The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  It felt good to exchange smiles. “Hey, speaking of Lolly,” Mo said.

  She told me she’d run into Lena LoVecchio the day before—that Lena had come to the compound to see a client, and she and Mo had chatted for a few minutes. “I mentioned that I was reading Lizzy’s life story, and I said how we wouldn’t have known any of these things if you hadn’t rented out the upstairs to someone whose field was Women’s Studies. And Lena said that Janis wouldn’t have found any of that stuff if Lolly hadn’t hijacked it.”

  “Hijacked?” I said. “What did she mean by that?”

  “That’s what I asked her. Do you remember when they started harassing Lolly? Bullying her so that she’d resign?”

  “How could I forget?” I said. “She gave me the blow-by-blows every single Sunday night.”

  “Well, according to Lena, Lolly saw the writing on the wall. She knew they were gunning for her. For some reason, all of her grandmother’s old records and diaries and letters were still here at the prison. Stuffed in a storage closet someplace. But when Lolly said she wanted it all back, they said no. That it was state property, even Lizzy’s correspondence. And, come on. Lizzy had written and received those letters before this place even existed. And it wasn’t because DOC was actually interested in Lydia’s archives. They just were saying no to spite her.”

  “Sounds about par for the course,” I said.

  “So, according to Lena, Lolly said screw it, and she took it all home anyway. Carried everything out of here piecemeal, a box at a time.”

  “No shit,” I said. “I knew she’d defied them about taking Lydia’s wooden sign, but I didn’t know she’d boosted all the other stuff, too. God, there’s a ton of it up there—filing cabinets full. Must have taken her weeks. How the hell did she get away with it?”

  “I asked Lena that. She said Lolly told her that was one of the benefits of working second shift. When you left the place at eleven o’clock at night, you could walk out of there with the warden’s desk strapped to your back and nobody’d bat an eye.”

  I laughed, shook my head. “She was a gutsy one, wasn’t she?”

  “She was more than that, Cae. Janis may have put all the pieces together, but Lolly’s the one who carried those pieces out of here. She rescued your family history for you…. Oh, I’m sorry, Cae. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “No, it’s just that…” I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand. “I loved her so much, you know? I just can’t remember ever telling her I did.”

  “Well, whether you did or not, she knew, Cae. I know she knew.”

  I nodded. Sniffled a little more. “God, lately? I’m like a human fountain or something. I cry so much, they ought to put me on Dr. Phil.”

  “I think some of those tears have been waiting a long time to come out,” Mo said. “And it’s good that they are, Cae. It’s healthy.”

  “Yeah, okay. So anyway, that’s enough about me and my screwed-up family. How you doing? Everything okay here at Camp Quirk?”

  More or less, she said. She’d written to the deputy warden about the women’s harassment of Crystal. And miracle of miracles, he’d taken it seriously, she said. Had the ringleader transferred to a different tier, warned the others that he wanted it stopped, and told his COs to be on the lookout and let him know if it didn’t. “So far, so good,” Mo said. “Oh, and Crystal’s going to start hospice training. Her approval just came through today. I think it’ll be good for her, Cae. Whatever did or didn’t happen that day her baby died, the guilt she feels has paralyzed her. Comforting the dying will allow her to do something merciful. And maybe that will help her to…”

  “Forgive herself?”

  Maureen shook her head. “You never really forgive yourself. At least I haven’t been able to. But if you can find ways to be useful to others, you can begin to figure out how to live inside your own skin, no matter what you did. The girls who commit suicide here? They’re the ones who can’t figure out how to do that. Their guilt just becomes too hard for them to bear. A girl over in Travers Hall killed herself day before yesterday. Hung herself with a plastic garbage bag. She just couldn’t take it anymore.” Maureen asked me if I remembered a cellmate she’d had a while back. “Irina? The Russian woman?”

  I nodded. “Irina the Terrible. The one who was always coughing. Was she the suicide?”

  Mo shook her head. “She’s in hospice now. I’ve been taking care of her. It probably won’t be more than a couple of days.”

  “What’s she dying from?”

  Multiple problems, Mo said. Because of confidentiality, she couldn’t really go into the specifics.

