The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (78 page)

I
HAD A TERRIBLE TIME
starting this story. A year’s worth of promising beginnings fizzled into false starts. I had a waiting readership, a book contract, and a deadline … but no story. In the midst of this creative drought, I agreed to teach a writing seminar at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans. It was my first visit to that city, and I mostly avoided the conference socializing in favor of walking the streets alone. My wandering led me to St. Louis Cathedral on busy Jackson Square in the city’s French Quarter. Outside there was revelry—street musicians, mimes, dancing, drinking—but the cavernous church was empty. In my forlorn state, I lit a candle, knelt, and prayed to … well, I don’t know who, exactly. The muse? The gods? The ghost of Tennessee Williams? “Whoever or whatever you are,” I said, “please let me discover a story.” Shortly after that trip, I began this novel in earnest. This was the first sentence that my then-nameless, identityless protagonist spoke to me:
My mother was a convicted felon, a manic-depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950.

In the nine years it’s taken me to construct the novel, the ground has shifted beneath us all. School shootings, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the protracted war in Iraq: these have altered us, collectively and as individuals. As I struggled to understand what was happening to our nation and our world, I looked to and was guided by ancient myth. I placed my fictional protagonist inside a confounding nonfictional maze and
challenged him to locate, at its center, the monsters he would need to confront and the means by which he might save himself and others. Along the way to discovering Caelum Quirk’s story, I, too, wandered down corridors baffling and unfamiliar, investigating such topics as the invisible pull of ancestry, chaos-complexity theory, and spirituality—my own and Caelum’s. The former strand is given voice in the letters and diary entries of Caelum’s forebears, Lizzy and Lydia. The latter two strands are symbolized by a pair of totem creatures from the natural world, the butterfly and the praying mantis.

My volunteer teaching at York Correctional Institution, a maximum-security women’s prison, has been concurrent with, and integral to, the discovery and execution of this story. I began facilitating a writing workshop there the same month I started work on the novel—a dozen or so weeks after the massacre at Columbine High School. On the afternoon of April 20, 1999, my wife Christine and I were in Boston, where I was to receive a lovely writing award. I was tying my necktie in front of the bathroom mirror of our hotel room when I heard, from the other side of the door, Chris’s distress: “Oh! Oh, no! Oh, god!” A few seconds later, I was staring at CNN’s live coverage of the chaotic events unfolding at Columbine.

Two and a half years after Columbine, I sat before the television again, along with the rest of America, staring in disbelief at the smoke rising from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the file footage of Osama bin Laden kneeling and firing his rifle at a terrorist training camp. On impulse, I turned off the TV and drove to my sons’ schools, where I circled the parking lots, trying to decide whether to let my kids carry on with their classes or to go inside
and sign them out so that I might keep them safe. But safe from what? From whom? My fear was at the wheel that day, and I see now that I was confusing the actions of the terrorist hijackers with the actions, two years prior, of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

In the months after September eleventh, the White House assured us that Iraq’s leader was complicit in the attacks and had weapons of mass destruction which he would not hesitate to use against us. “Bring it on!” our president said, and we became immersed in the “shock and awe” of war. At first a trickle and later a steady flow of American military personnel began returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with maimed bodies and damaged psyches, or in flag-draped coffins which government officials decreed must not be photographed. In the name of combatting terrorism, Congress passed the Patriot Act and the Administration bypassed the rules of the Geneva Conventions governing the humane treatment of prisoners of war. And as the tactics and conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo came slowly to light, my inmate students, through their writing, began to enlighten me about some equally disturbing realities: the correlation between incest and female crime; the racist and classist nature of the American justice system; and the extent to which our prisons fail to rehabilitate the men, women, and children in their custody. And yes, I did say children. One of my students entered prison at the age of 15 and is not scheduled to be released until 2046, the year she turns 64. She has, since her incarceration, attempted suicide three times.

