Left At The Alter
Dear Tara,
Pity Miss MacIntosh! We come to the story of her ill-fated engagement to Mr. Bonebreaker, a Chicago street preacher, back in the days when her wig was black, not the red, marcelled one of later days. They met on the street shortly after Miss MacIntosh’s operation to remove her left breast. Holding down a job in a bowling alley, she was still recovering from her time in the hospital. Bonebreaker spotted her leaving the bowling alley, reeling with exhaustion. He thought she must be drunk or a lost soul and asked if she desired salvation.
“It was his specialty to poke and pry with his long black umbrella, looking for lost souls in shadowed doorways—also for stubs of pencils, key rings, keys, though she could not guess his habit of taking whatever he found.”
Miss MacIntosh finds herself compelled to follow him.
“So how could she resist the temptation of salvation, for it was just after the amputation which might be the first of many wounds, and she had felt her loneliness and her powerlessness to make a decision? Besides, he had seemed to understand at the very first what she had suffered, that loss of a breast as something more than a physiological loss, as something which had happened in God’s name…”
As you might guess, their romance is not traditional in any sense. Bonebreaker ambles around Chicago, preaching on street corners, intent on salvaging souls with Miss MacIntosh, day after day, night after night. For Bonebreaker what is set out in the Book of Revelations would very soon come to pass.
“Their marriage, which was continually postponed by Mr. Bonebreaker, and for no known reason, for none of the reasons that marriages are postponed, was to last not long upon the earth, he said, for earth would not last long.”
Bonebreaker flees the night before he and Miss MacIntosh are to be married. Seems he quite liked her flowing black hair and often complemented her on it. When Miss MacIntosh reveals her baldness to him, it is just too much for Bonebreaker; he flees, never to be seen by her again.
Miss MacIntosh retained two items from their time together—his “great, loud-ticking watch, luminous and waterproof, which for many, many years she had worn on her dress over the breastbone where the breast was missing—as it to equalize the unequal body, as if to keep concealed from everyone the wound which no one would have noticed,” and his great, black umbrella.
Why does Miss MacIntosh chose this time, her last month of her life, to tell Vera about her “engagement” to Mr. Bonebreaker? And is this story even true?
Although Vera might not realize it at the time, Miss MacIntosh intends, very soon, to walk into the cold, churning sea, never to return. She speaks to Vera about a watery death:
“…when her time ended, she would have no coffin, knowing that there was no coffin which was waterproof…”
“She would soon be where the seashells lost their pulsing colors and where no lamp lights would reach her, often she declared in the last month, although I scarcely listened to these sad prophecies of mortal woe, for I thought she was merely talking on and on.”
Does Miss MacIntosh kill herself because she believes that like Mr. Bonebreaker, Vera will never accept her baldness? Has she finally been broken, all her illusions shattered? Or is she too humiliated by the fact that she has failed, time and again, to disillusion others about who she really is? That she could not even keep her “cover” of baldness, her true identity, from Vera a cloistered, inexperienced child?
On my way to the wig shop,
Lori