Or else he could stay home and drink.
Thereafter his fatherhood manifested in packages sent north—perhaps this was why Minna remembered him so fondly, he was a genius of generosity, she had so many keepsakes from him, and none from her mother, from whom she was never parted till death. He remembered what she liked and never duplicated anything. A leather-bound set of Shakespeare, a long necklace of jet, silk dresses. He wrote love letters and love poems. Bertha’s money he left alone in the bank, having plenty of his own. It was one of her vanities, that she was rich and so he could practice medicine among the poor of Salford. He had never told her he still owned a farm in Oromocto, run by his brother—he had so many people he’d given up for his marriage!—enough that Minna would never have to worry.
His sister, Almira, wrote back, Now you will find out how sorrow shapes a life.
But sorrow doesn’t shape your life. It knocks the shape out. It severs, it unstuffs, it dissolves. It explodes. That was what he couldn’t get over. It had exploded the logic of his brain as well. An explosion! The car—oh, he knew—no, not a car, a tank. So the explosion killed her? No, not exactly, the deluge. A tidal wave? Of sorts. Of sorts? Of molasses. She drowned? Yes, or she suffocated, or was bludgeoned. She was a wonderful woman, your wife. He hadn’t had so many people refer to his Bertha as wife when she was alive. What was she now? Past tense. She wasn’t anything: no wife, no mother. Intolerable.
She’d been frightened of certain things, particularly once Minna was born. House fires, for instance, and tidal waves. Bees. Hurricanes, reasonably. Highwaymen. Drowning in all its previously imaginable forms: bathtub, ocean, pneumonia. Being buried alive. Falling down stairs. Should have built a bungalow, she always said, watching Minna spiraling on the spiral staircase.
She didn’t fear her Stanley Steamer. He blamed it.
Margaret Vanetten had written him a card, left it behind when she and Minna had gone to Oromocto, a full three days before Bertha—but was it Bertha? he wasn’t sure whether he wondered this metaphysically or actually—before a body fitting the description of Bertha was pulled from the muck. Margaret had copied from an almanac the following words: We cover a bird’s cage to hear it sing, night brings out the stars, and sorrow reveals to us many truths. He had disagreed with it instantly. Other people’s sorrows might bring out the stars. One’s own sorrow made everything in life counterfeit and pointless.
He went to the belvedere to write. Poetry, he thought at first, and he did write some:
Bertha, darling, are you going
Down the alley, out the door?
Round the corner, ’long the sidewalk
To our lifetime’s distant shore.
Bertha, honey, I beseech you,
Leave your Levi nevermore.
He adores you wholly always.
Never lost but gone before.
But even he had to admit: Bertha cared nothing for poetry. “Too few words,” she’d tell him, “and half of ’em only chosen for the rhythm or rhyme.” What Bertha loved was myth. He would say, of her notion that the human brain was many different organs and not merely one, “I have seen the human brain, Bertha, and that is not true.”
She would answer, certain, “I believe it to be true,” as though the belief was what made it manifest.
He should have gone to look for her when her bowling women begged him to, when that stiff white widower he had never even met had come up the stairs to say, “Come now, Levi, pull yourself together and look, before you regret it.” He hadn’t looked. He could exist in Salford because he was a blindered man. Like a horse he could keep on because of what he would not turn his head to see, the hatred and the gossip, the terrible indifference, the bald curiosity. Even now: he would turn around to look into the past. He would write the Myth of Bertha, as she might have written it herself, and every page would be happy.
He wrote:
The Life of Bertha Truitt
—and then he stopped, in tears: it was the life because she was dead.
No, Leviticus. This is your work now.
Believe your nonsense: make it true. That was behind it all, all those awful pamphlets she collected, A Home for All and Fowler on Matrimony. You wrote to persuade yourself, because the ideas in their way were beautiful. To sleep beneath an octagonal roof would make your marriage harmonious; to choose your beloved based on the shape of his head meant some scientific destiny guided your life. The brain was such a terrible closet, packed full, uncatalogued. Who wouldn’t want it organized?
He wrote her life. He lied a lot, in the ways she herself lied: omission, aggrandizement. The first day of work was dreadful, Bertha distant, as though she had not told him a single secret in their married life and would not now. Who was that woman, whom he’d met in the Salford Cemetery sixteen years before? He did not know anything about her. The next day he felt the heat of her, standing behind his chair, breathing on his neck the way she did, and the next day—as though it were a phrenological faculty, the seat of Berthaness—he knew everything and wrote everything. Her feet as she bowled felt little and sweet; her bust interfered with her swing; when Minna was a suckling baby she bowled with cabbage leaves in her brassiere. What a strange thing, to be a woman in this world! He’d never really thought about it.
He did not go downstairs unless he had to, just sat up in the belvedere and wrote and drank. His daughter’s birthplace, where Bertha had been stuck with the entire house below her like a hooped skirt. He didn’t need the entire house, not ever again.
In the belvedere he fell asleep deathlike: no dreams, no rest, those minutes excised from his life. He was awake and then suddenly he was struggling awake again. You could not dream sitting up. It was architecturally impossible. Bertha worried about being buried alive—and she was! she was!—but he wouldn’t have minded: it would have been no big change for him. He would close his eyes and would remember these things, in this order: I am alive, I am a human being, I am not in bed, Bertha is dead, I am sitting up, I am in a chair, I am in a glass box, the Almighty might see me from any angle, birds, too, it is Monday, I am alive.
The cats would curl on his lap, but he ignored them. They purred less. They looked for love elsewhere.
The book took him three weeks, and when it was over he wept, because his time with Bertha was over. He looked around the cupola and saw how wild he’d gone, the empty bottles, the stink of his body. Of course that was why he’d sent the child out of the house. He had a memory of pissing down the speaking tube. Let the house fall to ruin: it had anyhow.
He sent the manuscript off to his publisher, changed the name of the house to Supersum—that which is left behind, superfluous—and went to the shuttered bowling alley, to sleep on Bertha’s lane.
2
An Alley Marriage