The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  By eleven o’clock, the evening was winding down. Grandmother was gently wakened. Susy, Harmony, and I made promises to write faithfully to one another. Because the night had turned damp and foggy, the Clemenses insisted that their driver bring ’round the carriage so that we should ride rather than walk the short distance back to the Twichells’. I was loath to leave that grand house and to bid farewell to a most magical evening, though all good things must end. Grandmother was helped into the carriage. The long day had exhausted her and her failure to exact a promise from Mr. Twain had disappointed her, but she thanked her hosts and said she hoped we should all meet again. Then, just as I was about to climb into the carriage, Grandmother said, “My shawl. I have forgotten my shawl.”

  Mr. Twain said he would go back inside and retrieve it, but I said no, I would do it. I knew exactly where it was. I did, too, for I had seen the shawl slip from Grandmother’s shoulders to the floor during dinner. My real reason for wanting to retrieve it, however, was so that my eyes, one last time, could look upon that magnificent house with all of its magnificent things.

  Lil, it was when I reentered the Clemenses’ dining room, picked up Grandmother’s shawl from the floor, and was about to leave that I committed my theft. It was an impulsive act. I heard the soft clatter from the kitchen, the voices outside through the open window. I was completely alone in that beautiful room and felt I must take away some small part of it. I walked over to the vase that held the peacock feathers. When I bent the top third of the tallest and most beautiful, its thin shaft snapped easily. I hid the purloined feather in the folds of Grandmother’s shawl and returned outside. I know it was wicked of me, Lil, but I am glad I did it and am today strangely without remorse.

  Last night, as I lay in bed next to Grandmother in the Twichells’ guest room, my head filled with the sights of my amazing day: those thousands of gray-haired soldiers, the majestic brownstone Arch, Mrs. Clemens in her elegant green gown, the delicate ice cream cherubs. “He’s a cock of the walk if you ask me,” Grandmother muttered. “Such comforts and luxuries will prove detrimental to his character and his soul…. He calls that singing? I call it caterwauling.” I drifted off to sleep to the sounds of our disappointed grandmama’s myriad disapprovals and her gaseous digestion.

  And now, Lil, just a moment ago, an unexpected surprise! The ticket agent emerged from his cage to announce that the train to New Haven will be arriving momentarily. A cheer rose up from the crowd to hear the news, and as I looked from traveler to traveler, my eyes fell upon the face of a man I recognized but could not immediately place. I watched this man’s approach to Grandmother and realized, suddenly, that it was Mr. Twain’s carriage driver—he who had delivered us back to the Twichells’ last evening. “He was going to post this to you, Missus,” the driver told Grandmother. “But then we heard about the delay here at the station and he said to bring it to you direct. He wrote it this morning before he come downstairs.” And with that he handed an envelope to her. Inside was a typewritten, hand-signed endorsement letter from Mr. Twain, his signature at the bottom so big and bold that I could read it from two seats away. Strange, Lil. Until yesterday, I have never known our stoic old gran to shed tears. Yet here in Hartford, I have seen her cry twice.

  Yours ever so truly,

  Lydia

  P.S.

  Here is a queer thing, Sis—something I had forgotten to record until this second. As if I had not yesterday already seen far too much of the curious Mr. Tesla, during the night I dreamt of him as well. A strange dream it was. Mr. Tesla was himself but also somehow a stallion in a field, and I was astride him, riding swiftly and recklessly without benefit of a saddle.

  chapter twenty-two

  I HAD TOURED HARTFORD’S MARK Twain House many times with my high school students but drove there on that beautiful Indian-summer Sunday so that Janis could see for herself the place where my adolescent great-grandmother had dined with the country’s most renowned author, the inventor of alternating electrical current, the architect of American football, and the stage actor who would later don inverness coat and deerstalker cap to become the quintessential Sherlock Holmes. “Caelum, you’ve got to read this! Oh, my God, what a find!” Janis had said, wide-eyed, when she unearthed from the chaos of sun-porch clutter young Lydia’s account of her Hartford trip and rushed downstairs to show me. After I’d finished reading the diary entry, she’d handed me a stack of printouts—the result of her Google searches on Nikola Tesla, Walter Camp, and William Gillette.

