Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “I fell asleep,” said Arch, but his brother was right. It was Saturday, June 26, at 2:30 P.M., the Year of Our Lord 1935, the eleventh year of Arch Truitt, and Arch was drunk, not for the first time.

  If not for beer, Arch Truitt might have become a pickpocket, a sneak thief, a Peeping Tom, a second-story man, a spy: what interested him were the secret compartments of adulthood, the things grown people cupped their hands around. Wallets, sex acts, lit cigarettes, whispers into ears. What things went on! So he went looking, and the first place he looked was a left-behind beer glass, and what was there satisfied his curiosity, piqued it, satisfied, piqued, satisfied.

  Arch drank beer ends. The warm of it, the way it went down the middle of your tongue then rolled to the edges bubblier in some places than in others; the way it spread out first at your shoulders and then at your hips. It tasted of bread infused with gold, a flavor inseparable from the way it unlaced his muscles, his way of thinking. It was as though his body ordinarily was a darkened room. Beer turned on the lights, warmed the furniture. Made him happy to be there. Filled him with joie de vivre (which is fatal in nearly all cases). He could drink beer for the rest of his life, he thought.

  Margaret refused to let Arch pinset after his accident. “He’s too sleepy,” she said, “it’s dangerous for him.” As though sleepiness were hemophilia. One side of his body was bruised like an autumn shadow. “He never fought sleep, not even as a baby,” said Margaret. She said it in a voice of admiration: he was a pacifist in the Army of the Wakeful. Let others fight sleep, let Arch act as distraction, sacrifice himself to his pillow and satin-bound blanket.

  “He’s lazy, you mean,” said Roy.

  “He’s sleepy,” said Margaret. “He can’t help it. Look at him. He’s meant for something else. Great things.”

  “Aren’t I?” cried Roy.

  His mother looked at him. The truth was, she knew nothing about fate, or destiny, or even tomorrow, but she knew she needed someone to take care of her and only one of her sons was capable. “Oh Roy,” she said. “Not all of us are.”

  Margaret didn’t mean to be cruel. She was only stupid; she’d had ideas put in her head. It felt to her later as though these thoughts had physically been put there by Nahum, solid thoughts she never could have manufactured on her own. Arch reminded her of Bertha, friendly and ruthless; Roy of her, a left-behind person who would always strive for love. What was keeping her in Salford, when everybody else had left? Duty. Some people were built for it and others weren’t.

  A Painted Kangaroo with a Pair of False Wings

  The wreck of Supersum still stood in those days, boarded up by the city. A colony of birds nested in the belvedere. Nocturnal, pelagic, monogamous, mysterious, ordinary dun-colored birds, but nobody knew what they ate, or where they went.

  The Audubon Society wrote to City Hall. Something must be done about the house, they said.

  We’ll tear it down, said City Hall, who’d been meaning to look into it for some time. They just had to write to the owner first.

  You can’t! said the Audubon Society. Not now!

  Why not?

  We’d thought these birds were extinct! To see one—

  —are you sure you saw it.

  —yes, said the Audubon Society coldly. Quite sure. As sure as we can be. Now, these birds only come inland to breed—

  Like sailors! said the old woman at City Hall.

  Some people, said the Audubon Society, say that they’re the ghosts of drowned sailors. They hover over the ocean to feed. They patter. They flutter. It’s amazing to see, if you could see it, but mostly you can’t.

  And they’re extinct?

  We thought the Cross-rumped—what we have here—was. The Ringed might be. The New Zealand: almost certainly. We know so little of these birds.

  Then how do you know they’re them?

  They are no good at walking, said the Audubon Society, ignoring the question. They never really do, their legs are so weak. But their wings! They can fly forever, or so we think. Amazing birds. Little married couples. They trade off incubation of the egg, father then mother then father then mother.

  Just one egg?

  One egg is enough, said the Audubon Society in a prim voice.

  The old gentleman at City Hall believed in the birds. He’d seen something flying home to the belfry in the early morning. What the old man thought: there were birds in the Octagon, and if the Audubon Society believed they were these extinct seabirds, then they were. The belief made it so. It was like love.

