Dreams Carved of Wood
His older brother, Roy, was a self-contained child, sedentary and bookish, but Arch Truitt opened things. Doors, cupboards, purses, pockets of trousers left on the floor, pockets of occupied trousers, packages of powdered soap. He was an investigator, a rifler. It confounded his parents, who both had assumed that children knew the line between the childish and adult world, and would ask permission to cross it. Roy had been that sort of child, at least when it came to the physical, but here was Arch, butter-blond and blithe and laughing. Even so when they found him, at four, in bed asleep with the doll, they assumed Roy, then five, was to blame. That doll was as big as Arch. Bigger. How could he have carried it there without the sound of her wooden heels against the wooden floor?
Margaret, standing over the bed, was the one who’d discovered the child and the doll. The doll’s head was on the pillow next to Arch’s, though faceup. His lips were at her neck. Her head, crudely sewn of white duck, was a lopsided bulb, not much of a chin, not much of a nose, though the face itself had been hand-painted and was poignant.
“Holy!” Margaret whispered before astonishment shut her up.
She’d thought at first it was the Salford Devil, come back from the stories and curled into her child’s bed. It was a put-together thing, same as the Devil, with one beautiful carved wooden arm outside of the covers, plus that worn bolster of a head: it reminded her of a woman she’d once seen with hyacinth blue eyes and a jaw swollen by a purpling growth, a woman deformed and beautiful simultaneously, not one state despite the other. The doll’s eyes were green and large, the mouth, near where the head tapered into something like a neck, sherbety, lips parted to show little painted teeth. The doll was having a good time. Margaret uncovered the body—a white duck torso, happily unpainted but buxom, unnippled, unnaveled, unnellied; wooden limbs that looked real. Arch was still asleep, one hand on the doll’s large lopsided right breast.
By then Roy was awake, and Nahum stood in the door of the bedroom. “What’s going on?” yawned Roy. The summer heat had pasted his nightshirt to his stomach. “What’s that?”
“It’s Bertha,” said Margaret.
“Bertha?” said Nahum, stepping awkwardly into the room, which he generally considered a place for women and children; bedtime and awakening were a mother’s job. But intruders fell to fathers, and here was an intruder. He tossed aside the blanket.
The doll was calm and barefoot. Unlike china dolls who showed their teeth, she seemed unworried, like she was about to pick up a check. “Bertha,” Margaret said. “Without a doubt.”
“Well,” said Nahum uncomfortably. “She got fat. Archie,” he said. “Archer. Wake up.”
He wouldn’t, he only snuggled in, gripped the one breast harder. Margaret turned away.
“Arch,” said Nahum, and walked through the back door of the boy’s dreams, and made everyone there scatter, the dogs, the man with the mechanical swan, the miniature women, and Arch was up and blinking. “Who’s her?” he asked of the doll. He touched her painted hair, her painted ear rememberingly, and answered his own question. “I found her.”
What do you do with an effigy like that? Where could it go? Margaret wanted to install it in the alley. Nahum wanted to burn it; he knew he couldn’t burn it. Drown it, but dolls don’t drown. Give it away, though what child, other than Arch, would cuddle a thing like that? Put her in a rowboat and send it down the Salford estuary. Put it in the fens and let the animals decide. Bury it in the Salford Cemetery. Seal it in a wall. Put it in a chair and offer it sweets. Build it a little house where it might be happy forever. Give it to the prop mistress at the Salford Theater, so that it might tread the boards. Donate it to a ventriloquist who might make it a better head—no, no, best not give it the power of speech, uncanny enough silent. Buy it a train ticket to Hollywood. Try to find her people. Write letters to her breathing double—no, her double was dead, of course, though surely only Bertha would know what to do about the wooden Bertha.
Nahum hated the thing and kept locking her in the basement. Arch loved the thing and pulled her up the stairs to cuddle her, took her back to his bedroom. Roy alone was indifferent, though it amused him to use her to model items from the lost and found—scarves, hats, spectacles. Margaret sewed the doll a suit: a divided skirt, a double-breasted vest, rolled sleeves, an annular hat, and sat her up on the oak counter at the front of the house.
