“I imagine so,” said Margaret. “Family knows family.” My darling. My dearest. You don’t need to go with those strangers, Minna, Margaret wanted to say.
They had been in Canada a long time already and had more Canada to go: Margaret, from Massachusetts, found this upsetting. The bigger the place, the more claustrophobic. They might never get out of Canada. She felt it close over her head like a coal mine.
At the train station in Fredericton, Benjamin Sprague stood next to his creamy green REO, one foot propped on the running board, looking like his brother except taller and thinner and unmustachioed and in a pair of new two-tone shoes of the sort Dr. Sprague never would have worn, shoes to go to the city in, and also he was lighter skinned, and with a nose that had once been broken—really, they looked only as alike as cousins, but he had the Sprague gravity. Margaret wished he would make decisions for her. “What news?” she asked him. The damp guarded look conveyed to Margaret that Bertha was dead, but they would wait to tell Minna. She started to sob. She reached to gather Minna in her arms, to whisper the scalding secret in her ear, but Minna had already climbed into the back of the Sprague motorcar, a fine sedan, and regarded her old nurse with dry eyes and a little horror.
“Minna!” said Margaret. “Will you write to me?”
The girl nodded.
“You’re homesick,” Benjamin said to Margaret in his deep voice, both sympathetic and imperative. He offered her a red paisley handkerchief, which she accepted and stuck in her pocket, though she knew that’s not what he’d meant. “You should go on home.”
She looked in her purse as though for her life. “I don’t have a ticket,” she said in a waterlogged voice. She wanted to be taken in with Minna, raised up by the Sprague siblings. Stranger things had already happened. But she understood that she and Minna had not been cast out together. Margaret had been cast out. The girl had been saved.
Benjamin Sprague pulled a roll of bills from his pockets. “For your service,” he said, handing her the bills, fake, clearly fake, no, Canadian. “Your folks’ll miss you. Thank you, I should say. Thank you for bringing our Minna to us.”
“Give me your address,” she said, “so I may write to my charge.”
“Charge no longer,” he told her, but he wrote it down on the back of a train schedule, in curvilinear script. Ah, there was the family resemblance: the strong Sprague S, the weak Sprague e. She folded the timetable and stuck it into her coat pocket.
She had no folks. She had no people. She waited for Benjamin Sprague’s REO to pull away and she walked into town, found a room in a hotel for women, found a job in a restaurant, stayed there for an entire year in case Minna needed her. She sent a note to Benjamin Sprague:
Dear Mr Sprague or are you also Dr, I shouldn’t be surprised with an educated family like you, if Minna wishes to find me I am working at Bach’s Cafeteria, I am there most days but will come anywhere.
Later she would remember this year as the loneliest and most peaceful of her life. She waited: for Minna, on customers. The Spragues would surely come to her. She wrote to Minna every week, till an envelope came back that said RETURN TO SENDER. No more explanation than that.
Benjamin Sprague was exactly right: Margaret Vanetten was homesick. She was homesick the same way she was anything else, from birth and forever. Born missing the womb, left off at the convent—she’d never had a bed to herself before going to work for Sprague and Truitt, and at first she couldn’t sleep for all the rooms and doors in that house.
She had loved Dr. Sprague like a father; she would never forgive him for sending her away. For all she knew, Minna had gone home once the worst of her father’s grief had passed. Two weeks, or two months—of course she would go back, taller but still a child, to comfort her father and sleep in her own bed. Now this envelope. She was the sender. Her love had been returned to her. Only Margaret had been forgotten. Only Margaret displaced forever. But Salford was her home, too. Those people could not keep her from it.
Not till she got back did she discover that Dr. Sprague was dead and the house boarded up. She couldn’t bear to stop by the bowling alley itself, to be among people who had known for so long what she, an idiot, had not: her life as she’d known it was over and she hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t felt the difference.
She was a hired girl again, working for a family who lived on Pinkham Square, who told her what a fine house theirs was, belonging to a fine family. In the foyer they kept a family tree, embroidered on linen, framed, enormous, stretching back to 1620. Her own family tree would have read, in its entirety,
Margaret (b. 1892?–d.)