  But the old woman at City Hall had once been a young woman at City Hall. She had been there in 1903, when the Salford Devil had been sighted skulking along the squares at night, killing cats, terrifying women, shrieking at motorcars. City Hall had offered a bounty. What people brought in! An eight-foot gutshot snake. A small boy with his bellowing mother who wanted to teach him a lesson: “I have the Salford Devil here! I’ve come to ask the mayor to throw him in jail.” A curious foreign man presented a kangaroo (where did he get it?) painted the same lime green as the gas station, with a pair of wings fashioned out of a bifurcated umbrella. Most people who brought their devils forgot about the wings, but the wings were the essential part. The foreign man was deported; the kangaroo’s fate is unrecorded. One teenage girl carried, in a shoebox painted white, a dead bat dressed in a doll’s satin wedding dress, veiled, bouqueted, sides split to make room for its own born wings.

  “The Salford Devil!” said the then-young woman of City Hall, before she looked closer and saw the beauty of the folded ears, the furred cheeks.

  The girl was hurt. She cuddled the thing. “No, lady. She’s an angel. I found an angel.”

  “We didn’t ask for angels,” said the woman. “No rewards for angels, and I mean none.”

  A bat was a bat. A bird was a bird. You couldn’t make up a species by calling it by name, not petrel for Saint Peter, nor any of the other names the seabirds were known by: waterwitch, satanite, satanique, oieseau du diable. Bird of the Devil. Little rock.

  Anyhow, said the old woman of City Hall to the old man of City Hall, it was time to write to the owner of the house to straighten out its future.

  In this way, some months later, the owner of the abandoned house stood on Somefire Hill. (Supersum’s abandonment was finally as notable as its shape.) The neighbors took her for a stranger. They wondered whether to call the police. Bronze marceled hair, skin a shade darker, and a gap between her front teeth that made her look both voracious and elegant. Her tweed coat wasn’t the exact green of her eyes, but an altogether more alchemical color, and expensive, nipped in at the waist, the fur trim dyed to green plumage, the pockets angular and shocking. There was nothing about the coat that wasn’t magnificent. Its occupant looked like somebody who ate her dinner at midnight.

  Over the years Minna Sprague had thought of her old house, dreamt of it. She thought she remembered every room, the pantries and bedrooms, her father’s study, the belvedere, the peculiar number of closets, more rooms than any three people could need (she didn’t think to count as a resident Margaret Vanetten, whose bedroom had been next to hers). But she couldn’t do the geometry, she couldn’t make it fit: the second floor in her head was twice as big as the first, as though the house were not an octagon but a nautilus shell, a spiral around the spiral stairs.

  The letters from Margaret demanded love, which Minna had sent in homeopathic amounts, and very little else: postcards with her newest address (Toronto, Paris, New York, London, Paris again), reports on the weather, like any tourist. Who cared what the weather was like two weeks ago in Europe? It was something to say, something that cost Minna nothing. But the letters that Margaret sent got worse and worse.

  Minna darling I remember when you were a baby and I held you in my arms. I wish you were a baby again. Your mother come back from the bowling alley or from a trip for a tournament and you just crying for me. I looked after you so, Minna! Such a good baby. You didn’t miss your mother at all. Then you
got sent away and I thought that was a terrible thing. I was against that. I will say no bad thing against the dead but that was a terrible thing for your father to do when this was the home you knew. Some people will say he was broken but life breaks many people and they do not give up their children no matter their circumstance or family background. Come home, Minna. The house is big enough for all of us. When you marry I can nurse your babies for you, I am still a fine baby nurse. No matter how it looks to other people I don’t care. I was as a mother to you and I will be as a grandmother for your babies—Minna, come and I will explain all to you. I know you have love in your heart for me still because you were always such a fine and smart girl. I await your answer and I remain your loving Margaret Vanetten.

