Mrs. Ted Bliss (7 page)

Mrs. Bliss pushed herself up out of the armchair.

“
Stay where you are!
” Auveristas commanded. “I
said
the girl would see to it. Where is the nincompoop?”

Seeing he’d frightened Mrs. Bliss half to death, he abruptly modulated. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me, señora. You’re absolutely right. I think you’d be more comfortable someplace else. Here, take my arm. We’ll get out of this woman’s way while she works.” He said something in Spanish to the maid who, on her hands and knees, was picking a reddish sauce out of a trough of sculpted carpet before wiping the stain away with a wet cloth. He led Dorothy to a sofa—one of three—in a distant corner of the room. Seating her there, he asked again that she forgive him for his outburst and promised he’d be right back.

He returned with food piled high on a plate. “Ah, Mrs. Bliss,” he said. “Not knowing your preference in my country’s dishes, I have taken the liberty of choosing for you.”

She accepted the plate from the man. She respected men. They did hard, important work. Not that laundry was a cinch, preparing and serving meals, cleaning the house, raising kids. She and Ted were partners, but she’d been the silent partner. She knew that. It didn’t bother her, it never had. If Ted had been mean to her, or bossed her around…but he wasn’t, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, honest, they’d never had a fight. Her sisters had had terrible fights with their husbands. Rose was divorced and to this day she never saw her without thinking of the awful things that had happened between her sister and Herman. Listen, scoundrel that he was, there were two sides to every story. And everything wasn’t all cream and peaches between Etta and Sam. Still, much as she loved Etta, the woman had a tongue on her. She wasn’t born yesterday. Husbands and wives fought. Cats and dogs. Not her and Ted. Not one time. Not once. Believe it or not. As far as Dorothy was concerned he was, well, he was her hero. Take it or leave it.

What she told Gutterman and Elaine Munez was true. She
wasn’t
hungry; she had prepared a bite of supper before she came to the party. She wasn’t hungry. What did an old woman need? Juice, a slice of toast with some jelly in the morning, a cup of coffee. Maybe some leftovers for lunch. And if she went out to Wolfie’s or the Rascal House with the gang for the Early Bird Special, perhaps some brisket, maybe some fish. Only this wasn’t any of those things. These things were things she’d never seen before in her life.

Bravely, she smiled at Tommy Auveristas and permitted him to lay a beautiful cloth napkin across her lap and hand her the plate of strange food. He gave her queer forks, an oddly shaped spoon. She didn’t have to look to know that it was sterling, top of the line.

Nodding at her, he encouraged her to dig in.

Mrs. Ted Bliss picked over this drek with her eyes. From her expression, from the way her glance darted from one mysterious item to the next, you’d have thought she was examining different chocolates in a pound box of expensive candy, divining their centers, like a dowser, deciding which to choose first. Meanwhile, Tommy Auveristas explained the food like a waiter in one of those two-star restaurants where you nod and grin but don’t know what the hell the man is talking about.

“Which did you say was the chicken, the green or the blue one?”

“Well, both.”

“I can’t decide,” Dorothy Bliss said.

Auveristas wasn’t born yesterday either. He knew the woman was stalling him, knew the fixed ways of the old, their petrified tastes. It was one of the big items that most annoyed the proud hidalgo about old fart señoras like this one. She was his guest, however, and whatever else he may have been he was a gracious and resourceful host.

“No, no, Dorothy,” he said, snatching her plate and signaling the maid up off her knees to take the food away, “you mustn’t!” he raised his hand against the side of his head in the international language of dummkopf.

The señora didn’t know what had hit her and looked at him with an expression at once bewildered, curious, and relieved.

“It isn’t kosher,” he explained, “can you ever forgive me?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Of course.”

“You are graciousness itself,” Tommy Auveristas said. “May I offer you something else instead? We have grapes. I bet you like grapes.”

“I do like grapes.”

He had a bowl of grapes brought to her, wide and deep as the inside of a silk hat.

