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The eyelashes of the dozing are always full of meaning and beauty, telegraph wires for dreams, and hers were no different. Dr. Sprague marveled at their fur-coat loveliness. He took hold of her bare wrist, which was, against logic, warm.
The dead grass persisted weeks later, seasons. From the right angle in the Salford Cemetery you might see it still.
Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning and subtle.
Bertha Truitt confounded people. She was two things at once. Bodily she was a matron, jowly, bosomy, bottomy, odd. At heart she was a gamine. Her smile was like a baby’s, full of joyful élan. You believed you had caused it. You felt felled by a stroke of luck.
Like Rome, it had been built among seven hills; unlike Rome, it was a swampy place, a city of fens and bogs. Eventually the founders knocked over most of the hills, shoved them into the bogs, declared them to be squares, and named each for the former hill at its heart. Pinkham Hill became Pinkham Square; Baskertop Hill, Baskertop Square. As for the bogs, they were nameless, then gone.
She must have had ancestors. Everyone does. She seemed to have arrived in Salford sui generis, of her own kind, though of course genealogists don’t believe such a thing exists. No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.
Truitt bowled because the earth was an ocean and you had to learn to roll upon it.
The invention of a sport: here is a ball, now throw it through that net, if those other guys’ll let you. Here is a bat: somebody’s going to throw a ball at you and you knock it away and run, if those other guys’ll let you. Here is a tiny ball and a stick and out of view beyond that grassy hill is a ball-size hole: you figure it out. Here is a ball. Heft it in your hand. Nobody’s going to stop you. Some man might call out with advice, too much advice, but in the end it’s your game to play and your game to win.
Well, that was like a woman, wasn’t it. No score.
What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. If they were allowed a small measure of it, they had to forsake love. She forsook nothing.
“Words are not facts. A man who requires inferiors will find his own head superior, he will write encyclopedias on the subject.” “But you have a splendid head,” she said. “Your Dr. Fowler would not say so, on account of my race.” “Oh!” she said. “Truly? Then he would be mistaken.”
Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot. In winter you came to the ice floes like shattered monuments in the river; in spring you walked into a blooming dewy magnolia bush. Your walking was a devotion. Most days he rose early and left Bertha behind, asleep, and walked for three hours and was back to fix her breakfast. What happened in those hours? O only the shift from the sky dark and aerated with stars to the layered morning light to the sun gilding the river and regilding the already gilt dome of the courthouse, only the invention of morning, only
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Margaret Vanetten the hired girl thought she herself might die of fright. She had never seen so much in her life, so much fluid and woman and marriage. It smelled of spilled whiskey up here. Something sterilized, surely. Then she thought: I will know this baby her whole life, I will love her more than anything or anybody. (She was certain it was a girl.) If we live through this—by we she meant only the baby and herself—I will love the child perfectly. “Don’t be scared,” she said.
Margaret did not want to strive to understand the world. She wanted the world to simplify, so that she might understand it. “Margaret,” Minna said one afternoon, looking at her Mother and Child. She was six years old then. “Where were you born?”
“You’re not too good for your mother’s bowling alley,” said Margaret to Minna, knowing that she was. Leviticus knew it, too. Bertha didn’t know it, and wasn’t. You’re never too good for the things you love, no matter how low. But Minna was better than Truitt’s. He was, too. They had to be better, and this was the thing that Bertha never understood. She could be low, and not care, she could oddball around town all she liked. They had to be better. They had to keep their eccentricities to themselves.
Did a child need secrets? Yes, Bertha believed; everybody needed dark thoughts, they were the lime in the mortar of your head. They held up the good thoughts.
Mechanical Bertha, who had loved her bicycle, loved her motorcar better. She was steam powered, too, all human beings were, some set to simmer and others to boil. Listen to Bertha Truitt percolate! The things she would do, with her steam-powered notions. Doubt her? Feel: there’s her boiler. Why she never corsetted: she’d been built by her inventor particularly, she wasn’t going to choke her source.
Dr. Sprague favored nature, Bertha liked the works of man.
She had planned for disaster, just not this one. She could not make sense of it.
But sorrow doesn’t shape your life. It knocks the shape out. It severs, it unstuffs, it dissolves. It explodes. That was what he couldn’t get over. It had exploded the logic of his brain as well. An explosion! The car—oh, he knew—no, not a car, a tank. So the explosion killed her? No, not exactly, the deluge.
He was burning. Was it with shame or love? Either might kill him.
Joe Wear
crowd of dead people was as much a crowd as a bowling alley, he thought, until the morning he found a live woman amid the stones. He went to visit her at the hospital, and there she offered him a job, and lodging, and her odd smile, offered her hand for shaking. He took it.
