Of course she was looking for somebody in particular. She looked for him in the hospital—he was a doctor—and as she built the alley, and as she rode her bicycle along the streets of Salford. She had built a building and put her name on the front as advertising. Naturally she went to the cemetery, where they had first met, and looked for him there. All of the details were not clear in even Bertha’s mind, though she remembered the cold of the cemetery and the decision to lie down, to open her coat to let in the chill like a guest. Some days she could conjure up the whole Bertha-shaped stretch of the cemetery where she’d lain and think of it with affection. Her birthplace, in a way. No need to reflect upon what had come before. She’d been found. Marching forward had always been her habit. Only in a bowling alley did back and forth get you anywhere.
She was looking for the other man, the fellow her own age or a little younger, whose name she did not know. He had got into her head, though all he’d done was take her pulse. Still, he did that caressingly, the tip of his finger a bow against the stringed instrument of her wrist.
PHEBE PICKERSGILL, HERMANN SWETTMAN, SUSANA PETERSON, DELILAH FOREST, wife of, daughter of, aged 81 years, aged 18. Bertha Truitt thought they, the dead, were just the same as her, they’d also gone onto the next life. Or else the dead were the people she’d left behind, all life spans ending this date, this year, everyone she’d once known dead except her, a convenience. She could astound herself sometimes with the sudden iron of her heart. Cast iron, ringing like an anvil. Not all the time. At all important times her heart was flesh.
She thought, When I finish building Truitt’s, that’s when I’ll find him, and that was true, nearly to the day.
She saw him in the cemetery, walking the avenue of willows that led to the ornamental pond at the center of the park, and then her heart was neither iron nor flesh but pond, ready to receive and conceal anything tossed into it. He was a handsome, tubby, mustachioed black man, in a green suit with an orange windowpane check. The expression on the man’s face—he hadn’t seen her yet—was thoughtful and pleased, full of a self-kindled light. She felt a plunk in the pond of her heart and went to him.
June. The sun whetted its rays on the gravestones. The fish in the ornamental pond didn’t know they, too, were ornamental. They swam up to catch the light.
“Hello,” she said.
He said, in a voice quiet as a comb, “I knew you’d turn up eventually.” One wing of his black mustache was longer than the other. There was nobody looking after him. “I am glad to see that you are well.”
“I am.” She couldn’t think of the next thing to say, so she offered to give him a reading. A reading? Of your head: phrenology.
“No thank you,” said Doctor Sprague.
“Why not?”
He gave her a careful look. Later she knew all the angles of this particular expression, the subtle widening of the eyes, his condescending affection, the way he bore the burden of knowing too much. He was a man of facts. Even his poetry was highly accurate. He said, “Phrenology is not science.”
“But it is!” said Bertha Truitt. “There have been many words written on the subject.”
“Words are not facts. A man who requires inferiors will find his own head superior, he will write encyclopedias on the subject.”
“But you have a splendid head,” she said.
“Your Dr. Fowler would not say so, on account of my race.”
“Oh!” she said. “Truly? Then he would be mistaken.”
She was giving his head a look of admiration and hope, and nervousness, so he took off his derby and aimed his head at her. His splendid head. He liked to think he was immune to compliments, but he wasn’t.
This was a long time ago but they were still not young. Bertha, particularly, was not. She would be older till she died.
She read the territory of his scalp not through the close-cropped hair but beneath it. The back of his neck smelled of bay rum, his windowpane coat of tobacco. No, don’t smell, she reminded herself. That tells you nothing.
People misunderstood phrenology, thought Bertha. It was exercise. The stevedore, lifting a great deal of weight, changes the shape of his torso; the philosopher who lifts heavy thoughts, the shape of his head. Look at the portraits of Benjamin Franklin in his early years and at the end of his life, see the difference. Look at Dr. Sprague’s magnificent forehead, knotted with thought, evidence of all his education, the poetry he wrote, the patients he saved. She went to the knobs at the back of his head, to the prominences, as was her habit.
His area of Amativeness was well developed, as was his area of intelligence. His Alimentiveness was worrying. His Self-esteem was very bad indeed. His Hope—but now she could discern nothing abstract. Was that a scar? What had happened to the man?
“That bad?” Dr. Sprague asked, then, “I told you.”
“Hard to say,” said Bertha Truitt. She wanted to dally. Her belief in phrenology was draining from her, she could feel it spin down the drain. And yet: as her fingers circumnavigated Dr. Sprague’s skull, she did know him, there was no way to know him but through his head. She hadn’t taken off her kid gloves, a mistake she recognized as her little finger grazed the apex of his ear. So she removed them, tucked one in each armpit. She worked the ambits of his skull. He was kind, and lackadaisical, devoted, careless. He was melancholy. He liked to drink (this she determined from the smell of sweet ferment coming through all parts of him). He would do anything for her, to the best of his abilities. He would love and disappoint her.
“Now you,” he said, and doffed his gloves.
She pulled the pins from her hair. Maybe this was really how you read somebody. You applied your head to that person’s fingertips, and the person poured themselves into your brain, chin, neck, shoulders—and you knew everything. She stared at his shoes (good brown brogues, one toe scuffed across the perforations) and felt the mechanism of her soul flutter and falter. He was unconvinced, but what if her skull revealed her to be venal or petty or dumb? He was not touching her as though he believed her to be venal, petty, dumb. She closed her eyes. The two living people touched only fingertip to scalp; the dead beneath them lay foot to foot and head to head.
“All right,” he said at last.
She opened her eyes, squared her shoulders. His lopsided mustache twitched fondly. “You needn’t have taken your hair down,” he said, plucking the pins from her hand. She felt the heat of his forearms against her neck, through his jacket, as he tacked her hair back up. She could tell it was a bad, tender job.