“Ireland. All dead now. He might be dead himself. He was a sickly thing.”
At that Nahum sniffed the air, as though for evidence, wound the tassels of the coverlet in his fingers. What he wanted was a coarse wool blanket, one that would rub a rash across his neck and onto his cheek; he wanted to yank his wife’s knit monstrosity by its useless tentacles right off the bed. He wanted to holler, but he knew it would do no good. His first wife had responded to shouts—she took herself away, for an hour, a day, finally for good—but Margaret was immune to noise. She didn’t pay him the least attention when he shouted; she answered in her usual voice. She might even sing her answer. Her conscience was astonishingly clear, always.
“What of the Truitt fortune?” said Nahum now. “The gold, I mean, she come here with.” But he didn’t really know how money worked, whether it was staggering the money had been squandered or a miracle it had lasted so long.
“Gone. Into the house and into this place. It’s been years.”
“Disappeared.”
“Spent.”
“I suppose. But the doll. Where is she?”
“Someone stole her as a joke. Perhaps she’ll come back. You see, Nim,” she teased. “There was another woman here all along.”
“She left with our luck.”
“No,” said Margaret.
“She was the plank what held it up.”
“You miss her,” said Margaret. “You miss your mother.”
“I miss the doll. I require the doll. Some idiot has hid her.”
He’d been in Salford eight years by then, and he had never meant to stay, only to secure his fortune and leave. Find the gold, if there was gold yet, or empty the bank account. He had a right. But then he had fallen into the long con of marriage, and lately he realized the gold must be gone. Spent, or swept into the harbor. He’d looked floor to ceiling in the Octagon, though by law he was not allowed to be there, and he had hated every moment of the search. The safe in the cellar of the alley was empty; he slammed the door shut and set the wheel spinning. Then he opened the safe again, as though the wheel might have pulled it up from some deep hiding place. Why had he stayed all those years? Why had he married that funny little woman? For the most appalling reason. He loved her. He could not live without her.
In the morning he would look for the wooden figure. He had hated living with that spurious Bertha but apparently he could not live without her. Much like the actual Bertha. He would look for the gold, too, cellar to roof, but he knew he would never find it. No, he told himself, you must believe that you will, that is luck, too, you conduct it with your brain. No man who felt unlucky was ever luckstruck.
Who was he? Who had he ever been?
Nahum Truitt, just as he said. Never Bertha’s son. Only her first husband, from whom she’d gotten her name and from whom she’d gotten bowling. She’d stolen her first candlepin from him, her first bowling ball, then she’d broken his heart and left him for Leviticus Sprague. They had met in Sacco, Maine. They’d parted in Boothbay. She was a tyrant. She was a thief. He loved her yet.
Years later he would die with these truths upon his lips. He loved everyone he had ever loved.
Margaret Overcome
In 1932 Nahum Truitt went to Picardi’s Barbershop in Phillipine Square to have the beard shorn from his face. He looked at the long mirror, his reflection surrounded by all the blades of the business, which meant he was, too. He trusted Picardi to put the sharpest blade to his very neck; he trusted himself not to wrest the razor away to do something terrible, to himself or someone else. Time was he wouldn’t have trusted himself. Therefore the beard.
Would he look older or younger without it? He’d grown it not to change his age but to hide his face, the nervous smile that had always brought him trouble. A liar needs a beard, but today he would tell his wife the truth.
These things were true:
He loved her.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was killing him.
He did not love bowling.
He was not Bertha Truitt’s son.
They were flat broke. No, they were at the bottom of a crater.
They would move to the State of Maine, all of them, and there—assured of his luck, once and for all!—he would stop gambling.
They would be happy the rest of their days.
This was it. The last day he could stand Salford. If she did not say yes he would leave her, and the boys, and Massachusetts forever.
He couldn’t quite order these facts in his mind. Start with the good news? Interweave? As for preamble:
Meg, I have news. I have good news. I have unfortunate—I have come to an unfortunate conclusion. I can explain. I can’t. Let’s away.
I am not myself, Meg, and have not been since you have known me, and long before. I love you.
(What about the boys? He loved them but could not say so. Even the thought of it made him furious.)
Nahum had amassed debts. Deep ones, the sort you could drown in. You, and your whole family. If you believed in them. Nahum did not always believe in his own debts. They were a lack of money, they were imaginary, and he had always thought that if he threw just enough money at his debts or outran them altogether he really owed nothing.
Nahum Truitt had lost bets, though he was not alone: the whole country had lost bets, and jobs, and fortunes, so it was harder to work to take money off another fellow to replace what you’d lost. These days he skimmed cash from the day’s earnings for dumb wagers. He pitched pennies in the park; he went to watch the dogs run; he went to watch the horses run though when he did he had to wash the smell of horse away, else canine Jeptha would sniff it out, and balk, and tell. He bet on other bowlers all the time, though he no longer bowled himself, worried he would fall again into the hustle—you couldn’t both hustle and stay in one place without being well and truly beaten. He had been well and truly beaten in his life, with fists but also bowling balls, thrown by a big Gypsy in Bangor, like bombs going off. He was a pious gambler but now he felt his belief worn away by reality.
When the last bit of lather and bristle had been scraped away by the blade, he examined himself and saw his mistake. His face had lived in the wilderness so long it was unprepared for the eyes of humanity upon it, white, abraded by the razor, his very chin retreating. Behind him Picardi winced. It was that sort of lack of chin. You blamed the fellow for it.
“Voilà,” said Picardi in a voice of tragedy. He was a bald barber. He had transferred his tonsorial vanity to his customers.
“Thank you,” said Nahum.
“Don’t,” said the barber. “It’s my job.”
Nahum, revealed, went to meet the little wife for lunch and further revelation. (Jeptha was running the alley counter; he was still allowed to then.) Nahum would have liked to go to Coop’s for his last meal in Salford—he’d never eaten in a restaurant till he was in his forties, and if he were a millionaire he might never eat anywhere else—but his frugal wife insisted on packing sandwiches to consume in the park. Her body seemed to produce sandwiches without her knowledge. “It’s not that I don’t like restaurants,” she always said, “it’s just that I prefer my own cooking.” This was another inexplicable, terrifying quality of hers that he nevertheless admired. Her stinginess was how they’d managed to limp along as far as they had.