The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (79 page)
Authors: Wally Lamb
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.
Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic
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
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.
HarperCollins e-book extra:
Who Is Wally Lamb?
The author addresses the National Endowment for the Arts.
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.