They could picture Truitt in her Steamer. She’s driving west, to Chicago maybe. To Texas.
“No,” said Hazel. She had married, had her twins, divorced, had gone from spinsterhood to respectability to scandal herself. She would have run away if she could have. “New York.”
“Her passenger seat’s full of candlepins,” said Mary Gearheart.
“No,” said Hazel, certain of it, “bowling’s done for her. She’s gone to be an artist’s model.”
Mary Gearheart laughed.
“And why not?” asked Hazel.
“Truitt?” said Mary Gearheart. “Naked save a bowl of fruit?”
“Surely Truitt’s the artist,” said LuEtta.
“Oh!” said Mary Gearheart, and Hazel, grateful and sorry not to have thought this herself, said, “Of course she is.” It was Hazel who believed that nudity and freedom occupied the same territory, not Truitt.
They felt ecstatic for her escape, and judgmental. They’d spent too long arranging their lives around their husbands and children, trying to mine happiness from the happiness of other people: always the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, always the least favored piece of chicken from the dinner platter. But they wouldn’t leave, LuEtta, Mary, Hazel. Maybe one day they’d go to New York and look for her, in the bowling alleys, in the public parks, a theater, a museum. When they didn’t find her, they’d stay another day, look in restaurants and opera houses. Of course they’d go back home to their families, once they had satisfied their curiosities.
The syrupy soles of their shoes skicked against the floor of the trolley.
“Maybe they’ll never find her,” said Mary, hopefully, because Mary of all of them knew she was dead, knew that for a while missing was better than dead, until it became worse. She touched Hazel’s elbow, and then Hazel knew it, too.
LuEtta shook her head. “We’ll look again tomorrow.”
“Oh no,” said Mary. “I could not make myself do that again.”
Hazel said, “Ah me,” and began to cry.
Nobody had ever seen her do such a thing, she who had watched so many people cut apart, the salvageable, the beyond repair, the good-as-new and the never-the-same. LuEtta and Mary took her hands. Somehow even their fingers were gummy, not the full muck stick of their feet but a remembrance of the stuff, enough to scent a love letter. “I’m sorry,” said Hazel, who now could not even dry her own tears or hide her face, “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll look again tomorrow,” LuEtta said. Hazel and Mary shook their heads.
So only LuEtta went to the relief station at Haymarket the next day, then the makeshift mortuary, then to the North Mortuary on Grove Street, where people killed by more ordinary things came as well, measles, old age, dropsy. On the third day she found Bertha at Grove Street, dusky sweet, her arm crooked over her head: the molasses had pulled her hat off, her boots from her feet, had knocked two teeth off-center from her now gaping mouth. The mortician had not yet begun to wash her with the bicarbonate of soda that would make her look like the twentieth-century person she was. Her silhouette was unmistakable, heavy bosomed, split-skirted, indomitable, brought low.
Vesuvius, Pompeii. What else could knock Bertha Truitt from this world? From the first, LuEtta had found herself praying: keep Bertha alive even if not here. Keep her in the world. She had never bowled a perfect game. She had never voted for anything. Hazel and Mary felt ordinary grief, for Truitt, for the children who’d been killed in the flood, for themselves for witnessing it all, for Truitt’s daughter, who’d lost her mother. That daft woman, Moses Mood called Truitt. No, please, keep her here. Bertha would teach LuEtta how to drive, the way she’d promised. She would bring LuEtta into Superba, into the cupola: they would sleep on the roof of the house, as Truitt said she did in the summer weather. They would bicycle. They would march for suffrage. They would hold in the palms of their hands the calamities of the past—Edith; whatever had happened to Truitt—and would talk about them, but only if they wanted to: the conversation would not be momentous. None of that had seemed possible when Truitt was around. Now it was impossible unless Truitt was returned. That was why LuEtta went to the infirmary before the mortuary, even three days after the flood, when nobody could possibly be rescued alive from the wreckage and muck.
Not Mount Vesuvius, but the tank of the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. Not caught in ash but molasses. Twenty-one people had been killed, but they wouldn’t know that for another four months, when the last body was pulled from the harbor.
