The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (60 page)

“You were pretty young, I guess. I remember that that was how she put it: that she’d wanted badly to go to Florida with her girlfriend, but that she couldn’t leave ‘Little Bit’ unprotected. I think I assumed at the time that she was talking about protection from your father. And now that we know Mary Agnes snatched you, it makes more sense. Doesn’t it?”

“Nothing makes sense right now,” I said.

She nodded. “I know. I’m so sorry you have to go through this, Cae. But the point is: Lolly sacrificed her own happiness to stand by you. Protect you. That’s love, Cae, whatever mistakes she made. Just remember that.”

I sighed. Rubbed the back of my neck. Looked around at the rest of the motley crew in that visiting room—Mo’s counterparts and mine. “Well, maybe I am a Quirk and maybe I’m not,” I said. “Let’s change the subject. What’s new with you?”

Mo said she’d applied for the prison’s hospice program, and the
program director had said she’d probably have a good shot at getting accepted. Comforting dying inmates—the majority of them addicts suffering from HIV and hepatitis—would give her purpose, she said. It would be the closest she’d ever get to nursing again. Oh, and she’d heard that morning that she was getting a new roommate, thank God.

I asked her what had become of Irina the Terrible.

She’d gotten into an argument with another inmate during “five on the floor,” Mo said—something about who should have refilled the hot pot during the previous hour. There’d been a dispute about whether Irina or the other woman had thrown the first punch, but because Irina was as unpopular with the COs as she was with the other inmates, it was she who’d been presumed guilty and hauled off to “seg.”

“So how does the new roommate look?” I asked. Mo said she hadn’t met her yet, but that CO Santerre had told her it was a young Spanish girl who hadn’t yet been sentenced—the defendant in a high profile case.

“What did she do?” I asked.

Maureen said she didn’t know. “But I was just thinking, Cae, if you want closure on this paternity thing? Maybe you should think about a DNA test.”

“Yeah? How am I supposed to do that? Dig up my father’s grave?”

She shook her head. Lolly had shown her something once, she said: locks of her own and her twin brother’s hair from when they were children—curls scissored and saved from their first haircuts. “They were in her bedroom, in a bureau drawer. What did you do with Lolly’s stuff when those Mick people moved in?”

Those Mick people: Mo was still resisting the idea of Moze and Janis living in our house. “Dumped a lot of it,” I said. “Threw the rest in boxes and carted them up to the attic…. But you know something? I think I remember seeing those locks of hair. Right after
Lolly died, when I was getting some things for the funeral. I don’t remember seeing them later, though, when I was clearing things out for the Micks. I probably chucked them.”

“Maybe not,” Mo said. “You should look.”

I found them at three a.m. the next morning: the two envelopes inside a jewelry box, each labeled in what I now recognized from those old diary entries as Great-Grandma Lydia’s distinctive handwriting:

The closest testing center was in New London. The woman on the phone explained that a one-week turnaround on test results would cost me three hundred seventy-five bucks. Results in three days would set me back six hundred. If I had to know by the next business day, it would be a thousand. And though I needed to know the truth, I also wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I was grateful that I could just barely afford the one-week option.

“Wow, this is
vintage,”
the freckle-faced woman in the lab coat noted when I handed over the envelope containing the remnant of Alden Quirk Jr.’s first haircut. “Okay, have a seat and open your mouth so I can swab the inside of your cheek. This will take like two seconds.”

“That’s all you need to do?”

“Yup.”

“And that hair’s not too old?”

“Nope.”

A week later, a receptionist slid open her glass window and handed me a manila envelope. You’d have thought I would have torn it open, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, I opened the trunk of my car, dropped the envelope in, and slammed it shut.

I drove home, went inside empty-handed. Velvet was seated at
the kitchen table. Facing her were three snaggle-toothed, pointy-eared gargoyles. There was a bunch of art supplies on the table, too: brushes, little jars of paint, glitter, glue. I picked up a bag of garishly dyed feathers and asked her what she was doing. “Experimenting,” she said.

She’d had this idea that she wanted to try decorating the drab plaster statues—that maybe their customers, some of them, anyway, would want their gargoyles made up. “Like drag queens,” she said. “That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway. Drag queens are cool. I got to know some of them when I was living in Slidell.” Moses had made her no promises, she said, but he’d given her some defective pieces and fifty dollars for art supplies. If he liked what she came up with, he said, he might put her creations up on the Web site and see what happened.

