by Wally Lamb
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not. I’m going to read it. But I can’t just drop everything and—”
I stopped mid-sentence because that’s exactly what I was doing: patronizing her, bullshitting her. I’d been doing it for weeks.
The kettle whistled. She poured her tea and started to leave. But at the doorway, cup in hand, she stopped. Turned and faced me. “Caelum, the thing that happened between us while Moses was away? It just happened, that’s all. We were both feeling a little vulnerable that night, a little sorry for ourselves. We’d both had too much wine.”
Nodding in agreement, I began to gather my stuff together so I could work someplace else.
“We made a mistake. It doesn’t have to be a wedge between us.”
“A wedge?”
“Oh, come on, Caelum. You know what I mean. We don’t run together anymore. You don’t share meals with us like you used to. Half the time when I talk to you, you won’t even look at me. And this refusal of yours to read my work: it’s passive-aggressive. And it hurts.”
“Being busy makes me passive-aggressive?”
“You couldn’t read sixty pages in six weeks? About your own ancestor? No one’s that busy, Caelum. Look, we didn’t plan for it to happen. It just—”
“I planned for it to happen, okay? I kept pouring you that wine hoping it would happen.”
That stopped her, momentarily. “And I kept drinking it,” she finally said. “So maybe I was hoping it would happen, too.”
“Does he know?”
“Moses? Oh, God, no. I would never—”
“Good,” I said. “Great. Because you know something? I’ve been the husband who got cheated on. And you know what? It sucks when you find out. It hurts like hell.”
She blinked back tears. “Caelum, why are you so mad at me?”
“I’m not. I’m mad at…” At who? I wondered. The uptight mother who wasn’t really my mother? The mother who was screwing two guys that summer? My straight-talking aunt who had kept it from me, too? “Never mind,” I said. “I can’t go into it.”
“Can’t?” she said. “Or won’t?”
I had to pull the plug on this going-nowhere conversation, so without answering her, I stuffed my students’ papers inside my grade book and stood. Let her think that my not reading that damn thing was about what we did that night. Let her flatter herself that that’s all that was on my plate…. And besides, it had hurt like hell—getting that phone call out of the blue that night from Hay’s wife’s meddlesome friend. We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife is having an affair. That phone call had lit a fire in my head, and it had spread as fast and wild as the one that killed all those people at the Cocoanut Grove that night, Ethel Dank included…. If things hadn’t gone the way they did—if that pipe wrench had crushed Paul Hay’s skull like I’d meant for it to do—then it might have been me sitting in prison for having killed someone….
Janis? Yeah, I still wanted her. But she was someone else’s wife, and telling her the truth about why I couldn’t bring myself to read her paper would have been another kind of intimacy between us. No. Uh-uh. If I was going to get into my paternity problem with anyone, it wasn’t going to be Janis.
“BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, Cae,” Maureen said. “Why would some town clerk affix her seal to a phony birth date?” I had just confessed my confusion about who I was and wasn’t in, of all places, the ugly gray-walled visitors’ room, under the gaze of surveillance cameras and a scowling CO with a buzz cut and a bulked-up torso.
“I don’t know. Money, maybe?”
“From who?”
“From whoever wanted my birth hushed up. The married beer executive, maybe. Or the ballplayer. I Googled him. He was married, too.”
“But Cae, hold on a minute. If you’re not a Quirk, then why do you look like your father?”
“I don’t look like him. There’s no resemblance between him and me. It’s just that Lolly used to say it so often, everyone took it as the truth.”
Mo shook her head. “You know those family photos Lolly used to have up in her bedroom?” she said. “One time, she put your high school yearbook picture next to your father’s. I saw the resemblance, Cae. It wasn’t just Lolly telling me.”
“That’s what pisses me off the most,” I said. “The fact that she was just as big a liar as the rest of them. Lies and secrets: that’s what the Quirks were all about. And Lolly was as much a part of the big cover-up as any of them.”
Mo said she hadn’t known any of the others, so she couldn’t vouch for them. “But I knew Lolly, Cae. She loved you. And in spite of how confusing this must be for you right now, you should try to remember that. Lolly never would have done anything to hurt you intentionally.”
“Well, she did hurt me. Never used to shut up about Quirk this, Lydia that. But she couldn’t let me know who my mother was? That hurts like hell.”
“I understand that. And it was wrong for her to withhold it from you. You had a right to know. But Lolly must have been torn about it: whether to tell you the truth or protect you from it. She was very protective of you, Cae.”
“Protective? Really? Jesus, my neck still hurts from some of those headlocks she used to put me in.”
Maureen smiled. “I’m serious, though, Cae. You know what Lolly told me once? That before Hennie, she’d been involved with another woman. Someone named Maggie, who she was crazy about. There’d been a plan in the works. Lolly was going to ‘get out of Dodge,’ as she put it. Get out from under her father’s yoke and move down to Florida with Maggie. They had it all figured out; there was this trailer park they were going to move into—a lesbian community that sort of flew under the radar, I guess. But in the end, she broke it off and stayed put. And do you know why? Because she couldn’t leave you, she said. Her brother wasn’t reliable, and she felt that your mother had her limitations: her temper, her resentment about the way your father—”
“Rosemary wasn’t my mother,” I said. “I was just tricked into believing she was…. When was this, anyway? Because Hennie was around for as far back as I can remember.”
“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:
LOUELLA’S FIRST HAIRCUT, JUNE 1, 1933.
ALDEN’S FIRST HAIRCUT, JUNE 1, 1933.
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.
chapter twenty-eight
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 in August of 1862 and Edmond with the Connecticut Volunteers, 21st Regiment, one month later.