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

  Led by an inmate who was carrying a yard-high wooden cross, Ralph Brazicki marched in wearing his priestly robes. He looked more full-faced and baggy-eyed than the last time I’d seen him. Thinner on top, too. Well, we were all getting up there, myself included.

  Ralph welcomed everyone to what he said he hoped would be the first of many family masses. It was up to all of us, inmates and visitors, he said; the smoother things went, the more inclined the warden would be to okay the next one. And with that, he introduced the No Rehearsal Choir.

  Eleven women rose from their chairs, assembled up front, and began a song called “On Angel’s Wings.” As they sang, I thought about my stepmother: how fervent Rosemary Sullivan Quirk’s love of God had been in spite of the many crosses she’d borne: a drunken husband who had never really loved her, an unforgiving father who left whatever room she entered because she’d married and then divorced a non-Catholic, a stepson who had stood as rigid as that wooden cross up front, waiting for her hugs to be over. The Mass in this prison corridor was about as far away as you could get from the solemn services Mother and I had attended at stately St. Anthony’s Cathedral. And yet, as I studied the faces of the No Rehearsal Choir—many of them ravaged, I could see, by addiction, by violence endured and committed—I was struck by their resemblance to the tortured faces of the saints and martyrs rendered in stained glass at that church of my childhood.

  Mo’s friend and former cellmate, Camille, approached the podium and gave the first reading, an Old Testament account of God the Father’s justifiable smiting of some deserving transgressor. I meant to pay attention, but my mind wandered, and before it could refocus on the business at hand, Camille was genuflecting and starting back to her seat.

  Next, two African-American women walked to the front. One was a tall and muscular androgyne; the other was short, fat, and womanly—a living Venus of Willendorf. Rosalie and Tabitha, their names were, according to the program. They harmonized beautifully on a gospel song called, “Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone?” There’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me, the tall one sang, and in response, her partner wailed a snatch from of a hymn more familiar to me. Amaze-amaze-amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. It had been Great-Grandma Lydia’s favorite hymn—the hymn Grandpa would sing to her those nights after he’d gotten her ready for bed. The hymn that Lolly, in honor of the grandmother who had raised her, had requested for her own funeral, a service that had gone on without me as I flew back to Colorado on that nightmarish day, not knowing if Maureen was alive or dead. As the song crescendoed, they raised their voices, in tandem, to a fever pitch.

  I found in Him a resting place …

  And now my heart is glad…

  I’m not alone!…

  Not alone!…

  Not alone!…

  No, not alone!…

  To me, the loinclothed Christ figure in Picasso’s Minotauromachia was clearly climbing up that ladder, bailing out on the sufferers, but Rosalie and Tabitha’s song walloped me nonetheless. I looked to my right and saw that Maureen was crying. And that Velvet, to Mo’s right, sat there dry-eyed but looking stunned.

  After Tabitha and Rosalie took their seats, Maureen rose unexpectedly and started toward the podium. “Our second reading comes from the New Testament Acts of the Apostles,” she announced. She scanned the gathering, smiling at one and all, and, in a voice both calm and assured, began.

  “Now when Herod was about to bring him forth, that same night Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and outside the door sentries guarded the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood beside him, and a light shone in the room; and he struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly.’ The chains dropped from his hands. And the angel said to him, ‘Gird thyself and put on thy sandals.’ And he did so; and the angel said, ‘Wrap thy cloak about thee and follow me.’

  “And Peter followed him out, without knowing that what was being done by the angel was real, for he thought he was having a vision. They passed through the first and second guard and came to the iron gate that leads into the city; and this opened to them of its own accord. And they went out, and passed on through one street, and straightway the angel left him.”

  Father Ralph’s homily homed in on the passage Maureen had read. His message was a radical one, given that six sober-faced correctional officers stood at attention and watched us, their shoulder blades against the cinderblock wall, their eyes searching for trouble. Like Peter in Acts, Ralph said, the women of Quirk CI might likewise slip their chains of confinement and escape, even as they served their sentences. “We all have the power to free ourselves from prisons of our own or others’ making, but doing so depends on our willingness to take that crucial leap of faith and realize that angels are real, not merely the products of wishful thinking, and that they are all around us. We are, my friends, or can be, angels for one another. But this is real life, not La-La Land. And as we heard in the passage that Maureen read to us, the angels can lead us to freedom. But then they will leave us to chart our own path toward righteousness. And that, my friends, is a solitary journey. Each of us passed individually through the birth canal when we came into this world, and each of us will be alone once again at the hour of our death. ‘From dust we came, to dust we shall return.’ What matters is how, in the interim, we treat each other.”

  A burly inmate across the room popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “I hear you, Father! That’s some righteous truth you’re speaking!”

  “Sit down, Miss Fellows!” one of the younger, more intimidating COs shouted. He took a step or two in her direction. “Show some respect or I’m going to take you out of here.”

  “I’m just feeling the feeling is all,” Miss Fellows protested.

