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.