Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The property?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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