The Hour I First Believed

Lolly hung the sign in the bedroom she shared with Hennie.

Hennie died in May.

I sent Maureen back East to the funeral instead of going myself.

And for the next two years, Sunday night after Sunday night, the phone would ring, and I’d guard myself against her frustration and her loneliness. Half-listen to her account of whatever latest stunt they were pulling over there at “Grandma’s prison,” then pass the phone to Maureen.

AT THE WEST END OF the property, I tramped around in what had once been our cornfields. They were a fallow, neglected mess now, blanketed with dead leaves, weeds, and junk-food wrappers. I walked all the way back to the gravel pit, trying to pinpoint where, exactly, the maze had been. And in the middle of figuring it out, I was clobbered by the sudden remembrance of what, earlier that day, had eluded me: my father’s wake….

It had been at McKenna’s Funeral Home: closed-casket, pitifully attended, and me standing there, wearing that itchy woolen suit they’d bought me for the occasion. I’d held my breath each time Mr. McKenna swung open the vestibule door, afraid that the next mourner might be someone from my school—someone who had connected me to that drunk in the newspaper—the fucking missing-toothed failure of a man who hadn’t even managed to get himself out of the way of a moving train.

Then someone from school had come: Mr. Cyr, my freshman cross-country coach. He offered condolences to my mother, aunt, and grandfather. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said he was sorry for my loss, and that he knew how it felt because he had lost his father when he was in high school, too. I nodded, mumbling uh-huhs and thank-yous without looking at him. His kindness filled me with contempt: for him, for my father, for myself. I quit cross-country the following week, although not in any aboveboard way. I just stopped showing up for practice. And when Mr. Cyr stopped me in the hall to ask me why, I lied. Told him my grandfather was shorthanded and needed me for farm chores.

And I remembered something else about my father’s wake—that weird disturbance near the end. I’d gone to the restroom, and when I opened the door to return to the viewing room, there she was: the kerchief woman. She was shaking badly, I remember. She said my name and reached toward me, like someone groping for something in the dark. And then my mother, in a voice louder than I had ever heard her use in public before, said, “Oh, good God Almighty! This isn’t hard enough without her showing up here?” She rushed toward us, shouting, “Get away from my son! Don’t you dare touch him! You get out of here! Now!”

Lolly and Hennie hurried Mother out of the room, and Grandpa and Mr. McKenna approached the kerchief woman, coaxing her away from me and out of the building. And then I was standing there, alone, looking back and forth between my father’s coffin and the door through which the kerchief woman had just been given the bum’s rush….

What had ever become of that woman? I wondered.

Who had she been?

Chapter Six

I LIKED VICTOR GAMBOA, WHO was sympathetic without being smarmy. Cradling Lolly’s file, he told me how much he’d enjoyed working with her when they were both second-shift COs. “She was always fair with the ladies, but she didn’t put up with any of their monkey business either. What do they call it now? Tough love? I think your aunt invented it.”

“Or inherited it,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, that was her grandmother’s style, too.”

“Oh, the old lady? Yeah, she’s a legend at that place. Or was, I should say. Different story over there these days.”

“Tough love minus the love, right?”

He nodded. “We get a lot of the suicides.”

Victor had photocopied Lolly’s preference form, and we reviewed it together. She’d requested a nondenominational service, a cut-rate casket, and cremation. Her ashes were to be mixed with Hennie’s (“blue jar in our bedroom”) and spread on the farm. No obituary. (“You have to pay the paper for it now. Nuts to that!”) No flowers. If people wanted, they could buy a book and donate it to the prison library. In the margin, she’d written, “The girls like murder mysteries, movie star biographies, and romance novels.” Under “Music,” she’d written, “Amazing Grace (my grandma’s favorite hymn.)” We scheduled the wake for Wednesday evening, the funeral for Thursday morning.

The form had six slots for pallbearers. Lolly had written:

Caelum Quirk (nephew) Ulysses Pappanikou (employee) Grace Fletcher (friend) Hilda Malinowski (friend) Lena LoVecchio (lawyer) Carl Yastrzemski (ha ha ha)

“Women pallbearers?” I said. “Is that okay?”

