by Lamb, Wally
* * *
JANIS IS OUT IN CALIFORNIA now—she took a job teaching Women’s Studies at Redwoods University. Moze decided to stay put, and cherubs&fiends.com is thriving. The Micks’ divorce became final a couple of months ago.
Alphonse and Dolores got married. I was Al’s best man and Mrs. B was Dee’s matron of honor—wore a corsage that was half as big as she is. She and I waved the newlyweds goodbye when they drove off to their honeymoon in the Phoenician Yellow Mustang. It’s like Dr. Patel told me once: sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need. After the Mustang disappeared around the corner, I turned to Mrs. B and said, “Well, you’re a widow and I’m a widower. Maybe we should hook up.”
“Nah,” she said. “You’re not my type.”
“No?” I said. “Then who is?”
She thought about it for a few seconds. “Tony Bennett,” she said. “You know what his real name is, don’t you? Benedetto!’
* * *
LIKE AL AND DEE, VELVET and Jesse Seaberry started out as friends and then it turned into something else. I’d gotten to know Jesse by then and had come to like the kid. He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s got a good heart and he’s remained faithful to his sobriety. It was Jesse, in fact, who brought me to my first meeting and later became my sponsor. It’s helped, too. I’m working on the second step.
I’m sleeping better these days. Most nights when I hit the sack, I lie there in the dark and listen to the moving water below. Then I talk to Maureen. Catch her up on what’s been happening. “Velvet’s pregnant,” I’ll say. “Been sick as a dog. She’s due in August.” Or, “Velvet had an ultrasound yesterday. They’re having a boy.” Or, “Well, Mo, you’re never going to believe this one. Today I went and got myself a tattoo.”
“You?” Velvet said when I told her about it.
“Yup. It’s true. I’ve become a marked man.”
“Holy shit. Let me see it.” When I pulled up my pant leg and showed her my calf, she said, “Cool. What is it? A grasshopper.”
“Praying mantis,” I said.
* * *
“SHE’S SHOWING NOW, MO,” I told Maureen the other night. “I can’t believe she’s already halfway through her second trimester. I’m taking her on a field trip this weekend. So on Sunday I’ll probably be talking to you from up there in the Green Mountain State.”
Velvet yacked nonstop for the first couple of hours. Pregnancy this, pregnancy that. But somewhere between White River Junction and Barre, she became quiet. I was quiet, too, lost in my memory of the last time I’d made that trek. After twenty minutes or so of neither of us saying anything, I reached over and turned on the radio. Listened to Van Morrison’s “Moon Dance,” then Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and then that ubiquitous Cher song from several years back: Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…. After it ended, the news came on. The war, the nomination battle between Barack and Hillary, and then something about Columbine. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office had just released a bunch of previously-withheld evidence: things they’d written, videotapes they’d made. When I looked over at Velvet, she was looking back at me.
“In all these years, you’ve never spoken to me about that day,” I said.
She nodded in agreement. Said nothing.
“I’m curious. Did you and Mo ever talk about it with each other?”
She shook her head.
A mile or so later, her eyes on the road ahead, she broke her silence. “I was under a table by myself, over near the wall, when they started killing kids. And I kept saying, not out loud or anything, ‘Don’t see me. Please, please don’t see me.’ And then one of them walked over to where I was. The tall one. All I could see were his boots with his pants tucked inside them. ‘Don’t see me, don’t see me.’ And then he bent down and smiled at me. ‘Peekaboo,’ he said. ‘What do you say, you fucking freak? Would you like to die today? ’ … And I shook my head. I was too scared to speak, but I didn’t want to make him mad, so I just kept shaking my head. And I remember thinking, okay, this is it. This is the end of my shitty fuckin’ life. Just please, not my head. Don’t shoot me in the head…. And then he asked me something. He said, ‘Tell me, mutant girl. Do you believe in god? ’ … And I couldn’t … I didn’t know what answer would make him not shoot me. So I just … I didn’t say anything. I just wanted him to pull the trigger and get it over with, if that was what he was going to do. And to not shoot me in the head. So I closed my eyes and waited. But then nothing happened. And when I opened my eyes again, I saw that his boots had walked away. Had walked to the next table. And then there was this flash. Gunfire or riflefire. He had killed another girl instead of me. And I don’t … I never told anybody about this before, but I’ve thought about it a million times. Not as much as I used to, but … And what I always wonder is why, instead of shooting me, he walked away. But now, lately, it’s kinda been making sense. Because maybe …”
I waited. “Maybe what?” I finally asked.
