Lake Wobegon Days (49 page)

It is hard. She has picked three hard songs by foreign composers with one name. “Serenade” by DesCanzi, “O Tall Papaya Tree” by Del Monte, and “April Is in My Mistress’ Face” by Morley. “April is in my mistress’ face, / And July in her eyes hath place, / Within her bosom lies September, / But in her heart a cold December.” When I sing about her bosom, I think of Miss Falconer in her underwear with leaves between her breasts. Some of the tenors cannot sing “Within her bosom lies September” without snorting and gasping, because Bill Swenson once sang it “Within her bosom lies Bill Swenson.”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Swenson mentioned once, “perhaps they could do better with something like ‘Red River Valley.’”

Miss Falconer gave her a withering look. “I’m not going to baby them,” she said. “They are just going to have to learn that music is something you have to work at and apply yourself. You can’t sit around singing cowboy songs all your life. Listen to this,” she said. She played a record of an English boys choir singing “April Is in My Mistress’ Face.” “Those boys are the same age as you and younger,” she said. She played the record again. We despised them, their fluty voices, the little twerps. But Miss Falconer wouldn’t give up. “It’s April! April! Not
Aprul!
” she said. “Open your mouths. Look at me. Think about what you’re singing. And—”

And—we sang softly, listening to the boy next to us for the note, and we thought about bosoms—and now it is Monday again and “April is in my mistress’ face” and I am sitting next to Jerry Swedeen, fourth from the end in the tenor section, looking at the back of Donna Bunsen’s neck as Miss Falconer taps her pencil on the music stand. “Tenors,” she says. “I want you to sing your part for me so I know you have it. One at a time.”

One at a time. Death; we all die inside. My heart has collapsed. No, it hasn’t—it’s pounding like hammers. My face itches. Girls poke each other and whisper and smirk at us: Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

“James,” she says. James stands up. He always knows his part. He takes piano, he has an advantage. “That’s very good. Thank you. Bill—” Bill has now learned the song from James. “Fine. Jerry?”

I now almost have the song in my mind from James and Bill, and now Jerry destroys it. He sings all over the place. Miss Falconer tells him to sit down. “You girls—I hear whispering. You may sit down, Jerry. Gary?”

“I don’t feel very good, Miss Falconer.”

“If you’re well enough to be in school, you’re certainly well enough to sing.”

“I don’t think I can. I don’t feel good.” It’s true. I feel terrible. We had bread with yellowish gravy on it for lunch—chicken a la king with string beans and green Jell-O with mayonnaise and crushed walnuts—and I honestly think that if I stand up and sing in front of everybody right now that this whole lunch—

“Sing,” she says.

I stand. I study the notes for a moment as if—if I look at them hard enough, they will jump into my mouth.

“April is in my mistress’s face, / And July in her eyes hath place,” I murmur, and then at the thought of what is coming, I begin to suffocate. Girls snicker. Miss Falconer doesn’t even look at me. “That’s enough!” she barks.

I come home ashamed and stay in the backyard.

I’m not very hungry, thank you. Meat loaf, no thank you.

I do dishes with my older sister. She sings a song we always sing together when we do dishes, but I don’t feel like singing it, so she sings it with my mother.

I go to my room and fall face-down on the bed and wonder why God made my life so embarrassing. What I want most is to sing—to be a famous singer like Elvis or Ezio Pinza or George Beverly Shea and stand on stage with light all over me and open my mouth and out comes my magnificent voice and people get weak listening to it because my voice tells them that life is not miserable, it is impossibly beautiful, but instead I open my mouth and out come faint cries of ducks, awful sounds, a drone, a whine. My heart is full of feelings, but I can’t sing worth beans.

I make myself feel better, as I so often do, by putting a record on the phonograph and pretending I’m the singer. My Uncle Tommy, who attended the University of Minnesota and made something of himself, had sent me a souvenir record of “Minnesota, Hail to Thee,” sung by the University chorus and Mr. Roy Schuessler, baritone. I get out the record, and imagine that it is Memorial Day and sixty thousand people have come to Memorial Stadium to honor the dead and also to hear me, Roy Schuessler, and the chorus sing our state song. The governor is there, and mayors and ministers, and five thousand Boy Scouts in formation holding American flags; my family has driven down from Lake Wobegon for the occasion, and after I sing, we’ll go to a swank restaurant and have sirloin steak and french fries.

And now the moment has come. Sixty thousand people rise to their feet, the stadium is hushed, as I put the record on the phonograph and stand, head up, feet apart, at the foot of the bed, arms outstretched, facing the wall, facing the great wall of faces turned up toward me.

And as I mouth the words, “Thy sons and daughters true will proclaim thee near and far,” my mother walks in with an armload of laundry—she walks between me and the chorus to the dresser and puts socks in the top drawer. The governor, the sixty thousand fade away—the song goes on.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m practicing,” I say. “For choir.”

Miss Falconer’s portrait was painted by an art student at the University for $400, and from the looks of it, the two women did not hit it off.
The artist seemed to have the same impression that we did: not only does the figure look stern, pointing a pencil viewerward, but her face is flushed and her eyes are ever so slightly crossed. There is a barely visible mustache.

