The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  JANIS IS OUT IN CALIFORNIA now—she took a job teaching Women’s Studies at Redwoods University. Moze decided to stay put, and cherubs & fiends.com is thriving. The Micks’ divorce became final a couple of months ago.

  Alphonse and Dolores got married. I was Al’s best man and Mrs. B was Dee’s matron of honor—wore a corsage that was half as big as she is. She and I waved the newlyweds goodbye when they drove off to their honeymoon in the Phoenician Yellow Mustang. It’s like Dr. Patel told me once: sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need. After the Mustang disappeared around the corner, I turned to Mrs. B and said, “Well, you’re a widow and I’m a widower. Maybe we should hook up.”

  “Nah,” she said. “You’re not my type.”

  “No?” I said. “Then who is?”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. “Tony Bennett,” she said. “You know what his real name is, don’t you? Benedetto.”

  LIKE AL AND DEE, VELVET and Jesse Seaberry started out as friends and then it turned into something else. I’d gotten to know Jesse by then and had come to like the kid. He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s got a good heart and he’s remained faithful to his sobriety. It was Jesse, in fact, who brought me to my first meeting and later became my sponsor. It’s helped, too. I’m working on the second step.

  I’m sleeping better these days. Most nights when I hit the sack, I lie there in the dark and listen to the moving water below. Then I talk to Maureen. Catch her up on what’s been happening. “Velvet’s pregnant,” I’ll say. “Been sick as a dog. She’s due in August.” Or, “Velvet had an ultrasound yesterday. They’re having a boy.” Or, “Well, Mo, you’re never going to believe this one. Today I went and got myself a tattoo.”

  “You?” Velvet said when I told her about it.

  “Yup. It’s true. I’ve become a marked man.”

  “Holy shit. Let me see it.” When I pulled up my pant leg and showed her my calf, she said, “Cool. What is it? A grasshopper.”

  “Praying mantis,” I said.

  “SHE’S SHOWING NOW, MO,” I told Maureen the other night. “I can’t believe she’s already halfway through her second trimester. I’m taking her on a field trip this weekend. So on Sunday I’ll probably be talking to you from up there in the Green Mountain State.”

  Velvet yacked nonstop for the first couple of hours. Pregnancy this, pregnancy that. But somewhere between White River Junction and Barre, she became quiet. I was quiet, too, lost in my memory of the last time I’d made that trek. After twenty minutes or so of neither of us saying anything, I reached over and turned on the radio. Listened to Van Morrison’s “Moon Dance,” then Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and then that ubiquitous Cher song from several years back: Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…. After it ended, the news came on. The war, the nomination battle between Barack and Hillary, and then something about Columbine. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office had just released a bunch of previously-withheld evidence: things they’d written, videotapes they’d made. When I looked over at Velvet, she was looking back at me.

  “In all these years, you’ve never spoken to me about that day,” I said.

  She nodded in agreement. Said nothing.

  “I’m curious. Did you and Mo ever talk about it with each other?”

  She shook her head.

  A mile or so later, her eyes on the road ahead, she broke her silence. “I was under a table by myself, over near the wall, when they started killing kids. And I kept saying, not out loud or anything, ‘Don’t see me. Please, please don’t see me.’ And then one of them walked over to where I was. The tall one. All I could see were his boots with his pants tucked inside them. ‘Don’t see me, don’t see me.’ And then he bent down and smiled at me. ‘Peekaboo,’ he said. ‘What do you say, you fucking freak? Would you like to die today?’…And I shook my head. I was too scared to speak, but I didn’t want to make him mad, so I just kept shaking my head. And I remember thinking, okay, this is it. This is the end of my shitty fuckin’ life. Just please, not my head. Don’t shoot me in the head…. And then he asked me something. He said, ‘Tell me, mutant girl. Do you believe in god?’…And I couldn’t…I didn’t know what answer would make him not shoot me. So I just…I didn’t say anything. I just wanted him to pull the trigger and get it over with, if that was what he was going to do. And to not shoot me in the head. So I closed my eyes and waited. But then nothing happened. And when I opened my eyes again, I saw that his boots had walked away. Had walked to the next table. And then there was this flash. Gunfire or riflefire. He had killed another girl instead of me. And I don’t…I never told anybody about this before, but I’ve thought about it a million times. Not as much as I used to, but…And what I always wonder is why, instead of shooting me, he walked away. But now, lately, it’s kinda been making sense. Because maybe…”

  I waited. “Maybe what?” I finally asked.

  “Maybe I had to stay alive so I could have this baby.”

  With my left hand on the steering wheel, I reached over and took hold of her hand with my right. Squeezed it. Unsqueezed. Squeezed it again. I didn’t let go until we’d passed through the gates of Hope Cemetery.

