The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (49 page)

“Her son, right?”

“Uh-huh. He was good to her, I remember. On Sundays, he’d carry her down the stairs and out to his truck. Take her for a drive.”

As I spoke, I saw them drive off together. Saw my high-strung mother upstairs, stripping Great-Grandma’s soiled sheets with a vengeance. She did Lydia’s bed linens on Sunday, her day off, the same
day she did the priests’ laundry. Mother was clearly pissed at this extra assignment, I remember: having to tend to the needs of a troublesome old relative of her ex-husband—someone whose DNA had nothing to do with her own. God, Mother’d been intense—brittle to the breaking point half the time. And when she did break,
whack!

“So Grandpa Quirk was your father’s father?”

“Hmm? Yeah…. He used to get Lydia ready for bed every night, I remember. And after he tucked her in, he’d sit on her bed and sing to her. ‘Rock of Ages,’ ‘Amazing Grace.’ She loved it when he sang those old hymns to her. She’d smile, mouth the words.”

“He sounds like a nice man.”

“Grandpa? Yeah, most of the time. He was good to me. My father had pretty much abdicated, so he pinch-hit for him. Grandpa and my Aunt Lolly. Lolly liked guy stuff: fishing, roughhousing on the parlor floor. She and Hennie? Our housekeeper? They were a couple. Of course, nobody back then dared to say the word ‘lesbian.’ But, hey, they went on vacations together, slept in the same bed…. But yeah, Grandpa was a good guy. He could be a son of bitch when you didn’t measure up, though. He and I had a few go-arounds when I was in high school. You know how teenagers are. I started thinking I knew everything there was to know, and he took it upon himself to convince me otherwise. This one time? Right after I got my license? I came home cocked, and he caught me. Slammed me up against the wall, jabbed his finger in my face, and told me in no uncertain terms that he’d be goddamned if he was going to let me go down the same path as my father.”

“Meaning?”

“Daddy’d been a drunk. A bum, pretty much. He was dead by then, though. Died when I was fourteen.”

“How?”

“Got hit by a train. Cops thought he probably passed out. Either that, or it was suicide.”

“Oh, God, Caelum. That’s awful.”

“Yeah, well … the conventional wisdom was that it was the Korean War that screwed him up. But Lolly had told me one time that Grandpa Quirk blamed my father for his wife’s death, so I don’t imagine that did wonders for his psyche either. They were twins, my father and Lolly, and no matter how badly he messed up, she always came to his defense.”

Janis asked why Grandpa blamed Daddy for his wife’s death.

“Because she died having him. Lolly was born first, no problem. But Daddy’s was a breech birth. Tore up their mother pretty bad, and she started hemorrhaging. Died a day later, I think Lolly said it was. Grandpa was left with these twin babies to raise by himself. Well, he and his mother, I guess.”

“Lydia,” Janis said.

I nodded. “Must have been quite a balancing act for her—running a prison and raising a couple of grandkids. And she was no spring chicken by then. Would have been what? In her sixties, maybe? … But anyway, Lolly said that after my father got back from Korea, he never would talk about it. Built a wall of silence around whatever happened to him over there—with beer cans and liquor bottles, pretty much.”

Janis said her grandfather had fought in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and that he’d never talked about his experiences either. “That ‘greatest generation’ stoicism,” she said. “Maybe that’s what made them ‘the greatest’: the fact that they spared everyone at home the details.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then my father would have had a leg up. We Quirks were good secret-keepers. Our family motto should have been, ‘Shh, don’t tell. What goes on in this house
stays
in this house.’”

As I spoke, I saw Daddy, dirty and seedy-looking, parting the cornstalks and entering the clearing at the center of the maze—him and that girlfriend of his, the one who’d shown up at Daddy’s wake and been given the bum’s rush out of there. Bums, they’d been: both
of them. His-and-her derelicts, dependent on a little boy’s thievery and secret-keeping.
Don’t tell your grandpa we’re out here. Okay, buddy? Because that’s a secret between you and me, right? Now what do you got there? What’d you bring us?
I liked it better when Daddy
didn’t
show up—when I could just hide the stuff I’d stolen in the baby buggy and go. Get away from those stuffed, pumpkin-headed replicas of who the Quirk family was supposed to be. No lesbians or drunks or divorcees. It was funny the way townspeople would come in droves every autumn weekend to wander through our maze and find, at the center, the Quirks we weren’t. “Caelum?”

