Authors: Wally Lamb
The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (61 page)
Recalling the séance years later, Lizzy Popper would express skepticism that she had, in fact, made contact with her dead son and daughter that night. She nevertheless took to heart the “message” she had received. Putting aside her personal grief, Popper wrote to the Union Army’s Superintendent of Women Nurses, Dorothea Dix, whom she had met fifteen years earlier at Seneca Falls. “I am nearly sixty years of age and have had no formal medical training, but my constitution is strong and I can learn as swiftly as any. Having lost sons to this war, I should like to come to the aid of other mothers’ sons.”
JANIS WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN,
looking the worse for wear.
“Hey,” I said. “Coffee’s just made. Help yourself.”
She nodded. Her eyes lit for a second on Lizzy’s manuscript, opened before me on the kitchen table. Then she turned away and busied herself pouring coffee, adding milk from the fridge. “So I suppose you heard the fireworks last night,” she said. Her back was to me.
Play dumb, I told myself. “Fireworks?”
“Moze and me. We had a fight about … oh, never mind.” She sipped her coffee and sighed. “I don’t think I got two hours’ sleep last night. God, I didn’t need this. I’ve been so stressed out anyway.”
“About what?”
“They’re convening my Ph.D. committee. I fly down to defend my thesis proposal on Monday. ‘Defend’: sounds hostile, doesn’t it? And it probably
will
be. I keep thinking I rushed it—that it needs more work.”
“Could have fooled me,” I said. “It’s reading beautifully, Janis.”
She walked over to the counter and stared at Velvet’s row of grotesques. “This is probably what my committee’s going to look like when I walk into that room,” she said. Ignoring my smile, she stuck
her hand into the pocket of her robe and fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Smart of me, isn’t it? I stop running and take up smoking instead.” She turned and faced me, her eyes glistening. “You know what he hit me with last night? He’s changed his mind. Now he
wants
us to have a child together. Kind of coincidental, don’t you think? Just when my career may be … and it’s bullshit, too. Moses doesn’t want a baby. He just wants to throw a net over me so that I can’t get away.”
Get away? She was thinking about leaving him?
The temporary insanity of my sexual attraction to Janis had long since subsided. She was a cute, intelligent, somewhat neurotic rent-paying tenant, and I’d been a lonely, angry idiot that night that I’d poured her all that wine and taken her to bed. But like she’d said before: she’d drunk the wine; she’d gotten into bed with me, too. This disclosure about a baby was a red flag, though. Becoming Janis’s kitchen confidante now would be another kind of intimacy, and if there was one thing I didn’t need, it was further entanglement. But when I opened my mouth to say something like “You’ll work it out” or “Well, this is between you and him,” she held out her hand like a traffic cop and headed out the back door.
Still, I felt for her. She’d worked hard to bring Lizzy back into the light of day, and if her career was poised for takeoff, it was because she’d earned it. I watched her out there for a minute or two, sitting on the stoop, puffing away. Then I folded a napkin in half, bookmarking the place where I’d stopped reading. I grabbed the spring-bound manuscript and went out there. “Scoot over,” I said.
“Caelum, I’d just better be by myself, okay?”
“Nope. Push over.” I sat down beside her on the chilly stone stoop. “Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
I tapped my knuckles against her manuscript. “For this,” I said. “My aunt used to try to interest me in all this family history, but I
wasn’t
interested in it back then. And then, after she died and Maureen
and I came back here, life had just gotten too complicated. If it wasn’t for you, it’d all still be sitting up there on the sun porch. Or lost to the landfill, maybe. But you rescued it for me and, well,
synthesized
it. Brought Lizzy to life for me and, you know, for other people, too. So I’m grateful for all the hard work you did. Thanks.”
She nodded. Mumbled it almost inaudibly, “You’re welcome.”
Somewhere in the woods beyond the farm, rifle fire exploded—three blasts in quick succession. It was mid-November now, hunting season, the trees bare and the ground carpeted with papery leaves.
“A guy came by to see you yesterday,” she said. “I forgot to tell you.”
Junior had called a couple of times that week about the upcoming civil suit. The Seaberrys’ attorney had called him about some clarifications about deeds or something. I’d purposely not returned those calls. “Did he give you a name or a business card?”
“He wasn’t exactly the business-card type. He said something about you hiring him to do some work around here. Something about the apple house.”
“Oh, okay. Old, skinny guy, right? Was he drunk?”
“Not that I noticed. He was jittery, though. Who is he?”
“Nobody. Just some old rummy who used to do odd jobs for my aunt. He’s harmless.” I held
Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper: An Epistolary Self-Portrait
in front of her. “Listen, Janis. You’ve got publishers interested in this thing, inquiries from colleges. Your committee’s not going to give you any trouble.”
