“Those curls’ll fall out,” Margaret had told Bertha, because she’d heard that was what happened. You admired a newborn baby for her hair and then it dropped out and both of you were disappointed. But Minna’s hair stuck.
Rosy and squinched Minna, milky sweet, with her smell that sent Margaret swooning—though the scent turned out to be a particular brand of detergent that Dr. Sprague had shipped to him from Canada in the same box as his whiskey. “Nothing in America like it,” said Dr. Sprague, who wrote love poems to his girl:
Daughter, you are little, waking
In the slant light of late morning.
I am here to meet my sweetheart:
Glint-eyed, round-faced, dimpled darling.
Who knows, baby, if you hear our
Prayers for you, our dreamy dreams?
Every hour we tell the hour
By the sun’s unlikely beams
Through our windows: you’re our sundial.
You’re the measure of our days.
Your ears are flowers, I whisper in them,
Your eyes as green as chrysoprase.
Minna, mine, remember this if
Babes remember things they hear.
My heart, eight-sided, every angle:
Is my Minna’s. She’s my dear.
(The poem was in Minna’s desk when she died, written in the sort of cirrocumulus penmanship that sets you to dreaming no matter the words.)
Bertha Truitt was a mother, a loving one, but perplexed. Minna in her mother’s arms looked up. Anybody has seen it, a baby reading a face, careful as a phrenologist: that round chin means you’re my mother, that wide forehead means you’re my mother, that ear close to your head, those green eyes! What a scientist Minna was. What inventions and conclusions. She had the advantage. She had known Bertha’s literal depths, had elbowed her organs and heard the racket of her various systems. She had measured time by her mother’s diet and respiration, her exercise, and then Minna was born into the wide world and Bertha was so behind in knowledge she would never catch up.
So every morning she went to her place of business, to remember who she was. Of course she brought the baby.
“I’ll come along,” said Margaret.
“The laundry wants you,” Bertha Truitt told Margaret, as though the laundry were a man at last asking for her hand in marriage, “and the alley wants us.”
People inexperienced with babies couldn’t understand how that baby slept so peaceful amid all the noise. Mary Gearheart wondered if she were deaf. Nora Riker wanted to toss her like a football. Hazel Forest dispensed advice about her mechanics. LuEtta Mood saw her beauty, knit little round caps for her dark hair to spring out the bottom of. She wanted to pick the baby up to feel the dense loveliness of her. But people, women especially, are leery of mothers of dead children, or too gentle around them. The bereaved mother is a combustible gas, the baby is a match; which one is dangerous makes no difference but best keep them apart. LuEtta couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t make her seem more dangerous. She saw she might never be allowed to hold anyone’s baby again. She peered over people’s shoulders into the pram, and admired Minna: plump thoughtful mouth, hands in dowsy fists. Oh, a fast asleep baby was faster asleep than any other animal. The women of Truitt’s Alleys had children, too. Mary Gearheart her slack-jawed darling Patrick; Nora Riker a bald-headed drooling detestable boy named Philip; Hazel Forest the mismatched twins Hollis and Ivy. Only LuEtta Mood remained childless, childless in the present tense.
Bowling was Minna Sprague’s lullaby, like Rip Van Winkle before her, the low thunder of the ball down the wood, the clatter of the pins. No matter how far Minna Sprague got from Truitt’s Alleys—and she put oceans between her and it, and graduate degrees, and husbands—her heart was set, like her mother’s, to alley time, though it would make her furious to hear it.
Scatterbrained Jeptha Arrison was always picking up the baby and threatening to bring her to the pinbodys’ shelf. One day Joe Wear found her snoozing on the cast-iron ball return. Joe scooped her up and went to talk to Truitt. “This ain’t a place for a baby.”
“And why not? You look fine with a baby, Joe Wear.”
“Babies need peace and attention.”
“What do you know of it?”
“I don’t know what babies need, OK,” said Joe Wear. “I run this alley. Miz Truitt, do I run this alley?”
Of course he did. She didn’t know the least bit of the way the place worked. She relied on him and he’d never put his foot down till now.
“What I know is babies need a place to think,” he said. He held the baby tucked in the crook of his arm. “And to not be carried off every which way. A baby who grows up in too much clatter is miserable. Hm,” he said to the baby, who’d started to fuss. He reached down and touched his finger to her cheek. Minna looked taken aback, then dubious, then—as though she finally got the joke, your finger, my cheek—she smiled and revealed dimples, left and right. You got shocked with love, when a baby smiled at you. It was a religious experience. Joe Wear renounced it.
“Here,” he said, and he handed her not to her mother, but to LuEtta Mood. Every woman in the place—it was morning, they were all women—quieted.
The two of them had never discussed their understanding, Joe a lifelong orphan, LuEtta the mother of a dead child, but they shared a ruthless sentimentality. “Would you, Lu?” he asked, and she did. The baby was solid with sleepiness. She yawned. LuEtta handed her to Truitt. “Here she is,” said LuEtta, as matter-of-fact as she could make it, the way you always do, when someone has trusted you and you want to be trusted again.
