a Phoenician Yellow Mustang: everyone was out looking for something.
Right you are, Quirk. And what, pray tell, are you looking for?
Me? I don’t know. To avoid the Love Bug virus, maybe?
Not something you’re looking to escape, Quirk. Something you’re looking for.
A little peace of mind, maybe? A full night’s sleep?…Yeah, that’d be nice: eight uninterrupted hours of repose.
Don’t play dead before you have to.
Approaching Three Rivers, things looked both the same (the dog’s face painted on the rock ledge, the abandoned textile mills) and different (Wal-Mart, Staples, an Olive Garden restaurant). At the foot of the downtown bridge, they’d put up a sculpture: a Wequonnoc warrior, steroid-enhanced from the looks of him. For most of the twentieth century, Three Rivers had been in bed with the defense industry—the submarine base, Electric Boat. But the affair had fizzled when the Cold War ended, and now, for better or worse, the town was sleeping with the Indians. Or, as Lolly liked to grouse, “those phony-baloney one-eighth Indians. Those white one-sixteenth Wequonnocs.”
I’d intended to drive out to the farm first, but changed my mind. I’d come all this way to see her, so I should go see her, right? I got to the hospital a little after six. They had a parking garage now—that was new. They’d redone the entrance: added an atrium, a gift boutique, a coffee bar. “Courtesy of the Wequonnoc Nation,” a banner proclaimed. The receptionist told me Lolly was on the fourth floor. In the elevator, I could feel the beat of my heart.
At the desk, two nurses were conferring over a takeout menu. “Well, they wouldn’t call it spicy tuna if it wasn’t spicy, but you can probably order it milder,” the frizzy-haired one said. Then, to me, “Can I help you, sir?”
“Louella Quirk?” I said.
“Oh, yes. I’m her shift nurse. Are you her nephew from California?”
“Colorado,” I said. “How is she?”
“Well, according to her chart, she had some agitation earlier in the day, but she’s been sleeping peacefully since I came on. Her vitals look good. I just took her temp and b.p. a few minutes ago. You can go on down. She’s in 432, four rooms down on the left. I’m Valerie, by the way.”
“Caelum.”
“Hi. Hey, are you hungry? We were just about to order sushi.” I shook my head and started down the corridor. Sushi? In blue-collar Three Rivers?
She was in a semiprivate, her bed the one near the window. I exchanged smiles and nods with the roommate and her visitor. Lolly’s curtain was half drawn, her light dimmed. Her TV was on, moving images minus sound.
Her face looked lopsided, her mouth drooping open on the left side. Her coloring, usually burnished by the sun, was as gray as putty. There was dried blood at the point where the IV tube entered her hand. A sour smell hung in the air around her. When I kissed her forehead, she sighed in her sleep.
Valerie came in. “Aw, look at her,” she whispered. “Sleeping like a baby.” She checked her IV drip, plumped up her pillow, and left us.
A baby, I thought. Babies. Within the first few minutes of their lives, their mother had died, leaving them to be raised by a distant father and a no-nonsense prison matron of a grandmother. Daddy—born second and assigned the burden of having killed his mother in the process—had drunk his life away. Lolly had soldiered on, worked hard, kept her spunk and her spirits up. She’d found love, too, whether people liked it or not. And now here she was, widowed and weakened, the rest of her life to be dictated by a damaged brain.
I kept a vigil by her bedside, feeling, in waves, both moved and bored. In the top drawer of the nightstand, I found the standard issue: tissues, lotion, a cellophane-wrapped comb. Lolly’s short gray hair, usually permanent-waved and poufy, lay limp and oily. I pulled the wrapper off the comb. Tried to fix her hair a little. I didn’t want to wake her if rest was what she needed, but I was hoping, too, that she would wake up. See me and know that I’d come. When I stopped combing, she did open her eyes. She stared at me for several seconds without recognition, then closed her eyes again…. Had she been awake? Had I just missed another chance to tell her I loved her?
Valerie reappeared, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cup of ice cream in the other. “Thought you might like a little something,” she said. “I figured you for a chocolate man, but we have vanilla and strawberry, too.”
“Chocolate’s good,” I said. “Thanks. She opened her eyes a few minutes ago. She looked right at me, but I don’t think anything registered.”
Valerie shrugged. “Hard to tell,” she said.
I asked her how to activate the TV’s closed-captioning, and as she did it for me, the 60 Minutes stopwatch filled the screen. “Kind of fitting this show’s coming on,” I said. “It’s her favorite.”
“Oh, mine, too,” Valerie said. “I love it when they nail the hypocrites.”
I nodded toward Lolly. “She calls me every Sunday night after her supper, gives me all the updates. But as soon as that stopwatch starts ticking, she’ll say, ‘Well, gotta go, kiddo. My boyfriend’s coming on.’”
Valerie smiled. “Who’s her boyfriend?”
“Morley Safer.”
She nodded. “Mine’s Ed Bradley. I like his little earring.”
I touched Lolly’s shoulder. “Safer interviewed her once.”
“Your aunt? What for?”
“This story they did called ‘The Prison That Cures With Kindness.’ Their researchers went looking for the correctional facility with the lowest recidivism rate in the country, and they came up with Bride Lake.”
“The women’s prison? When was this?”
“Long time ago. ’Seventy-eight, ’seventy-nine. The producers came up, dug around, and discovered Lolly. She was a guard there at the time, but she was also the granddaughter of the woman who’d established the place. See, before my great-grandmother came along, they used to just lock up the women with the men. The assumption was that they were throw-aways anyway.”
“Oh, my God, that’s horrible,” Valerie said.
“But my great-grandmother had this idea that a separate facility run by women—plus fresh air, sunshine, farmwork, schoolwork—would rehabilitate. Community service, too. Giving back was part of her formula. And it worked, too, I guess. Sociologists, criminologists, shrinks: they came from all over to study her methods. Sigmund Freud visited once. That was in the 60 Minutes story, I remember. There’s this great picture of Freud and my great-grandmother strolling the grounds arm in arm.
“But anyway, they loved Lolly—the producers, the crew, Morley Safer. She’d never paid much attention to television, so she wasn’t intimidated by it. And that made her, whaddaya call it? Telegenic. And on top of that, Lolly’s a great storyteller. She told Safer about the day Sophie Tucker came to visit an old vaudeville friend who was in for larceny and stayed on to do a show. And about the summer when the inmates served as surrogate mothers for a bunch of monkeys that were being fed experimental doses of lithium up the road at the state hospital.
