This was something else. It was the last thing she’d expected, and for all that Alcibiades Chitral had couched his attack in different terms, taking care to distinguish himself from the ordinary Jew-hater and seemingly apologize to her as he went along, she knew she was getting it all, being hauled up on all the charges he could think of. She was having, she thought, the book thrown at her. By Alcibiades Chitral’s lights it was as if Dorothy Bliss had been found guilty and sent up for a hundred years.
So now she’d heard everything. Everything. Full force. Flat out. It was like having the wind knocked out. It took her breath away. Determined as she was to maintain her calm — it was what Chitral himself had told her to do; even before he’d attacked her, he’d warned her against her anger — she found herself breathlessly hiccuping, then choking.
Chitral moved behind her, clapped her sharply on the back. Astonishingly, it worked. Her hiccups were stopped as effectively as if he’d clasped his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Now, tentatively, as though she were testing the waters, she drew deeper and deeper breaths. She felt a little light-headed and, peculiarly, disheveled. She was conscious of fanning her hands before her face, of making various fluttery gestures of adjustment, silly, girlish, inappropriate Southern belle movements about her septuagenarian body. It was as though she were frisking herself and, try as she might, could not make herself stop. She felt as if she were in Michigan, performing for the townspeople again.
“Do you want some water? I’ll get you some water,” Chitral said, and left the table.
If I die now, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, they’ll see how upset I am and I’ll get him in trouble.
But then, a little more sanely, she thought, a hundred years, isn’t that trouble? And thought, anti-Semite or no anti-Semite, could she blame him? She had testified against the man. She thought, she knew the blue book value. She thought, she had sold Ted’s car to pay off a property tax of two hundred dollars. She thought, I made a profit five thousand dollars over and above the blue book value and still I threw him in jail!
Was it so terrible what Chitral did? All the business part of their married life the Blisses had lived by markup. She’d made a twenty-five hundred percent markup on the deal! Ted would have been proud. Even what the Spaniard had done with the car hadn’t been so geferlech. What, he’d chosen it because who’d ever suspect that a Buick LeSabre equipped not only with seat covers but with all the other features, too, plus a permanent personal parking space out of the rain in a big, mostly Jewish condominium building, could be used as a sort of dope locker? So Ted was a butcher. He stored meat in lockers. Meat, dope, it was all of it groceries finally. A hundred years? Would they have given Ted a hundred years if they had discovered he’d once had dealings in the black market? A hundred years, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, a hundred years was ridiculous. It was longer than even she’d been alive.
Still, she felt bad Chitral had such a biased picture of Jews. This didn’t sit well. But a leopard couldn’t change its spots. He couldn’t make it up to her for his anti-Semitism, and she couldn’t make it up to him for his hundred years.
So she split the difference, and while he was still looking for her glass of water, she took out her checkbook and wrote a check to him for a hundred dollars — making over to him exactly half what it would have cost her in property taxes if she’d never sold the car to him in the first place.
They were quits, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss.
And, in the limo, on the long ride back to the Towers, Mrs. Bliss took comfort in the fact that she was at last even a little better than quits. Now she knew why he had picked her out of all the possible people in south Florida with all the possible used cars they had up for sale; she was finally satisfied that an unthinking promise she’d made all those years back to come on this, what-do-you-call-it, pilgrimage, could be stamped paid-in-full and she’d never have to think about the nasty Jew-hating bastard son of a bitch again!
EIGHT
It was April, and Mrs. Bliss had agreed to spend the Passover holidays with Frank and Frank’s family in Frank’s new house in Frank’s new city of Providence, Rhode Island. Maxine and George would be there with their kids, the beautiful Judith and chip-off-the-block, entrepreneurial James. Frank was said to be helping out with Ellen’s fare (her daughter, Janet, was still in India) and with poor Marvin’s son, Barry’s, the auto mechanic. Frank’s own boy, the brilliant Donny, who could have bought and sold all of them, would probably be flying in from Europe.
All this had been arranged months before, in December, and Dorothy had agreed because who knew what could happen between December and April? In December, to a woman Dorothy Bliss’s age, April looks like the end of time. She didn’t see any point in refusing. But as early as February Mrs. Bliss had begun having second thoughts.
If he still lived in Pittsburgh, if there were a nonstop flight from Fort Lauderdale to Providence, if he still had all his old friends from the university in Pittsburgh instead of a whole new bunch of people she’d have to meet and whose names, chances were, she’d probably never even catch because, let’s face it, people all tended to arrive together on the first night of a seder and who could distinguish their names one from another in all the tummel with all their vildeh chei-eh kids running around, never mind remember them. If this, if that. But the fact was it was already late March and she had to purchase her airline tickets if she wanted to qualify for a cheap fare and escape the “certain restrictions apply” clauses in the carrier’s rule book.
She made her reservations on USAir the same day she realized it was already late March and she had better get packing. There was a direct flight to Providence — you had to land in Washington — but no nonstop one, and it turned out it was the only flight going there, so she didn’t even have her choice of a departure time. Mrs. Bliss wasn’t afraid of flying so much as she was of landing in strange cities and having to sit in the plane while it changed crews or took on fuel or boarded new passengers. (Also, she knew about landings, how they were the trickiest part of the whole deal.) But what troubled her most, she thought, was what to take with her. She’d never been to Rhode Island and it was Frank’s first year there so he really wouldn’t be able to tell her. She found an atlas of the United States in the building’s small bookcase in the game room and looked up Providence. It was north of Chicago, north of Pittsburgh, north of New York, and all that stood between it and the rest of cold, icy New England and Canada was a wide but not very high Massachusetts.
Mrs. Bliss had lived in south Florida since the sixties. In another year it would be the nineties. Over that kind of time span a person’s body gets accustomed to the temperature of a particular climate. Take the person out of that climate and set him down in another and she’s like a fish out of water. The blood thins out; the heart, conditioned to operate in one kind of circumstance, has to work twice as hard just to keep up in another. There were people from up North, for example, who couldn’t take the Florida heat. Their skin burned, they ran a high fever. Except on the hottest days, and even then only when she’d been waiting for a bus in the sun or carrying heavy bags of groceries back from Winn-Dixie, Dorothy didn’t even feel it. By the same token she’d noticed that in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati on visits, she needed her good wool coat on what everyone else was calling a beautiful, mild spring day.