The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (58 page)

So they decide they’ve got to get rid of Jinx—get Estelle Olsen in on the next plane from Los Angeles and make her Miss Rheingold. Hazelton balks at first because he’s got some beautyful pictures of Jinx—says he doesn’t care if the guy she’s screwing is black, white, or purple with yellow polka dots. But he finally comes on board, because that contest is
his
bread and butter, too. Now the
good
thing is, the announcement ad hasn’t run yet, so the public won’t need any explanations. The
bad
thing is, the accounting firm that oversees the contest has already registered the election results. In pounds of paper, right? Remember the barrels? It’s on the books that Jinx has won by about x number of pounds, I can’t remember how many.

So here’s what they do. Everyone at that meeting, myself included, goes down to the warehouse and into the government cellar. It’s all hush-hush, top secret. They bring in all the unused ballot pads—boxes and boxes of ‘em, maybe two, three hundred pads of ballots in each box. They have a couple of the warehouse guys roll in four or five empty barrels. Then all of us—Gus, me, the lawyers—we spend the better part of the day checking off ballots for Estelle. Next morning, they make up this cocka-mamie story about how someone’s discovered these barrels of ballots in the warehouse that accidentally never got counted. So now they have to do a recount, see? A
re-weigh.
They get the accounting guys back in, and the loading dock guys roll both Jinx’s and Estelle’s barrels out to the weigh station. And whataya know? Estelle’s got Jinx beat by eighty, ninety pounds. So they reregister the election results and Estelle Olson becomes Miss Rheingold for 1950.

What happened to Jinx?

She took it bad. Trashed that fancy apartment the day they evicted her. Broke all the mirrors, slashed the upholstery. At
first, she swore up and down she was gonna fight them—go to the papers, go to Gus’s wife, sue the company. But she backed down. The company’s lawyers put a pretty good scare in her, I guess. In the meantime, they put a
team
of private investigators on her, and these guys dug up something really screwy: turns out, the kid wasn’t really Jinx Dixon. I forget what her real name was, but the real Jinx had been a roommate of hers who’d gotten fed up with modeling and left the city. So this one “borrowed” her name—to get past the background check, see? But once they found out who she really was, they had the goods on her. She’d had a couple scrapes with the law, see, and she’d signed a contract that said she was clean as a whistle. So there was no way she could’ve sued. By contest rules, she was ineligible. We coulda saved ourselves all that writer’s cramp, checking off all those ballots…. The sad thing was, after Rheingold fired her, Sparks dropped her like a hot potato and so did her modeling agency. Word got out, so no other agency would touch her either. She hung around for a while—kind of stalked Gus, I guess. It got pretty ugly. One afternoon, she showed up at the Brooklyn plant where Gus’s office was and they called the cops—had her removed from the premises by armed guards. They hushed it up, though. I heard she made some trouble for Sparks out at the Polo Grounds, too. I guess she went a little off the deep end. I felt kinda lousy about my part in it, but the girl dug her own grave.
Schtupping
two men at the same time, one of ‘em a black guy? Bad mistake. Miss Rheingold had to be pure as the driven snow…. Funny thing was, the white-black thing was what finally killed off Miss Rheingold anyway. About fourteen, fifteen years later—the summer when all the race riots were breaking out—Rheingold pulled the plug on the contest. They claimed the public had lost interest, so it was no longer cost-effective. But the real reason was, the company was between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they were getting pressure from
the blacks to run a colored contestant. You remember Adam Clayton Powell? Congressman from Harlem? He kept calling, giving Gus White the needles about it. Sadie had passed on by then and Gus was president of Rheingold, and I was his driver. So one afternoon, I got the boss and Powell in the backseat and Powell says, “Now Gus, the good people in my district buy a lot of your beer. Lot of folks wondering when you’re going to give us a beautiful Negress to vote for in that little contest of yours.” But back then, if they’da run a black girl, there woulda been a backlash from the whites. Maybe old Otto Weismann would have done the right thing, but Gus wouldn’t risk it. The Rheingold girls were about fun, see, not politics. So rather than run a colored girl, they killed the contest.

Okay, but back up a minute. You ever hear anything more about Jinx?