  The letter that Minna received from the city through her uncle Benjamin was something else again: she was responsible for the house, for the birds inside, unless she wanted to deed it over. Now she opened the kitchen door—when she was little they never used the front entrance, which was boarded over anyhow—and it felt as though the whole weight of the house had been resting on that lintel. She never should have come. She went in farther. She thought about taking off one of her stockings to breathe through, but it was cold and already she was nervous about the neighbors. She didn’t remember them kindly. She’d worn her most ostentatious clothes because she knew that the best camouflage was a kind of flagrancy: you didn’t have to worry how people took you so much if the first thing they noticed was that you were rich.

  The floors were not just dusty but covered in debris—chunks of plaster from the ceiling, bottles left behind by somebody who’d taken refuge there some years before. She understood that the neglect was her own, that she could have hired someone to fix the place up, rent it out. Then again, she’d been a child. What had her aunt and uncles been thinking? Well, they’d been mourning her father, too. The oldest brother. The smartest and quietest one. They did not know what they would do without him, never mind that he’d gone away, had married away, had written faithfully but rarely visited.

  She felt she might come across his body, or her mother’s, though her mother’s remains were buried in the Salford Cemetery and her father’s sealed in an urn up in Oromocto. The neighbors had called the house the Wedding Cake because of the tiers, and that was what the plaster was like, ruined cake. She touched a wall and it crumbled away in her hands. The house was beyond saving.

  She’d had an idea, when the letter had found her in Paris: she would donate the house and land to the city under the condition that it could be turned into a museum—not a museum devoted to her father (though Salford could do worse) but a history museum, with her father’s office preserved. In her father’s office, she was certain, was evidence. Of what? Of him, his strangeness, genius, goodness. Her mother she remembered as bosomy and flatulent, hot, grasping, an old woman already, when Minna was a young woman already.

  She could go up, look out the window and see what the birds saw, what her father had seen the last day he was happy. Wondering when his darlings would be back—Bertha from Boston, Minna and her nurse from the public library. They’d come down Mims Avenue. “You wave at me,” he’d instructed Minna. “You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.”

  The stairs were the best-built part of the house, and she climbed them to the second floor. The doors to all the bedrooms were shut. No, she wouldn’t open them.

  The roof had fallen in. Of course it had: it hadn’t been pitched right, and years and years of uncleared winter snow and melt had collapsed it. On the dark desk was a glass of wine that time had boiled the moisture from, leaving one ruby clot at the bottom. The desk was otherwise blank. The shelves were empty. He was beyond saving, too.

  In Oromocto, in his family, he was both prodigal and favored, gone away from them but never lost. His picture was in the parlor, the books he’d written around the house, and when she’d been sent there it was as if in recompense, as though she were coming back to lead his life, this light-skinned girlchild instead of their beloved Leviticus. She slept in his bed and inherited his old books and the depth of his siblings’ love: she was a loved child in Oromocto. “This was his real life,” her aunt Almira always told her. “He was so happy here. That woman made him miserable and left him to die in a bowling alley.”

  In a way she believed that still, she could feel a sort of misery, like the afterheat of fire coming up through the floorboards. It felt distinct, familial. This was what he’d chosen. The heat of her mother. She missed her mother now, she realized, the bustling bossiness of her. She remembered being—how old? Too big for it, but lying across her mother’s lap and sneaking a hand up her mother’s shirt just to feel the lovely fatness of her, that roll across the tummy, the boiling heat.

  You could get at her mother, she remembered now. Her father was always out of reach, overhead.

  She had known for a long time that her childhood was over, but now it was also lost. No museum. The house torn down. She told herself it had been good as torn down all those years she was away. The city could raze it and take the land—no, that’s right, they were worried about the birds. All right. Let the birds take it over, fill every floor with nest.

  Then she heard the pounding on the door.

  “The neighbors called,” said the woman behind the door. “Oh, my Minna.”

  Minna Sprague recognized Margaret: her brown hair in its childish bowl cut, her little hooked nose, the way her hands clutched at each other, the printer’s ink purple of her clothing. “My baby,” she said to Minna, very seriously, and then she folded her arms around her. It was an odd feeling, a powdered milk embrace, something like actual love but reconstituted from a packet.

  “Minna-bean,” said Margaret, a phrase so inane it unraveled the embrace. “How is it? The house.”

  Minna shook her head.

