NINE

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

“Hey, forget it,” said the guy he thought he’d aggrieved. “I’m only a distant nephew. I barely knew him. I’m his lawyer. Uncle Manny hired me over the phone to buff up his affairs if anything happened to him. I’m just here on the case, no harm done.”

Mrs. Bliss wasn’t so sure but held her tongue.

The harm, she supposed, was to Manny’s spirit. Olov hasholem, Manny, she thought, and even, she thought, may have muttered aloud. (She was deafer than ever these days, and couldn’t always distinguish her thoughts from what she actually said.) At any rate it wasn’t the little nephew lawyer pisher to whom the harm had been done. It was an insult that there couldn’t have been more than ten people in the place. And even at that, no turnover to speak of because Mrs. Bliss had been there all evening practically and for every two or three people who left barely one arrived to take their place.

It was just too bad there really wasn’t anyone to be sore at, for the fact of the matter was that in the just four years since Rosie’s death the Towers had practically emptied out. There just weren’t that many old-timers or familiar faces left. When someone died their children, who usually had no use for Florida, would either list the condo with an agent or hang around for a month or so to try to sell it themselves. The price of these places had gone through the floor, and the sad truth was that Mrs. Ted Bliss could have had the biggest, highest-priced condo the Towers had to offer (except for the penthouses of course) for many thousands less than what she and Ted had given for their own only median-scale suite of rooms back in the sixties.

“Did you know,” Junior Yellin said beside her on Manny’s long white leather sofa, “the silly son of a bitch arranged for the caterer himself?”

“He was my friend, I won’t listen to gossip about him,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“What gossip?” Junior said. “His nephew told me.”

“Shh!” Mrs. Bliss, whose increased hardness of hearing encouraged her in the belief that people tended to raise their voices when they were around her, waved down the volume of Junior’s voice.

“I don’t know did he, didn’t he, but the kid gave me his word as a lawyer your pal not only knew who would and who wouldn’t be here today, but pretty much sized up the collective tastes of the crowd. That’s why you see more decaf and sweet table than lox and pastrami. They’re counting cholesterol, they’re stinting on fat.”

“It’s ridiculous he had his own shivah catered. It’s ridiculous, it’s nuts.”

“Is it, oh yeah? Wasn’t he a lawyer, didn’t he have a head for contingency and probability?”

“What’s that got to do?”

“What’s that got to do, what’s that got to do?”

“Shh!”

“Look at this place, will you,” Junior said. “Who are these people? They sit off by themselves. They could be patients in the waiting room reading my magazines.”

Mrs. Bliss glanced around the room, which, except for Junior, herself, and the nephew, had only two other visitors left. “Since when,” she asked, “has your waiting room been this full?”

“Wise guy,” Junior said, “it gets me through my days.”

“Oh, now,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“ ‘Oh, now? Oh now?’ Dorothy, this is the way goyim talk. Maybe you’ve been in this place too long.”

It was true, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the Towers had gone downhill. Many of the Cubans and Latin Americans had moved out to Palm, or farther down Collins to South Beach, or bought in the Keys, while a lot of the Jews had died off or moved out altogether. Ted, she reflected, wouldn’t recognize the place today, and then corrected herself. Yes, he would. Sure he would. Of course he would. It wasn’t all that much different from the fifty-unit Chicago apartment building he owned on the North Side where Dorothy went with him on the first Monday of every month to collect the rents, covering for him with a gun he hadn’t even known she had.

So sure he would, he’d have known in a minute, failing only to recognize that this, in the end, was where he’d chosen to bring her, to live side-by-side with those same old Polacks and Slavs her family had fled when she was a kid. Only, in an odd way, she had the upper hand while they, the new goyim, were the interlopers.

Change, she reflected, between crumbs of sweet coffee cake she licked from her fingers, if you just managed to live long enough, even change changed.

Because here was Mr. Milton Junior Yellin beside her — butcher, farmer, realtor, bookkeeper, philanderer, black marketeer, recreational therapeusisist, and general, all-round-who-knows-what-all, a bona fide quick-change champion in his own right, transmogrified again from masher to friend, then friend, absorbed into friendship, something even more valuable — mutual witnesses to each other’s lives, necessary kibitzers. So that they could, even at their age, get down, Yellin reserving the right to accuse her speech (“Dorothy, this is the way goyim talk”), Mrs. Bliss at liberty to discuss the fiction of Junior Yellin’s “practice.” It was heady stuff, heady, and, quite frankly, they may have embarrassed Manny’s nephew executor with their open laughter.

Because with the exception of the nephew, Mrs. Bliss, and Milt Yellin, Manny’s condo was now quite empty of mourners. It must have seemed that there was no one left in the entire world who genuinely missed him, this once minister-without-portfolio who did so much for so many of them in the Towers complex that he seemed to have become a kind of precinct captain and ward heeler for them. (All this was in the old days, of course. Though, really, Mrs. Bliss thought, the old days weren’t all that long ago. Hadn’t she pressed her claims on Manny’s mysterious volunteer spirit as recently as last year when she’d packed two or three times more than she needed and counted on what even then as well as in hindsight was an already thinning, short-winded huffer and puffer who shouldn’t have been called upon to so much as snap her valises shut let alone carry them from her apartment all the way down the hall to the elevator, albeit he made two trips with one suitcase held out in front of his belly with both hands — the way children carry weights too heavy for them — rather than two suitcases, one dangling from each hand and swinging along beside him as if to the marching music of youth and strength? And didn’t, for a short-winded old man, two trips with half a load each create a greater threat to the constitution than just some single let’s-get-it-over-with effort of the double weight? So it was only fitting, she thought, that she who had added to his burdens the longest should have stayed the longest, making the most of his death even at the expense of wearing out her welcome.)

The sun had already begun to set before Dorothy realized that though they’d been talking together for some hours now they’d never been formally introduced. She broke off in the middle of a reminiscence to do the honors.

“I’m Dorothy Bliss,” she said, “and this here is Junior Yellin.”