Heard
from
her. Got a call one Sunday morning, out of the blue. At first, I thought she was calling to give me guff for blowing the whistle on her. It had to have dawned on her that I was the one. But no, that wasn’t it. She says, “Peppy, can you do me a favor?” What she wanted was for me to drive her back home to Connecticut. She wanted to get the hell out of New York, she said, because there was nothing left for her here, and because that’s what the head shrinkers at Bellevue said would be best for her. To pull up stakes and go home. She’d landed in the nuthouse, see? Admitted as much. So I said, “Sure, okay, Jinx.” I was still calling her Jinx, see? Playing as dumb as possible, for her sake as well as mine. I didn’t want to drive her up there, but what was I going to do? Say no? I made sure Cookie rode up with us, though. We got a babysitter for Rochelle, and me, Cookie, and Jinx drove up to Connecticut. I mean, I liked the kid, I really did, but she was bad news. I didn’t want any trouble. You get what I’m saying?

Yes.

We picked her up outside this little coffee shop way downtown on Delancey. You should’ve seen her. She was wearing bobby sox, rolled-up dungarees, kerchief on her head. No makeup. No trace of Miss Rheingold. She looked like some sweet, innocent high school kid. On the drive up there, we stopped at a diner for pie and coffee, and when I went off to the men’s room, she told Cookie she was pregnant. Didn’t say who the father was, so I don’t know if it was Gus or Sparks or maybe even someone else. She said there was a boy back home—a guy who loved her, would take her back. We dropped her off at some little town called … geez, I can’t remember the name. When she said Connecticut, I was thinking Danbury or Bridgeport, maybe. But it was way the hell over on the other side of the state. Little town in the boondocks.

Three Rivers.

Yeah, that might’ve been it. We had a hell of a time getting back to the city, I remember. It had started snowing, see? One of those crazy March blizzards and I didn’t have any chains on my tires. So all the way back to … Hey, you all right? You look a little … emotional. Did you know Jinx?

No.

Here. Now
you
need a napkin.

I’m okay. It’s…. I’m fine.

This isn’t really a business book you’re writing. Is it, Jake?

No.

Well, whatever it is, I better go home now. You okay to drive? Because if you need to take another minute, maybe have a cup of coffee—

I’m okay.

And I have your word, right? I’m not gonna see any of this Jinx stuff in some book down the line? No. It’s all off the record.

Okay, then. Good. Well, I guess I talked your head off, eh? About King Ludwig, and the Weismanns and all that. Now you
just give me a call when you’re ready to have me fill you in about the other stuff. Because remember what I said: history is all cause and effect. Connecting the dots.

Yeah, speaking of that, did you ever wonder about what

became of her after you dropped her off?

Jinx? I did, as a matter of fact. From time to time, I’d—

She killed herself. They found her floating facedown at the edge of a lake, same as your buddy, King Ludwig. Suicide, the paper said.

No kidding. Gee, that’s a shame. How do you—

Bride Lake, it’s called. It’s on the grounds of the prison where she ended up. So there’s your cause and effect. You fed my mother to the fat cats, and she ended up dead.

Your mother? Jinx was your … Look, she had problems. You can’t say—

Here’s your coat. Let’s get out of here. Because to tell you the truth, I’m sick of listening to you.

I stood, flung Peppy’s coat at him, and threw a bunch of bills on the table. Grabbing my tape recorder in one hand and his forearm with the other, I hustled him out the door of the Inn Between a little faster than his feet wanted to move. Damned if, at that moment, I could remember a single one of those anger management strategies I’d learned. Damned if I wanted to.

In the parking lot, Peppy lost his balance and stumbled forward, and I broke his fall at the expense of my tape recorder. It hit the asphalt and cracked, sending double-A batteries rolling. I got him off his knees and into the car, then walked back to the broken recorder. Picked it up and hurled it, hard as I could. It rattled a chain-link fence and ricocheted into a patch of dead weeds.

I got in the car and started the engine. “Look, you don’t understand,” he said. “If it got out what she was doing, it would’ve cost the company—”

I shouted it without looking at him. “Don’t talk!”

On the drive back to his daughter’s, he sat ramrod straight, staring ahead. His hands, illuminated at the traffic lights, danced with tremors. One of his pant legs gaped open, exposing a bloody knee. It wasn’t until he was safely out of the crackpot’s car that he issued his two-sentence defense. “The Weismanns were like
family
to me! There was something
wrong
with her!”

I stomped on the accelerator.