Although
The Hour I First Believed
is a work of fiction, it explores and examines such
nonfictional tragedies as war, catastrophic fire, violent weather, and school shootings by interfacing imagined characters with people who exist or existed. Why did I choose to access the actual instead of taking the safer and more conventional novelist’s approach of creating fictional approximations of easily recognizable nonfictional people and events? Why, specifically, did I take on the tragic events that occurred in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999? My reasons are twofold. First, I felt it was my responsibility to name the Columbine victims—the dead and the living—rather than blur their identities. To name the injured who survived is to acknowledge both their suffering and their brave steps past that terrible day into meaningful lives. To name the dead is to confront the meaning of their lives and their deaths, and to acknowledge, as well, the strength and suffering of the loved ones they had to leave behind. Second, having spent half of my life in high school—four years as a student and twenty-five as a teacher—I could and did transport myself, psychically if not physically, to Littleton, Colorado. Could I have acted as courageously as teacher Dave Sanders, who sacrificed his life in the act of shepherding students to safety? Would I have had the strength to attend those memorials and funerals to which I sent my protagonist? Could I have comforted Columbine’s “collaterally damaged” victims, as Caelum struggles to comfort his traumatized wife? The depth and scope of Harris and Klebold’s rage, and the twisted logic by which they convinced themselves that their slaughter of the innocent was justified, both frightened and confounded me. I felt it necessary to
confront the “two-headed monster” itself, rather than concoct Harris-and Klebold-like characters. Were these middle-class high school kids merely sick, or were they evil? What might their words and actions, their Internet spewings and videotaped taunts, tell us about how to prevent some future tragedy? Were they anomalies, or harbingers of school violence to come? Sadly, that latter question has been answered in the years since Columbine, at middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities in California, Minnesota, Colorado, Arkansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And it is a bitter irony that, on the day I finished this manuscript and mailed it off to my publisher, a graduate student emerged from behind a curtain inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, raised his gun, and shot twenty one victims, five of them fatally, before taking his own life.

Why all this rage? Why all these deaths and broken-hearted survivors?

I hope and pray that, in using the names of those involved in my fictional/nonfictional exploration of the whys and wherefores of school shootings, I have not, in any way, added to the suffering of those directly involved, including the Harris and Klebold families, who also grieve and who did nothing wrong. And I hope and pray, as well, that this story, in some small way, might broaden understanding, the better to prevent future tragedy.

The year I began this novel, my elder two sons were a college freshman and a high school freshman. Today they are both teachers, working with the storm-tossed children of New Orleans. Whenever I visit them there, I make it a point to stop in at
St. Louis Cathedral, where I give thanks to the greater power than I that allowed me to locate and tell my story. Having affixed its last period to its final sentence, I now release it to my readers and invite them to find in it whatever they want or need to find. Still, I hope the book advances the notion that power must be used responsibly and mercifully, and that we are all responsible for one another. These things I believe:

—That as James Baldwin once put it, “People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes back to them, poisoned.”

—That wars, because of the terrible cost they exact, are never won.

—That love is stronger than hatred.

I’
M OFTEN ASKED
what novels by other authors I reading when I’m writing one of my own. The better question is: What and who am I listening to? I’m pleased to share many of the tunes, recognizable and obscure, that helped me write
The Hour I First Believed.
The tracks are arranged more or less along the lines of the narrative. I hope you enjoy them.

1. “Gloria”—Van Morrison, from
The Sopranos: Peppers & Eggs
(Morrison).
Caelum saves a slot for Van the Man in his list of “Greatest Songs of the Rock Era.” Morrison had this hit with the band Them in 1964, the year Caelum was thirteen.

2. “Meaning of Loneliness”—Van Morrison, from
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
(Morrison).
In a bluesy mood, Morrison, now middle-aged, explores the “existential dread” of life’s second half. Middle-aged Caelum is pondering life’s meaning, too.

3. “Asshole”—James Luther Dickinson, from
Free Beer Tomorrow
(M. Unobsky).
“Ask any of us cynical bastards to lift up our shirt, and we’ll show you where we got shot in the heart,” says Caelum, as he angrily grieves two failed marriages and a third failing one.

4. “Black Books”—Nils Lofgren, from
Nils Lofgren: Favorites 1990–2005
(Lofgren).
Lofgren’s mournful vocal, matched to his stunning guitar-work, mirrors Caelum’s struggles to accept the jolting reality of Maureen’s infidelity.

5. “Useless Desires”—Patty Griffin, from
Impossible Dream
(Griffin).
Dr. Patel advises Caelum that if he cannot forgive his wife, he should move on. Instead, the Quirks move—away from Three Rivers and toward tragedy in Littleton. Griffin’s bittersweet road song captures both the desire for and the futility of escape.

6. “At the Bottom of Everything”—Bright Eyes, from
I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
(C. Oberst).
Conor Oberst (a.k.a. Bright Eyes) imagines an airplane ride every bit as strange as the one Caelum takes beside chaos theorist Mickey Schmidt.