“Ha! Too bad
you’re
not on it. How far have you gotten?”
“The sons’ deaths, the séance. Shit, it’s no wonder she fell into that depression. Her kids get killed in a war she opposed, her husband bails on her. It’s sad, isn’t it? That she and Charlie couldn’t have grieved together.”
“Charlie was a pig,” Janis said.
“Maybe. But he had to have been struggling with the loss, too.”
“So that justifies his moving out? Getting his mistress pregnant?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just pointing out that they were his sons, too. And, hey, it couldn’t have been easy living with someone like Lizzy.”
She turned toward me, frowning. “Meaning?”
“Meaning she was relentless—the tireless little crusader for social justice. Maybe Charlie needed her to be less of a crusader and more of a wife. It’s kind of like what’s-her-name, that antiwar mom who lost her son and camped out near Bush’s ranch, demanding to speak to him.”
“Cindy Sheehan,” Janis said.
“Yeah, her. She and her husband split up; it was in the paper. Because of her activism, I think it said. All I’m saying is, the cause may be righteous, but when they go into overdrive—”
“And ‘they’ means women, right? Why are you men all so insecure?”
I smiled. “All of us, huh? Now there’s a broad indictment.”
“I’m serious, Caelum. Why is it so threatening to men when a woman feels compelled to engage with the world? Look at the grief Hillary Clinton always gets.” She took an angry drag off her cigarette. “For five years he tells me he doesn’t want us to get pregnant, and now he does?”
Rather than debate her on gender politics, I brought the subject back to her book. “Tell me something,” I said. “The missing son? Willie? He was my great-grandma Lydia’s father, right?”
Janis nodded.
“Which means he was what? My great-great-grandfather?”
She nodded again.
“So why’d he go missing? Don’t tell me he got killed in the war, too?”
She looked disbelieving of my stupidity. “You’re
here,
aren’t you?”
“So where was he then? Where’d he disappear to?”
She stubbed her cigarette against the stone step. “I wrote the goddamned thing, Caelum. You want the Spark Notes, too?”
“No, ma’am. I get the message. I’ll just keep reading.”
She said she didn’t mean to snap at me—that it was nerves, sleep deprivation, their fight the night before. She lit another cigarette.
Out in the woods, there was more gunfire. I thought about Maureen—how, after we moved back here to the farmhouse from Colorado, those random gunshot blasts during hunting season would make her flinch, set her on edge. Return her, over and over, to that place, that day….
“Wow,” Janis said. “Where were you just now?”
“What?” I looked away from her gaze. “Nowhere. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“You know what I find depressing?” she said. “That between Lizzy’s era and ours, nothing’s really changed.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ouija boards and horse-drawn carriages have kind of fallen out of fashion, haven’t they?”
“Really, Caelum. Think about it. We still enslave black people. We still put kids in uniform and send them far away from home to kill and be killed. Do you know what our military is paying in ‘blood money’ these days so that they can make their recruitment quotas? I heard it on NPR yesterday. Twenty thousand dollars! And who’s vulnerable to bribery like that? Well-heeled kids from the suburbs? No, poor kids. Inner city kids. Twenty thousand dollars so they can go over there and get themselves killed in Bush and Cheney’s bullshit war. It’s disgusting.”
“Okay, the deck’s still stacked. I’ll grant you that. But ‘enslaved’? That’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
“You know something, Caelum? You don’t live in New Orleans for five years without having your eyes opened. You don’t marry a black
man without seeing the million little ways this country chips away at his dignity. And not just in the South either. Do you know how many times Moze has been pulled over and profiled since we came to Blue State Connecticut? Three times. Do you know how many banks he had to go to before one of them would give him a small business loan? Four. And do you know why the fourth one said yes? Because
I
was with him that time. Because that stupid loan officer addressed everything he had to say to me and treated Moze like he wasn’t even there.”
“All right, I’ll give you institutional racism. But that’s not—”
“Tell me something, Caelum. When you go to visit your wife, what’s prevalent at that prison—and every other prison in this country, for that matter? Light skin or dark?”
“Dark,” I conceded. “Eight or nine to one.”
“And who gets a longer sentence for the same conviction? That one white woman or the nine black women who can’t afford good lawyers?”
She shook her head in disgust. “Poor Lizzy. She must be rolling over in her grave. And Lydia, too.”
“Maybe so. But here’s a little friendly advice. When you walk in there to present your thesis proposal? I think you’d better check your guns at the door.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, don’t start talking about ‘blood money,’ and how blacks are still enslaved. Because if there’s a couple of conservative professors in that room and you start sounding like Al Sharpton, they might just take you on. And then things
could
get hostile.”
