Читать книгу The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb - Страница 12

LOLLY’S CAT WAS CAUTIOUS AT first, watching me from doorways, scooting from the rooms I entered. But half an hour into my homecoming, she sidled up to me, brushing against my pant leg. My aunt had given her some goofy name I couldn’t remember. “Where is she, huh?” I said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

In the pantry, I found a litter box in need of emptying, an empty bag of Meow Mix, and a note in Lolly’s handwriting: “Get cat food.” There were a couple of tins of tuna in the cupboard. “Well, whatever your name is, you’re in luck,” I told the cat. With the first twist of the can opener, she began bellowing. We were probably going to be friends for life.

Thinking I should call Maureen, I flopped down on Lolly’s sofa and grabbed the remote. The Practice was on. Okay, I thought. Not my favorite, but watchable. I stood up and brushed the grit off the sofa, sending cat fur flying. My aunt had many talents, but housekeeping wasn’t one of them; that had always been Hennie’s department. I pried off my shoes and put my feet up. Lolly’s cat hopped aboard, walked up my leg, and nestled against my hipbone. Gotta call Maureen, I thought. Soon as the commercial comes on….

WHAT? WHERE…? I stumbled toward the ringing telephone, realizing where I was: back in Three Rivers, back at the farmhouse.

“Hey,” I said. “I was going to call you. I must have conked out.”

Except it wasn’t Maureen. It was some doctor, talking about my aunt’s stroke. Yeah, I know all this, I remember thinking. That’s why I’ve come back. But somewhere in the middle of his monologue, it dawned on me that he was talking about a second stroke. Lolly hadn’t survived this one, he said. They’d pronounced her dead ten minutes earlier.

I went outside. Sat on the cold stone porch step. The sun was rising, coral-colored, over the treeline. Higher in the sky, the moon was fading away.

I went back inside. Called Maureen and woke her out of a sound sleep.

“Caelum? What time is it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s sunrise here…. She died, Mo.”

I waited out the silence, the sigh. “How?”

“Another stroke.”

“Oh, Cae. I’m so sorry. Are you at the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The farmhouse. I sat with her for a couple of hours last night, but then I came back here. They said when they checked her at four, she was stable. But then, twenty minutes later…Maureen, I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel anything. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Cae,” she said. “You just haven’t been able to take it in yet. Absorb the shock of it.” She said she’d talked to Lolly’s doctor the day before, while I was en route to Connecticut. More of the test results had come back; the damage had been massive. “She might not have been able to walk, or talk, or even swallow food. Lolly would have hated living like that.”

“They asked me did I want to come in and view the body. I said no. Is that something I’m supposed to do?”

“It’s a personal decision, Cae. There’s no ‘supposed to.’”

“I should have stayed with her last night. Slept in the chair or whatever. God, I hate that she died alone.”

Mo said should-haves weren’t going to do Lolly or me any good.

“Last night? I got up and started combing her hair. More out of boredom than anything else, I guess. I’d just been sitting there, watching her sleep. And her hair was all smushed down and I found this comb in her drawer and…and when I stopped combing? She opened her eyes. Stared at me for a few seconds.”

“Then she knew you’d come back.”

“No. Uh-uh. Nothing registered.”

“Maybe it did, Cae. Maybe knowing you were there, she could let herself die. The hospice team at Rivercrest always used to say that the dying—”

“Yeah, okay. Stop. I doubt it, but thanks.”

“How did it feel?” she asked.

“What?”

“Touching her? Combing her hair?”

“It felt…it felt…” The question made my eyes sting and my throat constrict. Trying to stifle tears, I uttered a weird guttural noise that caught the cat’s attention.

“It’s okay to feel, Caelum,” Mo said. “Just let yourself—”

“What’s her cat’s name, anyway?” I said, cutting her off. “I fed her tuna fish last night and now she’s like my shadow.”

“The black and white? Nancy Tucker.”

