The Hour I First Believed

  I asked him if he knew what had happened to her.

  “Died young, same as he did. I want to say a month or two later, but I could be wrong. My memory’s kinda fuzzy these days. All the booze, I guess.”

  IN CLASS ON TUESDAY, I passed out a quiz on the Campbell essay that was so difficult, all but three of them flunked it. Well, tough, I told myself. If they can’t do college-level work, then they shouldn’t be in college. Screw ’em.

  Driving to and from Oceanside that week, I honked my horn at any asshole whose driving got in my way. At the bank to deposit the Micks’ rent check, I went off on a teller who’d infuriated me by waiting first on a customer who’d come in after me. Back home again, when Velvet hit me up for a ride over to Target, I didn’t just say no. I said I thought it was kind of pathetic that someone in her twenties still had to bum rides off of other people. That someone her age should have her own car. Run her own errands.

  “What’s your problem?” she’d shot back.

  “Oh, I got a bunch of them,” I said. “You, for one.”

  Slouching away, she said it under her breath. “Jerk.”

  Hey, I was being a jerk. And I felt completely justified in being one. I’d finally figured out why I’d never been able to hug my mother: because she’d been a fucking fraud. If my brain hadn’t known that when I was a kid, I guess maybe my body had. My disengaged muscles.

  Every night that week, I’d lie in bed, stewing and sputtering instead of sleeping: about my father’s fatal attraction, about the battle between Mary Agnes and the Quirks. My mother had fought back with the only two weapons available to her: her looks and her defiance. I was furious on her behalf, and on my own. And when sleep refused to come, I’d climb out of bed, slip my clothes on, and walk down the road—by moonlight one night, by the first weak light of morning another couple. I’d walk the field where the maze had been, where my mother had emerged, smiling hungrily at me but never speaking. And now, forty-something years after the fact, I kept squinting into the tree line as if—like that ghost bride the inmates used to claim they saw walking along the lake shore—Mary Agnes might appear. Walk into the clearing toward me and reach out. Hold me. Hug me and let me hug her. They had had no right to keep us from each other. No fucking right at all.

  I stayed away from the prison that week.

  I walked and walked that field.

  I drank.

  By Friday, the apple house was nothing more than stacks of lumber, a pile of roof shingles, and a concrete slab exposed to the sun. “I’ll come by next week and start busting up that cement for you,” Ulysses said.

  I nodded, opened my wallet, and gave him two twenties and a ten. “You remember anything else about Mary Agnes?”

  I had asked him that same question all week. This time his answer was different. “Come to me this morning,” he said. “Something that happened when you were just a little fella. She took you.”

  “Took me? What do you mean?”

  “Grabbed you. Kidnapped you. It was over quick, I think. That same day or the next, maybe. I don’t remember the particulars.”

  I stood there, shaking my head. My mind reeled. “How old was I?”

  “Just a little fella, like I said. Two or three maybe. But my memory—”

  “Did they arrest her?”

  Ulysses shook his head. “Never pinned it on her. See, she had moved away by then—went down to New York and become a model, I think it was, and your dad had married the other one on the rebound. But then later—maybe five, six years after it happened—Alden and me were down at the VFW, getting soused together on twenty-five-cent beers. That’s when he told me.”

  “Told you what?” I said.

  “That it was Mary Agnes who come out here and took you that time. Her and some guy she’d hooked up with who had a car.”

  “What do you mean ‘came out here’? To the farm?”

  “Yeah. Drove out here and snatched you right in the yard. In broad daylight, I’m pretty sure. Her and that guy. She never had trouble attracting the fellas, you know? But it was always your dad she come back to, even after he’d moved on, married the other one. She kept showing up like a bad penny.”

  “Why did she take me?” I said. “For money?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she just wanted to see you for a little while. Have a visit with you. She dropped you off someplace, I think. At a store or something. But don’t trust my memory. I probably killed off more brain cells than I got left.”

  “WE’RE CLOSING IN FORTY MINUTES,” Tillie, the keeper of the Daily Record’s “graveyard,” told me. “It’ll probably take you a while to find what you’re looking for, especially if you don’t have the specific dates. Nothing’s indexed. Why don’t you come back earlier in the day on Monday?”

