Bowlaway Read online

  This was a long time ago but they were still not young. Bertha, particularly, was not. She would be older till she died.

  She read the territory of his scalp not through the close-cropped hair but beneath it. The back of his neck smelled of bay rum, his windowpane coat of tobacco. No, don’t smell, she reminded herself. That tells you nothing.

  People misunderstood phrenology, thought Bertha. It was exercise. The stevedore, lifting a great deal of weight, changes the shape of his torso; the philosopher who lifts heavy thoughts, the shape of his head. Look at the portraits of Benjamin Franklin in his early years and at the end of his life, see the difference. Look at Dr. Sprague’s magnificent forehead, knotted with thought, evidence of all his education, the poetry he wrote, the patients he saved. She went to the knobs at the back of his head, to the prominences, as was her habit.

  His area of Amativeness was well developed, as was his area of intelligence. His Alimentiveness was worrying. His Self-esteem was very bad indeed. His Hope—but now she could discern nothing abstract. Was that a scar? What had happened to the man?

  “That bad?” Dr. Sprague asked, then, “I told you.”

  “Hard to say,” said Bertha Truitt. She wanted to dally. Her belief in phrenology was draining from her, she could feel it spin down the drain. And yet: as her fingers circumnavigated Dr. Sprague’s skull, she did know him, there was no way to know him but through his head. She hadn’t taken off her kid gloves, a mistake she recognized as her little finger grazed the apex of his ear. So she removed them, tucked one in each armpit. She worked the ambits of his skull. He was kind, and lackadaisical, devoted, careless. He was melancholy. He liked to drink (this she determined from the smell of sweet ferment coming through all parts of him). He would do anything for her, to the best of his abilities. He would love and disappoint her.

  “Now you,” he said, and doffed his gloves.

  She pulled the pins from her hair. Maybe this was really how you read somebody. You applied your head to that person’s fingertips, and the person poured themselves into your brain, chin, neck, shoulders—and you knew everything. She stared at his shoes (good brown brogues, one toe scuffed across the perforations) and felt the mechanism of her soul flutter and falter. He was unconvinced, but what if her skull revealed her to be venal or petty or dumb? He was not touching her as though he believed her to be venal, petty, dumb. She closed her eyes. The two living people touched only fingertip to scalp; the dead beneath them lay foot to foot and head to head.

  “All right,” he said at last.

  She opened her eyes, squared her shoulders. His lopsided mustache twitched fondly. “You needn’t have taken your hair down,” he said, plucking the pins from her hand. She felt the heat of his forearms against her neck, through his jacket, as he tacked her hair back up. She could tell it was a bad, tender job.

  She was not beautiful, thought Dr. Leviticus Sprague. Not in the way he had been raised to think of beauty. Her skin was custard. Her hair was the color of bruised fruit. Her face looked like an anthology of other faces: an odd nose with a bump halfway down its slope, a thick upper lip that cast a shadow over its thinner downstairs neighbor. Narrow chin. Broad forehead. Even her eyes were mismatched, the right one bigger, prone to widening to show the white all around the iris, he would never stop noticing. It always made his heart chime.

  He had been alone a long while. He had never lived with a woman he was not related to—his grandmother, his mother, his sister—which is to say he had never been regarded the way this woman, this Bertha Truitt, regarded him, with an ardent curiosity. In his way he had loved her not from the moment he saw her in the frost but from the moment she had looked at him and he understood she might love him back. Love him back came first: he was a cave, happy to be a cave, and she a swung lantern come to light him up. When he’d heard her tell the policeman her name, he’d thought she was lying: she’d read it off some headstone. But he’d walked the cemetery a dozen times since then, and never found a single Truitt. The unsteady boy with whom he’d found her had gone. He could not go to the Salford Hospital to ask what had happened to her, not because he would be turned away as a visitor but as a doctor. He would not ask.

  But here she was. She was so odd. Mismatched in her soul, and pleased with the effect.

  “It’s a humbug,” he said. “A lie, start to finish.”

  “But tell me your findings.”

  She would always be stubborn in the face of his reason. He would always surrender.

  He said, “I could not find a single flaw.”

