Somebody had hung a wreath of roses and carnations on the door, and a black ribbon on the door handle. Joe hesitated, then removed the ribbon and got his keys out.
The place would need a full scrub: he would have to enlist Jeptha Arrison. No, he thought, he would do it himself, this first time. It might be a kind of ceremony. It might be just the exercise his body needed. He went to the corner to punch on the lights and then saw, in the corner, like a ghost, Old Levi sitting in the dark. He turned to look at Joe and gave a small forbidding nod. Joe turned the lights on anyhow.
“Open for business, you think?” Joe asked.
The same unfathomable nod.
Joe Wear had never liked Old Levi, the way he kowtowed to Bertha and at the same time was so full of himself, walked right in like he owned the place. Acted like he didn’t care what Joe Wear thought about him. It would be bad for business, a brooding drunk colored man in the corner. He’d aged in the way of furniture, Joe saw: threadbare in places so you could see the angles of his frame, creaking at the joints, and all his padding shifted.
“You happy there?” Joe Wear asked.
Old Levi held the sides of the round table, waiting. “I’m not happy anywhere,” he said at last.
If Bertha had left a will—surely she would have, she would never miss a chance to explain exactly what she gave away and to whom and in what quantity—she would not have left the alley to Old Levi, who would find it an albatross. He wouldn’t want it; she wouldn’t give it to him. Nor to their little daughter. There would be a will and it would be read. Until then—
“—I’m not fired,” Joe said.
“Not fired, no.” Old Levi’s voice was mild as milk, as though to cool the fire in Joe Wear’s. “You go ahead and open.”
“Listen, Sprague—”
“Doctor Sprague,” he said. So he did care, at least a little. “If you are seeking employment elsewhere—”
“No, Levi, I ain’t. I’m not fired?”
“Not fired,” said Dr. Sprague, irked at the fellow’s tone. But the point was to keep Bertha’s alley as it was, and that required this fool.
They both looked toward the front door, saw the three women goggling their eyes with their hands, peering in. They’d been drawn by the lights of the alley, on for the first time in two weeks. Now they straightened up and turned their backs, as though they’d only stopped on the sidewalk for conversation.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Wear,” said Dr. Sprague, so polite it sounded insulting. “I’ll die soon enough.”
“I’m not waiting for that.”
“Then what?” asked Dr. Sprague.
“Not waiting for anything,” said Joe Wear. “Waiting for the workday to be done.” Once the bowling started, surely, the man would be driven away, would go home to his own people up in Canada. “Heartfelt sympathy,” Joe said, then added, “to you. For your wife.”
He waited a while for an answer, then went to open the door for the women.
“Ladies,” he said, in a bitter voice, and he was overwhelmed with the smell of molasses. The women brought it in, slowed by it, by the sticky click of the gummy soles of their shoes against the alley floor.
The women—Mary Gearheart, Hazel Forest, LuEtta Mood—had read the paper every day for a funeral notice. Would it be at Cedrone’s Funeral Parlor? At the alleys? Not at a church, surely: Truitt had no use for church. She said so herself. They had to do something, even if it was just to bowl upon Bertha Truitt’s own lane. They had hung the wreath and the ribbon and had gone home to bowl in their sleep. Now they were here.
LuEtta Mood saw Dr. Sprague in the corner of the alley, and she thought about running. She had identified Bertha’s dead body; she should have gone directly to the Octagon to break the news. Instead she’d let the police do it. She had never written him so much as a note on the loss of his wife, when she should have been better, when she knew what a note or a word might mean to a person terrified and terrifying in grief. She had never understood Dr. Sprague but she had never tried.
Now she went to the table. “Dr. Sprague,” she said. He lifted his head.
He’d lost weight. His double chin, once curvaceous, nearly embarrassing, was gone; his mustache had taken on different, doleful angles. What happened in a marriage? Her own had fallen like a cake, if ever it had risen, and since Bertha’s death she’d been dreaming of escape, and only now realized it needn’t be a dream: leaving is something one might do. “LuEtta Mood,” she said of herself. Then, “I was a friend of your wife’s.”
Had she spoken to him in the past year? At the other end of the building, Mary and Hazel had begun to bowl quietly, which is to say badly, a pin at a time. Jeptha sat ready to set—now, when did he get here?—and neither he nor the women looked over. LuEtta knew she had to bring them back something.
“We were wondering,” she said, “if there will be a funeral.”
“Memorial service,” said Dr. Sprague. “Eventually. Not now.”
There was a carelessness to Dr. Sprague that alarmed LuEtta: he would attend to things when he got round to them and no sooner. He might not have done a single thing: the body itself, ant-sweet, caved in, glowing like a saint’s, might be stored in the house. Still, she thought, her loss of Edith gave her the right to talk to him about the loss of his wife. “And the burial?”
“Done,” said Dr. Sprague. “The Salford Cemetery.”
“Of course.”
He looked at her as though she had expressed an opinion on a dream he’d had.
“I’ll look for the stone, if it’s there,” said LuEtta.
“In a year, in the way of her people.”
“Her people.”
He nodded, said nothing more.
Then she sat down at the table. Why she hadn’t gone to see him after finding Bertha at the mortuary: because to do so she would have had to relinquish her own grief, fold it like a flag into a neat triangle and hand it over. She had not been ready then and she was not ready now. She tilted her head to see what he was writing; he turned it so she could read.
BERTHA in colored pencil, built not out of ordinary letters but something like architecture, ivy winding up the exterior wall of the B, and the R covered with pink roses and eyebrow windows, the A blushing peachily, alight with a sunset. She wanted to take it; he had it pinned to the table with his thumbs. He said, “Not lost but gone before,” and she said, “Yes. My condolences.”
He frowned. In his doctor’s voice, he said, “Not lost.” Then he looked at her, and more gently said, “Bertha said you lost a child.”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.” He examined her face a moment, as though troubled by it. “You could still have another, should you wish. Should your husband wish.”
“Thank you,” she said, though—she told herself later, away from the alley, fixing Moses Mood’s dinner, chicken livers and buttered noodles—it wasn’t as though permission was what she lacked.
Leviticus watched the women bowl. He loved Bertha, his thoughts never wandered to the loveliness of the other women, but it did wander. Inattention: his sin, as ever. Whatever was in front of him, he’d rather think of something else. He woolgathered, dreamt—sometimes he was stringing spondees and iambs on a line of poetry, but often not. He was vacant. He was walking along a street in Fredericton he’d last walked decades before. Remembering poems he’d memorized years ago, his own and other people’s, like reading old letters found in a trunk: nothing new, and everything new.
If he’d belonged to a confessing religion, he would have gone to confession. Bless me father for I have—what were we talking about?
Instead, like many sinners, he devoted himself to his sin. He sat in the corner of Truitt’s Alleys. Flask in pocket. Eyes to ceiling. A memory of Bertha trailing in from time to time and then her crushing death.