“Don’t see why not, if that’s what she wanted,” Gamboa said. “You may have to get a stand-in for Yaz, though.” As far as “Amazing Grace” was concerned, he said he had a recorded version he could pipe in, or he could call the soloist he sometimes used. “Or—” he said. He stopped himself.

“Or what?”

“Department of Correction’s got bagpipers. They hire out, but they’ll usually play gratis if it’s one of their own. Of course, it’d have to be cleared by the higher-ups, which might be a problem. I know that, toward the end, there was no love lost between your aunt and the department.”

“She had good reason to be bitter,” I said. He nodded in agreement. I said the canned music would be fine.

He asked me if I’d bring over an outfit that Lolly could wear to her wake—that day, if possible, or the next morning. I could bring pictures, too, if I liked. Some families liked to display framed photos, or put together a collage of candids. “Celebrate the person’s life,” he said.

I nodded, my mind on something else. “You know what?” I said. “She gave them almost forty years. What the hell. Try for the bagpipes.”

ULYSSES’S PHONE RANG AND RANG, unanswered.

Hilda Malinowski cried when I told her. Lolly and she had been friends since 1964, she said. She’d never been a pallbearer before, but if there was anyone she’d give it a try for, it was Lolly. She just hoped she was strong enough. She’d call Grace Fletcher for me, she said; Gracie was big-boned and she went to Curves, so she should be able to handle pallbearing.

Alice Levesque told me she knew something was up; Lolly hadn’t looked right the last time at bridge club. “She played lousy, too. She was my partner, and I gave her the devil about it. Now I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.”

Millie Monk volunteered to make lemon squares, if we were having a get-together at the house after the funeral, which people would more or less expect, so she suggested I should. Lolly had always loved her lemon squares, she said. “She asked me for the recipe once, and I said, ‘Who are you kidding? You wouldn’t even know how to turn on the oven.’ We always kidded each other like that, her and me. Jeepers creepers, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

Now that she thought about it, Millie said, maybe she’d come over to the house on Tuesday and tidy up a little. Run the vacuum. “Lolly was a sweetie pie, but she was never too zippedy-doo-da on the housecleaning.”

“Caelum Quirk! Long time no talk to,” Lena LoVecchio said. “You haven’t been swinging any more wrenches, have you?” I quieted her horsy laugh with the news about my aunt. “Jesus Christ! You’re kidding me,” she said. Lena told me she’d be honored to help carry Lolly’s casket, and she’d be happy to meet with me while I was in town so that we could talk about the estate. Had I looked over her will? I told her Lolly had sent me a copy, but I’d never read it.

“Well, let’s go over it together then. How does five o’clock tomorrow sound?” I told her I’d be there.

“Last time I saw Lolly was when I took her to a basketball game,” she said. “The Lady Huskies versus the Lady Vols. Lolly wore her UConn sweatsuit and booed Pat Summit so loud, she drowned me out, which isn’t easy to do. That’s how I want to remember her: screaming her head off at Tennessee. Well, okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Tuesday, right?” I asked.

She paused, momentarily taken aback. “Tuesday the twentieth,” she said.

I tried Ulysses a few times more. No answer. Well, I might as well get this over with, I told myself, and headed up the stairs.

Lolly’s bedroom—it had been her grandmother’s originally, and then the room where she and Hennie slept—was at the far end of the hallway, adjacent to the sun porch. The bed was unmade, the blankets and sheets rucked up at the bottom. Nancy Tucker was curled up on Lolly’s pillow. As I entered the room, the floorboards creaked and she opened her eyes and raised her head. Then she jumped from the bed and exited, bellowing down the hallway. “I miss her, too,” I said.

There was clutter all around: on the night table, the chair, the bureau top. The hamper was open, more dirty laundry on the floor around it than in it. Above the bureau, on the wall, were Lolly’s framed photographs: she and Hennie as younger women, arm in arm at some beach; a studio portrait of the two of them in middle age—some bank promotion, if I remembered right. They’d given me a copy of that picture, but I’d never framed it and put it out. There was a black-and-white photo of Grandpa, dark-haired and in a jacket and tie, holding some Farm Bureau award. Lolly’d put up two pictures of Great-Grandma Lydia: a formal portrait of her in an old-fashioned oval frame, and one of her at her desk down at the prison. There were several pictures of me—as a second-grader with missing front teeth, a high school kid, a college grad, a ridiculously young-looking groom at wedding number one.

