He wouldn’t, he only snuggled in, gripped the one breast harder. Margaret turned away.
“Arch,” said Nahum, and walked through the back door of the boy’s dreams, and made everyone there scatter, the dogs, the man with the mechanical swan, the miniature women, and Arch was up and blinking. “Who’s her?” he asked of the doll. He touched her painted hair, her painted ear rememberingly, and answered his own question. “I found her.”
What do you do with an effigy like that? Where could it go? Margaret wanted to install it in the alley. Nahum wanted to burn it; he knew he couldn’t burn it. Drown it, but dolls don’t drown. Give it away, though what child, other than Arch, would cuddle a thing like that? Put her in a rowboat and send it down the Salford estuary. Put it in the fens and let the animals decide. Bury it in the Salford Cemetery. Seal it in a wall. Put it in a chair and offer it sweets. Build it a little house where it might be happy forever. Give it to the prop mistress at the Salford Theater, so that it might tread the boards. Donate it to a ventriloquist who might make it a better head—no, no, best not give it the power of speech, uncanny enough silent. Buy it a train ticket to Hollywood. Try to find her people. Write letters to her breathing double—no, her double was dead, of course, though surely only Bertha would know what to do about the wooden Bertha.
Nahum hated the thing and kept locking her in the basement. Arch loved the thing and pulled her up the stairs to cuddle her, took her back to his bedroom. Roy alone was indifferent, though it amused him to use her to model items from the lost and found—scarves, hats, spectacles. Margaret sewed the doll a suit: a divided skirt, a double-breasted vest, rolled sleeves, an annular hat, and sat her up on the oak counter at the front of the house.
The worst was Jeptha Arrison, who sometimes when he finished his pinsetting shift took the seat next to her at a table, and held her hand, and said nothing. Once he set the doll out along the glass counter at the front and rubbed linseed oil into its joints. “Oh dear, oh dear: her brains is coming out.” He poked some horsehair stuffing into the seam of the doll’s head. “She does not like that.”
“Doesn’t she?” said Margaret, spooked by the feminine pronoun. “That smells flammable.”
“She’s fine,” said Jeptha. “Our girl’s not the type to burn.”
Margaret was uneasy, looking at Jeptha massaging the doll’s knees, feeling his own knees for reference, returning to the doll. “Where did she come from?”
“Heaven,” said Jeptha.
She shook her head.
Nahum looked broodingly at the doll. “It is a cursed thing. I cannot see an end to it that does not call down terrible luck.”
Her face was pale, her limbs were tan. You could see every knuckle, hear the blood beating beneath the varnish. Sometimes bowlers took her into their laps. They weren’t respectful. It would have been better if her expression hadn’t been so jolly.
Her face got grimy. Someone bit her breast. Somebody drew on pubic hair, which Margaret with averted eyes bleached out with a brush. There were rumors the doll was found in a different place in the alley every morning.
“Boris!” sobbed Arch. That was what he had named her. “Boris!”
Finally she disappeared. Nobody took responsibility.
But who is Bertha,” Roy wanted to know.
“Nobody,” said Margaret. “Founder of the alleys. Original Truitt.”
“Original Truitt,” said Roy. “So—a relative? We’re related to the founder? Bertha Truitt.”
“Well,” said Margaret. “Yes.”
“How?”
“For heaven’s sake,” said Margaret.
“Papa’s mother? We could do a family tree.”
“No use,” said Margaret. “We’ve been pruned.”
“But—”
“Who are you looking for, for heaven’s sake!” said his mother. “Aren’t I enough for you? And your father. Greedy,” she said to Roy, “that’s your problem.”
(How she talked too often: she thought something mean, thought, you can’t say that, and then she was saying it, knowing it awful, so she didn’t even get the pleasure of meanness.)
Margaret looked at her son. He was pale and freckled and redheaded and looked like nobody she’d ever seen before in her life. She thought, accusingly, as she often did, I made you. Any trace of Bertha Truitt had been stored in the cellar before Margaret had come back to it; there was no trace in Roy himself, except perhaps the plumpness. “Roy,” she said. “I can’t tell you. Don’t ask Papa. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Why not can’t I ask?”
“You know why,” said Margaret. Roy didn’t know why, but he did know that. His father had a way of stopping questions before you asked them.
But they couldn’t keep Bertha out that easily. Not just by never saying her name aloud. If Roy went looking—when Roy went looking—he would find the scrapbooks, the framed newspaper clippings, the monogrammed wallets, the photographs. Bertha herself was still everywhere, and Nahum, on dark mornings, could believe that the doll had assembled itself out of leftover emanations.
The bad luck snuck in bit by bit, misfortune to trial to catastrophe—or else it had always been there, like a basement infestation driven at last up through the floorboards. Or else it was only the luck they deserved, having not looked after their wooden matriarch. One afternoon, the strength tester that Bertha had so loved to dominate threw up a fountain of sparks when Jeptha Arrison squeezed it. It was the last place you could put your hand and pretend, for a moment, that you were shaking hands with Truitt, put your mouth to the tube where her mouth had been. The bowling balls, yes, it was possible, but balls were rotated through the lanes, they rolled back at odd angles, were eventually retired: you’d never know for sure. That was why Jeptha loved the strength tester, and the shock it gave you when you failed to squeeze hard enough (Jeptha never squeezed hard enough), a tickling pain in all the public and private parts of him, the curve of his cheeks and his giblets and oysters. Then the machine sent him to the hospital.
The three black-and-white cats who lived at Truitt’s—a mother and her children—died one after the other after eating rats who’d eaten poison laid out at Coop’s Cafeteria next door.
Arch caught measles and they were all quarantined. “Quarantine comes from the Latin for ‘forty,’” Roy said, he who knew too much of the ancient world and scorned the modern one. Nahum and Margaret got the measles, too, but Roy was fine. He heated up soup and nursed everyone. This means he will take care of me, thought Margaret in her fever. This means I will escape, Roy thought, because I can take care of myself.
The furnace caught whooping cough, whooped, whooped, whooped, never recovered. The pipes in their grief for the furnace froze and burst and wept over lane ten, which warped and rotted.
Martin Younkins of the Salford Half Nickels, the team of war veterans, stepped in front of the Salford Bugle truck one cherry-spring evening, league night, the air full of possibility and pollen. “He flew across the road!” said a witness, but he didn’t, he was killed on impact, he never flew again. The rest of the Half Nickels heartbrokenly rolled away from Truitt’s forever.
Nahum blamed the doll. They were not yet ruined—that would come later—but they could not do without luck, which meant he needed to find her. He could never find things, even the wrench in his hand, the name of a regular bowler. The way he misplaced things had always made Joe Wear shake his head. Joe Wear found things. It was one of his talents.
“Wherever do you suppose that fellow went?” Nahum asked Margaret one night in their bed. Astonishing how she’d made their bedroom over, with a knit throw over a quilt and flowered curtains, though the iron bed incarcerated them, and the radiator made a tin-cup-on-prison-bars sound.
“Who?”
“Joe Wear, when he went so sudden.”
“He might be anywhere,” said Margaret in a cheerful voice.
“Where were his people from?”