The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (70 page)
Authors: Wally Lamb
Willie Popper had come and gone by the time his mother sat in her parlor, reading the shocking news that she was now, at the age of seventy, the custodian of not one, but two, four-year-old girls—the first fathered by an unfaithful husband, the second by an irresponsible son. In her diary, she wrote poignantly of what happened next:
I sat there, trembling, wanting to rise and run from the room but was unable to move. In my lap was Willie’s letter, with its dozens of I’s, me’s, and my’s. He had learned humility in our home, and it troubled me to read how prideful he had become. Free love? Pish! What a fine and fancy term for lechery! … Last of the Wampanoags, indeed! If he has a child, he should be playing none other than the role of father-provider…. And what do I know of raising little girls? I had raised sons, and that with a husband’s and a sister’s help. Now the one was dead, and the other old like me and spending half her days in Florida. What would become of my work for the prisoners, and the traveling needed to accomplish it? … As I was mulling all this, I chanced to look over at the Daneghy woman’s daughter. That gaudy hair and freckled face were, I supposed, her mother’s, but her eyes gave her away as Charlie’s child. It pained me to see it. She was sitting on the settee, staring at me as if I, not she, were the curiosity. I realized then that I had been speaking my thoughts aloud. “And what, pray tell, is the matter with thee?” I demanded.
“Nothing, Missus,” said she. “I only wonder that, with all your jabbering, do you hear that banging?” I was suddenly aware of the rapping of the brass knocker against the front door.
“Well, miss, if this is to be thy home and we have a visitor, then I entreat thee to go to the door and say I am not receiving callers.” It was not proper for a child so young to be put to such a task, but I feared that, were I to rise and try to answer the door myself, my legs might collapse beneath me or I might burst into sobs. Such was my addled state.
I stared after the waif as she hied to her task. How was I to explain this Irish imp? Was I to bring her to the town green and proclaim, “Here is Pansy, the fruit of my husband’s adultery”?
And then, the four of them were standing at the parlor threshhold. The two children were in front, holding hands as if the steps from front door to parlor had made them friends. Behind them stood Martha, my sister and my rock, and our ne’er-do-well brother, Roswell, he with his eye patch and his leering smile. “Hallo, Sis. I’m back,” Ros proclaimed, as if this were welcome news, and not one more grievous burden heaped upon me.
Because I could not yet bear to look at the smaller, darker girl standing beside Pansy, I looked instead at the doll she clutched—its gingham dress, its porcelain head and black painted hair. My eyes, again, fell upon the two girls’ clasped hands, and that was when I knew what I would do: I would announce them as sisters…. Pansy: a gaudy flower, a gaudy name, a gaudy mother. I would rename her Lillian. They would be Lydia and Lillian, the twin daughters of my widower-son, Willie, and his poor, doomed wife…. And Willie: he would not be a foolish stage-actor, but rather a respectable government agent, posted to Italy. No, not to Italy but to England, where people embraced not “free love” and Pope-worship but proper Protestant values. It was pretense, yes, motivated by pride, and pretense and pride are sinful, but by this treachery the two little girls and I could save face and survive this cruel assignment which fate had given us. They would be sisters, and I the grandmother of not one but both…. With my
plan hatched, I was able to look now into the eyes of Willie’s girl. And when I did, I was lost with looking at her. Her black hair, her pale eyes and pale skin: she was plain, not pretty like the one whose hand she held. She was Hutchinson, top to toe, and my eyes filled with tears, and my head with thoughts of my beloved father, and my sons. I loved Lydia immediately, and when she gave me a shy smile, I gave her one in return. I turned then to the Daneghy girl. I knew that, though I would claim her and call her Popper, I would never love her. She somehow must have read my thoughts, for until that moment, she had acted as good as gold, but now her eyes went dead and her nostrils flared. She snatched the other’s dolly away from her and dashed it against the parlor wall. Its head exploded into a million shards.