The two photos that got to me the most that morning—put a lump in my throat and made me sit down on the bed—were the ones she’d hung in the middle of her montage: her own and her brother’s high school graduation portraits. By the time they were both in their twenties, Daddy’s alcoholism had begun to untwin them and, in their mid-thirties, that train speeding toward Boston had made the separation official. But there they both were again, on Lolly’s wall—smiling seventeen-year-olds, hinged together in twin gold frames.

Riding atop Lolly’s photo gallery, hung crookedly six inches below the crown molding, was Great-Grandma Lydia’s wooden sign: “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” I reached up and touched it, inching it back and forth until it was straight.

I opened Lolly’s closet door, looked through her bureau. The top right drawer brimmed with odds and ends: loose pictures, ancient elementary school report cards, a Camp Fire Girls medal, a Ted Williams baseball card from 1946. I removed the lid from a small white cardboard box—“Bill Savitt Jewelers, Peace of Mind Guaranteed.” Inside were two envelopes, labeled in blue fountain pen ink: “Louella’s first haircut, June 1, 1933” and “Alden’s first haircut, June 1, 1933.” I opened Lolly’s envelope. The soft, dead golden tuft between my thumb and fingertips felt creepy and strange. How odd that families kept this kind of stuff, I thought. How strange that children grow up, grow old, and die, but their hair—dead cells, if I remembered from high school biology class—remains as is. I put the lock of Lolly’s hair back in the envelope, tucked in the flap, and put it back in the box. Replaced the lid, closed the drawer. I didn’t open the envelope containing my father’s hair. Couldn’t go there.

Wardrobe-wise, once you eliminated T-shirts, flannel shirts, jeans, and coveralls, there wasn’t much to pick from. I chose the only thing Lolly had bothered to put on a hanger: the brown velour pantsuit she’d worn to Maureen’s and my wedding. If I remembered right, she’d worn it that Christmas afternoon when we’d looked at the old pictures, too. It had a grease stain on the front—no one had ever accused Lolly of being a dainty eater. Maybe I should have it dry-cleaned, or maybe Gamboa’s could camouflage it. It was either this pantsuit or her UConn Huskies sweatsuit, and I was pretty sure that outfit wouldn’t fly with Hilda and Millie and the girls.

From Lolly’s room, I wandered out to the sun porch. Cardboard cartons and wooden apple crates lined the floor. Stacks of ledgers and state reports, leather-bound albums and newspaper clipping files depressed the springs of the sofa bed. Two army-green filing cabinets, chock-full, stood against the west wall. Great-Grandma Lydia’s prison archives mostly, I figured. Lolly had tried several times to get me to look at some of this stuff with her. It would take forever to sift through it and see what I should probably save. Alternatively, it would take twenty minutes to heave it all out the window and let it fall into a Dumpster below.

I picked up one of Lydia’s musty-smelling diaries. Its rotting cloth covers exposed the cardboard beneath; its crumbly, age-browned pages were bound together with what looked like black shoelaces. I opened to a page dated September 17, 1886—a letter that had never been sent, I figured, addressed to a sister of hers named Lillian. “As ever, dear Sis, I struggle with two minds about Grandmother. Here, seated beside me, is the esteemed Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper, brave abolitionist, valiant battlefield nurse, and tireless champion of orphans and fallen women. But here also is the cold woman who has yet to remember her granddaughter’s fifteenth birthday, now eleven days past…. Had Lizzy Popper been in charge during the time of the Biblical flood, she might have led all of God’s creatures onto the ark, two by two, then closed the door against the torrent, and floated away, having forgotten her poor granddaughter at the pier!”

Well, it was interesting in its own way, except I wasn’t that interested. Maybe some historical society would want it. Maybe not. When Maureen and I got back in summertime, I’d have to deal with all this stuff. I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to ship it all out to Colorado. It would cost an arm and a leg to do that, and once it got there, where the hell would we put it all?

I walked up the hallway to Grandpa’s room. It looked the same as it always had, except for the two missing drawers in his mahogany dresser.