“Oh, yeah. Nancy Tucker. Where’d that name come from?”

“Some folksinger Lolly likes,” Mo said.

I stood there, nodding at the cat. “Liked,” I said.

Maureen asked me if I’d thought about what I needed to do that day. Should we go over stuff? Make a list? I told her what the hospital had said: that I had to let them know ASAP which funeral home they should contact to arrange for the transfer of the body. “I guess I’ll tell them McKenna’s,” I said. “We used them when my mother died, and my grandfather. My father, too, I think. Or did we? Jesus, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“I can’t remember my father’s funeral.”

“Well, you were so young.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was fourteen.” For a second, I caught myself thinking I’d have to ask Lolly about it.

Maureen said I should tell the hospital to notify Gamboa and Sons.

“The Mexican funeral parlor? I don’t think so, Mo. I doubt Lolly would have wanted a ‘cat licker’ sendoff.”

“A what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Mo said Lolly had used Gamboa and Sons for Hennie’s services—that Lolly and Victor Gamboa had been friends since the days when they’d worked together at the prison. “Lolly’s preplanned and paid for her funeral, Cae. After Hennie’s burial, she decided to do that. Which makes it easier, right? Now you won’t have to second-guess what she would have wanted.”

“Typical Lolly,” I said. “Miss Practical. So what do you think? You going to try to get back here? Because I’ll understand if you don’t think you can—”

Sure she was coming, Mo said. She’d call Galaxy Travel as soon as they opened and let me know when she had the details. Now that she thought of it, she’d better call the kennel, too. “Sophie drove them crazy last time, and they were hinting about not taking her anymore. But under the circumstances…Maybe you should try to plan the wake for Wednesday and the funeral for Thursday,” she said. “That way, if I can’t get everything in place until—”

“Today is what day?” I asked.

“It’s Monday, Caelum. Monday, the nineteenth.”

“Monday. Yeah, that’s right. I’m a little disoriented.”

“Well, that’s understandable. You were traveling all day yesterday. Plus, the time change. And you’re probably overtired on top of that.”

It wasn’t those things, though. It was being back home: remembering, not remembering. How could I not recall my father’s funeral? “I guess you better bring my suit,” I said. “And those shiny loafers you had me get.”

“Sure. Should we go over what you’ll need to do today? Make that list?”

I grabbed a pen, a scrap of paper. “Yeah, okay. What?”

First, I should call the hospital and tell them about the funeral home—get that done. Then I’d need to make an appointment with Gamboa’s to go over the details. “And you’re going to have to make some phone calls. Let her friends know.”

“How am I supposed to do that? She wasn’t exactly the Rolodex type.”

“Look in that little telephone table by the stairs. I bet she’s got an address book in there, or numbers written inside the phone book. Call the people whose names you recognize, and ask them to call whoever else they think might want to know. And Ulysses. Call him. I guess you’ll need to start thinking about what to tell him, job-status wise. Whether or not you’re going to keep him on for a while to look after the property. You’re her executor, right?”

“So she said.”

“Then you can probably write checks from her estate—pay him that way—but I’m not sure. I guess you’d better try to get an appointment with her lawyer, too.” Oh, great, I thought. Lolly’s lawyer was Lena LoVecchio, the attorney who’d represented me on my assault charge against Paul Hay. Just what I wanted to do: revisit that whole mess. “I’m sure most of the legal stuff can be put on hold,” Maureen said. “But there may be some short-term decisions to make, and while you’re back there, you might as well—”

“Oh, man.”

“What?”

“I suck at this kind of stuff. I’ll probably screw everything up.”

“No, you won’t, Cae. People will help you. They’ll want to help.”

“And you’re going to get here when?”

“Tomorrow, hopefully. Tuesday. Wednesday morning at the latest.”

“Oh, man.”