He asked if it was difficult to keep kosher, and Dorothy, a little embarrassed, explained that she didn’t, not strictly, keep kosher. Now that the children were grown and her husband was dead she didn’t keep pork in the house—she’d never tasted it—though there was always bacon in her freezer for when the kids came to visit. She never made shellfish, which she loved, and had always eaten in restaurants when Ted was alive, and it didn’t bother her mixing milchik and flayshig. And although she always bought kosher meat for Passover, and kept separate dishes, and was careful to pack away all the bread in the house, even cakes and cookies, even bagels and onion rolls, she was no fanatic, she said, and stowed these away in plastic bags in the freezer until after the holidays. In her opinion, it was probably an even bigger sin in God’s eyes to waste food than to follow every last rule. Her sisters didn’t agree with her, she said, but all she knew was that she’d had a happier marriage with Ted, may he rest, than her sister Etta with Sam.

He was easy to talk to, Tommy Auveristas, but maybe she was taking too much of his time. He had other guests after all.

He shrugged off the idea.

“You’re
sure
my soda pop wasn’t spiked?”

“What?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “that was someone else, the girl with the skin. Ermalina? We had a discussion about my soft drink.”

“I see.”

“What was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah,” she said, “I remember. Chicken.

“One time, this was when Ted was still alive but we were already living in Miami Beach. And we went to a restaurant, in one of the hotels with the gang to have dinner and see the show. The girls treated the men. (Every week we’d set a percentage of our winnings aside from the card games. In a year we’d have enough to go somewhere nice.) And I remember we all ordered chicken. Everyone in our party. We could have had anything we wanted off the menu but everyone ordered chicken. Twenty people felt like chicken! It was funny. Even the waitress couldn’t stop laughing. She must have thought we were crazy.

“Now the thing about chicken is that there must be a million ways to prepare it. Boiled chicken, broiled chicken, baked chicken, fried chicken, roast chicken, stewed chicken. Just tonight I learned you could make green chicken, even blue chicken. And the other thing about chicken is that every different way you make it, that’s how different it’s going to taste. Chicken salad. Chicken fricassee.”

“Chicken pox,” Tommy Auveristas said.

Mrs. Bliss laughed. It was disgusting but it was one of the funniest things she’d ever heard.

“Yeah,” she said, “chicken
pox!
” She couldn’t stop laughing. She was practically choking. Tommy Auveristas offered to get her some water. She waved him off. “It’s all right, something just went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, anyway, everyone ordered their chicken different. I’ll never forget the look on that waitress’s face. She must have thought we were nuts.

“But you know,” Dorothy said, “when you really stop and think about it, it’s not that much different from eggs.” She stopped and thought about it. “There are all kinds of ways of making eggs, too.

“Well,” Mrs. Bliss said, “the long and the short is that chicken is a very popular dish. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like it. We were saying that, and then one of the girls—she’s in this room now—wondered how many chickens she must have made for her family in her life. She thought it had to be about a thousand chickens. But she was way off. Way off. I didn’t want to embarrass her so I kept my mouth shut, but later, after we got home, I took a pencil and worked it out. Figure you make chicken twice a week. Say I’ve been making it for 53 years. It’s probably more. I must have helped my mother make it when I was a girl, but
say
53 years. If there are 52 weeks and 365 days in a year, that’s 104 chickens a year. You times 104 by 53 years, you get 5,512 chickens. I didn’t do that in my head. I worked it out on a gin rummy score sheet when we got home. I never forgot the number, though. When I told Ted, you know what he said? He said ‘I knew she was wrong. She had to be. I moved more chicken than anything else in the store.’ Ted was a butcher. He had a meat market on Fifty-third Street.”

“Which one is she?” Tommy whispered.

“Is who?”

“The dope who thought she made only about a thousand chickens.”

“I don’t want to embarrass her.”

“No,” he said, “go on. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word of honor.”

“Maybe they ate out more than we did,” Mrs. Bliss said, “maybe she hasn’t been cooking as long.”

“Still…” Tommy Auveristas said. “You can tell me. Come on.”

“Well,” Mrs. Ted Bliss, who hadn’t laughed so hard in years, said slyly, “if you promise not to tell.” Auveristas crossed his heart. Mrs. Bliss took a moment to evaluate this pledge, shrugged, and indicated he lean toward her. “It’s that one,” she said softly, “Arlene Brodky.”

“Arlene Brodky?”

“Shh,” Mrs. Bliss warned, a finger to her lips.