  “Do you bowl?” she asked him.

  He laughed then, with his whole head. She wouldn’t have known he was a laughing man. “Well,” he said. “I have bowled.”

  “I mean candlepins.”

  He nodded. Candlepins existed also in Oromocto, New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from. An elegant sport, he’d thought when he’d watched it, and like most elegant things that white people favored also essentially feebleminded.

  “I bowl,” said Bertha Truitt. Then she touched him behind his ear, beneath the brim of his hat.

  Mrs. Mood

  Everyone talked about what a merry person Truitt was, but LuEtta Mood could see that the merriment was trained on a trellis of sorrow. It was a companionable sorrow, the sort you might never have to discuss. It drew LuEtta Mood in. Sorrow had interested her since childhood, long before she had any sorrows of her own. Then she met her own unhappiness and wondered where the earlier interest had come from, ignorant as it was.

  Her husband, Moses Mood, was known almost reverently as the homeliest man in town. As a child he’d been shot in the ear by his brother, and the resulting scar made him look not blown apart by violence, but as though something deep in his head had tunneled its way out and, famished, lapped and then gnawed at the basin of his ear. When he’d woken up after the injury, age eight, his father said into his good ear, “Well, Mo, this will be the making of you,” and Moses Mood decided it wouldn’t. He would not be kinder than he might have been, but neither would he be ruined. The scar would mean nothing to him. So it didn’t, except for this: he was like a snake-bit man who concluded he must learn to dominate snakes, so it might never happen again. He loved guns. The snake charmer always dies of snakes eventually.

  The scar was not the source of Moses Mood’s homeliness: he would have been a bullet-eyed dogtoothed man no matter what, with dark eyebrows worn away at the edges. He grew from injured child into a slow-moving self-satisfied fellow whose lower teeth bulldoggishly revealed themselves when he laughed. He laughed indiscriminately. He seemed to ladle his laughter out like a philanthropist feeding the poor. All would benefit from his laughter; all should receive it. Beautiful LuEtta Mood (the former LuEtta Pickersgill) was used to getting more of everything. She was so young and so lovely she had never questioned why that was. Not till she married did she notice that the bolt of affection she received from her husband was not wider, nor longer, nor made from better stuff than what he gave to everyone. So she resolved to love him for that.

  Then her own sorrow arrived.

  The sorrow’s name was Edith; the sorrow had been born sick and lived sixteen months. It wasn’t the sickliness that killed her: she had been scalded by a cup of coffee while visiting her grandmother Mood, had wandered into the kitchen to find it on the table. LuEtta hadn’t known you could die of scalding. “Our Edith was not made for this world,” said Moses Mood. He meant to comfort his wife, forgive his mother, comfort and forgive by diminishing, and LuEtta Mood rejected the comfort and diminishment both. Forgiveness was his own affair. She had a locket with a lock of the baby’s hair inside, so fine and short it was like dust, it could not be kept together in any way. Red, from a certain angle. It had gone with Edith’s blue eyes.

  What was LuEtta’s duty, according to everyone else? To go mad with grief. To soldier on. To exist the rest of her life as a paradox, a human woman who suffered what everyone said was the worst thing and yet continued to live. So
metimes Hazel Forest, who after all had learned about death at the Salford Hospital, tried to talk about Edith, and that was the worst, to listen to a woman talk as though she understood when clearly she did not. Though of course all those years when LuEtta herself had been interested in the sorrows of other people that was just what she’d done. She’d offered up her sympathy as a way to keep herself safe.

  Also her duty: to have more children.

  It had been two years and she hadn’t had another child and she could see the pity and impatience people felt for her across their mouths like a handkerchief held up to filter out disease—what was she doing, walking around outside, when she should be quarantined in her marital bed? If another baby had followed, people would have forgotten about Edith; or she might’ve been talked about from time to time with a weak happiness. LuEtta didn’t want people to forget about Edith; she didn’t want them to remember, either. She wanted Edith to exist the way any child did.

