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

  She said she hadn’t been in grad school for five years without knowing what people’s politics were, and how to talk the talk.

  “Then you’ll do fine,” I said.

  She stood, said she’d better go back upstairs. But instead of opening the door, she just stood there.

  “What?” I said, knowing it was a risky question.

  “I got pregnant once. Not too long after Moze and I moved in together. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it or not, and he was pretty definite that he didn’t want it. So I had an abortion. I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d leave me.”

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  “That child would be in kindergarten by now. I was lying awake thinking about that last night. I’d be the mother of a five-year-old.”

  “First things first,” I said. “Go down there and get your degree. Then you can come back here and figure things out, you and him.”

  After she went inside, I stayed out there for a while. She’d forgotten her cigarettes, and I took one out of the pack and lit it. I don’t think I’d had a cigarette in a decade.

  Boom! Boom! A deer had either escaped or been struck down….

  I closed my eyes and saw the two of them out there on the side of the school building, armed to the teeth, taking aim at their own. Go! Go! This is awesome! This is what we always wanted to do! … Saw Rachel’s body in the grass near the top of the stairs. Saw her white casket, scrawled with messages of grief and love…. Rachel, Danny, all of them: they’d been their parents’ precious children, just as Edmond and Levi had been Lizzy’s. As Morgan Seaberry had been his mother’s pride and joy….

  Nothing ever changes, Janis had said. It did, though. We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere. What had that chaos theorist on the plane called it? I couldn’t recall the word. Began with a b.

  I checked my watch. My papers were graded, my lessons prepared, I was showered and dressed. I had another twenty minutes or so. I could either get to Oceanside a little early for a change—run off those handouts, answer some emails. Or else I could …

  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.”

  While Lizzy Popper awaited a response from Dix, she received, to her great relief, a letter from the missing Willie. Lizzy’s fear that her surviving son would become a casualty of war proved unwarranted. As his letter explained, Willie Popper had taken a far different path.

  Earlier correspondence between Lizzy Popper and her brother, the troubled, one-eyed Roswell Hutchinson, sheds light on the Popper family dynamic, and on the ways in which Charles and Elizabeth Popper’s youngest child differed from his siblings. In an 1859 letter to the sister who had raised and later rescued him from his troubles in Richmond, Hutchinson criticized what he perceived as his sister and brother-in-law’s “immoderate mollycoddling” of Willie. The letter was a parting shot of sorts; after an extended stay with the Poppers, Hutchinson had been asked to leave because of drunkenness, “dicing,” and unemployment. Said the wounded and wounding Hutchinson:

  Even a one-eyed shipwreck of a man such as I can see that Crown Prince William is worshipped by his fawning father and doting mother, and that he is ill served by these extreme attentions. Would that you had offered me one-tenth of the affection you bestow on this spoiled whelp, Lizzy, back in the day when you were young and I was younger, and the mother who would have loved me was mouldering in the ground. Perhaps if you had been more loving, I would not have taken as my consort the demon drink.

  In a letter written but apparently never sent, Lizzy answered her brother’s charges with Quaker frankness: “If thee was ill raised by me, I say only that I did my best. I will not be held responsible for thy intemperance. Willie’s gift sets him apart, but he is neither better nor more prized than his brothers.”

  By “Willie’s gift,” Lizzy Popper most likely referred to her son’s musical talent. Charles Popper had detected in his youngest son an aptitude for music and had taught him to play piano, banjo, and fiddle, and to sing much of the catalogue from the old Popper Family songbook. Willie shared his father’s love of performance, executing the abolitionist songs with passion and zeal, but later confessed to his mother that he gave little notice to the political messages the lyrics conveyed. During the second half of 1862, Willie Popper had been working unhappily as a longshoreman under the direction of his uncle, New Haven harbormaster Nathanael Weeks. Slight of build, Willie hated the work and was intimidated by the other dock workers—”coarse Irish,” he later wrote to his mother, “whose great sport is to mock me for my small frame and small hands, and the absence of whiskers on my chin.” It was at the harbor, however, that Willie became seduced by what he called “the siren’s song”: placards and broadsides advertising the Broadway melodramas and minstrel shows a short ferry ride away. On a winter afternoon, Willie Popper snuck aboard one of those ferries, crossed Long Island Sound, and arrived in Manhattan. He never saw his mother again.