  “Please,” I said. “I just need to…If I could just…”

  She must have realized I was fighting back tears, because she put aside her resistance. Took a key from her drawer and stood up. “This way,” she said.

  The old newspapers were bound in dusty, oversized books with hard covers: Jan-Mar 1950, Nov-Dec 1951. By luck, I found what I was looking for almost immediately in the book labeled July-Aug 1954.

  CHILD’S ABDUCTION ENDS HAPPILY; PARENTS RELIEVED, GRATEFUL

  What Mrs. Rosemary Quirk of 418 Bride Lake Road, this city, called “the most frightening day of my life” ended happily last evening for her and her husband, Alden Quirk, Jr., when the couple’s son Caelum, age 3, was found alone and unharmed at the Frosty Ranch, the popular ice cream emporium at the juncture of Routes 2 and 165. The boy had been abducted that morning from the family’s home.

  The kidnapper or kidnappers remain at large. Town and state police are on the lookout for a 1947 or 1948 green Hudson Commodore with whitewall tires, the vehicle they believe may have been used in the snatching.

  “It all happened so quickly,” Mrs. Quirk said of the abduction of her little boy. “I was outside hanging laundry on the clothesline and he was running back and forth between the sheets playing peekaboo. The phone rang and I went in to answer it. When I got back outside a few minutes later, he was gone.” Mrs. Quirk’s husband was away in Rhode Island at the time, attending a livestock auction with his father, Alden Quirk, Sr. The Quirk family owns and operates Bride Lake Dairy Farm.

  Mrs. Quirk said she initially thought young Caelum had wandered down to the nearby cow barn where his aunt, Miss Louella (“Lolly”) Quirk, of the same address, was working. Miss Quirk informed her sister-in-law that she had seen a green Hudson head up the driveway toward the family farmhouse and then, a moment later, drive away at a high rate of speed. “I had a feeling something fishy was going on, but I sure didn’t think anyone was kidnapping Li’l Bit,” Miss Quirk said. She tried to get a look at the license plate but was unable. “Whoever was at the wheel was driving like a bat out of h–,” she noted. Miss Quirk said there may have been a person in the passenger’s seat but she could not be certain.

  The kidnapping occurred at approximately ten a.m. yesterday. The Three Rivers Police Department was promptly notified and a search was begun under the direction of Detective Francis X. Archambault. By mid-afternoon, the search for the boy had widened to three surrounding counties. The Bride Lake State Farm for Women, which lies adjacent to the Quirk farm, was also searched. Prison authorities ascertained that each woman under their supervision was present and accounted for and that none had witnessed the abduction.

  Little Caelum was discovered seated alone atop a picnic table outside the Frosty Ranch Creamery shortly after eight p.m. by Miss Josephine Lenkiewicz, a Frosty Ranch patron. Miss Lenkiewicz said she had heard about the boy’s abduction on the radio earlier in the day and had remembered the description of the tyke’s clothing, a Hopalong Cassidy polo shirt, blue dungarees, and Buster Brown shoes. “I had to look twice because whoever took him must have bought him a chocolate cone, and Hopalong was sort of hiding beneath the stains,” Miss Lenkiewicz said. “Luckily, I remembered his name. When
I said it, he looked right up so I knew it was him.”

  The boy appeared calm when approached by police minutes later. “He had a mayonnaise jar in his lap with a praying mantis inside, and he was more interested in that bug than he was in us,” Officer Felix Delmore noted. “Someone had poked air holes in the top for him, probably the kidnapper.” Detective Archambault said later that the boy did not appear to have been harmed or mistreated.

  The abduction was unusual in that it had occurred at the victim’s home, Detective Archambault noted. “A kidnapper will usually make a grab at a grocery store or a country fair, some public place like that where he can disappear into a crowd with the victim and make a getaway. This was different. This was pretty brazen.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Quirk said they were not contacted by note or telephone about a ransom. Yet money may have been the motive, Detective Archambault said. “Whoever took him may not have had time to communicate his demands, or he may have lost his nerve and decided it wasn’t worth it,” he said. The investigation is continuing.