The worst was Jeptha Arrison, who sometimes when he finished his pinsetting shift took the seat next to her at a table, and held her hand, and said nothing. Once he set the doll out along the glass counter at the front and rubbed linseed oil into its joints. “Oh dear, oh dear: her brains is coming out.” He poked some horsehair stuffing into the seam of the doll’s head. “She does not like that.”
“Doesn’t she?” said Margaret, spooked by the feminine pronoun. “That smells flammable.”
“She’s fine,” said Jeptha. “Our girl’s not the type to burn.”
Margaret was uneasy, looking at Jeptha massaging the doll’s knees, feeling his own knees for reference, returning to the doll. “Where did she come from?”
“Heaven,” said Jeptha.
She shook her head.
Nahum looked broodingly at the doll. “It is a cursed thing. I cannot see an end to it that does not call down terrible luck.”
Her face was pale, her limbs were tan. You could see every knuckle, hear the blood beating beneath the varnish. Sometimes bowlers took her into their laps. They weren’t respectful. It would have been better if her expression hadn’t been so jolly.
Her face got grimy. Someone bit her breast. Somebody drew on pubic hair, which Margaret with averted eyes bleached out with a brush. There were rumors the doll was found in a different place in the alley every morning.
“Boris!” sobbed Arch. That was what he had named her. “Boris!”
Finally she disappeared. Nobody took responsibility.
But who is Bertha,” Roy wanted to know.
“Nobody,” said Margaret. “Founder of the alleys. Original Truitt.”
“Original Truitt,” said Roy. “So—a relative? We’re related to the founder? Bertha Truitt.”
“Well,” said Margaret. “Yes.”
“How?”
“For heaven’s sake,” said Margaret.
“Papa’s mother? We could do a family tree.”
“No use,” said Margaret. “We’ve been pruned.”
“But—”
“Who are you looking for, for heaven’s sake!” said his mother. “Aren’t I enough for you? And your father. Greedy,” she said to Roy, “that’s your problem.”
(How she talked too often: she thought something mean, thought, you can’t say that, and then she was saying it, knowing it awful, so she didn’t even get the pleasure of meanness.)
Margaret looked at her son. He was pale and freckled and redheaded and looked like nobody she’d ever seen before in her life. She thought, accusingly, as she often did, I made you. Any trace of Bertha Truitt had been stored in the cellar before Margaret had come back to it; there was no trace in Roy himself, except perhaps the plumpness. “Roy,” she said. “I can’t tell you. Don’t ask Papa. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Why not can’t I ask?”
“You know why,” said Margaret. Roy didn’t know why, but he did know that. His father had a way of stopping questions before you asked them.
But they couldn’t keep Bertha out that easily. Not just by never saying her name aloud. If Roy went looking—when Roy went looking—he would find the scrapbooks, the framed newspaper clippings, the monogrammed wallets, the photographs. Bertha herself was still everywhere, and Nahum, on dark mornings, could believe that the doll had assembled itself out of leftover emanations.
The bad luck snuck in bit by bit, misfortune to trial to catastrophe—or else it had always been there, like a basement infestation driven at last up through the floorboards. Or else it was only the luck they deserved, having not lo
oked after their wooden matriarch. One afternoon, the strength tester that Bertha had so loved to dominate threw up a fountain of sparks when Jeptha Arrison squeezed it. It was the last place you could put your hand and pretend, for a moment, that you were shaking hands with Truitt, put your mouth to the tube where her mouth had been. The bowling balls, yes, it was possible, but balls were rotated through the lanes, they rolled back at odd angles, were eventually retired: you’d never know for sure. That was why Jeptha loved the strength tester, and the shock it gave you when you failed to squeeze hard enough (Jeptha never squeezed hard enough), a tickling pain in all the public and private parts of him, the curve of his cheeks and his giblets and oysters. Then the machine sent him to the hospital.
The three black-and-white cats who lived at Truitt’s—a mother and her children—died one after the other after eating rats who’d eaten poison laid out at Coop’s Cafeteria next door.