“Hey,” she said. “You know what? After you call the hospital, why don’t you go for a run? It’ll help clear out the cobwebs, get rid of some of that tension. Then go back, take a nice hot shower and—”

“There’s no shower here. Remember?”

“Oh, right. A nice hot bath, then. Even better. And eat breakfast, Caelum. You need to remember to eat.”

“What else?” I said. “For this list?”

She said if she thought of anything else, she’d call me, but that she’d better get off. The dogs were chafing to go out.

I didn’t want her to hang up. “Hey, I forgot to tell you. I saw Velvet before I left. At the airport. I guess she’s on a cleaning crew?”

“Was,” Mo said. “She called last night to tell me she quit. She saw you, too, she said. Oh, that reminds me: I better try and get ahold of her. She was going to meet me at school tomorrow to talk about reenrolling, but if I get a flight…okay, the dogs! I’ll let you know when I’m coming. Call me if you need to. I love you, Caelum. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

I DIDN’T RUN, AS MO suggested. I wandered, from room to room downstairs and then up to the second floor. At the top step, I looked down the hallway. Stood there, rocking on the balls of my feet. I couldn’t do it.

From the house, I headed up the gravel road to the barn. Undid the latch, flipped on the overhead lights. Empty of cows, with its floor hosed and swept down to bald, cracked concrete, it was nothing but a glorified garage now—a parking place for the tractor and Lolly’s truck. “Come, boss!” I shouted, calling in the ghost-cows for morning milking. “Here, boss! Come, boss!” My voice bounced around and rose to the empty loft.

At the height of things, Bride Lake Farms had milked a herd of sixty-five registered Holsteins. Every other day, the Hood Dairy truck would pull up, pump nine thousand pounds of raw milk out of the tank, and drive it off for processing. As a kid, one of my chores had been to take care of our personal milk supply: put out two big pans for the barn cats and carry six quarts back to the house whenever we got low. Damn, but that was good milk: icy cold, cream on the top. “You drank it unpasteurized?” Maureen asked once, when I was comparing farm milk to the watery gray skim milk we bought at the KwikStop. “Yeah, and look,” I said. “I survived to tell you about it.”

I walked over to Grandpa Quirk’s beat-up wooden desk, still parked against the barn’s south wall. It was covered now with half-empty cans of paint and turpentine. Back in the day, Grandpa had sat there, hunched over his bills and receipts and ratios. He’d hated that monthly math, I remembered, but God, he’d loved his milkers. Named them after movie stars: Maureen O’Hara, Sonja Henie, Dorothy Lamour. Whenever one of his girls started producing, he’d take three Polaroid pictures of her: a head shot, a body shot, and a closeup of her udder. He’d label them on the back, date them, and put them in his big tin box. Standing there, I recalled something I hadn’t thought about in years: a game Grandpa and I had played. I’d pull one of the udder shots out of the box, hand it to him, and he’d look at it—study it at arm’s length, hold it close, scratch his chin. Then he’d identify whose milk bag it was. He never got any wrong. Had there been some trick to it? Could Grandpa really recognize all those girls by their udders?

I spotted his cowshit shovel, still hanging from its same nail in the wall, identifiable by its chipped red handle. As a girl, Lolly’d painted it for her father as a birthday surprise, but she’d overturned the paint can in the process and gotten a surprise of her own: a spanking. Most, but not all, of that red paint had worn off the handle now. I lifted the shovel from the wall and tamped its blade against the cement floor. My fingers fit in the valleys Grandpa’s grip had worn into the wood.

Or maybe his father’s grip had made them. Who knew how old that damn shovel was? Four generations of Quirks had farmed here, if I remembered the history right. Five, if you counted me, which I didn’t. I’d done my share of farmwork growing up—from junior high through grad school and beyond. But I’d never liked farming much—had never been interested in taking over. For the past several years, whenever Lolly mentioned my inheriting the farm, I’d cut her off. “Get out of here, you old coot,” I’d say. “You’ll outlive me.” But she hadn’t. And now, like it or not, this place was mine—the history and the burden of it.

