by Wally Lamb
“Ulysses say where he was going when he left here?” Jerry asked.
“Nope. But wherever he is, he’s not drinking any more of the vodka I let him have last night when he slept over here. I poured the rest down the sink.”
“You gave him liquor? In his condition?”
“Yeah, well…give drink to the thirsty, right? It’s one of the seven acts of Christian virtue.” Jerry gave me the kind of quizzical look I must have given Kareem Kendricks the day before in my office. “You see that thing on the news last night? About the soldier who opened fire at that office over in New London?”
“Yes, I saw it. What about it?”
“Student of mine. A few hours before he did what he did, he was in my office, reciting the seven acts of Christian virtue: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty…”
“Jesus,” Jerry said. “You’ve had a hell of a couple of days, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “I was up most of the night, letting the what-ifs do a number on me. What if I’d realized what he was planning and been able to prevent it? Said just the right thing that might have brought him back to his senses and…Then, of course, there’s the bigger, scarier what-if.”
Jerry cocked his head. “Meaning?”
“He’d been acting pretty unstable in class that morning, and one of the other students said something to antagonize him. He could have just as easily pulled out his gun and started taking victims then and there instead of…could have found ourselves in the middle of another…”
He finished it for me. “Columbine.”
I turned my back to him and walked over to the window. “I’ve been trying for eight years to wrap my head around that one,” I said. Outside, a hawk lifted off a sycamore limb and flew through the grim gray sky. I turned back and faced him. “You’re a cop, Jerry. Maybe you can tell me. Why is it that these damaged people who can’t take the pain anymore have to pick up firearms and go out in a blaze of glory? Destroy other people’s lives along with their own?”
“I don’t know, Caelum,” he said. “How’s she doing over there, anyway?”
“Okay. Better, actually. Although I’m not exactly looking forward to our next conversation when she asks me what’s new.” I looked down again at the babies. “Come on, Jerry. Think about it. What good’s some long, drawn-out police investigation going to do these two at this point?”
He rose and walked over to me. Put his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know, my friend. Acknowledge their existence maybe? Give ’em a little belated justice?”
“When that train smashed into him, it dragged him along for several hundred feet. Severed both his legs. She was doing time for vagrancy when they fished her out of Bride Lake. What’s the matter, Jerry? Cosmic justice not enough for you?”
“Not when I’ve got regulations to adhere to. Protocols to follow.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got your protocols, and I’ve got a lawsuit hanging over my head with my land and my home hanging in the balance. I don’t exactly need a lot of negative attention drawn to this place right now.”
He sympathized, he said, but he wasn’t going to put his job on the line for me or Ulysses. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay?” He pulled a pen and a small notepad out of his pocket. “Read me again what that letter says.”
I walked over to the counter. As I read him Sparks’s letter, he jotted some notes. “This is conjecture on my part,” he said. “But from that comment about ‘dollar signs’ in her eyes, I’m guessing she may have been trying to extort money out of him,” he said. “Threatening to go public about her pregnancy, maybe. So he would have had to either pay her off or scare her off, and it sounds like he opted for the latter. When was it Jackie Robinson broke through to the majors? Forty-six?”
“Forty-seven,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, put it in context. Robinson’s a great player on the field and a stand-up guy off of it, and when he broke through, he was getting death threats, for Christ’s sake. Couple of seasons later, this Sparks comes along, and not only is he cheating on his wife with some pretty little white model, but then he gets her pregnant on top of that? You know what would have happened if the papers got ahold of a story like that? He played for the Giants, you said? Probably would have brought his career to a screeching halt. Hell, there’d have probably been a lynching party right there at the Polo Grounds. So let’s say his letter works. Scares her into shutting her mouth. Now what the hell’s she going to do?…Interesting that she ripped up his letter and threw it in there, isn’t it? That’s hostile. Shows how pissed off she must have been when she realized she wasn’t going to get what she wanted from him. But, you know, this is all guesswork. I could be way off base.”
