Ethan’s father had not invented the shopping cart, but he had made certain clever refinements, and moreover had owned a small chain of grocery stores in Tennessee called Purity Markets. “Haven’t you met me?” Ethan liked to say. “I’m the Purity heir.” Ethan was rich, and restless with it, and eleven years younger than Joe. He owned a house in the West Village. Joe gave up his job at the Bowladrome but not the paraphernalia: he, too, would be an artist. He carved figures out of bowling pins, men who seemed, from whatever angle, to be turning away from you. He carved patterns into bowling balls and inked them and made prints, rolling them down the paper. Sometimes he remembered carving legs out of bowling pins for Dr. Sprague, and he thought: I should have done something better with my life, I should have gone into medicine.
He moved into Ethan’s house in the West Village, he who had lived only in rented rooms or dark apartments loaned by his employers. To live somewhere with a dining room, a library, a rooftop garden. It took him many years to sit in a chair after dinner, to just sit, so used was he to walking miles to get his head straight, to avoid the way a ceiling lowered itself like a twisting press upon your bed. To think that home was a place you might want to stay: it was Ethan, of course, who convinced him.
The only unhappiness was that Joe Wear could never really love Ethan’s cooking. “Tell me how you like it,” Ethan would ask, spooning the bouillon over the darling quenelle, and Joe would panic. He had been educated and liberated a thousand times over by then, he was a dumb kid brought up in the Dolbeer Home who knew the difference between chiaroscuro, sfumato, and contrapposto, a Hepplewhite foot from a Queen Anne, he’d learned music, he’d learned poetry at least a little, but a dumpling was a dumpling was a dumpling to him and he refused to pretend otherwise. Their friends tasted Ethan’s food and their eyes fluttered. “How do you do it?” asked Constance, tasting Ethan’s Poulet au Pot, and Joe thought, but did not say, It’s boiled chicken. Once a year they had a screaming fight about it. Constance said, when Joe told her, “You’re not fighting about the food, the food stands for something else.” No: they were fighting about the food. Who could take food that seriously, and that frivolously, at the same time?
He could still remember what it was like to be fifteen and hungry, actually hungry, and the beautiful drama of finally eating.
Joe had thought of Bertha Truitt over the years. She was the first unconventional person he’d ever met. Bertha Truitt was why he had not turned away from Manny and Constance outside of the Bowladrome in 1931: he recognized them, they were Bertha’s countrypeople, he might emigrate and join them. Then the oddity of oddities: one day, at one of Ethan’s parties, Bertha Truitt’s daughter showed up with a crowd of musicians. She was a singer, a good one, and a drummer—Joe couldn’t tell how good. He didn’t know about drumming. Jazz was one of the dull spots in his understanding, alongside abstract art.
It was odd to figure out the connection, but no odder than anything else in his life. Minna got along with Ethan but was wary of Joe, though he had once carved her a little cow out of a bowling pin. Maybe because he had. They didn’t know what they wanted from each other.
Ethan had been dead two months when the call came. Joe Wear lived in the house in the Village alone, among the fish forks and the soup tureens. The moment Ethan had died, in Cedars Sinai, of pneumonia, Joe’s inclination had been to join the army, though he was eighty years old and a pacifist. There must be some way to be shipped far away from home and killed, for a good reason, in another country.
Roy Truitt explained that they’d found a will, an old one. Not notarized, but it left the alley to Joe. They would talk to a lawyer—
Time was he might have said yes. It’ll be mine then. I’ll have it. Once he had people who loved him he’d seen how ill he’d been treated all the years before that. By Bertha, he’d thought, but if she’d left him the alley after all—then he realized he’d been at peace with Bertha some time.
Well, he’d come to see the place. Not to own it, of course. Just to see it before it was demolished.
Phillipine Square had been revised. The Gearheart Olympia was now the Salford Cinema, with four screens, advertising real butter on their popcorn, as though real butter on popcorn weren’t an ordinary human right. A sports bar, a women’s clothing shop that looked like it had seen better days, with outfits hanging in the window both revealing and frumpish: turtleneck halter tops, batwing minidresses. Sutherland’s Grocery was still there, with its pygmy shopping carts. A car mechanic. Cessidia’s Bakery, going strong, aniseed scented. A dry cleaner’s. Summertime, and all the brick and asphalt heated up.
Joe Wear arrived by subway—the subway stop was new, too, a direct line from South Station in Boston. He stood across the street from Truitt’s Alleys, though it wasn’t Truitt’s Alleys anymore, but the Bowlaway: the sign in fancy script was beat up, the B faded and cracked. owlaway. A cursed place. Roy Truitt had told him there’d been a murder, his brother, it had been in the papers. Nobody would bowl there ever again.
Joe had forgotten the angles of Salford, how none of the streets met one another straight on. They looped and slanted. They radiated. He crossed the street and knocked on the glass door—plate glass, put in since Joe had left—and a man came from the inside to unlock it.
Neither Joe Wear nor Roy Truitt was what the other had expected. Joe Wear wore a suit both expensive and casual—what the clothing in the window of Belinda’s Boutique hoped to be—in a pale blue gabardine, with a pleated shirt beneath. He had a ruched face, beautiful broad shoulders—he was a mythical creature with the body of a youth and the head of a geezer, though his body hitched when he walked—and a haircut that, like his clothing, spoke of money. Steel gray hair, and a glorious white mustache, the sort that reminded you that only certain men should be allowed mustaches. Roy Truitt was fifty years old by then, his red hair ebbing away, which was a shame, thought Joe: it was a face that could have used a good head of hair. He did not look like his mismatched parents, nor like an averaging of their qualities. He looked like a bowler.
“Mr. Wear. I’m Roy Truitt.”
“Roy.” Joe patted his own pockets, as though for protection. “This place.” Then he said, surprised, “I hated this place.”
“It’ll do that. Let me get the lights.”
They shook hands absentmindedly in the way of New Englanders, a kind of tired duty that was more intimate than the glad-handing of any other region of the country.
Truitt’s had been renovated piecemeal over the years, but the change, to Joe Wear, was total. Automatic pinsetters, of course, the pinboys shelf ripped out. Blue plastic benches to sit while you waited your turn, and overhead projectors for the score sheets. The long bar had been replaced by a series of machines: pinball, ice cream. Somebody had left the video Ping-Pong plugged in. Ghosts played it.
Joe Wear’s wooden counter was gone. He’d imagined standing behind it. Trying it on for size: a bit of time travel. But it had been demolished, replaced with a long glass counter along the wall, behind it all the empty matching shoes arranged by size. What would happen to those shoes?
Above the pin decks, wooden cutouts: an angry anthropomorphic ball, legless but with cocked arms, charging at a cringing crying pin, beneath them the die-cut slogan BOWL! FOR THE FUN OF IT!
“This place,” said Joe Wear again. “You got a buyer?”
“Not yet. This is my first time here since—” Roy shook his head. “Burn it to the ground, is my opinion. My sister-in-law’s, too. Betty. Arch’s wife.”
“Make sure and look in the safe,” said Joe Wear. “Before you light the match.”
“What safe?”
“In the cellar.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s been used in all the time I’ve been here. My old man is the last person who opened it.”
“You should check.”
“He would have cleaned it out.”
“I’m telling you.”
“What is it that you think is in there, Mr. Wear?”
“Gold bars. Ham sandwiches. Who knows. Gold bars,” he said again.
“Well, I’ll have to get the door blown off.”
“Seventy-six; thirty-three; two.”
“Is that—you remember it? Must be somebody’s birthday.”
“It’s nobody’s birthday. You should look. I’ll write it down.”