The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  In those first bitter days, I faltered. Drank too much. Ate too little. Didn’t bother to bathe or get dressed. Whenever Moses or Janis walked into the kitchen, I got up and left. One afternoon, from behind a window curtain, I watched the yellow Mustang come up the driveway, Alphonse at the wheel, his mother riding shotgun. Rather than answer the doorbell, I lay face down across my bed and waited them out. Later, at the front door, I found the things they’d left me: a mass card for Maureen, a potted plant, and one of Mrs. Buzzi’s ricotta pies. I left the plant out in the cold, tossed the mass card onto a pile of unopened condolences, and dumped the pie in the garbage.

  Velvet was hurting, too, I knew, but it was hard enough negotiating my own grief. I didn’t have the energy to take on hers. So I avoided her as much as possible, and she took the hint and avoided me. Until, that is, the afternoon she knocked at my bedroom door and asked if she could borrow some pictures of Maureen. What for, I wanted to know. So that she could make a collage, she said. I shook my head. Told her I didn’t want her cutting up Mo’s photos.

  “I won’t cut them up,” she said. “I’ll get them copied at Staples and give them right back.”

  “No,” I said again.

  She stood there, as obstinate as ever. “Why not?”

  Because in gathering together photos of Maureen, I would have to look at them. Confront, in those captured moments from her life, the kick to the groin her sudden death had been. Not that I explained that to Velvet.

  “Because I said so.”

  “Okay, fine. Whatever. You don’t have to be such a dick about it.” I saw that she was on the verge of tears and closed my door against them.

  The next morning, when Moze came down to make coffee, he caught me dozing face-down against the kitchen table. I’d been up most of the night.

  I raised my head and looked at him groggily. “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning.”

  When I rose and started for my bedroom, he put his big body between me and my escape. I watched his eyes bounce from my unwashed hair to my week’s worth of beard growth before they settled on my eyes. “Look, man, I know it’s hard,” he said. “But you’ve gotta snap out of it.”

  “You know it’s hard, Moze? How’s that? You ever lose a wife?”

  “No, I haven’t. But I’ve lost a son. Lost a home. A city.”

  I tried to outlast his gaze but couldn’t. “Back off,” I said.

  He threw up his hands. “Yeah, okay, man. I’m just saying. But I guess you gotta go through whatever it is you gotta go through.” He walked over to the coffeemaker, filled his mug, and started for the back door.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s your new guy working out? You know, the one whose family is suing me. The kid whose mother demanded that the judge max out her sentence.”

  “He’s working out fine,” he said, over his shoulder. It pissed me off when he merely closed the door instead of slamming it.

  Later that day, I stared at the ringing telephone instead of answering it. Stood there listening to Ralph Brazicki record his voicemail message. They were putting together a memorial service for Maureen over at the prison, he said. Would I come? I shook my head at the machine.

  Two days later, Ralph left a second invitation. “She had a lot of friends here, Caelum, and they’d like to pay you their respects. Appreciate it if you’d get back to me.” When I didn’t, he showed up at the door.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  “Actually, yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  He nodded. Stood there. “They keep asking me if you’re coming, Caelum. They need you to come.”

  To get rid of him, I said I would.

  “Okay then. Good. Great. Now before I go, can we pray together?”

  By way of answering him, I laughed and closed the door.

  In the few minutes of our exchange, he had kept looking at me funny. Curious to see what he’d seen, I went into the bathroom. Stood before the medicine cabinet mirror and cringed at the train wreck cringing back at me. At long last, I could see what everyone else had always seen: my resemblance to Alden Quirk the Third. It scared me shitless.

  It didn’t happen all at once. I re-engaged with life in small increments, baby steps. I showered and shaved. Changed the sheets on my bed. Cleaned out Nancy’s litter box. In the midst of filing away some papers from the previous semester, I found myself holding the final exam I’d given my Quest in Literature class. The Minotauromachia, I saw clearly, was a struggle for dominance: the lurching Minotaur versus the little girl, her candle raised…. In those signals Mo and I had devised when we’d gone to Dr. Patel to save our marriage, a lit candle had meant, I need you. Be with me. Love me. But Mo had become the slain woman draped across the horse. The Christ figure was climbing out of the picture, and the two women in the window were as disengaged as the dead. My options were limited. I could either love the monster or the brave little girl….

