“What?”
“Shake it. You can tell a man’s character by his handshake.” She closed her eyes assessingly. Then she opened them and looked at the splinters on the napkin. “Don’t forget me, Joe. You owe me a kindness. Androcles and the lion.”
What had she divined about his character? He said, though he did not remember, “My mother used to tell me that story.”
She smiled piteously at him. The pity was because he still believed that his mother and her stories belonged only to him. She said, at last, “I know she did.”
That afternoon at Les Miserables he got into a fever of pinsetting, set them so fast all the other pinboys sat back and watched him swing from pit to pit, standing the pins on the plates, tossing the ones that had split and grabbing new, sanding the bottoms on the fly so they’d keep their balance. It was true that the pins reminded him of Virgil Fraser, it seemed certain that he would never be able to take hold of a bowling pin in all innocence again. How had he ever? What they’d done had seemed necessary, incendiary in the room; it still seemed incendiary, and he was worried that he might burst into flames, and the cause of death would be sodomy. That was the word that came into his head. It was biblical. He had never read the Bible. Maiden aunt Rose would find out and send the news via prayer to her dead sister. Even so he wanted to go back to Virgil Fraser and the hard smell of him, his knockabout affection. The bentwood chair, the dormer, the bed. It was this that shamed him, not that he’d done such things but that he’d do them again, and he the only hope of his family.
He was burning. Was it with shame or love? Either might kill him. Physical pain, too: he knew in the morning he would be laid low with spasming muscles, unable to climb back on the shelf before the balls came at him. (There was a meanness at Les Miserables. The bowlers sometimes aimed balls at the pinboys for laughs.) He hoped every snatch of a pin replaced one of the splinters that had been stolen from him: he could touch nobody with his tender tended hands, including Virgil Fraser, a man who now seemed made of wood: barrel staves, bowling pins, sanded or ebonized or unvarnished. His sawdust breath.
After Joe came off his shift, he quit Les Miserables. He would walk away from this life and begin again. He would find a job where he was beneath notice or desire, where nobody would aim a weapon or a look at him. At the end of the week he found a job in Salford, a city five miles away, in a cemetery, surrounded by the dead, who (it turned out) did not withhold judgment. As I am now, so you shall be. Weep not for me. She was without sin. The dead were arranged by families, husbands next to first and second wives, unmarried people buried at the feet of their parents, all these stones paid for by somebody, after all. A crowd of dead people was as much a crowd as a bowling alley, he thought, until the morning he found a live woman amid the stones. He went to visit her at the hospital, and there she offered him a job, and lodging, and her odd smile, offered her hand for shaking. He took it.
You can tell a man’s character from his handshake, Aunt Rose had said. He didn’t know about a woman’s. Her hand felt like rock maple; his own, as though Rose with her needle had drawn out not splinters but his very bones. This woman was offering him escape from Virgil Fraser, his corrupting, compelling influence, the particular smell of him, his dangerous jokes, his ruinous affection—was it affection or was it just pastime for Virgil? He had known the minute Virgil Fraser had turned him over in bed that he was at a fork in the road, yes, no, and that his life would be made of such forks: he just didn’t know he’d come to another so quick.
“Will you join me,” said Bertha Truitt, as though it were not a question but persuasion, and then that’s what it was. “Do a good job,” she said, “and one day the business will come to you.”
Joe Wear left behind his rented room and moved to the apartment above Truitt’s Alleys, where he thought of Virgil Fraser hourly. Then daily. Then, after some years, weekly. Then only when he was startled by a tall bowlegged man coming through the front door: Virgil’s here for me at last, he’d think, nearly leaping over the counter and into the arms of the stranger.
In January of 1919, Joe Wear lay in bed in his room over the alley and grieved alone. Nobody knocked on his door. Nobody told him what was expected of him. For the death of Bertha Truitt, Old Levi would be given flowers, and bunting, and notes of sympathy. Actual sympathy. What would Joe Wear get? He had not said the name Virgil Fraser aloud in nearly twenty years, or ever. He had gone to see Aunt Rose at Shaw’s every week, until she had fallen in love with a widower with three small children, she had become a mother, she had moved to New Hampshire to begin her life. If he had given up Virgil for her (though Virgil had not been his to give up), if he had given up not just another life, but life itself, how could she have left him for the bald and birdish Mr. Birch, who owned a choker of summer cabins ringed round a lake?
She had, though. Come stay in a cabin, she told him. What would Joe Wear do in a cabin? All she owned, the coral necklace, the fine Irish linen, the sense of propriety: it would be left to her stepchildren.
Do a good job and one day the business will come to you.
“Don’t fall in love with that woman!” Aunt Rose had warned him twenty years ago, when he’d told her about Bertha Truitt. She did not believe that women should own businesses. But if he had fallen in love, or at least into marriage, the alleys would now belong to him.
He’d asked her only once how she’d come to be in the cemetery. After a pause she’d said, “You’re an orphan, Joe, aren’t you?” “Yes.” “Well, I was orphaned from myself.” “I don’t know what that means,” he said, but he did. A terrible thing to be orphaned from yourself. Why he and Truitt had an understanding: they both had been.
“Orphaned from myself,” said Truitt, “and so I left myself on the front doorstep of God. But you found me first.” “And your husband.” “First, Joe Wear. I always remember you found me first.”
One day the business will come to you.
She had said that. He was certain. It had seemed a preposterous promise when she made it, but Truitt had turned out to be a preposterous and trustworthy human being. If you looked hungry she would have a turkey dinner delivered. If you admired her hat she would have it duplicated for you, even if you were not in the habit of wearing ladies’ hats. She lived in a world not of sips of whiskey but cases, not of sandwiches but roast pigs.
He stood up in his bed and leaned on the iron headboard. He could feel the springs beneath his feet. All those days in bed had turned his muscles to starched sheets. They hurt to move. He wondered whether they’d hold him.
In his absence, he was certain, Truitt’s Alleys had stayed idle. The pins would have been cleared into the pits at the end of the night, the balls rolled back along the returns, the ashtrays emptied and stacked and left so for days. Old Levi wouldn’t have opened it, nor Jeptha Arrison. Only Joe. There might be a scrim of handprints, noseprints, on the plate glass window, bowlers wondering when Truitt’s Alleys might rouse itself, if ever, now that its mistress was gone.
Maybe he owned it. Maybe the business had come to him.
He went crotcheting down to open the alley under his own orders.