  During the bleak years when the Union battled the Confederacy and mothers on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line wept for their slain sons, there were no fewer than twenty blackface minstrel shows playing in and around lower Broadway. Willie Popper auditioned and was hired as an “Ethiopian delineator” by one of the most successful of these entertainments, Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels at Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre, located at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Promotional posters for this large-cast show promised that ticket-buyers would witness “The Darky As He Truly Is—At Work! At Rest! In Song and Dance!” But if authenticity was advertised, what Calhoun’s show delivered was the usual costumed extravaganza and comic stereotype.*

  Willie Popper began with Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels as a blackface chorus member in the opening and closing production numbers, but his voice and stage presence quickly brought him to the attention of owner-producer Waverly Calhoun, who renamed him Fennimore Forrest, dressed him in drag, and made him a featured player.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, women had broken the gender barrier in New York theater, among them actress-producer Laura Keane and soprano Jenny Lind, the popular “Swedish Nightingale.” Minstrel shows, however, continued to cast males in female roles, most likely for comic effect. As a longshoreman on the docks at New Haven, Willie Popper’s slender frame and beardless chin had been liabilities, but on the minstrel stage, they became assets.

  Wearing gaudy dresses and ocher-colored makeup, Willie titillated and repulsed audiences during the walk around as Lucy Long, a seductive, sashaying “yaller gal” who made fools of her would-be “darky” lotharios, and whose “lips are so big, they can’t be kissed all at once.” In the show’s afterpiece, Willie segued from comedy to melodrama, playing a suffering young slave named Minnie May. Minnie May was a blatant imitation of Eliza, the heroic escaped slave mother in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ever-popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dressed in ragged skirts and cradling a black baby doll wrapped in bunting, “Fennimore Forrest,” as Minnie May, apparently galvanized New York theatergoers. According to an April 3, 1863, New York World account, “The talented Mr. Forrest, in the midst of the third-act plantation frolics, stops the show with a poignant anthem that brings tearful audiences to their feet and reminds us of the Union’s Holy Mission.” For his showstopper, Willie had converted his father’s abolitionist hymn “Swing Open, Freedom’s Door!” into a melodramatic tour de force.

  In the letter Willie Popper sent to his mother, he enclosed a clipping of the World article and wrote that, despite lingering sorrow about the deaths of his brothers,

  I am far happier now than I have ever been. You who worked so hard to liberate the slaves will
hopefully appreciate that my life in New Haven was one of enslavement. When I stepped aboard the ferry that took me to New York, it was my escape from bondage! Cast aside your mourning and your Quaker resistance to theatricals, Mother. Come and see my show!

  No evidence exists that Lizzy complied, but her estranged husband, then ensconced at Manhattan’s DuMont Hotel, did attend a performance of Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels. Charlie Popper promptly disowned his surviving son. A subsequent letter from Willie to his mother is ambiguous as to the exact reason, or reasons, for the break with his father. Perhaps it was because Willie’s reworking of “Swing Open Freedom’s Door!” insulted Charles Popper, or because Willie’s taking of female parts embarrassed him, or because he disapproved of minstrel shows in general. The possibility also exists that Willie Popper may have been engaged in a sexual relationship with Waverly Calhoun, the show’s owner and producer, and that Charles Popper broke with his son for this reason. If Willie Popper was, in fact, having an affair with Calhoun, he hardly would have stated so in a letter to his politically liberal but socially conservative mother. The social mores of the time dictated that “the sin that dare not speak its name” was never referred to directly. But in Willie’s letter to his mother, he stated, “Waverly has become a friend to me—the dearest I have ever known.” The letter’s return address indicates that Willie was living at Calhoun’s Park Avenue apartment.

