The Hour I First Believed

I shrugged. “What do I do—pay you by the head?”

“You don’t pay me anything. This will be on me.”

“No, no. I don’t want you to—”

“Shut up, Quirky. Don’t give me a hard time. Hey, you eat breakfast yet? Let me get you something.” He disappeared out front and came back with bagels, cream cheese, and coffees.

We sat and ate together. Talked Red Sox. Talked basketball: how sweet it had been when UConn beat Duke in the championship game. “Jim Calhoun is God!” Al declared. “Takes those street kids and molds them into NBA players.”

“With seven-figure incomes,” I said. “You and I should be so lucky.”

“Yeah, well, keep dreaming, Quirky. You never could play b’ball.”

“Guilty as charged,” I said, smiling. “Although, as I recall, you were more a master of the brick than the jump shot yourself.”

I asked him how his quest for the holy grail was going—if any hot prospects had shown up on eBay or in the Yellow Mustang Registry.

“Nah, nothing lately. It’s out there somewhere, though. One of these days, you wait and see. Some poor slob’s gonna kick the bucket and they’ll have an estate sale or something. And there it’ll be: my 1965 Phoenician Yellow sweetheart, all two hundred eighty-nine cubes of her.”

I took a sip of coffee. “Right,” I said. “That’ll probably happen right after monkeys fly out of your butt.”

He nodded, deadpan. “Kinda redefines the concept of going apeshit, doesn’t it?” I’d forgotten how funny Alphonse could be—how quick he was. Before his father had chained him to the bakery, he had talked about becoming a stand-up comic.

I asked him how his parents were doing. The Buzzis had always been good to me—treated me like family. In college, whenever they drove up to visit Rocco, Mrs. Buzzi always packed two care packages: one for him, one for me. Grinders heavy with meat and cheese and wrapped in tinfoil, Italian cookies, packs of gum, three-packs of underwear and athletic socks. My mother sent me clippings from the Daily Record—bad news, mostly, about kids I’d gone to school with. She was too nervous, she said, to drive in Boston traffic. “Here,” Mrs. Buzzi would say, shoving a ten-dollar bill at me at the end of their visit. And when I’d put up a show of resistance, she’d say, “Come on! Take it! Don’t make me mad!” and stuff it into my shirt pocket.

Rocco’s death had wiped out Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi. Of their two sons, he had been the favorite, the superstar: their college and law school graduate, their young lawyer with a fiancée in medical school. That Rocco’s intended was an Italian girl had been the cherry atop the sundae. Alphonse, on the other hand, had been the family’s baker-designee—the crab his parents had never let crawl out of the bucket. I’d stayed in touch with the Buzzis—called them from time to time, sent them cards, stopped in with a little something around the holidays. After they retired and moved down to Florida, I’d more or less let them go.

“I call them down in Boca maybe three, four times a week,” Alphonse said. “Still fighting like Heckle and Jeckle, so I guess they’re okay. Last week, Ma gets on the phone and she’s honked off at my father. Hasn’t spoken to him for two days because, when they were watching TV and the Victoria’s Secret commercial came on, she told him to look away and he wouldn’t.” He launched into a dead-on imitation of his mother. “And you know what that louse had the nerve to say to me, Alphonso? That I was just jealous. Ha! That’s a laugh! Why should I be jealous of a bunch of skinny puttane parading around in their underclothes?”

I laughed. “How old are they now?” I asked.

“Ma’s seventy-eight, Pop’s eighty-five. Of course, every time he gets on the phone, I get the third degree about the business. Has to point out all the things I’m doing wrong. We been selling these bagels for a couple years now, okay? Dunkin’ Donuts sells bagels, Stop & Shop sells bagels, so we gotta sell them. My pop still hasn’t forgiven me for it. ‘You’re running an Italian bakery, Alfonso. Since when does an Italian bakery sell Jew rolls?’ ‘Since I’m out of them by noontime,’ I tell him. ‘Yeah? Well you listen to me, Mr. Smarty Pants. When people come into an Italian bakery, they want rum cakes, il pastaciotto, Napoleani.’ Yeah, his generation maybe. But all those old spaghetti benders are either dead or down in Florida where they are.”