She said she hadn’t been in grad school for five years without knowing what people’s politics were, and how to talk the talk.
“Then you’ll do fine,” I said.
She stood, said she’d better go back upstairs. But instead of opening the door, she just stood there.
“What?” I said, knowing it was a risky question.
“I got pregnant once. Not too long after Moze and I moved in together. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it or not, and he was pretty definite that he
didn’t
want it. So I had an abortion. I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d leave me.”
I nodded. Said nothing.
“That child would be in kindergarten by now. I was lying awake thinking about that last night. I’d be the mother of a five-year-old.”
“First things first,” I said. “Go down there and get your degree. Then you can come back here and figure things out, you and him.”
After she went inside, I stayed out there for a while. She’d forgotten her cigarettes, and I took one out of the pack and lit it. I don’t think I’d had a cigarette in a decade.
Boom! Boom!
A deer had either escaped or been struck down….
I closed my eyes and saw the two of them out there on the side of the school building, armed to the teeth, taking aim at their own.
Go! Go! This is awesome! This is what we always wanted to do! …
Saw Rachel’s body in the grass near the top of the stairs. Saw her white casket, scrawled with messages of grief and love…. Rachel, Danny, all of them: they’d been their parents’ precious children, just as Edmond and Levi had been Lizzy’s. As Morgan Seaberry had been
his
mother’s pride and joy….
Nothing ever changes, Janis had said. It did, though. We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere. What had that chaos theorist on the plane called it? I couldn’t recall the word. Began with a
b
.
I checked my watch. My papers were graded, my lessons prepared, I was showered and dressed. I had another twenty minutes or so. I could either get to Oceanside a little early for a change—run off those handouts, answer some emails. Or else I could …
Putting aside her personal grief, Popper wrote to the Union Army’s superintendent of women nurses, Dorothea
Dix, whom she had met fifteen years earlier at Seneca Falls. “I am nearly sixty years of age and have had no formal medical training, but my constitution is strong and I can learn as swiftly as any. Having lost sons to this war, I should like to come to the aid of other mothers’ sons.”
While Lizzy Popper awaited a response from Dix, she received, to her great relief, a letter from the missing Willie. Lizzy’s fear that her surviving son would become a casualty of war proved unwarranted. As his letter explained, Willie Popper had taken a far different path.
Earlier correspondence between Lizzy Popper and her brother, the troubled, one-eyed Roswell Hutchinson, sheds light on the Popper family dynamic, and on the ways in which Charles and Elizabeth Popper’s youngest child differed from his siblings. In an 1859 letter to the sister who had raised and later rescued him from his troubles in Richmond, Hutchinson criticized what he perceived as his sister and brother-in-law’s “immoderate mollycoddling” of Willie. The letter was a parting shot of sorts; after an extended stay with the Poppers, Hutchinson had been asked to leave because of drunkenness, “dicing,” and unemployment. Said the wounded and wounding Hutchinson:
Even a one-eyed shipwreck of a man such as I can see that Crown Prince William is worshipped by his fawning father and doting mother, and that he is ill served by these extreme attentions. Would that you had offered me one-tenth of the affection you bestow on this spoiled whelp, Lizzy, back in the day when you were young and I was younger, and the mother who would have loved me was mouldering in the ground. Perhaps if you had been more loving, I would not have taken as my consort the demon drink.
In a letter written but apparently never sent, Lizzy answered her brother’s charges with Quaker frankness: “If thee was ill raised by me, I say only that I did my best. I will not be held responsible for thy intemperance. Willie’s gift
sets him apart, but he is neither better nor more prized than his brothers.”
By “Willie’s gift,” Lizzy Popper most likely referred to her son’s musical talent. Charles Popper had detected in his youngest son an aptitude for music and had taught him to play piano, banjo, and fiddle, and to sing much of the catalogue from the old Popper Family songbook. Willie shared his father’s love of performance, executing the abolitionist songs with passion and zeal, but later confessed to his mother that he gave little notice to the political messages the lyrics conveyed. During the second half of 1862, Willie Popper had been working unhappily as a longshoreman under the direction of his uncle, New Haven harbormaster Nathanael Weeks. Slight of build, Willie hated the work and was intimidated by the other dock workers—”coarse Irish,” he later wrote to his mother, “whose great sport is to mock me for my small frame and small hands, and the absence of whiskers on my chin.” It was at the harbor, however, that Willie became seduced by what he called “the siren’s song”: placards and broadsides advertising the Broadway melodramas and minstrel shows a short ferry ride away. On a winter afternoon, Willie Popper snuck aboard one of those ferries, crossed Long Island Sound, and arrived in Manhattan. He never saw his mother again.