“Call me Milt.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the nephew said, “I’m Nathan Apple.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Nathan Apple.

“Excuse me, Nathan, but I have to get this off my chest. You mustn’t judge by what you saw today.”

“Saw today?”

“Well, didn’t see today. The turnout. Your uncle was one of the most popular, well-known, best-loved men in Building One. Were you at Rosie’s funeral? Your aunt’s?”

“My mother’s sister’s half-sister.”

“And I’ve been thinking, the reason Rosie had so many people and Manny so few in comparison, no disrespect to your aunt, wasn’t so much a tribute to Rosie as a show of support for her husband. Also, you’ve got to remember that many of those who dragged themselves out to her funeral on walkers back then are now in wheelchairs, and that a whole bunch of them who were in wheelchairs are now restricted to their beds. Many of the rest, may they rest, are dead. Others may not really have gotten to know him because he was already too old by the time a lot of them moved in for him to help them out much. Sure,” she said, “by that time Manny was the one who needed help. So I’m just saying, you mustn’t feel bad.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, Aunt Dorothy.”

Aunt Dorothy? Mrs. Bliss thought. Aunt Dorothy? She was stung by this smart aleck’s familiarity. Why, when you reached a certain age, did they rub your face in your harmlessness? That guy at Frank’s house in Providence should have smacked his kid for calling her his greatgrandma Dorothy.

“So tell me, Nate,” Junior Yellin said, “you got plans for this place?”

“Plans?”

“You know. How you intend to market it.”

“We haven’t really gotten that far in our thinking, Milt.”

“We?”

“Aunt Rosie’s and Uncle Manny’s legatees.”

“You know best, Counselor, but I figure you’re down here — what? — only one or two more days? Probably figure to list your uncle’s condo with an agent and skedaddle the hell out of here before you even get to know the lay of the land.”

Junior!” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Well, he was hired over the phone, Dorothy. He’s…what…a distant nephew? Manny and Rosie were from Michigan. That’s distant. Am I getting warm, Nate?”

“Well,” Nathan Apple said.

“Sure I am, I’m getting warm. All I’m saying, son, is that I’ve handled a few real estate transactions in my day. Aunt Dorothy can tell you. As a matter of fact I had at least a leetle something to do with some property she and her husband had a few years back. That was in Michigan, too, now I recall. Tell him, Dot.”

“Junior!”

“Tell him.”

“My husband bought a farm from Mr. Yellin.”

Through Mr. Yellin. I know you’re already the executor, young Nate, but if it makes you more comfortable why don’t you consult with the legatees and see what they want to do with the place? Tell them you have a man who might be willing to handle it for them without, under the circumstances, taking a commission.”

“Under what circumstances?” the lawyer said.

“Well, it’s sentimental,” Junior Yellin said. “I know how helpful Uncle Manny was to Mrs. Bliss. How indebted she was to him. In her book he was practically Uncle Johnny-on-the-spot.”

“Come on,” said Mrs. Bliss, “cut it out.”

“He was, wasn’t he?”

“He was very kind to me,” Mrs. Bliss admitted.

“I’m afraid I don’t see—”

“Tell me your price range. Maybe I’ll buy it myself.”

“I don’t know,” Nathan Apple said. “I don’t know the lay of the land. You said so yourself.”

“Ballpark.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s the most expensive of the three basic floor plans. It’s got a beautiful panoramic view of Biscayne Bay. And didn’t my uncle refurnish the place a few months after Aunt Rosie died?”

Junior nudged Mrs. Bliss and winked. “He don’t know he says, he don’t know. Is this guy Mr. Perry Fucking Mason or what?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said. “A hundred seventy thousand dollars?”

“Jesus,” Junior said, “he don’t know!”

Mrs. Bliss was amazed by Yellin, who seemed in the few minutes he’d been talking to Apple to have climbed down from all the moderated energies he’d displayed for her since coming to Florida and renewing their (in a sense) practically historical relationship, and reverted to his old piratical ways. The seamlessness of the transition was what most surprised her, some now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality to his character palpable as a magician’s trick. Old and diminished as he’d become, conversational, anecdotal, at times almost soliloquial in some gentle, calm, barbershop sense of mild, almost privileged reflection; then, quick as snap, there he was, back in business again. He was no slouch. And neither, Mrs. Bliss saw, to judge by the kid’s $170,000 gambit, was young Nate.

She was probably just a foolish old woman, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, but she had a sense that at least a bit of this male flourish and display were for her benefit. Even the pisher’s. It was a proposition incapable of being tested, but she had the impression that if she weren’t there to witness them, their moves and positioning, their vying, would never have been near so blunt. It was astonishing to her how people just couldn’t help themselves, fantastic they should be so mired in gender. Then she thought, look at the pot calling the kettle black. What, I’m not getting a kick out of this? And surrendered to what, in all the most ancient parts of her old being, she hoped would prove to be spectacular.

And egged it on even.

“A hundred seventy thousand dollars,” she said, almost like someone in a prompter’s box reminding the players where things stood, pronouncing this as the prompter would, without emphasis, neutrally as she could, almost meaninglessly.

“Ballpark,” said Nathan, picking up his cue.

“Yeah, sure,” Junior Yellin said, “ballpark. But Yankee Stadium?”

Mrs. Ted Bliss loved it. It was delicious. She ate it up.

“Okay,” Nathan said reasonably, “all right. I forgot about your loyalty to Uncle Manny and Aunt Dorothy. I forgot about your willingness to sacrifice your usual commission. What’s five percent of a hundred seventy thousand? Eighty-five hundred, am I right? A hundred seventy thousand take away eighty-five hundred is what…? A hundred sixty-one thousand, five hundred.”

“Absolutely,” Junior said. “Back in Grosse Pointe. Down here they go by the new math altogether.”

“The new math.”

“Yeah, well, first of all we start from an entirely different commission basis. The agent takes ten percent, not five. Already that brings us down to one hundred fifty-three thousand, and that’s without even factoring in the buyer’s initial additional expenses.”

What initial additional expenses?” Apple said.