Trying to escape Queens, I got good and goddamned lost, and none of the bodega cashiers or glassed-in gas station attendants I stopped to ask seemed to have heard of the fucking Whitestone Bridge…. She was already pregnant when she went back? With me? Had they lied about who my father was, too? Did I have a half-sibling somewhere? … Lost in a maze of unfamiliar streets, I somehow passed the Inn Between again. Braked, backed up. I found my tape recorder. Popped the cassette and slipped it into my coat pocket.

I never did find the Whitestone. Instead, I followed signs to the Throgs Neck, which got me to the Bruckner Expressway, which became the New England Expressway. Somewhere along dreary I—95, my shame kicked in. Yes, he’d taken the scenic route through Bavaria on his way to coughing up what I needed to know. But on the subject of my birth mother, Peppy Schissel had been far more forthright than my own family.

Then why did you get so angry with him?

Because he ratted her out. And because I saw the outcome: her out there at the corn maze, at Daddy’s wake. Dirty, seedy looking…. Eight years old and I had to steal them food, for Christ’s sake—my mother and father. If he even
was
my father….

So which do you prefer? The lies or the truth?

The truth! I just want the truth!

You sure about that, Quirk? The Minotaur took victims before he was slain.

Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?

The truth might eat you alive.

In Branford, I pulled off the highway and into a McDonald’s rest stop. I parked at the outer edge of the lot and cut the motor. Picked up the cassette I’d salvaged from that busted recorder and shoved it into the tape player of my car.

“It was a sight to make you cry: this fine and fancy lady, watering plants, pulling weeds. Trying to make something beautyful out of—”

I hit fast-forward. Stop. Play.

“—that the question you gotta ask isn’t Why? or If? The question is How?”

I slammed the dashboard so hard and so many times that I sprained my fucking wrist.

I GOT BACK TO THREE
Rivers a little after midnight. Drove past the glow from the casino, onto Ice House and then onto Bride Lake Road. Drove past the jail. A “circumstantial separation,” I’d told him—a bullshit euphemism for “my wife’s in prison.”

I drove up the driveway and around to the back. The lights were on in the barn; Moze’s Web site business had taken off, and he and Velvet were hustling to keep up. The upstairs was dark. Janis had left for San Francisco that morning to deliver her paper at that conference.

I entered through the kitchen door and fumbled for the light switch. I saw it first thing: the slim, spring-bound book with its burgundy leather covers.

I approached it tentatively. When I opened it, a card dropped out—a note.

ELIZABETH HUTCHINSON POPPER (1804–1892):
An Epistolary Self-Portrait of a Remarkable
Nineteenth-Century Woman

By Janis S. Mick,
Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s Studies,
Tulane University

Social activist Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper’s extraordinary life spanned the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland. Her acquaintances included such nineteenth-century notables as writers Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, reformers Dorothea Dix and Lucretia Mott, and the many politicians and captains of industry whom she lobbied for support of a variety of social justice causes. A staunch abolitionist, “Lizzy” Popper was an agent of the Underground Railroad and, later, a Civil War nurse. A lifelong crusader for the betterment of the downtrodden, she worked tirelessly on behalf of orphans and poor women, slaves and free blacks, and female prisoners. Popper left behind a treasure trove of documents, diary entries, and saved letters. Because it was her long-standing practice to slip a sheet of “carbonated paper” beneath the letters she wrote to others, what survives is a rarity: a record of both sides of written exchanges between Popper
and her correspondents. From these it has been possible to reconstruct the details of a life fully lived and to gain intimate access to the psyche of the remarkable nineteenth-century woman who lived it.

Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper was born in 1804, the eldest child of William and Freelove (Ashbey) Hutchinson, devout Hicksite Quakers of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The eldest of four children, Elizabeth assumed the role of surrogate mother to her siblings after her own mother died, probably of cerebral hemorrhage, while birthing her youngest child, Roswell (1817). In addition to her domestic responsibilities, “Lizzy” Hutchinson, during her teens and twenties, ran a small private Quaker school for girls. At the urging of family friend Lucretia Coffin Mott, she also wrote abolitionist pamphlets and articles for the Society of Friends. Following the death of her father in 1834, Lizzy Hutchinson closed her school and traveled to Connecticut to visit her sister Martha, the wife of New Haven harbormaster Nathanael Weeks. For the remainder of her life, Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper called Connecticut home.