  That was why LuEtta Mood bowled, to give people something else to know about her. Joe Wear was right, she brought in gawkers, mostly mannerly, men who came because where else could you see such a good-looking girl dewy with sweat and happiness, and not pay a cent, and not have to go to confession? LuEtta Mood swung around and smiled at the spectators. Then she rolled.

  Soon enough she was better than Bertha, and Bertha bought a new machine to stand by the sculptoscope, a combination grip tester and spirometer. See how strong Truitt’s hands were, after years of bowling! See how mighty her lungs when she blew into the tube! No woman or man could beat her at the machine, including LuEtta. Let LuEtta bowl. That was fine. Truitt was still a record holder.

  Mary, Hazel, and Nora (the poodly one) bowled as though they were delivering the mail, politely, dutifully, inaccurately, but LuEtta Mood rolled so hard and true, you wanted to write a folk song about her.

  She did not love bowling—no, she did, she loved it, only this love was inseparable from her love for Bertha Truitt. The fascinating greenness of Bertha Truitt’s eyes. That particular smile—not the smirk, which was bonny, but the big beaming smile that seemed both private and magnanimous. Her very peculiar clothing—she always wore the divided skirt, but sometimes she had a divided petticoat beneath shushing and surging as she bowled. The way she called LuEtta by her full name, LuEtta Mood, now LuEtta Mood pay attention to your follow-through, and LuEtta wished she could hear her old name, her real name, in Bertha Truitt’s whiskey voice, LuEtta Pickersgill, though even Lu herself knew it wasn’t near so lovely.

  “But where did you come from?” LuEtta Mood asked her.

  “I’m here now,” said Truitt, her customary answer.

  Dear LuEtta wanted only to assemble Truitt accurately. A born-in-Texas Truitt was different from a born-in-San-Francisco Truitt, a widowed Truitt different from a never-married. Even three years of living one way or the other would sharpen or dull other facts.

  One morning when LuEtta turned she saw a stranger, a black man wearing a tweed suit. The tooth of the tweed was dulled by dust, though overall his appearance was neat. His feet were propped up on a canvas bag that looked military but smaller. He read a book too small for his hand, a Bible or instruction manual; he had another book in his breast pocket. A long, curved pipe smoked in his hand. He frowned—no, only his mustache frowned. His actual face was at ease. He gave no indication that he knew he was in a bowling alley. He scratched the corner of his mouth with the stem of his pipe.

  “Who’s that,” LuEtta said warily to Bertha Truitt.

  Without looking, Truitt picked up a ball and said, “That gentleman is my husband.”

  “I mean the colored man,” LuEtta clarified.

  “Just so,” said Bertha. “My husband, Doctor Leviticus Sprague. Dr. Sprague is from the Maritimes.”

  How could this be? LuEtta had heard the rumors of a husband, but Bertha Truitt was Bertha Truitt, alone on her bicycle, bending the paper to laugh at the Katzenjammer Kids, a singularity. Even when LuEtta dreamt of her, she never imagined interrupting that singularity, never saw the two of them in a kitchen somewhere, sitting on a sofa, sitting on the edge of a bed—nowhere but the bowling alley.

  Maybe the man wasn’t colored. Maybe the Maritimes were a place where white men were dark, like the Azores, or Sicily.

  “Congratuations,” LuEtta said. “No, really. When ever did you get married?”

  “Sit, Lu,” said Truitt irritatedly. Truitt held the ball as though it were an intimate thing she couldn’t reckon with as long as someone stood near. LuEtta felt a flare of shame, jaw to cheekbones, at having got her so wrong.

  She went right to the man, Truitt’s so-called husband.

  “I’m LuEtta,” she said.

  The man looked up. He nodded, and smiled, and conveyed to LuEtta—who had a sympathetic heart, it was her downfall, she saw the best in everyone but could never figure out how to get it out of a person, she could just see it glittering away inside doing nobody any good, this was the lesson of her marriage—a radiating, painful shyness. He had a face plumper than the rest of his body. LuEtta fought the urge to touch him.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said. “I hear you’re—you’re married to Bertha.”

  “She tell you that?” He shook his head, but smiled again. “Well, I’ve never known her to be wrong.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “Yes, a pleasure. For me. As well as you. Excuse me.” She thought he was about to stand up, but instead he put his pipe in his mouth and returned to the book.

