Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

It was just too bad there really wasn’t anyone to be sore at, for the fact of the matter was that in the just four years since Rosie’s death the Towers had practically emptied out. There just weren’t that many old-timers or familiar faces left. When someone died their children, who usually had no use for Florida, would either list the condo with an agent or hang around for a month or so to try to sell it themselves. The price of these places had gone through the floor, and the sad truth was that Mrs. Ted Bliss could have had the biggest, highest-priced condo the Towers had to offer (except for the penthouses of course) for many thousands less than what she and Ted had given for their own only median-scale suite of rooms back in the sixties.

“Did you know,” Junior Yellin said beside her on Manny’s long white leather sofa, “the silly son of a bitch arranged for the caterer himself?”

“He was my friend, I won’t listen to gossip about him,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“What gossip?” Junior said. “His nephew told me.”

“Shh!” Mrs. Bliss, whose increased hardness of hearing encouraged her in the belief that people tended to raise their voices when they were around her, waved down the volume of Junior’s voice.

“I don’t know did he, didn’t he, but the kid gave me his word as a lawyer your pal not only knew who would and who wouldn’t be here today, but pretty much sized up the collective tastes of the crowd. That’s why you see more decaf and sweet table than lox and pastrami. They’re counting cholesterol, they’re stinting on fat.”

“It’s ridiculous he had his own shivah catered. It’s ridiculous, it’s nuts.”

“Is it, oh yeah? Wasn’t he a lawyer, didn’t he have a head for contingency and probability?”

“What’s that got to do?”

“What’s that got to do, what’s that got to do?”

“Shh!”

“Look at this place, will you,” Junior said. “Who are these people? They sit off by themselves. They could be patients in the waiting room reading my magazines.”

Mrs. Bliss glanced around the room, which, except for Junior, herself, and the nephew, had only two other visitors left. “Since when,” she asked, “has your waiting room been this full?”

“Wise guy,” Junior said, “it gets me through my days.”

“Oh, now,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“ ‘Oh, now? Oh now?’ Dorothy, this is the way goyim talk. Maybe you’ve been in this place too long.”

It was true, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, the Towers had gone downhill. Many of the Cubans and Latin Americans had moved out to Palm, or farther down Collins to South Beach, or bought in the Keys, while a lot of the Jews had died off or moved out altogether. Ted, she reflected, wouldn’t recognize the place today, and then corrected herself. Yes, he would. Sure he would. Of course he would. It wasn’t all that much different from the fifty-unit Chicago apartment building he owned on the North Side where Dorothy went with him on the first Monday of every month to collect the rents, covering for him with a gun he hadn’t even known she had.

So sure he would, he’d have known in a minute, failing only to recognize that this, in the end, was where he’d chosen to bring her, to live side-by-side with those same old Polacks and Slavs her family had fled when she was a kid. Only, in an odd way, she had the upper hand while they, the new goyim, were the interlopers.

Change, she reflected, between crumbs of sweet coffee cake she licked from her fingers, if you just managed to live long enough, even change changed.

Because here was Mr. Milton Junior Yellin beside her — butcher, farmer, realtor, bookkeeper, philanderer, black marketeer, recreational therapeusisist, and general, all-round-who-knows-what-all, a bona fide quick-change champion in his own right, transmogrified again from masher to friend, then friend, absorbed into friendship, something even more valuable — mutual witnesses to each other’s lives, necessary kibitzers. So that they could, even at their age, get down, Yellin reserving the right to accuse her speech (“Dorothy, this is the way goyim talk”), Mrs. Bliss at liberty to discuss the fiction of Junior Yellin’s “practice.” It was heady stuff, heady, and, quite frankly, they may have embarrassed Manny’s nephew executor with their open laughter.

Because with the exception of the nephew, Mrs. Bliss, and Milt Yellin, Manny’s condo was now quite empty of mourners. It must have seemed that there was no one left in the entire world who genuinely missed him, this once minister-without-portfolio who did so much for so many of them in the Towers complex that he seemed to have become a kind of precinct captain and ward heeler for them. (All this was in the old days, of course. Though, really, Mrs. Bliss thought, the old days weren’t all that long ago. Hadn’t she pressed her claims on Manny’s mysterious volunteer spirit as recently as last year when she’d packed two or three times more than she needed and counted on what even then as well as in hindsight was an already thinning, short-winded huffer and puffer who shouldn’t have been called upon to so much as snap her valises shut let alone carry them from her apartment all the way down the hall to the elevator, albeit he made two trips with one suitcase held out in front of his belly with both hands — the way children carry weights too heavy for them — rather than two suitcases, one dangling from each hand and swinging along beside him as if to the marching music of youth and strength? And didn’t, for a short-winded old man, two trips with half a load each create a greater threat to the constitution than just some single let’s-get-it-over-with effort of the double weight? So it was only fitting, she thought, that she who had added to his burdens the longest should have stayed the longest, making the most of his death even at the expense of wearing out her welcome.)

The sun had already begun to set before Dorothy realized that though they’d been talking together for some hours now they’d never been formally introduced. She broke off in the middle of a reminiscence to do the honors.

“I’m Dorothy Bliss,” she said, “and this here is Junior Yellin.”

“Call me Milt.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the nephew said, “I’m Nathan Apple.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased to meet you, ” said Nathan Apple.

“Excuse me, Nathan, but I have to get this off my chest. You mustn’t judge by what you saw today.”

“Saw today?”

“Well, didn’t see today. The turnout. Your uncle was one of the most popular, well-known, best-loved men in Building One. Were you at Rosie’s funeral? Your aunt’s?”

“My mother’s sister’s half-sister.”

“And I’ve been thinking, the reason Rosie had so many people and Manny so few in comparison, no disrespect to your aunt, wasn’t so much a tribute to Rosie as a show of support for her husband. Also, you’ve got to remember that many of those who dragged themselves out to her funeral on walkers back then are now in wheelchairs, and that a whole bunch of them who were in wheelchairs are now restricted to their beds. Many of the rest, may they rest, are dead. Others may not really have gotten to know him because he was already too old by the time a lot of them moved in for him to help them out much. Sure,” she said, “by that time Manny was the one who needed help. So I’m just saying, you mustn’t feel bad.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, Aunt Dorothy.”

Aunt Dorothy? Mrs. Bliss thought. Aunt Dorothy? She was stung by this smart aleck’s familiarity. Why, when you reached a certain age, did they rub your face in your harmlessness? That guy at Frank’s house in Providence should have smacked his kid for calling her his greatgrandma Dorothy.