“Well, good luck,” I said. “If you’re going to paint, spread some newspapers first.”

“Don’t sweat it, Dad,” she said.

Dad? I rolled my eyes and left the room. I was lying facedown on my bed when I heard her calling me. “Caelum? … Hey, Caelum!”

I recalled that dream I’d had about the maze—the way Velvet had been calling me and how, when I thought I had finally reached her, I’d found Klebold and Harris standing there instead. “What?” I called back.

“I’m gonna make some scrambled eggs. You want some?”

“No, thanks.”

I thought about how she’d been there that day—in the line of fire. How she’d lived, run away, wound up in Louisiana, and then had traveled north and found us again. She never had talked to me about having witnessed the slaughter that day. Having dropped beneath a table and survived. Did she talk about it when she went over there and visited Mo? Was that day what they talked about? …

That night, the Micks’ argument woke me up—Janis’s end of it, anyway. “I
don’t
think I’m better than you, Moses! … Well, what do
you expect me to do? Forfeit my career?” I couldn’t make out Moze’s murmured responses, but her retorts came through loud and clear. “All these years, I couldn’t even bring up the subject, and now you
want
us to have a baby?”

After awhile, everything was quiet up there. I squinted at the clock radio. One forty-eight a.m. Half an hour later, I gave up on sleep and went out into the kitchen. When I put on the light, there they were in all their garish glory: Velvet’s leering, colorful grotesques. Customers would either love them or hate them, I figured. They’d either bomb or sell a million.

I thought about what Maureen had said in the visiting room: that despite the mistakes Lolly may have made, she had loved me enough to stay and protect me, to give up her plans, her lover. From the window, I looked out at my car, illuminated by a three-quarter moon. Maybe that was why those test results were still out there, locked in the trunk. Maybe I was afraid they’d show that Lolly had never really been mine, either.

See that? What did I tell you? The truth can eat you alive!

Yeah? Well, let it. Because not knowing the truth is doing a pretty good job of that, too.

I grabbed my keys. Grabbed the door handle. The bottoms of my bare feet were wet and cold against the dew-covered grass. I popped the trunk and took out the test results.

Back inside, by the light of the kitchen stove, I opened the envelope with shaking hands and read the report.

It was a match. I
was
Alden’s son, Lolly’s nephew….

And so maybe Janis had been right that day up at Bushnell Park. Maybe my ancestor
was
trying to talk to me. Because here was the scientific proof in black and white, wasn’t it? I was a Quirk. Lizzy Popper’s blood was my blood.

In addition to her antislavery efforts, Lizzy Popper was active in the Children’s Aid Society of Connecticut and the Society for the Alleviation of the Miseries of the Public Prisons of Connecticut. In 1849, she initiated a correspondence with French statesman and writer Alexis de Tocqueville. A decade earlier, Tocqueville had toured the Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield and, in his famous study
Democracy in America,
had written favorably about the degree of order, obedience, and penitent silence maintained inside America’s penal institutions. In her own tours of the Wethersfield prison and other state jails, Lizzy Popper was appalled by what she saw: the squalor of inmates’ living conditions (“tethered veal calves being readied for slaughter receive more charitable treatment”), the imprisonment of “lunatics better suited to modern insane asylums than to the Medieval dungeons the State maintains,” and the easy access of male guards to the handful of “godforsaken female wretches banished to the prison’s attic.” One such “wretch,” an Irish immigrant named Maude Morrison, surreptitiously slipped a letter to Lizzy during a prison tour. Morrison complained that guards and favored male trusties “gratified their lusts” at will with the female inmates; that rum and trinkets fell into the hands of women willing to oblige these urges; and that false charges of incorrigibility were made against women who resisted them. “We
who try to fight them off are stripped naked and lashed in front of whatever man wishes to gape at our shame, jailer and jailed alike,” Morrison wrote. In response, Popper wrote letters of complaint to prison superintendent Silas Norrish and Connecticut governor Joseph Trumbull; this intervention resulted not in improved conditions but in Morrison’s abrupt release. When Popper also wrote of this matter to Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville wrote back. Their occasional correspondence, exchanged over the next several years, constituted a lively philosophical debate as to the balancing of society’s obligation to “suppress vice” against its obligation to “restore female sinners to sacred womanhood.” In the 1870s and 1880s, Lizzy Popper would again take up the cause of female prisoners, lobbying for a separate reformatory where women could be held “apart from the abuses of malevolent men.” However, the issues of slavery and secession would dominate her political activism during the decade that began with Abraham Lincoln’s bid for the presidency in 1860 and ended with the securing of voting rights for blacks through the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.