For a second or two, I couldn’t quite place her. “Sorry,” I said. “I was someplace else. What were you asking?”

If your grandfather ever remarried.”

“Uh, no. Nope. He had lady friends from time to time, but … God, do you really want to hear about all this?”

She said she did.

“Before? When I said Grandpa was good to me? According to Lolly, he was just the opposite with my father. Beat him, threw it in his face all the time about how my grandmother would have lived if it wasn’t for him…. I guess Daddy’s big mistake was going right back to the farm after he got out of the service. Signing on for another tour of duty as Grandpa’s whipping boy. Lolly said he’d work for his old man all day, then go downtown and get shit-faced at night. Then he started drinking day
and
night, and that was when Grandpa gave him the boot…. At school? I used to lie about him.”

“Your father?”

I nodded. “Tell the other kids my dad was dead—that he’d died a war hero. And they bought it, too, until this one big-mouthed girl in my class, Bunny Clauson, brought in a newspaper clipping for current events, and it was about my father. How he’d staggered, drunk, off the downtown pier and had had to be rescued by police frogmen.
Having to sit at my desk and listen to that and not cry, not show
any
emotion: man, that had to be one of the hardest moments of my life…. But like I said, Grandpa was good to me. That time I came home drunk was the only time he laid a hand on me. And, you know, you can see where
that
was coming from.”

Janis sighed. “Families are so hard,” she said.

Neither of us spoke for a minute or more. Then she stood and said she wanted to walk back over to the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, study it some more. Did I want to come? “No, I’ll stay here,” I said. “Take your time.”

Sitting on that picnic bench, I put my head in my hands and thought about that weird flashback-like experience I’d had a few hours earlier. Families are hard, she’d said: well, I couldn’t argue with that. But better to have had Alden Quirk the Third for a father than Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold for a son. A brother. I’d known them both: Eric’s and Dylan’s older brothers. Nice kids, good students. How were
they
surviving? How had
they
managed to go on after life dealt them the hand it did, courtesy of their little brothers? … It made me think about something I’d read in Lydia’s diary—the part where, at the Clemenses’ dinner party, the conversation had come around to the burdens of John Wilkes Booth’s brother, the actor Edwin Booth. How had
he
carried on after his brother’s infamous deed? Head down and one foot in front of the other, probably. The way
I’d
gone on after Maureen killed the Seaberry kid….

Morgan Seaberry: he’d been a secret-keeper, too. And when his brother’d threatened to blow the whistle—out him to their mother—he’d run out of that motel room and gotten himself killed. But what if that
hadn’t
happened? What if Mo had left Rivercrest five minutes earlier, or been held up and left five minutes later? Hell,
one
minute later. That poor kid would have crossed the road safely, and the dominoes would have fallen a whole different way. Maureen would have come home from her shift that morning, and gone to bed, and never
have gone to prison…. And Morgan might have gone to UConn like he wanted to, come out to his dad and stepmom first maybe, and then to his mom. Become himself, finally, and stopped pretending to be the paragon she wanted him to be. He might have met some nice guy and fallen in love. Told his lover about how hard it had been for him in high school, before he’d found himself, claimed his life as his own….

I cleaned up the picnic stuff, brought the cooler back to the car. The book I’d bought was on the front seat, and I opened it and read.

When Janis got back, she said she’d been thinking that maybe none of this was an accident.

“This?”

Maybe she and Moze had been
meant
to meet me at the bakery that morning. Maybe she’d been
meant
to move into the farmhouse and find those old diaries and letters.

I smiled. “So it’s not all just a crapshoot, then? Some Master Puppeteer’s up there in the sky, yanking everyone’s strings according to his Master Plan?”

If by that, I meant did she believe in God, she said, then yes. She did.

“Yeah? And why’s that?” I asked.

