The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  There! He has given me his back. Rubbish to him and good riddance!

  Sister, a shocking thing has just happened in the moments since I wrote my words above. When the train pulled into the station at Middletown, another throng stood waiting on the platform, bound for the dedication. Two dozen or more passengers squeezed into this car, and in the shuffle, Sir Tatty Suit was turned back toward me again—all but pushed by the crowd into my lap. Propriety forced me to look past Grandmother and out the window. Where else was I to look? I fixed my eyes so, until the constant rush of the countryside made me dizzy and I thought I should be sick if I did not look away.

  One of the passengers I’d seen board at Middletown was a thin, nervous man of middle age. Despite the crowded conditions, he was pushing and shouldering his way about the car. He was not a vagabond from what I could see, neither unshaven nor ill-dressed. Still, I watched him take pains to elude the conductor. I assumed the fellow was down on his luck and had no money for a ticket. Well, let it stand, I thought. With all of the extra paying customers today, the Consolidated line can well afford the loss of one fare.

  Whether this curious fellow had money or not, he was enterprising. I watched him accost several of the veterans aboard, attempting to interest them in the purchase of what looked like half-penny postal cards. A few bought them, most did not, but all studied them with serious interest.

  The trouble began when the strange salesman approached Sir Tatty Suit with his wares. I reached into my bag for a penny and spoke. “Sir, if those are engravings of the Memorial Arch you are selling, I should like one.” Well, Sis, it was as if I were the ether and not a living, speaking person.

  “Sir, I should like to purchase one of your engravings,” I said again, this time in a voice he could not ignore.

  “Hey!” someone shouted from behind. “I thought I told you to stay off my train!” And at that, the seller threw his cards at me and pushed past so violently that Sir Tatty lost his balance and landed on my lap! He rose immediately, only to be knocked down again by the portly conductor in pursuit of his scoundrel. We all watched the chase, of course, and the last view I had of the salesman was from the window to my left. He had leapt from the train and was tumbling down a grassy embankment! In what state his hasty exit left him I should not venture to guess, but he was gone and good riddance.

  Gathering himself, Tatty Coat offered me a hundred embarrassed apologies, as well he should have, the clumsy oaf. I acknowledged him with the curtest of nods and no words whatsoever. It was then that I noticed the fugitive’s disgusting wares, sitting still in my skirts.

  They were photographs mounted on cardboard such as I had never seen and hope never to see again. Each image was more filthy than the next. In one, a woman stood admiring herself before the glass. She was naked except for the lavaliere around her neck and the high-button shoes on her feet. In another, this same wicked woman leaned forward to be spanked by a man with a paddle. In the third, a different woman, fully displayed, and a naked man with a hideous horselike deformity were…well, it was as if human beings were beasts.

  Lil, I sat there, frozen. I could neither touch the loathsome cards to rid myself of them nor look away from them. It was as if their wickedness had cast a spell. I felt light-headed and began to tremble. I did not know what I should do.

  It was Mr. Shabby Jacket, of all people, who helped me. Without speaking a word, he gathered the cards and ripped them into pieces. Then he reached past me and Grandmother and tossed the ruined things out the open window. To save me further humiliation, I suppose, he then pushed past the others and found a place elsewhere in the car.

  I must end now, Sis, because we are fast approaching the station. The crowds are milling about and it looks as if every building in Hartford has been gotten up in patriotic bunting. Grandmother snorts and awakens, having missed most of this wretched ride. I am glad that the sun has come out and that tonight we will dine with the Clemens family. Still, my spirits are a good deal less sanguine than they were. What I had imagined would be a red-letter day has turned into something else. Still, I have this evening’s dinner to anticipate and can barely wait for it to come.

  I shall write you more anon.

