Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “You done, gal?” Nahum Truitt bellowed.

  She stuttered on the approach, her steps too long, and the sleeping baby gave a shuddery sigh, and LuEtta was at the foul line and over it. He yet could win.

  The men of the alley watched Nahum Truitt’s expression, neither negative nor positive but zero, the face of a man who knows that any emotion might get him killed. His posture was rigid. His grip had changed, and he put some English on to spin the ball, a tenpin trick rarely seen in candlepin alleys. Some people thought it couldn’t be done, but here was Nahum doing it. He stopped talking to the Salford Half Nickels. While he waited to bowl his next two frames, he put his hands in his pockets and watched LuEtta unmovingly. Then he bowled. Spare, nine, and it was clear Lu wouldn’t catch him. He seemed almost bored by his ability.

  It was not God, Joe Wear knew, though of course Nahum would say it was. He was just that good and had hid it, a hustler who’d been waiting to make his move. Every time he disappeared from Truitt’s it was to bowl and hustle in somebody else’s house.

  Joe had cleared out plenty of cheats in his years at Truitt’s, men who snuck in weighted balls or wrongly sized, but Nahum owned the place, and as far as Joe could tell he wasn’t cheating, he’d only hustled himself into a bet he was pretty sure he could win. It was too late, even, for Joe to fiddle at setting the pins to give Lu a chance. You could see her heart was no longer in it.

  The men of the alleys had abandoned their lanes, their racing forms. A dozen forgotten cigarettes burnt in the tin ashtrays stamped at the bottom TRUITT’S. LuEtta bowled, a tall gal in white leather shoes, her ankles in their thin socks indecent. Her blond hair was brassy. Her form was exemplary. She looked like a deer burst through a window at a train station. She didn’t belong there, she had to go, they would never stop talking about her, they needed to show her the door, for her sake, too. If you were the last of your kind why would you stay.

  You stay because of your stubbornness, learned from your mentor. You stay because you think you’ll stop being the last of your kind if you just get by: another of your kind will come find you. One woman surrounded by two dozen men, not one of whom would fight to keep her there, no matter she was Salfordian born and bred, no matter her long association with the eponymous Truitt of Truitt’s Alleys, the one true Truitt. O Bertha, a stranger who came into Truitt’s Alleys now would think Nahum was the significant Truitt. They would think the lone woman was the toothache. When there were plenty of women they caused no trouble at all—why, they were barely noticeable. One woman was an insult, a poison, a gal, a girl, disposable—she would be carried out and dumped in the gutter. The actual gutter, the one of the street. Jeptha Arrison on his shelf looked like he was praying over a four-horsemen leave, a line of pins LuEtta could convert to a spare if they jumped right, but what good would it do?

  LuEtta Mood shook her head and shivered. She tried to tell herself that her luck today, two spares, two ten boxes, was a kind of enchantment. To believe it was skill and physics meant she was, as Nahum said, done. What would it have meant to own Truitt’s Alleys, if the man actually gave it up? Leaving her marriage for good. Never leaving Salford. Honoring Bertha—she longed to feel Bertha here but she couldn’t.

  In the end the man beat the woman 117 to 101. The loser offered her hand. The winner wouldn’t take it.

  “Well then,” said LuEtta Mood, and every man in the place saw how ruined and relieved she looked. “I’ll go.”

  “Aw come on,” said Martin Younkins. “He didn’t mean it.”

  “I meant it, every pin,” said Nahum. “I meant she must go, she must go, this marks the Common Era in Truitt’s Alleys, we may begin our mission.”

  “It’s a bowling alley for Chrissakes,” said Jack Silver.

  “Yes, for His sake,” said Nahum. “I do not blame you, gal, for your blindness. I myself were raised to believe there were no difference between man and woman or if yes then it were a small difference, that man and woman were as business partners and everything agreed upon but that an’t true. Indeed, the female sex is smarter and foxier as has been so since the Garden, and therefore the male of the species must be stronger. Only then is it even, in life as in marriage. Goodbye,” he said to LuEtta Mood. “It is time for you to go.”