  “Let me see.”

  Inside, Minna found that porous Margaret Vanetten absorbed some of her terror. It helped to have company as she said goodbye to the house. “This is the front parlor,” said Margaret. “Just over the milk room. The kitchen. Oh! The sewing room!”

  “Who sewed? Not my mother.”

  “I did. You did, too.”

  “Not anymore,” said Minna. “I pay people to sew for me.”

  “Good for you, sweetheart,” said Margaret. “I was so happy here.”

  Margaret Vanetten Truitt opened the door to her room and there it was: the little single iron bed, still made up, the quilt she’d sewn herself grayed with dust. The hairbrush on the dresser top. “And through here—” She opened the door: Minna’s room. Another single bed, though grander, with an Eastlake headboard. A good bed. The blue coverlet had been kicked down, the pillow. Margaret remembered making both beds up the morning they left for Canada. Who’d slept here since? “You were happy, too,” she said, feeling Minna’s doubt. This house went on and on. She still dreamt of it, too. She straightened the covers on Minna’s bed. “Do you have children, sweetheart? I should have asked that. I should have asked that first thing. You married?” She’d worshipped that child all along and now she saw how right she was to do it.

  “Divorced,” said Minna. Margaret clucked her tongue. “No children.”

  “You’re young yet,” said Margaret. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Oh, it’s too sad.”

  “I’m already sad,” said Margaret, in an improbably cheerful voice. They went through: the softness of the plaster, the holes in the roof.

  “Shame,” said Minna. “They didn’t build it right.”

  But Bertha Truitt had followed every direction. Fowler’s advice was just so damnably bad. The wooden houses he scoffed at still stand everywhere in New England, but the gravel and lime octagons have fallen to rubble.

  “Where are the birds?” asked Minna.

  “Sleeping,” said Margaret.

  “Margaret,” said Minna. “Come with me into my father’s study. I want to look in the desk. See if there’s anything in there.”

 
They walked onto the wooden floor as though it were ice on a pond. Little steps. They clung to each other as though that would do any good. The desk was leather topped, gold edged, though you could not see the gold for dust. Minna remembered the pleasure of writing on it, the way the leather gave under the pressure of a pencil tip.

  The desk drawers were empty save one: in the bottom drawer, a bird’s nest, three perfect celadon-green eggs snuggled in.

  “Are these the eggs?” asked Minna. “The seabirds. They nest in drawers?”

  “Oh, no,” said Margaret. “These are ages old. Your father collected them. He had dozens. He shut them away from the cats.”

  How do you disturb a thing like that? Minna wanted to own it and to leave it alone. Her father’s hands, a doctor’s, had moved it from its first location. You could do that with human houses, too, she knew. It was the eggs that shook her. Inhabited, haunted. Little mausoleums. She took the nest away.

  It was among her effects, when she died in New York, fifty years later. Or maybe that was a different nest. All nests look as though they were built in the nineteenth century. She had become, like her father, a collector.

  “Somebody stole the stairs,” said Margaret. “The iron ones, to the cupola.”

  “That’s where I was born,” said Minna. “On the stairs.”

  “Not quite. Overhead. That’s where your father worked, mostly.”

  They gazed up at the hole in the ceiling. Maybe it was the seabirds themselves who sold it for scrap.

  Minna looked down at the nest balanced on her upturned palms. She’d always thought of nests as round, but this one looked polygonal, like the house itself. She’d come to Salford to get the last scrapings of her father’s life. Here it was, overhead, in her hands. Unhatched eggs, but beautiful. A former hired girl as a guide. You could hear the wind through the cupola overhead, whistling at a strange pitch. Her father—his private thoughts, his bad habits, his actual self—was above her, no way to get at him. Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them—they’re on the shore and we’re on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer. There were poems above her head, and the corpses of cats, empty bottles, peanut shells, the smell of heartache, a small stack of hate letters sent to the house, which Dr. Sprague had intercepted (not realizing that most such correspondence was sent to Truitt’s Alleys: all on the subject of their marriage, written by strangers, which Truitt threw in the furnace). One carpet slipper. A photo of a beloved baby.