The Hour I First Believed

  After the ceremony ended, the President and his entourage passed by, not ten or twelve steps away from Lydia and me. Mr. Cleveland’s demeanor is reminiscent of Charlie Popper’s, and it pained me to think of that other thing they had in common: the fathering of children outside of wedlock. I hated so that ditty that commonfolk chanted in jest during the campaign two years ago: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” It made me glad then and now that women do not vote, for whom would I have chosen: Blaine the Swindler or Cleveland the Fornicator?

  In addition to the dedication ceremony, Lizzy and Lydia’s New York itinerary that week included a ride on the Third Avenue el, a visit to the newly opened Bloomingdale’s department store, and a matinee performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Princess Ida, in which the title character concludes that men are “little more than monkeys in suits,” then promptly retreats to Castle Adamant to run a college for women. In her diary, Lizzy dismissed the musical as “piffle” and complained of an inability to stay awake beyond the first act, “but Lyd has talked ever since about how ‘marvelous’ were the performances and the music, and how she would be elated to attend a college exclusive to females, for she wishes to have as little as possible to do with men.”

  Another diary entry, written shortly after the former, reveals that, even as an old woman, Lizzy Popper was still processing her traumatic experiences as a Civil War nurse. Responding to a newspaper article about Robert Wood Johnson’s manufacturing of Johnson & Johnson sterile dressings, individually packaged, the invention of which had been inspired by a lecture Johnson had heard James Lister deliver, Popper reflected in her diary:

  This medical discovery is significant but twenty-odd years too late in coming. It might have saved hundreds who died in their beds at Shipley. Those boys would be middle-aged men now, gray-haired or bald with children of marrying age. Their mothers would not have outlived them, subverting the natural order of life. I have outlived Edmond and Levi for two-score years and three now. Where is God’s plan in that?

  The years between 1886 and 1892 were, for Lizzy Popper, ones of declining physical health and painful personal losses. Her beloved sister Martha died of heart failure in 1889. Her surviving sister Anna Livermore died of the same the following year. Although Popper’s mind remained clear and productive until her final days, she became unsteady on her feet and was often confined to a wheelchair in her last two years. In May of 1892, while attempting to move from her chair to her bed, she fell and broke her hip. The fracture hastened Popper’s decline and she died of complications nine days later, on May 30, 1892.

  Lydia Popper was with her grandmother during her final days and reported that Lizzy drifted in and out of consciousness near the end. During one of her lucid hours, Lydia reported, Lizzy said to her, “My failures were far too many, Lyd, and my successes far too few. I can say only that I did my best.” At her grandmother’s bedside when she died, Lydia later wrote that Elizabeth Popper’s final words were, “Listen. The girl is crying for me. Come, shadow, take me now.”

  Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper may have failed during her remarkable lifetime to achieve her goal of establishing a separate state-funded women’s reformatory administered and run by women, but her dream was realized posthumously when the granddaughter she had raised, sociologist Lydia Popper Quirk, became the inaugural superintendent of the Connecticut State Farm for Women at Three Rivers in 1913. Quirk held the position until 1948 and, during her long tenure, instituted many progressive changes that bettered the lives of the incarcerated women under her supervision. “The prison that cures with kindness,” people often said of the institution that was the realization of Lydia P. Quirk’s grandmother’s vision. Throughout her years as Superintendent, a wooden plaque stating her philosophy hung on the wall behind Lydia Quirk’s desk. It said, simply and eloquently, “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.”

  chapter thirty-four

  REMAINS OF TWO INFANTS FOUND ON LOCAL FARM

  State’s Medical Examiner to Conduct Autopsies on Long-Buried Babies

  CONDITION OF SOLDIER’S WOUNDED WIFE IMPROVES

  Iraq Veteran’s Widow Says Husband Was “Still at War”

  MUMMIFIED REMAINS TO BE ANALYZED BY STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST

  Second Exhumed Infant Died 50 Years Ago, Test Indicates; State’s Attorney: Criminal Prosecution Is “Moot Point”