Arch caught measles and they were all quarantined. “Quarantine comes from the Latin for ‘forty,’” Roy said, he who knew too much of the ancient world and scorned the modern one. Nahum and Margaret got the measles, too, but Roy was fine. He heated up soup and nursed everyone. This means he will take care of me, thought Margaret in her fever. This means I will escape, Roy thought, because I can take care of myself.
The furnace caught whooping cough, whooped, whooped, whooped, never recovered. The pipes in their grief for the furnace froze and burst and wept over lane ten, which warped and rotted.
Martin Younkins of the Salford Half Nickels, the team of war veterans, stepped in front of the Salford Bugle truck one cherry-spring evening, league night, the air full of possibility and pollen. “He flew across the road!” said a witness, but he didn’t, he was killed on impact, he never flew again. The rest of the Half Nickels heartbrokenly rolled away from Truitt’s forever.
Nahum blamed the doll. They were not yet ruined—that would come later—but they could not do without luck, which meant he needed to find her. He could never find things, even the wrench in his hand, the name of a regular bowler. The way he misplaced things had always made Joe Wear shake his head. Joe Wear found things. It was one of his talents.
“Wherever do you suppose that fellow went?” Nahum asked Margaret one night in their bed. Astonishing how she’d made their bedroom over, with a knit throw over a quilt and flowered curtains, though the iron bed incarcerated them, and the radiator made a tin-cup-on-prison-bars sound.
“Who?”
“Joe Wear, when he went so sudden.”
“He might be anywhere,” said Margaret in a cheerful voice.
“Where were his people from?”
“Ireland. All dead now. He might be dead himself. He was a sickly thing.”
At that Nahum sniffed the air, as though for evidence, wound the tassels of the coverlet in his fingers. What he wanted was a coarse wool blanket, one that would rub a rash across his neck and onto his cheek; he wanted to yank his wife’s knit monstrosity by its useless tentacles right off the bed. He wanted to holler, but he knew it would do no good. His first wife had responded to shouts—she took herself away, for an hour, a day, finally for good—but Margaret was immune to noise. She didn’t pay him the least attention when he shouted; she answered in her usual voice. She might even sing her answer. Her conscience was astonishingly clear, always.
“What of the Truitt fortune?” said Nahum now. “The gold, I mean, she come here with.” But he didn’t really know how money worked, whether it was staggering the money had been squandered or a miracle it had lasted so long.
“Gone. Into the house and into this place. It’s been years.”
“Disappeared.”
“Spent.”
“I suppose. But the doll. Where is she?”
“Someone stole her as a joke. Perhaps she’ll come back. You see, Nim,” she teased. “There was another woman here all along.”
“She left with our luck.”
“No,” said Margaret.
“She was the plank what held it up.”
“You miss her,” said Margaret. “You miss your mother.”
“I miss the doll. I require the doll. Some idiot has hid her.”
He’d been in Salford eight years by then, and he had never meant to stay, only to secure his fortune and leave. Find the gold, if there was gold yet, or empty the bank account. He had a right. But then he had fallen into the long con of marriage, and lately he realized the gold must be gone. Spent, or swept into the harbor. He’d looked floor to ceiling in the Octagon, though by law he was not allowed to be there, and he had hated every moment of the search. The safe in the cellar of the alley was empty; he slammed the door shut and set the wheel spinning. Then he opened the safe again, as though the wheel might have pulled it up from some deep hiding place. Why had he stayed all those years? Why had he married that funny little woman? For the most appalling reason. He loved her. He could not live without her.
In the morning he would look for the wooden figure. He had hated living with that spurious Bertha but apparently he could not live without her. Much like the actual Bertha. He would look for the gold, too, cellar to roof, but he knew he would never find it. No, he told himself, you must believe that you will, that is luck, too, you conduct it with your brain. No man who felt unlucky was ever luckstruck.
Who was he? Who had he ever been?
Nahum Truitt, just as he said. Never Bertha’s son. Only her first husband, from whom she’d gotten her name and from whom she’d gotten bowling. She’d stolen her first candlepin from him, her first bowling ball, then she’d broken his heart and left him for Leviticus Sprague. They had met in Sacco, Maine. They’d parted in Boothbay. She was a tyrant. She was a thief. He loved her yet.
