When they found her bed empty and unmade they could not imagine what had happened. She couldn’t have left it on purpose, she who believed an unmade bed was as sordid an object as found in a modern home. Where’s Margaret? They searched every corner of the house, and the yard, and the Bowlaway, and the public library half a mile away. The police went door-to-door.
Where was she? Had she taken the train? Had she started to walk? Had she been pulled from her window by a kidnapper (you’re coming with me, don’t forget your purse) and been driven far away in a dark car? She had wandered off again, she was old, the family was prone to wandering. But to disappear so thoroughly. And also: When? There was a whole stretch of hours they had not seen her.
They should have put her in the home, where she would have disappeared the usual way, via slow evaporation.
Fathers Fore
Arch went to college bars to drink away his guilt. He, who had never been to college, believed college students were honest. They wouldn’t rob you, anyhow. They wouldn’t kill you. They were dumb, in their way—this idea he got from Roy, that any grown man could outdrink them and outthink them. Then he was sitting in Father’s—which number? Too? Fore? Won? he couldn’t remember—in odd company when the lights came on. The bars closed at 2:00 A.M. and the package stores hours before that but Arch was a drinker who’d fallen in with drinkers: they were still thirsty. Two boys and one quiet girl. It was essential they have another. Where could they go? “I got a bottle at home,” said Arch. “I got a car,” said one of the boys. Arch rode up front. He knew how drunk they all must have been; he was full of admiration at the driver’s skill, this long-haired beetle-browed boy. The other boy (shorter, in a flat scally cap) sat in the back with the girl (Italian, Arch thought, brown hair parted in the middle, blue jeans and a plaid shirt shot through with gold thread). He felt the rattling of the car but he thought they were holding still, it was the road that was moving beneath them, under their wheels and far away behind them in the dark.
If the night had gone differently, Arch might have woken up the next morning, astounded to have survived the mere drive home. What a stupid thing to do! he might have said to Cracker, who would have answered, It’s time to forgive yourself. Drink at home, if you have to drink. Instead, he unlocked the door to the Bowlaway and said to the kids—Jordan, Terrence, and somebody else, Arch couldn’t remember whether the girl was Jordan or the beetle-browed boy was. Terrence was the cap. “Come in,” said Arch. They all did.
They drank in the dark of the alley, whiskey that Arch kept under the counter, mixed with Coke from glass bottles pulled lengthwise from the upright vending machine. “Don’t you have a key?” asked Terrence the Cap, as Arch counted out quarters. “Somewhere,” said Arch. “All the keys of the world are somewhere.” The key was on his key chain. He unlocked the machine and swung the door open so they could help themselves.
“Wicked,” said Jordan, or not-Jordan, the boy.
“What kind of bowling is this?” the girl asked.
“Candlepin.”
“What the fuck is that,” said the girl.
“Language,” said Arch. “You’re not from New England.”
“Sorry. Pennsylvania,” said the girl. “You own this place?”
“No,” he said. “Mr. Joe Wear owns it. I just work here.” He said, “Oh well.”
The bowling-alley gloom had taken the gloss out of the girl’s hair. Arch wanted to know what her name was. He was old enough to be her father. Arch had no designs on her, not so much as a doodle, except that he wanted her to like him. Terrence the Cap and Beetle-brow were trying to figure out how to turn on Pong till Terrence gave up and went to rifle through the candy behind the front counter.
Arch was a grown man looking after children. “Maybe it’s time to call it a night.”
Terrence the Cap unwrapped his candy. A Sky Bar, the worst kind of candy there was, five compartments of not quite chocolate filled with not quite caramel, not quite coconut, not quite fudge. “You got a key to this safe?” He kicked at the small lockbox under the counter.
“Nah,” Arch said. “They don’t trust me with it.”
“It’s dark in here,” called the beetle-browed boy.
“Bowling alleys aren’t famous for their light,” said Arch.
“You got electric,” said the Cap.
