirely unintentional, dear. You’ve mistaken my meaning. Haven’t I already said I admire you? Didn’t I speak of the Jew’s charms — his patience and innocence and naïveté and passivity? Even the imperfect posture of your people’s priorities has its charm. The anti-Semites get it wrong with their wild, extravagant claims — all that international-banker crapola and Trilateral Commission hocus-pocus, all those cabala riffs and lame spew about controlling the media. The illuminati this and Protocols of the Elders of Zion that. No, they’ve tin ears for Jews, Jew baiters do. They go on forever with their Zionist conspiracies and Israeli lobby and Jerusalem-Hollywood nexus. My God, Mrs. Bliss, they can’t even drum up a convincing case for your stringing up Jesus!

“Haven’t I already said I cherish you? Don’t I admire your sweetness and softness, your honor and taste? Yet you ask why I chose you.

“Well, I’ll tell you. I chose you because you were available, a surefire target of opportunity. I did you because there were seat covers in your husband’s automobile! I did you because you’re descended from a great race of babies!

Now she’d heard everything, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Twice in her long life she’d sensed herself slurred, once when they’d owned the farm in Michigan and in the deepest part of winter, dressed to the nines, she’d walk to the village on the simplest household errand, then again when the DEA agents had come into the garage in Building Number One and made cracks while they cordoned off Ted’s car. But even on those occasions none of the townspeople had ever said a word to her about her religion and, years later, not even the agents (who she felt had been using Manny, talking through him so Mrs. Bliss could overhear what they said) had mentioned Jews. If she’d felt herself personally derided those times perhaps the reason was she’d felt outmanned, outgunned in the presence of so much sheer, overwhelming Americanism. Even as a child in Russia, Dorothy had merely heard of pogroms. She’d never even seen a Cossack. What she knew of anti-Semitism she knew by hearsay, word-of-mouth. It was rather like what she knew of ghosts and haunted houses.

This was something else. It was the last thing she’d expected, and for all that Alcibiades Chitral had couched his attack in different terms, taking care to distinguish himself from the ordinary Jew-hater and seemingly apologize to her as he went along, she knew she was getting it all, being hauled up on all the charges he could think of. She was having, she thought, the book thrown at her. By Alcibiades Chitral’s lights it was as if Dorothy Bliss had been found guilty and sent up for a hundred years.

So now she’d heard everything. Everything. Full force. Flat out. It was like having the wind knocked out. It took her breath away. Determined as she was to maintain her calm — it was what Chitral himself had told her to do; even before he’d attacked her, he’d warned her against her anger — she found herself breathlessly hiccuping, then choking.

Chitral moved behind her, clapped her sharply on the back. Astonishingly, it worked. Her hiccups were stopped as effectively as if he’d clasped his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Now, tentatively, as though she were testing the waters, she drew deeper and deeper breaths. She felt a little light-headed and, peculiarly, disheveled. She was conscious of fanning her hands before her face, of making various fluttery gestures of adjustment, silly, girlish, inappropriate Southern belle movements about her septuagenarian body. It was as though she were frisking herself and, try as she might, could not make herself stop. She felt as if she were in Michigan, performing for the townspeople again.

“Do you want some water? I’ll get you some water,” Chitral said, and left the table.

If I die now, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, they’ll see how upset I am and I’ll get him in trouble.

But then, a little more sanely, she thought, a hundred years, isn’t that trouble? And thought, anti-Semite or no anti-Semite, could she blame him? She had testified against the man. She thought, she knew the blue book value. She thought, she had sold Ted’s car to pay off a property tax of two hundred dollars. She thought, I made a profit five thousand dollars over and above the blue book value and still I threw him in jail!

Was it so terrible what Chitral did? All the business part of their married life the Blisses had lived by markup. She’d made a twenty-five hundred percent markup on the deal! Ted would have been proud. Even what the Spaniard had done with the car hadn’t been so geferlech. What, he’d chosen it because who’d ever suspect that a Buick LeSabre equipped not only with seat covers but with all the other features, too, plus a permanent personal parking space out of the rain in a big, mostly Jewish condominium building, could be used as a sort of dope locker? So Ted was a butcher. He stored meat in lockers. Meat, dope, it was all of it groceries finally. A hundred years? Would they have given Ted a hundred years if they had discovered he’d once had dealings in the black market? A hundred years, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, a hundred years was ridiculous. It was longer than even she’d been alive.

Still, she felt bad Chitral had such a biased picture of Jews. This didn’t sit well. But a leopard couldn’t change its spots. He couldn’t make it up to her for his anti-Semitism, and she couldn’t make it up to him for his hundred years.

So she split the difference, and while he was still looking for her glass of water, she took out her checkbook and wrote a check to him for a hundred dollars — making over to him exactly half what it would have cost her in property taxes if she’d never sold the car to him in the first place.

They were quits, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.

And, in the limo, on the long ride back to the Towers, Mrs. Bliss took comfort in the fact that she was at last even a little better than quits. Now she knew why he had picked her out of all the possible people in south Florida with all the possible used cars they had up for sale; she was finally satisfied that an unthinking promise she’d made all those years back to come on this, what-do-you-call-it, pilgrimage, could be stamped paid-in-full and she’d never have to think about the nasty Jew-hating bastard son of a bitch again!

Загрузка...