The gesture made her feel positively girlish. It was as if forty-odd years had poured out of her life and she was back in Chicago again, in the dress shop, gossiping with the real salesgirls about the customers, their loony employer, passing confidences among themselves like notes between schoolmates. Frivolous, silly, almost young.

She had come to see the penthouse. She couldn’t have articulated it for you, but it was simply that interest in artifact, some instinctive baleboosteh tropism in Mrs. Ted Bliss that drew her to all the tamed arrangements of human domesticities. She had never expected to
enjoy
herself.

Maybe it was the end of her mourning. Ted had been dead more than three years. She’d still been in her forties when Marvin died, and she’d never stopped mourning him. Perhaps thirty years of grief was enough. Maybe thirty years stamped its quitclaim on even the obligated life, and permitted you to burn the mortgage papers. Was she being disloyal? He’d be forty-six, Marvin. Had she been a better mother than a wife? She hoped she had loved everyone the same, the living and the dead, her children, her husband, her parents whom God himself had compelled her to honor and, by extension, her sisters and brothers, her relations and friends, the thirty years dredging up from the bottom of her particular sea all the sunken, heavy deadweight of her overwhelmed, overburdened heart.

Still, it was one thing not to keep kosher (or not strictly kosher), and another entirely to have caught herself actually
flirting.
She could have bitten her tongue.

Dorothy was not, of course, a particularly modern woman. She had been alive at the time others of her sex had petitioned the franchise from dubious, reluctant males and, though she’d been too young to rally for this or any other cause, the truth was she’d have been content to leave it to others—to other women as well as to other men—to pick the federal government, or even vote on the local, parochial issues of daily life. She had never, for example, attended a P.T.A. meeting when her children were young or, for that matter, spoken up at any of the frequent Towers Condominium Owners Association meetings. On the other hand, neither did she possess any of the vast scorn reserves some women called upon to heap calumny on those of their sisters they perceived as, well, too openly pushy about their rights.

There was something still essentially pink in Mrs. Bliss’s soul, some almost vestigial principle in the seventyish old woman, not of childhood particularly, or even of girlhood, so much as of femininity itself, something so obscurely yet solidly distaff in her nature that she was quite suddenly overcome by the ancient etiquette she thought females owed males, something almost like courtship, or the need to nurture, shlepping, no matter how silly she knew it might sound—to Auveristas as well as to herself—the old proprieties of a forced, wide-eyed attention to a man’s interests and hobbies from right out of the old beauty-parlor magazines.

Right there, in his penthouse, within earshot of anyone who cared to overhear, she said, “Your home is very beautiful. May I be so bold as to ask what you gave for it? What line of work are you in?”

“Didn’t Señor Chitral mention to you?” Tommy Auveristas said evenly. “I’m an importer.”

It wasn’t the implied meaning of his words, nor his distance, nor even the flattened cruelty of his delivery that caused the woman to flinch. Mrs. Bliss had never been struck. Despite her fear of Mrs. Dubow from her days in the dress shop, though she knew the old dressmaker was mad and perfectly capable of violence; the alimony she paid her husband had been awarded because of physical harm—she couldn’t remember what—she’d inflicted, and her memories of being chased about the shop had always been bordered in Dorothy’s mind by a kind of comedy. She’d experienced Mrs. Dubow’s rage then, and remembered it now, as having taken place in a sort of silent movie, something slapstick and frantically jumpy and Keystone Kops about all that futile energy. So all it could have been, all that had lunged out at her so unexpectedly to startle her was hearing Alcibiades Chitral’s name, and hearing it moreover not from the mouth of any of her retired, Jewish, star-struck friends but straight out of the suddenly cool, grim lips of her South American host. It was the way the two DEA agents had spoken to her in the garage, in that same controlled, despising banter of an enemy. She had sensed from the beginning of the evening that she was somehow the point of the open house, even its guest of honor (as far as she knew it was the first time any Towers Jew had set foot in a penthouse), and in light of all the attention she’d received from the moment she entered she’d felt as she sometimes did when she was feeding her family a meal she’d prepared. Tommy Auveristas had practically exclaimed her name the minute he saw her. He’d introduced her around, excused himself if he had to leave. He had kissed her hand and paid her compliments and brought her food. He was all ears as she prattled on about the degree of kosher she kept, listened as she counted her chickens.