Lizzy Hutchinson was a founding member of the Ladies’ Division of the New Haven Abolitionist Society and a delegate to the New York Antislavery Convention of 1838. It was at this gathering that she met her future husband, fellow abolitionist Charles Phineas Popper. Seven years Lizzy’s junior, Popper was a traveling subscription bookseller and a member of the American Bible Society, a Congregationalist organization whose goal was to place Bibles “without note or comment” in homes where there were none. As a young man, Popper had toured the country with his brothers and sisters in a popular abolitionist singing act. The Popper Family Singers were headliners at antislavery fundraisers, spreading the abolitionist message to the settlers of westward territories preparing to vote on the issues of statehood and slavery. Two of Charles Popper’s songs, the rousing “Swing Open, Freedom’s Door!” and the sentimental
“Mother’s Tear-Stained Bible,” were widely published in songsters and as sheet music—the nineteenth century equivalent of hit records. Although Popper had made no money from these compositions, they lent him celebrity at the contentious 1838 New York Anti-Slavery Convention, at which factions argued bitterly about whether or not female and male delegates should conduct business separately or “intermingle promiscuously,” and whether or not “our sable brothers and sisters”—free blacks from New York and New England—should be allowed to fraternize with white delegates. Lizzy Hutchinson and Charles Popper both spoke out in favor of the intermingling of all, and it was this shared stance that first united them. In a letter to her fiancé dated May 6, 1839, Lizzy would later write:

In October of the same year, Charles wrote to his sister Winifred:

Assumed a spinster, Lizzy Hutchinson surprised her family when she married Charles in 1841 at the age of thirty-seven.
The couple was wed at the North Church of New Haven, the Congregational house of worship where Charles served as a deacon. She birthed three sons in quick succession: Edmond (1842), Levi (1843), and, at the age of forty, her beloved Willie (1844). Subsequently, she suffered at least two miscarriages and, on New Year’s Day of 1846, gave birth to a “severely imbecilic” daughter she named Phoebe. The child’s death ten days later triggered a depression in Lizzy Popper that lasted through the winter and spring of 1846. Records reveal that her sister Martha Weeks financed a six-week stay at the Hartford Retreat, a sanitarium, and cared for the Popper children during this time. Among the family’s private papers was a March 26, 1846, letter to Charles Popper from the Hartford Retreat’s Dr. Elihu Foot, advising Popper to offer his wife, upon her return:

It is unknown if Charles Popper heeded Dr. Foot’s warning, but by the autumn of 1846, Lizzy had reengaged wholeheartedly in her “charity work” and Charlie had begun the first of his extramarital affairs.

Two events in 1841 galvanized and further deepened Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper’s commitment to the abolitionist movement. The first was an incident involving her youngest brother, Roswell, by then an instructor at a boys’ preparatory academy in Richmond, Virginia. The second was the
Amistad
trial.

After Roswell Hutchinson had made remarks to his students that revealed his abolitionist sympathies, his lodgings were broken into and ransacked, and antislavery tracts were discovered among his possessions. He was attacked by “cowardly hooligans” the next night, and beaten so savagely that he lost an eye and suffered subsequent “lapses in sound judgment.” Accused of “attempting to poison the minds of Southern youth,” Roswell Hutchinson was jailed for his own protection. At the time, Lizzy Popper was five months pregnant with her first child. Although this was an era in which women rarely traveled without a male escort and pregnant women confined themselves to home, upon hearing of her brother’s plight, Lizzy journeyed alone to Richmond. She convinced the constabulary there to release her brother to her custody and to assist her in smuggling him out of Virginia and back to her home in Connecticut. Later in her life, she would identify this incident as the first of her many successful attempts at lobbying men in power for the sake of just causes.

The second event that heightened Lizzy Popper’s resolve to fight against slavery was the arrest in New Haven harbor and subsequent trial of the
Amistad
defendants, fifty-six kidnapped Africans who had killed captain and crew members of the Spanish-owned schooner
Amistad
and commandeered the ship in a failed attempt to sail home from Cuba. Following former president John Quincy Adams’s successful defense of the would-be
Amistad
slaves, they were supported by Farmington, Connecticut’s Congregational First Church of Christ while awaiting the collection of private funds to finance their return voyage to their homeland, now Sierra Leone. Members of New Haven’s North Church were active in this fund-raising initiative as well, and Lizzy Popper solicited and obtained significant contributions from prominent businessmen in New Haven, New London, and Windham. This cooperative effort between the Farmington and New Haven churches most likely initiated Lizzy and Charles Popper’s association with the Underground Railroad, as
Farmington was Connecticut’s “Grand Central Station” of the secret system by which escaped slaves made their way north to Canada. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, agents of the “railroad” were subject to arrest for aiding and abetting runaways; therefore, arrangements were covert and documentation is scant. It is believed, however, that both the Poppers’ attic and the barn of Lizzy’s sister, Martha Weeks, were used to harbor fugitives.