“The initial additional expenses of refurnishing this place.”

“That’s no problem,” Nathan said, “we’re selling it furnished.”

“You decided that? You and Aunt Rosie’s and Uncle Manny’s legatees?”

“I’m the executor.”

“I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” Yellin said. “We’re at an impasse here, Dorothy.” Junior sighed sadly. Nathan Apple, deep in thought, stroked his chin.

“Let’s see,” he said, “maybe not.” And looked up brightly. “Tell you what,” he said. “You gave up your agent’s commission, I’ll give up my executor’s commission. But you know,” he said, “my hands are tied. We’re paid on a sliding scale. In most states, in an estate like Uncle Manny’s, the lawyer is entitled to a two and three-quarters percent fee. Anyone have a pocket calculator?”

“I do,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “your uncle gave me this in a time of trouble.” She handed it to him. “It works on solar,” she said.

The lawyer punched some numbers into the little machine, then showed them the numbers that ran along the top of the keypad like a faded headline. “I make that $4,207.50,” he said. “Subtract that from…We’ll use your $153,000 as a base price, Milt. There, it’s $148,792.50.”

“Tell him, Dorothy.”

“Tell him what?” said Mrs. Bliss.

“Tell him about the neighborhood.”

“I want to stay out of this,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

She did. She wanted to stay out of it altogether. She wished only to sit there, comfortably ringside, and watch these two champions go at each other. Rivals, she thought girlishly. Rivals for my hand. She almost laughed at the absurdity. She was eighty years old. If she had once been beautiful it would have taken the genius of some paleontological vision to restore her from her fossil clues and data. Bands of archaeologists would have had to reconstitute her from the geological record. It wasn’t vanity, she wasn’t vain. It had to do with that old gender mire. It was that they couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t.

“Go on, Dot. Tell him.”

“You tell him, Milt.”

“Tell me what?”

“It’s sociology,” said the jack of all trades.

“Sociology.”

“And style. Sociology and style. Sociology and style and evolution, both progressive and retrograde.”

The jack of all trades was into his recreational therapeusistical mode now with more than a touch, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, of his handy-dandy bookkeeping and old black-marketeering skills than of his realtor ones.

“Because what you’ve got to remember,” Junior Yellin said, “is that this place, south Florida generally, is a one-industry town — the weather industry. Now you’ve got to refine that to read the winter weather industry. Not like Vermont, of course, or Vail, Colorado, but in some it’s-June-in-January sense. Why, it was practically invented by people with bad circulation. Well, it’s called the Sunshine State, ain’t it? They stick it on the goddamn license plates!

“All right, so what we essentially got here isn’t so much a place to be as a place to come to. You’re a kid, or in your thirties or forties or fifties, the blood is running, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’, and you’ve barely even heard of it. Maybe Disney-world, maybe Cape Canaveral. Maybe stone crabs, maybe Key lime pie. Because your nose is to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel. Because, jeez, you’re too busy even to notice the temperature, and if you did, so what? Because weather is a thing you strive for. You sock it away for a rainy day. I mean for when the blood turns to sludge, to thirty-weight oil. I mean for when the damp shtups mold and arthritis into your bones.

“So that’s when it happens. People live longer and longer, you know. The mean average dead man today is twenty or thirty years older than when Hector was a pup. So there’s this like sunshine boom now like once upon a time there was a gold rush. And then they put in the toll roads and interstates, and discovered stucco and air-conditioning, and invented beaches and tall buildings to put them up on. Tall, taller, tallest. And every year a new amenity. Once it was enough to have these huge game rooms where they’d bring in a songstress with an accordian and an old tummler from the Catskills on a Saturday night. Or have some circuit-riding rabbi who came around on Shabbes with a Torah, a bema, and a portable ark. Or they put TV monitors in the lobby you think you’re in a newsroom. Restaurants they had, Chinese take-out, cineplex, Banana Republic.

“That’s what they already got. You know what’s on the drawing boards? Condos like resort hotels — horseback, snorkeling, golf. One place a little north of here has its own trails. Next year they’re opening a building with its own community yacht!

“Paradise is a growth industry, the good life is. That leaves only the poor who’ll have to make do with global warming. The rest are flocking to Florida in droves, Southeastward ho!

“The only drawback, Nathan, is that the neighborhood’s changing. Dorothy will tell you. It’s going down steep as a thrill ride. Every year it becomes harder and harder to put a minyan together. I’m an old-timer, I don’t look so much to the future. What does it mean to me? I got enough to last me. And a little for a modest burial and maybe a few bucks left over for my own legatees and if the future is the wave of the future, so be it, I say. Others may have the energy for it. I don’t.

“You know what the Towers have become, Nathan? An ittybitty American metaphor. What, I’m making you blush? Relax, it’s no big deal. All I mean is it’s waves of immigration. All I mean is it’s peoples after peoples making a clearing in the world and then, soon as they see smoke from the other guy’s fire, they do a deal, they make an arrangement. The Jews are a very ancient race. If they didn’t always make the clearing they at least staked a claim and moved in. Sure, and then came the Spaniards. Just like the old days. Conquistadors with their macho dope rings and plunder. Aunt Dorothy could tell you stories would curl the hairs in your ears. You lived side-by-side, didn’t you, Aunt Dorothy? Who moved out on who is a nice question, but the bottom line is those waves of immigrants. Investment ops. Jews and South Americans falling all over each other. Until with a whoosh and a bim bam boom all of a sudden it’s the march of time and the South Americans are selling out or renting to some of the lesser Latinos. And even Jews beginning to sublet to WASPs down from up in the north country or a few worn-out old farmers in out of Iowa and the rest of the Midwest. Even, if you want to know, to a couple of handfuls of deserving poor who might actually qualify for food stamps if only those proud, worn-out old farmers and subsistence-level golden agers climbed down from their high horse long enough to register with the authorities.