“What this place needs is another miracle,” I said, pointing toward Mrs. Buzzi’s statue of the Blessed Virgin on top of the refrigerator. Back in the days when that statue had enjoyed more prominent placement in the window out front, a rusty red liquid of undetermined composition had, inexplicably, begun dripping from Mary’s painted eyes. The Vietnam War had taken its toll by then, and when Mrs. Buzzi placed a white dishcloth beneath the statue, the “blood” stain that seeped into it had shaped itself into a map of that ravaged country. And so the Mama Mia, for a time, had become a tourist attraction, visited by the faithful and the media. Business had spiked as a result, particularly after Good Morning America came calling. A yellowing newspaper photo of then-host David Hartman, his arms around Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi, was still Scotch-taped to the back of the cash register out front. I’d spotted it on my way in.

“Hey, tell me about how I need a miracle,” Alphonse sighed. “You know what the wholesalers are getting for almond paste these days?”

“Can’t say that I’ve been keeping up with that one,” I said.

“Yeah, and you don’t want to know either. But hey, it’s a mute point. The only Italian product we move these days are cannoli and sheet pizza.”

“Moot point,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s moot point. You said mute point.”

“Fuck you, Quirky. I already passed English, okay?”

“Just barely,” I reminded him. “In summer school.”

“And that was only because I used to bring doughnuts to class and crack up Miss Mish: remember her? She was pretty hot for a teacher, except for those sequoia legs. By the way, what do you think of these?”

“The bagels?” I said. “They’re good.”

He shrugged. “They’re okay. Nothing to write home about. We get ’em from U.S. Foods and bake ’em frozen. Takes ten minutes, but they go out the door, you know? The thing my old man doesn’t understand is that you gotta swim with the sharks these days. He never had to compete with the grocery chains and Dunkin’ Donuts the way I do now. And if Krispy Kreme comes north? Orget-it fay. I’ll just hang the white flag out front and lock the door.”

“Orget-it fay?” I said.

“Yeah? What?”

“You’re forty-five years old, Al. Stop talking pig Latin.”

“Uck-you fay,” he said.

I asked him if he wanted to go out that night. Get a bite to eat, have a couple of beers. “Can’t,” he said.

“Why not? You getting your bald spot Simonized?”

“Ha ha,” he said. “What a wit. Don’t forget, you got two more years on the odometer than I do. You look good, though. You still running?” I nodded. “Life treating you okay? Other than your aunt, I mean. You like it out there?” I nodded some more. Why go into it?

On our way out to the front, he stopped me so we could ogle his countergirl. “How’d you like to stick your dipstick into that?” he whispered.

“She’s a woman, Al,” I whispered back. “Not a Mustang.”

“Yeah, but I don’t hold it against her. I’d like to, though.”

I asked him which he thought would come first: losing his virginity or getting his AARP membership card.

“Yeah, if only I was more like you,” he said. “What wife are you on now—sixteen? Seventeen? I lost count.” He stuck his middle finger in my face, then jabbed me in the breastbone with it. “Gotcha,” he said.

WITH NOTHING BETTER TO DO, I drove over to the mall and walked around. The sound system was playing that Cher song you couldn’t get away from—the one where she sings that part with her techno-electro voice: “Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…” Cher, man. You had to give her credit for career survival. She’d been around since the days when Lyndon Johnson was president and Alphonse Buzzi’s Phoenician Yellow Mustang was rolling off the assembly line. If there was a nuclear holocaust, there’d probably be two surviving life forms: cockroaches and Cher. “Do you believe in life after love, after love, after love, after love…” Hey, more power to her. I just wished they’d give that fucking song a rest.

I bought a newspaper and sat down in the food court to read it. The front page had stories about Kosovo, the casino, the Love Bug virus. In the second section, there was an article about a project at the prison. That morning? When I’d walked past and seen the inmates out there, digging around for something? Apparently, they’d been unearthing graves. Baby graves, identifiable by flat stone markers, some with initials carved into them, some not. A surveyor had come upon what had been, in the early days of the prison, a cemetery for the inmates’ infants. Back then, it said, women had gone to prison for something called “being in manifest danger of falling into vice.” Translation: they’d gotten knocked up. Raped, some of them, no doubt. Talk about blaming the victim….