At first, Alzheimer’s had merely toyed with Grandpa’s brain. There’d been an incident at CVS when the cashier, having pointed out that his coupon was from the previous week’s circular, refused to give him the sale price on a jar of Metamucil. In response, Grandpa had called her a “dumb nigger” and stormed out of the store, product in hand, without benefit of a purchase receipt. Luckily, the cop who investigated had been, as a teenager, one of our farmhands. He and the store manager talked the cashier out of pursuing my grandfather’s arrest for having used hate speech. Not long after that, we discovered that Grandpa—that most frugal of men—had sent two thousand dollars to an “astronomical consortium” for the purpose of having a star named after his long-deceased wife. The documentation for “the Catherine star” had rolled out of a dot matrix printer, and the Better Business Bureau said there was little they could do without a return address or phone number. In September of that same year, Grandpa drove to the Eastern States Exposition for the Holstein judging—something he’d done every year for decades. He had left the house at seven that morning. One of the fair’s security guards had finally found him at ten p.m., asleep in a Port-a-Potty. He’d wandered the labyrinthine parking lot for hours, searching for a car he’d sold years before and later failing to remember what he was searching for, or where he was.

The mahogany dresser had lost those two drawers one afternoon when Grandpa had felt a chill. Hammer in hand, he’d converted them to kindling, added newspaper, and lit a cozy fire atop his braided rug. That had been the last straw for Hennie. She’d put her foot down—either Lolly was going to take hold of the situation, or she was moving out. Better that than die in a fire! And so Lolly had surrendered her father to Rivercrest Nursing Home.

The relocation had agitated Grandpa at first; he was baffled about why he was there and pissed as hell that an alarm would beep whenever he put on his coat and tried to walk out the front door. He’d had no idea that that alarm was triggered by the plastic bracelet around his ankle, or even that he was wearing a bracelet. Lolly visited Grandpa twice a day, at lunch and dinnertime, usually, figuring that if she bibbed and fed him herself, she wouldn’t have to worry that he wasn’t eating enough. I dragged myself there once or twice a week at first, less frequently as time went on. Entering his sour-smelling room, I’d often find him rifling through his dresser drawers, searching furiously for something he could never quite identify. Eventually, his restlessness subsided and he became sullen and withdrawn, sometimes rapping his knuckles against his skull in frustration. Toward the end, he sat listlessly, recognizing no one.

It was during that final phase of Grandpa Quirk’s life that I met Maureen. A recent divorcée, she had just become Rivercrest’s new second-shift nurse supervisor. Our first conversations centered around my grandfather. Who had he been before the onset of his disease? How had he made his living? Who and what had he loved? It moved me when she said that my answers to her questions would help her give him better care. I’d been divorced from Francesca for three years by then. I hadn’t dated since, or wanted to. But Mo was as pretty as she was compassionate, and my visits to Grandpa Quirk increased. On the night I finally got up the nerve to ask her out, I felt the heat in my face when she said no. Too soon after her divorce, she said; she hoped I understood. “Of course, absolutely,” I’d assured her, nodding my head up and down like freaking Howdy Doody. But a week later, Mo stopped me in the hall to ask if my offer was still good.

I picked her up at the end of her shift and took her to the only place in Three Rivers, other than the dives that my father used to haunt, that was open after eleven p.m. Over mugs of coffee in a booth at the Mama Mia Bakery, we talked about our lives—families, marriages and divorces, the way personal goals and actual outcomes could diverge. And we laughed: about my adventures working for the Buzzi family, about the funny things her patients sometimes said and did. God, that felt good. And when Alphonse came out from the back with a couple of just-made cinnamon doughnuts, it more or less sealed the deal—for me, anyway. Biting into that aromatic deep-fried dough, watching the way sugar clung to her lips as she ate hers: the warm deliciousness of that moment reawakened in me a hunger I hadn’t felt in years. Two dates later, at her place, we made love. And afterward, when I was spent and sleepy, she told me in the pitch-dark that if part of what I was looking for was kids, I was going to have to keep looking because she couldn’t have them. A nonissue, I assured her, with all the certainty of a guy still in his thirties—a guy whose childhood had been an unhappy one, and who didn’t particularly want to be in charge of some theoretical future child’s happiness.