“So that’s the story, Counselor. That’s why I won’t waste your time by pretending to consider your $170,000 or $161,500 or even your $148,792.50 price for Uncle’s condominium. Now, if you’d come to me in the flush old days when the Towers were regarded as one of your hot, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, pushed envelope, growth-industry properties, it might have been a different story altogether. I mean I still wouldn’t have given you your $148,792.50 asking price of course, but I don’t think I would have felt myself so personally insulted.

“Here’s what I will do. If you get it repainted and bring the cosmetics up to code we’ll split the difference — loan me the calculator, Dorothy — and I’ll make you an offer of…$74,396.25.”

“That’s very funny,” Nathan Apple said.

He’s stalling for time, Dorothy thought. He sees his work’s cut out for him and he’s stalling for time. He’s figuring what can he do with a guy like this. Personally, she almost had goose bumps. She hadn’t felt so important since the evening, years ago, when she’d gone to Tommy Auveristas’s open house and he’d sat next to her on one of the living room’s three sofas. She couldn’t imagine what the nephew would say, but he’d have to go some just to earn a draw. It was wicked, really, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Men. Really, she thought, the lengths to which they went to flash their plumage in front of other males. It was flattering to the ladies, but sometimes she wondered if it was intended for their benefit, if they’d ever bother to get themselves up in their colors if there were only females around to catch their act. Otherwise, well, otherwise they might just pick out the one who’d caught their eye, knock her to the ground, and take her. Perhaps the reason for courtship at all was the same reason soldiers lined up in ranks for parades. Maybe all that display was the only way they knew to civilize themselves.

Well, look at Dorothy Bliss, will you, thought Dorothy Bliss. Was this Alcibiades Chitral’s pigeon, damned for her stupor and incuriosity?

Certainly she’d been entertained by Junior Yellin’s aggressive arguments. Certainly she’d anticipated that Nathan would counterattack. But she’d stopped just in time. (Because if there was no fool like an old fool, what sort of old fool would an eighty-year-old woman make?) Flattered, but short of taking it personally, a privileged witness to their swagger and strut. While quite abruptly reminded of Ted’s ways with his customers: charming them into one cut rather than another, selling them three pounds rather than two, and with no more plumage on him than the dried blood across his apron and, when Junior was not in the shop, the only witness to his sweet talk Dorothy herself for whom he passed in parade.

The nephew was staring straight into Junior Yellin’s eyes.

“Done,” he said sweetly. “If you can talk Aunt Dorothy into selling me hers for fifty-five thousand.”

“What about it, Dot?” Junior said. “You willing to trade up? There’s bedrooms and toilets galore. I could move in with you. We’ll split the nineteen-some-odd grand right down the middle. That would put us in Manny’s apartment — just a second — for $9,698.12. I won’t pressure you, I leave it entirely in your hands. I mean, I see the guy’s game. He buys the place, turns around and sells it on the open market. He could clean up, but what the hell, the laborer is worth his hire, and the two of us got a luxury apartment we could get lost in. Come on, kid, what do you say?”

“I say,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss, “I’m a married woman. I say Ted, olov hasholem, would turn over in his grave.”

Now she was eighty-two, the mysterious, discrepant matter of her age seemed to have resolved itself. Without proof, without seeming even to have been aware of how or why, she at last knew how old she was. Not in round, approximate figures but exact sums. It was as if all the peculiar spring-forward, fall-back, daylight savings and central standards and fluky international time lines and zones of her personal history had been fixed, repaired, tuned to some Greenwich Mean of the ticking world. She had a birthday now, and though she had not yet officially observed it (and had no plans to), it was as if all the square feet and exact specs of the properties and registered deeds of her existence had at last been revealed to her.

This was, of course, essentially useless, but like other essentially useless things, an old person who earns a bachelor’s degree in her last years, say, she received a genuine sense of accomplishment and pleasure from it. She finally knew, or if she didn’t actually know then at least had finally fixed upon the age she should be.

She did nothing about it. She didn’t rectify her social security records or notify Medicare. Nevertheless, she could now fit numbers to her life and this was somehow as liberating as the emerging knowledge of who she was and of what she had been.

She was eighty-two. She was a very old woman. Junior Yellin, whose very name suggested that she was his senior, was a very old man. Mrs. Bliss knew that if she had taken Yellin up on his offer to move into Manny Tressler’s apartment, Ted would not have turned over in his grave. He wouldn’t have so much as stirred. Ted had been fond of Manny and, despite all the awful stuff Junior had pulled on him, had always been rather more well-disposed toward him than otherwise. Ted had been dead almost fifteen years. The world had changed, attitudes had. Scandal had been all but wiped out in her lifetime, even, had he lived a little longer, in Ted’s. Since the sixties there had been a general, accelerating erosion of the shameful. It wasn’t that goodness was on the rise but that a general sense of evil — Think, Mrs. Ted Bliss thought, of the terror Mrs. Dubow, the first wife in Illinois forced to pay the husband alimony, evoked; that was a shocker that brought the house down — was being absorbed into the atmosphere. She saw it on the morning programs, she heard it on the call-ins, she read about it not only in the tabloids at the checkout in the supermarket but in the legitimate papers, too.

Who knew what went on behind closed doors, of course, but in her and Ted’s day married people had been generally loyal to each other. Except for Junior Yellin and his bimbos, Mrs. Bliss didn’t think she could name a man who ran around on his wife. Today it was a different story. In just her own family, hadn’t both Jerry, Irving’s boy, and Louis, Golda’s, died of AIDS? (And Louis had been married!) And hadn’t she recently heard that Betsy, a distant cousin she’d known only to say hello to who’d tested HIV positive, had come down with full-blown AIDS? (And why had her grandson Barry never married? What was what in that department?) And what was going on with the shaineh maidel, Judith, Maxine and George’s exquisite daughter, a girl in her mid-thirties if she was a day, who had probably been with at least a dozen men (and lived with three of them), so beautiful she could have afforded to remain a virgin forever but who instead — her grandmother should bite her tongue — chose to think with her panties the way some men had their brains in their pants? Or, while we’re on the subject of disgrace, was Frank and May’s Donny, the brainy one, a target of a grand jury investigation or not? He hadn’t flown in from Europe that time when Mrs. Bliss had gone to Providence for the seder. The fact was that Dorothy hadn’t heard from him in years, neither through a letter or a phone call (who used to call her with regularity), and whenever she had a chance to ask Frank about him, her son was uneasy, or put her off with a vague answer, or changed the subject. (Were they tapping her phones? Was that why Donny didn’t get in touch anymore? It wasn’t so far-fetched. She had a sort of record with federal people. Her Camerando connection. As far as she knew the government still held Ted’s Buick LeSabre under impoundment.)