I shook my head. “She had a temper when people thwarted her. I know that much.” I told Jerry about the old newspaper article—the one about how, as a seventeen-year-old, Mary Agnes had swallowed India ink after Great-Grandma Lydia forbade her from seeing my fourteen-year-old father. And about how, after she got hauled into court and the judge ordered her to stay twenty-five feet away from him when they were at school together, she ripped into His Honor and got slapped with a contempt fine. “And after Rheingold fired her? Before she vacated the fancy apartment they’d set her up in? He told me she trashed the place. Broke mirrors, slashed the furniture.”
“Who’s he?” Jerry asked.
“The old guy I talked to down in Queens. The former driver.”
“Okay, so what we’ve got then is a behavior pattern: she’s volatile when she doesn’t get what she wants—which, in this case, let’s just say, for example’s sake, might have been blackmail money.”
It was hard to hear him describe her as being that devious, that unstable—hard because it sounded plausible. In the face of all that was coming to light, it was getting harder, too, to romanticize about my mother. I’d been outraged about the way the Quirks and everyone else had bullied her. Used their power against her. But I was beginning to see that, for whatever reason, Mary Agnes Dank had engineered most of her own troubles.
“The old guy you talked to down in Queens—the Rheingold driver. He said she was pregnant when he drove her back here from New York, right? Any idea when that was?”
“Yeah, nineteen fifty. Wintertime, because he said it started snowing on his way back to the city. March, I think he said. Pregnant with me, I thought—either by Sparks or the other guy she was seeing. The heir apparent at Rheingold, also married. But the math didn’t add up. If she was pregnant with me in March of 1950, then how the hell could she have given birth to me in October of ’51? So then I figured, okay, maybe if my family had gone to the trouble to have that bogus birth certificate made up—to hide the fact that Mary Agnes was my mother—then maybe they’d lied about my date of birth, too. Maybe I was a year older than I’d been led to believe. I started thinking about things like how, by the end of sixth grade, I was already shaving. Already having wet dreams. I came up with all kinds of—” “Sixth grade? Jeeze, I didn’t have my first one until high school. On an Explorers campout. Woke up dreaming about Joey Heatherton, and I started firing off like Mount Vesuvius. Thank God for sleeping bags, you know?” He was making wavy lines on his notepad. “Joey Heatherton: where is she now?”
“Probably in a nursing home,” I said. “But it was driving me nuts, you know? Not knowing how old I was, who my father was. Then this DNA test I had done said I definitely was a Quirk. That my father was my father.”
I told Jerry what I’d found out from Ulysses and later verified in that old newspaper article about my kidnapping. Told him about how I’d been taken away from Mary Agnes and “legitimized”—given a different mother who was passed off as the one who’d given me birth.
Jerry glanced down at the babies. “So who the hell are these two then? That’s what I’ve got to figure out.” He took out his cell phone and started punching buttons. I asked him who he was calling. “The station house. I’m going to have a couple of my patrolmen drive a
round, see if they can find our buddy Ulysses so that I can talk with him.”
“So you’re going to question him yourself?”
“Yeah, I figure he’d be more forthcoming if—Yeah, Gina? This is Captain Martineau. Who’s on this afternoon? Tanaka?…Okay, tell him I want him to see if he can find someone for me. And put Bill Meehan on it, too, while you’re at it. You know that old rummy who—”
“Hold up,” I said. I pointed toward the back door. Ulysses was sitting on the stoop, his head in his hands.
chapter thirty-two
HE WAS PRETTY SHAKEN UP. Pretty scared. “You drunk?” Jerry asked him.
He shook his head. “I wish I was.”
I started a pot of coffee, and Jerry told Ulysses, as gently as he could, that he had some questions he needed him to answer.
Ulysses looked back and forth between us. “Questions about what?” he asked. Jerry extended his hand toward the babies. “Oh. Yeah, okay.” He said he didn’t mind answering Jerry’s questions, but he’d just as soon not have to do it in the same room as “those things.”
“Fair enough,” Jerry said. They adjourned to the living room.
When the coffee was ready, I poured three mugs and went in there. “Mind if I sit in on this?” I asked. Jerry said it was okay with him if it was okay with Ulysses. Ulysses said he’d feel better if I did.
