She was not beautiful, thought Dr. Leviticus Sprague. Not in the way he had been raised to think of beauty. Her skin was custard. Her hair was the color of bruised fruit. Her face looked like an anthology of other faces: an odd nose with a bump halfway down its slope, a thick upper lip that cast a shadow over its thinner downstairs neighbor. Narrow chin. Broad forehead. Even her eyes were mismatched, the right one bigger, prone to widening to show the white all around the iris, he would never stop noticing. It always made his heart chime.
He had been alone a long while. He had never lived with a woman he was not related to—his grandmother, his mother, his sister—which is to say he had never been regarded the way this woman, this Bertha Truitt, regarded him, with an ardent curiosity. In his way he had loved her not from the moment he saw her in the frost but from the moment she had looked at him and he understood she might love him back. Love him back came first: he was a cave, happy to be a cave, and she a swung lantern come to light him up. When he’d heard her tell the policeman her name, he’d thought she was lying: she’d read it off some headstone. But he’d walked the cemetery a dozen times since then, and never found a single Truitt. The unsteady boy with whom he’d found her had gone. He could not go to the Salford Hospital to ask what had happened to her, not because he would be turned away as a visitor but as a doctor. He would not ask.
But here she was. She was so odd. Mismatched in her soul, and pleased with the effect.
“It’s a humbug,” he said. “A lie, start to finish.”
“But tell me your findings.”
She would always be stubborn in the face of his reason. He would always surrender.
He said, “I could not find a single flaw.”
“Do you bowl?” she asked him.
He laughed then, with his whole head. She wouldn’t have known he was a laughing man. “Well,” he said. “I have bowled.”
“I mean candlepins.”
He nodded. Candlepins existed also in Oromocto, New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from. An elegant sport, he’d thought when he’d watched it, and like most elegant things that white people favored also essentially feebleminded.
“I bowl,” said Bertha Truitt. Then she touched him behind his ear, beneath the brim of his hat.
Mrs. Mood
Everyone talked about what a merry person Truitt was, but LuEtta Mood could see that the merriment was trained on a trellis of sorrow. It was a companionable sorrow, the sort you might never have to discuss. It drew LuEtta Mood in. Sorrow had interested her since childhood, long before she had any sorrows of her own. Then she met her own unhappiness and wondered where the earlier interest had come from, ignorant as it was.
Her husband, Moses Mood, was known almost reverently as the homeliest man in town. As a child he’d been shot in the ear by his brother, and the resulting scar made him look not blown apart by violence, but as though something deep in his head had tunneled its way out and, famished, lapped and then gnawed at the basin of his ear. When he’d woken up after the injury, age eight, his father said into his good ear, “Well, Mo, this will be the making of you,” and Moses Mood decided it wouldn’t. He would not be kinder than he might have been, but neither would he be ruined. The scar would mean nothing to him. So it didn’t, except for this: he was like a snake-bit man who concluded he must learn to dominate snakes, so it might never happen again. He loved guns. The snake charmer always dies of snakes eventually.
The scar was not the source of Moses Mood’s homeliness: he would have been a bullet-eyed dogtoothed man no matter what, with dark eyebrows worn away at the edges. He grew from injured child into a slow-moving self-satisfied fellow whose lower teeth bulldoggishly revealed themselves when he laughed. He laughed indiscriminately. He seemed to ladle his laughter out like a philanthropist feeding the poor. All would benefit from his laughter; all should receive it. Beautiful LuEtta Mood (the former LuEtta Pickersgill) was used to getting more of everything. She was so young and so lovely she had never questioned why that was. Not till she married did she notice that the bolt of affection she received from her husband was not wider, nor longer, nor made from better stuff than what he gave to everyone. So she resolved to love him for that.
Then her own sorrow arrived.
The sorrow’s name was Edith; the sorrow had been born sick and lived sixteen months. It wasn’t the sickliness that killed her: she had been scalded by a cup of coffee while visiting her grandmother Mood, had wandered into the kitchen to find it on the table. LuEtta hadn’t known you could die of scalding. “Our Edith was not made for this world,” said Moses Mood. He meant to comfort his wife, forgive his mother, comfort and forgive by diminishing, and LuEtta Mood rejected the comfort and diminishment both. Forgiveness was his own affair. She had a locket with a lock of the baby’s hair inside, so fine and short it was like dust, it could not be kept together in any way. Red, from a certain angle. It had gone with Edith’s blue eyes.
What was LuEtta’s duty, according to everyone else? To go mad with grief. To soldier on. To exist the rest of her life as a paradox, a human woman who suffered what everyone said was the worst thing and yet continued to live. Sometimes Hazel Forest, who after all had learned about death at the Salford Hospital, tried to talk about Edith, and that was the worst, to listen to a woman talk as though she understood when clearly she did not. Though of course all those years when LuEtta herself had been interested in the sorrows of other people that was just what she’d done. She’d offered up her sympathy as a way to keep herself safe.
Also her duty: to have more children.
It had been two years and she hadn’t had another child and she could see the pity and impatience people felt for her across their mouths like a handkerchief held up to filter out disease—what was she doing, walking around outside, when she should be quarantined in her marital bed? If another baby had followed, people would have forgotten about Edith; or she might’ve been talked about from time to time with a weak happiness. LuEtta didn’t want people to forget about Edith; she didn’t want them to remember, either. She wanted Edith to exist the way any child did.
That was why LuEtta Mood bowled, to give people something else to know about her. Joe Wear was right, she brought in gawkers, mostly mannerly, men who came because where else could you see such a good-looking girl dewy with sweat and happiness, and not pay a cent, and not have to go to confession? LuEtta Mood swung around and smiled at the spectators. Then she rolled.
Soon enough she was better than Bertha, and Bertha bought a new machine to stand by the sculptoscope, a combination grip tester and spirometer. See how strong Truitt’s hands were, after years of bowling! See how mighty her lungs when she blew into the tube! No woman or man could beat her at the machine, including LuEtta. Let LuEtta bowl. That was fine. Truitt was still a record holder.
Mary, Hazel, and Nora (the poodly one) bowled as though they were delivering the mail, politely, dutifully, inaccurately, but LuEtta Mood rolled so hard and true, you wanted to write a folk song about her.
She did not love bowling—no, she did, she loved it, only this love was inseparable from her love for Bertha Truitt. The fascinating greenness of Bertha Truitt’s eyes. That particular smile—not the smirk, which was bonny, but the big beaming smile that seemed both private and magnanimous. Her very peculiar clothing—she always wore the divided skirt, but sometimes she had a divided petticoat beneath shushing and surging as she bowled. The way she called LuEtta by her full name, LuEtta Mood, now LuEtta Mood pay attention to your follow-through, and LuEtta wished she could hear her old name, her real name, in Bertha Truitt’s whiskey voice, LuEtta Pickersgill, though even Lu herself knew it wasn’t near so lovely.
“But where did you come from?” LuEtta Mood asked her.
“I’m here now,” said Truitt, her customary answer.