Years later he would die with these truths upon his lips. He loved everyone he had ever loved.
Margaret Overcome
In 1932 Nahum Truitt went to Picardi’s Barbershop in Phillipine Square to have the beard shorn from his face. He looked at the long mirror, his reflection surrounded by all the blades of the business, which meant he was, too. He trusted Picardi to put the sharpest blade to his very neck; he trusted himself not to wrest the razor away to do something terrible, to himself or someone else. Time was he wouldn’t have trusted himself. Therefore the beard.
Would he look older or younger without it? He’d grown it not to change his age but to hide his face, the nervous smile that had always brought him trouble. A liar needs a beard, but today he would tell his wife the truth.
These things were true:
He loved her.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was killing him.
He did not love bowling.
He was not Bertha Truitt’s son.
They were flat broke. No, they were at the bottom of a crater.
They would move to the State of Maine, all of them, and there—assured of his luck, once and for all!—he would stop gambling.
They would be happy the rest of their days.
This was it. The last day he could stand Salford. If she did not say yes he would leave her, and the boys, and Massachusetts forever.
He couldn’t quite order these facts in his mind. Start with the good news? Interweave? As for preamble:
Meg, I have news. I have good news. I have unfortunate—I have come to an unfortunate conclusion. I can explain. I can’t. Let’s away.
I am not myself, Meg, and have not been since you have known me, and long before. I love you.
(What about the boys? He loved them but could not say so. Even the thought of it made him furious.)
Nahum had amassed debts. Deep ones, the sort you could drown in. You, and your whole family. If you believed in them. Nahum did not always believe in his own debts. They were a lack of money, they were imaginary, and he had always thought that if he threw just enough money at his debts or outran them altogether he really owed nothing.
Nahum Truitt had lost bets, though he was not alone: the whole country had lost bets, and jobs, and fortunes, s
o it was harder to work to take money off another fellow to replace what you’d lost. These days he skimmed cash from the day’s earnings for dumb wagers. He pitched pennies in the park; he went to watch the dogs run; he went to watch the horses run though when he did he had to wash the smell of horse away, else canine Jeptha would sniff it out, and balk, and tell. He bet on other bowlers all the time, though he no longer bowled himself, worried he would fall again into the hustle—you couldn’t both hustle and stay in one place without being well and truly beaten. He had been well and truly beaten in his life, with fists but also bowling balls, thrown by a big Gypsy in Bangor, like bombs going off. He was a pious gambler but now he felt his belief worn away by reality.
When the last bit of lather and bristle had been scraped away by the blade, he examined himself and saw his mistake. His face had lived in the wilderness so long it was unprepared for the eyes of humanity upon it, white, abraded by the razor, his very chin retreating. Behind him Picardi winced. It was that sort of lack of chin. You blamed the fellow for it.
“Voilà,” said Picardi in a voice of tragedy. He was a bald barber. He had transferred his tonsorial vanity to his customers.
“Thank you,” said Nahum.
“Don’t,” said the barber. “It’s my job.”
Nahum, revealed, went to meet the little wife for lunch and further revelation. (Jeptha was running the alley counter; he was still allowed to then.) Nahum would have liked to go to Coop’s for his last meal in Salford—he’d never eaten in a restaurant till he was in his forties, and if he were a millionaire he might never eat anywhere else—but his frugal wife insisted on packing sandwiches to consume in the park. Her body seemed to produce sandwiches without her knowledge. “It’s not that I don’t like restaurants,” she always said, “it’s just that I prefer my own cooking.” This was another inexplicable, terrifying quality of hers that he nevertheless admired. Her stinginess was how they’d managed to limp along as far as they had.
She wanted him to stop gambling, but he couldn’t. It was how he thought about the world. Gambling was a series of questions: Am I lucky? Am I favored? Am I unlike other men? Will I die alone? Am I loved? Am I respected? The answers to these questions came at once, and with great certainty. Then the certainty evanesced. That was the good news. You got to ask again. Only the wilderness could cure him, where there was no other man to wager against.
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