The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Upon leaving Connecticut, Edmond Popper’s regiment was attached to the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Division, Army of the Potomac. The soldiers’ mission was to keep Washington secure from Confederate attack. Toward that end, Edmond died of injuries sustained at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December of 1862.

  The location of Edmond Popper’s remains likely would have stayed a mystery like his brother’s, if not for the kindness of a young Union Army chaplain. In January of 1863, a letter addressed to “The Mother of Private Edmond Popper of New Haven, Connecticut” arrived at the Popper home, forwarded from Washington. The sender was twenty-four-year-old Joseph Twichell,* a native of Southington Corners, Connecticut, and an assistant chaplain in New York’s Excelsior Brigade. Edmond Popper had died in Twichell’s arms, and Twichell wrote Lizzy Popper to tell her of her son’s final words: “They as raised this war have done a terrible wickedness, I know it now. Tell Ma I will see her in the bye and bye.” Lizzy had been inconsolable, but hearing her son’s words comforted her, as did the information about the location of his remains. Concerning the latter, Twichell wrote:

  Many a mother’s heart, for years to come, will yearn over some spot of earth, she knows not where, which holds the ashes of her brave son. You, however, shall know where your boy is buried. We gave Private Popper a brief but honorable service, then laid him to rest in the back field of Robert Hatheway’s farm, which lies south and to the west of Fredericksburg, four miles from Spotsylvania. He rests fifteen or so rods behind the barn, ten or twelve steps to the east of the stone wall at its corner.

  The deaths of their sons, six months apart, rocked both Charles and Elizabeth Popper. Sadly, neither seemed able to console the other, perhaps because of their fundamental disagreement about the necessity of what Lizzy Popper called “Mr. Lincoln’s fratricidal war.” In a December 1862 letter written on stationery from Manhattan’s Hotel Du-Mont, Charles Popper referred to the couple’s New Haven home as “an empty shell to which, at present, I am loath to return.” Popper instructed his wife that all necessary communication should be forwarded to him in care of the New York office of his employer, the Century Publishing Company. This period of estrangement lasted for fourteen months, during which time Charles Popper began an extramarital affair with Mrs. Vera Daneghy, a subscription customer to whom he sold penny novelettes and by whom he later fathered a daughter, Pansy, born in 1870. Letters Vera Daneghy sent to Lizzy Popper after Charles Popper’s death suggest that Popper saw little of his illegitimate daughter but deposited small sums for her in a secret bank account.

  Elizabeth Popper’s fifty-ninth year was one of profound and confusing loss. Compounding her grief for her slain sons and the defection of her husband was the abrupt and mysterious disappearance, during Christmas week of 1862, of her youngest child, nineteen-year-old Willie. Lizzy became consumed with fear that her surviving son had followed his brothers into the Union Army and would perish as they had. Alone and afraid, she spiraled into a second immobilizing depression.

  Worried about their sister’s “addled state” and “unkempt person,” Martha Weeks and Anna Livermore came to Lizzy Popper’s aid. As she had done before, Weeks financed a “rest cure” for Lizzy at the Hartford Retreat. She also commissioned Boston sculptor Aldo Gualtieri to create, from existing daguerreotypes, memorial busts of Edmond Popper and Levi Popper. Anna Livermore traveled from Pennsylvania to stay with Lizzy following her release from the sanitarium, and it was she who promoted her sister’s brief but influential foray into Spiritualism. Like many nineteenth-century feminists, Livermore was both a suffragist and a Spiritualist. “Spiritualism and women’s rights drew from the same well,” notes author Barbara Goldsmith. “For women—sheltered, repressed, powerless—the line between divine inspiration, the courage of one’s convictions, and spirit guidance became blurred.”

  For the grief-stricken Lizzy Popper, the possibility that she might communicate with sons who had “passed over” was irresistible. Could she learn the location of Levi’s remains? The whereabouts of her missing Willie? A séance was arranged, to be conducted by Spiritualist minister Theodore W. Cates of Boston, a friend of Livermore’s. An account of what transpired that evening—no doubt a subjective one—was later published in a Spiritualist newspaper, A Beacon from the Beyond. The article’s author was Anna Livermore.

