Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“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.