  He was definitely not a white man.

  When Bertha was done, he stood to join her. They did not speak, they did not touch. They walked out not together but adjacent. How they always moved through the outside world together: close enough to not lose track of one another though neither glanced the other’s way, far enough to be blameless strangers if they passed the wrong sort of people. On the street at the same time as though by coincidence, but the sort of coincidence arranged by the gods, and between them a space of such evident magnetism that no reasonable person would have breached it.

  Bowling was new to the territory: superstitions grew like ivy on the walls of Truitt’s Alleys.

  It’s bad luck to spit in a bowling alley.

  It’s bad luck to drink beer in the middle of bowling one frame; wait till the pinbody resets the pins before you touch your glass.

  If the bowler on either side of you has a bad leave, wait till she finishes the frame to bowl, or you too will be cursed with a bad leave.

  It is terrible luck to be born in a bowling alley.

  Bad luck to eat fish in a bowling alley: eat only beef, venison, fowl.

  A nonbowler who spends time in a bowling alley must never pick up a ball: he is as a priest in a maternity ward, on entirely different business, and must remain pure.

  Do not speak of a nonbowler in a bowling alley. Worst sort of luck.

  (For who? The bowlers, the pinbodies, the nonbowler himself?)

  That’s enough now.

  Where had he been? Mary Gearheart heard he’d been out walking. (Her father ran the vaudeville house: she could sniff out the freak acts.) He had walked from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from, and then back, a distance of 1,100 miles. He was a pedestrianist: he’d won walking races, though this had not been a race. It had taken him a hundred days altogether, but that included ambling. Ambling and rambling, swims in rivers, visits to relatives. It was a religion. It was a disorder. It was a habit, like drinking or bowling. He was a physician, educated in Glasgow. Did he walk to Glasgow? In a way: he walked for miles on the ship that took him there. Did he speak Scottish? Scottish is not a language, Mary. I think it is, I heard a Scotsman speak it.

  The women pictured him sloshing across the surface of the ocean in seven-league boat-bottomed boots. They pictured him striding to Canada, a fishing pole shouldered like a rifle.

  He might have been deaf, the way he nev
er flinched at the sounds of the alley. He had a double chin so replete that strangers wanted to test its bounce with a finger, or wished he’d grow a beard for modesty’s sake. “Dr. Sprague is from the Maritimes,” Truitt said whenever she introduced him. She said this as though The Maritimes were a chronological location, not geographical. In a way she believed that this was the case, though she couldn’t have explained it.

  “That’s my husband,” Bertha Truitt said, to the police who wondered whether she needed help, the greengrocer, the ladies of Truitt’s Alleys, anyone who asked. He did speak, at the same rumbling pitch of the rolling balls, maybe why she loved him.

  Jeptha Arrison said, “There’s the smartest man I ever met.” But Jeptha was so amiably stupid everybody was the smartest man he ever met. It was a worldwide tie.

  “Nobody can think that much,” said Joe Wear.

  “He writes poetry,” said LuEtta Mood. At first she’d resented Dr. Sprague: she felt she’d dug out a little space next to Bertha Truitt and here was this man stepping into it. She had thought terrible things about him, even wondered whether their marriage was legal (in Massachusetts, it was) or actual (a different question entirely).

  But Lu was as muscular in mind as in body: she made a decision. She would protect him. She said to Joe Wear, “He’s published two books. He writes the poems in his head as he walks.”

  Joe Wear frowned with such vehemence it made the women laugh. “No doubt he does. Myself, I have a job. I have no use for poetry. I don’t see what’s so funny, ladies.”

  He was a feral child, Joe Wear, brought up in bowling alleys by bowling alley operators. He had gone to work for Bertha Truitt because he understood she would not try to mother him: he had no use for mothers, having never had one, only a photograph and a maiden aunt and a general ungainliness caused by the doctor’s forceps (according to the matron at the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children) or the umbilical cord around his neck (according to the maiden aunt). Not a limp but a liquid lumbering walk. He seemed to need tightening at his joints, or else he’d been overtightened. It did not stop him. It would not.