Leaving the barn, I spotted Lolly’s plaid jacket hanging from a hook—the one she was wearing the day she’d waved us off to Colorado. I reached out and grabbed the sleeve. Clutched it in my fist for a few seconds, and then let it go.

Most of the two dozen trees in the orchard looked blighted. Not long before we moved to Colorado, I’d helped Lolly cut down three or four of the dead ones. I saw her now, goggles on, chain saw in hand. “You’re a maniac with that thing, old lady!” I’d yelled, over the buzz and the blade’s bite, and she’d laughed and nodded like it was high praise. The apple house was in sorry shape, too—busted windows, half-collapsed roof. Well, what did it matter? The cider press was gone—sold to Olde Mistick Village years ago. There was nothing left in there that the rain could wreck. Let the bats and mice have it.

I headed back down, crossed Bride Lake Road, and started toward the cornfields on the far side of the prison. Walking along the road, I thought about how fucked up the layout was: a fifty-acre women’s prison parked in the middle of a two-hundred-acre family farm. Lolly had filled me in on the history of the farm a few years back. Christmas day, it was—Maureen’s and my first trip back home after we’d moved west. Mo and Hennie were in the kitchen, cleaning up, and Lolly and I had lingered at the dining room table, drinking brandy and passing around the old family pictures. I’d heard a lot of Lolly’s Quirk family stories before, but that day, for some reason, I was more interested in them than usual. Why was that? Because I’d finally escaped Three Rivers? Because I’d reached my mid-forties? Whatever the reason, part of the pleasure that day was witnessing Lolly’s pleasure in telling them to me.

The sale of land to the state had been a desperation move, Lolly’d said. The original Caelum was MacQuirk, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. He’d married into manufacturing money and come to America to oversee his father-in-law’s latest acquistion, the Three Rivers Bleaching Dyeing & Printing Company. But Caelum MacQuirk had failed at both textile mill management and marriage, Lolly said; he’d operated the company at greater and greater loss and fathered a child out of wedlock. To be rid of him, his father-in-law had bought him off, and with the money MacQuirk had purchased a two-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract of land along the southernmost boundary of Three Rivers. He’d married the child’s mother and taken up farming, but had failed at that, too. “Hung himself,” Lolly said, matter-of-factly. “Left his widow and son land-rich but cash-poor.”

It would have made more sense for the widow Quirk to sell acreage at either the east or west end, but, according to Lolly, the state of Connecticut strong-armed her into selling them the tenderloin of the property, lake and all. Still, it had all worked out, in its own way. The deal they negotiated called for the widow’s son, Alden—a recent graduate of Connecticut’s agricultural college—to be installed as the new prison’s farm manager.

“You remember my Grandma Lydia, don’t you?” Lolly asked me. “Your great-grandmother?”

I nodded. “The tappy old lady with the rag doll.”

“Well, she was a hell of a lot more than that. Back in her prime, Lydia Popper was a force to be reckoned with. Got her salt from her grandmother, she always used to say. She politicked for years until she wore down the state legislature and got ’em to buy the land and build her her ladies’ jail. The cottage-and-farm plan, she called it. Designed it, and ran the place for forty years. And raised a son all by her lonesome while she was doing it.”

“Her son was Grandpa Quirk, right?”

“That’s right. And then when our mother died delivering your dad and me, she had to step up to the plate and help raise us, too. She was in her sixties by then, and now here were these two babies to do for. She was smart, though. Got her prison gals to pitch in and help. Couple of ’em even wet-nursed us, my father told me.”

“Nursed by convicted felons,” I said. “Maybe that’s why Daddy made all those trips to the pokey.”

I’d expected my remark to draw a laugh from her, but it fell flat.