  Little Caelum’s parents arrived at the Frosty Ranch a short time after he was identified and were reunited with their son. “My prayers were answered,” his mother said. The Quirk family wishes to extend their gratitude to the Three Rivers Police Department and the Connecticut State Police. To reward Miss Lenkiewicz for her keen eye and quick thinking, the family will provide her with a dozen eggs and two quarts of milk each week for a year.

  Anyone who may have information about the abduction is asked to contact Detective Francis X. Archambault of the Three Rivers Police Department at Turner 7–1002.

  “Sir?” Tillie said. “Five more minutes. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I just need to find one more thing.”

  Ulysses had said he thought she died shortly after my father. Daddy’d been killed in May of 1965. I pulled two books from the shelf: May-Jun ’65 July-Aug ’65, Sept-Oct ’65. I found what I was looking for in the latter book.

  STATE FARM PRISONER DROWNS; SUICIDE SUSPECTED

  The body of State Farm for Women inmate Mary Agnes Dank, 36, was recovered on Monday from Bride Lake, a body of water located within the confines of the prison compound. The victim, missing since Saturday, was reported to have been distraught in recent days.

  Coroner Asa T. Pelto, who has examined the body, has concluded that Miss Dank died from drowning, most likely at her own hand. There were no signs of foul play, he said.

  Miss Dank, a Three Rivers native, had been serving a six-month sentence for vagrancy, disturbance of the peace, and the assault of a law officer. She had once worked as a fashion model, registered with the prestigious John Robert Powers Agency of New York City, but more recently had fallen on hard times.

  BACK HOME, I CLIMBED THE stairs to the attic. There, on the floor next to a box labeled “Xmas Decorations,” was the cat caddy Moses had asked about. And there, leaning diagonally against the south wall, was the wooden sign that had hung first in my great-grandmother’s office over at the prison and later on on the wall above Lolly and Hennie’s bed. I’d taken it down and exiled it when the Micks moved in. Atop Grandpa Quirk’s bureau with its missing drawer, in a cardboard box, was The Absent Boy, the book I’d written in my early thirties and had almost gotten published. I lifted the manuscript out of the box and flipped through the yellowing typewritten pages. How could I have written an entire novel about the kidnapping of a little boy when I had no recollection whatsoever of my own abduction by the mother who had been denied me?

  I dropped my book back into the box. Walked over to Great Grandma’s sign and cocked my head to read the words her husband-to-be had burned into the wood the year Bride Lake Prison had opened. I spoke Lydia’s manifesto aloud: “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.” Well, my mother had had to surrender hers; the Quirks had made sure of that. First, they’d made my father inaccessible to her. Then they’d separated her from me. Then they’d imprisoned her. A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity. No? Then what was so dignified about having your water-bloated body pulled out the lake and hauled off to the coroner’s?

  She’d never had a chance against them, and neither had her mother. The Quirks versus the Danks had been an unfair fight from the beginning. And so, I lifted my foot and brought it down hard against Lydia’s sign. Broke it in two. Grabbed the cat caddy and went back downstairs.

  The following week, while Moses was away, I bought two bottles of red wine, invited Janis down for dinner, and got us both drunk. Got to talking about how hard it was to be married to Maureen. Got Janis talking about all the ways Moze didn’t understand or appreciate her. All those times we’d gone running, that day up in Hartford: I’d wanted so badly to take her to bed and make love to her. But that wasn’t what I did that night. I just got her drunk and fucked her. Pulled out just before I got there and spilled my stuff—my Quirk-Dank DNA—into the rucked-up sheets. There’d been nothing loving about it, and my despair overtook me before I’d even gone limp again.

  I rolled over and gave her my back.

  “Caelum?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  Didn’t speak a word when, to my relief, she slipped her clothes on and went back upstairs. Alone again, I lay there, thinking to myself that maybe I should track down Paul Hay and call him up. Tell him I’d joined the brotherhood: guys who fucked other guys’ wives. What had they called it in anger management class? The cardiology, neurology, and endocrinology of rage? Well, I was enraged all right. I was fucking furious. They had goddamned lied to me, all of them: my grandfather, my no-good father, the mother who hadn’t been my mother. Even Lolly, the person I trusted the most out of all of them. They’d gone so far as to make up a bogus birth certificate. Who had done that? Which one of those fucking liars?…

  She had had to kidnap me to spend a day with me….

