“ ‘Excuse me, Rabbi,’ your grandfather said.
“ ‘Yes?’
“ ‘That prayer you prayed.’
“ ‘Yes?’
“ ‘Didn’t you pray it to God?’
“ ‘To God, yes. To God.’
“ ‘And this Angel of Death, ain’t he God’s angel?’
“ ‘Of course. God’s angel. So?’
“ ‘So,’ ” said Ted Bliss, “ ‘don’t the left hand know what the right hand is doing?’ ”
Which took the wind out. Out of his grandmother, too.
“Except,” Mrs. Bliss said, “I was his mother. Didn’t I make a fuss with Myers? Didn’t I go over his head to put Marvin into Billings? Where they were doing the advanced work, the special, experimental treatments? We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do? So maybe what that chaplain rabbi was trying to do on a spiritual level was just as much in the experimental stage as what those doctors were trying to do on the scientific one. We were losing him, Barry, what harm could it do?”
“Oh, Grandma.”
“Only I could never say it,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Only I could never say it, say Moishe Herschel. He was my first-born, he was my son. I couldn’t call him different.”
“You called him Marvin?”
“I didn’t call him anything,” she said, and wept while her grandson tried to comfort her.
Later that night, when the guests had all gone home, and the house was quite dark and everyone was sleeping, Mrs. Bliss woke from her sleep. She was very thirsty. She put on her house slippers and, making no noise lest she rouse somebody, went to the kitchen. She meant to get a glass of water at the sink and had to turn on the light to see what she was doing. She was astonished. May had made no effort to wash the dishes. Mrs. Bliss would have started them herself but was afraid, one, that she’d make too much noise and wake them up upstairs and, two, that May would take it as a reflection on her housekeeping when she came down the next morning to find everything cleaned and put away. Mrs. Bliss took pride in being a model mother-in-law. She stayed out of people’s way, kept her opinions to herself, she didn’t interfere.
So she decided to get her drink of water and go back to bed. Except every surface was covered with dirty dishes, she couldn’t see a clean glass anywhere. So she went to the cabinet where she thought her daughter-in-law might keep her everyday water glasses. She reached overhead and opened the cabinet.
It was filled with unused Yortzeit candles, glasses filled almost to their brims with a dry white wax and they must, Mrs. Bliss thought, forgiving them all, have been waiting on the anniversaries of everybody’s death.
And still later that night, when she’d drunk her fill from the cold water tap in May’s kitchen, when she’d quenched her thirst and slaked at least a little of her disappointment at the remarkable though oddly reassuring sight of the well-stocked cupboard of all those candles, and she was once again back in the perfectly comfortable bed in the perfectly comfortable little first-floor guest room Frank and May had set up for her, you’d think, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, I’d be able to sleep. You’d think, she thought, that after what I told Barry about his father’s last days, it would be like a weight off my back. She saw that the poor kid hadn’t known bubkes, and speculated that it was probably a sin to keep things from people who needed to know them more than you needed the distraction and comfort you got from not having to explain everything. It was a kind of protection racket they ran on each other, but the only ones they protected were themselves. Even Marvin, olov hasholem, had been kept in the dark about what was what with him and was never brought up to speed on how he was really doing. They conducted themselves that year like they were managing a cover-up. Did this one know what that one knew? How could they keep so-and-so from finding out such-and-such? It wasn’t power they sought, advantage, only the control of information, charging themselves with a sort of damage control.
And she still couldn’t understand why Frank had become so religious, or what the real story was — throw out the flim-flam — why — a man his age — had ever left Pittsburgh. She was, there in the dark, in the dark, Mrs. Bliss was, about her children’s lives. As much as they were in the dark about hers. People were through with each other before they were through with each other, and explaining yourself was just too much trouble. How could she tell them, for example, that Junior Yellin was back in her life, or that they’d been talking about going on a cruise together some day, staying on the seafront property of Caribbean resort hotels, or that maybe, to cut down on costs, they’d been thinking about sharing the same cabin, the same room? How could she speak of the Toibb mystery, or of Hector Camerando and what he’d offered to do for her, or ever hope to explain why, after what he’d put her through, or laid on the line what he thought about Jews, she’d given Alcibiades Chitral the hundred dollars, or her visit to the prison, or the question of the roses, or even, for that matter, her conversation with the driver who took her into the Everglades? Or so much as hint at the crush a woman her age could have on Tommy Auveristas, or the fact that Manny was no longer in a position to help her, their trusted, very own envoy and in loco parentis guy in south Florida? They wouldn’t have understood anything, anything. They wouldn’t have understood, she didn’t herself, how even peripheral people — Louise Munez, Rita de Janeiro — had taken up the space in her life that they had once rightfully occupied. Not anything, none of it, nothing, anything at all, as in the dark about her life in south Florida as she was about theirs in any of the half-dozen places they lived their own mysterious lives.
NINE
Dorothy was surprised by the paltry turnout of mourners at Manny from the building’s funeral. Compared to the great hosts of people only three or four years earlier who’d not only come to the chapel to pay their respects when Rosie lost her life but come out again the following day for the funeral service and gone on to the cemetery itself, many of them on walkers or in wheelchairs, to witness the burial proper, Manny’s obsequies were not merely negligible, they were all but intangible. Rosie’s shivah had broken house records. So, of course, did Manny’s, but from the wrong end of the telescope. One of the few people who showed up at Manny’s apartment — notices had been posted in each of the Towers’ game rooms — for Manny’s pathetically small farewell party looked around and remarked to the young man who’d opened the door for him, “Jeesh, this seems to be just about the coldest ticket in town, don’t it?” It was unfortunate that the person to whom he made the remark was Manny’s only attending relative, and when he was informed, by Mrs. Bliss as it happened, to whom he had passed his comment, he could have bitten his tongue in half.
“Hey, forget it,” said the guy he thought he’d aggrieved. “I’m only a distant nephew. I barely knew him. I’m his lawyer. Uncle Manny hired me over the phone to buff up his affairs if anything happened to him. I’m just here on the case, no harm done.”
Mrs. Bliss wasn’t so sure but held her tongue.
The harm, she supposed, was to Manny’s spirit. Olov hasholem, Manny, she thought, and even, she thought, may have muttered aloud. (She was deafer than ever these days, and couldn’t always distinguish her thoughts from what she actually said.) At any rate it wasn’t the little nephew lawyer pisher to whom the harm had been done. It was an insult that there couldn’t have been more than ten people in the place. And even at that, no turnover to speak of because Mrs. Bliss had been there all evening practically and for every two or three people who left barely one arrived to take their place.