No mother, no imagination. He could not see how things could be improved or changed, and so he’d follow his employer’s directions to the letter. She had found him at the lowest point of his life, ruined by love. Or not yet ruined, but the ruin hung over him like a guillotine blade. The blade hung there still. She had stayed the execution but did not have the power to pardon him.
Do a good job, Truitt had said to him the day of his hiring, and one day the business will come to you.
His employer, singular: Bertha Truitt. Old Levi wasn’t anything to him, married or not. Still, his presence worried Joe Wear. Truitt was a fraud—she went around claiming she’d invented The Game, when everyone knew that wasn’t so—and now she’d married a colored man, which showed she was a woman of bad judgment, too. Joe Wear worried somebody might burn Truitt’s Alleys to the ground. Nobody did. Rich people were allowed to do things, he guessed. One day he’d be rich himself and live how he wanted.
No curtain at Truitt’s, too many women, but he had lodging above the alleys and Truitt trusted him. He had never been trusted in his life. It was a perturbing sensation.
They were alike, Joe Wear and Bertha Truitt, foundlings for whom the rolling ball was the feel of a hand on a forehead, a light touch of love on the back. Bowling gave you something to think about besides your regrets.
The Oddity
Dr. Sprague had no theories about architecture, and so he let his wife draw up the plans for the house on Somefire Hill, near City Hall, half a mile away from Truitt’s Alleys, along O. S. Fowler’s architectural theories: octagonal, with large rooms, a stepped-back third floor, an octagonal cupola at the top. It wasn’t a good-looking house but a spectacle. Not a folly (people could live in it) but a folly (who would want to). The walls were filled with lime and gravel and ground rice, and stuccoed with a combination of plaster and coal dust. A Home for All (the pertinent pamphlet, fished from Bertha’s gladstone bag) promised it would make its occupants happy. Bertha oversaw the construction, the frames built and filled with mortar. She got the Irish in again. “That lime’ll eat up my boots, Troot,” the foreman said, and Bertha said, “Never mind your boots, I’ll buy you more.” There were more rooms and closets in the house than anyone in Salford had ever seen. The neighbors called it the Wedding Cake.
Bertha named the house Superba, which she insisted was Latin for superb. Unlike Dr. Sprague, she had no classical education. “It means arrogant,” he said. “The feminine form.” Oh no, she said, people made that mistake all the time, but her interpretation was the correct one.
It was hard to arrange the furniture in the pie-shaped rooms, and Bertha shifted the chairs and tables clockwise around the floors as though measuring time. The one interior staircase, spiral, was in the middle of the house, just as Fowler recommended—fewer steps, less wasted time—which meant they met there several times a day. They loved each other, it was fine almost always, but a staircase amplifies ill will, and a spiral staircase tangles those feelings round. When they fought, Dr. Sprague took the exterior stairs, which were built into the plaster outside, all the way up to what Bertha called the cupola and he called the belvedere and the reader might think of as a widow’s walk. You couldn’t see the exterior stairs till somebody was on them. Dr. Sprague seemed supernatural, sprinting up the outside of the Wedding Cake. The neighbors worried that someday he might climb their houses in just such a way, as though it were a talent he and possibly, terrifyingly, all of his race had.
(He crawled into their dreams, too, like his wife. Not into dream beds but into dream kitchens, where the dreamer would find him at the table, drinking from a glass of water, waiting—the dream–Dr. Sprague listened to his neighbors as they confessed to him first their medical problems, then marital; the failures of their bowels and their affections. The dream–Dr. Sprague was interested, and did not interrupt, and so they kept talking as he nodded, and just before they woke up they felt awful that they planned to boil the glass or even throw it out, so unnerved were they by the colored doctor’s lips upon it.)
Sometimes Leviticus would send Bertha a note in the dumbwaiter, and she would answer through the speaking tube that fed into the closets and ran along the dumbwaiter shaft. The speaking tube opened with a squeal of air that signaled an incoming call. He would be in the belvedere, composing a poem in his head. He composed everything in his head, music and poetry and watercolor paintings, and then it took a maddening few minutes to set his notions down on paper—except those compositions he forgot on the stairs down, dozens of them he reckoned, because he forgot everything when Bertha called his name.
Their bedroom was large, bedrooms needed to be, else your own breath could kill you in the night or make you—that most dangerous thing, according to health specialists—sluggish. A slugabed. A mucousy terrestrial mollusk. No, thought Bertha, they would not be slugs. She had a sort of canine back that responded to scratching: Leviticus knew all the spots. He liked to be bit. Once, during a thunderstorm that had woken them in the night already lovingly biting and lovingly scratching, she looked up and caught sight of the mirror’s reflection above the dresser, both of Leviticus’s dark hands around one of her white breasts, and said aloud, this is what other people see when they look at us, and it was as though their iron bed had been struck by lightning. But their bedroom was safely on the second story, and she merely lovestruck. Bad for the health to sleep directly under the roof because of chilling breezes, bad directly over the cellar because of the noxious gases off decaying vegetables.
They never lied to each other but the past was behind them, the past was a patient beyond saving.
