That was all Margaret wanted. To be an ancestral entry. She’d been left at the Little Sisters of the Poor clutching a braided lock of unidentified light brown hair, as meaningless and meaningful an object as ever an orphan has inherited.
Her Pinkham lodging was a closet behind the kitchen. In the Octagon she’d had a second-floor bedroom, same floor as the family, odd shaped but good sized, and she walked to Somefire Hill every day to remind herself of the people she’d lost—Bertha, Dr. Sprague, Minna—as well as the house that had lost them all. Uninhabited, the whole place, every room. Could she break in? She still had a dress hanging in the cupboard, a hairbrush on the dresser. They had broken her heart in turn, the family, they had taken it apart like an orange, first peel (that was Bertha, dying), then the breakapart into pieces (Dr. Sprague, sending her away), then the eating up (Minna, who did not even cry as they separated forever). That hairbrush was hers by rights. The room was.
Then one day a tall bearded man likewise was walking on the lawn around the house. “Curious construction,” he said to her, “put up by curious people. Lost on me how people could live in such a space. Warps ’em, I would think. Odd angles here.” He tapped his head. “And also.” He thumped his heart.
“I could tell you,” said Margaret Vanetten.
“You tell me then,” said the man. “You tell me everything. I’m Nahum. Truitt. Bertha’s child. Whoa, stand up, gal, whatever is the matter with you?”
Margaret had sat down on the lawn in shock. “You’re alive!”
“So far I am,” he admitted. “You might keep me live longer.”
“I’d figured you for a stillborn,” she said and then covered her mouth with her hand. What a thing to say aloud! Then again, she’d never heard about Nahum Truitt from Bertha, only from Jeptha Arrison.
At this the man sat down next to her on the lawn. He didn’t have to worry about grass stains on his dark pants, though she could feel the stains on her own. She remembered, all of a sudden, being a child and learning that grass could do that, paint your clothing green so you’d never forget it: what a wonder that was. The man’s face was long, sad, sincere. “No,” he said, “that wasn’t me. No. I survived. Lived. Outlived.”
A squirrel came up to regard them. There were always squirrels on Somefire Hill, brown brawny ones, but this was their squirrel, and it sat back on its haunches, and under the circumstances it was impossible to ignore how much such a squirrel looks like a preacher come to marry a couple, consulting his tiny Bible.
Oh, she was a rotten judge of character, she knew it, she never foresaw who would stand up for her and who would betray her and she alternately believed that she would be looked after by good people, and that she was doomed to be taken advantage of by callous ones. Regarding this man she felt both things at once.
“Well I’m glad,” said Margaret. Because that sounded forward, she added, “No mother should outlive her child, it’s unnatural.”
He put one hand to the back of his neck. “What happens in nature is natural. Commonest thing in the world. The Lord God has his reasons.”
“Are you Catholic?” she asked.
He said, “Small c.”
She took that to mean yes, but not devout. By the time she found out otherwise it was too late, a week later, at their wedding in Rockland, Maine. Overwhelming in a way: the thumping oak of his voice, his height, his furred body—somebody should have told her that men could be so bodily whiskered. That skeletal Maine minister who married them, perhaps. The conductor who took their tickets for the train. Not that it would have changed her mind but just to sit quietly ahead of time and contemplate.
She was a married woman and everyone knew. Nearly all of the time it delighted her, his size, his rumbling overgrowth. Not a boyish iota to Nahum Truitt, and that conferred upon her (she believed) a seriousness, that she had married such a man.
Nahum was not interested in tales of his sister, lost somewhere in Canada; her name was not to be mentioned. Neither was Bertha’s, nor Dr. Spague’s. Why had he married her at all? She had imagined she was a way into his family. She’d known them, still possessed a store of love for them all kept in fine shape in the cupboard of her heart, that she might divide and share. No: he was not interested. He and she were the Truitts now.
Astonishing how quickly one’s origins fly to dust. Salford had forgotten that Bertha Truitt had been found unconscious in a cemetery without the expected underclothes; Salford forgot, mostly, at least for a time, that Nahum Truitt’s maternity had ever been in question, that Margaret Vanetten had been the hired girl. The new Truitts ran the bowling alley and lived in the little quarters overhead. They moved to the apartment above the alley, where Joe Wear had lived, which he had vacated so thoroughly it was as though he had never existed—all but the toilet by itself in the closet, a cubicle of such filth that Margaret preferred to use the ladies’ room downstairs in the alley.
A mile away, on Somefire Hill, the Octagon stood empty, a board over the front door and cataracts of dirt across the windows, though the grounds were kept tidy enough, the lawn mowed. “It were built to pagan specifications,” Nahum said, when asked. “We’ll have nothing to do with it.” Storehouse for ghosts, or more likely the Truitt fortune, because the one thing nobody forgot was money. There must have been treasure in every obtuse corner of that house, and the new Truitts misers who wore all black (him) and all purple (her) because neither color showed dirt. Saved on washing. The Octagon surely held their hoard.
Well,” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt, once installed in the bowling alley, “let us get to work. Mr. Arrison. Tell me what you know.”
“The pins,” he said. “The pins and the pins. You take the stool, Meggie. Joe Wear knew the business of it but I only know the pins. Except—” he said, in a voice full of meaning.
“Yes,” said Margaret.
“I am acquainted also with the bowling balls. Acquainted, but my love is for the pins. Let me help you up.”
He did, onto the high stool behind the front oak desk. The back of the desk was a warren, and Margaret now its warrener.
“There’s money for you.” Jeptha indicated a stack of bills rubber-banded together in a cubby. “There’s the bank book. Joe Wear would know all but he is gone.”
She took the afternoon to go through each cubby. She found more cash that hadn’t made its way to the bank. In those days they still kept score on chalkboards hung on the wall, but there were scraps of paper upon which Joe Wear had mapped interesting matches, or imaginary ones. You could tell they’d been written with the stubs of pencils.
In the bottom row, she drew out what she thought at first might be a forgotten sandwich. One of Dr. Sprague’s, no doubt; Margaret had always found him peculiarly forgetful about sandwiches. A wax paper packet, still a little greasy. She unwrapped it and found a stack of letters. From Minna, to her father. The return address was not the farm in Oromocto, but Paris. Another foreign country.
Oh. She held the envelopes as though they were Minna’s hands. Yours. Not hers. Thick cream paper. Sealed with blue wax, dramatic, like Minna herself, severed by Dr. Sprague. Men were bowling on their lanes. She pulled out one note, just enough to see the date, September 10, 1919, mere months after Minna had ridden off in the green REO. So all that time she’d waited in Fredericton, all those letters that Margaret had written: Minna was already gone.