This outburst was apparently the first of many for Pansy Daneghy, now known to the world as Lillian Popper. In diary entries and letters, Lizzy variously described her charge as “tetchy,” “petulant,” “sulky,” “a fibber,” “a thief in the making,” and “a red-haired blackguard in banana curls.” In contrast, Lydia was “docile” and “sweet-natured”—a “shy but helpful girl with her head always in books.” Numerous references are made to Lillian’s tormenting of Lydia: the snatching away of trinkets and sweets, the ruining of clothing and keepsakes. Lydia’s knees were “scraped and bloodied” when Lillian “shoved her to the ground without provocation as the two walked home from Miss Bridges’s Sewing School.” Lydia’s wrists were sprained in a desperate jump from a tree swing after Lillian pushed her higher and higher, refusing to stop. An 1880 letter from Lizzy to Martha Weeks in Florida reveals details of the household dynamic when both girls were ten.
Although Lillian never tires of plaguing her, Lydia remains a devoted sis, absorbing each insult, forgiving every trespass. In this regard, my granddaughter is a model
of Christian forgiveness, and her grandmother suffers in comparison. I am at my wits’ end about this troubled and troublesome creature who causes such havoc in our household. I suppose I am partly responsible for her troubles, for the girl believes as gospel what I have told her for her own protection: that her father and Lydia’s father are one and the same. Would it not be worse to say the truth: that she is the daughter of fornicators? Still, the child suffers when fine gifts arrive for Lydia but not for her. In the days before and after her birthday, Lil stood on the front porch in the cold, awaiting the postman’s arrival. Each day when he came into view, she would run up the lane to meet him. “Anything for me? Anything for me?” When at last she was reconciled to the fact that no packages were coming to her from Italy, she set about destroying the ones her sister had received. She took scissors to the red velvet cloak which that Urso woman had sent Lydia. She defaced Lydia’s favorite book,
The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland,
a gift from Willie. Across each page, she scrawled, “Lydia is ugley.” Page after page of that mean-spirited insult, and misspelled to boot. (Lillian is a poor speller, Lydia an excellent one.) Poor Lyd cried and cried for her losses. Yet when her Uncle Roswell grabbed the hickory switch to whip Lillian for her wickedness, who was it intervened on behalf of the sinner but she who had been sinned against! She hadn’t liked that red cloak anyway, Lydia told her uncle. She had read
Alice in Wonderland
so many times that she had grown tired of it. Roswell whipped Lillian about the legs and buttocks, but he said he gave her an easier thrashing than he had planned because it upset Lydia so.
Truth be told, Sister, it was with dread that I granted Roswell permission to take up residence in our home again. Yet I have been grateful for his help, for I doubt I could have dealt with Lillian on my own. When she has one of her conniption fits, it is “Uncle Ros” who can bring her back under control, sometimes with nothing more
than a fierce look in her direction, or by placing his fingers against his eye patch. For all her bluster and boisterous-ness, the girl is terrified that she might be made to look at what lies beneath Roswell’s patch, and it is a threat he holds over her head, the better to control her.
In thy last letter, thee asked if Roswell had embraced temperance. No, sad to say, he is still under the curse of the bottle. Yet, for the most part, he has done as I have asked and confined his consumption of spirits to the privacy of his room after he retires for the evening. With two young girls to raise, my life has become one of compromise, and Roswell is one of these. As the man of the house, he may be somewhat lacking in industry and moral rectitude, but without him, I would have to forsake my work. In the months when thee and Nathanael are away in Florida, how could I travel otherwise on behalf of my prisoners?
Travel on behalf of her prisoners Elizabeth Popper did. Her travel log reveals that she crisscrossed Connecticut numerous times in the years when Lydia and Lillian were in her care, calling on mayors, influential clergy, and prominent citizens to enlist their support for the separate state-funded women’s reformatory she envisioned. In a second log, Popper recorded the ups and downs of her lobbying efforts. Beside the name of each member of the Connecticut General Assembly she approached, she wrote “yes,” “no,” or “?”. In 1882, Popper presented Governor Hobart Bigelow letters of support from such illustrious Connecticut citizens as Aetna Life Insurance Company president (and future Hartford mayor) Morgan Bulkeley, the Hartford Retreat’s Dr. Eli Todd, social crusader Josephine Dodge, Norwich industrialist William Slater, Trinity College president John Brocklesby, and her friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church. But Popper had also picked up an articulate enemy of her cause, Yale professor William Sumner. The brilliant Sumner, an ardent Social Darwinist, championed laissez-faire,
warning that man must not tamper with the natural laws of social development. He spoke out against trade unions, government regulation, and such “meddling” social legislation as that for which Lizzy Popper advocated. In June of 1879, the Social Darwinist and the social reformer skirmished in the editorial pages of the
Hartford Daily Times.
