Authors: Stanley Elkin
So though they’d had their share of storm warnings and alerts, nothing had ever
really
happened. With the fierceness of its weather—its four- and five-foot drifts, its killer ice storms—Chicago presented more risk in a single winter than Florida did in all the years they’d lived there.
This one could pass her by, too. It would or it wouldn’t. It might or it mightn’t. It could or it couldn’t. It will or it won’t.
And though it was the middle of the afternoon of August 23, the hurricane was still up in the air, so to speak. The experts were still all over the tube with their special reports, advisories, and up-to-the-minute’s, but something had happened, a subtle change in the programming, as though the Greater Miami area had been somehow politicized, or put under martial law or vague state-of-siege conditions. City, county, and state officials had begun to appear on her screen—governmental agencies, FEMA, even the Coast Guard.
What these various spokesmen said often contradicted what others before them had said. Thus, on the one hand, Mrs. Bliss was advised that just sitting tight (particularly if one was within a few blocks of the ocean) was like the piggies in their houses of sticks and straw in the story practically inviting the wolf to huff and puff and blow their doors down, and, on the other, not to try to make a run for it, that the danger of traffic tie-ups on the main streets and northbound thruways could create major gridlock, that folks stalled in their cars would be like fish shot in barrels for the pitiless winds but, that if one were absolutely
determined
on escape, one had better carpool. (Mrs. Bliss thought wistfully of the Buick LeSabre, recalling the smooth, troublefree rides and trips she and Ted had made in it, endowing it with magical powers like a beast’s in a legend. In her daydream Ted turned the LeSabre’s steering wheel to the left and it soared above gridlock, setting down on straight empty highways in Georgia, Tennessee, eleven miles from Chicago. He tugged it to the right and they were on access roads, coasting alongside big clean motel chains, their vacancy signs flaring like great cheery lights of welcome.)
They did a job on each other, these municipal, state, and federal spokesmen, a great debate, their raised voices in babble and argument, some great bureaucratic covering of all the bases, particularly, Dorothy guessed, their behinds. They left her, finally, with her options open. She knew from experience, though she didn’t know how she knew it, that no final order, no ultimatum, would be given (offered, granted), that everyone was on his own in this one. (Even in extremis, the woman subsumed in the male principle—the spokesmen, the spokesmen.) Though maybe she did know, she thought, how she knew. These guys, they were like Ted’s doctors, these guys. (Laying out choices for her, the pros and the cons, shtupping them with pros and cons, making them dizzy with alternative, forcing them to choose—chemo or radiation or surgery.) One of the spokesmen, adding insult to injury, pointing out what a gorgeous day it was, not a cloud in the sky, a regular our-blue-heaven out there.
Which was true. Mrs. Ted Bliss, up to here with the voices on the television, opened her glass doors and walked out onto her small balcony. The day was spectacular, the weather even nicer than the time she went in the limousine to visit Alcibiades Chitral. How could a storm be brewing in weather like this? Which wasn’t like weather at all, really, but as comfortable as the neutral, flawlessly adjusted climate on the ground floor of a department store.
She stretched. She took in immense drafts of perfect air, almost gagging on its richness after the close, soiled atmosphere of the condo, which she hadn’t left since Friday, the day before she received Ellen’s wire, the day before she took up her vigil in front of the television. She was momentarily dizzy, sent reeling on the sweet truth of the world, and steadied herself on the railing of the balcony, her palms spread over the area where the old balusters had been loosened by the storm. Mrs. Bliss had outgrown most of what few superstitions she may once have indulged, but when she realized where her hands had come down to halt her swoon her breath snagged, caught on an omen.
She recovered and had started to go back indoors when she became gradually aware of noises, a hubbub. These seemed to rise all about her, sent from the street to where she stood on her balcony on the seventh floor and, at first, it seemed through all the sharp shrills and trebles of her amplified deafness that the noises—she recognized certain voices—might be calling to her—impatient, urgent sirens. But when she looked down she saw great activity in the streets and driveways of the buildings adjoining hers, in the driveway directly below her own.
