Mrs. Ted Bliss (16 page)

Now Dorothy wasn’t blind. All butchers were flirts. The female customers seemed to expect it and were flattered by it. (It was good for business, even.) Mrs. Bliss had a theory that she’d mentioned to Ted.

“I think butchers flirt because they’re always working with meat.”

Her husband blushed.

“That’s why, isn’t it? Ted? No, I’m serious.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Bliss. “You hit the nail on the head. Some go for the pot roasts, the rest for the chickens.”

She would have mentioned the incident with Junior, too, but she was afraid of what might happen. Ted was a gentle man, but it wasn’t unknown for partners to use their carving knives in a fit of temper. It wasn’t Junior’s life she feared for but her husband’s. Since he’d touched her she imagined Junior capable of any outrage. If it happened again, though…

And that’s why she was so bothered by those telephone calls at all hours. Dorothy was frightened Ted might be taking up with Junior again. The gonif had stolen from them once (tricks with the books), and though Herbie Yellin, Junior’s father, had made good their losses (or Dorothy might have taken up a carving knife herself and cut him where it would do the most good), she knew he could rob them again. It was in his nature to be a thief, and not just a thief but someone who deliberately went out of his way to betray the people who were closest to him. Look how he treated his wife, or, fallen down drunk, how he must have appeared to his beautiful children. Look what he’d done to Ted, and how he ran to his daddy whenever he got too far behind in his gambling debts. Was it any wonder Mrs. Bliss didn’t want him back in their lives?

But whenever she tried to bring up the subject of the calls with Ted her husband just shrugged and denied that there was anything going on and changed the subject. Sometimes he smiled and winked, conveying that if he really was up to something it wasn’t anything she needed to worry about.

Then he sprang the farm on her!

Then he told her—it was in the old, ruined farmhouse that first night after the children had fallen asleep—that the thing of it was that it was a black-market operation. He knew he could trust her, he said. It was no big deal, he said. It was 1942, probably already the middle of the war, and time to strike while the iron was still hot. It was the first time they’d really ever had any opportunity to cash in big. Fortunes were to be made in meat. And did Dorothy remember what it was like during the Depression, how no one had the money for the better cuts of meat and the only way they’d managed to get by was by eating up half their inventory? And every independent butcher he knew was into it directly or indirectly. Some were taking under the table for monkey business with the ration books. And some were charging whatever the traffic would bear no matter how hard the OPA tried to hold prices down. And some sons of bitches had given up the butcher profession completely and had become full-time ration-stamp counterfeiters. Now that was
really
a dirty thing to do, and hurt the war effort, and Ted wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What he was trying to accomplish with his little operation was just to go to the source,
become
the source and set up his own little business. Why let big shots like Swift and Armour and Mr. Hormel Ham soak up all the profits and leave nothing over for the little guy? It was supply and demand, he said. Didn’t Dorothy know anything about supply and demand? It was how business did business, he said, and if Dorothy didn’t understand that even the war effort worked by that principle, then all he could say was that he was offering her a very valuable lesson. “Well,” Ted said, “what do you think?”

“Does Junior Yellin have anything to do with this?”

“Junior’s out of it. He found the place. Then all he did was put me in touch with the guy who owned it.”

“And took a cut, I suppose.”

“He took his commission. He’s entitled to his little commission. Even Junior Yellin has a right to live, Dorothy.”

