She went to her roadster and lit the boiler and climbed in. She waited for it to start up. It purled in the way that unnerved Leviticus. She wished he were in the seat next to her. She missed him more than she was sympathetic to his fear.
Just now he would be in the cupola, pulling on a bottle of whiskey. She knew he drank. She liked to think he didn’t hide his drinking: they simply didn’t speak of it. She wouldn’t have expected him to give up alcohol for her nor would she ask him to give up his pantomime teetotal. Only sometimes did it bother her—when he fell twice a year into alcoholic melancholy, or when she reflected that he would die before his time. Then again, being so much younger than she, his scheduled time was long after hers, and drinking might even it up, a pair of scissors snicked across two lengths of ribbon at once. She supposed a better love would have wished him a long, long life without her, but her love was deep and true and bottomless and in the end (she didn’t know that it was the end) not all that good. She had loved him immediately for the following reasons: his quietude, his broad forehead, the deep lines in his lower lip, the way his pinker upper lip was half-masked by his mustache, his mustache itself, the certainty of his medical knowledge, which she did not always believe. She had loved him next for the erotic scrubbing curve of his tummy, the way he hated the word tummy, his carelessness in all things (coins spilling from his pockets, food down his shirtfront), his love of cats—no man she’d ever met loved cats so much, whispered more endearments in their ears; she’d forgiven his foolishness over the Mother Cat, what a lot of fuss over an animal whose time it was. His love of Minna, of course, which was just as it should be and no more (despite her eccentricities Bertha believed the love of a mother and child, and husband and wife, were more important than father and child: in this she was a woman of her time). Most, first, ever: his admiration of her. That was evident the moment they met, and despite her pleasure in his admiration she had thought then it showed her own weak character, to find admiration so lovable. Now she knew: in marriage, what else mattered but admiration? And of course she admired him, too—loved him, knew his follies, lusted for him even now, felt it quicken her step—but most of all she admired him. It was the one marital affection you were allowed to take out in its true state and display to the dinner guests.
As for the affections you weren’t supposed to show in company—even now. Bertha Truitt, in her dotage—though she never would have used the word—miles away from the man, felt flush with him. In their early days he had been decorous, polite, the way he’d been while reading her head, but by nature he was a nuzzling, nestling, insidious man, and eventually every county of his body had rubbed against every county of hers—unlike Savior Ercolini, who had always been extraordinarily specific in his physical affections.
Now why had she thought of that man? He was another life.
Gunshots. She’d parked on Commercial Street near the elevated train tracks. She thought they were gunshots anyhow, six sharp metal reports. Then she heard the roar of an enormous animal. You couldn’t tell whether the animal was rampaging or dying, at first.
An elderly woman pushing a pram nearby turned to Bertha. “What was that?” she said.
Bertha said, “It sounded like—”
But then the woman screamed.
Not gunfire but a spitfire of rivets popping sockets on the tank atop the Purity Distillery Building. The tank was full, had been full, was now unburdening itself of two and a half million gallons of molasses in all directions. It had already killed two children and a horse, had done that straight off.
Bertha knew how to swim in water. She knew how to find the pocket of air in an upturned boat. She knew to stay indoors in a lightning storm, to go to the basement in case of tornado, she knew that salt or a wool blanket would smother a fire. She knew how to protect her heart—that is, her brain—from the various inflammations of dissatisfaction. She knew to look a mad dog straight in the eye and show her teeth; she knew never to try the same thing on a bear.
She had planned for disaster, just not this one. She could not make sense of it.
Nobody could. People tried to outrun the flood, but which way was safety? No guessing. The molasses scooped the baby from its pram; it turned a big man into a missile and sent him through a trolley windshield.
Drive, Bertha. Put the steamer in gear, turn the wheel.
The molasses smashed the door of Bertha Truitt’s motorcar, wrenched it off the frame, and dragged her out. She couldn’t hear anything over the sough. The smell was overwhelming, a kind of sweet lumber. It painted the back of her throat. Slow as molasses. The molasses wasn’t slow. The molasses had grip and intention. You couldn’t swim against it. You couldn’t punch your way out. It plucked her hat from her head, which hurt worse than anything, the yanked hair, the indignity. It had the finicking audacity to unlace her boots, the animal strength to turn the car over. Then the molasses pushed her down beneath its surface and blacked her eyes and shut her up. Above her it swept an entire house, whole, out to harbor. The baby stolen from his pram; scrap iron; stray dogs: all passed over Bertha Truitt like the shadows of birds. She had already thought of Minna, of Leviticus, of the winding cats including her favorite, the black-and-white Donizetti, who was bony and old now, she would miss him, she would grieve, and now the cats were multiplying in her octagonal memory, they clogged the spiral staircase and filled the dumbwaiter and she was just on the brink, the brink, of thinking of her parents, and of her sister, and of lost Nahum—now, how would they find him to break the news of her death? she had worked so hard to banish him from her memory—and then another clobbering wave of molasses lay itself over the first, and her brain lit up like a lightning storm, then went over green, then was struck entirely dark.
In the old days, the disaster happened. When a stranger called or wrote or traveled by train, you learned of both the disaster and your ownership of it.
In Salford, in what was not yet known as a widow’s walk, the widowed innocent Dr. Leviticus Sprague looked down Mims Avenue and wondered when Bertha would be back. His ticking punctual Bertha always knew the hour. Her heart kept excellent time. His did not. He hadn’t brought up his watch. The fact is he did not drink so very much in those days—more than most men, but less than many. He kept his senses, his wits, nineteen times out of twenty. Now the January sunlight cut through the eight windows of the cupola—no, let’s be honest, only four, that’s as much as is mathematically possible—and he felt warmed from the inside and the out.
Superba did not have a phone. At six o’clock someone knocked on the door. Margaret Vanetten answered. A policeman stood there, holding an object like a sodden corsage. The molasses had taken Bertha’s hat to the shipyard and pasted it to the side of a tugboat in drydock. Her name was stitched inside. They had not found anything else, not car, not body, not laced shoe.
Margaret Vanetten climbed to the darkened cupola, a place she’d been forbidden. She hadn’t gone there since Minna’s birth.
“Dr. Sprague,” she said. “She was a wonderful woman—”
Margaret Vanetten had got ahead of herself. She always did, that one.
We Regret
Leviticus Sprague would not come down from the cupola. The women of Truitt’s Alleys stood on the third floor of the Octagon and shouted up the little wrought iron staircase, which they didn’t want to climb for fear of embarrassing him or themselves. They didn’t know about the speaking tube. Not one of them had been in the house before.
“She might be alive!” LuEtta Mood called.