7. “House Where Nobody Lives”—Tom Waits, from
Mule Variations
(Waits).
In response to his aunt’s stroke and, later, her death, Caelum returns to a now-empty farmhouse.

8. “When God Made Me”—Neil Young, from
Prairie Wind
(Young).
Caelum, back in Three Rivers and now in his late forties, contemplates an earlier, more innocent youth—and its loss.

9. “Mbube (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)”—Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Taj Mahal, from
Long Walk to Freedom
(S. Linda).
Mr. Mpipi performs a dance of hunger that turns into a dance of love, and a praying mantis egg case explodes with life on young Caelum’s windowsill.

10. “Believe”—Cher, from
The Very Best of Cher
(B. Higgins/S. McClennan/P. Barry/S. Torch/M. Gray/T. Powell).
“Believe” was inescapable in 1999, the year I toured Europe with my previous novel and began this one. The pop star’s durability causes Caelum to speculate that only two life forms would survive a nuclear holocaust: cockroaches and Cher.

11. “My Buddy”—Chet Baker, from
The Best of Chet Baker Sings
(W. Donaldson/G. Kahn).
My dad used to sing this song to me when I was a little boy riding beside him in our green Hudson during Saturday errands. Baker’s songs always make me sad, but this one’s bittersweet. I played it over and over when I was writing the episode where Caelum’s father drives him to town to buy him his belated Christmas gift.

12. “Mary”—Patty Griffin, from
Flaming Red
(Griffin).
When the shooting begins in the Columbine library, Maureen crawls inside a cabinet, writes Caelum a good-bye note, and prays the Hail Mary.

13. “A Case of You”—Michael Holland from
Darkness Falls.
(Mitchell).
This Joni Mitchell classic evokes, for me, the impact of Mo’s Columbine experience on the Quirks’ marriage. Holland’s version of this often-covered song is the best of the bunch.

14. “Losing My Religion”—R.E.M., from
In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988–2003
(M. Stipe/P. Buck/B. Berry/M. Mills).
How could a merciful deity allow Columbine to happen? Caelum’s ambivalence about God turns to bitter rejection.

15. “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray”—Maggie and Suzzy Roche, Ysaye Barnwell, and DuPree, from
Zero Church
(traditional).
Disengaged and dispirited, Caelum gropes for a spiritual connection but hears only silence. This song was recorded by vocalists from the Roches and Sweet Honey in the Rock in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. The shadow of that cataclysmic day hung over my writing of this novel for six years.

16. “I Drink”—Mary Gauthier, from
Mercy Now
(Gauthier/C. Harmon).
As Maureen’s reliance on prescription drugs increases, Caelum, too, numbs himself—with his father’s, and later Ulysses’s, preferred poison.

17. “Hallelujah”—Jeff Buckley, from
So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley
(L. Cohen).
Leonard Cohen’s haunting meditation on the spirit and the flesh has been covered by many artists. The late Jeff Buckley’s version is perhaps the loveliest and most poignant.

18. “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—Bruce Springsteen, from
The Ghost of Tom Joad
(Springsteen).
In the closing days of a traumatic school year, in a borrowed classroom, Caelum and his students discuss Steinbeck’s masterpiece,
The Grapes of Wrath.
Shortly after, Caelum and Mo will take to the road as the Joads did, yet they’ll travel from west to east.

1. “I Can’t Tell You Why”—Vince Gill, from
Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles
(T. Schmit/D. Henley/G. Frey).
In Gill’s melancholy vocal, I hear Caelum’s attempts to reach a wife who’s slowly fading away.

2. “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”—Fats Domino, from
The Fat Man: 25 Classic Performances
(H. Williams).
In 1957 my sister Vita bought and played, over and over on our turntable record player, Fats Domino’s “(I Found My Thrill) On Blueberry Hill.” In 2000, years before our sons moved to the Big Easy, Chris and I attended the New Orleans Jazz Fest and caught “the Fat Man’s” lively performance. In Katrina’s aftermath Domino was presumed dead, drowned in his Ninth Ward home. Happily, reports of his demise were premature.

3. “Louisiana 1927”—Randy Newman and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra with members of the New York Philharmonic, from
Our New Orleans 2005
(Newman).
Fats Domino’s fictional neighbors, Moses and Janis Mick, escape Katrina before their home is destroyed. This dirge by one of America’s best contemporary songwriters evokes an earlier New Orleans flood that resonates with the tragedy of Katrina’s aftermath and the deep-seated racism it exposed.