  I took her first to see Pandora. Velvet touched the statue’s cheek, its hair. Then she knelt down before the open jar, reached in, and caessed the tiny granite baby. It sort of shocks me to say it, but I think Velvet may turn out to be a damn good mother.

  “Do you mind if I wander around by myself?” she asked.

  “Course not,” I said. “Go to it.” So we set off in different directions.

  Later, I found her standing in front of an angel in flight—another of her grandfather’s works, she told me later. “Hey!” I called. “You about ready to go?” As she turned to face me, she was blocking off the angel’s torso but not its wingspan. For a second, it looked like Velvet herself could fly.

  WE GOT BACK TO THREE Rivers a little after midnight, and when I dropped her off at the farmhouse, she hesitated before getting out of the car.

  “I Googled your name the other day,” she said.

  “Quirk?”

  “No, Caelum. It’s from astronomy—the name of a constellation or something.”

  I nodded. “It’s in the Southern Hemisphere.”

  “I’ve always liked your name. Jesse does, too. How do you think this sounds: Caelum Morgan Seaberry?”

  “I like it,” I said. “I like it a lot.”

  “Yeah, I like it, too. Grandpa.”

  “Grandpa?” I said. “So I’m your father?”

  “Yup. Sucks for you, huh? Whoa.” She laughed and touched her stomach. “Baby’s kicking. Want to feel him?”

  She pulled up her shirt and I placed my hand against the curve of her big, veiny belly. “Man, Bruce Lee’s got nothing on this kid,” I said.

  She thanked me for the trip and got out of the car. I cried all the way back to the condo.

  IN AA, THE FIRST THING you have to do is cop to your own impotence and surrender to a higher power. How you define that higher power is up to you….

  God: big G, little g? Buddha? Allah? The Holy Trinity? Is god the DNA we bring forth? The genes that mutate on the cliff’s edge of chaos? Beats me. For all I know, god may be nothing more—or nothing less—than the sound of the moving water outside your window.

  What I do know is that we are powerless to whoever or whatever god is. That was your tragic mistake, Eric and Dylan: your assumption that the power of the gods was yours to wield. That vengeance solved anything.

  Anyway, I’m Grandpa now—eligible for the senior citizen discount at Dunkin’ Donuts whether I want it or not, so I guess my best course of action is to stop resisting and grow old gracefully. Wisely. In the fifty-plus years of my life so far, I’ve known many sorrows, but I also have been the recipient of many valuable gifts, the student of many wise teachers. Among them are these.

  An old woman who had witnessed the ho
rrors of war returned home and still could see a forsythia bush’s explosion of yellow in springtime, still could hear the music of melted snow rushing past in a nearby brook. “Gifts from God, these sights and sounds,” she wrote. “This placid here and now.”

  “The question you gotta ask isn’t Why? or If?” a wise old man once advised me as we sat in a bar in Queens, New York. “The question is How?”

  “I can’t do it,” I had insisted on a dark and lonely road between Boston and home, but my loving aunt had insisted I could. And when I tried again, that stubborn lug nut, miraculously, had loosened and turned.

  When I was a boy, I saw a laughing man perform a dance of hunger that turned, without pause, into a dance of love. And in my third and final attempt at marriage, I learned, alongside Maureen, how to master the steps of Mr. Mpipi’s dance…. Hi, Mo. It’s me again. I just wanted to let you know that I do believe that there’s life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

  AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.

  I looked away, then, from the impotent man-beast and down at the bust of Levi Popper, one of my fallen ancestor-uncles. I reached out and placed the curved palm of my hand against his cool marble skull. And in my hand resided, too, the tactile memory of what I had felt half an hour earlier, when I’d placed it against Velvet’s swollen belly. Feeling both at once—the cool, silent pull of the dead-but-living past and the rigorous kick of the future: that was when I finally understood what had until then eluded me.

  Yes, that was when and how it happened.

  That was the hour I first believed.

  afterword

  I HAD A TERRIBLE TIME starting this story. A year’s worth of promising beginnings fizzled into false starts. I had a waiting readership, a book contract, and a deadline…but no story. In the midst of this creative drought, I agreed to teach a writing seminar at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans. It was my first visit to that city, and I mostly avoided the conference socializing in favor of walking the streets alone. My wandering led me to St. Louis Cathedral on busy Jackson Square in the city’s French Quarter. Outside there was revelry—street musicians, mimes, dancing, drinking—but the cavernous church was empty. In my forlorn state, I lit a candle, knelt, and prayed to…well, I don’t know who, exactly. The muse? The gods? The ghost of Tennessee Williams? “Whoever or whatever you are,” I said, “please let me discover a story.” Shortly after that trip, I began this novel in earnest. This was the first sentence that my then-nameless, identityless protagonist spoke to me: My mother was a convicted felon, a manic-depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950.