  Another scowling CO entered the fray. “Then ‘feel the feeling’ with your mouth shut!”

  “Everything’s cool,” Father Ralph assured the guards and the assembled. “Everything’s fine.” But when Miss Fellows opened her mouth again, she was escorted by two officers down the corridor and around the corner. “You say one more word and I’m giving you a ticket,” I heard one of them threaten.

  After Holy Communion was dispensed—Mo partook, Velvet and I refrained—Ralph gave the final blessing and invited Rosalie and Tabitha to return to the front for the closing song. They delivered a jubilant, no-holds-barred foot-stomper called “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.” Throughout the room, singly at first, and then in pairs, and finally in entire rows of people, inmates and guests rose from their chairs to clap, shout, dance, and sing along. When Mo got on her feet, Velvet followed suit. I held back at first, then suspended my skepticism and joined the rapture, partly in solidarity with the banished Miss Fellows, but also in celebration of the notion that trouble might not last always. In the midst of our impromptu group response, I glanced over at the bewildered COs. They looked nervously at one another, hard pressed to know what, if anything, to do. I was pretty sure their paramilitary training had not covered the appropriate response to spontaneous joy, and I pitied them the stolid joylessness that was, no doubt, a part of their job description. For all I knew, the majority of them might be good and decent people when they got home and changed out of their uniforms.

  The luncheon buffet had been set up in the visiting room, and as we all made our way back there, Maureen introduced Velvet and me to Crystal and her mom, Camille and her husband and daughter, and LaToya, one of her fellow hospice volunteers. The wide tables that, on normal visiting days, served to separate us from our loved ones, were now covered with long white tablecloths and silver serving dishes. Inmate servers wearing hairnets and white jackets, stood poised and ready to feed us. The smiling, wiry guy in toque and chef’s whites called out, “Okay, everybody. We got pasta with meat sauce, salad, cake, and fruit punch. Come and get it! Enjoy!”

  “Let’s hear it for Mr. Price-Wolinski!” someone shouted and the inmates all cheered.

&n
bsp; “He runs the culinary program,” Mo explained. “He’s awesome. Everyone loves him.”

  En route to the buffet line, I felt someone grab my shoulder and turned to see who it was. “Good to see you, Caelum,” Ralph said. “I’ve got a fair amount of table-hopping to do first, but I hope we get a chance to talk a little later on. We’ve got some serious catching up to do.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Nice job today, by the way.”

  He deflected the compliment by turning to Maureen. “This gal’s one of my mainstays. Didn’t she do a great job with that reading?”

  As he walked away, Maureen noted that his comment was typical. “He does all the work and gives everyone else the credit.”

  We got in line, Velvet first, then Mo, then me. Maureen picked up her Styrofoam plate, then dropped it on the floor. She turned abruptly, her hand reaching out for me. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m seeing double.”

  I opened my mouth to ask her if she wanted to sit down for a minute, but she screamed out in pain. “Oh, my god! My head! It hurts! It hurts !”

  Her eyes rolled back. Her legs buckled, and she fell backward against Velvet. “Mom?” Velvet screamed. “Mom!”

  A female officer kept insisting that I was not allowed to ride with her to the hospital. “Sir, I understand your situation, but this is a security issue. You’re going to have to follow behind in your own vehicle.”

  When I attempted to climb up into the ambulance anyway, two of her male counterparts grabbed me and pulled me back. “Get the fuck away from me!” I yelled, trying without success to yank myself free. “That’s my wife! I need to be with her!” Still fighting against their hold, I watched the ambulance, alarm blaring, speed away.

  Cerebral aneurysm, the autopsy report would later conclude. She died en route to the hospital.

  chapter thirty-five

  Where would I go? I had asked Jerry Martineau the day I dug up the babies and he advised me to get away. Didn’t matter where I ended up, he said. At the wheel, I could think about where I’d been. I would know where I was when I got there. And so I had grabbed Lizzy’s story and gone.

  From Route 32, I’d picked up 6–West to I–84. In Hartford, I got onto I–91 heading north. Passed Springfield and Northampton and drove into the Berkshires. “Mountains,” some people call those hills, but they’ve never lived in the shadow of the Rockies. At White River Junction, I’d had to make a choice. Québec? Burlington? To avoid the rigmarole of border patrol, I chose the latter and eased into the flow of traffic on I–89 North. It was getting dark and I was getting tired as I approached the sign for Montpelier. I put on my blinker and exited. Got a room, a bottle of screw-top red wine, and a pizza. Took off my pants, ate, drank, and read about the final decades of Lizzy’s life. About how both her husband’s dying mistress and her narcissistic son had dumped their daughters on the old girl’s doorstep. About how, as busy and as tired as she was, she’d taken on the task of sheltering them both. And between the lines of Lizzy’s letters and diary entries, in her troubled silence, I read about how she had loved and inspired one of those girls and had failed the other. Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper was a complicated and thorny ancestor, more admirable than loveable, and somewhere in the middle of my reading that night, I began to connect the dots between my formidable forebear and my less than formidable stepmother. At the cliff’s edge of a bleak and lonely future, Rosemary Sullivan had defied her austere father, taken a leap of faith, and cast her lot with a troubled man she’d met at a dance hall—a man whose infant son had needed a mother. My father, for all his flaws and failures, had done that at least: had gone looking for and found me a decent and dutiful mother…. Like Lizzy, Rosemary had been driven more by duty than love. And because of this, she had stayed after my father abdicated—had lived with and tolerated the in-laws who tolerated her so that I might have, if not my father, a reliable grandfather and a loving aunt….

