She would not read them. Of course she would read them, just not yet. Sitting at the oak desk at Truitt’s Alleys, she wrote to Minna Sprague, 44 Rue du Temple, Paris. She wrote on the long paper that spun off a spool, used for receipts. She folded it into an envelope. Would Minna recognize the address in the corner? Margaret herself wouldn’t have: she thought of the alley as being in Phillipine Square, but the actual address was 74 Mims Avenue. She added Apartment 1. She omitted Truitt. Why? Oh, she would explain things soon enough but for now she meant to be only Minna’s Margaret, and not Minna’s, what was she—she burst out laughing. She was Minna’s sister-in-law.
Well, Margaret understood relics. She jettisoned the wax paper and tied the bundle with blue ribbon. She hid the bundle at the back of a bottom cubby, where Nahum would never find it.
She got a letter back, from Minna, Parisian Minna. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you!
It was a short letter, well spelled, unsentimental. No blue wax seal. It explained that she had moved from Oromocto with her aunt a few weeks after her arrival; her aunt could teach her the cello—of course Minna should play the cello—but Minna’s voice required training and of that Almira Sprague was ignorant. Her father was dead, had Margaret heard, of course she must have heard, being back in Salford. She signed herself as ever.
Margaret read the letter five times. Then she was out of words and she allowed herself to read Minna’s letters to her father.
She could tell the difference. Minna’s letters to her father were strange casseroles, made of language, yes, but only sometimes in English: words of such foreignness they felt like cold spots in the warm lines of Minna’s sentences. (Latin, French, Italian, probably, even little prickly lines of what Margaret assumed was Greek.) Also sudden bars of music, pencil drawings, watercolors. Was it that Minna and her father didn’t understand each other, so she wrote in as many languages as possible, hoping to find the one in which they were both fluent? Or was it that they understood each other so utterly that this was how they communicated? She wrote in rebuses and code. One letter began, My own Papa! This is a lipogram. It’s lacking. Do you know what it lacks, my darling Papa? Hint: a small thing, but without it you & I cannot sign our patronym, nor you your first.
Minna’s letter to Margaret was in ordinary English. Dear Margaret, she wrote. How extraordinary to hear from you! You say you would recognize me anywhere. I wonder. I am quite made over. In answer to your question: no, I don’t think I will ever come back to Salford. Not ever. You must understand that it is a place of terrible memories for me, worse than you know. Not ever, she wrote again, and here she underlined it, and underneath the word ever—silly to think so, and yet it was true—Margaret could see a hint of the child she’d known. The paper was torn. So not ever and yet in a way here she was. Not ever and as ever.
For every five letters she sent to Minna she got one back. They were matter-of-fact, as though to a distant friend, enough, the way you might send pennies to the electric company when you owed hundreds of dollars: not square, but you wouldn’t be cut off. Margaret tied her letters, her paltry archive, with blue ribbon, too.
Nahum made over Joe Wear’s old apartment, moved the toilet to the other side of the apartment, added a sink. Bought a fine new electric icebox with a monitor top.
“What else would you like, Meggie?” he asked. “Say the word.”
She would like not to live above a bowling alley, with the smoke that came up through the floorboards. She would like to say, “Now that we are married, we can bring Minna home!” But Minna was a far-off dream, and Nahum was real, and she loved him. You gave things up for love. The nuns had taught her that. What she wanted was the house and she imagined Minna owned it and she imagined Minna should give it to her, after all she’d done for her.
He left alone the kitchen-side tub, that he might sit at the table late at night and watch Margaret in her bath, so little all he could see was her head on the lip at the higher end, one languid dripping hand on the edge, until the moment—it was staggering suspense, you never knew when it would happen—she would chide herself for sloth and stand streaming, as though hoisted in the air, not a freckle on her pale body, not a mole, not a scar, immaculate Meg!, even when she fell pregnant, once (that was Roy, professorial even as a baby), twice (Arch, a flirt, also from birth). No little girls. That was for the best, little girls didn’t belong in bowling alleys. Leave the bathtub, watch the boys like otters in their evening wash, always (Nahum thought) on the verge of drowning each other: you knew, when you were that young, that the point of life was to win no matter how you managed it.
It seemed a bewitchment to Margaret. A storeroom became a bedroom. A hired girl a wife. A woman could become a mother, even without meaning to. Some days she closed her eyes and tried to remember that other path, the one she’d been on, which she’d thought she hated. A single woman who had to work to keep herself alive. That whole year in Fredericton, waiting for the Spragues to come for her, washing dishes, putting aside her whole paycheck so she could build a home for Minna and herself and whoever else came along. When she remembered that girl she’d been, she saw the light all around her and thought, You were so miserable! And for what?
Orphaned, taken in. Alone, married. She did not know who she was. Her soul was a goldfish, a little thing inside the bowl of her body. She always had to concentrate to find it before she said her prayers.
Dreams Carved of Wood
His older brother, Roy, was a self-contained child, sedentary and bookish, but Arch Truitt opened things. Doors, cupboards, purses, pockets of trousers left on the floor, pockets of occupied trousers, packages of powdered soap. He was an investigator, a rifler. It confounded his parents, who both had assumed that children knew the line between the childish and adult world, and would ask permission to cross it. Roy had been that sort of child, at least when it came to the physical, but here was Arch, butter-blond and blithe and laughing. Even so when they found him, at four, in bed asleep with the doll, they assumed Roy, then five, was to blame. That doll was as big as Arch. Bigger. How could he have carried it there without the sound of her wooden heels against the wooden floor?
Margaret, standing over the bed, was the one who’d discovered the child and the doll. The doll’s head was on the pillow next to Arch’s, though faceup. His lips were at her neck. Her head, crudely sewn of white duck, was a lopsided bulb, not much of a chin, not much of a nose, though the face itself had been hand-painted and was poignant.
“Holy!” Margaret whispered before astonishment shut her up.
She’d thought at first it was the Salford Devil, come back from the stories and curled into her child’s bed. It was a put-together thing, same as the Devil, with one beautiful carved wooden arm outside of the covers, plus that worn bolster of a head: it reminded her of a woman she’d once seen with hyacinth blue eyes and a jaw swollen by a purpling growth, a woman deformed and beautiful simultaneously, not one state despite the other. The doll’s eyes were green and large, the mouth, near where the head tapered into something like a neck, sherbety, lips parted to show little painted teeth. The doll was having a good time. Margaret uncovered the body—a white duck torso, happily unpainted but buxom, unnippled, unnaveled, unnellied; wooden limbs that looked real. Arch was still asleep, one hand on the doll’s large lopsided right breast.
By then Roy was awake, and Nahum stood in the door of the bedroom. “What’s going on?” yawned Roy. The summer heat had pasted his nightshirt to his stomach. “What’s that?”
“It’s Bertha,” said Margaret.
“Bertha?” said Nahum, stepping awkwardly into the room, which he generally considered a place for women and children; bedtime and awakening were a mother’s job. But intruders fell to fathers, and here was an intruder. He tossed aside the blanket.
The doll was calm and barefoot. Unlike china dolls who showed their teeth, she seemed unworried, like she was about to pick up a check. “Bertha,” Margaret said. “Without a doubt.”
“Well,” said Nahum uncomfortably. “She got fat. Archie,” he said. “Archer. Wake up.”