Then they’d really have me going to the doctors, Dorothy thought, and giggled. Running away from some tall, dark, and handsome character who was trying to force money on her without, except for lifting her hands to receive it, her lifting her hands.
“You’re too proud,” they’d say, “introduce me!”
But she wasn’t. Too proud, that is. It had nothing to do with pride. Nor, like so many of these widowed, tummy-tucked, liposuctioned, double-dentured, face-lifted, hair-dyed, foolish old husband hunters, the Never-Too-Late brigade, was she looking for a man, or a boyfriend, or even a companion with whom she could go to a movie. In Mrs. Ted Bliss’s experience, it wasn’t true what they told you, the experts, the AARP people, all the high-powered gerontologists and aging-gracefully crowd — that desire burned a hole in your pocket even on your deathbed. Speaking personally, she hadn’t felt that way about a man since Ted, olov hasholem, had lost his life. Or even, if you want to know, since the time his cancer was first diagnosed. Well, she’d been afraid of hurting him and, more shamefully, of his hurting her, of her contracting, though she knew better, a piece of his illness.
And, if you had to know all the truth, she’d never so much as touched herself, not once, not in her whole life. So, as far as Mrs. Bliss was concerned, it was bunk, and they were full of it if they said that the sex drive in a healthy person didn’t die. What, she wasn’t healthy? She was healthy. She was plenty healthy. It was those others, the oversexed ones, who couldn’t accept that there was a time and a place for everything and went on searching for the fountain of youth long after it ceased to be appropriate.
Like her friend, who’d only have snickered and kidded her about having a fancy man if she so much as said a word about Camerando.
But even that wasn’t the reason she not only kept Hector Camerando’s name out of the picture but took actual pains to avoid him. She was saving him. He was money in the bank, something she’d set aside for a rainy day, and she was, she liked to think, playing him like some of the men in the Towers played the stock market.
Now Dorothy was no fool. Just as she knew there was a time and a place for everything, she understood, without ever having come across the actual words, the notion that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood, et cetera. He might be riding high right now with his Basques and his greyhounds, but she had known plenty of his type back in Chicago, high rollers, heavy winners and losers in a thousand enterprises, men, competitors of Ted’s who followed the trends and locations like dowsers, and opened stores and businesses first in this place, then in that, who had buildings, sold them here, bought them there — wiseguys, into the rackets some of them, always with some new deal on the books, mavins one day, bankrupts the next, but make no mistake, people you had to take seriously, men who always seemed to have good reasons for what they did. Ted, who’d lost his life, had never been one of them, knock wood and thank God. He told Dorothy that what it finally came down to was a failure of nerve, and asked her forgiveness as if, in a way, he held her responsible, their three, then two, children, his family responsibilities. Only one time, during the war, when he splurged and bought the farm in Michigan where he raised and slaughtered his own cattle to sell on the black market, had he behaved otherwise. It wasn’t Dorothy, though he used her as an excuse to sell it at a loss only eleven months after he bought it. They’d made money hand over fist; he’d had no reason to sell. It was his failure of nerve and not her complaints about having to live on a place that morning to night stank of cow shit and urine and God knows what awful odors of sour milk and fermenting hay. In town, she had turned even the odd stares of the grauber yung and anti-Semites into reluctant grins with her cheery, preemptive greetings and comments and deliberately clownish ways.
What, they’d never seen Jews before? They thought they had horns, tails? They never dreamed Jews could be comely and clean? If, before going into the little village for supplies, she showered in the infrequently hot water of their primitive bathroom and got herself up in her nicest hats and dresses and furs and nylons and shoes, if she put on her makeup as carefully as she might if she’d been going to synagogue on the highest holiday, it wasn’t to flaunt her beauty or show off her big-city fashions but to defy the epithet of “dirty Jew.” She took the insult not only personally but literally, too, and, drawing on all her old, childish notions of shmutsdread and trayf, meant to get round it literally, by turning herself into a sort of sterile field. (And wasn’t that freezing Michigan village with its wood houses and all its big, powerful goyim and blond, rosy-cheeked shiksas enough like its old Russian counterparts that as soon as she saw it it was like forty years had dropped away from her just like that?) So it wasn’t just for herself that she went to these ridiculous lengths. (To avoid getting shit on them, she wore galoshes over her high heels and removed them, setting them down on the side of the road only after coming within sight of the tiny town.) On the contrary. As far as she was concerned she would have donned overalls and walked all the way into town without so much as bothering to scrape the muck from her boots. No, it was for Ted that she went to extremes, for Marvin and Frank and Maxine. To honor her mother and her father and the memory of all her Jewish relatives and all her Jewish playmates who had ever suffered some Cossack’s insult. To rub her cleanliness in the faces of the gentiles.
Who of course she thought too benighted ever to take her point, but doing it anyway, as much a victim of her own rituals and superstitions as Hector Camerando with his degree-of-difficulty reparations.
Because, for herself, he needn’t have bothered. She’d never have made it an issue between them or thrown it in his face. Sure. She hated the farm, was appalled from the first moment she’d seen it. Which was at night, so how much of its ramshackle and disrepair could she have actually seen? The darkness at the cozy edges of the candlelight was soft, a layered dark of flickering, unfocused textures. Even the chill beyond the thrown heat of their woodstove seemed a sort of complementary, necessary fiction, lending a kind of magic, olly-olly-oxen-free privilege to the room, a port-in-a-storm illusion of harbor. In the morning she could see just how close they’d actually come to shipwreck. What was wooden in the room was splintered, the fragile chairs they sat on just steps up from kindling. The homespun of the curtains that hung above their windows was so dusty it seemed clogged with a kind of powder. Only Marvin, ten or eleven at the time, was excited by their new arrangements. Four-year-old Maxine was frightened by the animal noises. The baby choked on the dust. Ted, as if he’d been born to it, was already out working the barns.
He hadn’t told Dorothy a thing. For months he’d been placing and taking mysterious phone calls at all hours. The voices, if she managed to get to the phone before Ted, were mostly unrecognizable to her. Sometimes they were even female, and once or twice she thought they may have been customers from the store. Another time she thought she distinctly recognized Junior’s voice. She’d even asked, “Junior, is that you?” but he’d hung up without answering her. Junior was Milton, Herbie Yellin’s boy. Nobody knew why he was called Junior. Dorothy had other, less polite names for him. Early on, and for only a very brief time, he’d been the single partner Ted had ever had. Dorothy had never liked him. He was married to a very nice girl and had two beautiful children, but he was a drunk, a heavy gambler, a philanderer, and flirted with every pretty woman who came into the shop. Once, before the holidays, when they’d been very busy and Mrs. Bliss was helping out behind the counter, he even tried to rub up against Dorothy in a disgusting, filthy way.