It was April, and Mrs. Bliss had agreed to spend the Passover holidays with Frank and Frank’s family in Frank’s new house in Frank’s new city of Providence, Rhode Island. Maxine and George would be there with their kids, the beautiful Judith and chip-off-the-block, entrepreneurial James. Frank was said to be helping out with Ellen’s fare (her daughter, Janet, was still in India) and with poor Marvin’s son, Barry’s, the auto mechanic. Frank’s own boy, the brilliant Donny, who could have bought and sold all of them, would probably be flying in from Europe.
All this had been arranged months before, in December, and Dorothy had agreed because who knew what could happen between December and April? In December, to a woman Dorothy Bliss’s age, April looks like the end of time. She didn’t see any point in refusing. But as early as February Mrs. Bliss had begun having second thoughts.
If he still lived in Pittsburgh, if there were a nonstop flight from Fort Lauderdale to Providence, if he still had all his old friends from the university in Pittsburgh instead of a whole new bunch of people she’d have to meet and whose names, chances were, she’d probably never even catch because, let’s face it, people all tended to arrive together on the first night of a seder and who could distinguish their names one from another in all the tummel with all their vildeh chei-eh kids running around, never mind remember them. If this, if that. But the fact was it was already late March and she had to purchase her airline tickets if she wanted to qualify for a cheap fare and escape the “certain restrictions apply” clauses in the carrier’s rule book.
She made her reservations on USAir the same day she realized it was already late March and she had better get packing. There was a direct flight to Providence — you had to land in Washington — but no nonstop one, and it turned out it was the only flight going there, so she didn’t even have her choice of a departure time. Mrs. Bliss wasn’t afraid of flying so much as she was of landing in strange cities and having to sit in the plane while it changed crews or took on fuel or boarded new passengers. (Also, she knew about landings, how they were the trickiest part of the whole deal.) But what troubled her most, she thought, was what to take with her. She’d never been to Rhode Island and it was Frank’s first year there so he really wouldn’t be able to tell her. She found an atlas of the United States in the building’s small bookcase in the game room and looked up Providence. It was north of Chicago, north of Pittsburgh, north of New York, and all that stood between it and the rest of cold, icy New England and Canada was a wide but not very high Massachusetts.
Mrs. Bliss had lived in south Florida since the sixties. In another year it would be the nineties. Over that kind of time span a person’s body gets accustomed to the temperature of a particular climate. Take the person out of that climate and set him down in another and she’s like a fish out of water. The blood thins out; the heart, conditioned to operate in one kind of circumstance, has to work twice as hard just to keep up in another. There were people from up North, for example, who couldn’t take the Florida heat. Their skin burned, they ran a high fever. Except on the hottest days, and even then only when she’d been waiting for a bus in the sun or carrying heavy bags of groceries back from Winn-Dixie, Dorothy didn’t even feel it. By the same token she’d noticed that in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati on visits, she needed her good wool coat on what everyone else was calling a beautiful, mild spring day.
But who knew from Providence? So for a good two months before she left for that city Mrs. Ted Bliss studied the weather maps and read the long columns of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s temperature, the lows and the highs, and prophetically shook her head from side to side whenever she saw the dull gray cross-hatching of fronts and weather.
So, just in case, she packed almost everything, bringing along her heaviest woolen sweaters, scarves, even gloves. Her two big suitcases were too heavy and though she hated to impose on him she called Manny from the building and asked for his help.
“You look like you’re moving for good.”
“I never know what to take, not to take.”
“The summer Rosie died I went back North to see the kids. You don’t think I froze?”
“Here,” she said, “let me help you.”
“That’s all right, I’ll make two trips.”
She should have waited for the van and given the driver a tip a dollar. It was like seeing some once familiar face from television who popped up again after an absence of a few years. She still recognized him, but there was something pinched about his eyes, or his mouth had fallen, or his body had become too small for his frame. Something. As if he were his own older relative. She hated to see him shlep like that.
“You’re going to…?”
“Frank’s.”
For a second the name didn’t register and, even after he smiled, she felt a small stab from a not very interesting wound. Dorothy knew Manny knew Frank had not liked him much. He’d resented his mother’s dependence on the guy after Ted died. It was nothing personal. There was no funny business to it. No one, not Frank, not Dorothy, certainly not Manny, had any crazy ideas. It was a compliment, really. Frank felt bad she was all alone and a stranger had to do for her.
How, she wondered, when she was on the plane and had finished her snack, and returned the tray table to its original upright position and drifted off to sleep as the airline’s inflight shopping catalog with all its mysterious, unfathomable tsatskes, exercise equipment, short-wave radios and miniature television sets, motivational self-help videos, garment bags, and special, impregnable waterproof watches guaranteed to a depth of five thousand feet slipped into her lap, did I get to be so smart?
Though she declined when the hostess asked if she wanted to request a chair to meet her in Providence, she had treated herself to a ride in a wheelchair in the Florida airport even though she’d allowed herself plenty of time to get to the departure gate, and as she dozed it was of this she dreamed. Dreaming of unaccustomed, incredible comfort, dreaming right-of-way like a vehicle in a funeral procession, dreaming alternating unseen skycaps behind her who pushed her in the chair — Junior, Manny, Tommy Auveristas, Marvin, Frank, and Ted — as she sat luxuriously, dispensing wisdom, eating up their attention like a meal.
Despite the pleasure she thought she’d taken in her dream, she woke with a bad taste in her mouth, thinking: The same thing that gives us wisdom gives us plaque.
“How was the trip, Ma?”
“Fine.”
“Make any new friends?”
“I don’t talk so much to strangers anymore.”
“Here,” Frank said, “give me the baggage checks. I’ll have the skycap bring your bags out to the curb.”
To Frank’s surprise, his mother surrendered the claim checks without a word.