  AIDS? Hepatitis? Hadn’t I read something a while back about an outbreak of TB in Russia? “Tell me she’s not infectious,” I said.

  Instead, Mo assured me that she was careful—that, as a nurse, she knew how to take precautions and make sure the other volunteers took them, too. “But you know something, Cae? Now that Irina’s close to the end, that hostility has left her. And god, she’s so appreciative of small efforts: if I feed her ice chips when her mouth gets dry, or comb her hair. Sometimes at night when she gets scared, she asks for me. And the third-shift COs are pretty good about waking me up and letting me go to her…. She likes me to listen to her stories about when she was a little girl, or sometimes she just wants me to hold her hand. I never would have predicted it when we were stuck in that cell together, but Irina and I have become friends.”

  “She’s lucky she’s got you,” I said.

  “But I’m lucky, too, Cae. That’s what’s so cool about working with hospice patients. It’s reciprocal.”

  Kareem Kendricks came suddenly to mind—his recitation of the seven acts of mercy: minister to the prisoner, bury the dead….

  “You know something?” I said. “You’re a damn good nurse.”

  She broke into a beautiful smile. “I am, aren’t I? Thank you, Caelum.”

  The CO at the desk announced that we should begin our goodbyes. Visits were over in five more minutes.

  “Hey, before I forget,” I said. “Dr. Patel said to say hi. Velvet, too.”

  “Oh, speaking of Velvet, that reminds me,” Mo said. “Father Ralph’s gotten the warden’s okay for a special family mass. We can each invite two people on our visitors’ list. It’s two Sundays from now, January twentieth. I thought maybe you and Velvet?”

  “Could be dangerous for you,” I said. “If she and I show up in a house of worship, that God you believe in will probably start hurling thunderbolts.”

  “But seriously, Cae. Will you come? And ask Velvet?”

  I told her she could count me in, but that Princess Voodoo might be a tougher sell to get to a Catholic mass.

  “Father Ralph’s even gotten the warden to spring for a light lunch after the service. So we’ll be able to share a meal and hang out together for a while, without these stupid tables between us. Which is huge, huh? Father Ralph is awesome.”

  I said I expected nothing less from one of my fellow Four Horsemen.

  “Four Horsemen?” she said. “Oh, okay. Your relay team. Right?”

  “State record holders for umpteen years.”

  “And wasn’t Captain Martineau on that team?” she said.

  I nodded. “Who’d have thunk, back when we were those four skinny high school seniors passing off the baton to one another, that we would have turned into a cop, a priest, a casino big shot, and yours truly…. A lunch, huh? Guess I’ll finally get to taste some of that five-star jailhouse cuisine you’re always raving about.”

  “Cuisine?” Mo said. She got a kick out of that one.

  It had been a good visit—one of the best we’d had since she’d gone in. Thinking about it as I walked back up Bride Lake Road, I caught myself smiling. And as that smile faded, I subtracted in my head the number of months she’d now served from her sixty-month sentence. Twenty-nine down, thirty-one more to go. The day of that family mass, she’d be right about at the halfway mark.

&nbs
p; From: studlysicilian@gmail.com

  To: caelumq@aol.com

  Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007

  Subject: I’m Baaaaack!

  Yo, quirk. Back home with the parental units in toe. Long story. My father fell again. Took some doing but I got them both into St Joe’s, that nursing home over on Rte 14. Bakery’s open again. For now anyway. Stop in when u get a chance. Got a lot to catch you up on.

  “A girlfriend, Al?” I said. “And we’re talking about a real woman here, not the vinyl blow-up kind that arrives in a UPS truck?”

  “Geeze, Quirky, that was so funny, I forgot to laugh.” We were having coffee in the booth by the front window. Seeing him again, I realized how much I’d missed him.

  “So who is this lucky lady?”

  The woman who’d sold him his car, he said.

  “The Mustang widow? Really?”

  She had telephoned him a few weeks after he bought it, he said. “Her stepson was cleaning out her garage for her and he found the ’Stang’s mud flaps. Her husband had had them custom-made at some specialty shop. I think the guy might have been more of a Mustang lunatic than I am.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure you’d take him in the general lunatic category.”

