The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (73 page)

“But, Ma—”

“Don’t ‘but Ma’ me. This is a Catholic bakery and don’t you forget it.” Ever the dutiful Italian son, Alphonse rose to do her bidding. “And when you’re done with that, get a hammer and some nails and put Padre Pio’s picture back up, too.” I wasn’t sure whether to smile or wince. After the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, her deceased son Rocco, and Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, Padre Pio was
the man
for Mrs. B. For decades, she had prayed daily to the memory of the mystical, miracle-working priest and had twice made pilgrimages to his birthplace. If Mrs. Buzzi ever sat down and made a list, I was pretty sure her surviving son and her ailing husband would hold spots well below her beloved Padre Pio.

“Hey, Ma,” Al said. “You see who’s here?”

She pushed her glasses onto her forehead, squinted over at me, then broke into a smile. “Oh, jeepers Christmas! I didn’t recognize you, sweetheart. Come over here. You got any kisses for an old lady?” We approached each other, arms extended, embraced and smooched. “Oh, my gosh, look how gray you got,” she said, tousling my hair. “Hey, how’s your wife?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “You still saying those novenas for her?”

“‘Course I am, the poor thing. And I’m praying for those poor little babies you found, too. Terrible thing that was, huh? Just goes to show you how much respect there is for human life these days. I don’t
know what this world is coming to.” Rather than point out that the babies in my backyard had died a century and a half century earlier, I asked her how Mr. Buzzi was doing.

She shrugged. “Eh. He’s an old man. What do you expect?”

“And how about you? Looks to me like St. Joe’s is agreeing with you. You like it over there?”

“Eh,” she said again. “The food’s lousy. They don’t put enough salt in anything. Their marinara sauce comes out of a can, for Christ’s sake.” When she realized she’d just taken the Lord’s name in vain, she made a hasty sign of the cross. “But it’s easier for this one,” she said, pointing her chin at Al. “So I put up with it. What the hell else am I gonna do?”

Hammer in hand, Alphonse pounded a nail into the wall. “Yeah, but he’s a good boy, though. Isn’t he, Mrs. B?”

“Yeah, he is. Don’t tell him, though. I don’t want him to get a big head.”

A few minutes later, Alphonse had restored the Mama Mia to his mother’s specifications. The Blessed Virgin had been reinstated in her place of honor and plugged in so that her halo, once again, was aglow. Padre Pio’s scowling portrait had been restored to the side wall gallery alongside the framed pictures of President Kennedy, Rocco Buzzi, Mother Teresa, Sergio Franchi (who had once enjoyed biscotti at the Mama Mia), and the curse-breaking 2004 Red Sox, Alphonse’s only decorative flourish.

“Well, it’s nice to see you again, sweetie pie,” Mrs. B told me. “I gotta get back to my pizelles.” And with that, she hustled, stoop-shouldered, back to the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

Al and I shot the shit for a little while longer, and I got up to go. I was putting on my coat when the little bell over the front door tinkled and a smiling, middle-aged woman entered the bakery. “Hey,
here
she is!” Alphonse said, beaming at the plump, pretty redhead who approached him. “Come over here, hon. I want you to meet someone.” He took her by the hand and brought her to me.

“Caelum, this is Dolores Kitchen,” Al said. “And Dee, this is my best buddy, Caelum Quirk. But you can call him what I do: Quirk the Jerk.”

She rolled her eyes and gave him a swat. “Oh, Alfie, grow up,” she said.

“Yeah, Alfie,” I said. “Pleased to meet you, Dolores.” And I was, too. I liked this woman already.

FOR THE PRISON MASS, WE
invitees gathered in the front foyer, presented our IDs, and, once the COs had located our names on their “approved” list, passed through the metal detector and entered the compound. But instead of stopping, as usual, at the sliding metal door of the visiting room, we were escorted by two COs into the inner sanctum. We walked en masse through a series of doorways, a maze of passageways, and finally reached the wide gray corridor where the special Sunday service would be held. Each of a hundred plastic putty-colored chairs, their backs stenciled with the words “Quirk CI,” had been set up in neat rows, divided by a center aisle. A folded, photocopied program had been placed on each seat. A sober-faced CO wheeled a portable altar through a set of open Plexiglas doors and brought it to rest at the front. For this event, the usual visiting rules had been reversed. Now it was the visitors who took seats and waited for the arrival of the inmates.