Mrs. Bliss was surprised, too. She dismissed any idea of the skycap’s trying to make off with her things.
Something else that surprised her was that in the months since she’d last seen him, Frank had become very religious. He insisted, for example, that she accompany him to synagogue. And not just for the relatively brief Friday evening service but for the long, knockdown, drag-out Saturday morning services, too. Now he and May, his wife, had never been particularly observant. Their son Donny had been bar mitzvahed but the ceremony had taken place in the nondenominational chapel of Frank’s Pittsburgh university. A rabbi from Hillel had presided. The boy had been brilliant, flawlessly whipping through his Torah portion, and doing all of them proud, but Mrs. Bliss knew that afterward he didn’t bother to strap on his phylacteries, not even during the month or so following the bar mitzvah when the flush of his Judaism might still be presumed to be on him. (His grandmother had been impressed with the grace and speed he employed in getting out his thank-you notes, though, blessed as he was with a sort of perfect pitch for gratitude. Each note was bespoke, custom cut to the precise value of the gift. He did not rhapsodize or make grand promises about how a $10 check from a distant cousin would be deposited into his college fund, but would instead fix upon a specific item — film, say; a tape he wanted; a ticket to a Pirates game.)
Both Mrs. Bliss’s sons had been bar mitzvahed, Marvin as well as Frank, but neither could be said to be very religious. When Marvin died it was Ted, not Frank, who rose before dawn every day for a year to get to the shul on time to say Kaddish for their son. When Ted died it was no one. She’d begged Frank, but he refused, a matter of principle he said. So Dorothy, who was as innocent of Hebrew as of French, undertook to say the prayers for her dead husband herself. She read the mourner’s prayers from a small, thin blue handbook the Chicago funeral parlor passed out. It was about the size of the pocket calculator Manny from the building had given her to help balance her checkbook after Ted lost his life. She read the prayers in a soft, transliterated version of the Hebrew, but came to feel she was merely going through the motions, probably doing more harm than good. If Mrs. Ted Bliss were God, Mrs. Bliss thought, she’d never be fooled by someone simply impersonating important prayers. It was useless to try to compensate for her failure by getting up earlier and earlier each morning. God would see through that one with His hands tied behind His back. If there even was a God, if He wasn’t just some courtesy people politely agreed to call on to make themselves nobler to each other than they were.
So Mrs. Bliss’s first reaction to her son’s new piety was mixed not just with suspicion but with a certain sort of anger.
Especially after Frank made them all sit through the long seder supper, unwilling to dispense with even the most minor detail of the ritual meal. He didn’t miss a trick. Everything was blessed, every last carrot in the tsimmes, each bitter herb, every deed of every major and minor player, one grisly plague after the other visited by God upon Egypt. It was a Passover service to end all Passover services. Indeed, Mrs. Bliss had a hunch that there wasn’t a family in all Providence, Rhode Island, that evening that hadn’t finished its coffee and macaroons and gotten up from the table before the Blisses were midway through their brisket and roast potatoes.
May seemed imbued with more baleboosteh spirit and just plain endurance than Dorothy could imagine herself handling during even the old golden glory days in Chicago with the gang. She wore her out, May, with her hustle and bustle. And for at least a few minutes Mrs. Bliss actually considered herself the victim of some clumsy, stupid mockery. As a matter of fact she was almost close to tears and, though she slammed down her will like someone bearing down on the brakes with all her weight and just managed to squeeze them back (she wouldn’t give Frank — or May, who might have put him up to this — the satisfaction of volunteering to help clear away the dishes), she could almost feel the strain on her face and only hoped that no one noticed. She sat through the remainder of the meal with an assortment of smiles fixed to her face like makeup.
When it was finally done she was one of the first to pile into the living room, and found a place for herself in the most comfortable chair. She took some great-grandchild onto her lap like a prop and started to rock the kid, who was already half asleep.
I’m going to get away with this, she thought. I’m going to act like everyone here expects me to act and come away scot-free without giving a single one of them the satisfaction of believing they ever got to me.
And would have, too, if her pious son hadn’t seen through to the depths of her heart.
“Something wrong, Ma?” Frank said in a low voice at the side of her chair.
“You’re the spiritual leader here,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you tell me.”
Her son looked genuinely puzzled, even hurt. He’d been a good boy. Quick in school, responsible, considerate to the family, never demanding on his own behalf — they had to remind him that what he wore was wearing out and that he needed new clothes; they had to ask him what he wanted for his birthday; throughout high school they raised his allowance before he ever asked — she’d never had occasion to punish him, or even to yell at him. Her heart went out to him. This was the young man who couldn’t do enough for her, who was always on the lookout for special gadgets to make her life more comfortable and, though he seldom wrote, called even when the cheap rates weren’t in effect. He called as if long distance grew on trees.
So of course she was sorry she had spoken harshly. Of course she could have bitten off her tongue rather than speak without thinking or cause him pain.
Only she hadn’t spoken without thinking. She’d been thinking for a long time, for years as a matter of fact, whether she knew it or not. And though this was hardly the time (the first night of Passover when the Jewish people sat down together to celebrate their deliverance), and certainly not the place for it (her sole surviving son’s new home where he’d be making a new life, which, let’s face it, he was no spring chicken, so how many new lives could he expect to make for himself from now on, and his mother didn’t think he’d be asked to take another job so quick), there were plenty of good reasons to get what had been eating at her and eating at her off her chest.
“What?” he said, following her down the hallway as she sought the spare room where they’d put her up as if it were a neutral corner.
“What?” he repeated. “What?”
“You’re so religious,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “How come you couldn’t say Kaddish for your father? How come I had to depend on Manny who volunteered to say it for him?”
“Ma.”
Maxine was standing in the doorway, looking in; George, her husband, was.
“I begged you,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Oh, Ma,” Frank said.
