“Not in her own house. In her own house she bowled. So we’ll bowl.”
In fact Hazel did not want to bowl: her shoulder was bursitic. She was older than LuEtta Mood, and she’d been divorced eight years now. Golda Bastian, like Hazel a nurse at the hospital, had moved in to help, but it was clear that Golda hated children with the pure passion of a bigot. “I’ll bowl with you,” said Hazel.
She lasted a single afternoon.
Men came from all over by car, by trolley, to see the Angel of the Alleys. Time had blunted the point of her chin, and bowling, as Bertha Truitt foretold, had proved a boon to her form. She wouldn’t give up, LuEtta. She bowled alone. She got there in the morning and bowled till night, in white culottes and a blue-trimmed middy blouse. Bertha Truitt had bowled alone plenty and the men had never wanted to intrude on her solitude. LuEtta was different. Soon enough men started to challenge her. That is, they tried to flirt and she said, “We’ll play for it.”
“Play for what?”
“Conversation,” said LuEtta. “You lose, you leave me alone.”
“All right,” the challenging man might say.
She was a spectacle, just the sort of thing Joe Wear used to despise, but he found he didn’t mind so much. He even found a wedge of admiration for her.
Thereafter, nearly any time of day, you could find LuEtta Mood taking a stack of cash off some frowning man, the frowning baby strapped to her back. That imperious baby! He seemed to disapprove of everything, though silently: he would issue his orders for your execution later, through his trusted ministers. Good thing he would never remember this, it was terrible to be so bound by duty and age, and soon enough the baby—did he have a name? nobody ever heard her mention it—kept his eyes averted, as though the sight of her pained him, as though she were dying in a hospital bed. Duty. You would sit close, you had to, but to watch your mother do something so grim and personal meant you’d remember her no other way.
One afternoon Moses Mood met them on the sidewalk outside of Truitt’s. He had not been on the streets of Salford for a year or more. His assistants ran the hardware store; he stayed at home and worried. He’d had black hair once, so black that people wondered where it had come from. Now it was white. Turned white overnight, people said, from the shock, but it was only that they hadn’t looked at him in so long, not really. He’d lost weight, and the scar on his cheek had been laid bare. Lu wanted to touch it, as she had in the old days. He put his hand up to hide it.
Moses Mood had thought the baby would make things better. Would eat up some of her affection for the dead Edith’s, so that his husband’s portion would outweigh either child’s. No: that gobbling baby ate up every bit of spare love and attention, and then she took him to the bowling alley and stayed away all day. He was a year old now, as baby a baby as ever, as gobblingly greedy.
“Lu-Etta,” Moses Mood said in his slow furious voice. “Lu-Etta.” He shook his head and chuckled. There was never such a man for chuckling. “Come on home, it’s dinnertime.”
What was he wearing? Shirt and tie, he wanted to look good, but with a little shawl around his shoulders because he was cold. It was March. He had a pistol in his pocket, a little one.
“I’m hungry,” he said, with a small awful smile, small as the hidden gun.
“You know how to cook,” she answered.
“You walked right out of the house, no food in the icebox. I looked for you. I yelled for you. Then Snodders calls me on the phone and says, She’s down at the alleys again.”
Of course she had taken to the alleys, married to a man like that! For years she’d been trying to please him and he would not allow it. She had sewn or knitted or crocheted all of the baby’s clothing (she had made the very shawl that Moses Mood wore) to the wonder of her friends: nobody’s stitches were tinier, and Moses Mood could only say, Look at the little fellow in his ball gown. She had cooked him meals for years, and never a compliment. Had sung to the baby: Was that you caterwauling, Lu? No matter what she’d done over the years she could hear his response: Let me do that and you’ll ball it up and this house is a mess, no I’ll clean it, I’ll clean it, I always do. When he yelled, she could only make herself smaller on the couch. She’d had a father who hit her. Moses never did but she believed she was the one who stopped him, by her small stillness.
He said again, “No food in the house. I looked.”
“You said you were too sick to eat! You said you wanted to lie in bed alone!” For a moment she was a stranger listening to herself berate an old man on the sidewalk and she almost softened to him. The baby on her back turned.
Moses Mood said, smiling, smiling, “I am dying, honey. Come tend me.”
“I will,” said LuEtta, “soon.”
“Then I will take the boy,” said Moses Mood. He went back of her and tried to extricate the baby from its wrappings.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s no good for him,” he said. He got her by the hand. Her bowling hand, which fidgeted in his own. “You bitch,” he said under his voice, but now he was not just smiling but laughing. Laughing so he could laugh it off.
LuEtta thought, We’re in trouble.
Danger was a cloudburst. Ordinarily she read the signs, thunder nobody else could hear, a greening of the sky, a whiff of ozone. Not today. In the past she had merely stayed away. She would put the baby on her back so nobody could get to him, so she would be able to place her body between him and disaster. Were they in more danger because Moses Mood was in public or less? He cared what people thought of him. That was why he laughed. He thought his laughter was charming.
She knew he had a gun because he always did. She wasn’t particularly frightened of the gun itself. Not more today than any other day. The baby on her back made it easier to flee, that was another thing. She’d already packed the important object. A year ago she might have thrown herself on Hazel’s mercy and asked to move in, but that was before the child-hating Golda Bastian had taken over the house. “Let go, Moses,” she told him, though then she realized that as long as his hands were occupied he was not fishing for the gun. She wondered how long she might keep up this dancing. The baby was alive. She could heard the ticking in his chest that came before he cried.
“You’re not scared,” said Moses Mood to his son, or to his wife.
What was the right response to that?
Then the door to Truitt’s opened up, and Jeptha Arrison stepped out. He said in a mild, formal voice, “Your lane awaits you, Mrs. Mood.”
“No,” said Moses Mood. Now he laughed at Jeptha, the idiot who thought he could take a woman from her husband.
“Nevertheless,” said Jeptha, in a voice of such chivalry it made Moses Mood step back. “I’ll take the babby.” The child reached his arms to Jeptha. Moments before he’d seemed tied to his mother permanently. Now he nearly flew through the air to Jeptha. “Please,” Jeptha said to LuEtta, and he held the door for her, and the three of them—bowler, baby, pinbody—went into the alley.
“I said No!” yelled Moses Mood, though he was alone on the sidewalk. “No! No!” He was going off like a gun, though he kept the gun quiet in his pocket; he felt its weight. No! No! What direction would he fire in?
When the news came some weeks later that Moses Mood had shot himself in the other ear, LuEtta was staying with Jeptha and his parents in Attleboro. Mood had left two notes, one that said I belong to the ages and the other Lu, I do not blame you, you see I could not live with myself either.
“You saved me, Jeptha,” said LuEtta, and he said, “You saved yourself.”
But that was after Nahum Truitt had made LuEtta Mood bowl for her soul.
Rattled