William Burling Jeter Jr. laughed with happiness. “Then bring him to me.”
“The oldest man in Salford is dying,” Margaret said. “He’s in a hospital. Or he’s in bed. The oldest man in Salford doesn’t have time to waste in a bowling alley, begging for hot nuts.”
“I’m not begging, honey,” said William Burling Jeter Jr. “I’m just fine. Somebody else will get me my hot nuts.”
“They’re mine,” she said, “so I don’t know who.”
“That nice Archie,” suggested Jeptha.
He always did, that nice Archie, that profligate kid. Meanwhile Margaret wasn’t going to smile for William Burling Jeter Jr. unless she knew who he really was. She turned to the old man, but his face was amused and aggravating, so she just said again, “They’re my hot nuts.”
“I know it, honey,” Jeet said. “You hold ’em close. Hey Jep. I ever tell you I saw Sally Rand?” Only William Burling Jeter Jr. could make a story about a burlesque dancer dull—he began in the lobby, and lingered by the refreshment stand—Bud orange soda, made in Watertown, Massachusetts; Necco Wafers, made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought—if you didn’t know!—by the explorer MacMillan to the Arctic so he could bribe the Esquimaux. It took a long time to get to Sally Rand herself. “I believe she was not nekkid behind her bubble but garbed in long underwear, still I’ll be damned—Jep, hey Jep—hey, hey. Help!”
Midafternoon on a Saturday. The bowling stilled slowly. There is always shouting in a bowling alley: you want a beer, it’s time to go, your mother’s looking for you. Now the place fell quiet.
The silence scared William Burling Jeter Jr. even though he was the one who’d sounded the alarm. “Look,” he said to Margaret Truitt.
Jeptha lay on the wooden bench. There was a tidiness to his body, ankles aligned, hands folded on his stomach, which didn’t look like sleep.
What happened?
Nothing!
I’ll call an ambulance.
Too late.
You sure?
I’m not.
Things went on in Jep’s head all this while like that glass paperweight Dr. Sprague once gave him, millefiori, a thousand flowers, all shot through with color. Mille-feuille, a pastry, a thousand leaves. A thousand! Look at Jep, thought Jep of Jep. There’s French in his head yet.
Young man, Jeet said to Jeptha, and that’s when Jeptha Arrison knew he was really dying: he was a young man to somebody. Jeptha could hear the minuscule suction of Jeet’s false teeth against his palate, could feel the cold velvet of his hand on Jeptha’s throat. Young man. Jeptha Arrison. His own clothing being rearranged by a bunch of hands. His lungs seizing up.
Don’t move him, said a boy’s voice, and he hoped it would be the last thing he heard.
We have to! said a woman.
I loved you all, thought Jeptha, with a few notable exceptions. He wished he’d had the gumption to say it aloud. By gumption he meant life. He was dead.
But he could still hear. It was the last transmission of the earth into the head of Jeptha Arrison.
Why had Jeptha stayed at the alleys all those years he wasn’t paid, was taken for granted? He was awaiting. What he reckoned, and what he always reckoned, was that Bertha Truitt was a chrononaut. A time traveler. He had read about it in a magazine. What else explains her apparition in the cemetery, discovered by a stranger, rich as Hector’s pup? She fell through a rip in time. An empty cemetery. Then a woman in the frost. Three Berthas: Bertha; beneath her, a Bertha-shaped piece of dead grass; above her, a Bertha-shaped rift in the clouds. Where did she come from? The past. Then once she’d founded Truitt’s, sometimes she would just disappear. He had written them down, those times. All of April 1911. Part of both June and July 1912. Seven hours of November 13, 1915. Off and on through the war. The only explanation, Jeptha believed, was time travel.
I don’t remember her being gone.
You were not always there, Lu. She would bring things from the future: coins stamped with the wrong date. From the past, too, stale cakes, candles melted from the speed of decades. She came singing back on the wires—not like a ghost, nothing like a ghost. Like pneumatic tubes, whizzing faster than other people, and meanwhile Jeptha would be her flag, waving here, here.
Jeptha, LuEtta had said. You know she’s dead.
We know she died but we don’t know she’s dead.
There’s a stone in the cemetery.
But Bertha Truitt would have pointed out this truth: a stone in a cemetery is only ever evidence of a stone in a cemetery.
“Damnation,” said Jeet.
“Who do we call?” said Margaret.
“His wife,” said Jeet. “They live in Revere. They own an arcade on the boardwalk.”
“Jeptha has a wife?” said Roy Truitt. “Wonder of wonders.”
“Of course,” said William Burling Jeter Jr. “Her name is Lu, LuEtta.”
Margaret didn’t call LuEtta Mood Arrison (really? really they’d married?); she let the hospital do it. She assumed that LuEtta would come by to collect Jeptha’s effects, though she discovered he had not left anything behind, not a lunch pail, not a toothpick. She might come for his back pay, though Margaret could not remember the last time she’d paid him at all.
Still, she dug out a scrapbook that Bertha had kept. It was slapdash, as nearly all of Bertha’s handiwork was, but it included a clipping of the Salford Bugle the year LuEtta beat Minnie Barden in the trolley tournament. There she was on the front page, a rangy woman with thick hair and a heroic jaw.
“Good grief,” said Roy. Then, “There’s hope for all of us.”
“Even you,” said Margaret.
“Thank you, Mother.” He flipped through the scrapbook and then said, idly, “I’m going to enlist.”
“You’re seventeen.”
“When I’m eighteen.”
“No,” she said. “You’ll take on the alley. Be the boss.”
“You’re the boss.”
She said, “No I am not. It’s not right. You’ll take it, Roy. You’re clever. You’re a very clever boy.”
“Is that a qualification for the job?”
She couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be insulted or not, which was probably a sign that she wasn’t clever, but then again she’d never thought of herself as clever, and so why be insulted? Not clever but loving and tough and good with a dollar. She’d kept them afloat for a while now and her arms were aching with it.
“We need you here,” she said. “To run the family business. Oldest son. How it’s worked since the beginning of time.”
“But is it,” said Roy.
“Is it what?”
“The family business.”
What had he heard? “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, in too calm a voice. It was her habit when cornered to fuss with the candy in the glass counter, as though a nurse with incubating infants. “You’re not allowed to join the army.” Then she looked at him. “He was your father and he loved you,” she said.
But Roy hadn’t asked about love, and he knew his father was his father. It was the single fact he knew for sure about the man. “Anyhow,” he said, “we need more pinsetters, now Jeptha’s gone. You could ask Arch.”
“Arch isn’t suited.” She shook a paper sack full of Mary Janes into one of the apothecary jars, was thinking of eating one, how sweet and chewy they were, thinking of how you could never get all the wax paper off and had to extract it later, masticated and damp, from your back molars. For Arch it was drink and for Nahum gambling and for Margaret it was candy, but she had strength of character, she stopped herself, though all she wanted was to eat all the candy in the world.
She handed Roy a Mary Jane. They were molasses flavored. She said, “I’ll hire someone.”