The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'
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21. “Take My Hand”—Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama, from There Will Be a Light (Harper). The ability—and inability—to take the hand of another is a motif that threads its way through The Hour I First Believed. Harper’s plaintive vocal, backed by the startling urgency of the Blind Boys, helped me to better understand the story I was gestating.
22. “Amazing Grace/Nearer My God To Thee”—Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Emmylou Harris, from Long Walk to Freedom (traditional). By a serendipitous accident (my writing often lurches forward via the power of these inexplicable “gifts”), I discovered this amazing version of the novel’s title song late in the writing of The Hour I First Believed. When I listen to Harris in harmony with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, I hear the voices of Lydia Quirk and Mr. Mpipi, and renew my hope for a world that practices humility and celebrates diversity.
23. “Hope’s Aria (Il Giardino di Rose)”—Cecilia Bartoli, from Opera Proibita (A. Scarlatti). With a bow to hope and high culture, I include this aria, composed by Alessandro Scarlatti and channeled through the wondrous voice of Bartoli. Now a “senior citizen,” Caelum surrenders his farm to the Seaberrys and moves peacefully to a more modest home, beneath which flows two conjoined rivers. The aria’s words reflect Caelum’s fate by the novel’s end:
While I take delight in sweet oblivion
Let the playful breeze
Whisper more languidly around my heart.
Let the waves meander by,
Babbling against the riverbanks,
While I rest here among the flowers.
(Thanks, Steve.)
24. “Come on Up to the House”—Tom Waits, from Mule Variations (Waits/K. Brennan). Who better than Waits to close the show, with a lyric by which Caelum might survive and thrive?” Come down from your cross, we can use the wood.” My fictional stand-in, Dr. Patel, couldn’t have said it better herself.
notes from the author
ABOUT COLUMBINE: For the reasons explained in the Afterword, I have cited the actual names of the Columbine victims, both those who died and those who survived. All other characters in the Columbine-related chapters are fictional creations, with the exception of the following: Brian Anderson, Robyn Anderson, Brooks Brown, Frank De Angelis, Phil Duran, Patrick Ireland, Mark Manes, Patricia Nielson, Tim Walsh, and Greg Zanis.
ABOUT QUIRK CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION: Although the work of my students at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute has informed the writing of this book, readers are reminded that Quirk CI is a fictional construction set in a fictional town and run by a fictional administration and custody staff. Those interested in reading about York CI, and its previous incarnations, the Niantic Correctional Institution and Connecticut’s State Farm for Women, are encouraged to examine Andi Rierden’s The Farm: Life Inside a Women’s Prison (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), a nonfictional examination of the facility, past and present. Also available to readers are two collections of our York writers’ autobiographical essays, Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison (Harper, 2007).
ABOUT MISS RHEINGOLD AND RHEINGOLD BEER: The first Miss Rheingold was selected by brewery executives in 1940. The second was chosen by distributors of the beer. From 1942 to 1964, the winner was chosen by the popular vote of customers at taverns, package stores, delis, and supermarkets that sold Rheingold. As it is described in the novel, the annual “election” was a promotional juggernaut that made Brooklyn-brewed Rheingold one of the biggest-selling beers in New York and New Jersey, New England, Pennsylvania, and later, California. But in reality, there was never a Miss Rheingold scandal, the likes of which are depicted in my novel. Nor does the fictional Weismann family represent in any way the Liebmann family, the original owners of Rheingold Beer. Readers who wish to read about the actual Rheingold story, as opposed to my fictional version, can access Rolf Hofmann’s “From Ludwigsburg to Brooklyn—A Dynasty of German-Jewish Brewers,” originally published in Aufbau, June 21, 2001, and available online or through the Harburg Project, a Jewish genealogical initiative. In 2003, Rheingold beer was reintroduced to the New York market and the Miss Rheingold contest was briefly revived. However, the tattooed, pierced, and midriff-baring twenty-first-century candidates—bartenders in and around New York—bore little resemblance to the demure, white-gloved contestants of past “Rheingold girl” glory. In 2006, the brand was sold to Drinks America, a Wilton, Connecticut–based beverage company, which now distributes Rheingold beer.
Credits
Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are included for the reasons fully described in the Author’s Note. All other names, characters, places, and dialogue and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
Pablo Picasso, Minotauromachia, © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum.
“Boston’s Worst” © 2008 Time Inc.
Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3, 118–120, translated by Chad Davidson, Associate Professor of English at the University of West Georgia.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2008 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED. Copyright © 2008 by Wally Lamb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION PUBLISHED 2009.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Lamb, Wally.
The hour I first believed : a novel/Wally Lamb.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-039349-6
1. Domestic fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A433H68 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008020752
ISBN 978-0-06-098843-2 (pbk.)
09 10 11 12 13 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780061980312
Version 02222013
Dedication
This book is for my father and my sons
In ways I don’t fully understand, this story is connected to the lives and deaths of the following: Christopher Biase, Elizabeth Cobb, Randy Deglin, Samantha Deglin, Kathy Levesque, Nicholas Spano, and Patrick Vitagliano. I hope that, in some small way, the novel honors both their memory and the devotion and strength of the loved ones they had to leave.
Contents
Dedication
HarperCollins e-book extra: Who Is Wally Lamb? The author addresses the National Endowment for the Arts.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
<
br /> Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Acknowledgments
A List of Sources Consulted
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
Who Is Wally Lamb?
Wally Lamb, recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, addressed the National Council on the Arts on November 2, 2001.
I didn’t start writing short stories until 1981, the year I was thirty, but I believe the seeds for my fiction writer’s life may have been planted way back in 1961, the year I was ten. JFK had just been inaugurated, Dion and the Belmonts were belting out “Runaround Sue,” and I was a public school student growing up in blue-collar Norwich, Connecticut. As such, I was required by my Italian-Catholic mother to attend catechism class at St. Patrick’s Parochial School each Wednesday, which was where I had a close encounter with Sister Mercy.
This was, of course, the baby boomer era, and so, after spending the long school day with thirty-four or thirty-five parochial school students, the last thing Sister Mercy wanted to do on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30 was welcome into her midst thirty-six or thirty-seven rowdy public school students. We were equally unhappy to be there and so there was acting out, answering back. Some of us were exiled to the cloakroom. Then, at 4:29 p.m. we would all thank God for His mercy and hold our collective breath.
The old school clock on the wall in Sister’s room was the type that measured time both visually and audibly. As the minute hand would prepare to move toward the magical moment of 4:30, it would first lunge back a bit, then thrust forward with a ca-chunk, ca-chunk. “Class . . . dismissed!” Sister would announce and we would thunder toward the door and pound down the stairs as if the Good Humor man was waiting outside on the sidewalk with free samples.
Now, I was much too big a scaredy cat to be a troublemaker in Sister’s class; my m.o. for survival was to sit in back, say nothing, and try as best I could to blend into the wainscoting. But on the afternoon I became a fiction writer, I got a strange urge. I wanted Sister Mercy to like me. Or, if she couldn’t like me, then at least to be aware that I existed. And so, on that day, when the minute hand lurched first backward, then forward, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, and Sister intoned those liberating words, “Class . . . dismissed!” and my peers scrambled toward the exits, I hung back. Stood up. Approached, with trepidation, Sister’s big wooden desk.
She was already scowling and correcting her parochial students’ papers and so didn’t notice me at first as I stood facing her. Now, earlier that same day, in public school, two of my friends, Howard Goldberg and Johnny Jacobsen, had brought into our science class a papier-mâché volcano. And they had poured baking soda into the core of their creation and, with the help of vinegar, had made lava bubble up and spring forth and dribble down the sides. And this demonstration had impressed me and was still very much on my mind.
Sister looked up from the papers she was correcting. “Yes, what is it?”
“Sister, my grandfather moved to this country from Italy in 1890,” I said.
Which was true. He had. Pure, untainted non-fiction. But I could see from Sister’s clenched facial muscles that it didn’t impress her in the least.
And so I continued. “And . . . and, before he came over here, while he was still in Italy, this volcano started erupting in his town early one morning and he was the only one up and so he ran around pounding on people’s doors and everyone woke up and ran to safety and . . . and he saved a bunch of people’s lives.”
Sister’s facial muscles relaxed a tad. She cocked her head and her gold rim glasses glinted a little from the light of a fluorescent lamp above our heads. But I could see that my marriage of fact to fiction had fallen just short of being quite enough. For a fiction writer-to-be, it was a moment of truth. A moment suspended in time. Sister waited. I waited. And then, finally, I said, “. . .And the Pope gave him a medal.”
Well, Sister smiled broadly. She reached down to her bottom right-hand desk drawer, drew out a holy picture, and gave it to me. The following Wednesday afternoon, Sister knew my name, I had preferred seating up front, and, for the rest of that school year, whenever there was need for a note to pass from Sister to the office, you can probably guess who got to deliver it.