  I thought about the newspaper account of my kidnapping—that long-ago day when Mary Agnes and whichever man she’d manipulated into driving the getaway car had trespassed once more on Quirk property and snatched the three-year-old boy she’d birthed and then abandoned. Mary Agnes had only wanted to borrow me for the day, as it had turned out. At dusk, she had delivered me to a public place and left my life once more. In the hours between my disappearance and reappearance—those hours when I had been “the absent boy,” the missing child who might well have been harmed or even killed—Rosemary must have been in the same kind of terrifying free fall as the Columbine families when they gathered at Leawood Elementary School on that worst of days, waiting to hear if their missing children had been murdered. Rosemary must have prayed to—begged—her god for a happy ending. And then, at sunset, she’d gotten one. There I was, unharmed on a picnic table at the Frosty Ranch, wearing the dungarees and Hopalong Cassidy shirt she’d dressed me in that morning. There I was, transfixed by a praying mantis that someone—who else but Mary Agnes?—had imprisoned inside a mayonnaise jar on my behalf….

  Rosemary had told the newspaper reporter that, until its happy conclusion, that day had been “the most frightening of my life.” Hadn’t it been her love for me, not her duty to me, that made it that? As anxious and limited as that love might have been, it had been love nonetheless. In that drab, nondescript Montpelier motel room, I had finally admitted to myself that, all along, I had had a mother’s love. And so I had closed Lizzy’s story and held it tight against my beating heart. Hugged that book as if it were Rosemary herself. At long last, I could fully return the embrace of the lonely woman who had stepped forward to mother a motherless boy.

  In the morning, I showered and dressed, itchy to get the hell out of there. But should I go home? Keep driving in the opposite direction? In the motel office, while the desk clerk was printing out my receipt, my eyes fell upon a tourist brochure—an invitation to travelers to visit Barre, Vermont’s Rock of Ages Granite Quarry and the nearby Hope Cemetery, a graveyard filled with the funerary sculpture of the area’s artisans. Velvet’s grandfather had been one of them, I recalled. Back in my car, brochure against the steering wheel, I followed the map. Hope Cemetery: kind of oxymoronic, I remember thinking. What was so hopeful about being dead?

  Fifteen minutes later, I drove through the gates, parked, and roamed.

  They moved me, those strange and poignant stonecutters’ efforts to immortalize the dearly departed. In bas-relief, a woman materializes from the cigarette smoke of her brooding widower…. A man and woman hold hands while lying in beds that double as their coffins. Above them floats an inscription from the Song of Solomon: Set me as a seal upon thine heart, for love is strong as death…. Some stonecutter with a sense of humor had freed a death angel from a slab of rock. There she sat, one leg across the other, chin resting in hand, looking impatient with the cluelessness of mortals….

  I had no idea which works were Velvet’s grandfather’s, but as I headed back toward my car, I came upon a sculpture signed in stone by a name that sounded familiar: Colonni. When I looked up from that signature, I found myself standing before a life-sized gray granite Pandora, her arm raised in front of her face as if to shelter herself from the wide-mouthed jar she has just opened—her gift from the vengeful gods. Too late, now, to undo what’s been done. Behind her, in bas-relief, Colonni had sculpted a quartet of human skulls, labeled “pain,” “war,” “pestilence,” “suffering”—the horrors she has just unleashed on humanity. Inside the jar, easily missable by the casual stroller through this garden of graves, was a sweet-faced infant wearing a necklace of flowers. The child, as my Quest in Literature students might have remembered, embodied the one thing that has not escaped from Pandora’s jar: hope. Above its head were carved these words: By this, we dreamers cross to the other shore.

  I drove out of Hope Cemetery and back onto the interconnecting roads that would bring me back home. En route, I thought about Maureen—h
ow, hidden inside her dark womb in that cramped library cabinet, as she heard the pleas and screams, the taunts and explosions, she had mouthed her prayers to Mary. How she had scribbled onto the wood, in anticipation that I might somehow, some day, find them: her messages of hope and love.

  * * *

  I CHOSE CREMATION OVER BURIAL. No calling hours, no funeral, no newspaper obituary. There were certain mandatory procedures to follow, certain services I was required to purchase. I handed my credit card to Victor Gamboa and told him to charge whatever it was I was supposed to pay for. I signed whatever paperwork he put in front of me.

  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.