For that matter how hotsy-totsy could Frank’s and Maxine’s marriages be? You couldn’t tell her there wasn’t any funny stuff going on back in Providence — probably the result of Frank’s picking up his Pittsburgh roots and setting them down in Rhode Island. She and Ted had done the same, and when they were even older than Frank and May, but let’s don’t kid ourselves, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, Frank and May were a horse of a different color.

Dorothy and Maxine were close as ever, so Mrs. Bliss didn’t have to speculate why her daughter was having such a tough time of it these days with George. The insurance business was practically in ruins, at least at George’s end of things. Whole life was out, a thing of the past, along with the agent who sold such policies, a relic. These days all the money was in term. It was entrepreneurial James who spotted the trend before his dad and left him to go with another company.

Life had lost the oom-pah-pah of fabulous things. Everyone lived shmutsig today, everyone had a rough time of it. The Mr. and Mrs. Ted Blisses were as dead as the dodo, olov hasholem. Which isn’t to say that some of their angels didn’t have dirty wings. Sam not only cheated at cards but on occasion might clumsily palm a loose quarter or fifty-cent piece if one were tossed to the ragged outer edge of the pot. And Philip wouldn’t give you a true wholesale price if your life depended on it, and Jake — who did he think he was fooling? — changed his name and signed up his sons for a Christian boarding school, while Joyce was a shnorrer first-class who gave cheapo wedding presents, bar mitzvah gifts that were practically an insult, and somehow never managed to have the right change in her purse when it came to sharing a cab or splitting a check.

But all that was piker sin, a kind of four-flusher pride, committed not so much in the name of fun as the spirit of edge.

Ted, taking the long view, had lived in a permanent state of forgiveness. He was too benign to have died of malignant tumors. (Mrs. Bliss recalled the last year of his life, how generous he was, how proud he’d been of her, how tirelessly he’d joined in on the grand joke of her beauty at those spirited underauctions where the bidders tried to guess her age.) So it was almost impossible to argue he would have been shocked by Junior Yellin’s suggestion that he move into Manny Tressler’s with her. (Whoa. Wait a minute. Was that the real point of the game? Was part of the pleasure Ted took in her sixty-some-odd-year-old beauty some old trap-more-flies-with-honey thing? Was it a routine he went through to make his wife more attractive to the bachelors he knew would survive him? Had it been more some midway trick in a carnival than an auction? Was Dorothy supposed to be the grand prize on the booth’s upper shelf?) Shocked? If she knew her Ted, he would have been thrilled! He could not bear to die and leave her a widow. He wanted to make sure she was settled, cared for, supported, unlonely. Thanks but no thanks, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Surely even Ted could not have wanted Junior Yellin for a legatee. Her condo plus $9,698.12? Not at those prices!

It was another thing altogether that they should turn out to be friends. Ted had made friends with him. Or if not friends exactly, then at least come to terms with the man. Sitting back amused, enjoying for all he was worth just watching the man operate, even if it was at his own expense. Not to pick up tips, tricks of the trade, not in any way trying to apprentice himself to the gonif, but like some scholar or philosopher, to see how far Yellin would go, to study the ways he had up his sleeve to get there. What did they call it, a sting operation? A sting operation, but with nobody jumping out of the wallpaper at the end of the show to point a gun or slap on the handcuffs.

So who knows, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Maybe Ted wouldn’t mind even if she took Junior up on his offer. Maybe Mrs. Ted Bliss was part of a sting operation, too. Maybe Ted was dead today because he was ahead of his time (just as Dorothy had been behind hers) all the years he had been alive. Maybe he was the first one ever to have lost the sense of scandal, the one man to have taken in that first whiff and understood that evil was only another unpleasant smell, like mold, say, in a summer house.

But that’s where they parted company. If it suited Ted’s plans for Dorothy to participate in her husband’s experiment, it did not in the least suit Dorothy’s. Not only was she too old, Junior Yellin was. She’d been by herself too long now. She was settled, she could take care of herself, and her misery, whatever else it may have been, was not loneliness. Manny from the building had been more support than Yellin.

Would Junior shlep for her, drive her around on her errands? Would he have taught her to make out a check, or advised her in legal matters? In the drive and shlep, practical information, and stand-by-your-side departments he wasn’t worth the paper he was written on, and although — it was probably a sin just to think about this part — were both of them thirty or forty years younger they might have made something or other with the bedroom thing, Mrs. Bliss still wouldn’t have touched him with a ten-foot pole. For one thing the man was a born chaser. He would have broken her heart.

Mrs. Bliss gasped at the thought. Quite literally it took her breath away. The idea, just the idea, that Mrs. Ted Bliss could have been a candidate for a busted heart was enough to make her laugh. Or cry. For all her odd old vanity, the pride she’d taken in her beauty, in all the fastidious, just-so arrangements of her old life (the two and three daily baths, her painstaking toilet, her wardrobe, even the old baleboosteh care she lavished on the plastic seat covers over her furniture, the sky blue water in her commode, the shined surfaces of her breakfront and wood tabletops), she’d never been much interested in sexual relations. (Ted had rarely seen her nude and, with the exception of his illness, Mrs. Bliss, when she had helped him in the bathroom or washed him in their bed, had just as rarely — had in fact gone out of her way to avoid looking — seen her husband’s naked body.)

So it was pretty ridiculous to think of herself with a romantically broken heart. Marvin’s death had broken her heart, the deaths and divorces of certain close relatives, the failure of the Michigan farm, and other times her husband had sustained business reversals or been forced to sell at a loss. Her grandson Barry broke her heart. Losing Ted, it goes without saying. But a sufferer because of romance? Never. Never!

