The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (69 page)

Ulysses said my father promised he’d help her out, but he refused to marry her. “That’s what she wanted, see? For them to get hitched on the quick. Have him make her an honest woman, and if they sent him over and he got killed, she’d be a widow entitled to some benefits. She’d always had a kind of power over him, everyone knew that, but this time he stuck to his guns. See, if he did what she wanted, he’d end up with a half-colored baby. And, you know, back then …”

What my father had offered Mary Agnes instead of marriage, Ulysses said, was money: for an operation, if that was what she wanted to do and could find someone who’d do it, or money to help her and the kid get by, once she had it. “But she was holding out for a wedding ring, see? And she got mad as hell when he wouldn’t budge. Started
hitting him, throwing things at him. Scratched his face up pretty bad, too, he said. So Alden said the hell with her. Borrowed his sister’s car and took off for a few days. And when he come back, he said, he walked in the door and seen a telegram sitting on the front table. His orders had come. But then the phone started ringing, so he picks it up and who is it but her.”

“Mary Agnes?”

“That’s right.” She’d taken some kind of concoction, Ulysses said—tincture of something or another that she’d mixed with Coca-Cola and drunk to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. “That girl brung her troubles on herself, always did, but she was pinning everything on Alden. Told him that, thanks to him, her baby’d be dead in a few hours and she was probably going to die along with it. And that, later on, he could go to the cemetery and find her grave and spit on it.” Ulysses turned to me. “She could play your father like a fiddle, see? She was a pro at that.”

Ulysses said my father told him he jumped back into Lolly’s car and broke every speed limit between here and Jewett City. And sure enough, by the time he got to her, Mary Agnes was vomiting and convulsing. And the baby was coming.

“‘Course, Alden had helped birth plenty of calves, so he knew the basics about what to do. How to get a baby out of its mother. Or he
thought
he did, anyway. But things got complicated, he said. It was coming out wrong, or trying to, I guess, and it tore her up pretty bad. Alden said she lost so much blood that he got scared. He was worried that she was going to die, see? Same as his mother when she had him.

“Baby was dead by the time he got it out of her, he told me. It was a boy, or woulda been. Alden said he didn’t know what to do with it, where to put it, so he wiped it off a little and put it in a dresser drawer. He cleaned up the mess as best as he could—the blood and such. Cleaned her up a little. Then he just sat there with her, holding her hand. It was one hell of a long night, he said. Mary Agnes was sick
as a dog—burning up with fever and rambling wild, thrashing back and forth. He said he kept making her drink water, lots of it, because he figured whatever that stuff was that she’d taken, she’d be better off if she could flush it out of her system. He was scared to bring her to the hospital, see? Because they’d start asking questions. But he was scared to
not
bring her, too. After a while, he tried convincing her that that was what they better do, but she carried on so bad that he give it up.”

By mid-morning the following day, my father had told Ulysses, Mary Agnes had come around a little. She was weak, still, but lucid—improved enough so that he could leave her for a few hours—get Lolly’s car back to her, grab a little sleep, and then head back there. Before he left, she asked him what he’d done with the baby, and he told her. He offered to take it with him, but she told him no. He should leave it for the time being, in case she wanted to look at it.

“And then, wouldn’t you know it?” Ulysses said. “He gets back here to the farmhouse and there’s that telegram. With everything else happening, he’d forgotten about it. And sure enough, it was his orders. The United States Navy wanted him to get to San Diego inside of a week. And you know what San Diego meant, don’t you?”

“Korea,” Jerry said.

“That’s right. But when he got back to Mary Agnes’s and told her he had to shove off, she got hysterical. Begged him to ignore his orders—go AWOL and stay with her. She didn’t care that he’d get in trouble, get himself thrown in the brig, long as she got what
she
wanted. That’s the way she was. But Alden said no, he had to get down to New York, get on a train, and go. That made her furious, Alden said. Didn’t matter that he’d sat up all night with her—got the baby out of her and probably saved her life. When he went to kiss her good-bye, Alden said, she wouldn’t let him. Told him to just get the hell out and take the baby with him. Alden said he opened that dresser drawer, but it wasn’t in there. ‘It’s in there,’ she said, and she was pointing to her suitcase—the one you found inside the trunk, I
guess. Alden told me he couldn’t risk walking out of there carrying a lady’s suitcase. Didn’t want to draw people’s attention to it, you see? Not with what was inside of it. So he took his coat off and put that over it. And just before he left, he told me, he asked Mary Agnes to wish him good luck, tell him she hoped he’d come back in one piece. She wouldn’t do it, though, he said. Wouldn’t even look at him. He hadn’t done what she wanted, see. So as far as she was concerned, he could go pound sand.”

