“Also a woman. There is no part of the earth that isn’t. Yes,” Bertha Truitt repeated, “I am at home in a bog.”
Hire Irish to lay brick, a doctor had told her in the hospital, and now she believed it like a superstition. The Irish called her Truitt, which they made a single syllable, Troot, and so she was known by most people: not Bertha Truitt or Miz or Mrs., not The Truitt Woman, not Mrs. Sprague once her husband arrived. The lack of honorific was the honorific: Troot. Troot runs a good house.
It took her two months to build the bowling alley. Nobody had seen a building go up with such speed, brick by brick, like knitting a sock. Truitt walked through every day, a distracted but bemused look on her face, as though she were looking not for progress but for a particular person long missing, and was preparing her face for the joke: What took you so long or I knew you’d turn up eventually or Hello, you.
Two stories and a cellar to the Truitt House. Look through the glass windows at the front, like the historic dioramas at the Salford Public Library. The title of this diorama is the Bowling Alley at Dawn. Eggshell light outside; inside, murky workingman dark. No windows except at the front: neither the rising of the sun nor its inevitable setting matter here. Balls turn. The earth (being a woman) might or might not.
There are six lanes to bowl upon. The floors are built of rock maple. At the end of the lanes is a ledge—a high wooden bench that runs the length of the wall—for the pinboys to alight upon while the bowlers bowl. Once the bowling alley has opened for the day, the pinboys will sit on the ledge like judges, or vultures, but not yet. Between lanes are three elevated cast-iron tracks—the ball returns—so the pinboys can bowl the balls back to the bowlers. The Bowling Alley at Dawn is a tidy place. The pins have been set. Only one pale matchstick pin has fallen over in the first lane. Impossible to know whether this is the carelessness of the pinboy, or the artist who made this diorama.
Nobody watches or waits. Nobody stands behind the wooden counter at the front—a large oak structure like a pulpit, with a spectacular cash register that looks ready to emit steam-powered music, a calliope of money. Nobody sits at the bar along the other wall, though the jar of pickled eggs glows like a fortune-teller. The tables and chairs in the middle of the room await lollygaggers. The ceilings are warehouse high, so that the eventual smoke coming off all those eventual people (cigarette, cigar, desire, effort) might be stored aloft. Six fluted iron columns for support, three left, three right. In the corner the first of the coin-op entertainments, a standing sculptoscope. Drop in a penny, bend to the brass goggles—you might expect to see a stereoptical Niagara Falls or Taj Mahal, but in the Bowling Alley at Dawn you see instead the Bowling Alley at Dawn in further miniature, complete with diminutive sculptoscope with its minuscule stereoptical view of the Bowling Alley at Dawn.
Below, the cellar is divided into rooms for storage. It smells of bog. The only thing of note is a broad-shouldered cast-iron safe, painted with flowers and the name of its maker (EXCELSIOR SAFE & LOCK CO., SALFORD MASS.) in excruciatingly beautiful cursive.
Upstairs, above the alleys, storage rooms east and west, with an apartment in the middle. When the sun rises—if the sun ever rises in the Bowling Alley at Dawn—the light will fall through the immense sash windows at the back onto the good furniture: an Eastlake sofa, an enamel table with turned legs, an iron bed. Even this room feels like a storehouse, the domestic objects in it arranged like unused furniture, the bathtub near the kitchen sink, the stove near the front door, the toilet in one of the closets. At the front of the building, the staircase down to the alley’s foyer, every step white, every riser green.
“For you?” the Irish foreman had asked Truitt, when shown the plans for the apartment. She had sketched them on what seemed to be the grease-stained wrapper of a sandwich; her governing aesthetic was symmetry. The foreman was embarrassed by how protective of her he felt, to own this emotion for which Truitt would have nothing but contempt: I do not need protection, Mr. Dockery, I look after myself.
“For pity’s sake,” she said. “No. It wouldn’t suit me at all. I plan to install a man.”
She’d found her man already, of course: Joe Wear, late of the cemetery. She had known from the moment she’d met him that he was a bowler to his very soul. He had that knack for pointless devotion; his body was built on bowling angles.
He’d visited her once in the hospital, had told her, “I won’t pinset. I pinset at Les Miserables. I could manage a house.” She turned to him with a gleaming expression, bright and greedy and promising as a collection plate. He said, “I never meant to end up in a graveyard. Bowling”—his voice broke, he repaired it—“is what I got.”
She hired him on the spot. All during construction he came to the alley, to give advice, to shake Bertha Truitt’s hand. Every handshake was a test, he knew. She was a prophet of bowling but she needed other people to love it, too.
“Jeptha Arrison will be the Captain of the Pinbodies,” she told him. That was her own word to describe the boys and men who set the candlepins. “Everyone else is yours to hire or fire. Do a good job,” she told him, “and one day the alley will come to you.”
There was something wrong with Jeptha Arrison—he was minuscule but had an enormous and lopsided head—and Joe Wear wasn’t sure he wanted to be joined to him in an alley wedding. There was something wrong with Joe Wear, too, but he knew how things worked. Everywhere else women bowled behind a curtain, to protect their modesty, to protect men from the spectacle of feminine sport. A steel curtain, so that you couldn’t even see the outline of waist or ankle.
“You want women in here, you’ll need a curtain,” he said.
“Well,” said Bertha, “I invented the game, so I suppose I make the rules.”
“How’s that?” he said.
“I invented this strain of bowling.”
She was older than he was, and would pay his salary, and for a moment he thought about agreeing, then found he was already saying, “Looks like ordinary candlepin to me.”
“It is not.”
“In Worcester—”
Truitt barked. With laughter? Not quite. With anger? No, she barked, a noise that meant who’s there and I’m here and nothing at all.
“I have never been to Worcester,” she said.
“Anyhow,” said Joe Wear. He could feel the long muscles of his arms spasming, and he crossed them. Not everyone would give him a job, never mind one of authority. He should be grateful and agreeable. But hadn’t he saved her from foolishness once? Hadn’t he been hired for his knowledge? “You’ll need a curtain,” he said again.
Bertha Truitt knew it was wrong to protect somebody else’s modesty. Your modesty was your own. “No curtain, Joe.”
“You’ll get gawkers.”
“Let ’em gawk.”
That was that.
Gawkers, gapers, gogglers, oglers! She couldn’t see them, she was ogle-blind. She rode a bicycle around the city in her split skirt and never wobbled even when the sidewalk boys hooted at her. She still found her way into people’s dreams, still dissolved in daylight. Perhaps she was a succubus or a vampire, the way she snuck into dreams and returned to Salford in daylight, reading the funny papers on the sidewalk, laughing so loud the pigeons scattered. She even appeared in the Salford Bugle itself, beneath the headline NEW BOWLING ESTABLISHMENT INVITES ALL WOMEN. In the photograph accompanying the article, Truitt seems to be in mourning, as all women of a certain bustline do: her very bosom grieves, and is brave, and soldiers on. Upon this bosom a bowling alley was founded.