Mrs. Ted Bliss (18 page)

“Over a year ago.”

“Over a year?”

“He was murdered.”

“What? He never! Murdered?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He was a physician. They killed a physician?”

“Well, you know, technically he wasn’t a physician.”

“He was a great healer,” Mrs. Bliss said. “A
great
healer.”

“The consultants miss him. We all do,” the woman said. “I was working here only a few months when it happened.
I
miss him.”

“Well, of course,” Mrs. Bliss said. “Besides being a good man, healers like him don’t come along every day. I feel sorry for his patients. What do they do now?”

“There’s others to fill his shoes,” the secretary said. “Toibb had foresight. He was no spring chicken, you know. He studied with Greener Hertsheim. He was with him practically from the start of the movement. So he knew. He did. He knew. He had the insight and foresight to bring other practitioners into the practice and give them the benefit of his knowledge. Oh, I’m not saying he expected to be murdered. People always think that’s something that happens to the next guy. And more power
to
them, I say! Because what’s the use of living if all you do with your life is go around all day with a long face like a scaredy-pants?
That’s
no way. A person has to have more of an interest than
thaat.

“You said you were who?”

“Mrs. Ted Bliss,” Mrs. Bliss said.

“And you were Holmer’s patient?”

“It’s been a few years.”

“We’d still have your records. He kept very good records. That was
his
interest.”

“My records?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“Well, the notes poor Toibb made on you.”

“Did they catch them?” said Mrs. Bliss. “Do they know who did it?”

“They haven’t closed the case yet. The detectives still come in from time to time. Do you know what I think? I think you should ask to see one of the consultants.”

“Why?”

“Well, you
did
ring this number. And as you say, ‘It’s been a few years.’ And you
were
his patient. And you thought so well of him.”

“I’m sorry to hear what happened.”

“He was very highly respected.”

“I don’t understand how he could have been murdered and I never heard about it. Was it in the papers? Was it on the news?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” this odd but quite friendly woman said, “they’re keeping it quiet. It’s how they’ve chosen to operate on this one. They’re waiting for someone to slip up. They always slip up.”

“Detectives come in? What do they want? What do they do there?”

“Oh, they just nose around. And we cooperate. Well, as much as we can.
You
understand. But not to worry. The therapeusisist/ client relationship is sacred.

“
I really think you should make an appointment for a checkup,
” the woman said ominously.

Mrs. Bliss’s first thought when she hung up was to get in touch with Manny. He was the one who’d given her Toibb’s name in the first place. The difficulty was she was reluctant to call him. They still saw each other of course. In a community as tight-knit as the Towers they could hardly have avoided running into each other, but the fact was Manny had taken up with other widows by now. With widowers, too. With anyone, really, to whom he could play Dutch uncle, all that wide-eyed, teeming lot of poor, tempest-tossed masses and tired, yearning, wretched refuse.

Really, Dorothy thought, in a kind of way it was as if she’d passed through a sort of second immigrant phase and, sloughing Manny from the building, taken out final papers. In unconsciously turning to Toibb, for example, deciding to go first class with her troubles, take them professional.

Of course she
missed
Manny. And when she saw him these days, and the helpless, troubled people who looked to him for support, it was quite as if she had dropped into an old neighborhood where she’d once lived. She often longed to tell him how she was doing, and to thank him. He had helped her, he really had, and she could never repay him, but now, in her new, unfocused, listless dispensation, Mrs. Ted Bliss had gone offshore so to speak, moved beyond the three-mile limit of Manny’s weak jurisdictionals. Which isn’t to say she didn’t occasionally feel flashes of a vestigial jealously, short twinges of a peculiar envy, not, she hoped, knew, because others now basked in the attention of the real estate lawyer who, with the death of his wife, had been thrust into an abrupt, sudden eligibility.

Rosie had passed away two years before from a massive coronary explosion.

Mrs. Bliss had gone to the funeral services and, afterward, to offer her condolences to the new widower. Manny’s condominium wasn’t large enough to accommodate so massive a shivah and they’d had to move it downstairs into the game room. Dorothy, no one, had ever seen anything like it. Not to take anything away from Rosie (though she was a decent, patient woman, everyone knew who the real star of the family was), but the tribute was to Manny. But, Rosie, Manny, those seven days of shivah would come to represent the benchmark of mourning in the Towers, possibly in all Miami Beach. Mrs. Bliss had approached the grieving widower, still a wide, relatively youthful and handsome man—he couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than Dorothy—oddly even more virile and distinguished-looking beneath his three- or four-day stubble like a loose gray veil of grief. “Oh, Manny,” Dorothy had said, “I’m so sorry. Listen,” she’d said, “if there’s anything I can do, anything.”

“I know, Dorothy. Thank you,” he said. And added, “You know what this means? It’s taught me a lesson. You’re up, you’re down. Life’s like a wheel of fortune. See, see how the tables have turned?”