  In the nine years it’s taken me to construct the novel, the ground has shifted beneath us all. School shootings, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the protracted war in Iraq: these have altered us, collectively and as individuals. As I struggled to understand what was happening to our nation and our world, I looked to and was guided by ancient myth. I placed my fictional protagonist inside a confounding nonfictional maze and challenged him to locate, at its center, the monsters he would need to confront and the means by which he might save himself and others. Along the way to discovering Caelum Quirk’s story, I, too, wandered down corridors baffling and unfamiliar, investigating such topics as the invisible pull of ancestry, chaos-complexity theory, and spirituality—my own and Caelum’s. The former strand is given voice in the letters and diary entries of Caelum’s forebears, Lizzy and Lydia. The latter two strands are symbolized by a pair of totem creatures from the natural world, the butterfly and the praying mantis.

  My volunteer teaching at York Correctional Institution, a maximum-security women’s prison, has been concurrent with, and integral to, the discovery and execution of this story. I began facilitating a writing workshop there the same month I started work on the novel—a dozen or so weeks after the massacre at Columbine High School. On the afternoon of April 20, 1999, my wife Christine and I were in Boston, where I was to receive a lovely writing award. I was tying my necktie in front of the bathroom mirror of our hotel room when I heard, from the other side of the door, Chris’s distress: “Oh! Oh, no! Oh, god!” A few seconds later, I was staring at CNN’s live coverage of the chaotic events unfolding at Columbine.

  Two and a half years after Columbine, I sat before the television again, along with the rest of America, staring in disbelief at the smoke rising from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the file footage of Osama bin Laden kneeling and firing his rifle at a terrorist training camp. On impulse, I turned off the TV and drove to my sons’ schools, where I circled the parking lots, trying to decide whether to let my kids carry on with their classes or to go inside and sign them out so that I might keep them safe. But safe from what? From whom? My fear was at the wheel that day, and I see now that I was confusing the actions of the terrorist hijackers with the actions, two years prior, of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

  In the months after September eleventh, the White House assured us that Iraq’s leader was complicit in the attacks and had weapons of mass destruction which he would not hesitate to use against us. “Bring it on!” our president said, and we became immersed in the “shock and awe” of war. At first a trickle and later a steady flow of American military personnel began returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with maimed bodies and damaged psyches, or in flag-draped coffins which government officials decreed must not be photographed. In the name of combating terrorism, Congress passed the Patriot Act and the Administration bypassed the rules of the Geneva Conventions governing the humane treatment of prisoners of war. And as the tactics and conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo came slowly to light, my inmate students, through their writing, began to enlighten me about some equally disturbing realities: the correlation between incest and female crime; the racist and classist nature of the American justice system; and the extent to which our prisons fail to rehabilitate the men, women, and children in their custody. And yes, I did say children. One of my students entered prison in 1996 at the age of 15 and is scheduled to be released in 2046, the year she turns 64. She has, since her incarceration, attempted suicide three times.

  Although The Hour I First Believed is a work of fiction, it explores and examines such nonfictional tragedies as war, catastrophic fire, violent weather, and school shootings by interfacing imagined characters with people who exist or existed. Why did I choose to access the actual instead of taking the safer and more conventional novelist’s approach of creating fictional approximations of easily recognizable nonfictional people and events? Why, specifically, did I take on the tragic events that occurred in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999? My reasons are twofold. First, I felt it was my responsibility to name the Columbine victims—the dead and the living—rather than blur their identities. To name the injured who survived is to acknowledge both their suffering and their brave steps past that terrible day into meaningful lives. To name the dead is to confront the meaning of their lives and their deaths, and to acknowledge, as well, the strength and suffering of the loved ones they had to leave behind. Second, having spent half of my life in high school—four years as a student and 25 as a teacher—I could and did transport myself, psychically if not physically, to Littleton, Colorado. Could I have acted as courageously as teacher Dave Sanders, who sacrificed his life in the act of shepherding students to safety? Would I have had the strength to attend those memorials and funerals to which I sent my protagonist? Could I have comforted Columbine’s “collaterally damaged” victims, as Caelum struggles to comfort his traumatized wife? The depth and scope of Harris and Klebold’s rage, and the twisted logic by which they convinced themselves that their slaughter of the innocent was justified, both frightened and confounded me. I felt it necessary to confront the “two-headed monster” itself, rather than concoct Harris-and Klebold-like characters. Wer
e these middle-class high school kids merely sick, or were they evil? What might their words and actions, their Internet spewings and videotaped taunts, tell us about how to prevent some future tragedy? Were they anomalies, or harbingers of school violence to come? Sadly, that latter question has been answered in the years since Columbine, at middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities in California, Minnesota, Colorado, Arkansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And it is a bitter irony that, on the day I finished this manuscript and mailed it off to my publisher, a graduate student emerged from behind a curtain inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, raised his gun, and shot twenty-one victims, five of them fatally, before taking his own life.