Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were quits, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.

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

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.