During the bleak years when the Union battled the Confederacy and mothers on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line wept for their slain sons, there were no fewer than twenty blackface minstrel shows playing in and around lower Broadway. Willie Popper auditioned and was hired as an “Ethiopian delineator” by one of the most successful of these entertainments, Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels at Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre, located at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Promotional posters for this large-cast show promised that ticket-buyers would witness “The Darky As He Truly Is—At Work! At Rest! In Song and Dance!” But if authenticity was advertised, what
Calhoun’s show delivered was the usual costumed extravaganza and comic stereotype.
*
Willie Popper began with Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels as a blackface chorus member in the opening and closing production numbers, but his voice and stage presence quickly brought him to the attention of owner-producer Waverly Calhoun, who renamed him Fennimore Forrest, dressed him in drag, and made him a featured player.
By the mid-nineteenth century, women had broken the gender barrier in New York theater, among them actress-producer Laura Keane and soprano Jenny Lind, the popular “Swedish Nightingale.” Minstrel shows, however, continued to cast males in female roles, most likely for comic effect. As a longshoreman on the docks at New Haven, Willie Popper’s slender frame and beardless chin had been liabilities, but on the minstrel stage, they became assets.
Wearing gaudy dresses and ocher-colored makeup, Willie titillated and repulsed audiences during the walk around as Lucy Long, a seductive, sashaying “yaller gal” who made fools of her would-be “darky” lotharios, and whose “lips are so big, they can’t be kissed all at once.” In the show’s afterpiece, Willie segued from comedy to melodrama, playing a suffering young slave named Minnie May. Minnie May was a blatant imitation of Eliza, the heroic escaped slave mother
in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ever-popular
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Dressed in ragged skirts and cradling a black baby doll wrapped in bunting, “Fennimore Forrest,” as Minnie May, apparently galvanized New York theatergoers. According to an April 3, 1863,
New York World
account, “The talented Mr. Forrest, in the midst of the third-act plantation frolics, stops the show with a poignant anthem that brings tearful audiences to their feet and reminds us of the Union’s Holy Mission.” For his showstopper, Willie had converted his father’s abolitionist hymn “Swing Open, Freedom’s Door!” into a melodramatic tour de force.
In the letter Willie Popper sent to his mother, he enclosed a clipping of the
World
article and wrote that, despite lingering sorrow about the deaths of his brothers,
I am far happier now than I have ever been. You who worked so hard to liberate the slaves will hopefully appreciate that my life in New Haven was one of enslavement. When I stepped aboard the ferry that took me to New York, it was my escape from bondage! Cast aside your mourning and your Quaker resistance to theatricals, Mother. Come and see my show!
No evidence exists that Lizzy complied, but her estranged husband, then ensconced at Manhattan’s DuMont Hotel, did attend a performance of Calhoun’s Mississippi Minstrels. Charlie Popper promptly disowned his surviving son. A subsequent letter from Willie to his mother is ambiguous as to the exact reason, or reasons, for the break with his father. Perhaps it was because Willie’s reworking of “Swing Open Freedom’s Door!” insulted Charles Popper, or because Willie’s taking of female parts embarrassed him, or because he disapproved of minstrel shows in general. The possibility also exists that Willie Popper may have been engaged in a sexual relationship with Waverly Calhoun, the show’s owner and producer, and that Charles Popper broke with his son for this reason. If Willie Popper was, in fact,
having an affair with Calhoun, he hardly would have stated so in a letter to his politically liberal but socially conservative mother. The social mores of the time dictated that “the sin that dare not speak its name” was never referred to directly. But in Willie’s letter to his mother, he stated, “Waverly has become a friend to me—the dearest I have ever known.” The letter’s return address indicates that Willie was living at Calhoun’s Park Avenue apartment.
Whether or not Willie Popper and his producer were involved sexually, their relationship ended abruptly in January of 1864, when Waverly Calhoun’s Musee and Theatre was destroyed by fire. Calhoun had fallen asleep in his office while counting the evening’s box office receipts and had died, apparently of asphyxiation. A
New York Sun
account of the blaze and its aftermath describes the removal of Calhoun’s body from the destroyed building, “while his young star, Fennimore Forrest, looked on, distraught and in
dishabille.”
Willie Popper disappeared from New York shortly after and did not communicate with his mother again until ten years later, in 1874. By then, Charles Popper had died. He and Willie had not resolved their differences.
In March of 1863, Lizzy Popper received by telegram a succinct response from the Union’s nursing superintendent Dorothea Dix: “You will suffice. Come as soon as possible.”