  Whether or not Willie Popper and his producer were involved sexually, their relationship ended abruptly in January of 1864, when Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre was destroyed by fire. Calhoun had fallen asleep in his office while counting the evening’s box office receipts and had died, apparently of asphyxiation. A New York Sun account of the blaze and its aftermath describes the removal of Calhoun’s body from the destroyed building, “while his young star, Fennimore Forrest, looked on, distraught and in dishabille.” Willie Popper disappeared from New York shortly after and did not communicate with his mother again until ten years later, in 1874. By then, Charles Popper had died. He and Willie had not resolved their differences.

  In March of 1863, Lizzy Popper received by telegram a succinct response from the Union’s nursing superintendent Dorothea Dix: “You will suffice. Come as soon as possible.”

  I went back inside. Fed the cat, packed my briefcase for the teaching day ahead. On my way out, that word came to me: bifurcation. I checked my watch, looked over at the computer. The screen saver was on; I’d forgotten to close it down the night before. I sat. Googled chaos theory bifurcation.

  And son of a bitch, what was the first listing that rose up from cyberspace? An article by my airplane buddy, Mickey Schmidt. I’d called him, slurring drunk, at midnight on Y2K as the tectonic plates of time were shifting from the twentieth century to the twenty-first. Sure you remember me, I’d insisted. You said you were writing a book about gambling. You asked me to hold your hand during takeoff because you were afraid to fly.

  And did you? No, you didn’t. You couldn’t do that one small thing….

  Why don’t you ever hug me back? she’d wanted to know—the mother who hadn’t really been my mother. The mother they’d passed off as mine….

  “Emotional castrato,” Francesca had etched onto the face of my computer monitor the day she left me. Wife number two: she’d had the same complaint as wives number one and three. I saw Maureen, standing there in our Colorado living room, our signal, the lit candle, flickering between us. Come upstairs. Love me. Be close to me. But I’d withheld myself, as usual, and now withholding myself was one of the house rules: a quick embrace across the visiting room table, a peck on the cheek, no handholding. Guards and surveillance cameras were watching….

  I clicked the mouse. Scrolled down. And there it was, in Mickey Schmidt’s own words: “Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.”

  I thought about all this on my drive over to Oceanside, where the lawn signs and bumper stickers I passed—”Let’s Support Our Troops,” “Sleep Well Tonight—Our Marine Has Your Back,” “There Were No WMDs—They LIED,” “Impeach Bush”—spoke of our deep division, our bifurcation since 9/11…. Whether it was “Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war” or “Mr. Lincoln’s fratricidal war” or the vengeful war against their own that Eric and Dylan had waged: war begat chaos and altered everything. I thought about Private First Class Kendricks in my Quest class: who had Kareem Kendricks been, I wondered, before he went over there to fight the insurgency and got his hand blown off? … Thought about how chaos had descended on the Columbine families. They’d sent their kids off to school that morning, lulled by the assumption that school was safe…. Thought about Charlie and Lizzy—how the war had pretty much ended their marriage, how their children’s lives had bifurcated. Levi and Edmond had marched off to war to end slavery and had lost their lives to the cause. Their brother, my great-great-grandfather, had marched out onto a Broadway stage to reinforce all the ugly stereotypes and had been lauded and rewarded for it—at least until the night his benefactor went up in flames. But there was more to Willy’s story than that. There had to be. Because as Janis had put it, I was here, wasn’t I?

  Perturbation, chaos, bifurcation: it was just as Mickey Schmidt had written: some explosion—as local as rifle fire, as worldwide as war—can set things reeling in a whole different direction, can cause a fork in the road. And one path may lead to disintegration, the other to a reordered world.

  So maybe Janis had been right that day when we’d gone up to see the crumbling Memorial Arch that Lizzy and her granddaughter Lydia had seen unveiled and dedicated. Maybe my ancestors could teach me something….