  FAMILY OF TRAUMATIZED VETERAN DECRIES IRAQ WAR

  Widow Declines Military Funeral, Refuses Purple Heart

  STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST CONCLUDES:

  “MUMMY BABY” LIVED, DIED IN 19 TH CENTURY

  PFC KAREEM A. KENDRICK, 1983–2007:

  A Body Maimed, A Mind Impaired,

  An American Warrior Forsaken

  BEHIND THE GLAMOUR: A BEAUTY QUEEN’S LIFE OF PAIN AND DELUSION

  Mental Illness Was Family Curse, Scarring Legacy for Unearthed Baby’s Mother

  Over the next few weeks, as the enticing front-page headlines lured readers to the concurrently unspooling stories, I kept my head down and limped through the final classes of the semester. “No comment,” I repeated to each inquiring journalist; nevertheless, my name was linked to every new episode. Photos of the farmhouse, taken from the neutral ground of Bride Lake Road, illustrated the coverage. There was a recurring photo, too, of my mother as one of the six red-lipsticked, white-gloved women campaigning to be Miss Rheingold of 1950. And as I had feared, two or three of the journalists covering the story exhumed, along with my mother’s provocative past, the unrelated story of Maureen’s having survived Columbine, killed Morgan Seaberry while under the influence, and gone to prison for her crime.

  My Oceanside colleagues said nothing to me about my connection to the babies’ remains or the Kareem Kendricks tragedy. Yet whenever I entered the faculty lounge, my presence scattered some of my peers and silenced others, even those who loved nothing more than the sound of their own clever pronouncements. I had never felt so exposed and alone as in their midst during those difficult days of disclosure.

  My students were kinder. Daisy Flores handed me a card at the end of our first class meeting after Kareem Kendricks’s suicide. I delayed opening the envelope until the room was empty and was glad I had because it made me cry. “With Deepest Sympathy for the Loss of Your Brother,” the outside said. Inside were the signatures of each surviving class member. It felt both odd and touching to receive condolences for a fetal half-sibling whose death had occurred before my birth, and about whom I’d been in the dark until the morning I had unwittingly pulled him, with his mummified companion, from the ground. My discovery of “Baby Boy Dank,” as the newspapers had taken to calling him, had confused and challenged me, and had complicated my response to a birth mother for whom I had hungered unknowingly most of my life. But the class’s sympathetic acknowledgement of my loss invited me, finally, to acknowledge that it was a loss, and so to grieve. Baby Boy Dank had been my older half-brother. Claiming kinship with Mary Agnes’s other son meant that I had never been, as I had always assumed, an only child.

  At the beginning of that first class after Kareem’s rampage, I invited my students to share their thoughts and feelings. Only two did, and only to make businesslike announcements. Marisol Sosa gave the time and place of the college’s memorial service for Kendricks. Ibrahim Ahmed invited the others to join him at the weekly anti-war demonstration outside the student union. The rest were mute. I took note, especially, of Oswaldo Rivera’s sullen silence. It spoke, I was pretty sure, of his regret for having ridiculed Kendricks on what had turned out to be the last day of his life. Having seen through a glass darkly in Iraq, Private Kendricks had marveled at how “young” his contemporaries now seemed to him, Ozzie in particular. Now Ozzie’s vision, too, had darkened. Whatever the course curriculm had taught him, Ozzie seemed, because of his interaction with Kendricks, to have put away the persona of the cocky manchild and become a sadder but wiser adult.

  We’d been through a lot togeth
er, these Quest in Literature students and I, and so for their final exam, I gave them an essay question that they could not answer incorrectly.

  That best known of modern artists, Pablo Picasso, often drew on ancient myth for inspiration. He seemed particularly fascinated with the Minotaur, a creature to which he returned repeatedly. In a 1935 etching titled Minotauromachia, Picasso features the monster as the dominant figure in a dreamlike scene. A young girl, seemingly unafraid of the imposing man-beast, faces him while clutching a bouquet in one hand, a lit candle in the other. The monster reaches toward the candle flame, but it is unclear whether his gesture is one of acceptance or rejection. Between the girl and the Minotaur, a wounded female matador lies draped across a wounded horse. At the left of the composition, a man in a loincloth looks over his shoulder while on a ladder. Is he climbing down into the chaotic scene or escaping from it? To the man’s right, two women with doves are detached observers of what is happening below. In the far distance, a boat sails away, and in the sky above the Minotaur, a storm cloud releases dark rain.