She didn’t even know where her last name had come from. “It suits you,” Sister Catherine had said, as though it were a left-behind hat. Nobody behind her or ahead, just how Bertha had landed in Salford. Once Bertha had said to Margaret, “I didn’t mean to get caught up again in this whole business of families,” though Bertha had been cuddling two-year-old Minna at the time, and two-year-old Minna was particularly irresistible, a child who spoke in full sentences but still could see every supernatural corner of babyhood. “I never meant to be a line in the family Bible.”
That was all Margaret wanted. To be an ancestral entry. She’d been left at the Little Sisters of the Poor clutching a braided lock of unidentified light brown hair, as meaningless and meaningful an object as ever an orphan has inherited.
Her Pinkham lodging was a closet behind the kitchen. In the Octagon she’d had a second-floor bedroom, same floor as the family, odd shaped but good sized, and she walked to Somefire Hill every day to remind herself of the people she’d lost—Bertha, Dr. Sprague, Minna—as well as the house that had lost them all. Uninhabited, the whole place, every room. Could she break in? She still had a dress hanging in the cupboard, a hairbrush on the dresser. They had broken her heart in turn, the family, they had taken it apart like an orange, first peel (that was Bertha, dying), then the breakapart into pieces (Dr. Sprague, sending her away), then the eating up (Minna, who did not even cry as they separated forever). That hairbrush was hers by rights. The room was.
Then one day a tall bearded man likewise was walking on the lawn around the house. “Curious construction,” he said to her, “put up by curious people. Lost on me how people could live in such a space. Warps ’em, I would think. Odd angles here.” He tapped his head. “And also.” He thumped his heart.
“I could tell you,” said Margaret Vanetten.
“You tell me then,” said the man. “You tell me everything. I’m Nahum. Truitt. Bertha’s child. Whoa, stand up, gal, whatever is the matter with you?”
Margaret had sat down on the lawn in shock. “You’re alive!”
“So far I am,” he admitted. “You might keep me live longer.”
“I’d figured you for a stillborn,” she said and then covered her mouth with her hand. What a thing to say aloud! Then again, she’d never heard about Nahum Truitt from Bertha, only from Jeptha Arrison.
At this the man sat down next to her on the lawn. He didn’t have to worry about grass stains on his dark pants, though she could feel the stains on her own. She remembered, all of a sudden, being a child and learning that grass could do that, paint your clothing green so you’d never forget it: what a wonder that was. The man’s face was long, sad, sincere. “No,” he said, “that wasn’t me. No. I survived. Lived. Outlived.”
A squirrel came up to regard them. There were always squirrels on Somefire Hill, brown brawny ones, but this was their squirrel, and it sat back on its haunches, and under the circumstances it was impossible to ignore how much such a squirrel looks like a preacher come to marry a couple, consulting his tiny Bible.
Oh, she was a rotten judge of character, she knew it, she never foresaw who would stand up for her and who would betray her and she alternately believed that she would be looked after by good people, and that she was doomed to be taken advantage of by callous ones. Regarding this man she felt both things at once.
“Well I’m glad,�
�� said Margaret. Because that sounded forward, she added, “No mother should outlive her child, it’s unnatural.”
He put one hand to the back of his neck. “What happens in nature is natural. Commonest thing in the world. The Lord God has his reasons.”
“Are you Catholic?” she asked.
He said, “Small c.”
She took that to mean yes, but not devout. By the time she found out otherwise it was too late, a week later, at their wedding in Rockland, Maine. Overwhelming in a way: the thumping oak of his voice, his height, his furred body—somebody should have told her that men could be so bodily whiskered. That skeletal Maine minister who married them, perhaps. The conductor who took their tickets for the train. Not that it would have changed her mind but just to sit quietly ahead of time and contemplate.
She was a married woman and everyone knew. Nearly all of the time it delighted her, his size, his rumbling overgrowth. Not a boyish iota to Nahum Truitt, and that conferred upon her (she believed) a seriousness, that she had married such a man.
