The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
like a sergeant-at-arms. “Look at the two of them with those matching Cheshire grins,” I said. Lolly took back the photograph, squinted, and grinned herself.
“Little by little, he won her over, you see? She began to trust him. Rely on him. They swapped ideas, solved problems together. Became almost like business partners, I guess. And then, of course, it turned into a different kind of partnership. Lucky for us. Me and you wouldn’t be sitting here if it hadn’t.” Observing that made her chuckle, and those watery blue eyes of hers recovered their sparkle. “To hear Grandma tell it, widow Quirk was fit to be tied. First the state of Connecticut steals her land away from her so they can build a prison. Then the prison matron steals her son out of the cradle. Course, nobody’d stolen anything. The state had paid her for that property fair and square, and Grandma and Grandpa just plain fell in love. I tell you, the gossips in town must have had a ball with that romance! Grandma was already middle-aged—a confirmed old maid, or so everyone assumed until they got hitched. Married each other right down there by the lake, with all the prison girls in attendance. Nineteen eighteen it was. Grandma was well into her forties and Grandpa was still in his twenties. It was sad, though. We’d gotten tangled up in World War I by then, but Grandpa’d dodged that bullet—got a farm deferment from the government. Then he ups and dies of influenza. They’d been married for less than a year. When Grandma buried him, she was pregnant with my father.”
“Alden Quirk the Second,” I said.
“That’s right. Alden Jr., speak of the devil.” She passed me another picture: Grandpa Quirk, a boy in knickers, on the lap of a sober-faced Lydia.
“She looks more like his grandmother than his mother,” I said.
Lolly nodded. “She’d started late, and then had to raise him by her lonesome. And then, like I said, after our mother died, she pretty much raised your father and me. It’s funny, though: I heard her say more than once that making prisoners and little children toe the line was a cakewalk compared to dealing with her mother-in-law. Adelheid Quirk—Addie, they called her. Stubborn German girl. She was a pip, I guess.”
“So Addie was your great-grandmother?” I asked.
“Right. On my father’s side. Went to her grave blaming Grandma for her son’s death. Thousands and thousands lost their lives during that flu epidemic, but she held Lydia P. Quirk personally responsible.”
Walking along Bride Lake Road that morning, I smiled as I recalled that Christmas visit of ours three or four years ago: Aunt Lolly and me warmed by brandy and picture passing, by her desire to tell me the family stories and my desire to listen to them. “You gonna remember all this stuff?” she’d asked me that day. “You want a piece of paper to write it down?”
“Nah,” I said, tapping my finger against the side of my head. “Got it all in here.”
She nodded in approval, then called into the kitchen. “Hey, Hennie Penny. How about another slab of that apple crumb pie of yours?”
“Thought you said you were stuffed,” Hennie called back.
“I was. But all this reminiscing’s brought my appetite back.” Turning to me, she asked if I wanted more pie, too, and I said I did. “Make that two pieces. And two cups of joe if there’s any left.”
From the kitchen, “Want ice cream on that pie?”
“Twist my arm,” Lolly said.
A few minutes later, our wives had entered the dining room, plates of pie à la mode in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. “These two big lugs must’ve never heard of women’s lib,” Hennie had mock-complained. “Next time, we oughta burn our bras on the stove and make them get their own damn pie.”
Mo had nodded in good-natured agreement.
I CAUGHT MYSELF DOING SOMETHING I’d often done as a kid: kicked a stone along the side of the road, trying to give it a ride all the way down to the cornfields. But I kicked it crooked and a little too hard, and it hopped into the poison ivy sprouting up along the roadside.
In that aerial-view photo back at the farmhouse, you could see that the prison property was wedge-shaped, as if Connecticut had come along and cut itself a big slab of Quirk family pie. Narrowest near the road, the prison compound fanned out from there, encompassing Bride Lake and, surrounding its shore in a semicircle, the six two-story brick dormitories that housed the inmates. “Cottages,” they’d called them. Per Great-Grandma Lydia’s orders, they were left unlocked, Lolly had told me, and because “the girls” could walk off the compound, few of them had. Behind the cottages had been the barns, coops, pastures, and fields that had made the prison self-sufficient and had provided surplus dairy and vegetables to the almshouse and the orphanage. The rear of the property was woods and, beyond that, an abrupt drop-off. A stone thrown from the cliff’s edge would land in the town of New London.
A woman had thrown herself from that ledge once—a prisoner for whom Bride Lake had been a revolving door. I was in college at the time, and Mother had sent me a clipping about the suicide because the victim was someone I’d known as a boy. Zinnia, her name was. She’d worked for us during cider season. We’d been friends of a sort, Zinnia and me; she’d had a son my age and was always hugging me. Borrowing me, I realized now—borrowing my eight-year-old body. But at the time of Zinnia’s death, I was nineteen or twenty, consumed by college work and college life, and grateful for both the reprieve from Three Rivers and the anonymity of Boston. I was momentarily sad to read my mother’s news, I remember, and then the next moment I was over it…. I hadn’t thought about Zinnia in years. Decades. But on that April day that Lolly died, I felt, again, Zinnia’s fat, sun-warmed arms around me, and felt, along with her unequivocal embrace, the biting shame of my betrayal of her—my having let her take the rap for food I’d stolen.
Just past the curve in the road, the new high-tech complex came into view: a boxlike eyesore of a building, surrounded by chain link and crowned with spools of razor wire. “Makes me want to puke every time I come around the corner and see that goddamn thing, parked up there where the cow pasture used to be,” Lolly had grumbled during one Sunday evening phone call. “It’s like they’re sticking their middle finger up at everything Grandma stood for.”
“They” was the regime of Governor Roland T. Johnston, a law-and-order conservative from Waterford whom I’d had the pleasure of voting against before we moved out West. Johnston had come to power on the basis of his campaign promises to abolish the state income tax and put an end to the coddling of Connecticut’s convicted felons. “Let every Willie and Wilma Horton in this state take note,” I’d heard him say on TV the night he won. “The Carnival Cruise is over. The ship’s been docked.” Shortly after his inauguration, the custody staffs of the state’s seven prisons were paramilitarized, Police Academy trained, and armed with Mace and billy clubs. For the first time in Bride Lake’s history, male guards now roamed the compound, maintaining order largely by intimidation. Ground was broken on the state-of-the-art facility that would house the new, hard-core female inmate population, which, the governor maintained, had been the unfortunate byproduct of women’s liberation.
“That’s bullshit!” Lolly had declared. “There are some bad apples in the barrel over there—always have been. But it’s not right, the way he’s painting them all with the same brush. Most of the gals come in so beaten down by life that they’re more dangerous to themselves than anyone else.”
By the time the new “supermax” was open for business, Maureen and I were living out in Littleton, removed from state politics, but the age of Internet propaganda was upon us. “I had my friend Hilda write it down so you could take a look,” Lolly phoned to tell me. “She’s Miss Computer these days—Internet this, e-mail that. You got a pencil? It says double-ya, double-ya, double-ya, period, p-o, period, s-t-a-t-e, period, c-t, period, g-o-v. Whatever the hell that mumbo jumbo means. Hilda said to spell it out and you’d know.”
By logging onto the Department of Correction’s Web site, I was able to take a “virtual tour” of the new facility. During her forty-year tenure as superintendent of Bride Lake, Lydia Quirk had made fresh air and sunshine