“No. A stranger. A stranger you despised, that you humiliated in my home, my guest — you saw him, Maxine, you were a witness — that you gave him five dollars that time like you were throwing him a tip.”
“Five dollars?”
“You don’t remember the pocket calculator?”
“Come on, Ma. He makes me nervous. Sticking his nose in everywhere it don’t belong. All right, maybe I wronged him, I admit it. How is he, anyway? I haven’t seen him in years. I’m sorry if I hurt his feelings. If you want, I’ll write him an apology. I’ll call him up. We’ll make friends.”
“How is he? He’s old. Like everyone else. And don’t write him, don’t call him up. He probably forgot. What’s done is done. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“What’s done is done? If what’s done is done, how come you introduce a topic I haven’t thought about in years? If what’s done is done, how’d you happen to drag this particular Elijah into my house with you in the first place? Come on, Ma, is this really about Manny? Is it really even about my father?”
“Oh, you’re such a smart fella, Frank. You’re such a fart smeller,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“I haven’t heard that one since I was a little girl,” Maxine said. “Daddy used to say that one all the time.”
“My father said it, too. I think it was the only joke he knew,” George said.
“That’s old,” said one of Frank’s new Rhode Island colleagues, “that’s an old one.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “family business is being conducted here.”
“Sorry,” the colleague said, “I came for my son.”
He reached out to the child Mrs. Bliss had been rocking in her lap in the living room. The little boy had apparently followed her into the room with Frank.
“ ‘Fart smeller, fart smeller,’ ” the kid squealed, “Great-Grandma Dorothy called Great-Uncle Frank a fart smeller.”
Why was he calling her his great-grandmother? Who were these strange children, these outlanders, who apparently just latched on to the nearest, most convenient old lady and assumed some universal kinship? How could parents let their kids get away with stuff like that? Didn’t they realize how patronizing it was? It made Mrs. Ted Bliss feel like someone’s Mammy. (Though she felt for the child, too. How needful people were to belong, to be cared for.)
Her grandson Barry had squeezed into the room with the others. The auto mechanic slapped his tochis and guffawed.
“You mind your manners, Grandmother,” Barry said, “or we’ll have to wash out your mouth with soap. Strictly kosher for Passover. Ha ha.”
“Please,” Mrs. Bliss said, and again she was close to tears.
“Mama, what is it?” Maxine said.
“Give her some air, for God’s sake,” George said, and began to shoo people from the room.
It was a good idea, Mrs. Bliss thought. Why hadn’t someone thought of it earlier? “Yes,” Mrs. Bliss said, “give me some air. Stand back there,” she giggled, “make room. Oh,” she said, “I’m so full. Everything May put out was delicious. The brisket was sweet like sugar, she’ll have to give me her recipe. But so much? You could feed an army.”
“A question is on the table, Mother, I think,” Frank said.
“What question was that?” Mrs. Bliss asked wearily, sorry she’d taken her disappointment public.
“Is this really about Manny? Is this really about Dad?”
“No,” she said, her long life draining from her in buckets, “it’s really about why you never said prayers for your brother.”
Maxine made a noise as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her.
Frank moved toward the door of the first-floor guest room they’d set up for the old woman, shut it, and turned back again to his mother.
“Just what kind of son of a bitch do you think I am?” he demanded.
“I don’t think that,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Hypocrite then. I mean, Jesus, Ma, do you really believe I’m that scheming and political? Do you actually think that just because some damn zealot decided to drag my name into an op-ed column in the New York damned Times that legitimates his crazy charges?”
“Charges? There are charges? What did you do, Frank? Are you in trouble? Do you need a lawyer?”
“I got a lawyer, Ma. Manny from the building’s on retainer.”
“Manny from the building?”
“He’s kidding you, Mother,” Maxine said. “Frank, you’re scaring her half to death.”
“What’s going on?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“She doesn’t know?” Frank asked Maxine. “I mean her son is famous and she doesn’t even know?”
“What’s going on?”
“Mother, Frank left Pittsburgh because—”
“Was driven out of Pittsburgh,” Frank said.
“—some political correctness jerk did this high-powered deconstructionist job on him. He said Frank deliberately eschewed the Zionist movement and swung over to Orthodox Judaism to privilege the word of the father over the writings of the son.”
“You did this?”
“Of course not, Mother.”
“Anti-Semitism!” Mrs. Bliss said.
“Well,” said her son philosophically, “you know these guys, they get off on demystifying the whole hierarchy.”
“They threw you out?”
“Let’s just say they made the workplace hell for me.”
“The grinch who stole Pesach,” Maxine said.
She told them she was tired and said she thought she’d rest a while before going back out to help May with the dishes.
“May has plenty of help, Mother. You just get some sleep.”
“Tell her everything tasted wonderful, a meal to remember.”
The children came to the side of her bed. Maxine adjusted the pillows beneath her mother’s head, kissed her cheek. Frank pressed his lips against her forehead.
“I have temperature?”
“Temperature?”
“That’s the last thing I did after I put you to bed.”
“I remember,” Frank said.
“To check to see if you had temperature.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Maxine.
“Like clockwork,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t remember. If I did, if I didn’t. Then I’d have to go back to your room and do it again. Otherwise I couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh, Ma, that’s so sweet,” Maxine said.
“I’d always check to see if you had temperature.”
“I’ll turn off the light. Try to nap.”
“You I’d check. I’d check Frank. Marvin I’d check.”
“Oh, Ma,” Maxine said.
“In the hospital, even when he was dying from leukemia. Can you imagine? Did you ever? The biggest hotshot doctors, the best men in Chicago. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do for him. The doctors with their therapies, me brushing his forehead with my lips to see did he have temperature.”
“Please, Ma,” Maxine said.
