Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“There was a man in the waiting room. I’d seen him before, so naturally I thought he was a close friend or relative of one of the other patients on the floor. Though I’d never said a word to him. Listen, I didn’t look at a magazine, I couldn’t take in a headline. You think I was in the mood to make small talk with a stranger?”

She must have been crying. Sure, she must have been crying, because all of a sudden the man got up from where he was sitting and crossed the waiting room to where Dorothy was.

“ ‘How’s your son today, Mrs. Bliss,’ he says, ‘not so good?’

“I’d never spoken to him. How did he know my name? How did he know I was Marvin’s mother? He could have been reading my mind. He introduced himself, he gave me his card.”

His name was Rabbi Solon Beinfeld, and if she hadn’t been holding the card in her hand she’d never have believed he was a rabbi. He looked more like a lawyer, or a businessman, or even one of the doctors. He didn’t even look particularly Jewish to her if you want to know. And he could have been reading her mind again because he explained how he was the official chaplain for all the Jewish patients in Billings Hospital. She asked him, well, if he was the chaplain how come when she saw him he was always sitting in the waiting room.

“ ‘Patients are often self-conscious. Sometimes I embarrass them. And though I’m here to listen to them, or counsel them, it’s always an awkward situation. The waiting room is where I pray for them.’

“And you know, Barry, when he said that that’s the first time I really believed he was a rabbi, or even a chaplain. I mean, there we were, in Billings Hospital on the Midway campus of the University of Chicago, with all its high-powered specialists. What was I expecting, that he’d be dressed like a Hasid in a big black hat and have a long beard and side curls with tzitzit peeking out from under his vest? The only thing that surprised me was that he wasn’t wearing a long white lab coat.”

He wanted to know if she was Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed.

He was a rabbi, a man. She wanted to please him.

“I bentsh licht,” she said, and looked down modestly. He waited for her to go on. “In Russia,” she admitted, “girls didn’t always get a Jewish education. I don’t read the Hebrew.”

Suddenly he seemed uneasy, and Mrs. Bliss put two and two together. It was awkward, he’d said. He was there to listen to patients, to counsel them. What could he tell Marvin, to what would he listen — his cries and whimpers, his demands for injections?

He was there in the waiting room praying for her son, praying for Marvin and he was right, she was embarrassed. She’d put two and two together. More than from the evidence of his only intermittently improved blood counts or his brief pain-free periods when he seemed not only better but actually perky, or from those rarer and rarer times when the blood seemed returned to his cheeks (the red returning blood cells from the higher and higher doses of the heroic new devastating chemotherapies and almost steady transfusions he was getting now) all the more bright for the flat, colorless palette of his pale illness, it was her knowledge of the chaplain rabbi’s prayers for her son that depleted her hope, and made her want to die.

“You know something I don’t know, Chaplain?” Mrs. Bliss asked almost viciously.

“No,” he said sadly, “I think you know everything.”

He was not only a man, he was a rabbi, and despite her heartbreak, Mrs. Bliss still wished to please him.

“It was all I could do not to let myself cry out in front of him. I knew he was a rabbi. I knew it was his business and that this was the way he made his living, just like Grandpa was a butcher and you’re an automobile mechanic,” she told her grandson. “Still, it was all I could do not to run away from him or stop myself from howling in the street.

“I didn’t completely trust Myers? I wanted a second opinion? All right, here it was. The chaplain practically praying over your father’s body right out in the hall!

“It was too much to ask. What, I shouldn’t break down? I wasn’t entitled? Character is a terrible thing,” she said. “Who knows who knew what back there in Marvin’s room? If I screamed now they’d hear me and come running to see. Maybe your father himself would hear me and know how it was with him. Because it’s true what they say, ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’ What right did I have to take that away from anybody just because I’d put two and two together and understood he was a goner?

“Character is a terrible thing. Because all it is is habit.

“So instead of screaming, I started to moan.

“ ‘Marvin!’ I moaned. ‘Marvin, Marvin, Marvin! Oy Marvin. Marvin, my poor precious baby!’

“ ‘Shah!’ the rabbi says. ‘Shah! Shah!’ And actually touches his finger to my lips. I couldn’t have been more amazed than if he’d kissed me!

“ ‘Shah!’ he says again, quiet now. ‘Shh, shh.’

“ ‘He’s my son,’ I say.

“ ‘Don’t call his name.’

“ ‘Don’t call his name? Marvin’s my oldest. He’s going to die. I shouldn’t say Marvin?’

“ ‘Don’t say his name! ’ It’s a command. This guy is commanding me not to cry out the name of my dying baby.

“ ‘Your boy,’ he says, ‘what is this fellow’s Hebrew name?’

“ ‘Marvin’s Hebrew name—’ ”

“ ‘Don’t say his name! Is this chap’s Hebrew name Moishe?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘Moishe,’ ”

Which is when Beinfeld explained it to her.

When a person is supposed to die, he told her, God sends out the Angel of Death to look for the person. Now the Angel of Death is the stupidest of all the angels, and sometimes, not always, he can be fooled. Doctors often fool the angel with certain operations, or at times with special medicines. He’s a stupid angel, yes, but not a complete idiot. He’s been around the block and he’s picked up a thing or two. Only the thing of it is that of all God’s angels he’s not only the stupidest but the busiest. He hasn’t got time to hang around trying to figure out how to undo all that the doctors have done for sick people with their operations and special medicines. Which is why certain patients go— swoosh —just like that, and others, like Moishe, linger on for a year or more.

All he had to go on, Beinfeld told her, was a list of names. In certain respects he wasn’t all that much different from a postman who has to match up the name of the addressee with the name on the mailbox.

“ ‘This party of whom we were speaking,’ the rabbi says, ‘tell me, he has a middle name?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘Whisper it to me.’

“ ‘Sam. Shmuel.’

“ ‘Harry,’ he says. ‘Good. In Hebrew, Herschel.’ ”

So Beinfeld changed his name. They went into Barry’s dad’s room, and Dorothy introduced him and explained to everyone what was going to happen. It may have been the first time the chaplain had ever seen who he’d been praying for. He made out a paper. He even had the hospital type up a different band and put it around Moishe Herschel Bliss’s wrist. They did a new card at the nurses’ station and substituted it for the one on the door outside his room. Beinfeld turned the clipboard around at the foot of the bed holding you know who’s chart on it. Then the rabbi offered up prayers around the bed to spare the invalid’s life.

Mrs. Bliss hadn’t had a Jewish education; by her own admission she didn’t know Hebrew, and though she had no understanding of what Beinfeld was saying, she caught him repeating Moishe Herschel’s “name” throughout the course of his prayer. Well, she could hardly have missed it, could she, because each time he said it he seemed to say it more loudly as though the Angel of Death were not only stupid but maybe a little deaf, too.