“And Jer, before you get started, do you think he needs to lawyer up?”
Jerry rolled his eyes. “What I think is that you’ve maybe been hitting the Law & Order reruns a little too hard.”
We exchanged smiles. “Point taken,” I said.
Ulysses said my father and he had buried the trunk and laid the cement floor over it in September of 1953.
“You sure about that?” Jerry said. “Because we’ve been trying to piece this thing together, and we’re thinking it might have been 1950.”
Ulysses shook his head. It was about a week or so after he’d gotten his discharge from the navy, he said, and that was Labor Day of ’53. Grandpa Quirk and Lolly had gone out of state to a cattle auction, he remembered, and left my father in charge of the milking. “That and looking after the old lady.”
“My great-grandmother,” I said.
Ulysses nodded. “She wasn’t too tappy at that point, but it was heading in that direction. They kinda had to keep an eye on her. Anyways, Alden called me up, asked me if I’d help him milk.”
My father had been released from the service sometime before, Ulysses said. “Something happened to him over there, and it made him snap, I guess. The navy couldn’t use him any more. Medical discharge, I guess it was. Alden never did say what it was. Lolly told me he was in bad shape when he first come home. Stayed up in his room most of the time. Didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. By the time I got out, he was okay, pretty much. Drinking heavy, but other than that, the same Alden as before, far as I could tell. Except that he was a married man. He’d married on the quick, see? After Caelum here come along.”
“Yeah, speaking of that, where were Caelum and his mother that day you guys buried the trunk?”
Ulysses shrugged. Said all he remembered was that we weren’t around.
“We might have been up at the Cape,” I said. “Buzzards Bay. When she and I would visit her family, we’d usually stay over for two or three nights.”
“Okay, then,” Jerry said. “Go on, Ulysses.”
Grandpa Quirk had been after my father to help him build the apple house, he said. He was anticipating a bumper crop that year, and with it, he hoped, a bump in customers, too. “See, he’d just shelled out for that big cider press they used to have here. Thought it’d be a draw to get people out to the farm. Families with kids, that kind of thing: show ’em how cider’s made, and then they’d buy a jug or two and a basket of apples.” Ulysses looked from Jerry to me. “He was pretty shrewd, your grandfather. Knew how to tease out a dollar. But he wasn’t too happy with your father, because Alden had been dragging his feet on the building project, see? On purpose, see? Because he was waiting for an opportunity.”
“What kind of opportunity?” Jerry asked.
“A time when the old man wasn’t around. See, Alden had something he needed to do when nobody was around to see him do it.”
It was a scorcher that morning, Ulysses remembered. After he and my father finished morning milking, they’d begun drinking. “Working our way through a couple six-packs, and then, out of the blue, he says to me, ‘Come on, U! There’s something else you need to help me with.’ So I follow him up to the attic. And it was hotter’n hell up there, too. Like walking into a furnace.”
First, they had lifted a large highboy away from the wall. Then my father, with the claw end of a hammer, had pried off a wooden panel that that highboy had been parked in front of. “And there was this crawl space behind it, see? Alden said he’d discovered it back when he was a kid—that his grandma’s rule was that him and his sister were never supposed to go up in that attic unless she went up with them. And of course, the way Alden was, that was like handing him an open invitation to go up there and snoop around whenever he thought he could get away with it. And that’s what he done back when he was a boy: snooped around and found that secret passageway.”
My father got down on his hands and knees and disappeared into the crawl space, Ulysses said. And when he backed out again, he was dragging the footlocker. “And I remember, I says to him, ‘What do you got in there? Pirate treasure?’ And he laughed, said he wished it was. Only he wouldn’t say what was in it. He told me it was better for me if I didn’t know.
“We put everything back the way we found it—tapped the wooden panel back in place, put the highboy back in front of it. Then we hauled the trunk downstairs and out to the spot where the old man was planning to put up his apple shack.”