Ulysses said my father told him there’d been no time to bury the baby—not with Grandpa and Lolly around. So he’d snuck it up to the attic and hidden it away in the crawl space. The next morning, he packed his sea bag and said his good-byes to his father and grandmother, and Lolly drove him down to Grand Central Station. “And I still remember this, because Alden was crying to beat the band when he said it: he said that, when him and his sister got to the station and it was time to board his train, Lolly give him the kind of send-off that he’d wanted from Mary Agnes—held on to him so tight, and for so long, that he thought he was going to miss his train. And he says to me, he says, ‘You know something, U? That sister of mine’s the only person in my life who ever really loved me.’ And it was kinda sad, you know? Because it was true, I guess.”

Mary Agnes recovered, Ulysses said. Got a little money together and hightailed it out to California. “Got there a week or so before Alden shipped off for Korea. You’re the proof of that, Caelum. Your father told me that’s where you got made.”

It suddenly made sense to me—why he’d sometimes called me his “California kid.”

“She made her way back here after he shipped out. And after she had you, she went to Alden’s father and hit him up for money. But the old man wouldn’t budge. Then Mary Agnes did something stupid. You were only a month old or so, and she left you with a neighbor lady. Just for the evening, it was supposed to be, but what she done was, she went off on a toot with some fella and didn’t come back for
a week. By the time she did, Alden’s father and his grandmother had filed the complaint, gone down to see the judge, and gotten custody of you. And after Alden come back and got himself right again, they convinced him to find someone else—someone who’d make you a good mother. The grandmother couldn’t have raised you, like she raised your father and Lolly, see? She was starting to fail. And Lolly, well, your grandpa needed her on the farm. She might have been working over at the prison by then, too. I can’t remember. But that’s when Rosemary come into the picture. Alden met her at a dance hall, I think it was, and they got hitched pretty quick. But it never really took, Alden said; he just married her to give you a mother, and to try and get on his father’s good side. But Mary Agnes still had a hold on him. He’d go off and meet her on the sneak. If his family’d gotten wind of what he was doing, they’d have raised holy hell. See, they meant well, the Quirks. But one way or another, they’d never let Alden get out from under their thumb.”

For a minute or so, no one spoke. Then Jerry broke the silence. “How you doing?” I’d assumed he was asking Ulysses, but when I looked over at him, I realized he was talking to me. Realized, too, that I’d been holding on to myself and rocking back and forth in my chair.

“Me? I’m okay,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Yes. Or I will be.”

Jerry turned back to Ulysses. “So do I have the sequence right? She aborts the baby in 1950. He stashes it up in the attic here, then takes off for California. She follows him out there, gets pregnant with Caelum, and he ships out to Korea. Gets his medical discharge, then he marries the woman they pass off as Caelum’s mother. And then in September of 1953, you get out of the navy. The two of you take the trunk out of hiding, bring it out to that field on the other side of the orchard, and bury it.”

Ulysses nodded. “Sounds about right.”

“And you’re telling me that you had no idea whatsoever until 1965 that what you two buried inside that footlocker was the baby she’d aborted?”

He nodded. “That’s right, too. I didn’t know until that day him and me were fishing off of the bridge.”

“Okay, one more thing. Whether you realized it at the time or not, you guys put
two
babies in the ground that day. So eleven years later, when your buddy was letting it all hang out at the bridge, did he happen to say anything about who the second one was?”

“Well, that’s the screwiest part of it, if you ask me,” Ulysses said. “See, that’s what give him the idea to hide Mary Agnes’s baby up in the crawl space. He said it had always bothered him that the other one up there was lonely. Said he wanted to give it some company.”