  On a snowy evening in late February of 1863, Livermore wrote, Reverend Cates and seven others gathered around the Poppers’ dining room table and grasped hands, forming a Spirit Circle.

  Then prayers were spoken, incantations uttered, questions posed to the dead. A response came first in the form of notes played on a vacant piano in the adjacent drawing room. (All three of Mrs. Popper’s sons~Edmond, Levi, and William~had played the piano.) As instructed by Reverend Cates, Mrs. Popper then placed articles of her sons’ clothing across her lap and touched her fingers to the planchette of Mr. Cates’ Ouija board. Placing his own fingers on the planchette’s opposite side, Reverend Cates closed his eyes and asked in a commanding voice if spirits were present. Mrs. Popper immediately reported feeling tingling sensations in her arms and hands. Magnetic forces had entered her body, Mr. Cates explained. These caused the planchette to move across the board, gliding first to the letter E, then to the letter P. “Is Edmond Popper in this room?” Reverend Cates inquired. The planchette pointed to the word “YES.” Mr. Cates then inquired of Edmond if he was in the company of other spirits. The planchette roamed the board, stopping on the numeral one. When Mr. Cates called on the second spirit to identify itself, three people in the room—Reverend Cates, Mrs. Popper, and the author of this account—heard a baby cry. Mrs. Popper called out, “It’s the girl! It’s my Phoebe!” referring to a daughter she had lost in infancy. Mr. Cates asked the spirit of Mrs. Popper’s infant if she had a message for her mother, but the planchette remained still. Mr. Cates then reported seeing the ectoplasm of a small babe float through a window to the outside. The child had left, he announced, but Edmond Popper was still present.

  Through Cates, Lizzy asked Edmond if he was in contact with either of his brothers. The planchette failed to budge. A number of follow-up questions went unanswered as well. Then, wrote Livermore, Cates pushed a pencil through a hole at the head of the planchette and placed a sheet of paper between the planchette and the board. Cates asked if Edmond had a message he wished to impart to his mother. The planchette glided again, and as it did, the pencil spelled out, much in the manner of a modern Etch-a-Sketch toy, the message: “healthemma.” (The Beacon from the Beyond article is illustrated with a drawing of Lizzy Popper’s hand and the supposed message.) According to Livermore’s account, it was Lizzy herself who decoded the communiqué, staring at the cryptic swirls, then shouting, “Heal them, Ma!”

  Recalling the séance years later, Lizzy Popper would express skepticism that she had, in fact, made contact with her dead son and daughter that night. She nevertheless took to heart the “message” she had received. Putting aside her personal grief, Popper wrote to the Union Army’s Superintendent of Women Nurses, Dorothea Dix, whom she had met fifteen years earlier at Seneca Falls. “I am nearly sixty years of age and have had no formal medical training, but my constitution is strong and I can learn as swiftly as any. Having lost sons to this war, I should like to come to the aid of other mothers’ sons.”

  * * *

  JANIS WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN, looking the worse for wear.

  “Hey,” I said. “Coffee’s just made. Help yourself.”

  She nodded. Her eyes lit for a second on Lizzy’s manuscript, opened before me on the kitchen table. Then she turned away and busied herself pouring coffee, adding milk from the fridge. “So I suppose you heard the fireworks last night,” she said. Her back was to me.

  Play dumb, I told myself. “Fireworks?”

  “Moze and me. We had a fight about … oh, never mind.” She sipped her coffee and sighed. “I don’t think I got two hours’ sleep last night. God, I didn’t need this. I’ve been so stressed o
ut anyway.”

  “About what?”

  “They’re convening my Ph.D. committee. I fly down to defend my thesis proposal on Monday. ‘Defend’: sounds hostile, doesn’t it? And it probably will be. I keep thinking I rushed it—that it needs more work.”

