The Hour I First Believed

  Lolly went on and on during those Sunday night calls. “Uh-huh,” I’d say, straining for patience. “Really?…Unbelievable.” When I’d lived in Three Rivers, I’d invested in my aunt’s outrage—had felt some of it myself because I knew how much she cared about those women in custody, and about how disheartened she’d become. But now, hundreds of miles away from her, I only half-listened. The trouble with Lolly, I told myself, was that she’d never escaped home port. It was too bad she hadn’t gone to college. Hadn’t traveled out West and worked on one of those reservations. But because she hadn’t, she was hopelessly provincial and, well, boring. She walked to work, for Christ’s sake. “Maureen’s standing right here, waiting to talk to you,” I’d say, waving Mo over to the phone. “Let me put her on.” I’d have managed maybe five minutes of conversation, and Maureen would talk with her for the next twenty. Which was why, I guess, it was Mo who knew that the cat’s name was Nancy Tucker. That Lolly had been taking an antidepressant since Hennie died and had prepaid for her own funeral at Gamboa’s.

  Had my long-distance disconnect from my aunt stemmed from indifference? Uh-uh. No way. It had stemmed from pain. Our move to Colorado had separated me from the one person I’d loved my whole life. The one family member who’d remained a constant after everyone else had either died or up and left me. But then I’d up and left—had put the Rocky Mountains between my aunt and myself in order to save face after my arrest and save my crumbling third marriage. And rather than own up to the pain of that separation, I had masked it. Hidden behind my guyness. Don’t cry, we’re told. Big boys don’t cry. And so, on those Sunday nights when I’d hear the pain in her voice, or her old familiar chuckle, I’d safeguard myself against them. “No kidding,” I’d say. “Wow. Well, here’s Maureen.” Oh, yeah, I was one armored and inoculated son of a bitch. Shit, when her companion died—the woman Lolly’d loved and lived with for thirty-something years—I hadn’t even flown back for the funeral. But, it’s like they say: hindsight’s twenty-twenty. The night before? When she’d opened her eyes and stared right at me without registering who I was? Maybe that’d been some kind of karmic payback for the guy who’d never been honest with her about how much he missed her. How much, all his life, he had loved her. Well, I was facing the pain now, all right. Walking along that road and choking back sobs. Turning my face to the trees, so that people driving by wouldn’t see that one of the big boys was crying….

  Approaching the prison’s main entrance, I paused to look at the new sign they’d erected: my great-grandmother’s name chiseled into a granite slab spanning two brick pillars. When the state opened the new facility in 1996, they renamed the compound Lydia P. Quirk Correctional Institution. Lolly had been invited, in her ancestor’s honor, to assist with the ribbon-cutting. She’d declined via a bracing letter to the editor of the Three Rivers Daily Record in which she referred to the governor as “a hypocrite and a horse’s back end.” Protesting the forsaking of her grandmother’s ideals, she’d written, “Lydia Quirk helped women get their dignity back. Associating her name with a place that beats women down is like spitting on her legacy.”

  “Ouch,” I’d said, when she read me her letter over the phone. “You sure you want to burn your bridges while you’re still working for the state?”

  “Pass me the blowtorch,” she’d said.

  My eyes bounced from the sign to the gatehouse. Just outside, a uniformed guard stood smoking a cigarette and watching me. I waved. Ignoring the gesture, he just stood there, smoking and staring. “The goon squad,” Lolly had dubbed the new regime.

  Some of the inmates were already out in the west yard. A maintenance crew, from the looks of it—nine or ten women with shovels, hoes, and hedge cutters. Security risks, I figured, because they were wearing screaming orange jumpsuits. They were clearing brush and, by the looks of things, digging around for something. “Found another one!” I heard someone call, and a few of the others stopped working to go over and look.

  Two male officers stood together, sipping coffees and supervising. “Morales!” one called. “Get your fat ass in gear! Now! You, too, Delmore!” Delmore must have said something he didn’t like, because he shouted, “Yeah? Really? Then keep running your mouth, you stupid cow, because I’d just as soon march you off to seg as look at that pockmarked face of yours.”

  I shook my head. If this was the way they were treating them out in the yard when a pedestrian was in earshot, what was going on inside the place? That CO’s attitude was the kind of thing that had chased most of the Bride Lake old timers into early retirement, according to Lolly. Not her, though. She’d stayed and fought, filing grievances against the younger guards who bullied some of the inmates and flirted openly with others. She’d blown the whistle on one officer who, for an entire eight-hour shift, had refused to issue toilet paper to a woman suffering from intestinal flu. She’d written up another whom she’d observed hanging himself with an imaginary noose when an inmate passed by him on the way to the chow hall—a woman who, the month before, had attempted suicide.