“Maybe I had to stay alive so I could have this baby.”
With my left hand on the steering wheel, I reached over and took hold of her hand with my right. Squeezed it. Unsqueezed. Squeezed it again. I didn’t let go until we’d passed through the gates of Hope Cemetery.
I took her first to see Pandora. Velvet touched the statue’s cheek, its hair. Then she knelt down before the open jar, reached in, and caressed the tiny granite baby. It sort of shocks me to say it, but I think Velvet may turn out to be a damn good mother.
“Do you mind if I wander around by myself?” she asked.
“Course not,” I said. “Go to it.” So we set off in different directions.
Later, I found her standing in front of an angel in flight—another of her grandfather’s works, she told me later. “Hey!” I called. “You about ready to go?” As she turned to face me, she was blocking off the angel’s torso but not its wingspan. For a second, it looked like Velvet herself could fly.
* * *
WE GOT BACK TO THREE Rivers a little after midnight, and when I dropped her off at the farmhouse, she hesitated before getting out of the car.
“I Googled your name the other day,” she said.
“Quirk?”
“No, Caelum. It’s from astronomy—the name of a constellation or something.”
I nodded. “It’s in the Southern Hemisphere.”
“I’ve always liked your name. Jesse does, too. How do you think this sounds: Caelum Morgan Seaberry?”
“I like it,” I said. “I like it a lot.”
“Yeah, I like it, too. Grandpa.”
“Grandpa?” I said. “So I’m your father?”
“Yup. Sucks for you, huh? Whoa.” She laughed and touched her stomach. “Baby’s kicking. Want to feel him?”
She pulled up her shirt and I placed my hand against the curve of her big, veiny belly. “Man, Bruce Lee’s got nothing on this kid,” I said.
She thanked me for the trip and got out of the car. I cried all the way back to the condo.
* * *
IN AA, THE FIRST THING you have to do is cop to your own impotence and surrender to a higher power. How you define that higher power is up to you….
God: big G, little g? Buddha? Allah? The Holy Trinity? Is god the DNA we bring forth? The genes that mutate on the cliff’s edge of chaos? Beats me. For all I know, god may be nothing more—or nothing less—than the sound of the moving water outside your window.
What I do know is that we are powerless to whoever or whatever god is. That was your tragic mistake, Eric and Dylan: your assumption that the power of the gods was yours to wield. That vengeance solved anything.
Anyway, I’m Grandpa now—eligible for the senior citizen discount at Dunkin’ Donuts whether I want it or not, so I guess my best course of action is to stop resisting and grow old gracefully. Wisely. In the fifty-plus years of my life so far, I’ve known many sorrows, but I also have been the recipien
t of many valuable gifts, the student of many wise teachers. Among them are these.
An old woman who had witnessed the horrors of war returned home and still could see a forsythia bush’s explosion of yellow in springtime, still could hear the music of melted snow rushing past in a nearby brook. “Gifts from God, these sights and sounds,” she wrote. “This placid here and now.”
“The question you gotta ask isn’t Why? or If?” a wise old man once advised me as we sat in a bar in Queens, New York. “The question is How?”
“I can’t do it,” I had insisted on a dark and lonely road between Boston and home, but my loving aunt had insisted I could. And when I tried again, that stubborn lug nut, miraculously, had loosened and turned.