“Don’t want to attract the cops,” said Arch. Which was true enough. He’d had too much of the police, with his mother missing; he didn’t want them to find him drunk and out of place. He should be holding a vigil. Candlelight: she’d like that. If only she knew he was burning himself down from the inside. She’d been missing six weeks, was surely dead, but who knows where. He looked at his company. Where had they come from? No, not just how they had all ended up here, middle of the night, the Bowlaway, but who were they, who did they used to be? These children, they were so young, they used to be babies. They might have been nice babies. He tried to see it, their round baby heads, the pudge of their arms.
“What’s in the safe?” Terrence asked.
Arch got up to lean on the counter. He looked at the safe. It would be empty—Ida Jane, the night manager, would have taken the day’s receipts to the night depository—but that wasn’t a good story. Nobody ever wanted a safe to be empty. “The Doomsday Code,” he said.
“Nah, mush,” said Terrence. “Really.”
What Arch hadn’t realized: they were all strangers. The girl and the beetle-browed boy, one of them named Jordan; the guy in the flat cap, who was younger than the other two; Arch. They had met that night. The girl (her name was Julie, she’d only said her name was Jordan) was on the edge of dropping out of Radcliffe, she wasn’t failing but she knew she would; the beetle-browed boy, Marcus, was from Florida, and had enrolled at BC only to discover how much he liked to drink; Terrence the Cap was only ten miles away from home, seventeen years old, underage, in debt, in trouble, and already (he’d decided) doomed. Terrence had seen in Arch a countryman, drunk and frayed. Pliable. Starved for admiration. Terrence tried to pick up the safe, but it was bolted beneath the counter.
“Leave it alone,” said Arch.
“Whose place is this?” said Terrence.
“The boss’s.”
“Who’s that?”
“Mr. Joe Wear,” said the girl.
“Why not call it a night,” said Arch. He tried to make his voice paternal. In the fridge upstairs Arch kept a six-pack of beer he didn’t intend to share.
“Is there another safe? A bigger one?”
“No,” said Arch. “Yes.” There was a safe in the basement, enormous and flowered, though they had never in his memory used it: just another one of those ancient objects that had come to rest and never moved. Why hadn’t they? A safe might have changed everything. “All right,” he said, “it’s time to go.”
“Show me the safe.”
“I can’t,” said Arch.
“I think you can.”
“Knock it off, man,” called the other guy to the Cap. You could hear the bravery in the middle of the words, but he couldn’t quite force it all the way to the edges. “Got it,” he said, as he found the outlet and plugged in the Ping-Pong game.
Terrence turned and regarded him with disgust. “What’s your name?” he asked, as though he suspected the guy was just the kind of jerk who didn’t have one.
“Marcus,” said Marcus. “Let’s go.”
“Shut up, Marcus,” said Terrence.
Marcus tried the door, but Arch, like his mother, had locked it behind him. He wanted to go home. Cracker would be furious, and would forgive him. That’s what he needed.
“I’ll let you out,” said Arch, finding the key.
“Not going,” said Terrence. “Show the safe.”
“Don’t be a child,” said Arch. Then he looked at Terrence and saw that he was a child, a kid. Not a twitchy small guy, just not full grown, and the boy’s childishness suffused Arch’s heart and ossified it. Arch thought he’d never hated
somebody so much in his entire life. Terrence Fanning, his little steel eyes and overripe lips. “You fucking boy: when there’s a grown man telling you what to do, you do it.”
The kid turned. Unhappiness gave him a hunchback. I’ve done it, thought Arch, he’s going. Then the guy came charging at him, shoulder first. He knocked Arch off his feet, into lane three.
On the ground the two of them stared at each other. Terrence Fanning weighed nothing at all; Arch would knock him off once he caught his own breath. They were both doomed, which is to say they’d both always courted that feeling of doom. They loved it, the shadow over the sun that meant your own fuckups were not personal: they were ordained and condemned by God. Neither could help himself. “Fuck you,” said Arch from the floor.
Moments before, Arch had seen him with flashbulb clarity, every pimple, the fine wales of his corduroy cap. Now Terrence Fanning disappeared into a column of rage. He was gone. He couldn’t see Arch Truitt, either. The flame of fury had shot up all around him. How had they gotten here? They didn’t know.