It was unveiled at a school assembly on the last day of school, 1960, though Miss Falconer had already seen it and, though she couldn’t very well say so, she hated it. She hated it so much that when she looked at it, she looked exactly like it: ticked.

As a special surprise, we seniors stood and sang “Red River Valley,” which we had forgotten was not a favorite of hers. “Come and sit by my side if you love me, do not hasten to bid me adieu,” we sang sadly, with foreboding, and got on a bus and rode to St. Cloud and had a class dinner with the rest of our money, where we promised to keep in touch and be friends forever.

After a year at St. Cloud State, Johnny Tollefson came home something of a success, having notched a 3.2 grade average and published two poems in the literary magazine
Cumulus
(under the names J. Robert Tollefson and Ryan Tremaine), and promptly smashed the front end of his dad’s Fairlane on old Mrs. Mueller’s rock garden. It was a fine June afternoon and she was talking on the phone to Mrs. Magendanz about a woman whose house got robbed in St. Cloud in broad daylight, when she heard the screech, a couple loud thumps, the crunch of metal, and finally the hiss. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Somebody’s hit me!” she said. He had managed to take out her ornamental deer, a plywood Dutch windmill, and the martin house, and left two black ruts across the new sod. He didn’t damage the rock garden much, her son Earl having cemented it pretty good. The front of the car was mashed in back to the engine block, and the hood was sprung. Johnny sat with his hands still on the wheel, blood running down his chin. “Dear God in heaven!” she said. “I knew something like this was going to happen!” She braced one skinny arm against the car and put her
other hand over her eyes. “Dear Jesus, I’m about to faint,” she whispered.

He shouldn’t have driven the car home after that. With the radiator smashed and the oil left behind on the grass, the engine overheated and then, seeing the idiot light flash red, he drove faster, thinking the wind would cool the engine off. So, beyond the damage to the front end, the valves had to be reground. It came to $350 all told.

“Byron,” his wife said when Mr. Tollefson got home. “By.” She held onto his arm, slowing him down, and then routed him into the kitchen and sat him in a chair. “Be patient,” she pleaded. “Don’t talk to him when you’re so angry.” But Byron couldn’t talk much, he was so disgusted. He skipped supper and went to Mrs. Mueller’s. Earl had stood the deer up and the martin house, but the windmill was totaled. And two nests of martin chicks were dead. That was the worst of it. “Mother is taking it pretty hard,” Earl said. Byron could see that by the fact she didn’t come out and offer him coffee. “She’s so nervous to start with, and then this—”

“I don’t know,” Byron said. “I just don’t know.”

Earl said, “Well, they all grow up eventually.”

“I don’t know.”

From his wife, Byron got the story that his son “didn’t see the curve” and it “happened so fast [he] couldn’t do anything,” which made no sense. The curve had been there since God was a boy. Was the kid drunk? What the hell?

That night, after hearing a speech he had heard on other occasions,
^*
Johnny went up to his room, took out a yellow legal pad, and wrote:

He looked at his nose in the mirror. Dr. DeHaven said it was broken but not badly so he just put a piece of tape across it. It looked good with the tape, like a fighter’s, and Johnny hoped it would be a more distinguished nose with maybe a scar. His face was too childish. He wished he had a beard like W. Greg Hatczs. He had tried, but with his blond hair, what grew out didn’t make a big impression. W. Greg, on the other hand, had a huge multicolored beard, reds and browns and some whites. You looked at him, you thought,
Writer.

W. Greg Hatczs was the author of
Fragments of the Piece: A Dream Passage
, which he had read a chapter of to Mr. Davenport’s creative writing class at St. Cloud during his week as a writer in residence. He
was from Minneapolis. He wore a brown herringbone sportcoat and a gray turtleneck sweater and was as big as a desk. Johnny didn’t remember what the chapter was about, it didn’t have sentences and paragraphs as such, but he had liked the spirit of it and the boldness of the writer, who made Mr. Davenport look like a dink.

Mr. Davenport, who gave Johnny’s story “Song of Larry” a C-minus, and at the part where Larry’s parents turn into plastic lawn chairs, Mr. Davenport wrote in the margin: “Where are we? Who is Devereaux DesChampes? Point of view?
Unclear.
” Obviously, W. Greg was operating under no such restrictions.

Naomi Swenson, who sat next to him in class and took good notes, had managed to write only one word in her spiral notebook:
surrealistic.
She seemed to be pretty much right about that. W. Greg was not big on structure; the chapter seemed to take place in a Greyhound bus depot where General Custer had gone to sleep off a hangover. Or it might not have been Custer, who knows? And when the writer came to the end, it was hard to tell that it was the end. Some students thought the silence was maybe part of the story, a blank page thrown in for contrast. Then he asked for questions.

The students looked at him thoughtfully for a long time, as if the chapter had made such a profound impression on them and had raised so many questions in their minds that it was hard to narrow them down to just one. Finally Naomi raised her hand. The author nodded.

“This may seem like a dumb question,” she said, “but where do you get your ideas?”

He smiled as if she had asked what was his favorite food.
Dumb question
, everyone thought. W. Greg lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke that filled the entire room.

“That’s not a dumb question, only an impossible one,” he said, and all of the
A
writers smiled at him in an understanding sort of way. “I suppose I
could
say that I get my ideas from writing,” he said, “but that begs the question, doesn’t it?”