  And maybe I’d better put all of that aside for now, because my mission that day was to try and somehow convince seventeen skeptical community college students that the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur could inform their lives. Well, good luck with that one, Quirk. Wishing you all the best with Mission: Impossible….

  *After his war service, Reverend Joseph Twichell would become pastor of Hartford. Connecticut’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church and a close friend of his world-famous Nook Farm neighbor, Mark Twain. Twichell also became a lifelong friend and correspondent of Lizzy Popper and lent his support to a number of her social justice causes.

  *Most minstrel shows adhered to a standard three-part structure: the act-one “walk around,” the act two “olio,” and the act-three “afterpiece.” In the “walk around,” the entire cast sang and danced, then left the stage to a dozen or so featured players, seated in a semicircle. At center stage sat Mr. Interlocutor, a white master of ceremonies who served as straightman to the “end men” in the corner chairs—white comedians, their faces smeared with burnt cork, their lips exaggerated with contrasting white makeup. Called Tambo and Bones, or Gumbo and Sambo, or Jim Crow and Zip Coon, the end men were comic buffoons who swapped boasts, insults, and malapropisms, reinforcing the belief that “Ethiopes” were dim-witted, lazy, and happy with their lot in life. For the “olio,” the curtain was lowered. At the front of the stage, singers, fiddlers, jugglers, sleight-of-hand artists, and Shakespearean parodists performed a fast-paced variety show while, behind the curtain, stagehands readied the sets for the “afterpiece,” an elaborate production number set on a Southern plantation.

  chapter twenty-nine

  Order →Inciting disturbance →CHAOS →Order Restored

  Recapping the felt pen I’d used to scrawl the myth’s equation, I turned from the whiteboard back to them. “So by the end of the story, Theseus has slain the Minotaur, sacrificed his kill to the gods, and escaped from the imprisoning maze. Athens has been restored to order, until the gods’ next intervention for good or ill. But let’s backtrack, okay? W
hat would you identify as the ‘inciting disturbance’ of this story—the thing that called the Minotaur into existence in the first place?”

  Hipólito’s leg pumped up and down with restless boredom. Devin dozed beneath the brim of his ball cap. Kahlúa miscalculated that her text-messaging would be undetectable from my vantage point. My eyes moved from her dancing fingers to Private First Class Kendricks. As always, he was dressed in sand-colored camouflage. As always, he was seated in back, apart from the others. His eyes shifted nervously. His hands rested against his desktop, the fingers of his good hand steepled with the metal fingers of his prosthesis.

  “The inciting disturbance?” I asked again. “The thing that threw everything else out of kilter?”

  I waited for them. They waited for me.

  “Kahlúa? What do you think?” Busted, she dropped her cell phone into her oversized orange bag and shrugged guiltily.

  “Someone else?”

  No one else. Well, okay, they owned this uncomfortable silence. Let them live with it.

  Marisol raised a tentative hand. Poor, sweet Mari: the student most willing to volunteer and least likely to have a correct response. “Was it when the monster ate all the human sacrifices?”

  I scanned the others’ blank faces. “Mari proposes that the Minotaur’s periodic devouring of the seven youths and seven maidens is the inciting disturbance. Agree? Disagree?”

  Ibrahim’s eyes bounced to the board and back. He shook his head.

  “That’s a result, not the cause.”

  “Yeah, man,” Manny agreed. “That’s like saying that the soldiers coming back in body bags caused the war in Iraq.”

  Iraq: the word triggered my involuntary glance at Private First Class Kendricks back there. A few of the others looked back, too. Until then, Private Kendricks had been having one of his less kinetic mornings, but our glances set him in motion. It had begun three or four classes ago: Kareem Kendricks’s pacing and desk-switching back there. There’d been a complaint—a hushed after-class conversation with Daisy and Marisol. “He kinda freaks us out,” Marisol had said. “Makes it hard to concentrate.” Reluctantly, I’d promised to speak to him about it without mentioning them specifically.