On March 6, 1860, at the urging of her eldest son Edmond, Lizzy Popper attended a speech by Illinois senator Abraham Lincoln, who was then campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. Edmond Popper had recently joined the Wide Awakes, a Republican society comprised mostly of unmarried young men who organized and marched in torchlit spectacles in support of such causes as antislavery. Speaking to a large, enthusiastic audience at New Haven’s Union Hall, Lincoln advocated forbearance for both North and South, a settling of differences by peaceful means, and the prevention of slavery’s expansion to the western territories. Lizzy liked what she heard that day and supported Lincoln’s candidacy, although she would later become disenchanted with Lincoln when, as president, he concluded that war against the Confederacy was inevitable.

The Civil War further frayed the deteriorating marriage of Charles and Elizabeth Popper. Reverting to the Quaker values on which she’d been raised, Lizzy Popper took an unequivocally pacifist stance, arguing that it was a “monstrous fallacy” to assume the Union could be saved and slaves freed “by an armed hand.” Conversely, Charles Popper saw the fight as a “Holy Cause”—and a necessity in preserving the Union and ridding the nation, once and for all, of slavery’s evils. “Of war and slavery, slavery is the greater sin,” he wrote to his wife from the road. Edmond Popper and Levi Popper, the couple’s elder sons, sided with their father in this regard. Against their mother’s wishes, they mustered in as privates in regiments organized at Norwich, Levi with the Connecticut Volunteers, 18th Regiment Infantry and Edmond with the Connecticut Volunteers, 21st Regiment.

In response to her sons’ signing on as Union soldiers, Lizzy Popper, too, joined the war effort. She organized a “sanitary fair” in New Haven to raise money and medical supplies for the newly formed U.S. Sanitary Commission, a forerunner to the American Red Cross. She also directed two hundred women from New Haven, New London, and Three Rivers Junction in the making of uniforms, bandages, and compresses for several Connecticut regiments. Yet she continued to speak out against the war whose Union soldiers she abetted. Upon signing on, Lizzy Popper’s sons had each received thirteen dollars (the equivalent of one month’s army pay), plus a thirty-dollar bounty from the State of Connecticut. “Blood money,” their mother called this bounty in a letter published in the
Hartford Daily Times.
“As Rome handed Judas Iscariot thirty pieces of silver to betray Christ, Connecticut hands her sons thirty dollars apiece to betray their Christian values and slay their Southern brothers,” Popper argued.

Charles Popper was furious that his wife had gone public with sentiments at odds with his own and those of their soldiering sons. In a response published in the
Hartford
Daily Times
one week after Lizzy’s letter appeared, he, too, invoked scripture—not to condemn the Union effort, but to justify it. The Book of Jeremiah,
chapter 4
, verses 16–18, Popper contended, warned those southerners who would maintain “the bondage of God’s mahogany-skinned children” against His will:

Charlie Popper ended his argument with a couplet from “The Building of a Ship,” an 1849 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

A heartfelt letter from Lizzy Popper to her spouse, written in the wake of their public disagreement, revealed the private toll taken:

Sadly, Lizzy Popper’s reference to “blood money” proved prophetic. Neither Edmond Popper nor Levi Popper survived the war. Levi Popper’s regiment was first attached to the Defenses of Baltimore, Maryland, 8th Corps, Middle Department, and later moved on to Winchester, Virginia, joining
General Robert Milroy’s Command. Wounded at the Battle of Winchester, Levi Popper was captured as a prisoner of war during the early summer of 1862. He died shortly after at a makeshift Confederate hospital and was buried with other Union casualties in an unmarked communal grave, the exact whereabouts of which were never discovered by the Popper family, much to the consternation of his grieving mother.

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:

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.

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!”