“Maxine’s right, Ma,” Frank said. “You’ve had a long day. Try to get some rest. I can hear them in the living room, I’ll tell them to hold it down.”
“They’re your guests. Don’t say nothing.”
She couldn’t have napped more than fifteen minutes. She’d fallen asleep watching one of her programs on the little bedside TV and when she woke up the show was just ending.
“Grandma? Grandma, I hear the TV. Are you up? May I come in?”
So she didn’t know whether it was her grandson’s knock, or his voice, or the sound of the television itself that had aroused her from sleep. She was as surprised as ever by the effectiveness of a brief snooze. Yet she rarely lay down before it was actually time to go to bed, and wondered at those times, like this one, how it was a person could doze for only a few minutes but wake completely refreshed whereas she could sleep through the night, or at least a whole block of hours, yet still be as exhausted in the morning as she was when she went to bed. What an interesting proposition, she thought — old people’s science, septuagenarian riddles and the deep philosophic mysteries of experience. There should be men working on this stuff in the laboratories and universities. And, as usual, these questions were as immediately forgotten as the time it took her to think them. Which, she thought, was something else they should be working on. And immediately forgot that one, too.
“Grandma?”
“What?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Who’s that, who’s there? James? Is that you, Donny?”
“It’s Barry, Grandma. Can I come in?”
“All right, Barry.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you, Grandmother.”
“You didn’t. Maybe you did, I don’t know. It’s all right.”
“Well, if I did, I’m sorry.”
“Make the light, I can’t see you.”
He stood in the room in the light.
“Let me see your fingernails,” his grandmother said.
“Grandma,” he said.
“No, don’t pull away your hand. You know what, Barry? You got fingernails like a piano player, like a banker. A surgeon who scrubs all the time don’t have cleaner nails. What do you do, go to a beauty parlor?”
She’d been giving him the business about his nails all these years, ever since he first became a mechanic in a garage. It was true, his nails were immaculate, his hands were. There wasn’t a drop of dirt on them. They were rough, but pink as a girl’s. Ted had ribbed him, too. Now, though, she saw his small, sly, proud smile and Mrs. Bliss was a little ashamed of herself, and sorry for her grandson. How he must have worked on them, buffing and polishing and soaking them, it wouldn’t surprise, in warm emollients and lotions. Soft, buttery waves of a thin perfume rose off his fingertips like distant, melting light refracted in a road illusion. It was terrible, she realized, the lengths to which he must have gone to rub away all the appearance of failure, and Mrs. Bliss understood as suddenly and completely as she’d awakened to the laws of old people’s science how it was with poor Barry, in thrall, pursued by the reputations of his brilliant, successful cousins — Judith, Donald, James. And now it occurred that she didn’t remember ever seeing him in anything less formal than a jacket and tie since he was a child. At cards, at family gatherings, on picnics, Barry was the one who always showed up overdressed. She wondered if he even owned a sport shirt and had never seen him in a bathing suit. And though none of his clothes seemed particularly good or fashionable, they were as carefully chosen to create an impression (or counterfeit one) as if they had been made to his measure.
Poor Barry, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Poor fatherless Barry. Who, for all that he went about dressed to the nines, leading with his perfectly manicured screen actor’s fingernails, seemed somehow covered up, masked, as though the carefully groomed hands were only part of a magician’s practiced, deliberate distractions, some noisily flourished razzle-dazzle that deceived no one and, indeed, there was something depressingly coarse about him, like a man with an awful five o’clock shadow. There was something loud and awful too about the conservative colors of even his darkest suits, which were always too black, a step removed from patent leather, or too brown, like woodstain on cheap suites of furniture. If Mrs. Bliss, a woman whose habits and heart did not allow herself to pick and choose between the members of her family, had let her guard down long enough to admit of a particular favorite, of all her grandchildren Barry might well have received the lion’s share of her love, been chief beneficiary of the small store of her dedicated, egalitarian treasury. Indeed, if she could admit to the world what, even with both hearing aids turned up to their highest volume, barely registered on her consciousness (her still, small voice small still), she might have allowed herself to acknowledge that Barry took pride of place, said, “To hell with it!” and gone ahead and bought him that garage he was saving for.
But then, she thought, she’d have had to buy all of them garages.
He pulled an uncomfortable-looking slatted wooden chair (like the chair in the bed-and-breakfast that Frank and May had found for them the time she and Ted visited London during Frank’s sabbatical year) up to the side of his grandmother’s bed and sat down.
“So how are you, Grandmother?”
Mrs. Bliss started to laugh. Barry looked hurt.
“No, no, Barry. It’s just, when you asked, you reminded me.”
“What of?”
“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf?” sang Mrs. Ted Bliss.
“Oh,” Barry said, “yeah. Sure.”
“No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m the big bad wolf. What did you bring me?”
“Questions,” Barry said meekly.
“The better to see you with. The better to hear you with. The better to eat you with, my dear.”
“About my dad,” Barry said.
She’d never been one to carry on. She didn’t make fusses, wasn’t the sort of person who liked to impose. Outside the family, for example, she knew she made a better hostess than a guest. And if she had once been beautiful or vain, then the beauty and vanity were aspects of those same hospitable impulses that went into her lavish wish to please, to be pleasing to others. She wasn’t stoic or invulnerable. If you pricked her, she bled, if you tickled her she laughed, de da de da. It was just that same baleboosteh instinct to clean up after herself, the blood; to cover her mouth demurely over the laughter. It was some Jewish thing perhaps, a sense of timing, knowing when to make herself scarce.