  “Give me—”

  “Now,” roared Nahum. He looked sideways at Jeptha Arrison. The man had a daft canine look on his face, openmouthed, trying to make up a mind. Best smack him across the snout. The man even shook hands like a dog, offered it up at a soft-wristed angle, and Nahum took it. Jeptha’s hand seemed to grow in Nahum’s, till one hand engulfed the other. He stretched to whisper in Nahum’s ear. Poor soul, thought Nahum, ignorant of the ways of the world, and me, a stranger, the only one he can speak to.

  “I believe,” whispered Jeptha Arrison to Nahum Truitt, “I believe—”

  “What is it, child?”

  “I believe you’re going to hell,” Jeptha whispered, his voice calm as tar, and when he leaned away the assembled men assumed from the look on Truitt’s face that Jeptha Arrison must have finally bit somebody. LuEtta was already on the sidewalk. Jeptha leaned in again and said, “Me, too. I fiddled the pins for you, boss.”

  Then LuEtta and Jeptha were out on the sidewalk in front of Truitt’s Alleys.

  “Well, Lu,” said Jeptha. “I suppose there’s nothing for it but get married again.”

  “To who?” LuEtta asked wonderingly.

  Jeptha took her hand and LuEtta, like Nahum, felt its strange transforming properties, years of pinsetting tenderness and perfect timing. Who had ever understood her so well? The baby woke up then. She could feel his limbs reassemble after a long sleep.

  “To us,” he said. “I mean, each other. Will you, Lu?”

  She meant to say, I’m already married. Her husband was still then alive. She meant to say, Don’t be silly, I have a child, you cannot be a father. Instead she felt her torso open like a birdcage, and some part of her, either terrible or necessary, went flapping toward heaven, or at least past the belfry of the Methodist Church.

  “Will you, Lu,” he said again.

  Yes, in a way, she would.

  Inside, Nahum knocked the Zeno’s Gum machine off the front counter with one furious elbow. “Gum is for idiots and imbeciles,” he said to the stunned men. “They mistake a piece of gum in their mouths for a thought in their heads.”

  Joe Wear Evaporates

  In the middle of that night, Joe Wear woke to the shift and shuffle of somebody sitting on the edge of his bed. He’d grown up in an orphanage, he’d been woken in the night by strangers a dozen times. In sleep he was always the same abandoned child found by the wrong person: his first instinct was to pretend he was unconscious till such a time as he could not reasonably do so. Then the grown-up part of him drained of dreams. “Jep,” he said, but it wasn’t Jep.

  “These are no bad lodgings,” said Nahum Truitt.

  “Suppose not,” said Joe. “Do something for you?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Nahum. “Not bad lodgings at all. Not a bad bed you have here.” He gave a clattering phlegmy sigh. “I have been turned around in the dark, Wear. Give me this.”

  By this he meant Joe’s left hand, set on the old flowered counterpane, and by give he meant he would take it in both of his. The kitchen light tossed a bit of pewter from its tin shade onto the bed. Nahum’s hands were as tendinous as most men’s feet; Joe’s hand was the leather mitt of a laborer, muscle and threat. He thought about punching Nahum, what it would mean, how it would feel.

  “You’re an oblique one, an’t you, Wear?”

  “Beg pardon,” said Joe, not a question.

  “An invert. Not of this world. Listen, I recognize.”

  His touch on another human being was as ungainly as on an inanimate object. The bones at the back of his hand stood out in shadow like the ribs on a lady’s fan. “I can cure you,” he said, in a voice that might have been threat and might have been seduction. “I’ve done
it before, Wear.”

  “Cure?” said Joe. “Of what? Of myself?”

  “We are all afflicted with the disease of us,” Nahum agreed. “We are dying of it.”

  He took one of his hands away and Joe was grieved to realize he missed it. Turned around in the dark. What direction were you headed, when you went into the dark in the first place and then got turned around? Nahum put his free hand behind him, on Joe’s ankle, then lay back across Joe’s thighs, and in this way they made a cross in the bed. “My mother wouldn’t forgive me, for all that I have done,” said Nahum.

  “Bertha?”

  Nahum said nothing. Then, to the ceiling, “I am going to the State of Maine. Will you come with me? You need forgiveness, too.”