Velvet, seated beside me, was dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, black socks and blood-red sneakers. She’d grown her hair long over the past several months and recently had dyed it jet black. She’d painted her fingernails black, too. It was like being accompanied by a niece of the Addams Family.

“Psst,” she whispered. “Why do I smell onions?”

She followed my gaze to the dozens of fifty-pound bags of onions stacked against the corridor walls. “Oh, okay. What are they here for?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. To make people cry, maybe.”

“Oh,” she said, not realizing I was kidding. Then I told her what Maureen had said: that church was held in the food service wing.

A minute or so later, Velvet tapped me on the shoulder. “I only been to church one other time, you know,” she whispered. “So I don’t know about all that standing and sitting and kneeling shit.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” I whispered back. “I haven’t been to Mass in several decades. Just follow what everybody else does. And don’t worry about kneeling. There’s no kneelers. They’re not going to make us kneel on the floor.”

She nodded, relieved. “My mother was into Satan-worship for a while,” she said. I was pondering that new piece of information when she tapped me again. “Look. Here comes Mom.”

Maureen was at the head of a line of forty or fifty women, identically dressed in their maroon T-shirts and pocketless blue jeans. She approached us, beaming. “Hey, you guys. Thanks for coming. Wow, I like your hair, Velvet.” I scooted over a seat so that she could sit between us. She put an arm around each of us. Squeezed my shoulder and, I was pretty sure, Velvet’s, too. “I feel so happy,” she said.

Led by an inmate who was carrying a yard-high wooden cross, Ralph Brazicki marched in wearing his priestly robes. He looked more full-faced and baggy-eyed than the last time I’d seen him. Thinner on top, too. Well, we were all getting up there, myself included.

Ralph welcomed everyone to what he said he hoped would be the first of many family masses. It was up to all of us, inmates and visitors, he said; the smoother things went, the more inclined the warden would be to okay the next one. And with that, he introduced the No Rehearsal Choir.

Eleven women rose from their chairs, assembled up front, and began a song called “On Angel’s Wings.” As they sang, I thought about my stepmother: how fervent Rosemary Sullivan Quirk’s love of God had been in spite of the many crosses she’d borne: a drunken
husband who had never really loved her, an unforgiving father who left whatever room she entered because she’d married and then divorced a non-Catholic, a stepson who had stood as rigid as that wooden cross up front, waiting for her hugs to be over. The Mass in this prison corridor was about as far away as you could get from the solemn services Mother and I had attended at stately St. Anthony’s Cathedral. And yet, as I studied the faces of the No Rehearsal Choir—many of them ravaged, I could see, by addiction, by violence endured and committed—I was struck by their resemblance to the tortured faces of the saints and martyrs rendered in stained glass at that church of my childhood.

Mo’s friend and former cellmate, Camille, approached the podium and gave the first reading, an Old Testament account of God the Father’s justifiable smiting of some deserving transgressor. I meant to pay attention, but my mind wandered, and before it could refocus on the business at hand, Camille was genuflecting and starting back to her seat.

Next, two African-American women walked to the front. One was a tall and muscular androgyne; the other was short, fat, and womanly—a living Venus of Willendorf. Rosalie and Tabitha, their names were, according to the program. They harmonized beautifully on a gospel song called, “Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone?”
There’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me,
the tall one sang, and in response, her partner wailed a snatch from of a hymn more familiar to me.
Amaze-amaze-amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
It had been Great-Grandma Lydia’s favorite hymn—the hymn Grandpa would sing to her those nights after he’d gotten her ready for bed. The hymn that Lolly, in honor of the grandmother who had raised her, had requested for her own funeral, a service that had gone on without me as I flew back to Colorado on that nightmarish day, not knowing if Maureen was alive or dead. As the song crescendoed, they raised their voices, in tandem, to a fever pitch.

To me, the loinclothed Christ figure in Picasso’s
Minotauromachia
was clearly climbing
up
that ladder, bailing out on the sufferers, but Rosalie and Tabitha’s song walloped me nonetheless. I looked to my right and saw that Maureen was crying. And that Velvet, to Mo’s right, sat there dry-eyed but looking stunned.