“When I get a home, I want a cat,” Leviticus had said when they met. They took in a swollen vicious little tortoiseshell who’d been mewling around the pear tree and soon the foot of the bed was filled with kittens, whom Bertha named after famous Italians—Donizetti, Botticelli, Raphael—though she didn’t like opera and knew nothing of painting. The mother cat was the Mother Cat, as crabby and duck-voiced a creature as ever lived. Her undercarriage had been loosened by kittens and swung when she ran up the stairs. For Bertha she had no time at all; the Mother Cat’s love was for Leviticus alone. She looked like a carpet bag his own mother had carried. In his lap, she gave herself entirely to love; she purred, bade him pat and scratch, rubbed her cheek against his jaw.
“She reminds me of someone,” Leviticus told Bertha.
“Leviticus,” she said. “For pity’s sake I am not a cat.”
“Then what animal are you?”
She went silent a long time.
Finally he answered for her: “A sphinx.”
Dr. Sprague opened a practice in the next town over, Foxton, in a black neighborhood called West Hills; he had admitting privileges at the Plymouth Hospital in Boston, which his friend Dr. Garland had founded when no other hospital around would allow in black doctors. None of the white people in Salford could imagine it, the way he could hear wrongness in a body. Leviticus’s siblings were musicians but he had perfect pitch for the anatomical: gurgle, hush, echo. He knew all the body’s misdirections, the stomachache that meant an ear malady, the limp that meant your shoulder needed tending. His expression was scientific as he worked, his hands gentle, impersonal. You were not your body, but if you were to persist, your body must be attended to. His patients loved him. They asked after his wife. “She is very well,” he told Faucenia Brooks, Chickie Barksdale, O. V. Orlebar.
“Come to church,” said O. V. Orlebar. He meant Shiloh Baptist, where O. V. was a deacon, and Leviticus did go a few times. He’d been raised in the faith. His father had been a deacon, too. But church was his childhood, his family, whom he knew he’d turned his back on. His parents were dead. His younger siblings were still on the family farm in Oromocto waiting for him to come home. (That was where his own money had come from; his people had been farming in Oromocto since 1776.) No doubt his siblings—Almira, Benjamin, and Joseph—would think church was the first step north. Most of the parishioners at
Shiloh Baptist were from America’s South, people of surpassing kindness and foreignness to Dr. Sprague, above all because they believed in God and everlasting life.
Leviticus Sprague despised Truitt’s Alleys, though he would never say so. To be surrounded by people! Not just the fellow in the next lane over, but the pinbodies, the lollygaggers. The racket. The repetition of it. The troglodyte conditions. The smoke and spit of white men gathered together. The dirty looks. The ill feeling, which itself seemed made of smoke and spit.
The thing that had worried him about married life was the idea of somebody looking at him all the time. Out in the world people looked at him, more now than ever because he was married to Bertha. One of the things he liked about being a doctor: when people had their eyes on him they were thinking of themselves, what he might say about their health, what conclusions he had about a boil or a tremor—they did not care about his body, only theirs. But Bertha watched. She believed him to be her territory. When they ate dinner, the second that Leviticus got gravy caught in his mustache, or ketchup on his chin, Bertha would say, “My darling,” and gesture to her own face. The very second. He could not explain why this bothered him, other than a mustache was private property. “How is it?” Bertha would ask at the first bite, when the grub was still unfolding on his tongue. And meals were innocent. She was always watching. She did not tell him to give up his bad habits but she noticed them. Another pipe, Leviticus? Another glass of whiskey?
He brought all his bad habits to the belvedere. There Dr. Sprague opened the eight windows of the octagonal cabin, smoked his pipe and his du Maurier cigarettes, drank his Gibson’s Finest, read books on the history of the Maritimes, and with the wind whistling through, and the smoke puffing out the top, it was as though Superba were a great kettle, or a steamship headed upriver, a conveyance of industry. Up there he could not be seen and he was himself.
In the mornings he would walk. He was a man of nature, he could go miles along the river, all the way to Waltham, or through the Salford Fens north to Foxton. At the start of a walk, alone and moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted. (Unlike Bertha, he did not have the need to found or invent anything himself.) 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 Bertha in her dreams bowling, bowling, he could tell by her trembling arm and wrong-foot approach.
One early morning as Dr. Sprague walked along the edge of the fens he heard an animal rustling amid the marsh grass. What might it be? Something wild, he hoped. He’d been too long in a city looking only into the hostile eyes of men.
At first he thought the creature in the fens was a big cat. A hillocky beaver. A faun. Through the sandy grass he saw a pair of eyes, at first too wide-set for any earthly creature. Then the face looked distressingly human, though he could hear the steady thack-thack of a muscled tail, a noise neither warning nor comfort, and the unfurling sound of wings or a parasol.
“Hello?” he said. Dark green eyes. A narrow-bridged nose. Leviticus stumbled on the solid ground before the fens; his gloved hand plunged into the muck as though into a human body during surgery, he could feel a beating heart beneath, and he was on the creature’s level. He knew her, the face was hers, in a seizure he believed it. Despite the muck, the dark, the seizure, the beating earth, what he felt was love, and he said her name.