  “Here,” I said. “You wanted these?”

  I watched Velvet’s delight as she looked through the photos I’d gathered for her: Maureen in elementary school, as a high school cheerleader, a nursing school graduate…. Mo and me on our wedding day. Mo with her arms around Lolly and Hennie at some Christmas past. With Sophie and Chet, running along the water’s edge at Long Nook Beach. “Thanks, dude,” Velvet said.

  “No problem, dude. Sorry I was a jerk before.”

  “That’s okay. I’m used to it.” She smiled. I smiled. “Sometimes I forget that she’s…something will happen, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, I have to tell Mom that.’ Then it hits me. Weird, huh?”

  “No, it’s normal…. Probably the first time anyone’s ever used that word in connection with you, right?”

  She flipped me a good-natured middle finger. “You want a hug?”

  As we clung to each other, both of us crying for Mo, I thought about how far Velvet and I had traveled from You want a blow job?

  I told her about the memorial thing they were having over at the prison. “You want to go to it with me?”

  She shrugged. Made a face.

  “Yeah, okay. I understand…. I’d appreciate it if you did, though. I don’t particularly want to walk into that place by myself.”

  “All right then,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  “OH, HONEY, SHE WAS ALWAYS talking about you,” Camille informed Velvet. “I think she thought of you as the daughter she never had.” Several of the others gathered around her nodded in agreement.

  Velvet smiled. Said it almost inaudibly. “She was my mom.”

  The warden gave a generic tribute to a woman he obviously had not known then made a hasty exit. But the deputy warden stayed, as did Mo’s unit manager and Woody the jailhouse shrink. It meant something to me that a few off-duty COs had shown up, too. “She never gave us no trouble,” one of them assured me. “Always acted like a lady.” It made me think of Lydia: how, in her bygone era, the restoration of ladylike behavior had been one of the prison’s primary goals for incarcerated women.

  The music was celebratory, not sombre. Rosalie and Tabitha reprised “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.” When Ralph introduced the No Rehearsal Choir, he said they had belied their name and rehearsed all week. Their song, “O Happy Day,” rocked the house.

  Ralph gave the eulogy; Mo would have liked that. “This was not a place she would have chosen to live out the last years of her life,” he said. “But she had come to understand, I think, that suffering can become a pathway to redemption. Maureen Quirk made the best of a challenging situation. Made a life here, made friends, contributions. In her hospice work, especially, she made this prison a more humane and merciful place. And we will honor our sister of mercy—keep her spirit alive—whenever we respond mercifully to one another.”

  Brawny, tattooed Wanda Fellows, who at the family Mass had “felt the feeling” and gotten the boot for it, stepped forward to end the service. “This song was written by Mr. Sam Cooke,” she said. “He was da bomb,
and so was Miss Maureen.” She raised her eyes heavenward and called out, “This is for you, Mo!” And with that, she let loose a wrenching a capella rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” that raised goose flesh and made tears fall like rain. When it was over, I approached her and, though it was against the rules, held out my arms. And man, that woman could hug back. I hadn’t been squeezed so tightly since the days when Zinnia had helped run the cider press.

  “I’m so glad I came today,” I told Wanda.

  “Thass good,” she said. “You comin’ back?”

  Father Ralph overheard us and laughed. “You could, you know,” he said. “There’s an opening at the school.”

  Before I could respond, a CO bellowed, “Line up, ladies! Time to get back to your units for count!” He and another guard herded them out as if they were dumb animals, not thinking, feeling women.

  Ralph escorted Velvet and me out of the compound. “How about I take you two to lunch?” he said.

  “Can’t,” Velvet said. “I’ve gotta get back to work.” For some reason, she and Ralph shared a conspiratorial smile.

  “What do you say then, Caelum?” Ralph said. “My treat.”

  We dropped Velvet off at the farmhouse, then headed over to the Three Rivers Inn. “Oh, hi, Father,” the hostess said. “You can go right in. The others are already here.”

  The others? Wondering what was going on, I followed Ralph to a table all the way in back. There sat Jerry Martineau and Dominick Birdsey. “Here ye, here ye,” Jerry said. “This reunion of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is now in session.”