When I was a boy, I saw a laughing man perform a dance of hunger that turned, without pause, into a dance of love. And in my third and final attempt at marriage, I learned, alongside Maureen, how to master the steps of Mr. Mpipi’s dance…. Hi, Mo. It’s me again. I just wanted to let you know that I do believe that there’s life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.
* * *
AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.
I looked away, then, from the impotent man-beast and down at the bust of Levi Popper, one of my fallen ancestor-uncles. I reached out and placed the curved palm of my hand against his cool marble skull. And in my hand resided, too, the tactile memory of what I had felt half an hour earlier, when I’d placed it against Velvet’s swollen belly. Feeling both at once—the cool, silent pull of the dead-but-living past and the rigorous kick of the future: that was when I finally understood what had until then eluded me.
Yes, that was when and how it happened.
That was the hour I first believed.
Acknowledgments
I COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN this novel without the support and help of my family. Christine, my bride of the past thirty years, as ever, lent me to my characters, responded to my umpteen drafts (armed with Post-it notes), and gave me the invaluable gifts of her patient understanding and her love. Our son Jared’s teaching experiences in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward led me to the creation of Katrina refugees Moses and Janis Mick. Jared’s brother Justin, a writer and performance poet, offered critical feedback to my work in progress and exposed me to some of the great music—classic r&b, gospel, and hip-hop—that helped me tell the story. Teddy, our youngest, on his final day as a third grader, carried home from school a praying mantis egg case—a science experiment that had failed because the insects had never hatched. Later that summer, Teddy’s dormant egg case exploded with the hundreds of eyelash-sized mantises which became, in the novel, a symbol of good’s triumph over evil and an invitation to hope. Our sons’ honorary aunt, Ethel Mantzaris, one of my best and closest friends, was The Hour I First Believed’s head cheerleader. She told me so often and with such assurance that I could and would finish the novel that, after a while, I began to believe her.
What a lucky writer I am to have Terry Karten as my editor and Kassie Evashevski as my literary agent. Terry, who edits some of the finest authors in the world, agreed to take on my imperfect monster of a manuscript, and in doing so, helped me make the book more wisely, deeply, and sharply observed. Kassie is, in equal measures, savvy, sweet, and supportive; I’m grateful for her guidance and fortunate to have her first-rate representation. I’m thankful, too, for the HarperCollins team—for Jane Friedman’s and Michael Morrison’s wise stewardship and Jonathan Burnham’s brilliant editorial direction, for the enthusiasm and expertise of Kathy Schneider, Tina Andreadis, Beth Silfin, Leslie Cohen, Miranda Ottewell, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Sandy Hodgman, Christina Bailly, and Christine Boyd. Special thanks to Art Director Archie Ferguson for his patience, imagination, and keen artistic eye. And a tip of the hat for the Harper sales team, the best in the biz. My German publisher, Dr. Doris Janhsen, was kind and generous enough to read my manuscript at the halfway mark and offer me her valuable insights. (“Velvet may be the key to the meaning of the entire novel,” she said, and lo and behold, she was right.) My former editor and publisher, Judith Regan, championed my writing from the very beginning, and for her faith in me and my work I remain deeply appreciative. I am thankful, as well, to Oprah Winfrey and her staff; the Oprah’s Book Club endorsements of my two previous novels have led me to a readership far wider than I could have ever imagined.
On the homefront, I’m indebted to my two office assistants, Lynn Castelli and, later, Aaron Bremyer. Lynn’s research during the early stages of this book was thorough and impeccable. Aaron’s research was invaluable as well, and his willingness to listen to various drafts of chapters in progress and offer his response is deeply appreciated. And I am both indebted to and in awe of the members, past and present, of my two writing groups, talented scribes all, without whose help I could not have written this novel. They are: Doug Anderson, Susan Campbell, Bruce Cohen, Susanne Davis, Leslie Johnson, Terese Karmel, Pam Lewis, Sari Rosenblatt, and Ellen Zahl. Thanks as well to Margaret Hope Bacon, whose book Abby Hopper Gibbons: Prison Reformer and Social Activist inspired the character Lizzy Popper.
