The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (75 page)

Ralph gave the eulogy; Mo would have liked that. “This was not a place she would have chosen to live out the last years of her life,” he said. “But she had come to understand, I think, that suffering can become a pathway to redemption. Maureen Quirk made the best of a challenging situation. Made a life here, made friends, contributions. In her hospice work, especially, she made this prison a more humane and merciful place. And we will honor our sister of mercy—keep her spirit alive—whenever we respond mercifully to one another.”

Brawny, tattooed Wanda Fellows, who at the family Mass had “felt the feeling” and gotten the boot for it, stepped forward to end the
service. “This song was written by Mr. Sam Cooke,” she said. “He was da bomb, and so was Miss Maureen.” She raised her eyes heavenward and called out, “This is for you, Mo!” And with that, she let loose a wrenching
a capella
rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” that raised goose flesh and made tears fall like rain. When it was over, I approached her and, though it was against the rules, held out my arms. And man, that woman could hug back. I hadn’t been squeezed so tightly since the days when Zinnia had helped run the cider press.

“I’m so glad I came today,” I told Wanda.

“Thass good,” she said. “You comin’ back?”

Father Ralph overheard us and laughed. “You could, you know,” he said. “There’s an opening at the school.”

Before I could respond, a CO bellowed, “Line up, ladies! Time to get back to your units for count!” He and another guard herded them out as if they were dumb animals, not thinking, feeling women.

Ralph escorted Velvet and me out of the compound. “How about I take you two to lunch?” he said.

“Can’t,” Velvet said. “I’ve gotta get back to work.” For some reason, she and Ralph shared a conspiratorial smile.

“What do you say then, Caelum?” Ralph said. “My treat.”

We dropped Velvet off at the farmhouse, then headed over to the Three Rivers Inn. “Oh, hi, Father,” the hostess said. “You can go right in. The others are already here.”

The others? Wondering what was going on, I followed Ralph to a table all the way in back. There sat Jerry Martineau and Dominick Birdsey. “Here ye, here ye,” Jerry said. “This reunion of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is now in session.”

I OPENED THE SYMPATHY CARDS.
There were several from my students, sent to me in care of Oceanside and forwarded on by the department secretary. Patti, my first wife, had sent condolences. So had Maureen’s father and stepmother. Scrawled at the
bottom of their ostentatious card was a single chilly sentence in Evelyn’s handwriting:
Her father and I hope she has finally found peace.
Inside a padded envelope at the bottom of the pile I found a thoughtful handwritten letter from Dr. Patel and a gift, enveloped in a protective bubble wrap sleeve: a small soapstone replica of Ganesha, remover of obstacles and destroyer of sorrows. Holding him in the palm of my hand, I couldn’t help but smile. And as I did, I saw that his elephant’s face was smiling back at me, his four human hands reaching out.

SOMEONE IN THE CHIEF STATE’S
Attorney’s office sent me a registered letter informing me that their official investigation into the deaths of the unearthed infants had now been closed. They were ready, therefore, to release the corpses to my custody; I was to contact them as soon as possible with instructions as to how I wished them to proceed.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with them. Then I did. I sought and was granted permission to have the babies interred on the grounds of the prison that Lizzy Popper had envisioned and Lydia Quirk had actualized. They would join the other long-forgotten babies that Quirk CI volunteers had reclaimed and named. There was a modest healing ceremony, a blessing of their graves by a Methodist minister and two women from the Quakers’ House of Friends. And so Baby Boy Dank and Baby Popper of undetermined gender now rest in the little cemetery along with the children born to Bride Lake prisoners of the past. Their small stones face the modest meditation park where current inmates with good behavior records can go to sit, think, and pray. Camille, who has taken Crystal under her wing, wrote to tell me that the two of them stop by once or twice a week to pray for the children, and for Maureen.

ULYSSES DIED AT DAYBREAK ON
a gray day in March. I was with him at the end—me and Nancy Tucker, who had tucked herself like a death angel under his armpit and kept a vigil through the night. For some reason, cats were a comfort for the dying, the hospice director had told me. “You’re like my own kid,” Ulysses had whispered to me the day before he passed. In the final seconds, he seized, turned purple, and then was still. Nancy untucked herself, stood, and yawned. She licked his neck a few times, then jumped off his bed. I watched her stroll out of the room and around the corner. I left her there with the dying. I’m told she likes her new home and is treated like a queen.