Though they hadn’t, not really. Manny was still like some Johnny-on-the-spot with the men and women. If anything, he volunteered even more of his time now Rosie was dead than when she was alive. He’d even been singled out by a rabbi as one of the “just men,” one of those holy three dozen on earth who helped keep the good order of life. He was still, that is, on call, but these days Mrs. Ted Bliss had passed out of the range of his influence and was not at all envious of those people who were the beneficiaries of Manny’s new second wind, the brighter, even warmer glow of his radiating goodwill, so much as, well, a little sorry for them. They had more sharply defined needs than she, a different order of need—acute, short range, easily dealt with, like heat exhaustion, say. All they needed was to be pulled into the shade, given water, have cool, wet cloths applied to their temples and brows.

Mrs. Ted Bliss, on the other hand, had passed over into a new state of being, existed on a plane different from grief, out of reach of cumulate time’s ministering comforts and platitudes. Why,
she, she
had lost not only husband and family and self and appetite (that savored, one-shot pork chop for which she would never again feel a yen) but all urge and interest. The baleboosteh part of herself complete, her house at last in order, and order at last seen for what it finally was: the rule of regularity, habit ground down to the trim, plain, ugly shipshape of the deadened dinky, like all that long, perpetually cared for rectangularity in the Chicago boneyard. Urge and yen and craving subsided, absent from her life. Life absent from her life. So that all she could muster for this season’s batch and crop of bereft, forlorn survivors was a pinch of indignation, as if they were suckers of heartbreak, rubes and rookies who hadn’t seen nothing yet.

Oy, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Oy and oy. Oy, oy, a thousand times oy!

How come then, she thought, that such acceptance and coming to terms was so disquieting, so unsettling when everything the complete baleboosteh could hope for was to have all her decks cleared, squared away, every last hospital corner pulled taut and smooth, as if what life had been all about was preparation for some final white-glove inspection? What, she
didn’t
think in terms of a life in the barracks? But, surely, that’s what so much of hers had been all about. And now it was as if she’d been presented with a statement, some red-tape thing, complicated, governmental, bureaucratic, vaguely whiplashed through interagency (Part A’s uncertain relationship with Part B), like Ted’s Medicare bills almost a year after he died—
THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL, THIS IS NOT A BILL
—until one day one arrived inexplicably stamped Paid in Full.

So that if they had pressed her she could almost have told them, “Girls, they tell you time heals all things? Time heals nothing. What, you think you’re unhappy now? You think because your husband is gone this is the worst, the storm that breaks the camel’s back, water in the basement and climbing the stairs, that it’s up over the lip of the threshold and coming in under the door in the hall, that it’s destroyed the linoleum and already lapping the wall-to-wall, licking high up the legs of the dining room chairs, the mahogany sideboard and credenza, that it’s covered the tiles, and slipping down the side of the tub like dirty bathwater, is above the box spring and even with the mattress, is inside the chest of drawers with your things like stockings and underwear left to soak overnight in the bathroom basin.

“Or that the final slap in the face is when the insurance claim comes back marked ‘Sorry, not covered, act of God’?

“You think?

“You think so?

“Or from all that pile-on and pile-on of tsuris, the kids’ bad grades and the death of friends, your own decline, the failure of beauty, of memory, incontinence, shortness of breath, the inability not just to climb steps but to cross the room without pain?

“And that that’s the
worst
that can happen, one by one, or served up like so many courses at a dinner? Or that
that
is?

“You think, you think so? Well, all I can say is wait till
next
year! Because didn’t I already tell you you ain’t seen nothing yet? No, no, no, girls, there’s no such thing as a rock bottom to bottom!”

Though to tell the truth, she wouldn’t have told them a word. They couldn’t have
dragged
it out of her.

Meanwhile, there was
still
something on Mrs. Ted Bliss’s plate. Something left over that, though she knew, or thought she knew, to leave well enough alone, she continued to worry like a loose tooth.

It was what that awful woman had said, the secretary, or nurse, or maybe consultant herself,
whatever
she was who’d answered the phone when she rang Maxine and her head had accidentally dialed the wrong number and put her through to the Greater Miami Recreational Whoosis where Toibb had once had his practice—that he’d been murdered in some high, hush-hush covered-up crime and, more ominously yet, that they still held her records, whatever notes Toibb had written down when she’d spoken to him. She remembered his surprise (remembered it the very second the women mentioned the killing) when he found out she’d known Tommy Auveristas—“Tommy Overeasy” Dr. Toibb had called him—as if he’d discovered both shared some incredibly exotic, important secret that had raised her in his eyes to some new visibility; and recalled now, too, Hector Camerando’s sudden arousal to the bait, that at the time she hadn’t yet known was bait, when she’d asked him if he knew Auveristas, and how the pay dirt she thought she’d hit had suddenly exploded into his audacious assertions, like a stream of wild oaths, of the power and influence he held in south Florida, and that, moments later, had declined into all those favors and markers he’d thrust into her hands and which, for years, he practically begged her to call in, and which, for years, she just couldn’t bring herself to do, seeing it now, suddenly, as out of the blue as Overeasy’s name (that’s how Mrs. Bliss thought of him now, too) had years before let loose all that skyfull of pay dirt like a gusher of crude, uncapped connection, and which only now she had begun to sort out.

