Old Glory (22 page)

“You ain’t heard the Mississippi Songbird yet! She’ll be singing in a while!”

As I scrambled down the bluff to my boat I was thoroughly disconsolate. The man was obviously right: I had forty-one-year-old teeth. I was four years older than I’d thought, and the burden of this unexpected age sat leadenly on me; with the river getting darker every minute, I felt old-fogeydom closing in.

At Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, I felt my age. The hotel had closed down years before. The motels were booked solid. The streets were black. Dogs howled at their chains as I walked around the town; they could smell me for a grizzled hobo who had no business being on their block. I hoped that my last resort—the city police department—would take a more charitable attitude toward me than the dogs.

Even in the kindly half-light of Kaber’s Supper Club, I was grubbily conspicuous. I sat at a table with my scuffed luggage piled around me, in a denim shirt and old corduroy Levi’s, while the other diners—the prosperous small farmers of Wisconsin and their wives—were dressed for a Saturday night out. Never mind. I was going to eat first, and worry about finding a place to bathe and sleep later. Trying to make an announcement to the waitress that I wasn’t really the person I appeared to be, I skipped through the cheap wines and ordered a bottle that cost nine dollars. Within seconds, the owner of the restaurant was at my table. I supposed, sadly, that he was going to insist on seeing the color of this mooching bum’s money.

“Rex Kaber,” he said. “So it’s true you’re from England. The waitress said so. I told her she must have had a martini too many. Welcome to Prairie du Chien.”

I would never get the pronunciation of these places right.
Do Sheen. Do Sheen
. Remember that.

He joined me and we shared the nine-dollar Burgundy. Since Mr. Kaber said there was “no way” that he was going to let me pay for either the wine or the meal, I wished I’d been more modest in my choice.

“Well, this year we’re getting Presidents at a dime a dozen, but I can’t remember the last time we saw an Englishman around here. Where’re you putting up?”

I told him about the full motels.

“No problem. Stay in the kid’s room. We’ll be glad to have you.”

His words were easy and openhanded. His face wasn’t. It looked as if it masked a complicated inner life. Twenty years before, it would have been a simple face, hawkishly handsome, with a tight mouth and eyes set a little too thoughtfully far back in the skull. Since then it had taken on a contradictory pattern of fine lines and furrows. Kaber’s eyes were framed by big black-rimmed glasses, and watching them I saw a mixture of melancholy and good humor, gentleness and curiosity. There were sleepless nights there too. Rex Kaber looked misplaced as a small-town restaurateur: a lean, wary man who looked to me as if he had lived more on his wits and his nerve ends than was good for him.

We steadily talked the bottle down, and Rex called for another. Like John Dunlevy’s newspaper, Kaber’s Supper Club was an old family business; it had been Prairie du Chien’s main chophouse since early in the century. Rex showed me a brown photograph of the place in his grandfather’s time: men in aprons and straw hats in a long open kitchen which faced onto a street crowded with the overflow from the railroad and the steamboats.

“Prairie du Chien was really something then. Now … you just have to walk up West Blackhawk Street; half the places are empty and up for sale. Some of them have been like that for years. The Supper Club does okay; we get the tourists and the out-of-towners; but the rest of the city … Every year we lose seventy percent of our high school and college graduates. They just don’t want to know. Like my older son. He’s married out in Florida.…”

“So will the Supper Club stay on in the family?”

“I’m lucky. My younger son—he’s tending bar over there—he just took a natural interest in the business. He’s majoring in hotel management at college. As soon as he gets to be old enough, the place’ll be his. I’ll be the one who just tends bar. But Jo-Ann and I, we’re real lucky that way. For most parents, it’s heartbreak; they raise their kids here, and then just have to say goodbye to them at the airport. That’s the way it goes here. You seen McGregor, across the river? They had four,
five thousand people there in 1900. Nowadays … well, if you were to count a thousand you’d have to throw in a hundred dogs to make up the weight. They’re pretty, these places, but sometimes, ’specially when you see the kids all go, I think we’re all dying. Dying on our feet.”

When the restaurant closed, we crossed the yard to Kaber’s house.

“Would you like to see some of the pictures I’ve taken? I do photography, just for a hobby.”

He brought them out. As soon as I saw them I understood why we had made friends so easily. They were all photographs of water: a frozen creek, its ice splitting away in jagged diagonals; a dead tree standing on its still reflection; a whole colored sky floating in the vacant glass of the Mississippi.

“You like them?”

“I like them so much that I think I took them myself,” I said.

The “kid’s room” which was my billet for the night had the air of a museum. The kid was a married man with children of his own now, fifteen hundred miles away in Florida, but his room looked as if he’d left it yesterday. His football pennants decorated the walls: I lay under Saints, Colts, Cardinals, Redskins, Oilers, Vikings, Patriots, Raiders, Eagles, Buccaneers and Seahawks. His old singles lay in heaps on the floor, their scratched black vinyl leaking from dog-eared cardboard covers. I remembered them from … way back. Patience and Prudence singing “Tonight You Belong to Me”; “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper; Smokey Robinson and “You Better Shop Around.” A wooden chest spilled with sports equipment: ski boots, a baseball bat, a tennis racket left out of its press. I felt afloat in time, in this sixteen-year-old’s room with my forty-one-year-old teeth, and I cast out what I hoped would be an anchor by trying to read myself to sleep with a novel by Graham Greene. His lizardy tone of weary wisdom toward all times, in which past, present and future were equally corrupted under the eyes of God, seemed appropriate to the moment. I dreamed of bridgework, fillings and extractions.