  How does Picasso’s Minotauromachia investigate what we have discovered this semester: that ancient myth informs and illuminates modern life? In other words, what do you see in this picture? What does it say to you about the human condition and the world we inhabit and share?

  I went to Kareem’s memorial service, a sparsely attended event at which those few who spoke struggled to eulogize a sacrificial lamb who had been heroic, destructive, and deranged. When Marisol spoke, she reminded us to be kind to one another “because you never know.” She was followed by an army chaplain who assured us that God’s plan, unfathomable at times, was just and merciful nonetheless. Around me, the faithful nodded in glum agreement, and I envied them their belief in a Divine Father who loved us and knew best.

  For Kareem’s sake—and for Ibrahim’s—I went to the antiwar demonstration, too. “This song’s called ‘Peace Call,’ and it was written by a dude named Woody Guthrie,” a skinny, stocking-capped student announced as he strapped on his guitar. “And if any of you want to join in on the chorus, that’d be cool.” In a voice both plaintive and assured, this scraggly troubadour sang of dispiriting “dark war clouds” and the arrival of “heavenly angels.” And as he had invited us to do, we joined him on the refrain:

  Peace, peace, peace, I can hear the voices ringing

  Louder while my bugle calls for peace

  Back home again, I sat at the kitchen table and tackled my students’ blue books. Their Minotauromachia essays, to the last student, were poignant and thoughtful. A few seemed almost profound. In the menacing Minotaur, they saw Kareem Kendricks, the threat of terrorism, man’s inhumanity to man, and the dual capacity of humans for evil and good. The bare-breasted female matador was a rape victim, a suicide bomber, and Private Kendricks’s wounded wife. For one student, Kendricks was the wounded horse who carried her. Many identified Jesus as the man on the ladder, but they were divided as to whether the figure was arriving to save the day or evacuating. The little girl was the wisdom of youth over age, the personification of courage, and the triumph of light over darkness. Over the duration of the long semester, Devin O’Leary had been the class’s least engaged member and its most likely to snooze. But in the end, it was he, perhaps, who best summed up what they’d learned. “This picture shows us what all the myths we studied told us,” he concluded. “Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.” In the end, I realized that The Quest in Literature had been that best kind of class—the kind where teacher and students had taught one another. I gave all of their exams A’s and said good-bye to them with the click of my mouse—the electronic filing of their final grades. Then I walked into the winter sun and down to the prison to see Maureen.

  THE VISITING ROOM WAS LESS crowded that day, which was nice. With fewer people chattering away, Maureen and I were able to speak without raising our voices. The week before, I had donated Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper: An Epistolary Self-Portrait of a Remarkable Nineteenth-Century Woman to the prison library. Mo had asked the librarian, Mr. Lee, if she could be the first to check out the volume, and he’d said sure. By the time I visited, she had read Lizzy’s story from cover to cover twice.

  “I guess there’s no way to tell for sure,” Mo said. “But don’t you think the mummy baby might have been Pansy’s by that creepy Roswell?”

  I told her that was my hunch, too. “Maybe that’s what shut down Lizzy for a while: having to face the fact that she hadn’t protected the girl from him.”

  “And then having to deal with the shame and secrecy of her pregnancy,” Mo said. “However that baby died, they hid the body rather than bury it. I did the math, Cae. Pansy would have only been fourteen years old.”

  I nodded. “And if we’re right about whose baby it was, what’s also creepy is that someone had to have taken it out of hiding and moved it from Lizzy’s house in New Haven to the farmhouse here in Three Rivers.”

  “Who would have done that?” Mo asked. “Lydia?”