Two local ministers were leading the women in the recovery project, the article said, and the administration was cooperating. They weren’t sure yet what they were going to do once all the graves were recovered, but a couple of suggestions were on the table: a healing ceremony, a little meditation park where inmates with good behavior records might be allowed to go. One of the women interviewed, identified only as Lanisha, said she felt the infants’ souls knew they were there, looking for them. Another, Sandy, said it was hell being away from her own three kids while she served her sentence. “These babies were suffering back then, and my babies are suffering now. There’s no one in this world can take care of my kids as good as I can.” It got to me, that article. For a few seconds, I was on the verge of tears over those long-buried babies. When it passed, I looked around to make sure nobody’d been watching me. Then I got up and threw the paper and my half-drunk coffee into the trash.

On my way back to the farm, I picked up a six-pack, a Whopper at BK, and cat food for Nancy Tucker. Passing the prison yard, I braked. Looked out at the field where I’d seen those women digging. There was no one out there now. I counted the ones I could see: eleven unearthed grave markers.

Maureen had left me a long, rambling phone message. The travel agency had had a hard time getting her a flight. She couldn’t get out of Denver until Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m., which meant she wouldn’t get into Hartford until 1:15 a.m. Wednesday morning. She’d probably just go in to school Tuesday, since her flight was so late. I could reach her there until two o’clock or so, but then she’d have to go back to the house, pick up the dogs, and bring them to the kennel. At least this way, she wouldn’t have to cancel out on Velvet; she hadn’t been able to get hold of her to say she was going to be away. She’d been thinking about me all day, she said; she hoped I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed. She was sorry she’d be getting in at such a hideous hour. She loved me. She’d see me soon.

That night, woozy from beer, I let myself fall asleep on the couch again rather than head upstairs. I got up in the middle of the night, peed, got up again, peed again. At dawn, I awoke from a dream. My grandfather and I were in a rowboat on a lake that may or may not have been Bride Lake. There were graves along the shore, and I was a boy again, sitting on the seat nearest the bow. Grandpa was in the middle of the boat, rowing in long, steady strokes. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Be brave. She’s all right.”

“Who?” I asked. “Mother?”

“Maureen,” he said. And I saw in the water’s reflection that I was not a boy but a grown man.

ULYSSES CAME BY THE HOUSE the following morning. He looked scrawnier than I remembered. Grubbier, too. His eyes were bloodshot, his pupils jumpy. When I handed him a cup of coffee, he took it with trembling hands.

He already knew about Lolly, he said. He’d walked to the hospital the morning before and identified himself as the man who’d found her and called 911. “The woman at the visitors’ desk was full of herself. Wouldn’t give me the room number. Kept stalling, calling this one and that one. Then finally she just told me that Lolly had died. I was afraid I was going to break down in front of her. So I left. Walked down to the Indian Leap and tied one on.”

He was okay, though, he said. He’d just come from an AA meeting. It happened now and again, him falling off the wagon, but then he’d get himself to a meeting and climb back on. “Lolly was always good about it when I messed up,” he said. “She’d get mad at first—say that was it, she was done with me. But then she’d calm down again. She always took me back.”

I suddenly realized why she had, despite the fact that she’d nicknamed him “Useless” and was forever complaining about what a lousy worker he was. Ulysses was a drunk like my father and had been my father’s friend. Over the years, he had become her brother Alden’s surrogate.

He fished into his pocket and took out his key to the farmhouse. Placed it on the table. “Why don’t you keep it?” I said. “I’m just here for the next few days, and then I have to get back to Colorado. Probably won’t come back here until the start of summer. And until then, I’m going to need someone to look after the place, make sure everything’s okay. You interested in the job?”

He looked away and nodded.

“I’m seeing her lawyer while I’m here. She can help me figure out how to pay you. So I’ll have to get back to you about that. How did Lolly pay you?”

“By the hour,” he said. “Ten bucks per.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Just keep track of your time.”

“What about Nancy Tucker?” he said.

“Well, I guess you’ll have to feed her, empty her litter box.”

He nodded. “I got catnip growin’ wild in back of my place. I could bring her some of that when I come over.”

I thanked him for helping Lolly. “She was good people,” he said. He swallowed the rest of his coffee, stood, rinsed his cup in the sink. Without another word, he started for the back door.

“One more thing,” I said. “Lolly planned out her funeral before she died. She wanted you to be one of her pallbearers.”

He turned and faced me. “She did?”

I nodded. “Do you think you could do that for her?”

