Dear LuEtta wanted only to assemble Truitt accurately. A born-in-Texas Truitt was different from a born-in-San-Francisco Truitt, a widowed Truitt different from a never-married. Even three years of living one way or the other would sharpen or dull other facts.
One morning when LuEtta turned she saw a stranger, a black man wearing a tweed suit. The tooth of the tweed was dulled by dust, though overall his appearance was neat. His feet were propped up on a canvas bag that looked military but smaller. He read a book too small for his hand, a Bible or instruction manual; he had another book in his breast pocket. A long, curved pipe smoked in his hand. He frowned—no, only his mustache frowned. His actual face was at ease. He gave no indication that he knew he was in a bowling alley. He scratched the corner of his mouth with the stem of his pipe.
“Who’s that,” LuEtta said warily to Bertha Truitt.
Without looking, Truitt picked up a ball and said, “That gentleman is my husband.”
“I mean the colored man,” LuEtta clarified.
“Just so,” said Bertha. “My husband, Doctor Leviticus Sprague. Dr. Sprague is from the Maritimes.”
How could this be? LuEtta had heard the rumors of a husband, but Bertha Truitt was Bertha Truitt, alone on her bicycle, bending the paper to laugh at the Katzenjammer Kids, a singularity. Even when LuEtta dreamt of her, she never imagined interrupting that singularity, never saw the two of them in a kitchen somewhere, sitting on a sofa, sitting on the edge of a bed—nowhere but the bowling alley.
Maybe the man wasn’t colored. Maybe the Maritimes were a place where white men were dark, like the Azores, or Sicily.
“Congratuations,” LuEtta said. “No, really. When ever did you get married?”
“Sit, Lu,” said Truitt irritatedly. Truitt held the ball as though it were an intimate thing she couldn’t reckon with as long as someone stood near. LuEtta felt a flare of shame, jaw to cheekbones, at having got her so wrong.
She went right to the man, Truitt’s so-called husband.
“I’m LuEtta,” she said.
The man looked up. He nodded, and smiled, and conveyed to LuEtta—who had a sympathetic heart, it was her downfall, she saw the best in everyone but could never figure out how to get it out of a person, she could just see it glittering away inside doing nobody any good, this was the lesson of her marriage—a radiating, painful shyness. He had a face plumper than the rest of his body. LuEtta fought the urge to touch him.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “I hear you’re—you’re married to Bertha.”
“She tell you that?” He shook his head, but smiled again. “Well, I’ve never known her to be wrong.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “Yes, a pleasure. For me. As well as you. Excuse me.” She thought he was about to stand up, but instead he put his pipe in his mouth and returned to the book.
He was definitely not a white man.
When Bertha was done, he stood to join her. They did not speak, they did not touch. They walked out not together but adjacent. How they always moved through the outside world together: close enough to not lose track of one another though neither glanced the other’s way, far enough to be blameless strangers if they passed the wrong sort of people. On the street at the same time as though by coincidence, but the sort of coincidence arranged by the gods, and between them a space of such evident magnetism that no reasonable person would have breached it.
Bowling was new to the territory: superstitions grew like ivy on the walls of Truitt’s Alleys.
It’s bad luck to spit in a bowling alley.
It’s bad luck to drink beer in the middle of bowling one frame; wait till the pinbody resets the pins before you touch your glass.
If the bowler on either side of you has a bad leave, wait till she finishes the frame to bowl, or you too will be cursed with a bad leave.
It is terrible luck to be born in a bowling alley.
Bad luck to eat fish in a bowling alley: eat only beef, venison, fowl.
A nonbowler who spends time in a bowling alley must never pick up a ball: he is as a priest in a maternity ward, on entirely different business, and must remain pure.
Do not speak of a nonbowler in a bowling alley. Worst sort of luck.
(For who? The bowlers, the pinbodies, the nonbowler himself?)
That’s enough now.
Where had he been? Mary Gearheart heard he’d been out walking. (Her father ran the vaudeville house: she could sniff out the freak acts.) He had walked from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from, and then back, a distance of 1,100 miles. He was a pedestrianist: he’d won walking races, though this had not been a race. It had taken him a hundred days altogether, but that included ambling. Ambling and rambling, swims in rivers, visits to relatives. It was a religion. It was a disorder. It was a habit, like drinking or bowling. He was a physician, educated in Glasgow. Did he walk to Glasgow? In a way: he walked for miles on the ship that took him there. Did he speak Scottish? Scottish is not a language, Mary. I think it is, I heard a Scotsman speak it.
The women pictured him sloshing across the surface of the ocean in seven-league boat-bottomed boots. They pictured him striding to Canada, a fishing pole shouldered like a rifle.
He might have been deaf, the way he never flinched at the sounds of the alley. He had a double chin so replete that strangers wanted to test its bounce with a finger, or wished he’d grow a beard for modesty’s sake. “Dr. Sprague is from the Maritimes,” Truitt said whenever she introduced him. She said this as though The Maritimes were a chronological location, not geographical. In a way she believed that this was the case, though she couldn’t have explained it.
“That’s my husband,” Bertha Truitt said, to the police who wondered whether she needed help, the greengrocer, the ladies of Truitt’s Alleys, anyone who asked. He did speak, at the same rumbling pitch of the rolling balls, maybe why she loved him.
Jeptha Arrison said, “There’s the smartest man I ever met.” But Jeptha was so amiably stupid everybody was the smartest man he ever met. It was a worldwide tie.
“Nobody can think that much,” said Joe Wear.
“He writes poetry,” said LuEtta Mood. At first she’d resented Dr. Sprague: she felt she’d dug out a little space next to Bertha Truitt and here was this man stepping into it. She had thought terrible things about him, even wondered whether their marriage was legal (in Massachusetts, it was) or actual (a different question entirely).
But Lu was as muscular in mind as in body: she made a decision. She would protect him. She said to Joe Wear, “He’s published two books. He writes the poems in his head as he walks.”
Joe Wear frowned with such vehemence it made the women laugh. “No doubt he does. Myself, I have a job. I have no use for poetry. I don’t see what’s so funny, ladies.”
He was a feral child, Joe Wear, brought up in bowling alleys by bowling alley operators. He had gone to work for Bertha Truitt because he understood she would not try to mother him: he had no use for mothers, having never had one, only a photograph and a maiden aunt and a general ungainliness caused by the doctor’s forceps (according to the matron at the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children) or the umbilical cord around his neck (according to the maiden aunt). Not a limp but a liquid lumbering walk. He seemed to need tightening at his joints, or else he’d been overtightened. It did not stop him. It would not.
No mother, no imagination. He could not see how things could be improved or changed, and so he’d follow his employer’s directions to the letter. She had found him at the lowest point of his life, ruined by love. Or not yet ruined, but the ruin hung over him like a guillotine blade. The blade hung there still. She had stayed the execution but did not have the power to pardon him.