Ulysses said my father had confided something else to him that day: that he had discovered the remains of the mummy-baby when he was a boy of nine or ten—that he’d come upon the little iron chest hidden at the back of the crawl space one afternoon when he was poking around where his grandmother had forbidden him to go. That he’d pulled out the chest, opened it up, and there it was. He told Ulysses that, until that day on the bridge, he had never confided to another living soul the secret about what he’d found up there in that attic. “Kinda peculiar, ain’t it? Alden said he used to sneak up there from time to time and pull it out of its hiding place. Take the lid off and visit with it, like,
talk
to it, even, so’s it wouldn’t be so lonely up there. He said he had no idea whose baby it was or how it got there. The only thing he was sure of was that it had been hiding up there for a long, long time.”

Jerry closed his notepad and hooked his pen onto his shirt pocket. He told Ulysses he’d done a good job.

“We’re done, then?” Ulysses asked.

“We’re done. No more questions.”

“I have one more for you, U,” I said. “You could have gone to your grave without saying a word about what was under there. Why didn’t
you? Why were you so bent on bringing those two babies into the light?”

“Because of you,” he said. “They kept you in the dark about so much, and when you started asking me all those questions about Mary Agnes … But the thing is, I kept going back and forth about it, see? Because it’s not a very pretty story. It’s an
ugly
story, is what it is. Doesn’t put either one of them in a very good light. Her
or
him. But Alden … your father … hey, he fucked up plenty. I’m not saying he didn’t. But he was my friend, see? And Lolly was my friend. And you’re my friend, too. So I said to myself, I said, Ulysses, why don’t you have some guts for once in your life? Ugly story or not, why don’t you let the poor guy know the truth?”

“Thank you,” I said. He nodded.

Jerry left the room. Left Ulysses and me to our tears.

I DROVE ULYSSES HOME, THANKED
him again, and declined his request for “a little bit of booze money.” I told him he needed rest more than alcohol.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Well, don’t be a stranger.”

Driving home again, I realized it was a visiting day. But when I checked my watch, I realized, too, that there was only thirty minutes left. Sometimes it took that long just to get them past the walk gate and up to the visiting room. But I figured I’d try to see her anyway.

For once, there weren’t the usual delays. By the time she was seated and I was allowed in, we had twelve minutes together. “Oh, my God, Caelum,” she kept saying. “Oh, my God.” She said she’d need time for it all to sink in, but that she was going to help me through it. Help me sort it all out.

When the CO called time, I stood. Gave her one of those awkward across-the-table embraces. Kissed her once. Again. I didn’t want to let her go.

When I was halfway between the exit door and the table where she was seated, she called my name. I stopped, turned, and looked back at her. “Love you,” she said.

“Love you, too.”

BY THE TIME I GOT
back to the farmhouse, there were several vehicles in the driveway: cruisers, unmarked sedans, a crime lab van. When I walked in, Jerry was all business. “Mr. Quirk, this is Officer Tanaka. He has a few things he needs to ask you.”

“Anyone else living here?” Tanaka asked.

I nodded. “Upstairs tenants. A married couple and a young woman who lives with them. She works for the husband. They’re all away for the weekend.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “Let’s head on up to the attic, okay? I’d like you to show me that crawl space.”

When I came back down again, Jerry pulled me aside. “You know something? You should get the hell away from here for a few days. At least for an overnight. We’ll be here for most of the evening, and probably a good part of tomorrow.”

“Where would I go?” I asked him

“Anywhere. Just throw some things in a bag, get in the car, and drive until you’re tired. You got a lot of thinking to do, Caelum, and if you’re like me, you do your best thinking at the wheel.”

And so that was what I did. Packed a bag, gave Jerry a key, and started toward the door. Then I stopped. I went back into the bedroom and grabbed Lizzy Popper’s story. Wherever the hell I was going to sleep that night, I would take it along. Finish it before I crashed.