  Joe said the same nothing.

  “You will not,” said Nahum, as though putting his foot down. “For what? For murder.”

  “I didn’t ask you for what,” said Joe, though his blood turned to mercury at the accusation.

  “No man deserves to burn to death,” said Nahum. “Not even that one. You thought you got away with it.”

  “No,” said Joe Wear, to all of it. The accusation was as awful years later as it had been at the time. The way falseness made you doubt yourself, it deformed your very shadow, the grammar of your soul. He’d been led to believe that innocence was a pure feeling, cleansing, it would spirit away guilt and cowardice. That wasn’t true. Innocence stung. It’d be easier to be accused of things he’d done.

  Nahum’s weight across his legs hurt. Still the man was talking. Had he ever stopped? Did he, ever?

  “I shall retrieve Mrs. Truitt, of whom I so often fondly speak. When I am back we shall change things.”

  “When?” asked Joe.

  “I am going today.”

  “Today?”

  “This morning. It’s morning.”

  Joe looked at the windows and saw it was true. From the alley below came the sound of balls being bowled along the returns.

  “What’s that?” said Nahum. He startled from the bed and staggered to the kitchen table.

  “Jep, I imagine. He comes in nowabouts most mornings.”

  Nahum looked like he was about to leap to the tabletop like a treed cat. “That moron’s come back?”

  “’Pears so. You’ll need him.”

  “Pinboys are everywhere.”

  “He’ll die here if he’s allowed.”

  “By God.” Nahum slapped at the kitchen light and sent it swinging. Joe closed his eyes against the hammering flash. “This place,” said Nahum. “I was not meant for this place.”

  “Salford?”

  “The entire wicked world,” said Nahum. “You know what that fool said to me before he took the gal away?” He turned to look at Joe with his squintish sulfur eyes. “You know what he had the nerve to say?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “Never you mind what he said, Wear,” said Nahum. “I expect he regrets it still.”

  When Nahum Truitt returned from Maine with a set of luggage and a woman in a lavender traveling suit, it was Jeptha Arrison behind the glass counter who said hello. Spring—a verdant backed-up burble that ran down the streets—was lapping over the threshold of Truitt’s and inside. The woman’s hat was felt and bell shaped and trimmed with artificial violets.

  “This is Mrs. Truitt,” Nahum said to Jeptha Arrison. “She will be your mistress.”

  “She’ll be my what?” said Jeptha Arrison.

  “Your boss,” said Nahum. “This is Mrs. Truitt.”

  “This is Maragret Vanetten,” corrected Jeptha. “Hello, Meg! How ever have you been?”

  “The former Margaret Vanetten,” said Nahum, perturbed. “Yes. Currently Mrs. Truitt. We were married at the Church in the Woods. We have honeymooned at Boothbay Harbor and now we have returned to leap into marital bliss.”

  “We’ve leapt!” said Margaret.

  “Apparently we’ve leapt.”

  They were holding hands. Nahum’s beard had been topiaried into a kind of basin into which the former Margaret Vanetten could nestle her head. She did just that.

  “Hello, Jep,” she said. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

  “Hello, Meg,” he said again. Then to Nahum, “Where’s your wife, boss?”

  “Here before you, as I say,” said Nahum. “A Mrs. Truitt of one week, but nevertheless and for the rest of her life.”

  “Meg is?” said Jeptha.

  “Call me Mrs. Truitt,” she said, as though granting him an intimacy.

  “But where’s your wife?” Jeptha asked.

  Nahum Truitt removed Margaret Truitt from his beard, so that Jeptha might better look. “I am a widower, Jeptha Arrison. I’ve told you that. Dead these ten years. Dead without issue. I were alone in the world, until I met my Margaret. Jeptha Arrison,” said Nahum. “You said something to me. As you left.”

  Sometimes Jeptha’s pale eyes were glitteringly blank. Then there was a drawing together of his features, a suppressed smile, a near rakish intelligence visible there. “Well, boss, I helped you out. You don’t think you could beat her straight forward, do you.”

  Nahum nodded uncertainly, though that wasn’t what he’d meant.