We were married seven months after that first date of ours—a month or so after Grandpa’s passing. November 8, 1988. Mo was twenty-nine and I was thirty-seven, a third-time groom in a charcoal gray suit with a red carnation pinned to my lapel. Lolly and Hennie were our witnesses. After the exchange of vows, the four of us went out to a nice restaurant and then returned to the farm. Hennie had baked that morning: a wedding cake for Mo and me and a birthday cake for Lolly. “Damn, Lolly,” I said. “With everything else going on, I forgot about your birthday.”

“Your father’s birthday, too,” she reminded me.

“Best Wishes Mr & Mrs Quirk,” Mo’s and my cake said. In Lolly’s cake, Hennie had stuck candles and a little cardboard sign: “Good God in Heaven! Lolly’s 57!” Fifty-seven, I remember thinking—if he had lived. Shoveling frosting and sponge cake into my mouth, I did the math. My father had been only thirty-three when he died. I had, by then, outlived him by four years….

I WALKED TENTATIVELY TOWARD THE stairs, stopping at the threshhold of the room I’d slept in as a kid, and later had returned to during bouts of marital troubles. Marital and legal troubles, the last time I’d had to come back home. I didn’t particularly want to admit it, but I guess I’d been like my father in that respect: screw up, then come back home to regroup, to be good for a while…. My old room had been preserved as a museum of my boyhood. Red Sox and Harlem Globetrotters pennants on the wall, stacks of comic books and Boy’s Lifes still sitting on the pine shelf I’d made in seventh-grade shop class. The room had been a closet when the house was new, they’d told me, which was why it was windowless. I snapped on the overhead light. The twin bed pushed flush against the wall was covered with the same cowboys-and-Indians spread my mother had bought at the Durable Store, back when I’d watched Wagon Train and Bonanza each week without fail. To enter that claustrophobic former closet was to become, again, the boy whose father was a public nuisance, whose mother washed priests’ dirty clothes and answered sass with a stinging slap across the face. This was that boy’s room, and I backed out again. Escaped down the front stairs and out into the morning sunlight.

AFTER I DROPPED OFF LOLLY’S suit, I swung by the bakery to see Alphonse. “He’s in back in his office,” the counter girl said. “Supposedly doing his payroll, but he’s probably looking at Internet porn.” She had spiky red hair, a pierced eyebrow. Her nipples were poking out nicely from beneath the thermal undershirt she was wearing. This must have been the one Alphonse had been salivating about in his last few e-mails. “Make sure you knock first, or he’ll bite your head off,” she said.

“Or shoot me with his paintball gun,” I said.

Instantly, I was her ally. “I know! Isn’t that lame? He’s like my father’s age, and he’s still playing army over at that stupid paintball place.”

When I opened his office door without knocking, Alphonse hit the off button on his computer and popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. “Quirky!” he said. “What the hell you doing here?”

“You know, if you don’t shut that thing down properly, you’ll shorten the life of your hard drive,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, don’t tell Bill Gates on me. So what’s up, bro? You get homesick or something?”

He seemed genuinely sorry to hear about Lolly. “She used to come in here every once in a while,” he said. “Her and her friend. What was her name?”

“Hennie.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They were a matched set, those two, huh? Always got the same thing: blueberry muffins, toasted, with butter—not margarine.”

I smiled. “Gotta support the dairy farmers,” I said.

“Hey, remember the summer when your aunt found those pot plants that you, me, and my brother were growing out behind your apple orchard?”

I rolled my eyes recalling the incident. “The three stooges,” I said.

“And remember? She made us pull them up and burn them in front of her? And we all got stoned from the smoke—Lolly included.”

“She didn’t get stoned,” I said.

“The fuck she didn’t! I can still see her standing there, scowling at first and then with that goofy grin on her face. She was toasted.”

“What I remember is that she didn’t rat us out to my grandfather,” I said. “Which is probably why we’re still alive.”

The comment dropped like a stone between us. One of the three of us wasn’t still alive. Rocco had died of leukemia in 1981.

“Aunt Lolly, man,” Alphonse said. “A buon anima.”

I asked him if he’d be one of her pallbearers.

“Sure I will,” he said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need. Hey, you gonna feed people after the service? Because if you want, we can make up sandwiches and do some pastry platters. Coffee and setups, too. I’ll get one of my girls to help out. What do you figure—somewhere around thirty or forty people?”