She was not so high she could not attach names to the figures making these noises, this frantic bustle, nor so low—at that unlikely moment she was suddenly touched by her dead husband’s middling intentions, the normative measure he’d taken of their lives, meaning neither to distance themselves so greatly above the world that they were carefully buffered from it, nor so close to the earth that they could sink into it, but here, just here, precisely in the heart of the building’s hierarchy, its Goldilocksian mean—to distinguish what they were saying, their furious gestures. Though she well enough understood what they meant. These were the noises of flight, of refugees, the sound her family might have made when it quit Russia and started its journey. Beneath her, men and women stood by their automobiles hollering orders and questions at their wives and husbands who’d not yet quit their condos, barking last-minute details at each other like the flight checks of pilots before they took off. It reminded Dorothy of the times she and Ted were preparing to check out of motels, Ted at the door and Dorothy making one last surveillance of the room, checking drawers, closets, to see if anything had been left behind. She didn’t care how comfortable or unpleasant (she thought of the farm in Michigan) a stay had been, there was always something anxious and a little rushed about every leavetaking, all departure a sort of scorched earth policy.
And now, here and there on the other Towers buildings, she could make out thick, fortifying strips of tape crisscrossing various windows, or wide plywood planks covering a balcony’s glass doors, transforming the Towers into a kind of crossword puzzle, or even giant, ambiguous, ludicrous games of tic-tac-toe.
They’re getting out while the getting’s good, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss a little guiltily. They’re making a run for it. They’re doing something, she thought forlornly. They’d heard the same pros and cons she’d heard. She’d seen the same programs. More probably.
She hadn’t bothered to change her clothes and realized she must have been wearing them since the day of the telegram. The famous, fastidious Mrs. Ted Bliss had let herself go. The baleboosteh was doleful, almost in tears, and let in a tub for herself. She washed carefully, dried herself on her thickest towels, applied powder, light makeup, perfume, and changed into fresh clothes. She thought, I’m nobody’s fool, this isn’t some ritual, it ain’t my bas mitzvah, I’m not committing harakiri. It is what it is, she thought. I stayed by the TV too long and now it’s too late. I’d call but I’d never get a plane out now. They must be booked solid. If, she thought, shrewdly, they’re even flying in this weather. (She was an expert, a forecaster herself now. She meant the weather on its way, the hurricane, or even, knock wood, tropical depression. She was just too slow off the dime, and now it was too late. I’ll just have to wait it out, thought this little piggy.)
She sat down by the tiny telephone table, found the sheet of useful numbers the condominium complex handed out to all owners, and called Tower Stores, realizing even as she picked up the phone that it was a Sunday, that less than half the staff was on duty on Sundays, that even the lifeguards had Sundays off. On Sundays, in mitten derinnen, it was strictly swimming at your own risk. Gentiles, she figured, showed you no mercy. Therefore, she was actually a little surprised when she got a busy signal. She had to call back three times before the line was free and somebody answered.
“Tower Stores.”
“Tower Stores, this is Mrs. Ted Bliss in Building One.”
“Hey, Mrs. Bliss. Hola, sholem, how are you?”
“Francis?”
“Si.”
“It’s Sunday, I thought you’d be off.”
“They called people in because of the hurricane.”
“You’re in Tower Stores now, not maintenance?”
“No, I still work maintenance. It’s the hurricane, all hands on deck.”
“You think it’s going to hit us?”
“Like a potch in tochis.”
Francis Moprado was an engineer in the Towers complex. Dark as an Aztec, he was a short, almost tiny man of fierce appearance whose amiability had earned him a kind of mascot status among some of the residents. He liked to spike his conversation with Yiddish words and phrases he’d overheard, and often showed up at many of the community seders (where he’d pretend to steal the afikomen) and even at some of the old Friday night services in the game room. At these times he always wore a yarmulke, not the interchangeable plain black almost patent leather-looking beanies most of the men took out of brown cardboard boxes before they entered the converted sanctuary and put back again when they left but his own knit beige beaded skullcap. Everyone knew he was working the room for Hanukkah gelt and tips but went along with Moprado’s bald-faced fawning deferences anyway, reimbursing him generously for favors received, topping him off with gas money for the wear and tear on his car, the rubber he used up when he ran them out to the Fort Lauderdale airport or went out on errands. A taxi would have been cheaper, they agreed, but enjoyed having the patronizing little son of a bitch for a pet. Mrs. Ted Bliss found him a great curiosity, not so much for his blatant ass kissing as his complicated Indian and Hispanic blood. She thought his bland compliance and odd Latino Step’n Fetchit ways an anomaly. Unlike the other Cubans, Central, and South Americans she’d had contact with during her years in Florida, he seemed utterly without machismo, yet she was more fearful of him, of his dangerous smiling mildness, than ever she’d been of all the hidalgos’ aristocratic distance, courtesies, tricks, and airs. Somehow she knew his sharp ugly features hid no sweet and gentle heart. She guessed how much he hated them, yet when she heard his voice she felt reassured, almost lucky. She’d found her man.