But that was one thing. Friendship was another. Surprisingly, astonishingly, really, she and Milton Yellin had become good friends. Pals, if you want to know; buddies, partners in crime. It was almost as if, like kids, they were cut from the same cloth. That’s the way they were with each other. They played together. This quite new to Dorothy’s not exactly vast experience (something she actually had to learn and the only thing in the world Junior Yellin could teach her), new to the experience because, for all that she was eighty-two, she’d never had a friend. And why would she have had? She’d never had a childhood either. What she remembered of being a kid was what she remembered of being an adult: her family. Brothers and sisters and cousins of various degree, but no friends. No, what Junior called, “asshole buddies.”

“There’s,” he’d say if people were watching as he stopped to pick her up outside Building Number One on days he was off, “my asshole buddy, Mrs. Ted Bliss. How you doin’, Dodo?”

“How many times do I have to tell you,” Dorothy, blushing, would scold him, “you’re embarrassing me. You’re embarrassing them.

“Yeah, well, the day I can’t get a rise out of people is the day I might as well drop dead and die.”

In his old age he drove big four-wheel-drive vehicles, Jeep Cherokees, Land Rovers, other such machines that he would borrow for the day from various people he knew with whom he was cooking up schemes. “Arrgh,” he’d say with a certain self-loathing, “I’m too old for this stuff, I ain’t got the balls anymore. I give them away. They can have them with my compliments. All my best-laid plans of mice and men. They can have them for free. Surefire shit. They take a flier on the least of my ideas, they’d double, triple their investment! ‘Gee, Milt,’ they say, ‘if it’s half as good as it sounds why don’t you get in on the ground floor? Why don’t you put up some dough?’ ‘Me?’ I say, ‘I’m content to trade you my ideas for a box at the Dolphins game, or take your car out for a spin with my asshole buddy, Dorothy.’ I get a rise out of them, it gives them a laugh. So they humor me. Twirps in their fifties and sixties, what do they know from getting old, cutting their losses, tossing their towels in?”

“Oh, you haven’t tossed in your towel,” Mrs. Bliss reassured.

“Damn straight I ain’t,” he told her, cheering, “there’s still a few miles left in this model. So what do you want to do today, kiddo? Go fishing out on a charter? Catch the helicopter and do the beaches or downtown Miami? They got a new one in Fort Lauderdale. Takes us up the coast to Palm. I slip the guy ten bucks, he buzzes the Kennedy compound or flies low over the country club and spooks the polo ponies.”

“Oh, Junior,” Mrs. Bliss said laughing, “where do you get your ideas?”

“Oh, my ideas,” Junior Yellin said, “my ideas are a dime a dozen. What I’m looking for are a few good years.”

He really is a death-oriented man, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was odd, death was something you worried about in middle age, or while your family was together. It was something she gave little thought to these days. Manny had drawn up her will shortly after Ted had died and, to tell you the truth, her death was the last thing on her mind — except those few times when she wished for it. So she was bothered to hear Junior talk this way.

She had an idea. She told Junior she had to go to the bathroom and asked if he would stop at the next gas station. When they stopped Mrs. Bliss went up to an attendant, turned, and walked back to the car. “You need a key,” she explained, but when she went into the office she took a small notebook from her purse, found a number she’d written down, then searched the purse for a quarter and called Hector Camerando from the pay phone.

She returned to the big off-road vehicle.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“Yeah? What?”

“Why don’t we go to the jai alai?”

“Oh,” Yellin frowned, “the jai alai’s a crapshoot. It’s fixed as wrestling. You don’t know that? Everyone knows that.”

“So what if it is?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “What if it is if a person happens to know a person in a position to know which players are going to do what to which other players?”

Something in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s grin caused Junior to examine her closely, almost to appraise her.

“Dorothy?” he said.

“Junior?”

“I know you what, five decades?”

“Something or other.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, “apples don’t fall far from their trees. Ted, may he rest, was a sweet, stand-up guy. You heard of painless dentists? Well, your husband was a kind of bloodless butcher. He took practically all the cholesterol off a steak he trimmed the fat so close. That’s how honest he worked the scales. I’ll tell you the truth, I was a pig in comparison. I’d weigh in my thumbs, my wrists. Sometimes I’d sit with my tochis up on the scale to help make us break even. If I made him a patsy, if I wronged him, it was just to get even — almost like honor.

“Well, you know how I screwed him over — the books, the farm. From my point of view it was a…vindication. But what troubles me now is how you, who I had this idea lived in his moral shadow, all of a sudden pops out from the shadow to tell me she may know a person who knows a person who can chisel the jai alai.

“Do you know what you’re saying bites deeper than mafia? It huffs and puffs harder than the trade winds the drugs blow in on. It’s one of the grimmest shows the INS runs. We’re not just talking Basque separatists, we’re talking international terrorists.

“Dorothy, dear, tell me, how did you come to know such a person?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m—”

“No, don’t tell me,” Yellin broke in.

“I’m holding his marker.”

Junior Yellin scrutinized the old lady.

“Back at the gas station. You called him?”

“We could go to the greyhounds,” she said.

“The greyhounds, too?”

“I’m holding his marker.”

The jack of all scams weighed the odds.

“How much?” he asked finally. “What are we talking here?”

“The sky’s the limit,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

Yellin shut his eyes, his face lost in concentration. It was as though he were trying to guess in which hand an opponent was holding a coin. He opened his eyes. “The jai alai,” he said hoarsely.

They drove in silence to the white rectangular building, long and low as a huge discount store or a factory in an industrial park.

“So what did he say?” Junior asked when they were inside.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“I was making a speech,” Junior said shyly. “I never gave you a chance.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “his line was busy.”

It was only minutes before the first match was scheduled to begin. They were standing near the five-dollar and ten-dollar windows. Yellin looked stricken. “The line was busy? It was busy, the line.”