No one, she thought, understood the terrible toll Ted’s death had inflicted upon her. Maybe the stewardess on the airplane that time, maybe the woman in City Hall to whom she’d tried to explain the problem about the personal property tax on Ted’s Buick LeSabre. But the grief she felt when he died, that she still felt, never mind that time heals all wounds, was a thing not even her children were aware of (and to tell you the truth was more than a little miffed about this, not because they were blind to her pain so much as that their blindness gave her a sense that whatever they’d once felt about Ted’s death had gone away), though she wouldn’t have let them in on this in a million years. It wasn’t that she meant to spare them either. They were her kids, she loved them, but maybe they didn’t deserve to be spared. It wasn’t even a question of why she spared them. It was what she spared them. Mrs. Bliss’s loss was exactly that — a loss, something subtracted from herself, ripped off like an arm or a leg in an accident. It was the deepest of flesh wounds, and it festered, spilled pus, ran rivers of the bile of all unclosed scar, all unsealed stump. How could she ever ask anyone to look at something like that?
But Barry, with his grief for his father, for himself, was a different story altogether.
“He loved you, Barry. I never saw a prouder father. You were tops in his book. Tops.”
Barry watched his grandmother carefully.
“You were,” she said. “No father could have been closer to his son. He cherished you.” She turned, facing him on her side, her weight uncomfortably propped on her forearm, the edge of her thin fist. “Lean down,” she whispered.
Barry moved toward her, stretching tight his still buttoned suit jacket. “Yes?”
“It’s a secret,” she said. “Don’t tell your cousins, it would hurt their feelings. Marvin got more naches from you than Aunt Maxine and Uncle Frank got from all your cousins put together.”
“Really? No.”
“Sure,” said Mrs. Bliss. “It was written all over his face whenever you came into a room. Or maybe you’d just left and I’d come in and I’d say, ‘I just missed Barry, didn’t I, Marvin?’ Sure, I could tell,” she said, “it was like a big sign on his face.”
“I don’t remember,” Barry said.
“You were a kid, a baby. What were you when your father, olov hasholem, got sick, eight, nine?”
“He died just before my tenth birthday.”
“That’s right. And before that he was in and out of hospitals for months at a time for an entire year. The hospital wouldn’t allow visitors your age, and when he was home he was too sick to play with you. Except on those few days he seemed to be feeling a little better we tried to keep you away from him. We thought it was best that a child shouldn’t see his daddy in those circumstances. We were trying to do what was best by both parties. Maybe we were wrong. We were probably wrong. What did we know? Did we have so much experience? Were we so knowledgeable about death in those days?”
She was as moved by what she said as Barry himself, but then, olov hasholem, she knew that both of them, maybe all three of them, deserved better, that a debt was owed to what really happened.
So she told him the truth: that in that last awful year of his life he was too sick for pride, for favorites, big bright smiles, or any other sign unconnected to his pain and suffering, too sick for the least little bit of happiness, or, on even those rare, blessed days of unlooked-for remission presented to him like a gift, for gratitude, let alone having enough strength left over, or will, or determination, or drive, for anything as rigorous as love, or even common, God forgive me, fucking courtesy.
It was different then. This was not only before death with dignity, it was before pain management. It was the dark ages when doctors and nurses didn’t always play so fast and loose with the morphine, and patients had to wait on the appointed, exact minute of their next injection like customers taking a number at the bakery. So when Dorothy sat with him in the hospital that year, always putting in at least five or six hours a day and often pulling ten, or more even, on the days when Marvin — olov hasholem, olov hasholem, olov hasholem — was out of his head, chained up and screaming at his torturers like a political prisoner, she felt the pain almost as keenly as he did, fidgeting, uselessly pressing her lips to his head to feel the fever, kissing his cheeks, wiping his face down with wet, cool cloths in an effort to console him, even as he thrashed his head and neck and shoulders about, forcefully (who had no force) trying to escape, throw her off, shouting at her, actually cursing her, this good tragic son (whose tragedy was, for Mrs. Bliss, suddenly, sourly, obscurely underscored by the three- or four-year seniority his wife had over him in age, so that, if he died, he would seem, young as he was, even younger, and even more tragic) who’d never so much as raised his voice to her before; yes, and felt his relief, too, as her son’s vicious pains gradually subsided when he received the soothing sacrament of the morphine, but, exhausted as she was, not only not daring, not even willing to sleep during the three and then two and then one good hour of respite that the drug provided lest she miss one minute of what, despite all those hours of her visits to the hospital in the last year of Marvin’s life, she still managed to fool herself into believing was the beginning of his cure.
They never got used to it. Not Ellen, not Ted, not Dorothy or Frank or Maxine, spelling, relieving each other on the better days and, on the just-average-ordinary, run-of-the-mill lousy ones only long enough to dash down to the cafeteria for a bite or out to the waiting room to grab a smoke or to the vending machines for a soft drink or cup of coffee, while on the five-star, flat-out rotten ones they never even got that far, but chose instead, like captains of doomed, sinking ships to stay with their vessels, who if they could not go down with them could at least bear witness. So that Marvin became at last not their son or brother or husband at all but some all-purpose child, the rights to whose death they collectively demanded. They never got used to it. Why should they? When they never even got used to the diagnosis?
A cracked rib? What was the big deal about a cracked rib? All right, it was uncomfortable. It was painful to draw a deep breath, and you had to walk on eggshells when you climbed the stairs, and be very careful not to make any sudden movements if you wanted to save yourself from a painful stitch, but a cracked rib? How serious could a cracked rib be if all they did for you was tape up your chest? It was like breaking a toe where maybe they might go to the trouble of fixing it in a little splint while the bone went about the business of healing itself. It was a nuisance, of course it was, no one denied it, but serious? Come on! It was about as life threatening as a black eye, except that with a black eye you always had the added humiliation of explaining it away, trying to put it in the best light.
All right, two cracked ribs, the second following about a week after the first one got better, and Marvin unable to explain how he got it except to tell the doctor he felt this wrenching pain as he was bending over to lift a bag of Ellen’s groceries out of the backseat to carry into the house for her. But tests? Tests? Okay, the X ray they could understand, but sending the poor man off to the hospital for blood tests Dr. Myers said he didn’t have a way to take and have analyzed in his office quickly enough?