  We, the assembled ticket buyers, were a motley group: five clucking Red Hat Society ladies, two gaunt design students who’d driven up from NYU to check out the house’s Tiffany flourishes, a Minnesota couple and their bored-out-of-his-mind teenage son, plus Janis and me. At the start of the tour, our guide—“Hope Lunt,” her name tag said—had asked us to tell a little about ourselves. “A teacher,” I’d said, and Janis had identified herself noncommittally as someone interested in history.

  “Now the mantel we’re standing in front of was salvaged from a Scottish castle destroyed by fire in the early nineteenth century,” Hope said. She was one of those well-heeled West Hartford women of a certain age: tanned, tastefully dressed, and of an economic level that allowed for volunteer work and gold jewelry. “Sam purchased it during one of his European lecture tours and had it shipped here with the instruction that this date be carved into it.” She touched her fingertips to the numerals 1874.

  We were in Twain’s library. To our right was the conservatory, with its lush greenery and softly trickling fountain. To our left was the room where Lydia had eaten poached oysters and ice cream cherubs and later swiped herself a peacock feather. Miraculously, that feather had remained hidden between the pages of her diary for a hundred and twenty years. Despite the “Dear Lillian” salutations, that was apparently what all those entries had been: never letters meant to be sent, but daily reflections bound between hard covers. When Janis had shown me the feather, I’d picked it up and it had fallen apart in my hand.

  “Eighteen seventy-four? Any guesses as to the significance of that date?” Hope asked.

  One of the Red Hats wondered if that was the year the family had moved in.

  “Exactly! And here they lived happily for the next seventeen years.”

  Hope told us about the family’s storytelling ritual: how the Clemens girls would demand their father tell them impromptu tales by incorporating the paintings and knickknacks on and around the mantel. “And little Jean always had to have a tiger,” Janis whispered. We shared the look of coconspirators.

  “But by 1891, the troubles had begun and the family found it necessary to close up the house where they’d shared such happy times,” Hope said.

  “What sorts of troubles?” the Minnesota mom asked.

  “Well, Sam’s disastrous financial investments for one. And for another, the untimely death of the eldest daughter, Susy.” From Janis, standing beside me, I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Now this mantel was eventually removed and installed at Stormfield, Sam’s retirement home in Redding. That building, too, was destroyed by fire and curators assumed that the mantel had been lost in the blaze. But fortunately, it was discovered stored away in a barn and in 1958 was returned here to its rightful place on Farmington Avenue.”

  “How did Susy die?” Janis asked.

  “Oh, it was sad. Sam had fallen so deeply into debt that he was forced to mount a grueling year-long lecture tour that took him as far away as California and Australia. Mrs. Clemens and the couple’s middle daughter, Clara, traveled with him, but Susy and Jean, the youngest child, stayed behind. They were to join the others in England that summer, but Susy contracted spinal meningitis shortly before they were to sail. She deteriorated quite quickly, poor thing, and as her condition worsened, the congestion in her brain caused her to hallucinate and go blind. Friends and family thought it might comfort her to be in familiar surroundings, so they reopened the house and brought her back here. Sam stayed in England
, but Mrs. Clemens and Clara rushed back to be with Susy. Unfortunately, they were still two days from port when the end came. Mrs. Clemens could never bring herself to set foot in this house again. Sam came back here once, shortly before it was sold. We know from his letters that he felt terribly guilty about his daughter’s death—that if he hadn’t been so reckless with his finances, Susy would not have had to be without the comfort of her mother at the hour of her death.”

  Sad sighs from the Red Hat ladies. Janis looked close to tears. I caught myself mumbling the phrase my mother had repeated over and over each night while fingering her rosary beads: Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

  The teenager from Minnesota groaned out his boredom, and his dad reached over and swatted the back of his head. “What?” the kid said, scooping his baseball cap from the floor. I couldn’t help but smile. Sometimes I missed all those high school lunkheads I’d taught.