  I OPENED THE SYMPATHY CARDS. There were several from my students, sent to me in care of Oceanside and forwarded on by the department secretary. Patti, my first wife, had sent condolences. So had Maureen’s father and stepmother. Scrawled at the bottom of their ostentatious card was a single chilly sentence in Evelyn’s handwriting: Her father and I hope she has finally found peace. Inside a padded envelope at the bottom of the pile I found a thoughtful handwritten letter from Dr. Patel and a gift, enveloped in a protective bubble wrap sleeve: a small soapstone replica of Ganesha, remover of obstacles and destroyer of sorrows. Holding him in the palm of my hand, I couldn’t help but smile. And as I did, I saw that his elephant’s face was smiling back at me, his four human hands reaching out.

  SOMEONE IN THE CHIEF STATE’S Attorney’s office sent me a registered letter informing me that their official investigation into the deaths of the unearthed infants had now been closed. They were ready, therefore, to release the corpses to my custody; I was to contact them as soon as possible with instructions as to how I wished them to proceed.

  At first, I didn’t know what to do with them. Then I did. I sought and was granted permission to have the babies interred on the grounds of the prison that Lizzy Popper had envisioned and Lydia Quirk had actualized. They would join the other long-forgotten babies that Quirk CI volunteers had reclaimed and named. There was a modest healing ceremony, a blessing of their graves by a Methodist minister and two women from the Quakers’ House of Friends. And so Baby Boy Dank and Baby Popper of undetermined gender now rest in the little cemetery along with the children born to Bride Lake prisoners of the past. Their small stones face the modest meditation park where current inmates with good behavior records can go to sit, think, and pray. Camille, who has taken Crystal under her wing, wrote to tell me that the two of them stop by once or twice a week to pray for the children, and for Maureen.

  ULYSSES DIED AT DAYBREAK ON a gray day in March. I was with him at the end—me and Nancy Tucker, who had tucked herself like a death angel under his armpit and kept a vigil through the night. For some reason, cats were a comfort for the dying, the hospice director had told me. “You’re like my own kid,” Ulysses had whispered to me the day before he passed. In the final seconds, he seized, turned purple, and then was still. Nancy untucked herself, stood, and yawned. She licked his neck a few times, then jumped off his bed. I watched her stroll out of the room and around the corner. I left her there with the dying. I’m told she likes her new home and is treated like a queen.

  Mr. Buzzi died one day after Ulysses did, so I guess you could say that Alphonse and I both buried fathers that week. Mrs. Buzzi, no surprise, was a Sicilian stoic about her husband’s passing, but Al took it hard. After the funeral luncheon, seated at the bar in the front of the restaurant, he made his third or fourth toast to his father and said, red-eyed, “Well, at least he didn’t live to see the day when the business he started went under.” When he went teetering off to the men’s room, Dolores confided to me that, at Al’s request, she’d begun researching the pros and cons of filing for bankruptcy. “He went down to the casino last week and filled out an application for the food service department,” she whispered. “Don’t tell him I told you. Let him tell you. And for god’s sake, don’t say anything to his mother.”

  But Vincenzia Marianina DeLia Buzzi is a crafty old girl. She knew.

  At least I suspect she did, because the week after Mr. Buzzi was laid to rest, the Mama Mia became the scene of a second “miracle.” The statue of the Blessed Virgin, once again, began to weep. It shed its bloody tears for two days and, on the third day, went dry-eyed. At Mrs. B’s suggestion, the statue was removed from the front window “for security purposes” and placed atop the front counter, below which was showcased Al’s array of doughnuts, muffins, sweet rolls, and Italian cookies. The white cloth that had been placed beneath the statue in the window—and which had therefore absorbed its bloody lachrymal discharge—was framed and hung on the wall, where it could be analyzed by the Mama Mia’s burgeoning clientele. Opinions varied, but the majority could see in the rusty blood stain a map not of Vietnam this time but of the United States of America. “Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld’s America,” one of the Daily Record’s letters to the editor speculated—the one written by yours truly. The Record was the first newspaper to cover the story. Over the next few days, the New London Day, the Hartford Courant, the New Haven Register, and the Boston Herald followed suit. By the second week, TV journalists with their camera crews arrived to investigate the strange phenomenon: the Today show, Fox News, Inside Edition, CNN. Two high school students from Long Island drove up and, with a cell phone camera, recorded a narrated tour of the Mama Mia that Alphonse (the kids’ tour guide) says has had more than thirteen thousand hits on YouTube. That same week, none other than Conan O’Brien came to see the statue for himself and stuck around long enough to sign autographs, crack jokes, and chow down on a chocolate doughnut and Al’s newest creation. “The nun bun” was a variation on the traditional hot cross bun whose sales were not restricted to the Easter season. Mrs. Buzzi had no idea who Conan was, but she got a kick out of him. “Carrot Top,” she called him. Before he left, she made him an honorary Italian.