It was probably nothing of course, but just to make certain, be on the safe side.
His mother went white when she heard and Ellen’s pleas for her not to interfere, and to let Myers take care of it and just stay out of the doctor’s hair and not act like some ignorant greenhorn while they waited for the results.
Ignorant greenhorn? I’m his mother!
Of course you are, Ma, and I’m his wife, and I’m as scared as you are, believe me, but I don’t want the whole world in on this. It would only terrify Marvin if he found out.
The whole world, the whole world? I’m his mother. What did he say, the doctor?
Let’s take it one step at a time.
Let’s take it one step at a time? And you didn’t ask questions? You didn’t press him?
I pressed him, I pressed him. Okay? I asked him what’s the worst-case scenario.
What is?
Leukemia. Blood cancer. Are you satisfied?
Leukemia. Oh God, oh God, oh my God.
Myers didn’t say it was leukemia. What he said was that was the worst-case scenario. We have to wait for the tests, we have to take it one step at a time.
Leukemia. Oh my God oh God oh my God, my son has leukemia.
“He doesn’t have leukemia,” Ellen said. “We have to wait for the tests.”
But of course that was just what he would have, Mrs. Bliss knew. Since when does a perfectly healthy young man crack a rib from picking up a bag of groceries out of the backseat of a car? It just doesn’t happen. And when the results finally came back — and it wasn’t that long; what took time were all the additional tests they added on to those initial ones they sent him off to the hospital for — the reports from hematology, the pathologist’s opinions — and it was leukemia, Mrs. Bliss, God forgive her, couldn’t quite absolve her daughter-in-law from at least a little of the responsibility for her son’s illness. Who asks a man who’s just recovered from a painfully cracked rib to stoop over and pick up a heavy bag of groceries for her? What was she, a cripple? She wasn’t saying that that’s what caused him to come down with the disease, but maybe if she’d shown a little more consideration, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry, if she’d waited until he was a little stronger, Marvin wouldn’t have cracked another rib and his body would have had a better chance to heal, and the leukemia might never have happened.
“That’s silly,” Ted Bliss said. “How was it Ellen’s fault? This was something going on in his blood.”
“Leukemia. Oh my God, oh my God, my son has leukemia.”
They accepted the diagnosis, they just never got used to it. Just as, God forgive her (though she knew better and had known better even at the top of her anger and denial as she pronounced her awful thoughts about Ellen to Ted), to this day she couldn’t get past the idea that if his wife had taken better care of him, if all of them had, her son might be alive today.
So it was his death she never got used to.
Mrs. Bliss wasn’t ignorant greenhorn enough not to understand the nature of her son’s disease. The white cells were amok in his blood, she told him. The chozzers gobbled up the red cells like there was no tomorrow. They had a picnic with him.
“I never gave in to them,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “It wasn’t the easiest thing because, let’s face it, your mother was right, I am a greenhorn. What did I know about blood counts? About platelets? Did I know what a leukocyte was?”
So she made it her business. Not just to sit there. Not just to feel his fever or wipe his brow. She made it her business to study the numbers, to live and die by the numbers. Just like her son, olov hasholem, and learned to work the proportions between the white cells and red cells as if she were measuring out a recipe. And thought, If she knew, if she understood…
“Because I never believed he would die,” Mrs. Bliss said. “This I never believed.”
And spoke to Myers. And asked if everything that could be done was being done. Because didn’t she read in the papers and see on TV that breakthroughs happened all the time, that cures for this and cures for that were just around the corner? She wanted him to tell her where, in the city, they were doing the best work. The city? The country, the world! Myers, God bless him, was a good man but very conservative. Maybe not, Mrs. Bliss thought, up on everything. He told her, ‘Dorothy, dear, he’s too sick to be moved.’
“ ‘So if he lays still he’ll get better?’
“ ‘Dorothy, he’s not going to get better.’
“You think I accepted that? You think Grandpa or your mother did? We looked it up, we asked around, and what everyone told us was that if, God forbid, you had to be sick the best place to be was the University of Chicago hospital. So that’s where we put him, in Billings, where they were doing advanced work in the field, experimental, giving special treatments which the insurance company wasn’t willing to pay for, and where Myers himself wasn’t even on the staff, where he had to have special permission — wait a minute, it wasn’t a pass — where he had to have reciprocity, reciprocity, just for permission to look in on him.”
So that’s where they moved him, and called in the highest-priced Nobel prize specialists to let them have a go at him.
“But you know? It wasn’t they didn’t know what they were doing. They tried the latest chemotherapies on him. One drug Marvin was the first patient in the state of Illinois to receive it. And there were definite benefits. His white count never looked better.
“Only…
“Only…”
“Only what, Grandma?”
“Barry, he was dying.”
“Oh, Grandma,” he said.
“We didn’t know what to do.” Mrs. Ted Bliss sighed.
“Oh, Grandma.”
“That was when we were there practically around the clock. The room was so crowded you almost couldn’t breathe. We didn’t even spell each other anymore. If we went out now it wasn’t for a bite or to get a cup of coffee. It was to give the air a chance to recirculate.”
“Oh, Grandma.”
She went out to the waiting room this one time. She didn’t pick up even a magazine. There was a newspaper. She hadn’t seen a paper in days. The headline was in letters as thick as your arm. She looked but couldn’t take any of it in. She remembered thinking, Something important has happened, but what it was, or who it had happened to, she still couldn’t tell you. The year was a blur. The only current event she could remember was her son.
“There was a man in the waiting room. I’d seen him before, so naturally I thought he was a close friend or relative of one of the other patients on the floor. Though I’d never said a word to him. Listen, I didn’t look at a magazine, I couldn’t take in a headline. You think I was in the mood to make small talk with a stranger?”