Atypical of married women of her era, Lizzy Popper was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the “working mother,” frequently leaving her children in the care of the childless Martha Weeks when she traveled on behalf of one of her social justice causes. At the invitation of Lucretia Mott, Popper attended the 1848 Conference on Women’s Rights at Seneca Falls, the historic New York gathering that launched the struggle for women’s suffrage. More a moderate than a radical thinker, Lizzy Popper was ambivalent about women’s suffrage. Aboard the train returning her home, she wrote to Martha Weeks:

An 1851 letter from Charles Popper to his wife, when their sons were nine, eight, and seven, reveals that Lizzy’s
frequent travels became a source of conflict between the couple. A somewhat remote parent who was himself frequently on the road selling books, Popper accused Lizzy of saving the world at the expense of his children, and of ignoring “the sound, common-sensical guidance of Miss Beecher, whose book you stubbornly refuse to open.” Of the volumes he sold to his subscription customers, Charles Popper’s perennial best-seller was Catharine Beecher’s
Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School.
(Beecher was the sister of author Harriet Beecher Stowe and feminist Isabella Beecher Hooker.) Written in an autocratic tone, the book instructs women and girls on cooking, laundering, and household sanitation, and advocates the sublimation of the female’s personal ambition for the sake of her family. “I lay any future flaws in our sons’ character firmly at your feet,” Charles Popper warned his wife. But Charles’s criticisms failed to slow Lizzy’s momentum; her ledger of travel expenses reveals that she took seven trips in 1851, eleven in 1852, and sixteen in 1853. As for
A Treatise on Domestic Economy,
Lizzy Popper apparently read Catharine Beecher’s book after all—or tried to. In a letter to her sister, Anna Liver-more of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, she observed wryly that Beecher had taken seven pages to instruct readers on the proper way to prepare a garment for ironing “before the iron is allowed to touch the cloth.” Dismissing the work as “well-intented poppycock,” Popper concluded, “Let Miss Beecher attack her wrinkles. I shall attack injustice. There is no short supply of either!”

In addition to her antislavery efforts, Lizzy Popper was active in the—

I STOPPED THERE. PUT IT
away. I had to.

Because if Peppy Schissel was right—if Mary Agnes had been pregnant when she left New York—then it was possible, maybe even
probable, that I was
not
the great-great-great-grandson of the amazing Lizzy Popper. That I was not a Quirk at all but the bastard son of Calvin Sparks or Gus Weismann….

But if that was the case, then why didn’t the math add up? Peppy had told me “Jinx” was already pregnant when he drove her back to Three Rivers in March of 1950. I was born in October of 1951…. Or was I? If they’d gone out of their way to lie about who my mother was, maybe they’d fudged my date of birth, too. Paid off some town clerk or something. Was I a year older than I’d been led to believe? Half Jewish? Half black? Was I someone’s half-brother?

Not knowing what to think, I kept my mouth shut. But
not
knowing,
not
telling anyone, was making me crazy. I caught myself slamming things, dropping things, muttering to all the dead liars in my life. One afternoon, at the wheel of my car, I couldn’t recognize where I was or remember what I was supposed to be driving toward. One night, battling insomnia, I became lost in the corridors of our old corn maze. A woman’s voice was calling my name. Was it Maureen? Mary Agnes? I ran along the twisting packed dirt paths, getting closer and closer to the voice. Velvet’s voice—I recognized it now. But when I reached the center of the maze, instead of Velvet, I found Harris and Klebold, armed and smirking. It was Eric who spoke.
You know what I hate? Cuu-unnntry music! And people who think that wrestling is real! And idiots who are so fucking clueless, they don’t even know who their parents were!
As they raised their shotguns and took aim, I bolted upright in bed, gasping, flailing for the light.

JANIS HAD WOWED THEM AT
the Women’s Studies conference—had returned from San Francisco with business cards and e-mail addresses from department chairs and university press editors. Her adviser had assured her that, with a few strategic expansions and some fine-tuning, “Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper: An Epistolary Self-Portrait” would serve beautifully as both a detailed proposal for her doctoral
thesis and her gateway to the job market. If she could complete her revisions by April, they would call her committee together so that she could present her proposal and get the green light to proceed.