  “Not Lu. The angels are on Lu’s side. But I was on yours.”

  “Well,” said Nahum, glancing at the current Mrs. Truitt. “Perhaps this will cure her of feminine athletics.”

  “She’ll bowl yet but elsewhere. No, they’d kill her. From the pit I could tell all. For instance, what might you do?” Jeptha looked at Nahum with what seemed to be fondness. “Even you don’t know, my guess.”

  “Jeptha!” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt.

  “Never mind,” said Nahum grandly. He slapped the counter. “Today our new life begins. Where’s Joe Wear?”

  “Don’t know,” said Jeptha.

  “Well, ask someone.”

  “Someone knows nothing same as me,” said Jeptha. “Gone.”

  For years the Half Nickels would say, “Joe Wear would know the answer to that,” but Joe Wear was nowhere around. He had left not one forwarding detail. He wasn’t the last of his kind but he’d been acting like it, for decades now. Buried alive. Where would he go? Elsewhere. He took his head full of bowling straight out of Massachusetts, and did not return for many years.

  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. The disappeared and misattributed. The pathetic life spans of dead children, the greedy awful life spans of the very old. She came to a tragic end. That’s as true for the plummeted teenager (a Barcelona balcony, a broken romance) as it is for your great-aunt, dead at 103 after years of silent confinement, who has turned, it seems, into soap and slough. You will be born soon. You’re promised. What damage you’ll do to the family tree is in your hands. That’s for later. Patience.

  3

  Betrothed and Beholden

  Once upon a time, happily ever after, was never seen again. Such things are only true in the storybook world, not ours. Once upon a time there was a little girl—no, there have been millions of little girls, at all times. They lived happily ever after—but after the disaster, your happiness is always shadowed by the closeness of your escape. Never seen again—you can’t stop seeing the dead wolf opened like luggage on the bed, his turned-out stomach embossed with the pattern of your grandmother’s lace bonnet, his intestines perforated by her kicking heels. The dead are seen over and over, and most of the living.

  Once upon a time there was a girl. Then she was again.

  She was a parcel of a person, Margaret Vanetten, left and stored and sent away, sent away again. Left by her mother on the steps of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Raised by nuns who thought they might make a nun of her—nuns are more discerning than wolves, they don’t think any old naked left-behind baby is automatically one of them. Sent by those nuns to be in service to rich peculiarities living in a ridiculous house. �
�Are they adopting me?” she’d asked Sister Catherine.

  “Adopting?” said Sister. “Margaret Mary, you are fifteen years old.”

  Margaret waited for the rest of the answer a long time. Seventy years later she would die waiting.

  On the train north with Minna she had watched New England fly by and thought: we could get off anywhere. Hadn’t she raised that girl from a baby? Shouldn’t she be allowed to have the child instead of those Canadian strangers? She and Minna could make a life together. People might not believe the colored child was hers; then again, the baby’s own mother was lily white, just like Margaret (though Margaret suspected there was something dusky and foreign in Bertha’s past: Jewess, or Persian). Minna might pass, for Jewish, or Persian. She was born pale—Margaret knew because she’d been there—though she’d darkened up, with olive skin and green eyes. But where would they go? There was no house in the world that would take Margaret in, apart from the octagonal one from which she’d been cast out. From which she and Minna had been cast out. How could Dr. Sprague have done it?

  On that northbound train she dared herself to think about getting married, having children. She was twenty-seven already, spinsterish at her toes and fingertips, singularity creeping up her limbs. She might marry somebody small, modest. Somebody like limping Joe Wear, who was likewise employed by Truitt: she might be allowed as little as him. A pinboy’s worth of happiness. They would have little candlepin babies. They would take in Minna: a girl needed a mother and father, even queer ones such as themselves would make. Minna would have brothers and sisters at last.

  Dr. Sprague had paid for a compartment with a fold-down bed that folded up into seats. Your mother is dead, Margaret thought at Minna, though nobody knew that for sure. The girl had her diary in her lap. She didn’t understand it was a history book. Her mother had put her golden brown hair into two plaits the day before, the last record of her motherlove, now unraveling at the top.

  “Do you think they’ll recognize me? My aunt and uncles.”