This is bowling in New England (except Connecticut). A game of purity for former puritans. A game of devotion that will always fail. Tenpin balls (what most people think of when they hear the word bowling) are the size of hissing cartoon bombs. Tenpins are curvy and shaped like clubs. Candlepin balls are handsize. Candlepins are candleshaped. Bertha Truitt’s gravestone would eventually read INVENTOR OF CANDLEPIN BOWLING, THE SPORT OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, and so she was, no matter what the history books say, if history books care at all for the game of candlepin. Most don’t but this one does, being a genealogy.
Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn’t matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.
Our subject is love. Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley. It has to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, which pin it longs to set spinning. Then I love you! Then blammo. The pins are reduced to a pile, each one entirely all right in itself. Intact and bashed about. Again and again, the pins stand for it until they’re knocked down. The ball return splits up the beloveds, flings the ball away from the pins. You stay there. The ball never does, it’s flung back by the bowler, here it comes flying, blammo.
You understand. It only seems unrequited.
The policeman brought the so-called Bertha Truitt to the Salford Hospital, where it could not be determined whether she had amnesia or a privacy so pigheaded it might yet prove fatal. Did she want to stay in the hospital? Of course not. How old was she? She wouldn’t say. Did she know anyone in town? Possibly: she hadn’t gone door-to-door to ask. How long had she been in the cemetery? If they didn’t know, she surely did not. Where had she come from?
“I’m here now,” she said.
Lie down, lie down.
“Will you let me go if I do?”
All right.
The Catholics came to see her, and members from the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society, and some Presbyterians. She didn’t need or seek charity; they just wanted a gander. Newspapermen came to interview the curiosity but found only a pleasant plump woman whom nobody could account for. Those the city was full of. The mayor visited; his deputy had suggested that the recent reports of a strange creature stalking the fens on the north edge of the city—the newspapers called it the Salford Devil—had been this woman, looking for a place to lie down. The Salford Devil had red eyes and brachiated black wings, was the size of a dog, or a swan, or a malnourished child, had a long tail with a tassel (like a zebra or giraffe or a sphinx) or one that opened like a fan (like a bird). Bertha Truitt had none of these things, and on the second day of her hospitalization Moses Mood, the owner of the hardware store, swore he saw the still at-large Salford Devil steal a poodle where it had waited for its owner outside the public library. A real poodle, a pony-size one.
Bertha Truitt confounded people. She was two things at once. Bodily she was a matron, jowly, bosomy, bottomy, odd. At heart she was a gamine. Her smile was like a baby’s, full of joyful élan. You believed you had caused it. You felt felled by a stroke of luck.
Nobody who knew her came to visit, though the nurses noticed she was always peering down the ward with a hopeful expression. She had no recognizable accent, no regional manners, no cravings for a certain cabbage salad known on only one side of the Mississippi. When asked about her past, she waved it away. “I’m here,” she said. “Wherever that is.”
People began to dream of her. Not just her fellow patients, though they were the first, they dreamt of Bertha Truitt sneaking into their beds, lowering the mattress, raising the temperature, dissolving in the daylight. She got into the dreams of the nurses and doctors, then people through the town. One man swore he saw her fly through the air on her back, naked as a piglet, using her impressive breasts as wings.
Really?
Well, maybe more like rudders, he allowed. Otherwise I stand by it.
It was just a dream, his wife told him, as wives did everywhere in Salford, husbands, too, parents who could not imagine where their children had heard of the smiling lady who whispered in their ears at night, I have a game for you. And, it is possible to bowl away trouble.
The other patients hung around her bed to be smiled at. This included Jeptha Arrison, a lumpheaded young man who’d been hospitalized after swallowing a bottle of aspirin, one pill at a time, like consuming a tree twig by twig. Soon enough he was found sleeping under Bertha Truitt’s bed. “Let him stay,” she said, and though it was the woman’s ward he was left alone. Jeptha Arrison began to sleep abovedecks at the foot of her bed. “I like it here,” he said to Bertha Truitt. “The hospital. My ma told me I once nearly died in a hospital but now I think they do me good.”
“You have a fine head,” said Bertha Truitt. She gave him a look of admiration.
“Ought I become a doctor?” he asked.
“Heavens, no,” she said. “No, you’re not suited for that at all. I meant the shape of it. I was speaking phrenologically.” She touched his temples with the gentling tips of her fingers. He would have done anything she suggested.
It was the early years of American sports. She weighed the ball in the palm of her hand; she got Jeptha Arrison to set up her single pin, thin as a broomstick, all the way at the end of the ward. Again and again she knocked it over. “You have a problem,” she would say. “Bowling can take it away like this.” Knock it over again. It was impossible, the floor tilted to the south, the agitated footfalls of the sick sent vibrations through the boards, yet she managed it every time. Bertha Truitt told her visitors that the pharaohs bowled, of course they did, the pharaohs did everything first. Martin Luther bowled, before he was devout; Henry VIII had lanes built at Whitehall Palace. Rip Van Winkle was watching his neighbors bowl at ninepins when he fell into his famous sleep.
“As for me,” said Bertha Truitt, “I’ll build a bowling alley. What is this place.”
“This place?” Jeptha asked. He pointed at the bed he sat on. “Salford, or—”
“Salford,” Bertha Truitt said. “Massachusetts, then. Yes.”
The Bowling Alley Under Glass
Salford was a city hard north of Boston, with a sliver of coastline just big enough to ramshackle the houses and web the occasional foot. Like Rome, it had been built among seven hills; unlike Rome, it was a swampy place, a city of fens and bogs. Eventually the founders knocked over most of the hills, shoved them into the bogs, declared them to be squares, and named each for the former hill at its heart. Pinkham Hill became Pinkham Square; Baskertop Hill, Baskertop Square. As for the bogs, they were nameless, then gone.
Former bog dwellers were left to wander the municipality. Prosperous beavers in their beaver coats muscled around Gibbs Square, looking as though they meant to withdraw their funds from the local banks; nesting birds lamented the coarse new immigrants in their neighborhood, like them bipedal but unwilling or unable to fly. Frogs hopped like idle thoughts past the saloon. Sometimes they went in: you had to check your bucket of beer before you poured. Animals, flushed from Salford’s pockets, were everywhere. Perhaps the Salford Devil was only some Yankee platypus whose habitat had been replaced by the dime store.
A whole colony of little bogbirds had been ousted from the swamp that became Phillipine Square. In their place was a vaudeville house, a grocery store, and a trolley stop, though the whole demesne still smelled of bog: damp and up-to-no-good.
Here Bertha Truitt declared she would build her alley.
“I am at home in a bog,” she said. “A bog is a woman by its nature.”
“And hills?” asked Jeptha Arrison worriedly. Jeptha of the Hospital! He had a sack of a head, damp eyes an eely gray, and a face that altogether seemed something caught in aspic. He stood next to Bertha on the new sidewalk of Phillipine Square, though the road wasn’t yet paved, and looked down at his shoes, frilled at the edges with mud. “That’ll make me sick.”
“What will?”
“Filth,” he said. He asked again, “What’s a hill?”