4. “She Loves the Jerk”—John Hiatt, from
Y’All Caught?
(Hiatt).
With his own wife inaccessible, Caelum longs for Moses’s wife, Janet, his upstairs tenant.

5. “Hold On”—Tom Waits, from
Mule Variations
(Waits/K. Brennan).
Waits’s best songs are both sharply observed and arrestingly askew and can break the listener’s heart. The character of Ethel Dank, the doomed mother of Mary Agnes (a.k.a. “Jinx”), was imagined during repeated listenings of this song.

6. “The Magdalene Laundries”—Emmylou Harris, from
A Tribute to Joni Mitchell
(Mitchell).
Interpreted here by the ever-reliable Emmylou, Mitchell’s song about the infamous Irish prison laundry which housed girls of “ill repute” and was supervised by the Sisters of Charity argues for the compassionate treatment of incarcerated women. Sounds like a good idea to me.

7. “My Beer Is Rheingold, the Dry Beer”—from
TeeVee Toons: The Commercials.
The beer that made Miss Rheingold famous. Or was it the other way around? Caelum’s beautiful but reckless mother won, then lost, the title Miss Rheingold 1950.

8–11. “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Dixie/Bonnie Blue Flag,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Weeping, Sad, and Lonely”—an instrumental medley from
The Civil War
Original Soundtrack Recording.
After losing her soldier sons, Edmond and Levi, to a war she opposed, Lizzy Popper heads to Washington, D.C., to nurse and comfort other mothers’ sons.

12. “Déjà Vu (All Over Again)”—John Fogerty, from
The Long Road Home
(Fogerty).
Wars are fought for different reasons, but mothers’ sorrows are always the same. Once the driving force of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty reflects on Iraq, Vietnam, Korea …

13. “Peace Call”—Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Griffin, and Iris DeMent, from
Land of Milk and Honey
(W. Guthrie).
At Kareem Kendricks’s memorial service, Caelum hears a scruffy college student’s performance of Woody Guthrie’s plea for peace.

14. “A Change Is Gonna Come”—Ben Sollee, from
Learning to Bend
(S. Cooke/Sollee).
Sollee does a twenty-first-century take on the Sam Cooke classic, sung by Wanda Fellows at the Quirk CI memorial service Caelum attends with Velvet. (Thanks, Justin.)

15. “Without Her”—Harry Nilsson, from
Personal Best
(Nilsson).
Singer-songwriter Nilsson, a favorite of the Beatles, is most remembered for “Everybody’s Talkin’,” from the soundtrack of the Oscar-winning film
Midnight Cowboy.
In the aftermath of his friend John Lennon’s death, he advocated for gun control until his own untimely death to heart disease. In this lushly orchestrated cut, Nilsson articulates Caelum’s loss of the love of his life.

16. “Not Alone”—Patty Griffin, from
Living with Ghosts
(Griffin).
Having become a fan of Griffin’s, I bought her first CD years before I listened to this song, its final track. When I finally did, I was startled by its resonance to the novel I’d been writing for several years.

17. “We Gotta Get You a Woman”—Todd Rundgren, from
The Very Best of Todd Rundgren
(Rundgren).
Alphonse Buzzi searches for a vintage yellow Mustang and, in the process, finds love.

18. “Buona Sera”—Louis Prima, from
Big Night
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Prima).
A saluta,
Mrs. Buzzi! Far brasher than my own mother, Mrs. B is an amalgam of Anna, her sister Jennie, and our elderly next-door neighbor, a 4-foot, 8-inch force of nature named Lucy Levanto.

19. “Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone?”—Sam Cooke, from
Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers
(arr. Cooke).
Cooke, whose life would end prematurely and tragically, recorded this gospel number in 1956 as lead singer with the Soul Stirrers prior to his breakthrough as a chart-topping soul singer with hits such as “Cupid” and “Wonderful World.” My alternate title for
The Hour I First Believed
was
Not Alone
(see number 16 above). This song, performed by Tabitha and Rosalind at the Quirk CI family mass, incorporates both titles.

20. “Graceland”—Willie Nelson, from
Across the Borderline
(P. Simon).
One iconic American troubadour interprets another as he sings of traveling “through the cradle of the Civil War” toward Elvis’s Graceland and a state of grace. With Velvet in the passenger seat beside him, Caelum, too, travels toward grace as he heads north to Vermont’s Hope Cemetery.

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:

(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.