  Yours ever so truly,

  Lydia

  chapter twenty

  FATS DOMINO AND HIS WIFE had been rescued and were okay. The body of the Micks’ next-door neighbor, Delia Palmer, was found floating in the wreckage of what had once been her home and beauty parlor. Moze learned from a cousin who’d traveled by rowboat up Caffin Avenue that the chinaberry tree he’d worried about had fallen, dislodging his house from its foundation and breaking it in half. The back rooms were smashed. The front rooms were floating diagonally in floodwater. On the night he received the news, Moze got drunk and got into a knockdown drag-out fight with Janis, their shouting back and forth and then her sobs carrying down the front stairs so that I had to turn up the television to give them and their grief some privacy.

  The good news was that the Micks’ cat had survived. Moze’s cousin had found Fat Harry sitting “like an exiled king” in the fallen tree’s inverted root system. “Soon as they give the okay, I got to go down and retrieve that ole fleabag and see if there’s anything else left to salvage,” Moses told me. “But I can’t see as we’re ever goin’ back there to live if the Nines is unlivable.”

  He asked me if we could make a deal.

  The rental agreement I forged with the Micks obliged me to consolidate Maureen’s and my stuff to the first floor of the farmhouse, convert the pantry into a bathroom, and provide an outside exit from the upstairs—now Moses and Janis’s apartment. Egress, the building inspector called the necessity of a second-floor escape route. No egress, no certificate of rental.

  Moze, who had moonlighted on and off for a company called Big Easy Remodelers, said he could tackle most of the required renovations. He cut a door in the upstairs south wall, and together he and I built and installed the staircase that led from what had been Great-Grandma Lydia’s bedroom to the backyard. Moze roughed in the plumbing for the downstairs bathroom, guided me through the finish work, and installed showerheads upstairs and down. (At long last, it was possible to take a shower at 418 Bride Lake Road.) The building inspector returned, strolling upstairs and down with his clipboard and his poker face, reexamining things he’d already examined. I figured I was in for a hassle, but he surprised me by pronouncing the place rentable.

  In return for Moze’s help, I waived their security deposit and their first two months’ rent. That’s not to say I couldn’t have used that seven hundred and fifty bucks times three. Maureen’s legal bills had totaled about fifty thou, and that was just for the criminal case. The civil suit was yet to come, and I was probably going to have to hire a high-end law firm if I had any hope of keeping the Seaberrys from getting at the farm property. Still, I figured, letting the Micks ride for a few months was an investment. They seemed solid enough, and I sure as hell couldn’t have done those renovations on my own. I also agreed to let Moze set up his studio in the barn—free of charge for the first six months, three hundred a month after that. By February, I’d have a rental income of a thousand a month.

  I told the Micks about the specialty shops over in Olde Mistick Village, but Moze said he’d had it with the tourist trap thing. Mail order was the way to go. He registered a domain name, www. cherubs&fiends.com, and figured he’d go online once he’d built his stock up to about three hundred pieces and figured out how to put up a Web site. He told me his New Orleans customers had preferred the grotesque to the angelic by about four to one, and he guessed that ratio would hold once he went national.

  “Or international,” I said. “With the Internet, you never know.”

  Moze nodded in sober agreement. “I’m sayin’.”

  With Tulane University’s operations suspended, Janis’s academic work was on hold. That was a blessing, Moze said. Now she could help him in the studio, first with the castings and later with accounting
and shipping. He calculated an ambitious pouring schedule—three fiends for each cherub—but said he’d need to generate more capital before he could make his plan happen. What I needed was a reprieve from the night shift at the Mama Mia. I spoke to Alphonse about it. Al’s parents had stabilized, and he was back from Florida but still down a night guy. He agreed to my proposal: I would train Moze, then phase out. I was chafing at the bit to be done with baking and babysitting for Velvet Hoon. To be fair, Velvet pitched in sometimes, but only when the spirit moved her. When it didn’t, she’d sit on her ass all night, reading paperbacks and drinking Quirk-subsidized coffee. That, plus I’d have to keep reminding her that if she wanted to smoke, she was obliged to go outside and do it.