In the years following the Civil War, many female abolitionists transferred their energies to the causes of temperance and women’s suffrage. Lizzy Popper gave tacit support to both of these movements, but she was active in neither. A chance reunion with Maude Morrison, the former Connecticut State Prison inmate for whom Popper had once advocated, reignited her interest in prison reform for women, and it was this feminist cause that would become the focus of her later years.

Maude Morrison’s imprisonment at the age of seventeen had been a classic case of blaming the victim. Morrison had emigrated from Ireland the year before and had found work as a barmaid at a New Haven tavern popular with Yale College students. Morrison was raped and impregnated by two inebriated but well-connected collegians who charged that she had seduced them. She was found guilty of “being in manifest danger of falling into vice” and sentenced to the state prison at Wethersfield.

Sequestered with a handful of other female inmates in the windowless attic of the Wethersfield facility, Morrison resisted the sexual demands of guards and trusties and was flogged for insubordination. Midwifed by her fellow inmates, she birthed a stillborn in the sixth month of her pregnancy and nearly died from subsequent infection.

An ability to read and write and a resourcefulness born
of desperation won Morrison her freedom during the second year of her incarceration. With stolen paper and pen, she recorded the details of her prison life and slipped these pages to Lizzy Popper in March of 1849 during the latter’s tour of the facility on behalf of the Society for the Alleviation of the Miseries of the Public Prisons. Popper’s subsequent letters of complaint to government officials resulted in Morrison’s release.

Like many women with prison in their past, Maude Morrison might well have become a pariah, destitute and unemployable, if not for the intervention of a wealthy socialite with whom Lizzy Popper put her in contact. Mrs. Hannah Braddock, whose husband’s family owned J. J. Braddock & Company, a popular New Haven department store, arranged for Morrison to work in the store’s millinery department, where she fetched and fitted hats to the heads of Braddock’s well-heeled customers. Within a year, Maude Morrison was designing hats. Her elegant creations, veiled with fine Irish lace, sold briskly and afforded her status at J. J. Braddock, and later at Gimbel’s in New York. Under Hannah Braddock’s tutelage, Morrison was schooled in the manners and mores of polite society. At the age of twenty-seven, in Newport, Rhode Island, she was married to Lucius Woodruff, a New York financier twenty years her senior. A year later, Woodruff was deceased and Maude was a wealthy widow.

Maude Morrison Woodruff was the picture of refinement when, in May of 1868, her carriage passed Lizzy Popper as she walked along a busy New Haven street. Woodruff recognized the little Quaker woman who had once acted on her behalf and instructed her driver to stop. The two women took tea together and, at the end of an hour, decided to join forces for the betterment of “fallen” women.

Possessed of a first-hand understanding of the plight of female prisoners, Woodruff pledged a portion of her wealth to advance their lot. Her generosity fueled Popper’s resourcefulness. Lizzy designed and Maude funded
a boarding house, farm, and school for women exiting the state prison. Located away from the temptations of the city in the coastal village of Noank, Connecticut, the twelve-bed Lucius Woodruff Charitable Home and Farm for Women sought to provide a safe haven for “women who have run afoul of the law, so that they may rise again and be restored to their natural feminine dignity.” Opened in November of 1869, it was, in effect, Connecticut’s first halfway house.

The Woodruff Home ran quietly and successfully at first. Its residents assimilated discreetly, marrying local farmers and fishermen and becoming mothers. One woman opened her own tailoring shop in nearby Mystic. Another, illiterate when she entered the home, became the secretary of a New London shipping company scion. Yet the Woodruff Home faltered in its fourth year. A group of villagers who had objected to the admittance of the home’s first Negro resident stole onto the property and burned down a hayfield and a chicken coop. Blight killed off most of that summer’s crops. A deranged resident laced a supper stew with rat poison, killing one woman and making several others violently ill. The press gave the story lurid coverage, and the matron resigned as a result. Lizzy Popper was forced to step into the role of acting matron, even as she attempted to quiet the negative publicity and the calls for closure of the facility. The final blow came when Maude Woodruff learned that her late husband’s business partner had swindled her out of several hundred thousand dollars. Her financial advisers told her she could no longer provide the funds needed to run the home and farm. The residents were dispersed and the doors were nailed shut in January of 1873. The property sold at auction the following month.

