Jeptha lay on the wooden bench. There was a tidiness to his body, ankles aligned, hands folded on his stomach, which didn’t look like sleep.
What happened?
Nothing!
I’ll call an ambulance.
Too late.
You sure?
I’m not.
Things went on in Jep’s head all this while like that glass paperweight Dr. Sprague once gave him, millefiori, a thousand flowers, all shot through with color. Mille-feuille, a pastry, a thousand leaves. A thousand! Look at Jep, thought Jep of Jep. There’s French in his head yet.
Young man, Jeet said to Jeptha, and that’s when Jeptha Arrison knew he was really dying: he was a young man to somebody. Jeptha could hear the minuscule suction of Jeet’s false teeth against his palate, could feel the cold velvet of his hand on Jeptha’s throat. Young man. Jeptha Arrison. His own clothing being rearranged by a bunch of hands. His lungs seizing up.
Don’t move him, said a boy’s voice, and he hoped it would be the last thing he heard.
We have to! said a woman.
I loved you all, thought Jeptha, with a few notable exceptions. He wished he’d had the gumption to say it aloud. By gumption he meant life. He was dead.
But he could still hear. It was the last transmission of the earth into the head of Jeptha Arrison.
Why had Jeptha stayed at the alleys all those years he wasn’t paid, was taken for granted? He was awaiting. What he reckoned, and what he always reckoned, was that Bertha Truitt was a chrononaut. A time traveler. He had read about it in a magazine. What else explains her apparition in the cemetery, discovered by a stranger, rich as Hector’s pup? She fell through a rip in time. An empty cemetery. Then a woman in the frost. Three Berthas: Bertha; beneath her, a Bertha-shaped piece of dead grass; above her, a Bertha-shaped rift in the clouds. Where did she come from? The past. Then once she’d founded Truitt’s, sometimes she would just disappear. He had written them down, those times. All of April 1911. Part of both June and July 1912. Seven hours of November 13, 1915. Off and on through the war. The only explanation, Jeptha believed, was time travel.
I don’t remember her being gone.
You were not always there, Lu. She would bring things from the future: coins stamped with the wrong date. From the past, too, stale cakes, candles melted from the speed of decades. She came singing back on the wires—not like a ghost, nothing like a ghost. Like pneumatic tubes, whizzing faster than other people, and meanwhile Jeptha would be her flag, waving here, here.
Jeptha, LuEtta had said. You know she’s dead.
We know she died but we don’t know she’s dead.
There’s a stone in the cemetery.
But Bertha Truitt would have pointed out this truth: a stone in a cemetery is only ever evidence of a stone in a cemetery.
“Damnation,” said Jeet.
“Who do we call?” said Margaret.
“His wife,” said Jeet. “They live in Revere. They own an arcade on the boardwalk.”
“Jeptha has a wife?” said Roy Truitt. “Wonder of wonders.”
“Of course,” said William Burling Jeter Jr. “Her name is Lu, LuEtta.”
Margaret didn’t call LuEtta Mood Arrison (really? really they’d married?); she let the hospital do it. She assumed that LuEtta would come by to collect Jeptha’s effects, though she discovered he had not left anything behind, not a lunch pail, not a toothpick. She might come for his back pay, though Margaret could not remember the last time she’d paid him at all.
Still, she dug out a scrapbook that Bertha had kept. It was slapdash, as nearly all of Bertha’s handiwork was, but it included a clipping of the Salford Bugle the year LuEtta beat Minnie Barden in the trolley tournament. There she was on the front page, a rangy woman with thick hair and a heroic jaw.
“Good grief,” said Roy. Then, “There’s hope for all of us.”
“Even you,” said Margaret.
“Thank you, Mother.” He flipped through the scrapbook and then said, idly, “I’m going to enlist.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“When I’m eighteen.”
“No,” she said. “You’ll take on the alley. Be the boss.”
“You’re the boss.”
She said, “No I am not. It’s not right. You’ll take it, Roy. You’re clever. You’re a very clever boy.”
“Is that a qualification for the job?”
She couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be insulted or not, which was probably a sign that she wasn’t clever, but then again she’d never thought of herself as clever, and so why be insulted? Not clever but loving and tough and good with a dollar. She’d kept them afloat for a while now and her arms were aching with it.
“We need you here,” she said. “To run the family business. Oldest son. How it’s worked since the beginning of time.”
“But is it,” said Roy.
“Is it what?”
“The family business.”
What had he heard? “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, in too calm a voice. It was her habit when cornered to fuss with the candy in the glass counter, as though a nurse with incubating infants. “You’re not allowed to join the army.” Then she looked at him. “He was your father and he loved you,” she said.
But Roy hadn’t asked about love, and he knew his father was his father. It was the single fact he knew for sure about the man. “Anyhow,” he said, “we need more pinsetters, now Jeptha’s gone. You could ask Arch.”
“Arch isn’t suited.” She shook a paper sack full of Mary Janes into one of the apothecary jars, was thinking of eating one, how sweet and chewy they were, thinking of how you could never get all the wax paper off and had to extract it later, masticated and damp, from your back molars. For Arch it was drink and for Nahum gambling and for Margaret it was candy, but she had strength of character, she stopped herself, though all she wanted was to eat all the candy in the world.
She handed Roy a Mary Jane. They were molasses flavored. She said, “I’ll hire someone.”
Under a pillow. Under a bed. Pieces at first, and then all of you, as you came into being, and then pieces of you again. At the kitchen table. In the old toilet. Beneath a bowling alley approach (lane one). That was good, close to family, you could hear them overhead though you are only a doll and you know it. Only a doll means you are ignored more and caressed more than any other member of the family. In the coat closet. In a bed, at last, under the eiderdown, pawed and beloved. In the bathtub, damp-bottomed. In a chair, in the basement, in a chair, in the basement, under the eiderdown, in the bathtub, in the basement. Wired to a cast-iron column. Then higher on the column. On a glass counter, nothing worse, nobody knows how to take care of you. In a suitcase. In a kitchen, in a suitcase on a trolley, under the ground. Love and lack of love and love again.
You can tell when you’re underground even if you’re also in a suitcase, even if you’re made of wood and cloth. Sea air. In a penny arcade. In a glass coffin. (Not a coffin, a box. What’s the difference? Dolls don’t have coffins.) All along, one arm off, back on, one elbow broken, one foot on backward, eye gone from abuse, mouth half rubbed off, breast torn, brains leaking out. People think you’re funny. People think you’re unsettling. They are dismayed by your proportions. They want to lift your skirt. They don’t want to think about what they’ll find there. Do you have organs? A bowling ball, a small one, carved into the shape of a heart. Rubber, of course. Rubber and wood and cloth. How can they string you up so, when you’re made of movement and clatter.
Sea air, sea air, years of it. You are the mascot of Arrison’s Arcade, on Revere Beach. Suitcase, trolley, subway, trolley—all the same line, all the same car, just above and below and above again. Not carried kindly but with competence. Swung down the street and LuEtta Pickersgill Mood Arrison sets you down in the early morning in front of what was Truitt’s.
LuEtta Pickersgill Mood Arrison’s hair had gone roan with age. She was tall and lean, one of those women in
her fifties whose figures had flattened, but glamorously. She gave the suitcase a pat and fought the urge to peer at the doll of Truitt one last time—she had taken its presence in her penny arcade for granted for so long she no longer knew how she felt about it, though when Jeptha had brought it home ten years before she’d wanted to give it a Viking funeral: obliterate it, but with respect.
Jeptha was dead, had gone to the hospital because he was dead, the Salford Hospital where he’d slept beneath Bertha Truitt’s bed; then he had gone to the Salford Cemetery, where he owned a plot next to his first wife. He and LuEtta had lived these past years near the beach. They owned a little arcade that included eight Skee-Ball alleys, which LuEtta occasionally ran for the pleasure of her customers, op op op, center ring every ball. At Arrison’s Arcade you could walk away with evidence of your good time: a gleamingly damp fragrant strip from the photo booth; a metal token stamped with a message you chose one letter at a time from the ID machine; a penny smashed into a lozenge, on one side raised letters that said SOUVENIR OF REVERE BEACH, on the other a faint elongated leftover Lincoln.