  Sharing the farmhouse was a comfort in some ways—Janis kept the place in better order than I did and, as it turned out, Moze was a damn good cook. Fish stews, filé gumbo: more often than not, they asked me to join them, and it was nice not to have to eat alone. Still, having tenants took some getting used to. Because I’d given the Micks kitchen privileges, I had to train myself to put on pants before stumbling out to make my morning coffee. And there was the acoustics issue. The radiator pipes passed between us, so I’d often hear snatches of their conversations—their arguments, especially, which flared often enough. Stress, I figured. Why wouldn’t they be stressed after all they’d been through and all they’d lost?

  He didn’t hit her, far as I knew, although when they went at it, I kept an ear cocked for that possibility. I knew firsthand how a guy who’d been cornered by things out of his control could turn into his worst self. I thought about how I’d gone off on Maureen the night I found out about her and Paul Hay. How I’d seen Hay out there at the house he was building and swung that pipe wrench out of some kind of temporary adrenaline-fueled craziness. What had that ball-busting anger management instructor called it? The cardiology and endocrinology of rage. Coincidentally, I’d run into her a few weeks back in the middle of the renovation project. Moze and I were buying plywood at Home Depot, and there she was. I recognized her immediately, and I think she might have recognized me, too. Gave me a tight little nod, as if to say, I’m still watching you, buddy. She’d given Moze the evil eye as well. “Goddamn,” he’d quipped. “What’d we do to her?”

  I tell you one thing, though. Those fights of Moze and Janis’s didn’t seem to put a damper on their sex life. When I’d moved downstairs, I’d set up our bed and bureaus in what had been the dining room. Once upon a time, Great-Grandma Lydia had used that room to feed and politick with state and federal officials, even a U. S. attorney general—Hoover’s, I think Lolly’d said. The problem was that the Micks’ bedroom was directly above mine. Between us hung Lydia’s Victorian-era ceiling light with its suspended glass lampshades and lead-crystal doodads. Whenever they went at it, that damn fixture would sway and tinkle to the rhythm of their lovemaking. At first, I tried to respect their privacy—get out of bed and walk around the downstairs rooms until things quieted down again. After a while, though, I just stayed put and listened. I’d get to thinking about Mo and me back at the beginning. Or Francesca—the way she looked coming out of the water at that nude beach we went to a few times. My hand would drop between my legs while I watched that swaying light so that I could get some relief. Get some sleep…. And I’ll admit it: sometimes I’d lie there and banish him. Imagine myself upstairs with her. Hey, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I was obsessing about her or anything. But having a good-looking younger woman in the house, well…

  Mornings? When she’d come into the kitchen after her run? Her hair would be pulled back in a messy ponytail and she’d be wearing that cropped pink T-shirt and those little gray gym shorts with “Tulane” written across the ass. Her skin would have that patina of sweat.

  “I used to run pretty regularly,” I told her one morning. “Kind of fell out of the habit the last few years.”

  “Oh, you should start up again,” she said. “We could run together. Motivate each other.” I said I’d think about it.

  Her back was to me during this conversation—she was at the stove cooking eggs—and I kept looking up from my newspaper for another glimpse of that grabbable ass. Then she’d turned around and caught me looking. My eyes jumped back to the headlines, and I felt myself blush. It was a matter of forbearance, I figured. And anyway, it was kind of pathetic. I was old enough to be her father. It wasn’t like I ever caught her looking at me. She was getting all she needed, according to that swinging ceiling light.

  MAUREEN WATCHED MY APPROACH. WHEN I reached her, she stood and we gave each other the DOC-approved hug across the table, the prison-sanctioned smooch. “I didn’t recognize you when you first came in,” she said.

  “No? Who’d you think I was?”

  Her fingers grazed my temple. “I hadn’t noticed how gray you’ve gotten.” I felt like asking her whose fucking fault that was.

  I was already in a pissy mood. I’d just come from teaching my Quest in Literature class. Half of them hadn’t done the reading, and the half that had had spent the first fifteen minutes of class bitching about it: it didn’t make sense, they couldn’t relate to it, blah blah blah. Hey, I felt like telling them, I got dealt this class; you guys signed up for it. Halfway through class, the skateboarder had started dozing. The soldier in camouflage kept checking his watch. The blonde’s cell phone kept ringing. She couldn’t turn it off, she’d snapped back at me. Her kid was running a fever. Okay?