“I tried two or three times.”

“Try it now,” Junior pleaded, “if he hasn’t got anything for us in the first match, then maybe a later one.” His eyes shone with an immense idea. Mrs. Bliss thought he looked fifteen years younger. She turned to go. “Oh, and Dorothy?”

“What?”

He signaled her closer, then, when she stopped, he stepped forward and closed the gap between the two of them even more. Mrs. Ted Bliss, who’d never see eighty again, watched him warily.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only when you talk to him, it might not be a good idea to tell him someone else is in on this, too.”

She was old; for a moment she’d had a crazy thought that Junior had been on the verge of trying something. She was relieved when he hadn’t. The shine in his eyes, the sudden, transient, ischemic pallor on his face like a sort of youth — she thought she’d felt the last weak rays of lust radiating out of him. She had, thankfully, misrepresented its source. It wasn’t the love of an old lady that had excited him but the action. The excited, polyglot voices of the crowds milling around the betting windows — his sense of connection and edge like deep drafts of ozone.

Mrs. Ted Bliss laughed. “What,” she said, “you think I was born yesterday? Why would I tell him I have a partner in crime? As it is we’ll be pushing up the daisies soon enough. Let’s just let nature take its course. Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m sorry. I know this man, he wouldn’t lift a finger.” She was trying to comfort him. The pallor had returned to his face. All he wanted, he’d said, was a few good years. His bloodlessness was a sort of reverse blush. She understood. He was embarrassed by death. “Really,” she said, “if I call, I don’t even have to mention where I am. Maybe you’ve changed your mind.”

“Well,” Junior said, “if you’re holding his marker.”

It was odd about the high rollers, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Their lives, built around some tender armature of chance, were always deeply grounded in hedged realities. Briefly, Mrs. Bliss pitied the man, came within a hair of writing him off. If she got through to Camerando she might not only tell him up front where she was but tell him Junior Yellin’s name, too.

As it happened, however, she still couldn’t reach him. A phone company recording came on to tell her the number she was calling had been disconnected.

She went back to Yellin to tell him the news.

“No luck,” she explained, “the number’s been disconnected. I don’t understand. When I called a half hour ago I got a busy signal.”

“Hey,” he said, “no problem. It’s not a big deal. They’re here today and gone tomorrow these guys. Come on,” a restored, relieved Junior Yellin told her, “who needs the son of a bitch? If we hurry, we still got time to lay a bet down on the match. Any of the names of these bums mean anything to you?”

After that they were closer than ever. Junior was actually relieved to be back on terra firma. Perhaps the idea of edge, of extravagant advantage, made him nervous. It wasn’t the first time she thought the old bully was a piker, daring enough in his own small ponds but quick to lose heart where he knew he was beyond his depths. It was an insult to Ted, finally, whose measure he’d taken and relegated, whom he’d comfortably fit into manageable scale. On her behalf she was furious, on her husband’s, amused, come to terms with Ted’s forgiveness and understanding and philosophic scrutiny. On her husband’s behalf they were closer than ever, Mrs. Ted Bliss taking up their friendship like someone pledged to carry on the unfinished work of someone who’d died. Even that first day at the jai alai she allowed herself to be drawn into his piker schemes.

Freed from the obligation of taking a risk, they agreed upon a system whereby they pooled their money and, by wagering on opposing teams, in effect, covered each other’s bets. Even Mrs. Bliss understood that this was more like accounting or balancing her checkbook than like gambling. Except for the fact that neither of them stood to win or lose much money, Mrs. Bliss was content to go along with Junior’s reasoning that, what the hell, at the end of the day they’d gotten several hours of quite good value for their entertainment dollars — the price of admission, the cost of their programs, the tabs for their hot dogs, their coffees and Cokes.

And, for Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was entertaining. She meant the jai alai, the power and flexibility and stamina of the athletes, their lightning hand-eye coordination, the way they scooped up the small, heavy, hard-rubber pelota into the unyielding woven reeds of the curving cesta attached like a long, predatory claw to their arms and drove the ball flying back against the main granite wall. For all their athleticism and diving, driving speed, within the relatively close quarters of the wire mesh ceiling and vaguely chicken wire fencing of the viewing wall, they seemed to Mrs. Ted Bliss, protected only by their odd, single-winged arm, like nothing so much as wounded, desperate, captive birds fighting for their lives inside a terrible caged battlefield.

She was close enough to smell their heat and sweat. It was awful. It was wonderful. She was at an age, she reflected, past (if she’d ever been capable of them) such odors. Even her fevers when they came would be back-burner, a dry, desiccate desert heat — the almost pastel fragrance of old bone, ancient skin. Her stools, too, had lost force and sting. Only the ammonias of her pee seemed cumulative, consolidate. But she couldn’t remember when she had last perspired. On the hottest, steamiest days of the Florida summers she had felt the heat really as a kind of comforter across the lap of the sore, listless, stymied blood of her advanced age, and she could only marvel at the smells spilling from the cage of athletes even in the middling distance of her and Junior’s seats.

“Why did you cheer,” Yellin asked her, “for Berho and Hiribarren? Those characters were on the other side. Our guys were Darruspe and Urritzaga.”

She would have tried to tell him how she was drawn to what she could only have explained as their rugged vividness, but she would have sounded crazy even to herself.

So they played together. And it really was, Mrs. Ted Bliss supposed, quite like playing. She used as models her memories of Marvin’s and Frank’s and Maxine’s Saturday afternoon excursions with their Chicago buddies to the Rosenwald Museum of Science and Industry, or the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, double features at the South-town or Hyde Park, or important single features at big, first-run theaters like the State and Lake, the McVickers, the stage shows at the Chicago and Oriental; their forays into Jackson Park to the golf course and tennis courts, or out to see the Golden Lady, or the Japanese Gardens, to the archery range on the beach at Lake Michigan where they rented bows, arrows, leather bands for their arms, or their trips to the downtown stores on the I.C., or all the way to Wilmette to view the splendors of the Bahai Temple, shining, white as the Taj Mahal. And as asexual at her age with Junior Yellin as she assumed the children would have been when they had been tourists taking in the sights of their times.