Tears came to his eyes. “I’d like to,” he said. “But I don’t have no good clothes.” I reached for my wallet, then stopped myself. It wasn’t going to do either of us any good if he drank up his clothing allowance.

“Come on,” I said.

At Wal-Mart, I bought him a pair of navy blue pants, a boxed shirt and tie set, socks, underwear, and a cheap pair of black tie shoes. A chili dog, too, and a large Dr Pepper. “Now I’m good to go,” he said.

MY MOTHER’S BEDROOM WAS AS I remembered it: pale yellow walls, lace curtains. Her dust-covered Sunday missal still sat on her nightstand.

I walked up to the crucifix on the wall opposite her bed. Mother’s crucifix had been blessed by Pope Paul and given to her by her father, Grampy Sullivan, when, on his deathbed, he had at last made amends with the only one of his six daughters who had married a Protestant, and the only one who’d ever gotten a divorce. A chain smoker, Mother had died of lung cancer a few years later—the year she was fifty-five and I was thirty. On the morning of her final day, she’d asked me in a whispery voice to lift the crucifix off the wall and bring it to her. I’d done it and she’d cradled the cross in her arms, as tenderly as if it were an infant, while I stood and watched in envy.

I had never quite loved my mother the way other sons—the Buzzi brothers, for example—seemed to love theirs. Growing up, whenever Mother had held out her arms for one of those hugs, it was almost as if there was something parked between us. Something intangible but nevertheless real, I didn’t know what…. I’d stayed with her at the end, though, from early morning until late that night. People had come in and out all day, whispering: Lolly, Hennie, some of the nuns Mother had befriended, the priest who mumbled her last rites and, with his thumb, anointed her by drawing an oily cross on her forehead. Back in catechism class when I was a kid, they’d made us memorize the sacraments, and those seven “visible forms of invisible grace” had remained stuck in my brain: baptism, confirmation, penance, Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony, and, at every good Catholic’s final curtain, extreme unction. “Thanks a lot, Father,” I’d said when that priest had finished and started for the door. Slipping him a twenty, I’d added, “Here’s a little something for your trouble.” For your holy hocus-pocus, I’d thought but not said. It was weird, though. Even with the lights dimmed and the window shades half-drawn, that cross on Mother’s forehead, for the next several hours, had glistened eerily…. It was just the two of us at the end, and I witnessed, clearly and unmistakably, when life left my mother. One moment, she’d been a living, suffering woman; the next moment, her body was nothing more than an empty vessel. Later, after the McKennas had retrieved the corpse and Hennie had stripped the bed, I’d returned to Mother’s room. Her crucifix lay against the bare uncovered mattress. I picked it up, kissed Jesus’ feet, and hung it back on the wall. I made the gesture for her, not for her god or for myself. I was a twice-divorced thirty-year-old, teaching Twain and Thoreau to indifferent high school students by day and, by night, going home to my life of quiet desperation and one or two too many Michelobs. I’d long since become skeptical about an allegedly merciful God who doled out cosmic justice according to some mysterious game plan that none of us could fathom.

THE DOORBELL RANG. I LEFT my mother’s room, went downstairs, and opened the door. The woman on the other side looked vaguely familiar. “Millie Monk,” she said. “Here’s the lemon squares.”

I thanked her. Took the box she held out and stood there waiting for her to go. She reminded me that she’d come to do some vacuuming and tidying up. “No, really, I can do it,” I insisted. Millie was insistent, too.

“You put these on top the Frigidaire and then go relax,” she told me. “Put your feet up and watch some TV so I can get busy.”

I did as I was told, channel-surfing in the den while she vacuumed the rest of the downstairs. I’d just switched to CNN when the vacuum cleaner’s whirr turned the corner and entered the room. I got up, went into the kitchen. Figured maybe she’d like some tea.

The vacuum stopped. She called out to me over the sound of tap water rattling the bottom of the teakettle. “What’d you say?” I called back.

“Something bad’s happening,” she said. “Out in Colorado. Do you live anywhere near Littleton?”

“Littleton?” I said. “That’s right…that’s where…” By then I had made it back to the den.

I stood there, stupefied. Why was Columbine High on TV? Why was Pat Ireland crawling out onto the library’s window ledge? Shot? What did they mean, he’d been shot?

“You’re looking at live pictures from Littleton, Colorado, where the local high school is under attack by as few as two or as many as six shooters,” the news anchor said.