Ulysses said they dug the hole, lowered the trunk, and shoveled over it. Then they rolled the ground to level it, built the staging for the floor, and started mixing cement. “I said to him in the middle of it, I said, ‘Jesus, it’s hot out here. How about we quit for a little while now? Wait till it cools off a little?’ But Alden said No, no, we had to keep going so’s we could get everything done by the time his old man got back. So all afternoon, we mixed and poured cement, two wheelbarrows at a time. Then we…then…”
He had been staring into the distance as he recalled that long-ago day, but suddenly he was back in the present, back in the farmhouse living room. He looked at me, surprised. “I just remembered something,” he said.
“What’s that?” Jerry asked.
“The old lady. Alden’s grandmother.”
Now that he had retrieved the memory, he said, he could picture it plain as day. “In the middle of all that cement mixing we were doing, she come wandering out from the house. She’d always been the prim and proper type, you know? But when she come out there, she was barefoot and her hair was kinda helter-skelter. Wearing a housedress that was buttoned up all wrong…. See, Alden’d been so busy rushing around, trying to get everything finished, that he’d forgotten about her. But then, there she was. When Alden seen her, he kinda froze up. Because this thing we were doing was supposed to be top secret, see?
“She walks up to him, barefoot like I said—walks right through the slop from the spillover around the wheelbarrow. Grabs Alden by his wrist. Now, I’d seen her do that same thing often enough when I was a kid—grab him by the wrist with one hand and start hitting him with the switch with the other, because of something bad she’d caught him doing. But that day, she walks up to him, grabs his wrist, and she says to him, close up to his face, she says, ‘What did you do with it?’ Meaning the trunk, see? We hadn’t realized it, but she must have seen us that morning, carrying it down from the attic. And I said to myself, Uh-oh, the jig’s up now. Alden’s in trouble again. But then—and this surprised me—Alden looked right back at her, kinda bold-like, and he says he done what should have been a long time ago: put it in the ground where it belonged. And the old lady stood
there, not saying anything at first. It was like a face-off, you know? Like a contest between the two of them. Then she nodded, decisive-like, and said, ‘Good.’ And then Alden took her by the arm and brung her over to the water bucket. Washed that wet cement off her feet and walked her back to the house…. Funny how memory works, ain’t it? All those years ago, and now that I remember it, I can see her standing there plain as day. Hear her saying that one word when he told her that he’d buried the trunk: ‘Good.’”
Ulysses clunked down his empty coffee mug. “More?” I asked.
“Nah. I could use a little nip of something, though.”
“No way, José,” Jerry said. “We’re not through yet. And you’re not supposed to be drinking anyway.”
Ulysses nodded and turned to me. “How about one of them beers you were drinking last night, then? You got any of them left?” But before I could respond, Jerry asked him if there was anything else about that day that he remembered.
He shook his head. “Just that, when the old man come home that night, he was pleased as punch. Kinda shocked, I guess. Not only hadn’t the farm gone to hell in a handbasket with Alden in charge, but the building project had moved forward, too.” He said the next to me. “Didn’t happen too often that your grandpa was pleased about something your dad had done. But he was that night. He was falling all over himself about how we’d laid down that floor. Course, he had no idea why Alden had gotten so hardworking all of a sudden—that he’d been waiting for the chance to get that chest out of the attic, bury it, and make sure it stayed buried.”
Ulysses told us he had to stop talking and take a leak. But when he got up, he started heading toward the front door instead of the bathroom. “Wrong way,” I said. “It’s off the kitchen. Remember?” He said he’d just as soon relieve himself out in the yard if it was all right with me—that he’d rather not walk past “those two” again if he didn’t have to.
While he was outside, I told Jerry that it didn’t sound to me like Ulysses had been an accessory to anything except helping out his buddy. “So far, I’d say you’re right,” Jerry said. “But we’re not through yet.” He took out his phone again. Called the station house and directed his dispatcher to contact the coroner and give her a heads-up. He wanted the babies’ remains and the other contents of the footlocker picked up and brought to the forensics lab later that afternoon. He said he also wanted Officers Meehan and Tanaka to meet him here at three o’clock so that they could have a look up in the attic and cordon off the hole out back.