  Somewhere around three in the morning, I got up and got dressed. Walked down the driveway and headed up the road toward that empty field again, to the place where she once had been. Where she wasn’t.

  chapter twenty-six

  Transcript of an interview with Sheldon “Peppy” Schissel

  Recorded at the Inn Between, Astoria, New York

  February 18, 2007

  Would you like something to eat before we start, Mr. Schissel?

  Sure. How about a shrimp cocktail, a porterhouse steak, and some cherries jubilee for dessert?

  Uh…

  Nah, I’m just kidding you, Jake. You eat a steak at this joint, you’d probably get mad-cow disease. Maybe we should have a little something to wet the whistle, though. And by the way, you keep calling me “Mr. Schissel,” I’ll have to go home, put on a necktie. My friends call me Peppy.

  Peppy it is then. What are you drinking?

  Chivas and milk.

  Excuse me?

  Chivas and milk. I got a bum gut, but I can get away with a nip here and there, long as I keep it coated. Just don’t tell my daughter, will you? The Enforcer, I call her. Worse than her mother was. So what do I do now? Pick up this little microphone and talk into it?

  No, it’s recording already. Just speak in your regular tone of voice, and it should pick you up fine from the table here. Let me just get you your drink.

  Sit down, sit down. What are you having, Jake?

  Just coffee, I guess. My name’s Caelum, by the way.

  Gonna make me drink alone, eh? Well, let’s see if we can wake the barkeep up from his siesta over there. Hey, Jake! Yoo hoo! We’ll take a Chivas and milk, rocks, and a cup of coffee. You got any half ’n’half back there?…Atta boy. Chivas and half ’n’half then. And a coffee…. Did I already tell him the coffee?

  Uh, yeah. Yup.

  Memory’s a funny thing. Ask me what I had for breakfast today and I couldn’t tell you. But I can still name all the families lived on our street in the Bronx when I was a kid. Can still recite the ditties we learned in school. You ever hear this
one?

  Starkle starkle, little twink

  Who the hell you are you think?

  I’m not under the alfluence of inkahol

  Although some thinkle peep I am.

  You learned that in school?

  Yeah, school o’ hard knocks. So, Shirley Nussbaum said you wanted to talk about my career at Rheingold?

  Right—particularly your connection with the Miss Rheingold beauty contest. Mrs. Nussbaum said you used to chauffeur the contestants?

  That’s right. I drove the Rheingold girls, not to mention quite a few of the Mets when they were a new team—Gil Hodges, Bobby Klaus, those guys. Drove Nat King Cole and Lionel Hampton around one summer, too, when the brewery was cozying up to the Harlem market. Nice guys, they were—first-class gentlemen. Hey, you know how Shirley tracked me down, don’t you? Through the hoozy-whatsis.

  The Internet.

  Right. That and a matchbook cover. See, Shirley and I were in Public Relations together, and we were pretty good friends. No hanky-panky or anything, just, you know, office pals. So when my daughter Rochelle got married in 1966, we invited Shirley to the wedding and she kept the matchbook. Collects matchbooks, I guess. So that’s how she found me. Put my daughter’s married name—which is Skolnick—into her computer and got her number. And guess who answers the phone when she calls? Me! Because I’m living with Rochelle now, since my wife passed on. “Who?” I said. “Shirley Nussbaum? You gotta be kidding me.” Hadn’t talked to her in…well, let’s see. Pepsi Cola bought out Rheingold in ’73, and they shut us down for good in ’76. We all saw the writing on the wall, of course, but you know what the bastards did? Halted production right in the middle of a workday. Didn’t even bottle what we had in storage; they just dumped 100,000 gallons of good beer into the East River. Some of us old-timers stood there watching, holding our notices and crying like babies…. Well, life goes on, right? So what’s the story now, Jake? You writing a book?