After Tabitha and Rosalie took their seats, Maureen rose unexpectedly and started toward the podium. “Our second reading comes from the New Testament Acts of the Apostles,” she announced. She scanned the gathering, smiling at one and all, and, in a voice both calm and assured, began.

“Now when Herod was about to bring him forth, that same night Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and outside the door sentries guarded the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood beside him, and a light shone in the room; and he struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, ‘Get up quickly.’ The chains dropped from his hands. And the angel said to him, ‘Gird thyself and put on thy sandals.’ And he did so; and the angel said, ‘Wrap thy cloak about thee and follow me.’

“And Peter followed him out, without knowing that what was being done by the angel was real, for he thought he was having a vision. They passed through the first and second guard and came to the iron gate that leads into the city; and this opened to them of its own accord. And they went out, and passed on through one street, and straightway the angel left him.”

Father Ralph’s homily homed in on the passage Maureen had read. His message was a radical one, given that six sober-faced correctional
officers stood at attention and watched us, their shoulder blades against the cinderblock wall, their eyes searching for trouble. Like Peter in Acts, Ralph said, the women of Quirk CI might likewise slip their chains of confinement and escape, even as they served their sentences. “We
all
have the power to free ourselves from prisons of our own or others’ making, but doing so depends on our willingness to take that crucial leap of faith and realize that angels are real, not merely the products of wishful thinking, and that they are all around us. We are, my friends, or
can
be, angels for one another. But this is real life, not La-La Land. And as we heard in the passage that Maureen read to us, the angels can lead us to freedom. But then they will leave us to chart our own path toward righteousness. And that, my friends, is a solitary journey. Each of us passed individually through the birth canal when we came into this world, and each of us will be alone once again at the hour of our death. ‘From dust we came, to dust we shall return.’ What matters is how, in the interim, we treat each other.”

A burly inmate across the room popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “I hear you, Father! That’s some righteous truth you’re speaking!”

“Sit down, Miss Fellows!” one of the younger, more intimidating COs shouted. He took a step or two in her direction. “Show some respect or I’m going to take you out of here.”

“I’m just feeling the feeling is all,” Miss Fellows protested.

Another scowling CO entered the fray. “Then ‘feel the feeling’ with your mouth shut!”

“Everything’s cool,” Father Ralph assured the guards and the assembled. “Everything’s fine.” But when Miss Fellows opened her mouth again, she was escorted by two officers down the corridor and around the corner. “You say one more word and I’m giving you a ticket,” I heard one of them threaten.

After Holy Communion was dispensed—Mo partook, Velvet and I refrained—Ralph gave the final blessing and invited Rosalie and Tabitha to return to the front for the closing song. They delivered a
jubilant, no-holds-barred foot-stomper called “I’m So Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always.” Throughout the room, singly at first, and then in pairs, and finally in entire rows of people, inmates and guests rose from their chairs to clap, shout, dance, and sing along. When Mo got on her feet, Velvet followed suit. I held back at first, then suspended my skepticism and joined the rapture, partly in solidarity with the banished Miss Fellows, but also in celebration of the notion that trouble might not last always. In the midst of our impromptu group response, I glanced over at the bewildered COs. They looked nervously at one another, hard pressed to know what, if anything, to do. I was pretty sure their paramilitary training had not covered the appropriate response to spontaneous joy, and I pitied them the stolid joylessness that was, no doubt, a part of their job description. For all I knew, the majority of them might be good and decent people when they got home and changed out of their uniforms.

The luncheon buffet had been set up in the visiting room, and as we all made our way back there, Maureen introduced Velvet and me to Crystal and her mom, Camille and her husband and daughter, and LaToya, one of her fellow hospice volunteers. The wide tables that, on normal visiting days, served to separate us from our loved ones, were now covered with long white tablecloths and silver serving dishes. Inmate servers wearing hairnets and white jackets, stood poised and ready to feed us. The smiling, wiry guy in toque and chef’s whites called out, “Okay, everybody. We got pasta with meat sauce, salad, cake, and fruit punch. Come and get it! Enjoy!”