  Mrs. B greeted the media with open arms and free samples, but she gave the heave-ho to two graduate students from the University of Connecticut’s Chemistry Department who wanted to borrow the blood-stained cloth so that its chemical composition might be analyzed for scientific purposes. I happened to be at the bakery when they made their request and thus was eyewitness to the skirmish between faith and skepticism. “You two have got a hell of a nerve marching in here and questioning the will of God!” she yelled, as loudly as she had that time when Alphonse spilled a full glass of orange soda on her just-washed kitchen floor. “Get the hell out of here! Scram! And don’t come back!”

  After she’d fended off the infidels, I sidled up to Mrs. B and whispered, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

  “Hey, Mr. Smarty Pants, speak English,” she said. Then she winked and walked away.

  AFTER THREE POSTPONEMENTS AND NUMEROUS continuances, I didn’t so much lose the civil suit as surrender to the inevitable. For one thing, I couldn’t afford to keep shelling out for Junior’s billable hours. For another, I had come, little by little, to the realization that I was finally ready to unyoke myself from long-held Quirk family property. My
Scottish ancestor had purchased Bride Lake Farm with bribe money he’d received from a wealthy father-in-law who had wanted to rid his daughter of an unfaithful husband. A failure at farming and life, my namesake had hanged himself, Lolly once told me, leaving his widow and son cash-poor but land-rich. And although Adelheid and Caelum MacQuirk’s son and grandson, Alden Quirk and Alden Quirk, Jr., had loved the land and been good stewards, my father, Alden Quirk the Third, had dedicated his life not to dairy farming but to drink. He had once quipped, in reference to his decision not to name me Alden Quirk the Fourth, “Well, somebody had to come along and break the family curse.”

  In fairness, the Seaberrys had said they would not evict me—that I could remain at the farmhouse for as long as I wanted. I chose, instead, to pack up my things and move. In the process of doing that, I rediscovered, up in the attic, three long-forgotten treasures: my unpublished novel about a young boy’s kidnapping; the wooden sign that once had hung on the wall behind Bride Lake Prison Superintendent Lydia Quirk’s desk; and, miraculously, packed away in a wooden crate filled with excelsior, the marble busts of Lizzy Popper’s slain sons, Levi and Edmond, who gave their lives to free the slaves and save the Union.

  I like my new place: it’s one of those downtown condos they built a few years back—the ones that look out on the merge of the rushing Sachem and the meandering Wequonnoc, two of the three rivers for which our town was named. The thing I like best about my new digs, to tell you the truth, is the constant sound of that moving water. No matter what the weather, I keep a window cracked open to it because it reminds me of something Janis said to me that day up at Bushnell Park: that our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.

  The busts of Edmond and Levi have come to rest on a table in the living room of the condo. On the wall behind them I’ve hung Velvet’s collage, “The Amazing Maureen,” and the hinged high school graduation portraits of my father and my aunt, and the framed print I bought of Picasso’s Minotauromachia. I’ve been reworking The Absent Boy, partly in salute to my father who, according to Ulysses, had had a gift for words. I have no idea if it’ll ever be published or even publishable, but whatever happens, I’m thinking of changing the title; the revamped story seems somehow to have outgrown it. Oh, and I’ve Super-glued and wood-puttied the two halves of Lydia’s wooden sign. Did a good job of it, too. You’d have to go looking to see that I’d busted it in anger during that dark period when my family’s withheld secrets began to come to light. A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity: it still sends an important message, I think. I hung it up in my classroom over at the prison. I went back and forth about teaching there, but switching from Oceanside to the Quirk CI School has turned out to be a good move for me, too. My students are like sponges, I swear to god. I teach GED English and creative writing. Mostly, the women want to write about themselves, and it helps them, you know? Gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That’s the funny thing about mazes: what’s baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.