But was Bertha Truitt the Salford Devil? Did the Salford Devil make itself up piecemeal, gull’s wings, duck’s webbed feet, twitching cow tail? Did Bertha all alone transform so she could study him?
Ever after Leviticus took his flask with him. He walked off the liquor as he walked off everything. Soon the memory of seeing the creature was as though a dream, or a childish imagining, something he’d made up once to give himself a thrill. Something he kept in his pocket even now.
A Womanhouse
The first indication of Bertha Truitt’s condition was the spirometer’s reading. She held the record for both grip and gust—when you set a record, your coin was returned; if you failed you were given an electric shock instead—and though her grip was strong as ever, one day when she blew into the tube—Hygienic! the spirometer said, inaccurately—the machine rebuked her with electricity. “No,” she told it. She tried again. Another shock. She did everything she could: she imagined her lungs as bellows, and then as bagpipes; she quieted her mind and tried to still her other organs (hush, liver; settle down, pancreas); she tried to empty every inch of her body down to the soles of her feet to make room for more air that she could then expel into the spirometer. Shock, shock, shock.
Though she didn’t really believe that her husband knew more about her body than she did—all those years of experience she’d had with her carcass, and he only a handful—she walked home to him from the alley. Even now, three years after the last lick of paint had been put on it, the very sight of Superba lifted her—mood?—no, it felt more bodily than that. The angles of it pleased her, straightened out her spirit level, brought her plumb. So did Dr. Sprague’s roses. Whatever had lifted inside her was not her lung capacity: she was so out of breath by the time she got inside she couldn’t force a word into the speaking tube. She just opened it so it squealed upstairs, and he came down in his green dressing gown, the one that made him look like a handsome billiard table, with the quilted lapels.
“I am dying, maybe,” she said.
“I believe just the opposite,” he told her. “Sit, Bertie.” She sat, but on the arm of the davenport. He knelt on the floor beside her.
He’d seen the spread of Bertha’s nose, the puff of her ankles, took notice of tenderness of both the physical and spiritual kind.
“The opposite of dying is living,” she said.
“Is making life,” said Leviticus. “Bertie”—she stared down at him—“you are with child.”
“With?” she said. “With?”
She made allusions to her age, which she then remembered she’d vowed not to reveal, and began to say, you see my mother never, and remembered she’d vowed not to discuss her parentage, either. A change-of-life baby! After all, the octagonal home had been designed by O. S. Fowler to encourage procreation, even in a woman such as Bertha Truitt, at such an age.
Leviticus, kneeling, touched her right ankle with such gallantry you would have thought that the site of the miracle.
“Impossible,” said Bertha. “No, I refuse to believe it.”
“It isn’t a matter of belief.”
“I do not believe in the unseeable,” said Bertha. She heard the lie and decided to clarify. “I do not see a child and until I see a child I will not believe one exists.”
At first the pregnancy was like an idea she had, present, indefinite, entirely hers. A wait-and-see thing. Doomed, maybe. A bad idea. Then it was like a train ticket somebody had folded into her hand without telling her the destination, and she’d been put on a train and had to keep her fist shut till the conductor came through. Then as though somebody else’s bag on the train—here, hold this—had been settled into her lap so she couldn’t move around the way she liked, the bag’s owner striding off into the next car. Soon enough it was as though that stranger had picked up the bag and had sat extraordinarily close to her, but in a clever way, so that she could not complain, call the conductor to have that person removed.
Her bowlers looked at her sideways in the bowling alley. Her togs were designed for the ordinary fluctuations in her weight—all her life she was a pony, put on weight in winter to keep herself warm, lost it, lost most of it, in the summertime. Now her divided skirt was overburdened. She’d broadened all over. Mary Gearheart said it was a growth, her own mother had died of such a thing—
“I don’t think so,” said LuEtta Mood. “That it’s a growth. I think Truitt’s going to have a baby.”
“Banana oil,” said Mary. “Bullshit.”
Mary Gearheart might say anything at any time. Nobody ever asked her questions: she spewed. She spoke of her own cramps and bleeding and bowel movements, of her husband—she wasn’t Gearheart any longer, but Phillips—she was so frank about the various ways her body ticked and dripped and gushed and gurgled and stretched and smelled that she appalled even Hazel Forest, who believed in medicine but had her limits.
Mary Gearheart Phillips was pregnant, too. “See,” she said, and she lifted the white duck middy blouse she bowled in, and knocked her knuckles against her stomach. “Hard. My mother died of a growth big as an ottoman,” said Mary. “And it was soft. You could sink a fist in. I have hair on my toes, and my lip, and”—her voice dropped to a sizzling whisper—“nipples!” She talked about her own body as though gossiping about a girl at school she wished to humiliate.
“It’s natural,” said Hazel Forest.
“It’s disgusting,” said Mary Gearheart happily.
“It’s not a growth,” said LuEtta Mood.
LuEtta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty. She had seen beauties go mad in middle age, as their beauty turned less live and more monumental, beauty still but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.
Lu bowled. She bowled against women and men. One spring she bowled against Minnie Barden, famous in her own Massachusetts town, in a ten-string trolley tournament: five strings at Truitt’s, get on the streetcar to go to Ripton Lanes and finish it out. LuEtta won by seventy-eight pins. She brought the trophy back to Truitt’s.
“One day you’ll bowl a perfect game,” said Truitt, stout, ungainly, who’d never been ungainly.
“It’s not possible,” Lu said.
“Of course it is,” said Bertha. “On tenpin lanes they do it regularly. This is why The Game”—when bullheaded she called it The Game, there was no other; when tenderhearted, Our Game, a private pleasure—“why Our Game is better. It is harder. It is arranged to disappoint. But LuEtta Mood, you must not be disappointed. The world is prodigious. There are more things than are visible to the eye.”
“Truitt!” said Lu. “You mean God and spirits and such?”
“I mean quite the opposite,” said Bertha. “I mean the natural and exhausting teeming world.”
Well then. She would broach it. “When will Dr. Sprague be back,” she asked, for he was off on one of his walks. “How are you getting along?”
“Lonely,” said Bertha, and as she said it LuEtta herself felt lonely as a rung bell, longing for the clapper’s strike again. “What’s that look on your face, Lu? I like to be lonely. I have been lonely for most of my life.”
“I didn’t mean,” said LuEtta. “I’m sorry. I don’t like to be lonely. You do?”
“Oh, people like all sorts of pain,” said Truitt. “I could tell you. They pay for it. They like to be footworn and exhausted. I know a woman who loved the feel of starvation.”
“Truitt,” said LuEtta.
“Bowl,” said Truitt.
“You’re going to have a baby.”
Truitt shrugged. “Perhaps,” she said.
“Perhaps,” said LuEtta.
“We will see.”