So they played together, revisiting the jai alai, accompanying each other to the greyhounds, the track. Sightseers they were, the only difference between herself, Yellin, and her kids and their playmates was that Mrs. Bliss and Junior had more money to spend, but friendship at their level of disengagement as essentially touristic and hands-off as the kids had been when they aimlessly wandered from hole to hole on the Jackson Park golf course, or chased balls for the tennis players when they had been hit over the chain-link fences.

Playmates.

On rainy days playing the gin rummy variations (Hollywood, double points if the call card’s a spade, or being unable to knock until you had gin; the extra points, bonuses, and boxes in these refinements like a kind of runaway inflation) as her children might have stayed home and played Monopoly. Or shmoozing in restaurants over coffee after they’d eaten the Early Bird special. Playmates, but almost like courtship without any of courtship’s attendant anxieties. As comfortable with each other on these occasions as gossipy girls. (Junior Yellin unmasked, unmanned, sent home again to some almost virginal, pre-big shot condition, like a lion or tiger whose jaws and teeth are still undeveloped. Dorothy in her own way almost the same — their gossip making her nostalgic for something she’d never actually experienced, a life that, outside of family, had not yet happened.)

Queerly dependent on each other as a sort of stranger, castaways, say, or folks thrown together on a difficult trip. With nothing but time on their hands now, and nothing to do with that time — it’s still rotten out, say, the weather still threatening — but fall if not into the story of their lives then at least into some confessional sideshow aspect of the story of their lives, not the high points so much as the oddities, like freakish, unbeautiful geological formations in nature.

Mrs. Bliss, for example, offered a few of the reddest herrings from the last third of her life.

She told Yellin about the sale of Ted’s Buick LeSabre and of all the trouble that had gotten her into, and was quite astonished to learn that Junior had seen the car, had ridden in it, and, when his own was in the shop, had actually driven it once.

“What? No. Impossible.”

“What impossible? Why impossible? A seventy-eight, right?”

“Yes, but I could have told you that.”

“You never mentioned it. It was green, I think.”

“Not a dark green.”

“No, not a dark green. Ted wouldn’t drive around in a pool table. A light shade, I think. Like the background color on a dollar bill.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Bliss said. “But this was 1978, we were already living in Florida.”

“Didn’t he go back to Myers for a second opinion?”

“You know I forgot?” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, astonished. “So much happened that year.” Confused now, surprised she could have forgotten something like that but amazed, too, that Ted — the whole trip had taken less than a week — would have gone out of his way to look this man up, this son of a bitch who’d taken such advantage of him over the years and then, to add insult to injury, asked to borrow his car, a man who’d driven God knows how many miles all the way to Chicago to get a second opinion on his cancer—it was…it was outrageous! Why, her husband mustn’t have been so much amused by the man as absolutely fond of him!

She could do nothing more now but surrender to her dead husband’s wishes.

So she offered him Alcibiades Chitral, too, and Tommy Auveristas, and finally gave up Hector Camerando himself, the bizarre terms of Camerando’s arrangement with her.

“Four hundred dollars? A setup like that and all you took him for was four hundred dollars? Whatever happened to the grand views of Biscayne Bay, the penthouse in West Palm? You let that crazy spic off the hook for a lousy four hundred dollars?”

“It was embarrassing to me.”

“Embarrassing,” Junior said. “You got some sense of the proprieties. Didn’t it occur to you you might be hurting his feelings by running away from his generosity? Jesus! Dorothy!

“It’s over anyway. His number’s been disconnected.”

“That don’t mean he’s dead. Where there’s life there’s hope, where there’s a will there’s a way. I bet that Alcibiades Chitral guy could put you in touch. One da dit dot dash on the jungle telegraph would do it.”

“An anti-Semite? I wouldn’t stoop.”

“Tommy Auveristas, then. I can’t get over it. You know Tommy Overeasy.”

“Well, know,” said Mrs. Bliss dismissively.

“You were in the man’s home.”

“It was open house.”

“He put a napkin over your lap. You sat on a sofa with him and ate his food.”

“Oh, his food,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Drek, chozzerai. I barely moved it around on the plate.”

“You were the belle of the ball. You went mano a mano with him, you went tête-â-tête.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. This was right after my testimony. I think he may have been sizing me up. I think he must have been trying to see how much I really knew about Alcibiades Chitral. About Alcibiades Chitral and himself.”

“How much did you?”

“Nothing,” Dorothy Bliss said, surprised. “Nothing at all. My God,” she said, “I don’t even know Hector Camerando’s phone number. I can’t remember the last time I saw Tommy Auveristas,” she whispered, suddenly frightened by how much she had lost. “Can you imagine that?”

Junior Yellin shrugged. “Spilled milk,” he said.

Suddenly she felt a duty to be interested. She leaned toward her companion cross from her on the faux leather banquette in the fish restaurant. “Holmer Toibb must have told you plenty.”

“Holmer Toibb?”

“The man who trained you, whose practice you bought into.”

Yellin didn’t even look shamefaced. Or stare sheepishly into the dregs of his coffee cup.

“Friends?” he said.

“Of course friends,” Dorothy said.

“Well, the fact of the matter is I didn’t know Toibb. I never even saw him.”

“You told me he trained you.”

“Trained me. I’m an old dog. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“And Greener Hertsheim?”

“A legend.”

“A legend?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Like Robin Hood. Like George Washington and the cherry tree.” Mrs. Bliss scowled. “Friends?” Yellin asked like a professional wrestler extending his hand for forgiveness.

“But Junior, you billed me!”

“You never paid.”

“You threatened to turn it over to a collection agency!”

“Did I follow through?”

“It would have cost you money to follow through.”

“What are you so cockcited? You knew I was a fake. What troubles you, I was an untrained fake?”

“Junior, you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

“Oh,” Yellin said, “people’s lives.”

She took his point and smiled.

“Sure,” Mrs. Bliss said, “friends.”

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