  “Shut up, asshole. Anyways, I drove over to Easterly to pick ’em up, and she goes, ‘Do you want to stay for dinner?’ I got there maybe four, four thirty in the afternoon and I didn’t leave until after eleven. She’s easy to talk to, you know? When you’re with her, you don’t even notice the time. Plus, she’s funny. Sarcastic, kind of. I don’t know, we just hit it off.”

  “So Big Al’s romantically involved,” I said. “Thanks to mud flaps.”

  “Hey, flap this,” he said. “And it didn’t start out as a boyfriend-girlfriend thing either. It was more like, we were just two people talking, telling each other about our lives. Except now it’s kinda turned into something else.”

  He said that after his father’s most recent mishap—it was the third time in six months that Al had had to rush down to Florida—he’d had some tough decisions to make. Had had to lay it on the line to his folks. He couldn’t keep trying to be in two places at once; he had the business to run. “And at night? After Ma and me would get back from the hospital and she’d go to bed? I’d call Dee on my cell. Just to talk to a friend, you know? And after I hung up, I’d feel better about things. Calmer, like. And this one night I called her, she was like, ‘Okay, I’ve done some research for you.’”

  “Research about what?”

  “Old people stuff: home health care, nursing homes, Medicare. She’s the one who found St. Joe’s for us, and believe me, Quirky, that place has saved my ass. Whether or not I’m gonna be able to save this place is another story. I can’t keep operating in the red every month. Hey, if I thought it would beef up business, I’d put my counter girls in thongs, you know? Hell, I’d wear one.”

  “Them, maybe,” I said. “You? Nope. Bad move…. So your parents are okay with going into a nursing home?”

  “They balked at first—my mother, especially. Didn’t want to go someplace where she’d have to live with a bunch of ‘old people.’ And the food thing: nobody can cook the way she can. But she’s getting used to it. And Pop, well, he just kinda goes with the flow. Doesn’t hurt that they got a chapel there, so Ma can walk down the hall to Mass every morning. And the priest they got there’s Italian. I really lucked out there.”

  “And what’s Mama’s take on the girlfriend?”

  “Likes her okay, I think. First time I brought Dee over there, Ma was giving her the evil eye. You know that Sicilian thing: anyone who’s not famiglia’s a little suspect. But Dee’s Catholic, so that helps. Picked up some points when she told Ma she went to parochial school. Her husband who died? That was her second marriage. I haven’t exactly mentioned to Ma that she and her first husband got divorced. Or that she’s a lapsed Catholic.”

  “Well, what the old signora doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” I said. “But cut to the chase, will you? Have you and the widow, uh…?”

  “Have we what?”

  “Done the deed yet?”

  “You writing a book, Quirky? Make that chapter a mystery.”

  “Gee, lover boy’s blushing a little,” I observed. “I’d say that solves that particular mystery. So when do I get to meet your little honey?”

  “Stick around,” he said. “She’s driving over later on. We’re gonna do Chinese, maybe see a movie. You wanna come with us?”

  I declined the offer. Told him I’d swing by St. Joe’s in the next few days to see his folks. Al said if I wanted to see his mother, I could save my gas money. She was in the back. “Got her apron on and her pizelle iron fired up. It’s like she never left the place.”

  And as if on cue, Mrs. Buzzi, all four-foot-ten of her, emerged, lugging the once-famous statue of the Blessed Virgin whose eyes, back in the seventies, had bled a map of Vietnam. “Alfonso!” she said. “What the hell you got this stuck in the back for? Put her in the front window where she belongs.”

  “But, Ma—”

  “Don’t ‘but Ma’ me. This is a Catholic bakery and don’t you forget it.” Ever the dutiful Italian son, Alphonse rose to do her bidding. “And when you’re done with that, get a hammer and some nails and put Padre Pio’s picture back up, too.” I wasn’t sure whether to smile or wince. After the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, her deceased son Rocco, and Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, Padre Pio was the man for Mrs. B. For decades, she had prayed daily to the memory of the mystical, miracle-working priest and had twice made pilgrimages to his birthplace. If Mrs. Buzzi ever sat down and made a list, I was pretty sure her surviving son and her ailing husband would hold spots well below her beloved Padre Pio.