Mrs. Bliss, God bless her, was an old woman now. For a Jew her age she’d been spared a lot. She hadn’t lost anyone close in the Holocaust. Indeed, only very, very distant relatives of relatives, people whose names were vaguely known to her but whom she had never met. It was outrageous that anyone should have gone into Hitler’s ovens, of course, but that she and her family had been spared was, for Dorothy, one of the few proofs she had that there was a God. On the other hand, fair was fair, He didn’t exactly have an exemplary character. Hadn’t He cooked poor Marvin’s goose for him? Didn’t He run His own damn ovens?
Hotter
than Hitler’s! Leaving a mother’s heart to boil over when He laid His dirty hands on her child. Marvin was lying next to Ted in that old cold, queer Chicago cemetery this very minute. Every time she thought of that it pushed a chill through Dorothy’s system even in the Florida shvitz. Why, it was like a ghost story. Marvin had been in the ground even longer than Ted. In a way, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that made him not only her husband’s senior but her own as well, and had transformed the boy into a sort of ancestor, a death veteran. And that was another proof there was a God. Such magic, such fooling around in the supernatural.

Still, knock wood, she had to admit that for someone who was almost a
very
old lady a lot had been spared her. A lot. Not that she was counting her blessings. What, are you kidding? What blessings? All right, the kids, even with their little handful of troubles, and she had what to eat, shelter, places to go, reasonably good health, kayn aynhoreh, even enough money so she didn’t really want for anything, but most people had those things. Except maybe for the good health part, almost everyone in the Towers did.

So why, after she had made that accidental call, did she feel so suddenly fearful and bereft? Why had she had to run to the toilet with the same sort of nervous diarrhea she hadn’t experienced since she had worked in the dress shop for Mrs. Dubow when she was a girl? All right, Toibb, a man she actually knew, had been murdered. But so ill at ease? Come on, she’d lost closer every year, and now, at this time of life, every few months practically. In Chicago, the gang was falling by the wayside all over the place, losing their battles to cancer, to heart attacks, to all the dread whatnot of old age. (Even not so old, Irving’s boy, Jerry, and Golda’s kid, Louis, both dead of AIDS, and though nobody said it out loud, Betty, her distant forty-year-old third- or fourth-remove old maid cousin was thought to be HIV positive.) “I’m telling you,” her sister Etta had said when Dorothy had gone north for their sister Rose’s funeral last year, “it’s getting to be like there was a war.” It was at that funeral, so poorly attended—their death-thinned gang—that Mrs. Bliss decided that enough was enough, and that next time she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get on an airplane and fly to Chicago to see someone else she loved shoveled into the ground, particularly if such a sad occasion should take place in winter, or summer either for that matter. In spring, maybe. Indian summer. But she’d been living in Florida too long now. She couldn’t take cold weather, or wear herself out in hot, shlepping so many miles, with suitcases, with the formal, constrictive clothing you were expected to wear on such occasions. (People who didn’t live there didn’t understand. They thought you were putting on airs, pretending to make out you were better than other people, finer, but it was a scientific fact that once your system got accustomed to the Miami climate it wasn’t so easy to go back to a harsher one. And anyway, even at her sister Rose’s funeral, so poorly attended, not
everyone
was dead. Believe me, plenty stayed away just from being fed up with death. No love was lost between Dorothy and Golda. No matter how hard Ted pooh-poohed the idea, Mrs. Bliss was convinced her brother-in-law’s wife cheated at cards. (She’d caught her at it.) Yet, considering she was already in mourning for the fairy, how could she blame Golda for taking a rain check at Rose’s funeral? She didn’t need her as a reference of course, but Golda’s example had been good experience for Dorothy. Besides, to whom was she answerable these days? Her children and grandchildren. If, God forbid, her brothers should die, her surviving sister, but let’s not kid anybody here, she would certainly be taking the weather into account. Beyond the tight half dozen of her two children and four grandchildren there were no guarantees. None. She hadn’t played favorites, she’d been a loyal family member, but she was depleted and you drew the line somewhere or you died.
Then
what would happen to that tight dozen? So, though she thought she’d never live to see it, she wrote off Ted’s side of the family completely, she wrote off most of her own right down to her great-grandchildren. To tell you the truth, she thought that if anything maybe she was a little late in coming around to this thinking. I mean, just look how poorly attended Rose’s funeral had been.