The thing hissed and fled: oily waddle, blurping noise of a stout body sliding into swamp. Not his wife after all. But the love didn’t ebb. Bertha, he thought. No, an animal, or a spirit. He ran home. There, Bertha was turning over in bed, sleepy, dream-damp. “What is it?” she asked. He wanted to tell her. Then he said, “I thought I saw you by the fens.”
She gave a burbling half-awake laugh. “You saw the Salford Devil, maybe.”
He said, severely, he never was severe, “There is no such thing,” and climbed muddy beneath the counterpane. He felt above the covers, then below. “Where’s the Mother Cat?”
“Maybe the Salford Devil’s got her,” Bertha said matter-of-factly.
“Not the Devil,” said Leviticus. “We do not believe in the Devil.”
“I didn’t realize our beliefs were yoked together,” she said. “Anyhow if she’s gone she’ll be back, full of kittens. The cat, Leviticus,” she said. “Not the Devil.”
“That cat’s too old for kittens,” he said, and he made the clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth that always conjured up her and all cats from the corners. She didn’t come, only her children, Donizetti, Raphael, Botticelli.
The Mother Cat didn’t come home that afternoon, or that night. The next morning Dr. Sprague went through the neighborhood on all fours, clucking his tongue, with a herring on a string to toss beneath bushes. Had it been the Mother Cat, twitching in the fen? Where could she be? He went into people’s backyards, peered under their porches. “Mother,” he called, “little Mother.” “You’ll get yourself shot,” said Bertha, “and over a cat, when we have three more!” Eventually he did find her, but dead, beneath the roses in the backyard, intact, untouched: she had crawled there to die. He wept, he couldn’t stop. The Mother Cat had a way in bed of sleeping in the crook of his knees, so he could not move; she spent the evenings purring beneath his book, nudging the book with her head. He missed her bodily—
“We’ll get another mother cat,” said Bertha.
But he would not be comforted. “Another does not exist!”
“Grief is not for cats.”
“Do not, Bertie,” said Leviticus. “Do not.” He couldn’t finish the sentence: whatever she was doing was too awful to be named.
She wouldn’t stop. “Grief is surprise. Grief is, I wasn’t prepared. Grief is, It’s not fair.”
“It isn’t,” he said, but uncertainly.
“That cat was old as Moses and died in a rose bower. You are not griefstruck. You feel sorry for yourself. I feel sorry for you, too,” she added. They looked at each other and understood: this was how they might mourn each other, she clear-eyed, striding forward; he weeping and inarticulate. It was what each would have wanted of the other.
But was Bertha Truitt the Salford Devil? Did the Salford Devil make itself up piecemeal, gull’s wings, duck’s webbed feet, twitching cow tail? Did Bertha all alone transform so she could study him?
Ever after Leviticus took his flask with him. He walked off the liquor as he walked off everything. Soon the memory of seeing the creature was as though a dream, or a childish imagining, something he’d made up once to give himself a thrill. Something he kept in his pocket even now.
A Womanhouse
The first indication of Bertha Truitt’s condition was the spirometer’s reading. She held the record for both grip and gust—when you set a record, your coin was returned; if you failed you were given an electric shock instead—and though her grip was strong as ever, one day when she blew into the tube—Hygienic! the spirometer said, inaccurately—the machine rebuked her with electricity. “No,” she told it. She tried again. Another shock. She did everything she could: she imagined her lungs as bellows, and then as bagpipes; she quieted her mind and tried to still her other organs (hush, liver; settle down, pancreas); she tried to empty every inch of her body down to the soles of her feet to make room for more air that she could then expel into the spirometer. Shock, shock, shock.
Though she
didn’t really believe that her husband knew more about her body than she did—all those years of experience she’d had with her carcass, and he only a handful—she walked home to him from the alley. Even now, three years after the last lick of paint had been put on it, the very sight of Superba lifted her—mood?—no, it felt more bodily than that. The angles of it pleased her, straightened out her spirit level, brought her plumb. So did Dr. Sprague’s roses. Whatever had lifted inside her was not her lung capacity: she was so out of breath by the time she got inside she couldn’t force a word into the speaking tube. She just opened it so it squealed upstairs, and he came down in his green dressing gown, the one that made him look like a handsome billiard table, with the quilted lapels.
“I am dying, maybe,” she said.
“I believe just the opposite,” he told her. “Sit, Bertie.” She sat, but on the arm of the davenport. He knelt on the floor beside her.
He’d seen the spread of Bertha’s nose, the puff of her ankles, took notice of tenderness of both the physical and spiritual kind.
“The opposite of dying is living,” she said.
“Is making life,” said Leviticus. “Bertie”—she stared down at him—“you are with child.”
“With?” she said. “With?”
She made allusions to her age, which she then remembered she’d vowed not to reveal, and began to say, you see my mother never, and remembered she’d vowed not to discuss her parentage, either. A change-of-life baby! After all, the octagonal home had been designed by O. S. Fowler to encourage procreation, even in a woman such as Bertha Truitt, at such an age.
Leviticus, kneeling, touched her right ankle with such gallantry you would have thought that the site of the miracle.
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