Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

But then, she thought, she’d have had to buy all of them garages.

He pulled an uncomfortable-looking slatted wooden chair (like the chair in the bed-and-breakfast that Frank and May had found for them the time she and Ted visited London during Frank’s sabbatical year) up to the side of his grandmother’s bed and sat down.

“So how are you, Grandmother?”

Mrs. Bliss started to laugh. Barry looked hurt.

“No, no, Barry. It’s just, when you asked, you reminded me.”

“What of?”

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf?” sang Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Oh,” Barry said, “yeah. Sure.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “ I’m the big bad wolf. What did you bring me?”

“Questions,” Barry said meekly.

“The better to see you with. The better to hear you with. The better to eat you with, my dear.”

“About my dad,” Barry said.

She’d never been one to carry on. She didn’t make fusses, wasn’t the sort of person who liked to impose. Outside the family, for example, she knew she made a better hostess than a guest. And if she had once been beautiful or vain, then the beauty and vanity were aspects of those same hospitable impulses that went into her lavish wish to please, to be pleasing to others. She wasn’t stoic or invulnerable. If you pricked her, she bled, if you tickled her she laughed, de da de da. It was just that same baleboosteh instinct to clean up after herself, the blood; to cover her mouth demurely over the laughter. It was some Jewish thing perhaps, a sense of timing, knowing when to make herself scarce.

No one, she thought, understood the terrible toll Ted’s death had inflicted upon her. Maybe the stewardess on the airplane that time, maybe the woman in City Hall to whom she’d tried to explain the problem about the personal property tax on Ted’s Buick LeSabre. But the grief she felt when he died, that she still felt, never mind that time heals all wounds, was a thing not even her children were aware of (and to tell you the truth was more than a little miffed about this, not because they were blind to her pain so much as that their blindness gave her a sense that whatever they’d once felt about Ted’s death had gone away), though she wouldn’t have let them in on this in a million years. It wasn’t that she meant to spare them either. They were her kids, she loved them, but maybe they didn’t deserve to be spared. It wasn’t even a question of why she spared them. It was what she spared them. Mrs. Bliss’s loss was exactly that — a loss, something subtracted from herself, ripped off like an arm or a leg in an accident. It was the deepest of flesh wounds, and it festered, spilled pus, ran rivers of the bile of all unclosed scar, all unsealed stump. How could she ever ask anyone to look at something like that?

But Barry, with his grief for his father, for himself, was a different story altogether.

“He loved you, Barry. I never saw a prouder father. You were tops in his book. Tops.”

Barry watched his grandmother carefully.

“You were,” she said. “No father could have been closer to his son. He cherished you.” She turned, facing him on her side, her weight uncomfortably propped on her forearm, the edge of her thin fist. “Lean down,” she whispered.

Barry moved toward her, stretching tight his still buttoned suit jacket. “Yes?”

“It’s a secret,” she said. “Don’t tell your cousins, it would hurt their feelings. Marvin got more naches from you than Aunt Maxine and Uncle Frank got from all your cousins put together.”

“Really? No.”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Bliss. “It was written all over his face whenever you came into a room. Or maybe you’d just left and I’d come in and I’d say, ‘I just missed Barry, didn’t I, Marvin?’ Sure, I could tell,” she said, “it was like a big sign on his face.”

“I don’t remember,” Barry said.

“You were a kid, a baby. What were you when your father, olov hasholem, got sick, eight, nine?”

“He died just before my tenth birthday.”

“That’s right. And before that he was in and out of hospitals for months at a time for an entire year. The hospital wouldn’t allow visitors your age, and when he was home he was too sick to play with you. Except on those few days he seemed to be feeling a little better we tried to keep you away from him. We thought it was best that a child shouldn’t see his daddy in those circumstances. We were trying to do what was best by both parties. Maybe we were wrong. We were probably wrong. What did we know? Did we have so much experience? Were we so knowledgeable about death in those days?”

She was as moved by what she said as Barry himself, but then, olov hasholem, she knew that both of them, maybe all three of them, deserved better, that a debt was owed to what really happened.

So she told him the truth: that in that last awful year of his life he was too sick for pride, for favorites, big bright smiles, or any other sign unconnected to his pain and suffering, too sick for the least little bit of happiness, or, on even those rare, blessed days of unlooked-for remission presented to him like a gift, for gratitude, let alone having enough strength left over, or will, or determination, or drive, for anything as rigorous as love, or even common, God forgive me, fucking courtesy.

It was different then. This was not only before death with dignity, it was before pain management. It was the dark ages when doctors and nurses didn’t always play so fast and loose with the morphine, and patients had to wait on the appointed, exact minute of their next injection like customers taking a number at the bakery. So when Dorothy sat with him in the hospital that year, always putting in at least five or six hours a day and often pulling ten, or more even, on the days when Marvin — olov hasholem, olov hasholem, olov hasholem — was out of his head, chained up and screaming at his torturers like a political prisoner, she felt the pain almost as keenly as he did, fidgeting, uselessly pressing her lips to his head to feel the fever, kissing his cheeks, wiping his face down with wet, cool cloths in an effort to console him, even as he thrashed his head and neck and shoulders about, forcefully (who had no force) trying to escape, throw her off, shouting at her, actually cursing her, this good tragic son (whose tragedy was, for Mrs. Bliss, suddenly, sourly, obscurely underscored by the three- or four-year seniority his wife had over him in age, so that, if he died, he would seem, young as he was, even younger, and even more tragic) who’d never so much as raised his voice to her before; yes, and felt his relief, too, as her son’s vicious pains gradually subsided when he received the soothing sacrament of the morphine, but, exhausted as she was, not only not daring, not even willing to sleep during the three and then two and then one good hour of respite that the drug provided lest she miss one minute of what, despite all those hours of her visits to the hospital in the last year of Marvin’s life, she still managed to fool herself into believing was the beginning of his cure.

They never got used to it. Not Ellen, not Ted, not Dorothy or Frank or Maxine, spelling, relieving each other on the better days and, on the just-average-ordinary, run-of-the-mill lousy ones only long enough to dash down to the cafeteria for a bite or out to the waiting room to grab a smoke or to the vending machines for a soft drink or cup of coffee, while on the five-star, flat-out rotten ones they never even got that far, but chose instead, like captains of doomed, sinking ships to stay with their vessels, who if they could not go down with them could at least bear witness. So that Marvin became at last not their son or brother or husband at all but some all-purpose child, the rights to whose death they collectively demanded. They never got used to it. Why should they? When they never even got used to the diagnosis?