Mr. Buzzi died one day after Ulysses did, so I guess you could say that Alphonse and I both buried fathers that week. Mrs. Buzzi, no surprise, was a Sicilian stoic about her husband’s passing, but Al took it hard. After the funeral luncheon, seated at the bar in the front of the restaurant, he made his third or fourth toast to his father and said, red-eyed, “Well, at least he didn’t live to see the day when the business he started went under.” When he went teetering off to the men’s room, Dolores confided to me that, at Al’s request, she’d begun researching the pros and cons of filing for bankruptcy. “He went down to the casino last week and filled out an application for the food service department,” she whispered. “Don’t tell him I told you. Let
him
tell you. And for god’s sake, don’t say anything to his mother.”

But Vincenzia Marianina DeLia Buzzi is a crafty old girl. She knew.

At least I suspect she did, because the week after Mr. Buzzi was laid to rest, the Mama Mia became the scene of a second “miracle.” The statue of the Blessed Virgin, once again, began to weep. It shed its bloody tears for two days and, on the third day, went dry-eyed. At Mrs. B’s suggestion, the statue was removed from the front window “for security purposes” and placed atop the front counter, below which was showcased Al’s array of doughnuts, muffins, sweet rolls, and Italian cookies. The white cloth that had been placed beneath the
statue in the window—and which had therefore absorbed its bloody lachrymal discharge—was framed and hung on the wall, where it could be analyzed by the Mama Mia’s burgeoning clientele. Opinions varied, but the majority could see in the rusty blood stain a map not of Vietnam this time but of the United States of America. “Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld’s America,” one of the
Daily Record’s
letters to the editor speculated—the one written by yours truly. The
Record
was the first newspaper to cover the story. Over the next few days, the
New London Day,
the
Hartford Courant,
the
New Haven Register,
and the
Boston Herald
followed suit. By the second week, TV journalists with their camera crews arrived to investigate the strange phenomenon: the
Today
show, Fox News,
Inside Edition,
CNN. Two high school students from Long Island drove up and, with a cell phone camera, recorded a narrated tour of the Mama Mia that Alphonse (the kids’ tour guide) says has had more than thirteen thousand hits on YouTube. That same week, none other than Conan O’Brien came to see the statue for himself and stuck around long enough to sign autographs, crack jokes, and chow down on a chocolate doughnut and Al’s newest creation. “The nun bun” was a variation on the traditional hot cross bun whose sales were not restricted to the Easter season. Mrs. Buzzi had no idea who Conan was, but she got a kick out of him. “Carrot Top,” she called him. Before he left, she made him an honorary Italian.

Mrs. B greeted the media with open arms and free samples, but she gave the heave-ho to two graduate students from the University of Connecticut’s Chemistry Department who wanted to borrow the blood-stained cloth so that its chemical composition might be analyzed for scientific purposes. I happened to be at the bakery when they made their request and thus was eyewitness to the skirmish between faith and skepticism. “You two have got a hell of a nerve marching in here and questioning the will of God!” she yelled, as loudly as she had that time when Alphonse spilled a full glass of orange soda on her just-washed kitchen floor. “Get the hell out of here! Scram! And don’t come back!”

After she’d fended off the infidels, I sidled up to Mrs. B and whispered, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

“Hey, Mr. Smarty Pants, speak English,” she said. Then she winked and walked away.

AFTER THREE POSTPONEMENTS AND NUMEROUS
continuances, I didn’t so much lose the civil suit as surrender to the inevitable. For one thing, I couldn’t afford to keep shelling out for Junior’s billable hours. For another, I had come, little by little, to the realization that I was finally ready to unyoke myself from long-held Quirk family property. My Scottish ancestor had purchased Bride Lake Farm with bribe money he’d received from a wealthy father-in-law who had wanted to rid his daughter of an unfaithful husband. A failure at farming and life, my namesake had hanged himself, Lolly once told me, leaving his widow and son cash-poor but land-rich. And although Adelheid and Caelum MacQuirk’s son and grandson, Alden Quirk and Alden Quirk, Jr., had loved the land and been good stewards, my father, Alden Quirk the Third, had dedicated his life not to dairy farming but to drink. He had once quipped, in reference to his decision not to name me Alden Quirk the Fourth, “Well,
somebody
had to come along and break the family curse.”