  “Hey, Ma,” Al said. “You see who’s here?”

  She pushed her glasses onto her forehead, squinted over at me, then broke into a smile. “Oh, jeepers Christmas! I didn’t recognize you, sweetheart. Come over here. You got any kisses for an old lady?” We approached each other, arms extended, embraced and smooched. “Oh, my gosh, look how gray you got,” she said, tousling my hair. “Hey, how’s your wife?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “You still saying those novenas for her?”

  “’Course I am, the poor thing. And I’m praying for those poor little babies you found, too. Terrible thing that was, huh? Just goes to show you how much respect there is for human life these days. I don’t know what this world is coming to.” Rather than point out that the babies in my backyard had died a century and a half century earlier, I asked her how Mr. Buzzi was doing.

  She shrugged. “Eh. He’s an old man. What do you expect?”

  “And how about you? Looks to me like St. Joe’s is agreeing with you. You like it over there?”

  “Eh,” she said again. “The food’s lousy. They don’t put enough salt in anything. Their marinara sauce comes out of a can, for Christ’s sake.” When she realized she’d just taken the Lord’s name in vain, she made a hasty sign of the cross. “But it’s easier for this one,” she said, pointing her chin at Al. “So I put up with it. What the hell else am I gonna do?”

  Hammer in hand, Alphonse pounded a nail into the wall. “Yeah, but he’s a good boy, though. Isn’t he, Mrs. B?”

  “Yeah, he is. Don’t tell him, though. I don’t want him to get a big head.”

  A few minutes later, Alphonse had restored the Mama Mia to his mother’s specifications. The Blessed Virgin had been reinstated in her place of honor and plugged in so that her halo, once again, was aglow. Padre Pio’s scowling portrait had been restored to the side wall gallery alongside the framed pictures of President Kennedy, Rocco Buzzi, Mother Teresa, Sergio Franchi (who had once enjoyed biscotti at the Mama Mia), and the curse-breaking 2004 Red Sox, Alphonse’s only decorative flourish.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you again, sweetie pie,” Mrs. B told me. “I gotta get back to my pizelles.” And with that, she hustled, stoop-shouldered, back to the kitchen, wiping her hands on
her apron.

  Al and I shot the shit for a little while longer, and I got up to go. I was putting on my coat when the little bell over the front door tinkled and a smiling, middle-aged woman entered the bakery. “Hey, here she is!” Alphonse said, beaming at the plump, pretty redhead who approached him. “Come over here, hon. I want you to meet someone.” He took her by the hand and brought her to me.

  “Caelum, this is Dolores Kitchen,” Al said. “And Dee, this is my best buddy, Caelum Quirk. But you can call him what I do: Quirk the Jerk.”

  She rolled her eyes and gave him a swat. “Oh, Alfie, grow up,” she said.

  “Yeah, Alfie,” I said. “Pleased to meet you, Dolores.” And I was, too. I liked this woman already.

  FOR THE PRISON MASS, WE invitees gathered in the front foyer, presented our IDs, and, once the COs had located our names on their “approved” list, passed through the metal detector and entered the compound. But instead of stopping, as usual, at the sliding metal door of the visiting room, we were escorted by two COs into the inner sanctum. We walked en masse through a series of doorways, a maze of passageways, and finally reached the wide gray corridor where the special Sunday service would be held. Each of a hundred plastic putty-colored chairs, their backs stenciled with the words “Quirk CI,” had been set up in neat rows, divided by a center aisle. A folded, photocopied program had been placed on each seat. A sober-faced CO wheeled a portable altar through a set of open Plexiglas doors and brought it to rest at the front. For this event, the usual visiting rules had been reversed. Now it was the visitors who took seats and waited for the arrival of the inmates.

  Velvet, seated beside me, was dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, black socks and blood-red sneakers. She’d grown her hair long over the past several months and recently had dyed it jet black. She’d painted her fingernails black, too. It was like being accompanied by a niece of the Addams Family.

  “Psst,” she whispered. “Why do I smell onions?”