Thanks to my students and friends at York Correctional Institution. Each of the incarcerated writers I have worked with has added to my undemanding of crime and punishment in America and has taught me the importance of helping the silenced find and use their voices. The following DOC staff members, past and present, have also been supportive of me in the writing of this book: Dale Griffith, Jeri Keltonic, Evva Larson, Joe Lea, Monica Lord, Karen Oien, and Leslie Ridgway. And my deepest gratitude extends, of course, to Susan Cole and Careen Jennings, my fearless workshop co-facilitators.
A number of professionals shared with me the two-pronged gift of their time and their expertise. Attorneys Steven Ecker and Thomas Murphy advised me as to Maureen Quirk’s legal difficulties. Pharmacist Bob Parzych, one of my oldest and best buddies, advised me as to Maureen’s chemical dependency issues. Toward that end, Bob also consulted with Dr. Evan Fox of Hartford Hospital. Dr. Steven Dauer read the manuscript from a psychologist’s viewpoint and gave me valuable feedback and advice. Nick Buonocore, owner of the late and still-lamented Sugar Shack Bakery, taught me everything I needed to know about doughnut-making. Photo archivist Rick Goeren shared his knowledge of all things Miss Rheingold. Joline Gnatek, whose father served as farm manager of Connecticut’s State Farm for Women, provided period details about what life on “The Farm” was like “back in the day.” Literary agents Leigh Feldman, Linda Chester, Laurie Fox, and Jennifer Walsh offered friendship and guidance. Vic Butsch gave me a valuable assist with the Civil War material. Jonny Marks helped me with Peppy Schissel’s Yiddish idiom. I am grateful to the staff and volunteers of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, and to its directors past and present: John Boyer, Debra Petke, and Jeffrey Nichols. Bernice Bennett, owner of the home in which my office is located, provided comic relief and sustenance (gingerbread, pudding, Swedish coffee cake, etc., etc.) throughout my writing of this book. Much appreciated, Bunny! Thanks to Jerry, Deb, and Matt Grabarek for information about dairy farming, corn mazes, and ghost sightings. Thanks as well to the late Matthieu Keijser, who gifted me with a copy of Kaos, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 1984 film based on the works of Luigi Pirandello, and further piqued my curiosity about chaos theory. Matthieu, rest in peace.
Finally, as a graduate of the Norwich Free Academy and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program, and a past recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, I remain ever grateful to these institutions for having launched me on my way.
Praise for
The Hour I First Believed
“[Lamb] knows just how to let the details of a tragedy unfold without decoration or commentary. He’s a master at the kind of direct, unadorned
narrative that brings these events alive in all their visceral power…. This portrayal of a couple dealing with the asymmetrical effects of trauma is Lamb at his best, wholly sympathetic, deeply moving.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Lamb’s narrative … quickly pulls the reader into the lives of its characters…. Lamb casts a wide net and hauls back themes both grand and personal…. Lamb is exceptional in his exploration of the direct and indirect impacts of survivor guilt.”
—Denver Post
“A moving … story that seesaws between hope and despair.”
—Boston Globe
“Lamb … has delivered a tour de force, his best yet. Grade: A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Profound and moving…. The beauty of The Hour I First Believed, a soaring novel as amazingly graceful as the classic hymn that provides the title, is that Lamb never loses sight of the spark of human resilience…. Lamb’s wonderful novel offers us the promise and power of hope.
—Miami Herald
“Lamb does an extraordinary job narrating some of the most terrifying tragedies of the past ten years…. This is an epic journey that ponders the inexplicable nature of tragedy and its terrible repercussions. Through the chaos, Lamb reveals a quiet thread of hope. Grade: A.”