A bowling alley is a warehouse for blunt objects. Terrence Fanning belonged there; he was a blunt object; so was the ball he picked up in his hand; so were the wailing witnesses behind him. Neither doomed man was looking at the other. They jolted, jolted, hollered.
When it was over Terrence Fanning stood up. There was a candy smell that he knew came from his brain and meant his life was over. Candy required candy: he walked behind the counter and helped himself to several rattling boxes of Lemonheads and Boston Baked Beans. His shoes were bloody; he picked out a pair of piebald bowling oxfords with the size stitched on the heel, larger than he usually wore because he was self-conscious about his little feet. Somebody was weeping. It was him.
“Give me a ride home,” he said to Marcus, who was also weeping. Only the girl was dry-eyed. That was just like a girl, and he wanted to hit her so they’d match.
“We have to call an ambulance,” she said in a steady voice.
“He’s dead,” said Terrence Fanning, age seventeen, of Adams Road in the Nonantum neighborhood of Newton, Massachusetts. Now he was calm, too. He stubbed out the tears on his cheeks with the heels of his hands. “Give me a ride, Marcus.”
“What about the safe?” asked tearful Marcus.
“There is no safe,” said Terrence Fanning.
Behind them, Laughing Arch Truitt whispered into the floor, “Don’t leave me.” Who was he talking to? “Don’t let me,” he said. He didn’t finish the sentence. He could hear the ball that had done him in wobble stickily down the gutter toward the pins. He didn’t want to be saved. He only wanted somebody—the calm girl, the terrified boy, his gray-eyed murderer—to sit beside him as he died. Nobody did. His mother was close by, of course, but already dead, and no company at all. They would find her on the roof the next day, as they swept through the crime scene, the Bowlaway, old Bertha Truitt’s, her body an answer to one mystery, but not to most.
5
Among the Artists
After giving up Superba Minna Sprague saved everything that had touched her, imagining a museum about her extraordinary family—her father’s family; she had inherited everything—but it was a hodgepodge, a hash, a gallimaufry. Her children didn’t want it: they lived spare and settled lives in the Midwest, of all places. Easier if there had been a single story. Her father, the distinguished black doctor and writer. Or Almira the cellist, who composed music in her farmhouse bedroom till the day she died, age eighty-six, the last of her siblings. Benjamin the businessman and gentleman farmer. Even Joseph, the quietest Sprague, who made strange visionary drawings on grocery store bags with pencil and saved them in wooden egg crates. Almira had thrown out all the drawings but one after Joseph’s death, though she had saved dozens of his fine white shirts, which Minna now owned. If you knew Joseph—in another life he would have been the hero! the genius! instead of the most minor Sprague—if you’d known him the drawing, now framed in Minna’s parlor, would have meant something. Here was Almira, her body like a cello; here was Benjamin built of barrels and wheat. The sun on the horizon was a dozy eye about to close. Where was Joseph himself? The graphite hand in the corner reaching down, pinching a penciled pencil, as though the drawing were drawing itself. But nobody knew Joseph anymore but Minna, and the drawing was only picturesque, one more detail among too many details. You couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she owned all the drawings and damn the shirts. No, keep the shirts. She was, like some of the men who collected her recordings (always men), a completist. It was like a vitamin deficiency.
So when Roy Truitt called her she said, “I want everything.”
“Oh,” he said. “I mean, I was calling about the bowling alley—”
She did want everything. But you couldn’t ask. Or you could ask, but then you’d have to laugh it off as a joke, which she did now. She’d helped him out and then she’d never heard from him. “Of course not. I don’t need anything. My children don’t want it. That godforsaken place.”
“You have children,” he said, in a voice of irritating wonder.
“Yes, I have children,” she said. “Grandchildren, too. What do you think?”
There was a long pause. She couldn’t tell what he thought, though she was generally good at discerning the various discomforts that incited silence.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” he said at last.
“I never heard from you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—I’ve had a hard time.”
“Did you end up teaching?”