“All right, Truitt?” Joe Wear said. He hadn’t smiled once during the entire transaction, but a week later he presented Bertha with a jointed cow carved from a candlepin. Even the tail was articulated. Even the udders.
Everyone knew Minna Sprague was no ordinary child. She sat up at three months old and she said her first word—lightning—at seven months. She could read, it was said, at a year and a half, not taught, just off the marquee of the Gearheart Olympia Theater. Leviticus Sprague had been a prodigy himself, though his mother had accomplished this with drills and blows, until his sister, Almira, was born and their mother decided she’d rather a prodigy of the musical sort. Minna would not be put to work, but what was the harm in saying interesting things to her? Interesting things in French, perhaps? Then Bertha caught him at it.
“Italian, if you must,” she said.
Well, his own Italian was not so good, though his accent was flawless. They learned together.
They would educate Minna at home. “With governesses,” said Leviticus, worried that Bertha might teach her. “Margaret Vanetten will serve,” said Bertha.
No, of course not. Dr. Sprague would teach his Minna. Who else? They met in Dr. Sprague’s office on the third floor—he’d all but abandoned it for the belvedere—and read, or went over tables and maps. Bertha loved pamphlets; Dr. Sprague was devoted to reference books, atlases and dictionaries, anatomy books with transparencies and paper cutouts of the human body as red and pink and promising as dime-store valentines: you could lift the paper liver right out of the paper torso. Scientific treatises with gatefold appendices; giant dictionaries printed on cricklingly thin pages. They read next to each other, asked each other questions. Her mother was given to stroking Minna, which she loved, scratching her back, braiding her hair. Her father merely filled his office with his physical presence, which draped all around her, along with his pipe smoke. She leaned back on his shins, or absentmindedly untied his shoes. She was drawn to music and art, and needed to go to museums, which Dr. Sprague loathed: he did not object to the exhibitions but to the humanity that had come to regard it.
Margaret Vanetten took her to the Harvard Museums to examine the stuffed bison, whale, the dissected flowers blown from glass, the honeycomb like their own house, multisided, made of cells. They went to the art gallery, where Minna was drawn to the Mother and Childs. She particularly
liked one flat-faced Byzantine rendition, where Mary looked like a tarnished ladle and Christ a bronze coin balanced on her knee. Their bodies were turned to the observer, and they looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, as though the minute the museumgoers moved on they would gossip—but if Minna tarried, thought Minna, she might be included.
Certain paintings made Minna feel loved. Needed. This painting, for instance, required her above all other people to look at it. Sculptures were haughty; landscapes were tureens of soup, nice enough, sustaining for a while, but too democratic in their purpose. But the right painting—the Mother and Child by the Master of Nervi, for instance—was like music, a kind of flattering invited intimacy. She knew she couldn’t explain this to Margaret Vanetten, who always seemed to be examining her for highfalutin notions that, left unremarked upon, might develop into delusion, or suffrage. 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?”
“In Salford, I expect, or nearby. I was left with the nuns. So I don’t know.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Being born?” asked Margaret, laughing.
“Yes,” said Minna.
“Nobody remembers being born,” said Margaret, and added, “and a good thing, too.”
“I remember.” She turned her body to the painting one last time. “All right. Let’s go. You were there, Margaret. When I was born.”
“I was indeed.”
“I remember,” said Minna as they walked down the marble stairs, softened in the middle from generations of footfalls. “It was dusk. It was in the belvedere.”
“Your father tells you too much,” said Margaret uneasily.
“He doesn’t. And he didn’t. I remember. It was before he put the smoking stand up there. My mother was hollering, and then she quieted down.” Minna got thoughtful. “It was dark inside Mama—ordinarily I could see shadows, like on a lampshade—but then I saw some light—”
“Minna—”
In the vast atrium of the gallery, Minna turned to Margaret. The museum was closing. Gravity was working on the gallerygoers, shaking them down from the upper floors. “You smelled of onions,” said Minna.
At that Margaret put her fingers to her nose, as though they still might be soup-fragrant. “Yes,” she said, despite herself.
“Now you believe me,” said Minna. “I’d gotten very crowded inside of Mama.” She demonstrated with her elbows. “That’s why I was born early. I remember all of it.”
Was this terrible news, Margaret wondered, or splendid? All those things she had whispered, when she’d thought the infant Minna didn’t understand English, when she seemed a well to drop wishes into. Minna, I love you. Minna, nobody loves you but me. I love you best, I always will. Little grubby girl. Little darkling. Beautiful Minna, you are mine. Shall we run away together? Shall we go where nobody will find us?
What she wanted to ask Minna now: Do you remember loving me, back then? She knew that six-year-old Minna loved her, in a dutiful, condescending way, as children love things they know they will outgrow. But did she remember that particular baby love she had for Margaret? You’re a wonder, Dr. Sprague had said to Margaret, when little Minna quieted in her arms. You are surely good with babies. You have her figured out. But it was only that Minna loved Margaret, and Margaret loved Minna, and they made each other happy.