Sumner fired the first shot, writing that criminals, the great majority of whom belonged to the lower classes, could not be reformed. “The little Quaker lady who now bustles about the State Capitol on behalf of incorrigibles would squander the government’s money on a futile endeavor,” Sumner maintained.
Popper’s response, published the following week, dismissed Sumner’s argument as “elitist claptrap” that flew in the face of democratic ideals and biblical teachings.
Perhaps Professor Sumner would be more at home amongst England’s queen-lovers or Rome’s papists, for here in America we reject the notion that the rich and powerful are designated by divine right. Ergo, we must also reject the arrogant assumption that the criminal, driven more often than not by grinding poverty, is doomed by the hand of Almighty God. Nay, he is made poor and desperate not by natural laws as directed by the Great Overseer, but by the greed of the upper classes. Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.
The dozens of letters from
Hartford Daily Times
readers that followed this exchange ran two to one in favor of Popper’s argument and won her new support among Hartford’s lawmakers. Yet, curiously, just as Popper’s campaign for prison reform was gathering momentum in the General Assembly, she abruptly halted her lobbying efforts. Little is known about why the travel log of the “little Quaker lady”
lists no trips from April of 1883 to October of 1885, or why this otherwise meticulous chronicler, letter-writer, and letter-saver saved none of her own or others’ correspondence from this period, or recorded no diary entries. From this time period there exists only the faded five-sentence beginning of a letter from Popper to her sister Martha dated April 6, 1883—a communiqué that apparently was never finished and never posted, and which indicates that Popper’s retreat from politics was triggered by a domestic crisis involving her ward, Lillian, and her brother, Roswell.
Sister,
Thee must burn this immediately after reading. It is with anger and shame that I write of a vile thing that has happened, and has been happening, inside my home while I have been away. Since yesterday, I have been borne back over and over to a time long ago when my boys were young and Charlie warned me that I would save the world at the expense of his neglected children. Alas, that is what now has come to pass, although I thank the Good Lord that in this instance it is “child,” not “children.” To the best of my knowledge, Lydia has been spared. The injured party is not one of mine, but one with whom I have shared a surname and a home. The injurer, it pains me to say, is our brother. Yesterday, quite by accident, I discovered the
Popper stopped herself mid-sentence, then put a large X through what she had written. Interestingly, she did not follow her own dictate and burn the unfinished letter. Had Roswell Hutchinson’s whippings of Lillian led to greater violence against her? Had she become the victim of sexual abuse? The details of what happened are left to the conjecture of the modern biographer. All that is known is this: Roswell Hutchinson left the Popper home abruptly in April of 1883, the troubled Lillian ran away the following year, and Lizzy Popper entered a long and atypical period of disengagement from politics.
Both Roswell Hutchinson and Lillian Popper suffered untimely deaths. Among Lizzy’s papers are certificates of death for both. Hutchinson’s, issued at Baltimore, Maryland, is dated June 5, 1884. Cause of death: cranial bleeding from mortal blows to the head, suffered during a barroom altercation. Lillian Popper died in March of 1885 while incarcerated in the notorious New York City Tombs. Her death certificate indicates that, following her flight from Lizzy Popper’s home, she retained her father’s surname but reclaimed her given name of Pansy. As Pansy Popper, she was exiled to the Tombs for “the use of fisticuffs in the settling of a dispute” and “frequenting a chop suey house of bad repute.” The latter charge suggests the possibility that Charlie Popper and Vera Daneghy’s child had become a prostitute, a drug addict, or both, as “chop suey houses” of this era sometimes served as fronts for parlors at which opium and sex were bought and consumed. Pansy was fifteen when she died, her cause of death listed as “consumption,” the nineteenth-century term for pulmonary tuberculosis.
