Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

A cracked rib? What was the big deal about a cracked rib? All right, it was uncomfortable. It was painful to draw a deep breath, and you had to walk on eggshells when you climbed the stairs, and be very careful not to make any sudden movements if you wanted to save yourself from a painful stitch, but a cracked rib? How serious could a cracked rib be if all they did for you was tape up your chest? It was like breaking a toe where maybe they might go to the trouble of fixing it in a little splint while the bone went about the business of healing itself. It was a nuisance, of course it was, no one denied it, but serious? Come on! It was about as life threatening as a black eye, except that with a black eye you always had the added humiliation of explaining it away, trying to put it in the best light.

All right, two cracked ribs, the second following about a week after the first one got better, and Marvin unable to explain how he got it except to tell the doctor he felt this wrenching pain as he was bending over to lift a bag of Ellen’s groceries out of the backseat to carry into the house for her. But tests? Tests? Okay, the X ray they could understand, but sending the poor man off to the hospital for blood tests Dr. Myers said he didn’t have a way to take and have analyzed in his office quickly enough?

It was probably nothing of course, but just to make certain, be on the safe side.

His mother went white when she heard and Ellen’s pleas for her not to interfere, and to let Myers take care of it and just stay out of the doctor’s hair and not act like some ignorant greenhorn while they waited for the results.

Ignorant greenhorn? I’m his mother!

Of course you are, Ma, and I’m his wife, and I’m as scared as you are, believe me, but I don’t want the whole world in on this. It would only terrify Marvin if he found out.

The whole world, the whole world? I’m his mother. What did he say, the doctor?

Let’s take it one step at a time.

Let’s take it one step at a time? And you didn’t ask questions? You didn’t press him?

I pressed him, I pressed him. Okay? I asked him what’s the worst-case scenario.

What is?

Leukemia. Blood cancer. Are you satisfied?

Leukemia. Oh God, oh God, oh my God.

Myers didn’t say it was leukemia. What he said was that was the worst-case scenario. We have to wait for the tests, we have to take it one step at a time.

Leukemia. Oh my God oh God oh my God, my son has leu kem ia.

“He doesn’t have leu kem ia,” Ellen said. “We have to wait for the tests.”

But of course that was just what he would have, Mrs. Bliss knew. Since when does a perfectly healthy young man crack a rib from picking up a bag of groceries out of the backseat of a car? It just doesn’t happen. And when the results finally came back — and it wasn’t that long; what took time were all the additional tests they added on to those initial ones they sent him off to the hospital for — the reports from hematology, the pathologist’s opinions — and it was leukemia, Mrs. Bliss, God forgive her, couldn’t quite absolve her daughter-in-law from at least a little of the responsibility for her son’s illness. Who asks a man who’s just recovered from a painfully cracked rib to stoop over and pick up a heavy bag of groceries for her? What was she, a cripple? She wasn’t saying that that’s what caused him to come down with the disease, but maybe if she’d shown a little more consideration, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry, if she’d waited until he was a little stronger, Marvin wouldn’t have cracked another rib and his body would have had a better chance to heal, and the leukemia might never have happened.

“That’s silly,” Ted Bliss said. “How was it Ellen’s fault? This was something going on in his blood.”

“Leukemia. Oh my God, oh my God, my son has leukemia. ”

They accepted the diagnosis, they just never got used to it. Just as, God forgive her (though she knew better and had known better even at the top of her anger and denial as she pronounced her awful thoughts about Ellen to Ted), to this day she couldn’t get past the idea that if his wife had taken better care of him, if all of them had, her son might be alive today.

So it was his death she never got used to.

Mrs. Bliss wasn’t ignorant greenhorn enough not to understand the nature of her son’s disease. The white cells were amok in his blood, she told him. The chozzers gobbled up the red cells like there was no tomorrow. They had a picnic with him.

“I never gave in to them,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “It wasn’t the easiest thing because, let’s face it, your mother was right, I am a greenhorn. What did I know about blood counts? About platelets? Did I know what a leukocyte was?”

So she made it her business. Not just to sit there. Not just to feel his fever or wipe his brow. She made it her business to study the numbers, to live and die by the numbers. Just like her son, olov hasholem, and learned to work the proportions between the white cells and red cells as if she were measuring out a recipe. And thought, If she knew, if she understood…

“Because I never believed he would die,” Mrs. Bliss said. “This I never believed.”

And spoke to Myers. And asked if everything that could be done was being done. Because didn’t she read in the papers and see on TV that breakthroughs happened all the time, that cures for this and cures for that were just around the corner? She wanted him to tell her where, in the city, they were doing the best work. The city? The country, the world! Myers, God bless him, was a good man but very conservative. Maybe not, Mrs. Bliss thought, up on everything. He told her, ‘Dorothy, dear, he’s too sick to be moved.’

“ ‘So if he lays still he’ll get better?’

“ ‘Dorothy, he’s not going to get better.’

“You think I accepted that? You think Grandpa or your mother did? We looked it up, we asked around, and what everyone told us was that if, God forbid, you had to be sick the best place to be was the University of Chicago hospital. So that’s where we put him, in Billings, where they were doing advanced work in the field, experimental, giving special treatments which the insurance company wasn’t willing to pay for, and where Myers himself wasn’t even on the staff, where he had to have special permission — wait a minute, it wasn’t a pass — where he had to have reciprocity, reciprocity, just for permission to look in on him.”

So that’s where they moved him, and called in the highest-priced Nobel prize specialists to let them have a go at him.

“But you know? It wasn’t they didn’t know what they were doing. They tried the latest chemotherapies on him. One drug Marvin was the first patient in the state of Illinois to receive it. And there were definite benefits. His white count never looked better.

“Only…

“Only…”

“Only what, Grandma?”

“Barry, he was dying. ”

“Oh, Grandma,” he said.

“We didn’t know what to do.” Mrs. Ted Bliss sighed.

“Oh, Grandma.”

“That was when we were there practically around the clock. The room was so crowded you almost couldn’t breathe. We didn’t even spell each other anymore. If we went out now it wasn’t for a bite or to get a cup of coffee. It was to give the air a chance to recirculate.”

“Oh, Grandma.”

She went out to the waiting room this one time. She didn’t pick up even a magazine. There was a newspaper. She hadn’t seen a paper in days. The headline was in letters as thick as your arm. She looked but couldn’t take any of it in. She remembered thinking, Something important has happened, but what it was, or who it had happened to, she still couldn’t tell you. The year was a blur. The only current event she could remember was her son.