Nahum was not interested in tales of his sister, lost somewhere in Canada; her name was not to be mentioned. Neither was Bertha’s, nor Dr. Spague’s. Why had he married her at all? She had imagined she was a way into his family. She’d known them, still possessed a store of love for them all kept in fine shape in the cupboard of her heart, that she might divide and share. No: he was not interested. He and she were the Truitts now.
Astonishing how quickly one’s origins fly to dust. Salford had forgotten that Bertha Truitt had been found unconscious in a cemetery without the expected underclothes; Salford forgot, mostly, at least for a time, that Nahum Truitt’s maternity had ever been in question, that Margaret Vanetten had been the hired girl. The new Truitts ran the bowling alley and lived in the little quarters overhead. They moved to the apartment above the alley, where Joe Wear had lived, which he had vacated so thoroughly it was as though he had never existed—all but the toilet by itself in the closet, a cubicle of such filth that Margaret preferred to use the ladies’ room downstairs in the alley.
A mile away, on Somefire Hill, the Octagon stood empty, a board over the front door and cataracts of dirt across the windows, though the grounds were kept tidy enough, the lawn mowed. “It were built to pagan specifications,” Nahum said, when asked. “We’ll have nothing to do with it.” Storehouse for ghosts, or more likely the Truitt fortune, because the one thing nobody forgot was money. There must have been treasure in every obtuse corner of that house, and the new Truitts misers who wore all black (him) and all purple (her) because neither color showed dirt. Saved on washing. The Octagon surely held their hoard.
Well,” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt, once installed in the bowling alley, “let us get to work. Mr. Arrison. Tell me what you know.”
“The pins,” he said. “The pins and the pins. You take the stool, Meggie. Joe Wear knew the business of it but I only know the pins. Except—” he said, in a voice full of meaning.
“Yes,” said Margaret.
“I am acquainted also with the bowling balls. Acquainted, but my love is for the pins. Let me help you up.”
He did, onto the high stool behind the front oak desk. The back of the desk was a warren, and Margaret now its warrener.
“There’s money for you.” Jeptha indicated a stack of bills rubber-banded together in a cubby. “There’s the bank book. Joe Wear would know all but he is gone.”
She took the afternoon to go through each cubby. She found more cash that hadn’t made its way to the bank. In those days they still kept score on chalkboards hung on the wall, but there were scraps of paper upon which Joe Wear had mapped interesting matches, or imaginary ones. You could tell they’d been written with the stubs of pencils.
In the bottom row, she drew out what she thought at first might be a forgotten sandwich. One of Dr. Sprague’s, no doubt; Margaret had always found him peculiarly forgetful about sandwiches. A wax paper packet, still a little greasy. She unwrapped it and found a stack of letters. From Minna, to her father. The return address was not the farm in Oromocto, but Paris. Another foreign country.
Oh. She held the envelopes as though they were Minna’s hands. Yours. Not hers. Thick cream paper. Sealed with blue wax, dramatic, like Minna herself, severed by Dr. Sprague. Men were bowling on their lanes. She pulled out one note, just enough to see the date, September 10, 1919, mere months after Minna had ridden off in the green REO. So all that time she’d waited in Fredericton, all those letters that Margaret had written: Minna was already gone.
She would not read them. Of course she would read them, just not yet. Sitting at the oak desk at Truitt’s Alleys, she wrote to Minna Sprague, 44 Rue du Temple, Paris. She wrote on the long paper that spun off a spool, used for receipts. She folded it into an envelope. Would Minna recognize the address in the corner? Margaret herself wouldn’t have: she thought of the alley as being in Phillipine Square, but the actual address was 74 Mims Avenue. She added Apartment 1. She omitted Truitt. Why? Oh, she would explain things soon enough but for now she meant to be only Minna’s Margaret, and not Minna’s, what was she—she burst out laughing. She was Minna’s sister-in-law.