“A little,” he said. She had saved his life, in order that he might bungle it in ways he’d never foreseen. He’d blamed her, he saw now, though really he should have thanked her. “Now I own a bowling alley, somehow. Not my mother’s. I don’t know how it happened. Thank you,” he said. “I should have—anyhow, the alley, Truitt’s, was left to somebody. We’re trying to track him down. Joseph Wear. We’re not sure—”
“I know Joe,” said Minna. “Let me get you his phone number.”
All those years before, thirty-nine years old and suddenly liberated, there were a lot of things that Joe Wear had never done. He had never been out of New England—the farthest he’d gone was to New Hampshire, to see his aunt Rose and her new family one summer day, where he verified his dislike of lakes, and cabins, and Protestant ministers. He had never danced. Had his picture taken. Had a dream of flying and woke to earthbound disappointment. Married, of course. Had a pet. Bought a piece of furniture himself: not so much as a pillow. Been at ease.
(Never danced? Not once.)
Until one day coming out of the Bowladrome on lower Broadway in New York, Joe in his coveralls and boots, shaking out his limbs for the walk to his boarding room, when he came upon a man and a woman.
The man spoke first. “Hey,” he said. “I know you.”
Joe tilted his head.
“We’ve met before.”
The man was all forehead, with black curly hair around the edges. He held his head as though he wished you to admire the magnificence and plenitude of his forehead. His chin was tucked into his muffler, he had a beard and mustache that likewise suggested that his face was beneath notice, his bespectacled eyes were weak, his nose (he unfurled a handkerchief and blew it) faulty, but his forehead! It gleamed beneath the streetlight; his wife bent away from its dazzle. She wore a brown cloth coat fixed with a pewter pin shaped like a lobster. (She was the important one, though Joe didn’t know that yet.) It was entirely possible, thought Joe, that he’d met the man in a bathhouse but they had not paid attention to each other’s face, and that the moment the man remembered in the presence of his wife he would shriek and scuttle away.
“I’m pretty sure not,” said Joe.
“Yes!” said the man. “At the Jackdaws.”
“Oh,” said Joe, relieved. “No, that wasn’t me.”
“It was,” said the man. “No, I’m sure of it. The Jackdaws,” he said. “Thanksgivingtime, or thereabouts. You
were sitting on Abigail’s lap.”
“I don’t know Abigail.”
“Very likely!” the man said. “Not a requirement, for entrance to her lap. Constance, tell him: we’ve met.”
The woman was very small, with a round face and round red glasses. She seemed to be wearing a round sailor’s hat. “Leave him alone, Manny.”
“I will not! Not only,” said Manny, appraising his wife, “will I not leave him alone, I will very threateningly take him to dinner, and I will pay the bill, and we will discuss the Jackdaws, and we will introduce him to Arthur, and we will crack open our fortune cookies and follow the directions therein. What do you think of that.”
“Well!” said the woman. “Can’t argue. You like Chinese food?” she said to Joe.
“I guess I might,” said Joe, though he was thirty-nine years old and had never tasted it.
They went to Chen Wei’s on Thirteenth. Arthur turned out to be their favorite waiter, a Chinese-looking man in his seventies who wore a red bow tie and spoke English with a disorienting County Cork accent very much like Joe’s aunt Rose. Joe couldn’t figure out why they wanted to introduce him, though they shook hands. Arthur was so old that every time he showed up with a plate Joe half stood to help him with it. This incensed Arthur. “Lookit,” he said to Joe, “lookit,” but he was so mad he couldn’t finish the thought. To make peace, Manny made them both sit down and went to the kitchen to get the plates himself.
“Oddest thing,” said Manny. “Chinese makes my forehead sweat. You don’t believe me, I can tell. He doesn’t believe me, Arthur. Feel my forehead!”
Arthur said, “The man does not want to feel your terrible forehead.”
“Sure he does.”
“He does not,” said Arthur. “No man alive wants such a t’ing.”
“Listen,” said the woman to Joe. “What do you do?”
“Manage a bowling alley.”
“Really?” she said. She sounded genuinely touched. Her voice was buttery and odd. He found he trusted her. Now Manny was trying to convince Arthur to touch his forehead. “I’m wondering if I could paint you. Mostly I don’t paint people. I paint shipyards. Or train yards. But—no, please, I’d love to paint you.”
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