Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

Because family didn’t have to be nice to each other, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Because they didn’t always have to dance around tiptoe on eggshells. Because Golda never got her apology, and Sam did too sit down with them again to play cards. And the very next time, if she remembered correctly!

They didn’t even have to love each other if you want to know. Just being related gave them certain rights and privileges. It was like being born in Canada, or France, or Japan. Herman, her sister Rose’s ex, she’d written off. When they got their divorce he’d been revoked, like you’d cancel a stamp. Even though she’d rather liked Herman. He’d been a kidder. Mrs. Bliss, in her good humor, was a sucker for kidders.

But nice as Manny was, kind to her as he’d been, dependent on him as she would always be, and even though he was Jewish, and a neighbor, and a good neighbor, who shlepped for her and treated when she and Rosie and Manny went out together, to the show or for a bite to eat afterward, he just wasn’t related. He was only Manny from the building, and if Dorothy had been protective of his feelings where Frank and Maxine were concerned, it was because push shouldn’t have to come to shove in a civilized world, in Florida, a thousand miles from her nearest distant relative. Because Mrs. Ted Bliss knew what was what, was practically a mind reader where her children were concerned, as certain of their attitudes as she’d been of their temperatures when she pressed her lips to their foreheads or cheeks when they were babies. She knew Frank’s outrage that this stranger had moved in on her troubles, understood even her daughter’s milder concern. Didn’t Dorothy herself feel buried under the weight of all the blind, indifferent altruism of Manny’s professional courtesies? So she knew all right. Nobody was putting anything over on nobody. Nobody. Which was probably why all of them had backed down, why Maxine just watched the carpeting and Manny just stuck the five dollars into his pocket and Frank held his tongue when Manny told him that he had no change.

And why Dorothy, who hated decorum and standing on ceremony, welcomed it then.

And why, above all, Dorothy was thankful to God that Manny was leaving, without his coffee, without his cake. So he wouldn’t have to be in the same room with Frank even just only thinking to himself, Why the little pisher, the little pisher, the little no goddamn good pisher ! And Mrs. Ted Bliss wouldn’t have to yell at Manny and ruin it for herself with him forever, goodbye and good luck.

Nothing had been decided. Even during the little visit to Miami Maxine and her brother had undertaken after Manny’s all but incoherent telephone calls and the alarms they set off regarding her state of mind. To Frank’s assertion that the lawyer was probably not only a troublemaker but a shyster into the bargain, his sister said that even if he were she doubted he’d made up Tommy Auveristas’s end of the conversation.

“Meaning?”

“Frank, she’s a housewife. All she knows is ‘Tips from Heloise’ and how you get nasty stains out of the toilet bowl. She’s my mom and I love her, but she doesn’t have the imagination to make up that crap.”

“So what are you saying, Maxine, that this Manny guy is actually onto something, and that Mother’s in trouble with south Florida’s criminal element?”

“No. Poor Manny hasn’t a clue, but I think Mother’s in trouble all right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The guest of honor at Mr. Big’s house party? The guest of honor? A helpless old lady in a pink polyester pants suit among all those diamonds, furs, and high-fashion shoes? And that he practically never left her side the whole evening? Or that he hung on her every word? The never-ending saga of Mama’s epic recipes? And what about the part where he tore into the help because he spilled food on the rug when he came up beside her sealed-over ear and startled her? Come on Frank, he fed her? Or told her he was a Sox fan? This is good evidence? This is the bill of particulars she presented to Manny?”

“Well,” Frank said, “he told her he was an importer. You know what that could mean down here.”

“Sure. That he buys and sells bananas. Frank, listen to me, the strongest card in her suit, the strongest, is the car, the LeSabre in the parking lot, and there could be a hundred forty explanations for that. And all that talk about his tone, Tommy whatsisname’s sinister menace.”

“He scared the shit out of her, Maxine.”

“She’s deaf, Frank. The woman is deaf.”

“What are you doing, Max? What are you trying to say?”

“She never goes downtown. At night…at night she hardly ever leaves the building unless she has an escort even if it’s only to cross over to the next condominium.”

“Hey, she’s nervous. Her husband is dead. She’s frail and vulnerable.”

“She’s a suspicious old lady.”

“She doesn’t have a right to be?”

“Frank, she bought Daddy a gun! ”

“Oh, please,” said her brother.

“She carried it in her purse when they collected the rents. ‘Just in case,’ she told me one time, ‘just in case.’ ”

“Just in case what?”

“Just in case anything. I don’t know. If they called a rent strike, if they demanded new wallpaper.”

“You think she still has the gun?”

“Who knows?”

“You want us to confront her?” Frank asked. “Jesus, Maxine, why start up? We’re both of us out of here tomorrow. If she feels more comfortable with a gun around the place I don’t think that’s so terrible. She’d never use it.”

“As a matter of fact,” said his sister, “I don’t believe she even has that gun anymore. I mentioned it to point out her state of mind before Daddy even died.”

“So what are you getting at? You want to go one-on-one with Tommy A., take the bullshit by the horns?”

“I think she ought to talk to somebody,” Maxine said.

“Talk to somebody.”

“See someone.”

“You mean like a shrink? Can you really picture our mother going through analysis?”

“No,” Maxine said, “of course not. Just to have somebody to talk to. You see how she relies on Manny.”

“Mr. District Attorney.”

“Manny’s not so bad, Frank. He’s been very helpful.”

“Manny’s a jailhouse lawyer. The woods down here are full of them. Self-important experts and know-it-alls. Manny’s base, Maxine. That junk he fed us about Enoch Eddes? How he jabbed him with a left, and another left, then finished him off with a right hook?”

“Don’t be cruel, Frank. He told that story on himself.”

“Well, then he ain’t very reliable, is he?”

“They both see things in the dark, I think,” Maxine said.

They had less than twenty-one hours between them. Maxine’s flight was scheduled to leave Fort Lauderdale at nine the next morning, Frank’s an hour and a half later. While Mrs. Bliss was still in the kitchen, preparing at two o’clock in the afternoon the dinner she would not put on the table until at least six, her children concluded that Dorothy had not yet come to terms with her grief, that it was devouring her, and that in a kind of way she was reemigrating, first leaving the old country to flesh out the substance of a new life in America, and now quitting America to abandon what was left her of life in a sort of old country of the soul and spirit where she could be one with that bleak race of widowed grief cronies, woeful, keening sisters in perpetual mourning for the deep bygones of their better days.