  “Could have fooled me,” I said. “It’s reading beautifully, Janis.”

  She walked over to the counter and stared at Velvet’s row of grotesques. “This is probably what my committee’s going to look like when I walk into that room,” she said. Ignoring my smile, she stuck her hand into the pocket of her robe and fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Smart of me, isn’t it? I stop running and take up smoking instead.” She turned and faced me, her eyes glistening. “You know what he hit me with last night? He’s changed his mind. Now he wants us to have a child together. Kind of coincidental, don’t you think? Just when my career may be … and it’s bullshit, too. Moses doesn’t want a baby. He just wants to throw a net over me so that I can’t get away.”

  Get away? She was thinking about leaving him?

  The temporary insanity of my sexual attraction to Janis had long since subsided. She was a cute, intelligent, somewhat neurotic rent-paying tenant, and I’d been a lonely, angry idiot that night that I’d poured her all that wine and taken her to bed. But like she’d said before: she’d drunk the wine; she’d gotten into bed with me, too. This disclosure about a baby was a red flag, though. Becoming Janis’s kitchen confidante now would be another kind of intimacy, and if there was one thing I didn’t need, it was further entanglement. But when I opened my mouth to say something like “You’ll work it out” or “Well, this is between you and him,” she held out her hand like a traffic cop and headed out the back door.

  Still, I felt for her. She’d worked hard to bring Lizzy back into the light of day, and if her career was poised for takeoff, it was because she’d earned it. I watched her out there for a minute or two, sitting on the stoop, puffing away. Then I folded a napkin in half, bookmarking the place where I’d stopped reading. I grabbed the spring-bound manuscript and went out there. “Scoot over,” I said.

  “Caelum, I’d just better be by myself, okay?”

  “Nope. Push over.” I sat down beside her on the chilly stone stoop. “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  I tapped my knuckles against her manuscript. “For this,” I said. “My aunt used to try to interest me in all this family history, but I wasn’t interested in it back then. And then, after she died and Maureen and I came back here, life had just gotten too complicated. If it wasn’t for you, it’d all still be sitting up there on the sun porch. Or lost to the landfill, maybe. But you rescued it for me and, well, synthesized it. Brought Lizzy to life for me and, you know, for other people, too. So I’m grateful for all the hard work you did. Thanks.”

  She nodded. Mumbled it almost inaudibly, “You’re welcome.”

  Somewhere in the woods beyond the farm, rifle fire exploded—three blasts in quick succession. It was mid-November now, hunting season, the trees bare and the ground carpeted with papery leaves.

  “A guy came by to see you yesterday,” she said. “I forgot to tell you.”

  Junior had called a couple of times that week about the upcoming civil suit. The Seaberrys’ attorney had called him about some clarifications about deeds or something. I’d purposely not returned those calls. “Did he give you a name or a business card?”

  “He wasn’t exactly the business-card type. He said something about you hiring him to do some work around here. Something about the apple house.”

  “Oh, okay. Old, skinny guy, right? Was he drunk?”

  “Not that I noticed. He was jittery, though. Who is he?”

  “Nobody. Just some old rummy who used to do odd jobs for my aunt. He’s harmless.” I held Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper: An Epistolary Self-Portrait in front of her. “Listen, Janis. You’ve got publishers interested in this thing, inquiries from colleges. Your committee’s not going to give you any trouble.”

  “Ha! Too bad you’re not on it. How far have you gotten?”

  “The sons’ deaths, the séance. Shit, it’s no wonder she fell into that depression. Her kids get killed in a war she opposed, her husband bails on her. It’s sad, isn’t it? That she and Charlie couldn’t have grieved together.”

  “Charlie was a pig,” Janis said.

  “Maybe. But he had to have been struggling with the loss, too.”

  “So that justifies his moving out? Getting his mistress pregnant?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m just pointing out that they were his sons, too. And, hey, it couldn’t have been easy living with someone like Lizzy.”