Carmine, her son, was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. With Jeptha’s death LuEtta was officially alone. She’d lost plenty of people—Truitt, Moses, Jeptha, and first and always Edith—but there had always been somebody else hanging around, heart-in-hand, asking for love. She’d thought then she was grateful. Now she was ashamed to discover how much she liked solitude, silence, the loneliness that Truitt had talked about as a pleasure.
It was two hours before opening. She planned to set the suitcase with the doll of Truitt down in the tiled trapezoid in front of the doors, to escape before seeing another living person. But as she came up Mims Avenue, she saw a slumping, smoking figure rattling his keys in front of the door. Not Joe Wear, though for a moment—Maybe time travel was possible, Jeptha. A teenaged kid. He had the look of somebody who’d been out all night and had come to sneak home before his mother found out. He looked up and saw her and gave a tired smile.
All right then: she’d deliver it, in Jeptha’s name.
“Hey,” she called. “You’re one of the Truitt boys.”
“Arch,” he whispered, wincing up at the windows over the alley.
She nodded. They stood together on the worn-down black-and-white tile spelling out TRUITT. She would not look through the window; she handed the boy the case. She must have seemed to him an apparition. “From Jeptha,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“Look.”
He balanced the case on one knee—it was difficult, he was still full of beer—and opened it, and saw the battered avid face, and though five minutes before he would not have remembered the doll on his own, he felt that swoony sensation of childhood unexpectedly returned: as though she’d fallen through time, back into his arms. Ever since Arch had been stood up by a ghost, he’d been unmoored, had twice been found by the police passed out in places he shouldn’t have been—first in the passenger seat of a truck owned by his friend Phillip, who was busy stealing a rocking chair off somebody’s back porch; then in the white leather examination chair of his girlfriend’s dentist father at four in the morning. But this doll. He was drunk. He thought it might reform him. He looked up to thank the apparition—LuEtta was right, that was what she seemed like—but she had already gone.
LuEtta Mood Arrison was nearly to the trolley station when she thought she should have asked the kid to let her take a look inside Truitt’s. Empty, she might have been able to bear it. Maybe Jeptha was right, and on the other side of some door at the alley, Bertha Truitt was straightening her clothing. Flying through time will knock the hat right off your head! It will twist your skirts! It will unbutton everything! Get yourself straight: then open the door and look for the people who love you.
Except of course everyone was gone. Leviticus dead, Jeptha dead, all of the cats of her personal acquaintance, her daughter gone. Why would Bertha time travel here? They had already missed her. Go back further. Use all your celestial stereoptical gizmos to find the right spot. Your darlings are alive, plenty of future ahead of them. It isn’t too late to change things.
Don’t go back for her, LuEtta. Remember what happened the last time you looked.
Betty Among the Pins
Minna had a trio. Margaret remembered her saying so but didn’t know what that meant until one Saturday matinee at the Gearheart Theater, when she watched a wartime comedy featuring some dumb comedy team, a fat man and a thin man in suits. In a musical number set at a USO show, there was Minna in a cocktail dress, playing the drums behind a bass player and saxophone player, and singing: Swing me, Daddy, to a reveille beat. A trio. Three of them. A family. She watched Minna greedily, and though she knew it was impossible she believed in some way that Minna was able to see her in the Gearheart, would be able to sense her love. In the credits: Minna Sprague and her Canadian Cats. It was shocking to see a woman drum the way Minna did, with rapture and abandon. That was the province of men.
Her name out front! Margaret was proud: Minna, Minnabean, her dreamchild. She went to see the movie six times. Oh, mothering would be easy if it could be accomplished by cinematic means! Look at Minna twenty feet tall on the movie screen, safe and singing, beautiful. Meanwhile her boys, the Truitt boys, were slipping away from her. Roy was threatening the army. Soon it might be his choice.
Maybe he should do it. He was a boy both hard and soft—hard in his affection, for her, for his brother. Also untested. Sickly of spirit in some way. Anybody might take advantage of him. She supposed she had coddled him, by employing him as a pinsetter. He rarely spoke to anyone. Archie was soft where his brother was hard, and hard where he was soft. Arch would break a girl’s heart and then cry to himself when he’d done it. He would kiss his old ma and then stay out all night. He drank. He drank so much that was the only way you could put it. Not, he drank too much or he drank too often. He drank.