  “Had to have been. Which, in a way, would explain why, after Pansy died in the Tombs, Lydia started addressing all of her diary entries to ‘Dear Lillian.’ In one of those entries, she goes on and on about this poem she loved—this thing called ‘Goblin Market.’ I read it online a while back. It’s about this brave girl who rescues her sister from temptation and sin. Which, in real life, Lydia hadn’t done. For me, it begs the question: Where was Lydia while Uncle Ros was victimizing her ‘sister’? Did she know what was going on?”

  “If she did, Cae, why wouldn’t she have gone to her grandmother? Or for that matter, why didn’t Pansy?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe Uncle Roswell scared them both into keeping their mouths shut. Isn’t that how predators operate? By telling their victims about all the horrible stuff that will happen if they blow the whistle?”…

  I felt his breath on my face, heard him whisper it. I killed a dog once. Tied a rope around its neck, threw the other end over a tree branch, and yanked. You got a dog. Don’t you, Dirty Boy? Maybe he’ll have to get the Stan Zadzilko rope treatment….

  “Well, whatever the reason they didn’t tell, Lizzy would have had to realize what had been going on after Pansy started showing,” Mo said.

  “At which point, she would have had to wrestle with some pretty intense guilt. The Tombs: doesn’t sound like a day at the beach, does it?”

  “And Lydia must have felt terribly guilty, too,” Maureen said.

  Survivor’s guilt, I thought: Mo knew all about how hard that was.

  “You know, I can still picture her, up there on the sun porch in her wheelchair. Holding out that doll and telling everyone, ‘Kiss my Lillian. Love my Lillian.’ Now it seems so much like…a plea. And who knows? If Lydia carried all that guilt and shame into adulthood, maybe that’s why she took up her grandmother’s mission. Dedicated her life to saving ‘fallen women.’ With one glaring exception, that is.”

  “Your mother, you mean?”

  I nodded. “But it’s understandable, I guess. Lydia must have seen Mary Agnes as a kind of predator, too—which she was, in a way. Ulysses told me that, from the beginning, she could manipulate the hell out of my father. Get him to do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted him to. So I can see how Lydia would have done everything in her power to protect her grandson—her flesh and blood—from someone so…what? Reckless? Ruthless?”

  “Oh, sweetie, this must all be so painful,” Mo said. “How are you?”

  Okay, I told her. I was handling it, processing it. “It’s gotten a little easier now that the Quirk family skeletons aren’t showing up on the front page day after day. Not that I don’t still have my bad moments—my bouts of anger about the way they kept things from me that I had a right to know…. For a while there, I was really wrestling with the fact that Lolly never told me. But what you said helped: that she may have still been trying to protect me from the truth. I’ve checked in with Dr. Patel a couple of times, too, and she’s been helping me sor
t it all out.”

  “That’s good, Caelum. That’s great.”

  “Yeah. The thing is, I can’t ignore the fact that Mary Agnes was so unstable that she was dangerous—that I probably needed to be protected from her. You ever hear of ‘borderline personality disorder’?”

  Mo said she’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it.

  “Patel says that’s what my mother might have been suffering from. She took out this reference book, the DSM-something or other, and read me the symptoms: reckless, self-sabotaging, paranoid about abandonment. It’s plausible, isn’t it? The way she sabotaged her career as a model? The way, whenever my father got himself free of her, she’d sink her hook into him and reel him back in? There’s this other borderline symptom called ‘identity disturbance.’ That fits, too. She leaves the small town for the big city, becomes Jinx Dixon.”

  “The same as Lydia’s father,” Mo said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Willie Popper. He went to New York and became Fennimore Forrest.”

  I nodded. “Hadn’t thought about that. ‘Identity disturbance’ on both sides of my family. Lucky me, huh? Maybe I’ll go out of town for a while and come back as, oh, I don’t know…Derek Jeter.”

  “Isn’t he a Yankee?” Mo said.

  “Oh god, you’re right. What was I thinking? Lolly’s probably rolling over in her grave. She hated the Evil Empire almost as much as the Lady Vols.”