She must have been crying. Sure, she must have been crying, because all of a sudden the man got up from where he was sitting and crossed the waiting room to where Dorothy was.
“ ‘How’s your son today, Mrs. Bliss,’ he says, ‘not so good?’
“I’d never spoken to him. How did he know my name? How did he know I was Marvin’s mother? He could have been reading my mind. He introduced himself, he gave me his card.”
His name was Rabbi Solon Beinfeld, and if she hadn’t been holding the card in her hand she’d never have believed he was a rabbi. He looked more like a lawyer, or a businessman, or even one of the doctors. He didn’t even look particularly Jewish to her if you want to know. And he could have been reading her mind again because he explained how he was the official chaplain for all the Jewish patients in Billings Hospital. She asked him, well, if he was the chaplain how come when she saw him he was always sitting in the waiting room.
“ ‘Patients are often self-conscious. Sometimes I embarrass them. And though I’m here to listen to them, or counsel them, it’s always an awkward situation. The waiting room is where I pray for them.’
“And you know, Barry, when he said that that’s the first time I really believed he was a rabbi, or even a chaplain. I mean, there we were, in Billings Hospital on the Midway campus of the University of Chicago, with all its high-powered specialists. What was I expecting, that he’d be dressed like a Hasid in a big black hat and have a long beard and side curls with tzitzit peeking out from under his vest? The only thing that surprised me was that he wasn’t wearing a long white lab coat.”
He wanted to know if she was Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed.
He was a rabbi, a man. She wanted to please him.
“I bentsh licht,” she said, and looked down modestly. He waited for her to go on. “In Russia,” she admitted, “girls didn’t always get a Jewish education. I don’t read the Hebrew.”
Suddenly he seemed uneasy, and Mrs. Bliss put two and two together. It was awkward, he’d said. He was there to listen to patients, to counsel them. What could he tell Marvin, to what would he listen — his cries and whimpers, his demands for injections?
He was there in the waiting room praying for her son, praying for Marvin and he was right, she was embarrassed. She’d put two and two together. More than from the evidence of his only intermittently improved blood counts or his brief pain-free periods when he seemed not only better but actually perky, or from those rarer and rarer times when the blood seemed returned to his cheeks (the red returning blood cells from the higher and higher doses of the heroic new devastating chemotherapies and almost steady transfusions he was getting now) all the more bright for the flat, colorless palette of his pale illness, it was her knowledge of the chaplain rabbi’s prayers for her son that depleted her hope, and made her want to die.
“You know something I don’t know, Chaplain?” Mrs. Bliss asked almost viciously.
“No,” he said sadly, “I think you know everything.”
He was not only a man, he was a rabbi, and despite her heartbreak, Mrs. Bliss still wished to please him.
“It was all I could do not to let myself cry out in front of him. I knew he was a rabbi. I knew it was his business and that this was the way he made his living, just like Grandpa was a butcher and you’re an automobile mechanic,” she told her grandson. “Still, it was all I could do not to run away from him or stop myself from howling in the street.
“I didn’t completely trust Myers? I wanted a second opinion? All right, here it was. The chaplain practically praying over your father’s body right out in the hall!
“It was too much to ask. What, I shouldn’t break down? I wasn’t entitled? Character is a terrible thing,” she said. “Who knows who knew what back there in Marvin’s room? If I screamed now they’d hear me and come running to see. Maybe your father himself would hear me and know how it was with him. Because it’s true what they say, ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’ What right did I have to take that away from anybody just because I’d put two and two together and understood he was a goner?
“Character is a terrible thing. Because all it is is habit.
“So instead of screaming, I started to moan.
“ ‘Marvin!’ I moaned. ‘Marvin, Marvin, Marvin! Oy Marvin. Marvin, my poor precious baby!’
“ ‘Shah!’ the rabbi says. ‘Shah! Shah!’ And actually touches his finger to my lips. I couldn’t have been more amazed than if he’d kissed me!
“ ‘Shah!’ he says again, quiet now. ‘Shh, shh.’
“ ‘He’s my son,’ I say.
“ ‘Don’t call his name.’
“ ‘Don’t call his name? Marvin’s my oldest. He’s going to die. I shouldn’t say Marvin?’
“ ‘Don’t say his name!’ It’s a command. This guy is commanding me not to cry out the name of my dying baby.
“ ‘Your boy,’ he says, ‘what is this fellow’s Hebrew name?’
“ ‘Marvin’s Hebrew name—’ ”
“ ‘Don’t say his name! Is this chap’s Hebrew name Moishe?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘Moishe,’ ”
Which is when Beinfeld explained it to her.
When a person is supposed to die, he told her, God sends out the Angel of Death to look for the person. Now the Angel of Death is the stupidest of all the angels, and sometimes, not always, he can be fooled. Doctors often fool the angel with certain operations, or at times with special medicines. He’s a stupid angel, yes, but not a complete idiot. He’s been around the block and he’s picked up a thing or two. Only the thing of it is that of all God’s angels he’s not only the stupidest but the busiest. He hasn’t got time to hang around trying to figure out how to undo all that the doctors have done for sick people with their operations and special medicines. Which is why certain patients go—swoosh—just like that, and others, like Moishe, linger on for a year or more.
All he had to go on, Beinfeld told her, was a list of names. In certain respects he wasn’t all that much different from a postman who has to match up the name of the addressee with the name on the mailbox.
“ ‘This party of whom we were speaking,’ the rabbi says, ‘tell me, he has a middle name?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Whisper it to me.’
“ ‘Sam. Shmuel.’