Well, Margaret understood relics. She jettisoned the wax paper and tied the bundle with blue ribbon. She hid the bundle at the back of a bottom cubby, where Nahum would never find it.
She got a letter back, from Minna, Parisian Minna. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you!
It was a short letter, well spelled, unsentimental. No blue wax seal. It explained that she had moved from Oromocto with her aunt a few weeks after her arrival; her aunt could teach her the cello—of course Minna should play the cello—but Minna’s voice required training and of that Almira Sprague was ignorant. Her father was dead, had Margaret heard, of course she must have heard, being back in Salford. She signed herself as ever.
Margaret read the letter five times. Then she was out of words and she allowed herself to read Minna’s letters to her father.
She could tell the difference. Minna’s letters to her father were strange casseroles, made of language, yes, but only sometimes in English: words of such foreignness they felt like cold spots in the warm lines of Minna’s sentences. (Latin, French, Italian, probably, even little prickly lines of what Margaret assumed was Greek.) Also sudden bars of music, pencil drawings, watercolors. Was it that Minna and her father didn’t understand each other, so she wrote in as many languages as possible, hoping to find the one in which they were both fluent? Or was it that they understood each other so utterly that this was how they communicated? She wrote in rebuses and code. One letter began, My own Papa! This is a lipogram. It’s lacking. Do you know what it lacks, my darling Papa? Hint: a small thing, but without it you & I cannot sign our patronym, nor you your first.
Minna’s letter to Margaret was in ordinary English. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you! You say you would recognize me anywhere. I wonder. I am quite made over. In answer to your question: no, I don’t think I will ever come back to Salford. Not ever. You must understand that it is a place of terrible memories for me, worse than you know. Not ever, she wrote again, and here she underlined it, and underneath the word ever—silly to think so, and yet it was true—Margaret could see a hint of the child she’d known. The paper was torn. So not ever and yet in a way here she was. Not ever and as ever.
For every five letters she sent to Minna she got one back. They were matter-of-fact, as though to a distant friend, enough, the way you might send pennies to the electric company when you owed hundreds of dollars: not square, but you wouldn’t be cut off. Margaret tied her letters, her paltry archive, with blue ribbon, too.
Nahum made over Joe Wear’s old apartment, moved the toilet to the other side of the apartment, added a sink. Bought a fine new electric icebox with a monitor top.
“What else would you like, Meggie?” he asked. “Say the word.”
She would like not to live above a bowling alley, with th
e smoke that came up through the floorboards. She would like to say, “Now that we are married, we can bring Minna home!” But Minna was a far-off dream, and Nahum was real, and she loved him. You gave things up for love. The nuns had taught her that. What she wanted was the house and she imagined Minna owned it and she imagined Minna should give it to her, after all she’d done for her.
He left alone the kitchen-side tub, that he might sit at the table late at night and watch Margaret in her bath, so little all he could see was her head on the lip at the higher end, one languid dripping hand on the edge, until the moment—it was staggering suspense, you never knew when it would happen—she would chide herself for sloth and stand streaming, as though hoisted in the air, not a freckle on her pale body, not a mole, not a scar, immaculate Meg!, even when she fell pregnant, once (that was Roy, professorial even as a baby), twice (Arch, a flirt, also from birth). No little girls. That was for the best, little girls didn’t belong in bowling alleys. Leave the bathtub, watch the boys like otters in their evening wash, always (Nahum thought) on the verge of drowning each other: you knew, when you were that young, that the point of life was to win no matter how you managed it.
It seemed a bewitchment to Margaret. A storeroom became a bedroom. A hired girl a wife. A woman could become a mother, even without meaning to. Some days she closed her eyes and tried to remember that other path, the one she’d been on, which she’d thought she hated. A single woman who had to work to keep herself alive. That whole year in Fredericton, waiting for the Spragues to come for her, washing dishes, putting aside her whole paycheck so she could build a home for Minna and herself and whoever else came along. When she remembered that girl she’d been, she saw the light all around her and thought, You were so miserable! And for what?
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.
Bowlaway Page 16
