The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
and then about the history and the nature of her long-standing relationship with former Bride Lake inmate Hennie Moskowitz. “I told them my personal life was none of their goddamned business,” she said. “But they kept chipping away and chipping away, and I let ’em get to me, goddamnit.” The Department of Correction offered Lolly a choice: a discreet resignation, to be signed before she left the warden’s office that afternoon, or a full-blown investigation, possibly followed by an arrest. She was exhausted. She was frightened. Hennie was so sick. Now she did cry in front of them. She tendered her resignation, effective on the first of March, six months and twenty-five days shy of her forty-year goal.
Lolly vetoed the idea of a testimonial dinner at which “those two-faced phonies from central office” might stand at a podium and praise her. She nixed the plans for a staff open house at which the guards she’d filed grievances against might stand around, having cake and coffee and smirking at her defeat. All she wanted on her last day on the job, she said, was permission to take her grandmother’s sign with her.
The sign was a rustic pine board that had been presented to Lydia at the prison’s dedication ceremonies in 1913. It had hung on the office wall behind her desk throughout her long tenure as Bride Lake’s matron. Into the four-foot plank, Lydia’s farm manager, later her husband Alden, had burned the one-sentence philosophy by which she operated Bride Lake: “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” “It was a personal gift from my grandfather to my grandmother,” Lolly argued in her written request to the warden to take the sign. “And anyway, you’ve thrown out her values and her success rates. Why would you want it?”
When the warden denied Lolly’s request on the grounds that the sign was state property, she petitioned Central Office. The commissioner upheld the denial. Lolly contacted the governor’s office. Three unanswered inquiries later, one of Johnston’s lackeys contacted her. Governor Johnston put implicit trust in the people he placed in positions of authority, she said, and made it his policy not to undermine that authority.
“Bullshit!” Lolly had responded, and at the end of her final shift, had unscrewed the sign from a corridor wall and taken it anyway, meeting and defeating the gaze of several junior officers who watched her but did not try to stop her. “Good thing for them,” she told me later, “If they had, they’d have gotten clobbered with that board. I’d have broken noses if I had to.”
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,