“When I went out on my balcony,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I saw big pieces of wood covering a lot of the glass doors and windows. Can I get those?”
“Oy vay,” moaned the Jew hater, “if you’d called ten minutes sooner.”
“I’ve been calling for twenty minutes. The line was busy.”
“Yeah, there’s been a run on the four-by-eights.”
“You’re all out?”
“Well,” Moprado said, “there’s still a couple in back but I wouldn’t feel right selling them to you. Warped. Damaged goods.”
“Oh.”
“Probably I could pound out most of the flaws. It’s just the building would have to charge you the same as if you were getting first quality.”
“How much?” she said.
He quoted an outrageous price, three times, maybe four, the rate she’d have had to pay if a hurricane weren’t on the way.
“That’s steep,” she said. She could almost see the long face he put on for her at the other end of the phone, his helpless shrug, but when he spoke his voice was bright with consideration and possibility.
“Tell me, you got someone to slap them up for you?”
“No.”
“Tell you what,” he said, “I could drop by and give you a hand.” He’d been pretending to look at his watch now. “I can’t tie this phone up much longer. I hate to rush you but there’s probably half a dozen people trying to get through. You ought to decide. The staff’s getting shpilkes down here, it’s got its own tsuris. Their own families to deal with, last-minute stuff. Any minute the Towers will be emptying out like rats jumping a sinking ship.”
Mrs. Bliss didn’t understand why, but she had a sort of vision, a kind of freestanding knowledge like her shot-in-the-dark certainty of Francis Moprado’s hypocritical pantomime of sadness, helplessness, recovery, and urgency. She didn’t so much see as feel, visceral to her as sour stomach, raw as sore throat or tender glands, that whatever was going to happen had already happened. It was aftermath, the solemn embering end of the world. Everywhere, filling the landscape of Mrs. Bliss’s vision were people, in pairs or groups of three, four, but never more than five or six, clumps and clusters of the lost, encrusted in dirt and filth or in some ragged cleanliness like a scour of rough handling, the work of wind and water, say, a fellowship of bunches, of tufts and clumps of survival drifting in place as if they were trying to stamp blood and feeling back into their feet. Great drifts of the milling, great swarms of the solitary.
Moving in and out through the crowd were gangs of profiteers doing a kind of triage among the numbed and needy casualties, sizing them up, pushing their wares, pitching them, selling them four-by-eights, flashlights, batteries, candles, first-aid kits, generators, matches, portable radios, tubfuls of bathwater at a monstrous going rate, whatever the traffic would bear. Gulling the remnant, ripping them off. Disaster profiteers, they gathered about the disparate rabble selling them canned goods like it was going out of style, like, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, like, my God, Ted profiteering on meat and food stamps during the war!
“I don’t want to handlen with you, Mrs.,” Moprado said, “but if you want them up I need at least an hour.”
“Want what up?” Mrs. Bliss said.
“The boards,” he said. “The sooner I get started the quicker you’ll be safe. We’ve got a pretty narrow window of opportunity here. Time and tide. This damn storm’s got bells on….Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss?”
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’ve changed your mind? You know what the hurricane could do to your place in two shakes of a lamb’s tail? You got any idea?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I think so.”
“I’m not promising there wouldn’t be damage. There’s no guarantees. But if you put up plywood you’ll definitely be cutting your losses. Plus it looks better for the insurance. That you made an effort….Mrs. Bliss?”