He’d asked her only once how she’d come to be in the cemetery. After a pause she’d said, “You’re an orphan, Joe, aren’t you?” “Yes.” “Well, I was orphaned from myself.” “I don’t know what that means,” he said, but he did. A terrible thing to be orphaned from yourself. Why he and Truitt had
“He says men need a place they can come together without women,” Joe Wear had said. But wasn’t that the whole wide world? Where did women have?
The future is coming. It always is. We have generations to get through first, marriages and divorces and widowhoods and remarriages, the yoking of families, the unyoking.
Orphaned, taken in. Alone, married. She did not know who she was. Her soul was a goldfish, a little thing inside the bowl of her body. She always had to concentrate to find it before she said her prayers.
She’d thought at first it was the Salford Devil, come back from the stories and curled into her child’s bed. It was a put-together thing, same as the Devil, with one beautiful carved wooden arm outside of the covers, plus that worn bolster of a head: it reminded her of a woman she’d once seen with hyacinth blue eyes and a jaw swollen by a purpling growth, a woman deformed and beautiful simultaneously, not one state despite the other. The doll’s eyes were green and large, the mouth, near where the head tapered into something like a neck, sherbety, lips parted to show little painted teeth. The
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Nahum Truitt, just as he said. Never Bertha’s son. Only her first husband, from whom she’d gotten her name and from whom she’d gotten bowling. She’d stolen her first candlepin from him, her first bowling ball, then she’d broken his heart and left him for Leviticus Sprague. They had met in Sacco, Maine. They’d parted in Boothbay. She was a tyrant. She was a thief. He loved her yet. Years later he would die with these truths upon his lips. He loved everyone he had ever loved.
She wanted him to stop gambling, but he couldn’t. It was how he thought about the world. Gambling was a series of questions: Am I lucky? Am I favored? Am I unlike other men? Will I die alone? Am I loved? Am I respected? The answers to these questions came at once, and with great certainty. Then the certainty evanesced. That was the good news. You got to ask again. Only the wilderness could cure him, where there was no other
The souls of animals are usually too small to be detected with ordinary technology (the ordinary technology being the souls of human beings), but in the case of unexpected mass animal death (zoo fires, poisonings) they clump together and form a ghost about the size of a very old person’s. The ghosts of children are enormous. The ghosts of the very old are worn thin from use. Arch Truitt had grown up in an apartment over a bowling alley, and late at night he could hear the ghosts, which he believed were in fact science—radio waves, or radiation, or fine magnetic objects rushing to the North
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He was a fraud, but Margaret had a weakness for fraudulence. Fake cakes in the bakery windows lovelier than any real slice, her husband, her Saturday afternoon movie matinees, the packets of saccharine she sprinkled on her cereal. He said, “Bertha would want women here. You need them, anyhow. Get in some girls to set the pins.” “Girls?” said Margaret. “I can’t talk to the dead,” said Cadey. “No man can.” “All right,” she said wryly.
She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.
Just because you escaped your old life didn’t mean you were all the way into the next: you still had to burgle, slink, steal. What was the first thing civilized man did? Figure out a way to keep others from what he loves. And what did uncivilized man do? Figure out a way to pick the lock. His brother was not Archibald but Archer, he reminded himself every morning.
The sound of the Bowlaway, in the 1950s! It was like a piano tumbling down a flight of stairs, then panting in pain. Arch had a knack for fixing the various machines, so he loved them the way anyone loves something or someone who is easily humbled and easily cheered. Children screamed in the alleys because they could. Bowlers shouted conversation. Babies cried, and their parents laughed at them, said, do your worst, kid.
Bowling was made for television: unlike football, baseball, basketball, you didn’t have to shrink it down to watch. It was already box shaped. It already had suspense; its quiet moments (the ball headed toward the pins) were as thrilling as its loud ones (their eventual meeting).
It is a curse to be good at something, Arch thought. He would take comfort where he could.
Sober, he thought, prayingly, Well now I’ll be champion. But it didn’t work that way. Lots of the game was luck, which was why he liked it. Every ball was a test of luck, every box, every string. He still thought that, but it was a long story. Your luck could worsen. You could keep failing, get worse, reveal yourself as a failure, a jinx. Your own jinx.
What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.
As for Roy himself—it had come upon him then that if any living human could talk to the dead, to the galactically misplaced, to babies dreaming in their prams, it was his brother, as innocent a sinner as ever lived.
Joe had thought of Bertha Truitt over the years.
She was the first unconventional person he’d ever met. Bertha Truitt was why he had not turned away from Manny and Constance outside of the Bowladrome in 1931: he recognized them, they were Bertha’s countrypeople, he might emigrate and join them. Then the oddity of oddities: one day, at one of Ethan’s parties, Bertha Truitt’s