Truitt looked ancient, a prehistoric woman lugged from a bog, a primitive who had not known what death was, exactly. You knew it was a disaster, yes, but not the universal one. She was LuEtta’s second dead body, though she had not been allowed to see dear Edith’s face, so badly burnt. Edith had not needed to be claimed. She was only a dead child, no mystery at all.
“Bertha Truitt,” LuEtta said aloud. She meant it as an address. The mortuary employee took it as identification. She would not be covered with a sheet till the molasses was washed from her skin, the clothing cut from her body. Sorry, thank you, say goodbye.
The night of the molasses flood, still drunk, Leviticus wrote to his sister in Oromocto. Send the child now before there is news, he decided, get her far away before he knew something to tell. Anything might be put in a letter, later. Nearly nothing could be said aloud.
Minna was in bed. When did she sleep? They had not instilled good habits in her. You might find Minna sacked out in the parlor at eight in the evening, or awake in the kitchen at midnight. Her sleeping was deep and total, once she gave in, mouth agape and eyes open an unsettling crack. Leviticus stood outside her bedroom door and heard nothing. Then he found Margaret in the kitchen. She was making sandwiches. He knew her well enough to understand that this was an emotional response in her: anticipation and grief, worry, rage, all sent Margaret Vanetten to the bread bin, the icebox, the kitchen table. He examined the sandwiches to see if he could discern what drove her at the moment. Brown bread, butter, cheddar cheese. Her expression, too, was inscrutable, a cheddar-cheese and butter face. She turned it to him.
“Margaret Vanetten,” he said.
No tears, but nerves.
“Meg.”
“Yes,” she said.
What should she call him? She reminded herself that it depended on what he asked of her. Bertha issued commands, but Dr. Sprague (he was still Dr. Sprague to her) asked questions. Bertha was kind, but didn’t believe, exactly, that Margaret Vanetten had an interior life. Dr. Sprague was kinder, and he did believe in Margaret’s interior, her soul, her sorrows and ambitions, which frightened him: he could look her in the eye for only seconds.
If Bertha Truitt was dead, Margaret must be bold. She might finally be allowed to mother her girl the way she wanted, with the full force of her love—she might be a mother. For years Margaret had flattered herself by thinking she was as good as a mother, she was a second mother, motherly, motherlike, mothering, but that, she understood now, wasn’t enough. She would have to make the claim. It was tempting to believe that if you made yourself small and light, beneath notice, you might be allowed to persist nearly anywhere. But meek women were tossed out and forgotten: that was something she’d learned from Bertha Truitt herself. What women needed to do was take up space. Become unbudgeable. She would never be the woman of a fine house like this—but why not? Of course she wouldn’t marry the Widower Sprague—but why not? She didn’t have a family to be scandalized.
She knew the next question would be important. He had put on a clean shirt and tie to ask it. Would you be willing to stay, in another capacity? To give Minna all of your attention? Of course I would employ a new hired girl to take on your domestic duties. Or: What will I do without her, Margaret? Or: Margaret, tell me: am I an unredeemable sinner? Or: What will become of us? Or: Will you, Margaret? Will I what. Will you?
He said, “I am sending Minna to my family in Oromocto for a while. I have bought train tickets for you
and her. Would you be willing, please, to pack and take Minna to the station by eight, and explain to her—”
She was smiling. Even from the inside she could tell it was a daft smile. “No,” she said.
He nodded.
“I mean,” she said, “I won’t explain. You’ll do that when you say goodbye.”
“Ah, no,” said Dr. Sprague. “No, Margaret. What good would come of her seeing me like this?” He put out his arms to display himself. He believed that the ruin was already total, and patent, but not even a day had gone by. He was drunk, yes, but he was often drunk. In the days to come he would fall apart in all the ways a man can when nobody is looking, but for now he wore a staid green wool suit, with the dark tie he’d put on to go down to talk to the policeman.
“It’s a terrible thing, to say goodbye,” he said.
