People inexperienced with babies couldn’t understand how that baby slept so peaceful amid all the noise. Mary Gearheart wondered if she were deaf. Nora Riker wanted to toss her like a football. Hazel Forest dispensed advice about her mechanics. LuEtta Mood saw her beauty, knit little round caps for her dark hair to spring out the bottom of. She wanted to pick the baby up to feel the dense loveliness of her. But people, women especially, are leery of mothers of dead children, or too gentle around them. The bereaved mother is a combustible gas, the baby is a match; which one is dangerous makes no difference but best keep them apart. LuEtta couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t make her seem more dangerous. She saw she might never be allowed to hold anyone’s baby again. She peered over people’s shoulders into the pram, and admired Minna: plump thoughtful mouth, hands in dowsy fists. Oh, a fast asleep baby was faster asleep than any other animal. The women of Truitt’s Alleys had children, too. Mary Gearheart her slack-jawed darling Patrick; Nora Riker a bald-headed drooling detestable boy named Philip; Hazel Forest the mismatched twins Hollis and Ivy. Only LuEtta Mood remained childless, childless in the present tense.
Bowling was Minna Sprague’s lullaby, like Rip Van Winkle before her, the low thunder of the ball down the wood, the clatter of the pins. No matter how far Minna Sprague got from Truitt’s Alleys—and she put oceans between her and it, and graduate degrees, and husbands—her heart was set, like her mother’s, to alley time, though it would make her furious to hear it.
Scatterbrained Jeptha Arrison was always picking up the baby and threatening to bring her to the pinbodys’ shelf. One day Joe Wear found her snoozing on the cast-iron ball return. Joe scooped her up and went to talk to Truitt. “This ain’t a place for a baby.”
“And why not? You look fine with a baby, Joe Wear.”
“Babies need peace and attention.”
“What do you know of it?”
“I don’t know what babies need, OK,” said Joe Wear. “I run this alley. Miz Truitt, do I run this alley?”
Of course he did. She didn’t know the least bit of the way the place worked. She relied on him and he’d never put his foot down till now.
“What I know is babies need a place to think,” he said. He held the baby tucked in the crook of his arm. “And to not be carried off every which way. A baby who grows up in too much clatter is miserable. Hm,” he said to the baby, who’d started to fuss. He reached down and touched his finger to her cheek. Minna looked taken aback, then dubious, then—as though she finally got the joke, your finger, my cheek—she smiled and revealed dimples, left and right. You got shocked with love, when a baby smiled at you. It was a religious experience. Joe Wear renounced it.
“Here,” he said, and he handed her not to her mother, but to LuEtta Mood. Every woman in the place—it was morning, they were all women—quieted.
The two of them had never discussed their understanding, Joe a lifelong orphan, LuEtta the mother of a dead child, but they shared a ruthless sentimentality. “Would you, Lu?” he asked, and she did. The baby was solid with sleepiness. She yawned. LuEtta handed her to Truitt. “Here she is,” said LuEtta, as matter-of-fact as she could make it, the way you always do, when someone has trusted you and you want to be trusted again.
“All right, Truitt?” Joe Wear said. He hadn’t smiled once during the entire transaction, but a week later he presented Bertha with a jointed cow carved from a candlepin. Even the tail was articulated. Even the udders.
Everyone knew Minna Sprague was no ordinary child. She sat up at three months old and she said her first word—lightning—at seven months. She could read, it was said, at a year and a half, not taught, just off the marquee of the Gearheart Olympia Theater. Leviticus Sprague had been a prodigy himself, though his mother had accomplished this with drills and blows, until his sister, Almira, was born and their mother decided she’d rather a prodigy of the musical sort. Minna would not be put to work, but what was the harm in saying interesting things to her? Interesting things in French, perhaps? Then Bertha caught him at it.
“Italian, if you must,” she said.
Well, his own Italian was not so good, though his accent was flawless. They learned together.
They would educate Minna at home. “With governesses,” said Leviticus, worried that Bertha might teach her. “Margaret Vanetten will serve,” said Bertha.
No, of course not. Dr. Sprague would teach his Minna. Who else? They met in Dr. Sprague’s office on the third floor—he’d all but abandoned it for the belvedere—and read, or went over tables and maps. Bertha loved pamphlets; Dr. Sprague was devoted to reference books, atlases and dictionaries, anatomy books with transparencies and paper cutouts of the human body as red and pink and promising as dime-store valentines: you could lift the paper liver right out of the paper torso. Scientific treatises with gatefold appendices; giant dictionaries printed on cricklingly thin pages. They read next to each other, asked each other questions. Her mother was given to stroking Minna, which she loved, scratching her back, braiding her hair. Her father merely filled his office with his physical presence, which draped all around her, along with his pipe smoke. She leaned back on his shins, or absentmindedly untied his shoes. She was drawn to music and art, and needed to go to museums, which Dr. Sprague loathed: he did not object to the exhibitions but to the humanity that had come to regard it.
Margaret Vanetten took her to the Harvard Museums to examine the stuffed bison, whale, the dissected flowers blown from glass, the honeycomb like their own house, multisided, made of cells. They went to the art gallery, where Minna was drawn to the Mother and Childs. She particularly liked one flat-faced Byzantine rendition, where Mary looked like a tarnished ladle and Christ a bronze coin balanced on her knee. Their bodies were turned to the observer, and they looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, as though the minute the museumgoers moved on they would gossip—but if Minna tarried, thought Minna, she might be included.
Certain paintings made Minna feel loved. Needed. This painting, for instance, required her above all other people to look at it. Sculptures were haughty; landscapes were tureens of soup, nice enough, sustaining for a while, but too democratic in their purpose. But the right painting—the Mother and Child by the Master of Nervi, for instance—was like music, a kind of flattering invited intimacy. She knew she couldn’t explain this to Margaret Vanetten, who always seemed to be examining her for highfalutin notions that, left unremarked upon, might develop into delusion, or suffrage. Margaret did not want to strive to understand the world. She wanted the world to simplify, so that she might understand it.
“Margaret,” Minna said one afternoon, looking at her Mother and Child. She was six years old then. “Where were you born?”
“In Salford, I expect, or nearby. I was left with the nuns. So I don’t know.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Being born?” asked Margaret, laughing.
“Yes,” said Minna.
“Nobody remembers being born,” said Margaret, and added, “and a good thing, too.”
“I remember.” She turned her body to the painting one last time. “All right. Let’s go. You were there, Margaret. When I was born.”
“I was indeed.”
“I remember,” said Minna as they walked down the marble stairs, softened in the middle from generations of footfalls. “It was dusk. It was in the belvedere.”
“Your father tells you too much,” said Margaret uneasily.
“He doesn’t. And he didn’t. I remember. It was before he put the smoking stand up there. My mother was hollering, and then she quieted down.” Minna got thoughtful. “It was dark inside Mama—ordinarily I could see shadows, like on a lampshade—but then I saw some light—”