“Now, at first, Lydia balked at the idea of someone so young and untested as this wet-behind-the-ears college boy being put in charge of the farm operation, just because his mother had finagled him the position as part of the land purchase. See, Lydia’d promised those politicians up in Hartford that once it got going, the jail would pay for itself because of the farm production. What those gasbags up there cared most about was the business side of things, see? How it’d impact the state budget. Not whether or not a bunch of troubled girls got fixed. Got on with their lives. So the state gave her five years; if the place wasn’t breaking even by then, they’d shut it down. Grandma knew that the whole ball of wax depended on the farm operation, okay? And she knew, too, that several of those politicians who’d opposed her were itching to see her fail. They didn’t like the idea of a woman running things, see? Figured they’d give her just enough rope to hang herself. Lydia suspected they’d saddled her with this young Quirk fella to ensure her failure. Nothing she could do about it, though; it was part of the deal they’d struck with the widow.

“But Alden surprised Grandma. Turns out, young as he was, he was a damn good steward. Practical, shrewd. Worked like an ox. And he was good with the prison ladies, too. They liked him, so they worked their fannies off for him. Course, he was a good-looking son of a gun. I’m sure that didn’t hurt. See? Here he is.” She passed me a picture of a strapping young guy in overalls behind a team of plow horses. “You resemble him, don’t you think?”

I shrugged.

“Well, if you can’t see it, I sure as hell can. Your father resembled him, too. I got Popper looks, but your dad was all Quirk, same as you.”

The robust farmer in the photograph looked nothing like my scrawny, straggly-haired father, and I told her so.

“Well, you gotta remember, kiddo. You only knew your dad after the booze got him. That goddamned war was what turned him alcoholic. Him and Ulysses, the two of ’em. They were high school buddies. Me, my brother, and Ulysses were all in the same class.”

I said I hadn’t realized that. Or if I’d known it, I’d forgotten it.

“Yup. The two of them, Ulysses and your dad, went down to the recruiting office and enlisted right after we graduated. I had wanted to go to college myself. To study anthropology—maybe go out west and work with the Indians. I used to find arrowheads out in the fields every once in a while—from when the Wequonnocs hunted out here, I guess—and that’s what got me interested. Grandma Lydia was all for me going; she’d gone. Studied sociology. And little by little, me and her were wearing my father down on the subject. But after my brother enlisted, that was that. If Alden wasn’t gonna stick around and help Pop with the farmwork, then I was gonna. Somebody had to. So I stayed put, and Alden went off to see the world and fight the Koreans.”

“I never heard much about his war service,” I said.

“Well, I never did either. After he came back, he wouldn’t talk about it, not even to me. Whenever I’d ask him about it, he’d close up like a clam. Get huffy with me if I pursued it, so after a while I just shut my trap.” I watched her eyes water up as she remembered it. “Something happened to him over there, because he came back different. Damaged, you know? And that was when he started drinking hard.”

“No such thing as psychological counseling back then, I suppose.”

“I don’t know. But Alden wouldn’t have signed up for it if there was. First month or so he was back, he mostly stayed cooped up in his room. And then when he did finally get out of the house, he mostly went off to the bars.”

I opened my mouth to ask her some more, but Lolly shook her head and passed me another picture: her beloved grandmother, seated behind her desk at the prison, her young farm manager standing to her left 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 part of the equation by which female felons could heal themselves. But as the virtual tour proudly showed, the eight-by-ten-foot cells of the new high-tech prison had three-inch-wide window slits that didn’t open or let in light. Air recirculated now, and the electronically controlled cell doors were popped once an hour so that inmates could take a five-minute rec break on the tier. “Recreation? That’s a joke,” Lolly had said. “These days, recreation means standing in line at the hot water pot with your Styrofoam cup and your ramen noodles. All that junk food and sitting around on their asses: they get as fat as pigs now. Half of them are on insulin, or Prozac, or blood pressure pills. Why bother to rehabilitate ’em when you can just drug ’em and fatten ’em up. Grandma would roll over in her grave.”

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-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?