  “Well, on to more cheerful subjects!” Hope announced. “We’ll move on now to the second floor, so if you’ll follow me back to the entrance hallway. Please use the banister on your way up.”

  It happened as I was climbing the stairs. Thinking about “fairhaired, rosy-cheeked” Susy Clemens dying alone, I heard, out of nowhere, the explosion of rifle fire and shattering glass. I saw kids scrambling to escape. Saw Rachel and Danny, struck and lying there, dying alone outside the school. Nauseous, I took another step and saw Morgan Seaberry starting across the road, Maureen’s car bearing down on him without braking. When I heard the ugly thud of the impact, it dropped me to my knees….

  I LOOKED UP AT RED hats and concerned faces. Had I just passed out? “I’m all right,” I kept insisting. “Got a little dizzy and missed a step, that’s all. I think I’ll go out, get some air.” When Janis started to leave the tour with me, I insisted she stay. “I’m fine. Really. I’ll meet you in the gift shop. Enjoy.”

  I sat out in the sun for a few minutes, gathering myself, waiting for my hands to stop shaking. I was grasping for the first time, maybe, the terrible power of Maureen’s flashbacks. Or maybe not. I mean, how can you flash back to things you never experienced in the first place? Whatever the hell had just happened in there, I knew one thing: I was going to shut up about it. I’d tripped on the stairs. That was my story, and I was sticking to it.

  Killing time in the gift shop, I browsed through a book of Sam Clemens’s correspondence. I knew the Mark Twain everyone knew—the witty curmudgeon in the white suit who, according to Lydia’s account, stayed in character even at his own dinner table. Maybe his letters revealed the man behind the mask. I turned to the year 1896—to what he’d written from England in the wake of his daughter’s death. To his grieving wife, tending to Susy’s burial without him, he wrote,

  It rains all day—no, drizzles, and is sombre and dark. I would not have it otherwise…. She died in our house—not in another’s; died where every little thing was familiar and beloved; died where she had spent all her life till my crimes made her a pauper and an exile…. The beautiful fabric of her mind did not crumble to slow ruin, its light was not smothered in slow darkness, but passed swiftly out in a disordered splendor. Think of it—if she had lived and remained demented. For Dr. Stearns once told me that for a person whose reason is once really dethroned there is no recovery, no restoration.

  When I closed my eyes to his words, I saw Maureen, seated across from me in the Bride Lake visiting room—a pale, rail-thin prisoner who almost never smiled. A damaged woman crumbling to slow ruin…. I recalled our brutal separation that day: me, stranded across the country, unable to reach her, unable to fly back fast enough, and Mo hiding inside that cabinet, mouthing her silent Hail Marys….

  “WHAT’S IN THE BAG?” JANIS asked.

  “Hmm? Oh. Book of Twain’s letters. I’m not sure why I bought it.”

  She suggested we skip Bushnell Park and just drive home. “I’m fine,” I said. “Hungry, too. We didn’t pack that picnic lunch for nothing.”

  “But you said you got dizzy before. At least let me drive.”

  “Hey, who knows Hartford? You or me?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “You men.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were standing before the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Janis said it looked pretty much the way she’d pictured it from Lydia’s description. “Except for the addition of these aesthetically pleasing cement barricades,” I said. I explained that the Arch had been on the news a while back. Someone’s SUV had bashed into it and done damage. It had been repaired since, from the looks of it, but the barricades had remained to prevent further collisions between gas guzzlers and historical landmarks.

  “But where’s the river?” Janis said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Lydia wrote that the Arch spanned a river—the same one that ran behind the Twain house. But I didn’t notice any river there either.”

  I said maybe it had dried up, or maybe the city had filled it in for some reason—forced it underground.

  “You can do that? Make a river go underground?”

  “Civil engineers can. Sure.”

  We grabbed a picnic table and unpacked the lunch we’d brought. There were mallards in a pond, and twenty-first-century kids “skylarking” along the water’s edge. “Santiago!” a young mom screamed. “Don’t bother those ducks!”