  But Lolly had crossed a line when she complained to the deputy warden about the sexual shenanigans of a well-connected young CO named McManus. “Struts around like a rooster in the henhouse,” she’d groused. “And that juvie he’s got working for him is doing much more than washing and waxing floors, and everyone knows it.” As a result of her complaint, Officer McManus was assigned a different helper—a Bride Lake lifer who’d killed her husband and was old enough to be his mother. That’s about when the anonymous war against Lolly began.

  A rubber dildo was left in her desk drawer. Lesbian pornography was taped to the inside of her locker door. At a staff training in Wethersfield, someone spray-painted the words bull dyke on her driver’s-side door. Worst of all were the middle-of-the-night phone calls—whispered taunts that left Lolly and Hennie exhausted and frazzled. Still, my aunt was resolute. Or stubborn, depending on how you wanted to look at it. She had a goal in mind: to match her grandmother’s forty-year service record at Bride Lake. Lolly’d begun working there on September 25, 1957. She planned to retire on September 25, 1997, and not one day earlier. “If those sons of bitches think they can wear me down, they’ve got another think coming,” she told me. She took the phone off the hook. Took sleeping pills. Took Maalox for the ulcer she’d developed. She took no sick days, though. Shed no tears in front of them. Showed no signs of weakening in her obstinate resolve.

  It was during this siege that Hennie’s kidneys began to fail. Three mornings a week, Lolly drove her to the hospital for dialysis, cat napping or pacing in the waiting room during the three-hour procedures. On the good days, Hennie wouldn’t hemorrhage in the truck on their way back home. Lolly would get her some lunch, get her to bed, and then put on her uniform and walk down the road to do battle with the coworkers who’d become her enemies. She’d return from work a little after eleven each evening, and the phone calls would begin. “I’m more fried than a hamburger,” she admitted to me one Sunday evening. “But they might as well get it into their fat heads: they’re stuck with me until September.”

  But in February, the warden called Lolly to his office suite and introduced her to the two state police detectives who had come to ask her some questions. A Bride Lake inmate had charged that Lolly had groped her during a strip search, inserting her fingers between the lips of her vagina and stroking her clitoris with her thumb. A second inmate corroborated the story and said Lolly had molested her, too—that, for my aunt, groping was business as usual. “They’re junkies, both of those girls!” Lolly shouted at me over the phone. “Someone offered them something to say that stuff! Junkies will make a deal with the devil!”

  “You need legal advice,” I told her. “Why don’t you call Lena LoVecchio and see what she says?”

  “Too goddamned late for that,” she snapped back.

  For three hours, she said, those detectives had grilled her about the false accusations, and then about the history and the nature of her long-st
anding 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, there was no love lost between your aunt and the department.”

  “She had good reason to be bitter,” I said. He nodded in agreement. I said the canned music would be fine.

  He asked me if I’d bring over an outfit that Lolly could wear to her wake—that day, if possible, or the next morning. I could bring pictures, too, if I liked. Some families liked to display framed photos, or put together a collage of candids. “Celebrate the person’s life,” he said.

/>   I nodded, my mind on something else. “You know what?” I said. “She gave them almost forty years. What the hell. Try for the bagpipes.”

  ULYSSES’S PHONE RANG AND RANG, unanswered.

  Hilda Malinowski cried when I told her. Lolly and she had been friends since 1964, she said. She’d never been a pallbearer before, but if there was anyone she’d give it a try for, it was Lolly. She just hoped she was strong enough. She’d call Grace Fletcher for me, she said; Gracie was big-boned and she went to Curves, so she should be able to handle pallbearing.

  Alice Levesque told me she knew something was up; Lolly hadn’t looked right the last time at bridge club. “She played lousy, too. She was my partner, and I gave her the devil about it. Now I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.”

  Millie Monk volunteered to make lemon squares, if we were having a get-together at the house after the funeral, which people would more or less expect, so she suggested I should. Lolly had always loved her lemon squares, she said. “She asked me for the recipe once, and I said, ‘Who are you kidding? You wouldn’t even know how to turn on the oven.’ We always kidded each other like that, her and me. Jeepers creepers, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Now that she thought about it, Millie said, maybe she’d come over to the house on Tuesday and tidy up a little. Run the vacuum. “Lolly was a sweetie pie, but she was never too zippedy-doo-da on the housecleaning.”