In fairness, the Seaberrys had said they would not evict me—that I could remain at the farmhouse for as long as I wanted. I chose, instead, to pack up my things and move. In the process of doing that, I rediscovered, up in the attic, three long-forgotten treasures: my unpublished novel about a young boy’s kidnapping; the wooden sign that once had hung on the wall behind Bride Lake Prison Superintendent Lydia Quirk’s desk; and, miraculously, packed away in a wooden crate filled with excelsior, the marble busts of Lizzy Popper’s slain sons, Levi and Edmond, who gave their lives to free the slaves and save the Union.

I like my new place: it’s one of those downtown condos they built
a few years back—the ones that look out on the merge of the rushing Sachem and the meandering Wequonnoc, two of the three rivers for which our town was named. The thing I like best about my new digs, to tell you the truth, is the constant sound of that moving water. No matter what the weather, I keep a window cracked open to it because it reminds me of something Janis said to me that day up at Bushnell Park: that our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.

The busts of Edmond and Levi have come to rest on a table in the living room of the condo. On the wall behind them I’ve hung Velvet’s collage, “The Amazing Maureen,” and the hinged high school graduation portraits of my father and my aunt, and the framed print I bought of Picasso’s
Minotauromachia.
I’ve been reworking
The Absent Boy,
partly in salute to my father who, according to Ulysses, had had a gift for words. I have no idea if it’ll ever be published or even publishable, but whatever happens, I’m thinking of changing the title; the revamped story seems somehow to have outgrown it. Oh, and I’ve Super-glued and wood-puttied the two halves of Lydia’s wooden sign. Did a good job of it, too. You’d have to go looking to see that I’d busted it in anger during that dark period when my family’s withheld secrets began to come to light.
A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity:
it still sends an important message, I think. I hung it up in my classroom over at the prison. I went back and forth about teaching there, but switching from Oceanside to the Quirk CI School has turned out to be a good move for me, too. My students are like sponges, I swear to god. I teach GED English and creative writing. Mostly, the women want to write about themselves, and it helps them, you know? Gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That’s the funny thing about mazes: what’s baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.

JANIS IS OUT IN CALIFORNIA
now—she took a job teaching Women’s Studies at Redwoods University. Moze decided to stay put, and cherubs&fiends.com is thriving. The Micks’ divorce became final a couple of months ago.

Alphonse and Dolores got married. I was Al’s best man and Mrs. B was Dee’s matron of honor—wore a corsage that was half as big as she is. She and I waved the newlyweds goodbye when they drove off to their honeymoon in the Phoenician Yellow Mustang. It’s like Dr. Patel told me once: sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need. After the Mustang disappeared around the corner, I turned to Mrs. B and said, “Well, you’re a widow and I’m a widower. Maybe
we
should hook up.”

“Nah,” she said. “You’re not my type.”

“No?” I said. “Then who is?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “Tony Bennett,” she said. “You know what his real name is, don’t you?
Benedetto!’

LIKE AL AND DEE, VELVET
and Jesse Seaberry started out as friends and then it turned into something else. I’d gotten to know Jesse by then and had come to like the kid. He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s got a good heart and he’s remained faithful to his sobriety. It was Jesse, in fact, who brought me to my first meeting and later became my sponsor. It’s helped, too. I’m working on the second step.

I’m sleeping better these days. Most nights when I hit the sack, I lie there in the dark and listen to the moving water below. Then I talk to Maureen. Catch her up on what’s been happening. “Velvet’s pregnant,” I’ll say. “Been sick as a dog. She’s due in August.” Or, “Velvet had an ultrasound yesterday. They’re having a boy.” Or, “Well, Mo,
you’re never going to believe this one. Today I went and got myself a tattoo.”