She couldn’t exactly say why, she said; it was just a trust she had that some benign presence was making sure that good overpowered evil.

“Really? Then how do you explain Hitler and Columbine and 9/11? Or Katrina, for that matter. Why’d your ‘benign presence’ okay that one?”

She neither answered me nor looked away.

“This guy I met once?” I said. “This chaos theorist I got stuck sitting next to on an airplane? He was a total nut job, but he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. He said maybe God wasn’t Allah or Jesus Christ or any of the other deities that people are always using as an excuse to go to war over. That maybe all ‘God’ was was mutation. Mutability. The thing that happens when the DNA we’re ‘carrying forward’ from our ancestors suddenly jumps the track. Gets altered in some unpredictable way and, for better or worse, sets the first domino falling in a different direction.”

For a little longer than was comfortable, we held each other’s gaze. Then she came over and sat down beside me. Hitched her hair behind her ear. Touched her earlobe. “So I take it you and Maureen never had children?”

Children? “No,” I said. “Or me and my other two wives either.”

“Was that your choice or …?”

Where were
these
questions coming from?”Patti and I were only in our mid-twenties when we got divorced. We probably would’ve had kids if we’d stayed together. She and her second husband have them—daughters, I think. And Francesca was …”

God, she was cute: those smoky blue eyes, that little mole to the left of her lip….

“Francesca was what?”

“What? Oh. On the fast track, career-wise. Didn’t want anything or anyone to stand in the way of her ride up the corporate elevator. Including me, as it played out. And with Maureen, it was a nonissue. She’d had her tubes tied during her first marriage. So that was that.”

She shifted positions a little, and when she did, her knee bumped up against my thigh and stayed there. “Do you ever regret it? Not having kids?”

I shrugged. And when I opened my mouth, what came out of it surprised me. “A little, I guess. Doesn’t occupy major portions of my day but … Maybe it’s all this ancestor stuff you’ve been digging up. It’s got me thinking about how I’m the end of the Quirk line. How the river’s not going underground, it’s drying up.” A little bit after the fact, I realized she was touching my arm, rubbing her hand up and down it. “I read once that that’s why guys cheat—that we’re hardwired to want to spread our seed.” Now why had I just said that? Why was I shallow-breathing? “What about you and Moze? You guys see kids in your future?”

“Moses doesn’t want any more,” she said.

“Any more?”

She said he had an eleven-year-old daughter by a former lover. He and the mother had an agreement: no child support, but no contact, either. They lived in Oregon. “And before that, there was a little boy by a different woman. He died, though, when he was very young. Two, I think. I don’t know the circumstances. Moses doesn’t ever want to go there.”

“That’s got to be the worst,” I said. “Losing a child.” To spinal meningitis, I thought. Or to a couple of psychopathic kids with rifles. A nurse driving home stoned on painkiller. “So is that okay with you, then? No kids because he doesn’t want them?” I shifted a little, got an inch or so closer to her.

“Sometimes it is,” she said.

I nodded. Watched the rapid blinking of her eyes, shiny with un-spilled tears. Watched the moisture that had pooled in the little valley above her top lip. What was that indentation called? I always forgot. But God, didn’t it feel nice the way her fingertips were grazing the veins on the back of my hand? And wouldn’t it feel nice to lean forward and poke my tongue into that little valley and taste her salt, taste her …

I’m not even sure which one of us started it, but we were kissing
each other—openmouthed, tongue to tongue. When I felt her begin to pull away, I placed my hand against the back of her neck and kissed her some more. Right there in public, in Bushnell Park, in front of Santiago and his mom and the ducks and whoever else might have seen us—the pretty blonde who wasn’t even thirty yet and the gray-haired guy who was old enough to be, but was not, thank God, her father. I kissed her again. And again. Those kisses felt more necessary than right.

We were quiet on the drive back—both of us a little embarrassed, I think, by what had happened. Maybe she hadn’t kissed me, I thought. Maybe she’d just been kissing her access to Lydia’s diaries and Lizzy’s letters.

It wasn’t until I reached over to turn on the radio that she spoke. “Caelum, what happened back there shouldn’t have happened,” she said.