“You should go look for her!” bellowed Hazel Forest.
Getting Dr. Sprague out required a man. They would have asked Joe Wear, but nobody could find him—Truitt’s was dark and locked, and if he was in his apartment overhead, he didn’t answer the door. Jeptha Arrison was not a man to send on any mission. Finally Nora Riker’s husband, Norman, was dispatched. They thought Norman would know how to talk gently but firmly: jostling Nora had died the year before of flu.
“Drunk,” Norman Riker said when he came back down. He didn’t say anything else.
So the morning after the flood LuEtta and Mary and Hazel went downtown to look for Truitt. They’d been young women when they first met her, and she middle-aged; now they were middle-aged, and she—they had no notion. They loved her but were unaccustomed to this particular strain of love, worry on her behalf. They felt helpless with their lack of experience.
“I hope we don’t find her,” said LuEtta.
“Well,” said Mary Gearheart. The vicious little girl had grown into a deadly calm, censorious woman. “Well, LuEtta, I hope we do, and I hope she is healing.”
“I only meant,” said LuEtta, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. She knew what it meant to find a person alive but beyond saving.
“Ssh,” said Hazel. She was a nurse. You could not pronounce death without a body. “Girls, let’s look.”
Truitt wasn’t at the Haymarket relief station, where living victims had been brought, browned by molasses, their skin mottled like oilskin. Everything was dulcified, awful. The pillows and floors were smeared with molasses, the doctors and nurses with molasses and blood. People sobbed but quietly. Gummed wheels stalled the gurneys; the sticky floor sucked at the soles of shoes. Truitt might be walloped, unrecognizable. Two unidentified women had been brought to the relief station, neither of them Truitt. One of them, an old lady, regarded the bowlers with one dark eye—was the other plugged up with molasses, or plucked out?—and said, “I can’t get out, I’m trying to get out, Rachel.”
Outside, the streets were brown, glutinous. They heard gunshots. Real ones.
“What is that?” asked Hazel.
“Horses,” said Mary. “Trapped. They’re putting them down, poor things. Mortuary next, I suppose.”
The dead bodies were easier to look at than the live ones, since there was no longer anything to struggle against. The molasses turned people to pillaged antiquities, or bugs caught in insufficient amber. Louder than the relief station: filled with wailing, with no injured to disturb. After the women had toured the place and stepped outside, they gasped for breath.
“What I meant,” said LuEtta to Mary and Hazel, on the trackless trolley back to Salford, “is I wonder whether she ran away.”
“From home?” said Mary, in a voice of wonder.
“To somewhere.”
They began to discuss it, at first with concern, then titillation. She had done it before, landed in Salford, Bertha ex machina, rumors of a fled marriage and a child left behind. She had begun again so entirely, with such enthusiasm, they hadn’t held it against her. Perhaps this was her rhythm: take on a life, live it, shed it. If they could imagine her escape, then the gold shining behind her car was sunshine, not molasses, and she had nothing in common with the people they had seen that day, the man who had a spear of iron pushed through his chest, the old woman in the care station, alive, a ruined rowboat, crushed and washed far from harbor and longing for her Rachel.
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.