Patrick dangled, then fell from the ledge, landing in the arms of helmeted men on the roof of a truck.

What the—? In the kitchen, the teakettle screamed.

I’ll probably just go in to school tomorrow, since my flight’s so late.

“Oh, no! Oh, please, God. No!”

Chapter Seven

I KEPT DIALING HOME, PACING, trying friends’ and other teachers’ numbers, trying home again. I cursed myself for telling her a while back that we didn’t need cell phones. When the phone rang, I lunged. “Maureen?”

But it was Alphonse. He’d just heard about it on the radio. “I can’t get ahold of her!” I shouted. “I’ve been calling for over an hour! I get halfway through the number and the busy signal cuts in!”

“Okay, take it easy, Quirks. What do you need?”

“To hear her voice. To see her.”

He was at the farmhouse ten minutes later. He drove me to Bradley Airport, got me an emergency ticket to Denver with a connecting flight in Chicago, delivered me to the right gate, and waited with me. It was seven p.m.—five o’clock in Colorado. Six hours since they’d opened fire.

This was what I knew: there were dead bodies outside and inside the school; some of the injured were undergoing emergency surgery; bombs had gone off; the shooters—thought to be students—had fired back at the police from inside the library. I kept seeing what I’d seen on the news before we left for the airport: Columbine kids, a lot of them recognizable, streaming out of the building with their hands on their heads like captured criminals. Students had done this? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

“Still no answer?” Alphonse asked. I shook my head and handed him back his cell phone. “The library’s upstairs,” I said. “And the clinic where she works is downstairs, in another part of the building. So she was probably nowhere near the gunfire. Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Did I already say that?”

“Yeah. Hey, you know what, Caelum? How about I go get you a sandwich or something? Because at this hour, all’s they’re probably going to give you on the plane is a soda and one of those little things of peanuts.”

“Pretzels,” I said.

“What?”

“They don’t give you peanuts anymore. They give you pretzels.” I unfolded the paper where I’d jotted down the numbers for the hospitals: Littleton Adventist, Denver Health, St. Anthony’s, Lutheran Medical. Held out my hand for his cell phone again.

“Probably all that peanut allergy stuff that everyone’s so hopped up about now. Down at the bakery? We got about sixty different regulations from the state about product that has peanuts in it. Man, I make a batch of peanut butter cookies and I gotta fuckin’ sequester ’em.”

Most of the hospital lines were still busy, but when I dialed the number for Swedish Medical Center, it was silent for a few seconds and then, miraculously, I got a ring.

“It’s like a status thing, you know? ‘My kid’s special because he’s got a peanut allergy.’ I’m surprised they don’t have a bumper sticker for it.”

“Al, stop!” I said.

The operator passed me on to the crisis spokeswoman, who was polite at first, then less so. “Okay, look,” I said. “I can appreciate you’re not releasing any names yet. I understand that. But I’m giving you her name. All you have to do is look at your list, or your computer screen or whatever, and tell me she’s not there.” She gave me some line about following her protocols, and we went at it for a few more rounds, but she wasn’t going to budge. With my fingernail, I pushed the little end call button and handed the phone back to Alphonse.

He kept steepling his fingers, cracking his knuckles. “You sure you don’t want to eat something, Quirky? What about a hot dog?”

“What about the car I rented?” I said.

“What about it?”

“I didn’t return it.”

He stared at me in disbelief, then reached into his jacket pocket and produced the paperwork and the key I’d given him. “We worked that out. Remember? I’m going to drive it back up here midday tomorrow. Have one of my workers follow me up and give me a lift back.”

I nodded. “I already knew that, right?”

He nodded. “How about a couple of candy bars?”

“Alphonse, I can’t eat, okay?” I snapped. “My stomach’s in fucking knots.” As we sat there, across from each other, I suddenly realized he was still in his baker’s clothes: black-and-white checked pants, Mama Mia T-shirt, stained apron. He had flour in his eyebrows, bags under his eyes. “Thanks, man,” I said.

“For what?”

“Getting me here. Keeping me glued together.”

“What? You didn’t do the same thing for me, when my brother was down at Yale–New Haven?” I nodded. Flashed on Rocco in his hospital bed. In his coffin, Red Sox button pinned to his suit jacket lapel, rosary beads twisted around his hand. “Do you think I did the right thing?” I said.