This last was not something Dorothy entirely agreed with—the philandering, the gambling, the drunkenness, the lovely wife and beautiful kids, the funny business with Ted’s books, the funny business when he tried to try something with her—and although she knew her husband hated anyone speaking ill of his old partner (despite the fact that the no-good had cheated him), she understood that if she found out that Junior still maintained the slightest connection with this new operation, she would say something, she would have to, even if it meant spilling the beans about what had happened to her in back of the case in which the meat was displayed. (Though she understood her husband’s loyalty to Junior. She really did. It was the loyalty of family and, in a way, she shared it. The old loyalty of battle stations and circling wagons—all the closed ranks of blood. The world was humiliating enough. You couldn’t afford to live in a double-dealing world where you thought you were subject to being humiliated by partners, too. Of
course
old man Yellin had bailed out his boy by making restitution. Of
course
Ted had not broken up their partnership; of
course
it had been Herbie Yellin who had insisted that his son, so ruthlessly charged, so mercilessly done in by a partner who actually took the word of the accountant, an outsider, against the needs of a son who if he futzed the books did so out of necessity—those mounting gambling debts and the high price of his high nature with the floozies and bimbos he kept on the side. You came, you
sprang
to the defense of family. Dorothy understood this and even admired old Yellin for paying them back, then telling them off, and then insisting that it was Junior who had dissolved the partnership. Your dear ones were dear, no matter. Whatever was yours was.

(And if she’d gone to Ted that time and warned him about Junior and that what he pulled on the housewives and customers he had no compunction about pulling on Dorothy, too, then what? Would Ted have had it out with him, or would he have given her his old song and dance about how Junior was an artist, the best man in Chicago with boning knives, paring, carving knives, hacksaws and cleavers, an artist who could trim every last ounce of fat from a steak so that even the T-bones and porterhouses in their display cases, even the stringy briskets, looked like filet mignons, and you couldn’t say to an artist what you could say to an ordinary butcher? He loved her, she knew that, but she wasn’t so anxious to see push come to shove, never mind what she had told herself about carving knives and the temperaments of outraged butchers.)

It wasn’t even the discomfort of their life in the country she objected to, and certainly it wasn’t the problematic criminality of Ted’s being a black marketeer. She was innocent, and naive, and a woman of valor, but she was a wife, too, after all, and a mother with mouths to feed and babes to protect. What, she should be less than the simplest creatures, a lioness with her cubs, say, or a bear with its? So if she wished for the conclusion to the interval of their life on the farm, it was as much for the benefit of her three children as it was for her husband or for herself. Chicago represented an ideal of progress and comfort. It represented the future. Indeed, life in Michigan seemed so like life in Russia to Dorothy (though she could barely recall her girlhood in Russia) that the idea of Ted’s dumping the farm and moving the family back to Illinois seemed as much an ordeal and adventure as contemplating the journey from Russia to the New World must have seemed to her own parents. After only a few months away from the city, Chicago, raised to almost mythic stature, began to take on an atmosphere of enchantment and fable. Mrs. Bliss regaled her children with stories of how water had poured freely from every faucet in their apartment. All you had to do to fill a pitcher for lemonade was turn a tap. A pitcher for lemonade? To run a bath. To run a bath? To flush the toilet! She was a keeper of the flame, Mrs. Ted Bliss. She told them that in Chicago
all
the streets were paved, and the only paths you ever came across were the trails in Jackson Park or the Forest Preserves. Mail, she reported, was delivered by the postman directly to a letter box in the hall. The radio crackled with static only during thunderstorms. You could get all your programs clear as a bell.

It was the public schools, however, that were the city’s greatest asset. The different grades weren’t all jammed together in a single room, and the children didn’t have to share books. Also, she whispered, in Chicago, it was the goyim who were the exception, and there was a synagogue every three or four blocks.

In the end, though, it wasn’t Mrs. Ted Bliss’s relentless dislike for their farm that sent them back to Chicago. It was that failure of nerve that Ted simultaneously took responsibility for and ventriloquized over to Dorothy that drove them off.

It was the rustlers. He admitted as much to Dorothy.

“Rustlers?”

“What, you think these spindly, broken-down sparrows that pass for cattle around here were hand cared for by Farmer Brown or old McDonald on Michigan Avenue feedlots? They’re runts of the litter rustled off the wrong side of a rancher’s tracks by gangster gangsters in cahoots with gangster cowboys in cahoots with their gangster rancher bosses who winked their eyes and left instructions to leave the gate open.”

She had never heard him so passionate about anything. It was how Ted’s high-roller, go-for-broke pals back in Chicago talked, the mavins and machers butting in on the lines outside shows and in fancy restaurants.

It was his failed nerves whistling in the dark.