“It’s worse not to,” said Margaret.
She wasn’t sure that was true the next morning. She had packed their trunks. She had put on what she imagined were traveling clothes, though she had never traveled. Perhaps she would turn in the train tickets at the station, and they would go anywhere they wanted: to Cape Cod, to look at the whales. To Coney Island to ride a Ferris wheel. Meanwhile she would make sure her charge said goodbye to her father.
He hollered down the belvedere steps, “Bon voyage!”
“Come and say goodbye,” said Margaret in a stern voice.
Silence from above.
“Then we’ll come up!” she shouted, and that got him going.
Minna was alone at the foot of the stairs when he climbed down. She’d grown as tall as him. For her twelfth birthday he had bought her a snare drum, much to the dismay of Margaret Vanetten, but better to strike the drum than those steel stairs he now stood at the bottom of. “Women aren’t drummers,” Margaret Vanetten had said. “She’s a girl,” he said. “Look again,” said Margaret, and now Leviticus saw she was right. On her way, anyhow. But she would be a drummer.
“You’re going on an adventure,” he told her.
She nodded. Her bronze hair was still in the tight plaits Bertha had put in the morning before. They pointed like daggers down her back, ceremonial ones that would bring her luck. When Minna was serious, she didn’t look herself: she was then only a reasonably pretty child with no surprising theories. Only when she laughed or sang or drummed was she beautiful, beautiful because odd, with a gap between her front teeth and a wide mouth. Her nose and its seventeen freckles: she was golden, gold, golden, and he put his hand on her shoulder to keep from crying.
“Are you coming with me?” she asked.
“I’ll stay here.”
“What about Mama?”
“She’ll come along eventually. You’ll go with Margaret. You’ll meet your aunt and uncles. That’ll be something!”
“Yes,” she said, meaning no.
“Minna Sprague,” he said. At any moment he could say, me too, I’ll come, too, and be tucked into bed by Almira. “Love you, Minna dear,” he said, and she laughed at him, they were not a family who said such things, they scorned people who declared their love for one another instead of showing it through deeds. Margaret, for instance. Minna could only imagine he was joking. “I will write you,” said Dr. Sprague. “Will you write me?”
“Of course,” she said. You could sign a letter love. That was easy, or easy enough.
Later that day, Minna and Margaret already gone, he imagined he might start walking toward her straightaway. Let the train go, let it race ahead. He might outpace his own terror, and by the time he got to Oromocto he would be Minna’s father, a widower, a brother. (But what if Bertha were alive!) A colossal walk. A memorial parade. He would blaze a trail and every mark a remembrance.
Or else he could stay home and drink.
Thereafter his fatherhood manifested in packages sent north—perhaps this was why Minna remembered him so fondly, he was a genius of generosity, she had so many keepsakes from him, and none from her mother, from whom she was never parted till death. He remembered what she liked and never duplicated anything. A leather-bound set of Shakespeare, a long necklace of jet, silk dresses. He wrote love letters and love poems. Bertha’s money he left alone in the bank, having plenty of his own. It was one of her vanities, that she was rich and so he could practice medicine among the poor of Salford. He had never told her he still owned a farm in Oromocto, run by his brother—he had so many people he’d given up for his marriage!—enough that Minna would never have to worry.
His sister, Almira, wrote back, Now you will find out how sorrow shapes a life.
But sorrow doesn’t shape your life. It knocks the shape out. It severs, it unstuffs, it dissolves. It explodes. That was what he couldn’t get over. It had exploded the logic of his brain as well. An explosion! The car—oh, he knew—no, not a car, a tank. So the explosion killed her? No, not exactly, the deluge. A tidal wave? Of sorts. Of sorts? Of molasses. She drowned? Yes, or she suffocated, or was bludgeoned. She was a wonderful woman, your wife. He hadn’t had so many people refer to his Bertha as wife when she was alive. What was she now? Past tense. She wasn’t anything: no wife, no mother. Intolerable.