  Janis took a bite of her sandwich. She looked lost in thought.

  “Yoo-hoo,” I said.

  “Oh. Sorry. I was just thinking that that’s what your ancestry’s like. Anyone’s ancestry, really—not just yours, but yours is what’s on my mind because of Lydia’s diaries.” I told her I wasn’t following her. “Think about it,” she said. “What do we do when our elders die?”

  “Call the undertaker and start fighting over the will,” I quipped.

  “No, really. We put them in the ground, right? But we also carry them forward because our blood is their blood, our DNA is their DNA. So we’re intimately connected to these people whose lives—whose histories—have gone underground and become invisible to us.”

  “Like that river,” I said.

  “Right. Except in your case, a spring has bubbled up. Your great-grandmother is speaking to you, Caelum.”

  I started humming the Twilight Zone theme, but the reference went flying past her. Hey, why wouldn’t it have? The week before, Janis had turned twenty-nine. “I think Lydia’s speaking more to you than me,” I said.

  “To both of us, maybe. And, oh! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this. This morning? Before we left? I was looking in that old gray filing cabinet—the one with the wide drawers? The bottom one was jammed, and I had to keep yanking, but then, wham, it came flying open. And guess what was in there. Lizzy Popper’s letters! Your great-great-great grandmother!”

  “Wow,” I said, amused by her enthusiasm. “Whoopee.”

  “No, seriously, Caelum. Letters written to her and what looks like carbons of letters she wrote to other people. Bundles of them, tied up with velvet ribbons. I haven’t gone through any of it yet, but if she wrote about her nursing during the Civil War? Or her lobbying efforts? Oh, my God, that filing cabinet’s a treasure chest! It’s okay if I look through it all, isn’t it?”

  “Have at it,” I said. “I’m just glad someone’s interested. After my aunt died and we moved back here, I tried donating all that old stuff. One historical society said they didn’t have the space to house it, and the other never even called me back. I was going to heave it all, but I never got around to it.”

  Janis winced at the thought.

  “I remember her, you know.”

  “Remember…?”

  “My great-grandmother.”

  “Lydia? You do?”

  “Uh-huh. I must have been about eight or nine when she died. Hard to believe that feisty girl in the diary and the tappy old white-haired lady I remember were the same person.”

  “Tappy as in senility?”

  “Or Alzheimer’s maybe. Is Alzheimer’s
hereditary? That’s what her son died from. My Grandpa Quirk.”

  Janis wanted to hear more about Lydia.

  “Well, let’s see. She smelled mediciny—like liniment or something. And when she crapped her pants, well, that was a different aroma.”

  “She was incontinent?”

  I nodded. “And she was always taking her teeth out. Unless she was being fed, her upper plate would be sitting on her tray, smiling at you. She was bedridden, pretty much, but sometimes they’d bring her out on the sun porch. I didn’t like going near her. Used to sneak past in the hallway because…”

  In the act of conjuring Great-Grandma for Janis, I was becoming a kid again, demoted back to a childhood I preferred to keep a lid on, snapped tight as Tupperware.

  “You snuck past her because—?” Janis coaxed.

  “Because if she saw me, she’d call out. ‘Boy! Come here, boy!’ And then I’d have to go in there and let her pat me like a dog. Have to kiss her doll. She was always holding this rag doll and she’d…used to…” I looked up at Janis. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What?”

  “I just remembered her doll’s name. ‘Kiss my Lillian,’ she’d say.”

  “She named the doll after her sister?”

  “I guess. God, why was she so fixated on this Lillian?”

  Janis shrugged. “Who took care of her? Your mother?”

  “No, no. Mother worked at a bank, so she pretty much dodged that bullet. Used to do her laundry, but that was it. Lolly worked, too—on the farm during the day and then over at the prison at night. This housekeeper we had? Hennie? She took care of her during the day. And at night, after Grandpa was done with the milking and had had his supper, he’d take over.”