To her husband Charles, supposedly traveling through Massachusetts on business, Lizzy wrote philosophically about the closing of the Woodruff Home. Interestingly, the letter also presents a blueprint for Popper’s later life as a Hartford lobbyist on behalf of “fallen women”:

Lizzy’s letter, dated February 13, 1873, never reached its intended recipient. Charles Popper, supposedly in Boston, died in Manhattan that same evening. Having drunk a flask of brandy during a sleigh ride with his mistress, Vera Daneghy, he stood, lost his balance, and fell from the sleigh, breaking his neck. Popper succumbed three days shy of his sixtieth birthday. His widow had turned sixty-seven the week before. Vera Daneghy was thirty-eight.

Compounding the shock of her husband’s death was Lizzy Popper’s sudden awareness that he had kept a mistress for the previous eight years and fathered a child by her—a girl,
Pansy Rebecca, now nearly three years old. Among Lizzy’s trove of papers and letters, a thin file labeled “Daneghy woman” survives. Inside are six letters bound together with string: the three Vera Daneghy wrote to the wife of her deceased lover and carbon copies of Popper’s three responses to Daneghy.

Vera Daneghy’s first letter to Lizzy, dated ten days after Charles Popper’s death, informs his widow of her own and Pansy’s existence, and of her expectations in the wake of her lover’s demise.

Daneghy’s letter ends with instructions as to how Lizzy is to make monthly deposits to the bank account which Charlie had established for Pansy’s well-being. Daneghy suggests a sum of nine dollars per month but warns, “I can’t make do on any less than eight. Charlie would be mad if you was stingy.”

Lizzy’s response is curt and to the point: “This is to inform you that I have not the means, the intention, or the moral obligation to help with the support of a child conceived of thy own and my husband’s sin.”

Vera Daneghy’s second letter, dated one month later, is exasperated and self-pitying. It informs Lizzy that, in a fit of remorse, she has confessed to her husband that he is not Pansy’s father. In response, Seamus Daneghy has disowned his wife and the girl and put them out of his house. Her own and her husband’s families have spurned her and she has
been forced to take a menial position “peeling potatoes and worse” at Delmonico’s, a fine restaurant where Charlie had twice taken her to dine. She wishes to remind Lizzy that it was she, not Lizzy, who, on the night of the accident, had to deal with the police, the corpse in the road, and “that skinflint of a sleigh driver who insisted he be paid, no matter the circumstances, may he rot in hell.” Had it not been for Lizzy’s husband, “him with his fancy airs, big promises, and books I never even read, most of them,” her life would not now be in tatters. The woman who rents her a room and cares for “Charlie’s child” while she is at work robs her of most of her wages and she cannot make do on what’s left. She is
owed
some help, and if Lizzy Popper will not provide any “then you are as cold a fish as Charlie always said you was.”

Popper’s measured response to Daneghy’s demands restates her disinclination to offer assistance and advises Daneghy that it is not the intrusion of her late husband into her life, but rather the wages of her own sinning, which find her in her current predicament.

Vera Daneghy’s third and final letter, written fourteen months after the last in May of 1874, is markedly different in tone; Daneghy is resigned and frightened. In desperation, she has turned to prostitution to provide for herself and her daughter. She writes from a charity ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where she has just learned she is suffering from a “womanly cancer” that is expected to kill her before summer’s end. Daneghy apologizes to Lizzy for the grief she has caused her and acknowledges that she has no right to beg for what she must: that Lizzy retrieve Charlie’s daughter, give her his name, and raise her “like she was yours.”

Daneghy’s dilemma presented Popper with one of her own. Her husband’s mistress had become one of the fallen women to whom she had dedicated the last several years of her life. If she did not claim the innocent child, Pansy would be abandoned to a city orphanage or handed a worse
fate. Her final response to Daneghy was, once again, curt and to the point:

Of the many challenges life presented Lizzy Popper, perhaps none was more incongruous and ironic than what transpired next. On May 30, 1874, she returned home from New York with her red-haired, freckle-faced four-year-old charge in tow. A letter awaited her. Its author was her long-lost son, Willie.