  “I met an old friend of yours yesterday,” Maureen said. She was in an upbeat mood that afternoon. She’d been moved to a less restrictive unit. She liked her new cellmate, Camille.

  “Jesus, what is this now, your third move?” I asked.

  Her fourth, she said.

  “What’s Camille in here for?”

  Embezzlement, Mo said. “She convinced me to go to church with her yesterday—the Catholic mass. First I said no, but then I changed my mind.” Mo said she felt less heavy-hearted than she had since coming to Quirk.

  “Yeah? That’s cool. So who’s this friend of mine?”

  “Father Ralph,” she said. “I don’t know his last name. He said you guys doubled to the high school prom and ended up marrying each other’s dates.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “Ralph Brazicki.”

  “At first I was like: he’s married? But Camille said he was a widower.”

  I nodded. “Betsy Counihan. Breast cancer, I think it was. So what did your new roomie steal?”

  She’d been an accountant for a chain of carpeting companies, Maureen said—had been cooking the books and hitting the casino three or four nights a week. Once she struck it big, she was going to give her son and daughter-in-law the money for a down payment on a house and put back everything she’d “borrowed.”

  I noted that Camille was Mo’s second cellmate doing time for “creative accounting.” And the fourth out of four whose bid was connected somehow to an addiction. Five out of five, counting Mo herself.

  “Speaking of which,” I said. “You still going to your NA meetings?”

  “I do when I can get to the sign-up sheet fast enough,” she said. “They cap the number at fifteen. It’s ridiculous. If you need a meeting, you need a meeting.” The warden was always giving lip service to recovery, she said, but that was all it was. “The only time you see him on the compound is when he’s giving some politician or media person the tour. And he’ll stop a group of girls and say things like, ‘Remember now, one day at a time,’ and ‘It’ll work if you work it.’ But he’s the one who limits the attendance at meetings. And it was his big idea to cut the number from six to three meetings a week.”

  I was getting antsy. Eager to change the subject. “Father Ralph, huh? I’m still trying to imagine that one. Back in high school, Ralphie Brazicki would’ve been a shoo-in for Least Likely to Become a Priest. So what’s prison church like?”

  Strange, Mo said. But nice. They set up plastic chairs in the hallway of the industrial building. Bring i
n an altar-on-wheels. “It’s right outside where they do food prep, so there’s bags of surplus onions and flats of canned tomatoes lining the walls. And all kinds of noises coming from the kitchen. Camille’s one of the singers. The No Rehearsal Choir, they call themselves. But, I don’t know. The singing sounded so beautiful to me. The windows look onto the loading dock where the Dumpsters are. Where all the seagulls congregate.”

  “Maybe one of them’s the Holy Ghost,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said, minus a smile. She said Father Ralph had given her a set of rosary beads.

  “When I was a kid?” I said. “My mother used to pray her rosary every single damn night. Drag me to St. Anthony’s on Sunday. You know what I liked best about going to church? After it was over, if I’d sat still and behaved, she’d take me to this luncheonette for a Coke and a Devil Dog…. That, and looking at the stained-glass windows. All those suffering, pious faces. And the Holy Ghost flying above it all.”

  Maureen started looking fidgety. “So what’s new with you?” she said. “What’s new with the Minks?”

  “The Micks,” I said. “Let’s see. Remember all those boxes of stuff of my great-grandmother’s out on the sun porch? Janis has started digging through it. Says for someone like her in Women’s Studies it’s like hitting paydirt. You know what she found a couple days ago? My great-grandma Lydia’s diary entry about the night she and her grandmother ate dinner at Mark Twain’s house up there in Hartford. So that’s pretty interesting, huh?”

  Mo nodded halfheartedly.

  “And Moze is working solo at the bakery now. Says Velvet’s driving him nuts, same as she did me.”

  “Velvet came to visit me Sunday,” Maureen said. “I didn’t get to see her, though. There were clusterfucks all day long, and by the time they were ready to release us to the visiting room, Velvet had already left.”