She’d been frightened of certain things, particularly once Minna was born. House fires, for instance, and tidal waves. Bees. Hurricanes, reasonably. Highwaymen. Drowning in all its previously imaginable forms: bathtub, ocean, pneumonia. Being buried alive. Falling down stairs. Should have built a bungalow, she always said, watching Minna spiraling on the spiral staircase.
She didn’t fear her Stanley Steamer. He blamed it.
Margaret Vanetten had written him a card, left it behind when she and Minna had gone to Oromocto, a full three days before Bertha—but was it Bertha? he wasn’t sure whether he wondered this metaphysically or actually—before a body fitting the description of Bertha was pulled from the muck. Margaret had copied from an almanac the following words: We cover a bird’s cage to hear it sing, night brings out the stars, and sorrow reveals to us many truths. He had disagreed with it instantly. Other people’s sorrows might bring out the stars. One’s own sorrow made everything in life counterfeit and pointless.
He went to the belvedere to write. Poetry, he thought at first, and he did write some:
Bertha, darling, are you going
Down the alley, out the door?
Round the corner, ’long the sidewalk
To our lifetime’s distant shore.
Bertha, honey, I beseech you,
Leave your Levi nevermore.
He adores you wholly always.
Never lost but gone before.
But even he had to admit: Bertha cared nothing for poetry. “Too few words,” she’d tell him, “and half of ’em only chosen for the rhythm or rhyme.” What Bertha loved was myth. He would say, of her notion that the human brain was many different organs and not merely one, “I have seen the human brain, Bertha, and that is not true.”
She would answer, certain, “I believe it to be true,” as though the belief was what made it manifest.
He should have gone to look for her when her bowling women begged him to, when that stiff white widower he had never even met had come up the stairs to say, “Come now, Levi, pull yourself together and look, before you regret it.” He hadn’t looked. He could exist in Salford because he was a blindered man. Like a horse he could keep on because of what he would not turn his head to see, the hatred and the gossip, the terrible indifference, the bald curiosity. Even now: he would turn around to look into the past. He would write the Myth of Bertha, as she might have written it herself, and every page would be happy.
He wrote:
The Life of Bertha Truitt
—and then he stopped, in tears: it was the life because she was dead.
No, Leviticus. This is your work now.
Believe your nonsense: make it true. That was behind it all, all those awful pamphlets she collected, A Home for All and Fowler on Matrimony. You wrote to persuade yourself, because the ideas in their way were beautiful. To sl
eep beneath an octagonal roof would make your marriage harmonious; to choose your beloved based on the shape of his head meant some scientific destiny guided your life. The brain was such a terrible closet, packed full, uncatalogued. Who wouldn’t want it organized?
He wrote her life. He lied a lot, in the ways she herself lied: omission, aggrandizement. The first day of work was dreadful, Bertha distant, as though she had not told him a single secret in their married life and would not now. Who was that woman, whom he’d met in the Salford Cemetery sixteen years before? He did not know anything about her. The next day he felt the heat of her, standing behind his chair, breathing on his neck the way she did, and the next day—as though it were a phrenological faculty, the seat of Berthaness—he knew everything and wrote everything. Her feet as she bowled felt little and sweet; her bust interfered with her swing; when Minna was a suckling baby she bowled with cabbage leaves in her brassiere. What a strange thing, to be a woman in this world! He’d never really thought about it.
He did not go downstairs unless he had to, just sat up in the belvedere and wrote and drank. His daughter’s birthplace, where Bertha had been stuck with the entire house below her like a hooped skirt. He didn’t need the entire house, not ever again.
In the belvedere he fell asleep deathlike: no dreams, no rest, those minutes excised from his life. He was awake and then suddenly he was struggling awake again. You could not dream sitting up. It was architecturally impossible. Bertha worried about being buried alive—and she was! she was!—but he wouldn’t have minded: it would have been no big change for him. He would close his eyes and would remember these things, in this order: I am alive, I am a human being, I am not in bed, Bertha is dead, I am sitting up, I am in a chair, I am in a glass box, the Almighty might see me from any angle, birds, too, it is Monday, I am alive.
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