They’d both been coddled, Margaret.
You spend a while thinking about ghosts and everything felt like a ghost, even your conscience whispering in your ear.
Now here was Minna, out in the world, and so happy. Her hair hot-combed glossy and straight, the front in bangs, the back caught in a snood. Her mouth wide and toothy. Of course it was a movie, but Margaret didn’t believe anyone could playact at happiness. Not like that. Not happiness that made other people happy.
Margaret placed a newspaper ad in the Bugle. Work for girls pinsetting. Please apply to Truitt’s Alleys. That was how they got seventeen-year-old Betty Graham, known as Cracker for her last name and because it suited her. She was sweet, but just, with a mouth kept bright with lipstick and a laugh like a rusty gate. People loved to make her laugh: nothing that unbecoming could be fake. Before the war, she’d worked at the Grover Cronin department store in Waltham, in Intimate Apparel. With gas rationing she needed a job closer to home.
“Do you bowl?” Margaret asked.
“Yes,” she lied. She waited to be quizzed. She’d memorized scoring, jargon, dimensions of pins and balls.
“All right,” said Margaret, “you’ll do. Arch will show you around.”
Cracker looked across the alley. There was a boy in striped coveralls sitting on a ledge at the end of the lanes. His hair was dark red. He had a dimpled chin and a cowlick she wanted to brush down.
“Ah, there he is,” said Margaret, pointing in the other direction.
The boy she meant had been sitting at a table by himself, reading a magazine. He looked up and smiled. It was a smile of such charm and breadth that Cracker felt instantly insulted. She hated charm, male charm, unoriginal and automatic as it was. Margaret beckoned him over.
“This is Betty,” said Margaret.
“Hi, Betty. I’m Arch.”
Up close he had a newsprint smudge on one cheek, clean hands with bitten nails. You could see adolescence wasn’t quite done with him, not at the jaw and shoulder line, though his blue eyes were grown-up, and tired, and fond of both her and h
imself. As though he was glad for her, that she got to talk to him. Lucky girl!
She did not like him.
“Betty’s going to pinset. Show her around.”
That made him frown. “Surely Roy—”
“Roy’s working,” said Margaret. “I’m asking you.”
One woman made a difference: one woman brought more women. Cracker’s friends came to watch her skip from pit to pit in her ballet slippers and then—because Margaret Truitt insisted—in a pair of old black boots with steel toes and ankle supports. It wasn’t that Nahum Truitt had ever put a sign in the window that said NO WOMEN, not that he had changed anything about the place, not that once Nahum had disappeared Margaret had done a thing to discourage any particular woman from coming across the threshold. It was only the usual story: a low place that has contained only men for a good long time is deadly dull to most women. You could take one look through the plate glass window and see for yourself that Truitt’s offered nothing that couldn’t be had elsewhere, in better and tidier company.
Once there were a handful of girls coming to bowl regularly, their mothers came, too. They needed some cheap entertainment and conversation, to visit some minor violence upon inanimate objects. They watched Cracker Graham set their pins and laugh while she did it.
She was laughing at the beauty of bowling.
The beauty surprised her: she hadn’t known. Maybe it wasn’t beautiful from the front of the house, where you’d face people’s posteriors, the soles of their lagging feet. Maybe it wasn’t beautiful at the foul line, where you could see only the bowlers on either side of you, left, right, yourself. On the pinbody’s ledge, you saw the whole chorus line of bowlers, intent, sizing up the pins, the lane, though it’s the seventh frame of their third string and the pins are the same, the lane is the same. They touch the ball to the underside of their chins, or they hold it on one hip, like a Greek statue. They bite their lips. They approach, and deliver, and the ball comes down the lane, and the bowlers hope or despair. And they do this not in unison but not out of it either. Candlepin is hard; perfection is impossible; and yet some people are devoted to it. Cracker might have once found it ridiculous.
Bowlaway Page 22