Summary

Part 1 began with “The Found Woman,” in which Joe Wear and Dr. Leviticus Sprague found Bertha Truitt lying on the frosty grass in a Salford, Massachusetts cemetery. It was the turn of the twentieth century, and she seemed to have fallen from the sky. She had “one abandoned corset, one small bowling ball, one slender candlepin, and…fifteen pounds of gold” in her bag (3). At the hospital, Bertha refused to reveal anything about herself or her past. She became a spectacle, and people dreamed about her. She befriended Jeptha Arrison, a disabled suicide patient at the hospital, and Joe Wear as she planned to open a bowling alley.

In “The Bowling Alley Under Glass,” Bertha chose the bog on which to build her alley, the erecting of which took two months. She hired Jeptha as a pinboy and Joe...