“It was shocking cold, being born,” said Minna. She threaded her arm through Margaret’s, and they walked out of the gallery and into a chill evening, like that of Minna’s birth. Their own breath manifested in clouds in front of them; the clouds tore apart. Minna was still child enough to huff, to conjure up more fog, and Margaret joined her, two teakettles set to boil. Minna would know how breath did that, make itself known in cold weather; Margaret wanted to ask.
“It was shocking cold, being born,” said Minna again.
“It always is,” said Margaret.
By then Minna had forsaken the bowling alley entirely. As a child she’d visited every now and then, to watch her mother on her lane, but she couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t concentrate over the tumble of the pins but that people insisted on interrupting her. That’s a big book for a little girl! Or Look at you and your pigtails. Or You’re Truitt’s daughter. Truitt’s and that man’s. As a baby she had loved being peered at, admired, but at heart she was not like her mother: she minded being a curiosity. At least if she were one—and she was a curiosity, also at heart—she wanted to orchestrate it herself. She would not go to Truitt’s. I can’t read there, she told her parents.
“Novels have ruined many a young woman,” said Bertha. “That’s a quote.”
“From what on earth?” said Leviticus, whose idea of domestic life was the family reading together, in silence, until such a time as he found something interesting he wanted to read aloud.
“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.
Music Minna pulled out of the air. She sang, all the time and for hours.
Who know what a cat loves?
I know what a cat loves.
Not mice even though they’re delicious.
Not lizards or roosters or fishes.
Cats love fire because
What cats do fire does.
Purrs and skulks and stays up late
Pounces twice to celebrate.
One of Minna’s songs could last half a day, and her father nodded, pleased, and paid attention every third verse, and her mother would maddeningly try to sing along—“I know this song!” “You do not! I’m making it up!” “No, I’m sure: I heard it in the long ago”—and Margaret would be driven to distraction—“Such a clever girl,” she would say, “but you’ll wear yourself out”—but for Minna, inside Minna, the feeling was athletic and exhilarating, like climbing a tree, but the tree was the song, and grew up from the center of herself: it kept coming and coming, though she never knew the next line, neither words nor tune, till she’d sung it. That was the joy. She had to concentrate—not to make up the next line, but to perceive it.
Her house was like that, too. She sounded it the way her father sounded a body: thrummed the heels of her hands against the metal staircase that led to the belvedere (she was not allowed to go up without permission), rat-a-tatted her fingernails against the windowpanes, whispered secrets into the obtuse angles of the milk room to see whether her voice would travel all around and back to her, the way her father said sound traveled under the dome of St. Paul’s in London. She sang down the bulkhead doors. She sang in every closet in the house. The house was a drum. It was meant to be struck. Margaret Vanetten was always saying, “Oh, you want a sister, you poor thing,” but Minna didn’t, she didn’t want to share the house or her parents or any part of her childhood.
“I think the house is a drum,” she said at dinner. Margaret Vanetten had tried to civilize them, to insist they sit in the dining room and make conversation with each other, but as a family they were hopeless, and preferred the kitchen, and ate like castaways. Dr. Sprague’s table manners were passable—he ate with knife and fork and never ladled food from the serving bowl directly into his mouth, the way his wife did—but he read books right in front of everyone and seemed surprised when asked a question.
“Daddy,” said Minna. “Do you think the house is a drum?”
“Do I think what, my Minna?”
“The house is not a dru
m,” said her mother, idly picking up a clot of mashed potatoes with her fingers. “It is an octagon.”
“A drum might be octagonal,” said Dr. Sprague.
“Might,” said Bertha Truitt.
“I think,” said Minna, “that at night, when we are asleep, the house turns on its side and rolls around the world, and all the furniture spins out to the edges.”
“What happens to us?” said her mother, amused but also concerned.
“We spin out, too.”
“That’s called centrifugal force,” said Dr. Sprague.
“That’s called quite an imagination,” said Margaret Vanetten.
“You’re right,” said Dr. Sprague. “It’s a beautiful imagination.”
“I meant—”
Minna sang, “The house is a wheel, the wheel turns around, the cats yowl about, we all sleep so sound—”
“The child needs a sister,” sang Margaret Vanetten in her iceberg voice. She saw the looks on the faces at the table and understood that she had spoiled the moment, but she wasn’t sure how. “I wish you’d get out of my kitchen,” she said, bitterly, to nobody, “so I could do my job the right way.”
Bertha felt Minna’s head nearly every day but didn’t read it, though it was a head finer (as Fowler said of all children’s) than any adult’s. Wouldn’t you want the best for a head like that? People would judge her on it anyhow. They already did, they looked at Minna and thought different things about her, depending on who she was with, mother, father, nurse.
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. She knew now that phrenology was not real. It wasn’t true that your connubial love resonated from one side of your brain and your jealousy from another—but even now she could feel those thoughts, the good and the bad. Hear them, too, her brain a gyring xylophone that rang when struck.
She loved her child entirely, perfectly. Her husband, too. She had never intended to marry the way some people never intend to go to sea. It struck her thataway, something you couldn’t change your mind about for months if you didn’t like it. Marriage to Dr. Sprague was an ocean—one of those peculiar foreign oceans so full of salt it buoyed the leaden. She was in the middle of it. She could not sink if she wanted to.
Bowlaway Page 6