“ ‘Harry,’ he says. ‘Good. In Hebrew, Herschel.’ ”
So Beinfeld changed his name. They went into Barry’s dad’s room, and Dorothy introduced him and explained to everyone what was going to happen. It may have been the first time the chaplain had ever seen who he’d been praying for. He made out a paper. He even had the hospital type up a different band and put it around Moishe Herschel Bliss’s wrist. They did a new card at the nurses’ station and substituted it for the one on the door outside his room. Beinfeld turned the clipboard around at the foot of the bed holding you know who’s chart on it. Then the rabbi offered up prayers around the bed to spare the invalid’s life.
Mrs. Bliss hadn’t had a Jewish education; by her own admission she didn’t know Hebrew, and though she had no understanding of what Beinfeld was saying, she caught him repeating Moishe Herschel’s “name” throughout the course of his prayer. Well, she could hardly have missed it, could she, because each time he said it he seemed to say it more loudly as though the Angel of Death were not only stupid but maybe a little deaf, too.
He signaled the family out of the sickroom and instructed them that if they had to call Marvin by name they call him Moishe Herschel, or Marvin Harry, never Moishe Shmuel or Marvin Sam.
“ ‘Excuse me, Rabbi,’ your grandfather said.
“ ‘Yes?’
“ ‘That prayer you prayed.’
“ ‘Yes?’
“ ‘Didn’t you pray it to God?’
“ ‘To God, yes. To God.’
“ ‘And this Angel of Death, ain’t he God’s angel?’
“ ‘Of course. God’s angel. So?’
“ ‘So,’ ” said Ted Bliss, “ ‘don’t the left hand know what the right hand is doing?’ ”
Which took the wind out. Out of his grandmother, too.
“Except,” Mrs. Bliss said, “I was his mother. Didn’t I make a fuss with Myers? Didn’t I go over his head to put Marvin into Billings? Where they were doing the advanced work, the special, experimental treatments? We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do? So maybe what that chaplain rabbi was trying to do on a spiritual level was just as much in the experimental stage as what those doctors were trying to do on the scientific one. We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do?”
“Oh, Grandma.”
“Only I could never say it,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Only I could never say it, say Moishe Herschel. He was my first-born, he was my son. I couldn’t call him different.”
“You called him Marvin?”
“I didn’t call him anything,” she said, and wept while her grandson tried to comfort her.
Later that night, when the guests had all gone home, and the house was quite dark and everyone was sleeping, Mrs. Bliss woke from her sleep. She was very thirsty. She put on her house slippers and, making no noise lest she rouse somebody, went to the kitchen. She meant to get a glass of water at the sink and had to turn on the light to see what she was doing. She was astonished. May had made no effort to wash the dishes. Mrs. Bliss would have started them herself but was afraid, one, that she’d make too much noise and wake them up upstairs and, two, that May would take it as a reflection on her housekeeping when she came down the next morning to find everything cleaned and put away. Mrs. Bliss took pride in being a model mother-in-law. She stayed out of people’s way, kept her opinions to herself, she didn’t interfere.
So she decided to get her drink of water and go back to bed. Except every surface was covered with dirty dishes, she couldn’t see a clean glass anywhere. So she went to the cabinet where she thought her daughter-in-law might keep her everyday water glasses. She reached overhead and opened the cabinet.
It was filled with unused Yortzeit candles, glasses filled almost to their brims with a dry white wax and they must, Mrs. Bliss thought, forgiving them all, have been waiting on the anniversaries of everybody’s death.
And still later that night, when she’d drunk her fill from the cold water tap in May’s kitchen, when she’d quenched her thirst and slaked at least a little of her disappointment at the remarkable though oddly reassuring sight of the well-stocked cupboard of all those candles, and she was once again back in the perfectly comfortable bed in the perfectly comfortable little first-floor guest room Frank and May had set up for her, you’d think, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, I’d be able to sleep. You’d think, she thought, that after what I told Barry about his father’s last days, it would be like a weight off my back. She saw that the poor kid hadn’t known bubkes, and speculated that it was probably a sin to keep things from people who needed to know them more than you needed the distraction and comfort you got from not having to explain everything. It was a kind of protection racket they ran on each other, but the only ones they protected were themselves. Even Marvin, olov hasholem, had been kept in the dark about what was what with him and was never brought up to speed on how he was really doing. They conducted themselves that year like they were managing a cover-up. Did this one know what that one knew? How could they keep so-and-so from finding out such-and-such? It wasn’t power they sought, advantage, only the control of information, charging themselves with a sort of damage control.
And she still couldn’t understand why Frank had become so religious, or what the real story was — throw out the flim-flam — why — a man his age — had ever left Pittsburgh. She was, there in the dark, in the dark, Mrs. Bliss was, about her children’s lives. As much as they were in the dark about hers. People were through with each other before they were through with each other, and explaining yourself was just too much trouble. How could she tell them, for example, that Junior Yellin was back in her life, or that they’d been talking about going on a cruise together some day, staying on the seafront property of Caribbean resort hotels, or that maybe, to cut down on costs, they’d been thinking about sharing the same cabin, the same room? How could she speak of the Toibb mystery, or of Hector Camerando and what he’d offered to do for her, or ever hope to explain why, after what he’d put her through, or laid on the line what he thought about Jews, she’d given Alcibiades Chitral the hundred dollars, or her visit to the prison, or the question of the roses, or even, for that matter, her conversation with the driver who took her into the Everglades? Or so much as hint at the crush a woman her age could have on Tommy Auveristas, or the fact that Manny was no longer in a position to help her, their trusted, very own envoy and in loco parentis guy in south Florida? They wouldn’t have understood anything, anything. They wouldn’t have understood, she didn’t herself, how even peripheral people — Louise Munez, Rita de Janeiro — had taken up the space in her life that they had once rightfully occupied. Not anything, none of it, nothing, anything at all, as in the dark about her life in south Florida as she was about theirs in any of the half-dozen places they lived their own mysterious lives.