Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

“Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss.”

She thought she could hear someone call her name, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t be sure.

“Mrs. Bliss?”

Furtively, she put her hand into a breast pocket of her pants suit and quietly as she could fumbled for a hearing aid. She didn’t think she’d made any noise but the appliance wasn’t in yet so she couldn’t be sure.

“Mrs. Bliss, are you there?”

“Who’s that, who’s there?”

She hoped it wasn’t Francis Moprado come to murder her for not allowing him to board up her sliding doors.

“It’s me.”

“What do you want, how’d you get in?”

“Passkey.” The security guard walked in front of Mrs. Bliss’s chair. “I come to check you out.”

“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“No,” she said, “it’s me. Elaine Munez’s daughter.” She turned the batonlike flashlight on herself for identification.

“I fell asleep,” Mrs. Bliss said. Inexplicably, she felt a need to account for herself, her wanton presence in her condominium in an abandoned building during a hurricane. Idly, she wondered if this were a citable offense, if she could be written up, decided that trying to explain would make too long a story. She wouldn’t fight it.

“Did you see my mother?”

“What?”

“Did you see my mother? I been trying to call since the first reports on my scanner. She don’t answer, Mrs. Bliss.”

“Darling,” said Mrs. Bliss, “the phones aren’t working.”

“ Before they ain’t working.”

“People have been leaving the building, Louise. I saw from my balcony. It could have been yesterday. The day before yesterday.”

“She didn’t sign out,” said the security guard. “You got to leave your name with the security guard you go away overnight. I check the books. No Elaine Munez.”

“Well, everyone was in such a hurry.”

“She know the rule.”

“There must have been long lines. Everybody was honking their horns. Does Mother still drive?”

“No.”

“There,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you see? Her driver was giving her the bum’s rush. She probably didn’t have time for the formalities.”

“Not the formalities,” Louise said. She was close to hysteria. “She know how I worry.”

“You’ll see, Mother’s all right. Probably she tried to get a message to you. Everyone was in such a hurry.”

Was she crying? It was too dark to see but it seemed to Mrs. Bliss that the strange girl was crying.

“I come to guard her,” Louise explained. “To protect her from bandits and stranglers.”

“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“It isn’t secure,” Louise said, shaking her head desolately. “I’ll tell you something,” she whispered hoarsely. Remarkably, Dorothy could hear every word. She didn’t even have to lean forward, as if there were something in the complicated register of her alarm so insistent it wiped out all silence. “The building ain’t vacant!”

“You checked the sign-out ledger. Did many stay?”

“How hard it would be to sign out and stay behind? It make a good alibi,” she said professionally.

Mrs. Bliss looked toward the mad, improbable woman. Was it possible she knew what she was talking about? And recalled her paranoia in the hall when she’d called out her name like a talisman and stealthily tried all the doorknobs. But somehow her fear had been short-circuited. Sure, she thought, fear falls away, too.

“She could be anywhere,” Louise Munez said desperately. “She could be anywhere on any floor in any building.” Then, like a child, she said, “I want my mother, I want my mother,” and Mrs. Ted Bliss, who wanted her husband and her dead son Marvin, but now not so much, and her other children, too, and the gang, and all the others whom she loved who’d ever lived, but not now not so much, even Junior Yellin, even Ellen, was astonished to realize that the strange girl — she’d met her when she first came to the Towers — was no longer a girl but a woman in her fifties who even at that age was still forever frozen into whatever loony, skewed relationship with her mother had caused their breach and disappointed the mother forever. (Because of all the things that fall away — and everything did, everything, the whole kit and caboodle, even her condo, even the Buick LeSabre, the color of which she no longer remembered — thought Mrs. Bliss, maybe it’s only madness you can hang onto.) And felt something warm, even feverish, take her hand. It was Louise Munez’s hands, covering her own. “Oh,” she said, “I have frighten you.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss.

“I will wait with you,” she declared. “I will see you safe through the hurricane.”

Mrs. Bliss removed her hand gently from Louise’s and held her arms open. In the darkness she lifted her left hand to Louise’s head and began to stroke the dry hair.

Because everything else falls away. Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review . Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated with Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.