  She turned toward me, frowning. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning she was relentless—the tireless little crusader for social justice. Maybe Charlie needed her to be less of a crusader and more of a wife. It’s kind of like what’s-her-name, that antiwar mom who lost her son and camped out near Bush’s ranch, demanding to speak to him.”

  “Cindy Sheehan,” Janis said.

  “Yeah, her. She and her husband split up; it was in the paper. Because of her activism, I think it said. All I’m saying is, the cause may be righteous, but when they go into overdrive—”

  “And ‘they’ means women, right? Why are you men all so insecure?”

  I smiled. “All of us, huh? Now there’s a broad indictment.”

  “I’m serious, Caelum. Why is it so threatening to men when a woman feels compelled to engage with the world? Look at the grief Hillary Clinton always gets.” She took an angry drag off her cigarette. “For five years he tells me he doesn’t want us to get pregnant, and now he does?”

  Rather than debate her on gender politics, I brought the subject back to her book. “Tell me something,” I said. “The missing son? Willie? He was my great-grandma Lydia’s father, right?”

  Janis nodded.

  “Which means he was what? My great-great-grandfather?”

  She nodded again.

  “So why’d he go missing? Don’t tell me he got killed in the war, too?”

  She looked disbelieving of my stupidity. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “So where was he then? Where’d he disappear to?”

  She stubbed her cigarette against the stone step. “I wrote the goddamned thing, Caelum. You want the Spark Notes, too?”

  “No, ma’am. I get the message. I’ll just keep reading.”

  She said she didn’t mean to snap at me—that it was nerves, sleep deprivation, their fight the night before. She lit another cigarette.

  Out in the woods, there was more gunfire. I thought about Maureen—how, after we moved back here to the farmhouse from Colorado, those random gunshot blasts during hunting season would make her flinch, set her on edge. Return her, over and over, to that place, that day….

  “Wow,” Janis said. “Where were you just now?”

  “What?” I looked away from her gaze. “Nowhere. Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “You know what I find depressing?” she said. “That between Lizzy’s era and ours, nothing’s really changed.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ouija boards and horse-drawn carriages have kind of fallen out of fashion, haven’t they?”

  “Really, Caelum. Think about it. We still enslave black people. We still put kids in uniform and send them far away from home to kill and be killed. Do you know what our military is paying in ‘blood money’ these days so that they can make their recruitment quotas? I heard it on NPR yesterday. Twenty thousand dollars! And who’s vulnerable to bribery like that? Well-heeled kids from the suburbs? No, poor kids. Inner city kids. Twenty thousand dollars so they can go over there and get themselves killed in Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war. It’s disgusting.”

  “Okay, the deck’s still stacked. I’ll grant you that. But ‘enslaved’? That’s a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “You know something, Caelum? You
don’t live in New Orleans for five years without having your eyes opened. You don’t marry a black man without seeing the million little ways this country chips away at his dignity. And not just in the South either. Do you know how many times Moze has been pulled over and profiled since we came to Blue State Connecticut? Three times. Do you know how many banks he had to go to before one of them would give him a small business loan? Four. And do you know why the fourth one said yes? Because I was with him that time. Because that stupid loan officer addressed everything he had to say to me and treated Moze like he wasn’t even there.”

  “All right, I’ll give you institutional racism. But that’s not—”

  “Tell me something, Caelum. When you go to visit your wife, what’s prevalent at that prison—and every other prison in this country, for that matter? Light skin or dark?”

  “Dark,” I conceded. “Eight or nine to one.”

  “And who gets a longer sentence for the same conviction? That one white woman or the nine black women who can’t afford good lawyers?”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Poor Lizzy. She must be rolling over in her grave. And Lydia, too.”

  “Maybe so. But here’s a little friendly advice. When you walk in there to present your thesis proposal? I think you’d better check your guns at the door.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, don’t start talking about ‘blood money,’ and how blacks are still enslaved. Because if there’s a couple of conservative professors in that room and you start sounding like Al Sharpton, they might just take you on. And then things could get hostile.”