“I tell you, Dorothy, Junior Yellin himself couldn’t trick those beeves out into anything resembling anything respectable as steak or maybe even just ordinary hamburger.”

Of the toughs and heavy-lifter moving-men types who came every week or so to drop off their living, stolen, scrawny cattle in exchange for Ted’s slaughtered and dressed beef carcasses, the various rounds, rumps, ribs and roasts, shanks, flanks, chucks, and other moving parts of meat, her husband would whisper, shuddering, that they were the
real
black marketeers, an almost anonymous, dark lot of men who seemed only a few steps up the evolutionary scale from the very animals in which they dealt.
They
were the rustlers; dominant males of the herd,
they
were the ones who with something almost like instinct had a nice feel for just which sacrificial cows and steers the ranchers who owned them and collected insurance on them when they disappeared through those now several times cahooted unlocked gates least minded losing.

They were ugly customers and unnerved Mrs. Bliss, too, whenever they appeared on their rounds. To expedite pickups and deliveries they enlisted Mr. Bliss into helping them with the transfers, transforming her handsome husband, once not only president of the Hyde Park Merchants’ Association but a prominent member, too, of the Council of the Greater South Side Committee for Retail and Growth—a tribal elder of sorts, if not by nature himself one of the flashy, loudmouth speculators and get-rich-quick bunch, then a solid burgher of a man, at least someone who had the ears of the loudmouths, a man whose approval and interest in them they openly sought and even vied for. And now look at him, Mrs. Bliss secretly thought, down on the farm, a good two-hundred-plus miles from the city of Chicago, bowed almost to the breaking point under the weight of the sides of slaughtered meat he carried, the wet, red blood not only staining his white protective aprons beyond the point where his wife could ever get them clean again but the shirt he wore beneath them, and the undershirt he wore beneath that, too.

“Ted, what goes into one pocket from this black market,” Dorothy would tell him, “goes right out the other with what I spend in Clorox and Rinso.”

“Dorothy, it’s almost 1943. It’ll only be a year the war will be over.”

But Ted Bliss’s formula for a short, three- or four-year war was off the mark, of course.

It was November, and the news from the fronts was bleaker and bleaker. Loss of life in the Pacific and Africa was already too heavy. In Europe, our troops hadn’t really engaged the enemy yet. What happened when they finally did was awful to contemplate. What might have been acceptable in a lightninglike war where you got in and got out was one thing, but to continue to be what not even a year ago the papers had already begun to describe as a “war profiteer” was not something Ted Bliss particularly relished, never mind he was making money hand over fist. Also, word was getting out that the quality of his meat (even though everyone knew there was a war on, and that the government was buying up the best cuts for the boys) was going downhill fast. Plus his real fear of the toughs with whom he had to do business. And his fear, too, of the G-men whose pledge it was to shut down operations like his, find the perpetrators, lock them up and throw away the key.

Him? He
did these things? The Hyde Park Merchants’ Association prez? Some merchant. The merchant of Venice!

Also, there was no denying the fact of how uncomfortable he’d made Dorothy and the children by shlepping them out to the sticks and making them live in East Kishnif the better part of a year.

“I’m going to sell this place,” he announced to his family one day in late March.

“You are?” Dorothy said.

“Just as soon as I get a reasonable offer.”

“That’s swell, Dad,” his son Marvin said. “I really miss my friends back in Chicago. I don’t fish. You won’t
let
me hunt. There’s nothing for a boy my age to do up here.”

“Well, you’ll be home soon enough. I’m sorry. I didn’t look before I leaped. I just didn’t think. I didn’t realize how unhappy I was making you all. I thought you’d adjust, but, well, you didn’t. So I’ll wait till I find the right buyer who will give me my price, and then just sell the place.”

Marvin and Maxine ran up to their father, threw their arms around his neck and kissed him. “Oh, Daddy,” Maxine said, “it’s just exactly what I wished for.” Ted Bliss hugged his two children, then leaned over and pulled Frank up on his lap. The toddler squealed in delight.

“Well, Dorothy,” her husband said, “did I give you what you wished for, too?”