And so, at the tender age of ten, I learned of the rich rewards that can be yours if you take the truth and lie like hell about it.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I did not, after that experience with Sister Mercy, grow up to become a con artist or a pathological liar. I became a high school English teacher. And then a father. And, then at the age of thirty, a fiction writer. We had no money, my bride and I, and when the kids came along, my wife took a leave of absence from the elementary school where she taught and we went abruptly from two teachers’ salaries to one.
But I’d begun setting the alarm for 4:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings and dragging myself out of bed early and fooling around with fiction. See, I’d get these characters’ voices in my head, and I’d write down what they said and worry about them and root for them to be okay and wonder what was going to happen and not know what was going to happen until it came out of the pointy end of my Bic pen. As I worked on these short stories, I defied as best I could another voice, the voice of doubt, that kept saying to me, Stop kidding yourself. You’re never getting anything published. Get up from that desk. Go outside and mow the lawn.
But I let the lawn grow and toiled away on weekends and summer vacations and then, one day, ratcheted up my courage and submitted a story to Northeast magazine, the Sunday supplement of The Hartford Courant. This story, my fourth or fifth, was a first-person tale of a hapless fat woman whose jerk of a husband had just left her. Her name was Mary Ann at first and then she became Dolores. I liked Dolores, who was struggling to survive with self-deprecating humor, biting sarcasm, and Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Mallomars, M&Ms.
I put the story in a manila envelope and mailed it to Northeast. For seven months, I heard only the sound of silence. Then one afternoon, long after my publishing fantasies had been reined back in, I got a phone call from the editor, Larry Bloom. He said he was going to publish my story. I hung up, grabbed my wife and danced her around the kitchen. Then I picked up our three-year-old son, Jared, and tossed him so high into the air that his head hit the ceiling. (But don’t worry: this was one of those suspended ceilings with the lightweight panels. He didn’t hurt his head; it just disappeared for a second or two in the rafters and then re-emerged.)
The story, titled “Keep in a Cool, Dry Place,” was published in Northeast on Easter Sunday, 1984. I drove at dawn to the convenience store, bought three Hartford Courants, and, for ten minutes, couldn’t bear to look. Then I did look, and sat there by myself in the strip mall parking lot, and cried like an idiot.
I was on my way.
Now fast-forward sixteen years to June of 1999. My son Jared has transformed from that airborne three-year-old into a 6’2” man of eighteen. These days, if I tried to toss Jared into the air, I’d need back surgery. He helps me heft my luggage out to the driveway where a purring limousine waits. By this time, I’ve been touched twice by the magic wand of the Oprah Book Club, and readers have responded favorably, and so I am about to go on the road — flying progressively west on a twelve-city book tour to support the trade paperback release of my second novel, I Know This Much Is True. A chauffeur opens the back door for me — a courtesy which embarrasses me a little, just as, when I walk through airports around the country and see my books in racks and storefront window
s, I look away from them, grateful but chagrined.
Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high, punch holes in walls, trash the furniture with their band-mates. But authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments, we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room service sandwiches or ironing our clothes for the next reading or watching Judge Judy.
On my book tour, I met one elderly woman who informed me that writers like me, who let their characters use four-letter words, are degenerates who are ripping and tearing at the moral fiber of this great country; and, twelve or thirteen people back in the same signing line, I met another elderly woman who stood fidgeting with her pocketbook strap as she informed me that, in her humble opinion, I was “one of the best writers to ever shit behind a pair of shoes.”
In Berkeley, California, a middle-aged man told me, in tears, that his brother, a recent suicide, had suffered from schizophrenia and that my novel had been a life raft tossed to him at a time when he thought he might drown from guilt and despair.
Entering a Borders bookstore in Austin, Texas to autograph copies of my book, I passed none other than Monica Lewinsky, exiting after having autographed copies of hers.
In Lexington, Kentucky, I met, in the signing line, a bride of two hours who was still wearing her wedding dress. Her groom, she said, was waiting in the car.
And in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio, I had the most surreal experience of all: in the act of channel surfing, I came upon the quiz show Jeopardy at the exact moment my name surfaced: “He wrote the novel She’s Come Undone,” Alex Trebeck stated. And the three contestants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the bed in Room 714 of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a timid and tentative voice, Who is Wally Lamb?