“Cure?” said Joe. “Of what? Of myself?”
“We are all afflicted with the disease of us,” Nahum agreed. “We are dying of it.”
He took one of his hands away and Joe was grieved to realize he missed it. Turned around in the dark. What direction were you headed, when you went into the dark in the first place and then got turned around? Nahum put his free hand behind him, on Joe’s ankle, then lay back across Joe’s thighs, and in this way they made a cross in the bed. “My mother wouldn’t forgive me, for all that I have done,” said Nahum.
“Bertha?”
Nahum said nothing. Then, to the ceiling, “I am going to the State of Maine. Will you come with me? You need forgiveness, too.”
Joe said the same nothing.
“You will not,” said Nahum, as though putting his foot down. “For what? For murder.”
“I didn’t ask you for what,” said Joe, though his blood turned to mercury at the accusation.
“No man deserves to burn to death,” said Nahum. “Not even that one. You thought you got away with it.”
“No,” said Joe Wear, to all of it. The accusation was as awful years later as it had been at the time. The way falseness made you doubt yourself, it deformed your very shadow, the grammar of your soul. He’d been led to believe that innocence was a pure feeling, cleansing, it would spirit away guilt and cowardice. That wasn’t true. Innocence stung. It’d be easier to be accused of things he’d done.
Nahum’s weight across his legs hurt. Still the man was talking. Had he ever stopped? Did he, ever?
“I shall retrieve Mrs. Truitt, of whom I so often fondly speak. When I am back we shall change things.”
“When?” asked Joe.
“I am going today.”
“Today?”
“This morning. It’s morning.”
Joe looked at the windows and saw it was true. From the alley below came the sound of balls being bowled along the returns.
“What’s that?” said Nahum. He startled from the bed and staggered to the kitchen table.
“Jep, I imagine. He comes in nowabouts most mornings.”
Nahum looked like he was about to leap to the tabletop like a treed cat. “That moron’s come back?”
“’Pears so. You’ll need him.”
“Pinboys are everywhere.”
“He’ll die here if he’s allowed.”
“By God.” Nahum slapped at the kitchen light and sent it swinging. Joe closed his eyes against the hammering flash. “This place,” said Nahum. “I was not meant for this place.”
“Salford?”
“The entire wicked world,” said Nahum. “You know what that fool said to me before he took the gal away?” He turned to look at Joe with his squintish sulfur eyes. “You know what he had the nerve to say?”
Joe shook his head.
“Never you mind what he said, Wear,” said Nahum. “I expect he regrets it still.”
When Nahum Truitt returned from Maine with a set of luggage and a woman in a lavender traveling suit, it was Jeptha Arrison behind the glass counter who said hello. Spring—a verdant backed-up burble that ran down the streets—was lapping over the threshold of Truitt’s and inside. The woman’s hat was felt and bell shaped and trimmed with artificial violets.
“This is Mrs. Truitt,” Nahum said to Jeptha Arrison. “She will be your mistress.”
“She’ll be my what?” said Jeptha Arrison.
“Your boss,” said Nahum. “This is Mrs. Truitt.”
“This is Maragret Vanetten,” corrected Jeptha. “Hello, Meg! How ever have you been?”
“The former Margaret Vanetten,” said Nahum, perturbed. “Yes. Currently Mrs. Truitt. We were married at the Church in the Woods. We have honeymooned at Boothbay Harbor and now we have returned to leap into marital bliss.”
“We’ve leapt!” said Margaret.
“Apparently we’ve leapt.”
They were holding hands. Nahum’s beard had been topiaried into a kind of basin into which the former Margaret Vanetten could nestle her head. She did just that.
“Hello, Jep,” she said. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“Hello, Meg,” he said again. Then to Nahum, “Where’s your wife, boss?”
“Here before you, as I say,” said Nahum. “A Mrs. Truitt of one week, but nevertheless and for the rest of her life.”
“Meg is?” said Jeptha.
“Call me Mrs. Truitt,” she said, as though granting him an intimacy.
“But where’s your wife?” Jeptha asked.
Nahum Truitt removed Margaret Truitt from his beard, so that Jeptha might better look. “I am a widower, Jeptha Arrison. I’ve told you that. Dead these ten years. Dead without issue. I were alone in the world, until I met my Margaret. Jeptha Arrison,” said Nahum. “You said something to me. As you left.”
Sometimes Jeptha’s pale eyes were glitteringly blank. Then there was a drawing together of his features, a suppressed smile, a near rakish intelligence visible there. “Well, boss, I helped you out. You don’t think you could beat her straight forward, do you.”
Nahum nodded uncertainly, though that wasn’t what he’d meant.
“Not Lu. The angels are on Lu’s side. But I was on yours.”
“Well,” said Nahum, glancing at the current Mrs. Truitt. “Perhaps this will cure her of feminine athletics.”
“She’ll bowl yet but elsewhere. No, they’d kill her. From the pit I could tell all. For instance, what might you do?” Jeptha looked at Nahum with what seemed to be fondness. “Even you don’t know, my guess.”
“Jeptha!” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt.
“Never mind,” said Nahum grandly. He slapped the counter. “Today our new life begins. Where’s Joe Wear?”
“Don’t know,” said Jeptha.
“Well, ask someone.”
“Someone knows nothing same as me,” said Jeptha. “Gone.”
For years the Half Nickels would say, “Joe Wear would know the answer to that,” but Joe Wear was nowhere around. He had left not one forwarding detail. He wasn’t the last of his kind but he’d been acting like it, for decades now. Buried alive. Where would he go? Elsewhere. He took his head full of bowling straight out of Massachusetts, and did not return for many years.
The future is coming. It always is. We have generations to get through first, marriages and divorces and widowhoods and remarriages, the yoking of families, the unyoking. The disappeared and misattributed. The pathetic life spans of dead children, the greedy awful life spans of the very old. She came to a tragic end. That’s as true for the plummeted teenager (a Barcelona balcony, a broken romance) as it is for your great-aunt, dead at 103 after years of silent confinement, who has turned, it seems, into soap and slough. You will be born soon. You’re promised. What damage you’ll do to the family tree is in your hands. That’s for later. Patience.
3
Betrothed and Beholden
Once upon a time, happily ever after, was never seen again. Such things are only true in the storybook world, not ours. Once upon a time there was a little girl—no, there have been millions of little girls, at all times. They lived happily ever after—but after the disaster, your happiness is always shadowed by the closeness of your escape. Never seen again—you can’t stop seeing the dead wolf opened like luggage on the bed, his turned-out stomach embossed with the pattern of your grandmother’s lace bonnet, his intestines perforated by her kicking heels. The dead are seen over and over, and most of the living.
Once upon a time there was a girl. Then she was again.
She was a parcel of a person, Margaret Vanetten, left and stored and sent away, sent away again. Left by her mother on the steps of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Raised by nuns who thought they might make a nun of her—nuns are more discerning than wolves, they don’t think any old naked left-behind baby is automatically one of them. Sent by those nuns to be in service to rich peculiarities living in a ridiculous house. “Are they adopting me?” she’d asked Sister Catherine.
“Adopting?” said Sister. “Margaret Mary, you are fifteen years old.”