Do a good job, Truitt had said to him the day of his hiring, and one day the business will come to you.
His employer, singular: Bertha Truitt. Old Levi wasn’t anything to him, married or not. Still, his presence worried Joe Wear. Truitt was a fraud—she went around claiming she’d invented The Game, when everyone knew that wasn’t so—and now she’d married a colored man, which showed she was a woman of bad judgment, too. Joe Wear worried somebody might burn Truitt’s Alleys to the ground. Nobody did. Rich people were allowed to do things, he guessed. One day he’d be rich himself and live how he wanted.
No curtain at Truitt’s, too many women, but he had lodging above the alleys and Truitt trusted him. He had never been trusted in his life. It was a perturbing sensation.
They were alike, Joe Wear and Bertha Truitt, foundlings for whom the rolling ball was the feel of a hand on a forehead, a light touch of love on the back. Bowling gave you something to think about besides your regrets.
The Oddity
Dr. Sprague had no theories about architecture, and so he let his wife draw up the plans for the house on Somefire Hill, near City Hall, half a mile away from Truitt’s Alleys, along O. S. Fowler’s architectural theories: octagonal, with large rooms, a stepped-back third floor, an octagonal cupola at the top. It wasn’t a good-looking house but a spectacle. Not a folly (people could live in it) but a folly (who would want to). The walls were filled with lime and gravel and ground rice, and stuccoed with a combination of plaster and coal dust. A Home for All (the pertinent pamphlet, fished from Bertha’s gladstone bag) promised it would make its occupants happy. Bertha oversaw the construction, the frames built and filled with mortar. She got the Irish in again. “That lime’ll eat up my boots, Troot,” the foreman said, and Bertha said, “Never mind your boots, I’ll buy you more.” There were more rooms and closets in the house than anyone in Salford had ever seen. The neighbors called it the Wedding Cake.
Bertha named the house Superba, which she insisted was Latin for superb. Unlike Dr. Sprague, she had no classical education. “It means arrogant,” he said. “The feminine form.” Oh no, she said, people made that mistake all the time, but her interpretation was the correct one.
It was hard to arrange the furniture in the pie-shaped rooms, and Bertha shifted the chairs and tables clockwise around the floors as though measuring time. The one interior staircase, spiral, was in the middle of the house, just as Fowler recommended—fewer steps, less wasted time—which meant they met there several times a day. They loved each other, it was fine almost always, but a staircase amplifies ill will, and a spiral staircase tangles those feelings round. When they fought, Dr. Sprague took the exterior stairs, which were built into the plaster outside, all the way up to what Bertha called the cupola and he called the belvedere and the reader might think of as a widow’s walk. You couldn’t see the exterior stairs till somebody was on them. Dr. Sprague seemed supernatural, sprinting up the outside of the Wedding Cake. The neighbors worried that someday he might climb their houses in just such a way, as though it were a talent he and possibly, terrifyingly, all of his race had.
(He crawled into their dreams, too, like his wife. Not into dream beds but into dream kitchens, where the dreamer would find him at the table, drinking from a glass of water, waiting—the dream–Dr. Sprague listened to his neighbors as they confessed to him first their medical problems, then marital; the failures of their bowels and their affections. The dream–Dr. Sprague was interested, and did not interrupt, and so they kept talking as he nodded, and just before they woke up they felt awful that they planned to boil the glass or even throw it out, so unnerved were they by the colored doctor’s lips upon it.)
Sometimes Leviticus would send Bertha a note in the dumbwaiter, and she would answer through the speaking tube that fed into the closets and ran along the dumbwaiter shaft. The speaking tube opened with a squeal of air that signaled an incoming call. He would be in the belvedere, composing a poem in his head. He composed everything in his head, music and poetry and watercolor paintings, and then it took a maddening few minutes to set his notions down on paper—except those compositions he forgot on the stairs down, dozens of them he reckoned, because he forgot everything when Bertha called his name.
Their bedroom was large, bedrooms needed to be, else your own breath could kill you in the night or make you—that most dangerous thing, according to health specialists—sluggish. A slugabed. A mucousy terrestrial mollusk. No, thought Bertha, they would not be slugs. She had a sort of canine back that responded to scratching: Leviticus knew all the spots. He liked to be bit. Once, during a thunderstorm that had woken them in the night already lovingly biting and lovingly scratching, she looked up and caught sight of the mirror’s reflection above the dresser, both of Leviticus’s dark hands around one of her white breasts, and said aloud, this is what other people see when they look at us, and it was as though their iron bed had been struck by lightning. But their bedroom was safely on the second story, and she merely lovestruck. Bad for the health to sleep directly under the roof because of chilling breezes, bad directly over the cellar because of the noxious gases off decaying vegetables.
They never lied to each other but the past was behind them, the past was a patient beyond saving.
“When I get a home, I want a cat,” Leviticus had said when they met. They took in a swollen vicious little tortoiseshell who’d been mewling around the pear tree and soon the foot of the bed was filled with kittens, whom Bertha named after famous Italians—Donizetti, Botticelli, Raphael—though she didn’t like opera and knew nothing of painting. The mother cat was the Mother Cat, as crabby and duck-voiced a creature as ever lived. Her undercarriage had been loosened by kittens and swung when she ran up the stairs. For Bertha she had no time at all; the Mother Cat’s love was for Leviticus alone. She looked like a carpet bag his own mother had carried. In his lap, she gave herself entirely to love; she purred, bade him pat and scratch, rubbed her cheek against his jaw.
“She reminds me of someone,” Leviticus told Bertha.
“Leviticus,” she said. “For pity’s sake I am not a cat.”
“Then what animal are you?”
She went silent a long time.
Finally he answered for her: “A sphinx.”