In the morning I was burrowing in the humming recesses of a strange refrigerator, looking for the orange juice and the coffee beans, when Jo-Ann Kaber, vivid and big-eyed in her bathrobe, found me.

“Hi,” she said. “Sleep well?”

“Very,” I said, thinking that the actual confusions of my night would strike a stranger as good cause for committing me to an asylum for schizophrenics.

“Rex says that was some evening you had together. I had an early night. I missed out on the fun. You want the Alka-Seltzer?”

“I can’t take it,” I said. “Reminds me too much of champagne. I hate noisy bubbles in the early morning.”

“You want to come to church with us?”

“I’d like that,” I said.

Rex had come in. “You want to hear one of Father Finughan’s sermons. He’s a cracker. He’s not one of those milk-and-water priests. He makes you think. That’s why we go to St. John’s and not to St. Gabe’s. That Father Finughan, when he’s in form, he can make you shake in your seat. He don’t pull none of his punches: he tells you what you
ought
to hear when all those other priests just tell you what you want to hear.”

“Oh, he’ll just love Father Finughan,” Jo-Ann said.

We drove out across town to St. John’s. On the way we passed St. Gabe’s. Its parking lot was stacked, fender to fender, with new automobiles. Boards outside it advertised Bingo and a Grand Euchre Contest. At St. John’s, there was hardly a car in sight and the congregation was thinly sprinkled across yards of empty pews where dusty beams of sunlight showed up the threadbare cushioning and frayed hassocks.

Another beam shone on the bald skull of the priest, who moved quietly through the procedures of the Mass: a small, absorbed figure attended by an acolyte. He had a pointed face like a chipped flint arrowhead. He came suddenly to life when he moved forward from his holy duties to stand at the head of the aisle and deliver his sermon. He gave a dry cough of a laugh. There was more expression in that laugh than in the grand rhetorical flourishes of the American preachers I’d heard before: it held pity, and sarcasm, and disbelief in equal quantities. He looked across the half-empty vault of his church, and laughed again.

“The Church Triumphant,” he said. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? ‘The Church Triumphant? How many times have you heard those words’? They sound mighty fine when you’re singing along with the hymns; they make you feel pretty good, hey? You must be quite a guy, to be a paid-up member of this fancy corporation, the Church Triumphant.” There was another, wicked little laugh. “Well, don’t kid yourself. The Church hasn’t triumphed. Take a look at it—if you dare to. Oh, yeah, it’s still here, still around, struggling, suffering. The poor old Church. You think it’s ‘Triumphant,’ huh? I tell you,
I
don’t. When I see the Church, I see the struggling and the suffering, I see Her being opposed on all sides by the … elders … and scribes … of our time. Oh, yeah. Haven’t you heard? They’re rejecting us pretty regularly, those elders … and scribes.”

He had saved a special laugh for me, as he watched me trying to transfer his words to my notebook.

“Yeah, they’re turning their backs on us all right, the doctors, the lawyers, the college professors. The big shots. The good guys. The fellows we’re all supposed to look up to in our society today.” In a crackly whisper, he talked of the legal system in which rich men and their lawyers could buy acquittals for themselves, of hospitals where the poor couldn’t afford the treatment they needed, of the bill-collection agencies that terrorized people on welfare. The prospect of twentieth-century America sent him into a spasm of angry chuckles.

“You think the Church is a church of good guys, do you? You think Jesus suffered on the cross for the folks with two cars in their garage, and their fine homes, and their four-figure donations to charities? I tell you, this is the church of bad guys. It’s the church of sinners, the church of prostitutes, the church of the poor, the church of Mary Magdalen. You remember how Jesus taught us that we must sacrifice our goods? Think about it. Okay, so you’ll give away your house, your car, your farm.” He raked his congregation with a skeptical, amused eye. “Yeah? So who are you going to give them to? The good guys? Or are you going to sacrifice everything you’ve saved for to some bum, some guy who’s done nothing—nothing at all—to deserve it?

“That’s the teaching of Jesus. Pretty hard, ain’t it? That’s what He did. He suffered on that cross for prostitutes—not for saints, not for the good guys. Go on—give away your farm to the first bum you see on the street, or the prostitute in some bar … pretty crazy, huh? ‘That guy’s nuts!’ Can’t you hear the voices? Oh, yeah, all them good guys, they’d talk you out of it real fast, wouldn’t they? But that’s what Jesus did.…”

No wonder St. Gabe’s was packed and St. John’s was attended by the faithful remnant. Mocking, asperitous, plainspoken, the priest had come near to emptying his church with the rigor of his theology. We left chastened.

“Wasn’t that something?” said Rex.

“God, I need a drink,” Jo-Ann said.

Passing St. Gabe’s we could hear the last hymn swelling out onto the street, the sopranos and baritones competing with each other for the loudest, proudest notes. It sounded like a church of good guys, comfortably triumphant. Back at the empty supper club, with our Bloody Marys lined along the bar, Jo-Ann asked me why I hadn’t gone to the altar rail to take Communion.

“Aren’t you a Catholic? What church do you belong to, Jonathan?”

I explained that I’d been brought up in the Church of England and that although I still respected the moral force of Christian teaching, I could not accept any of its supernatural claims.

“You’re not an
atheist!
I’d hate to think you were an atheist!”

“No. It seems illogical to try to deny what you can’t prove or disprove. I’m an agnostic.”

“So that’d mean you’d still believe in … like, Eternal Life?”

“No. I don’t believe in Eternal Life.”

“But how can you bear to go on living? There’s going to be a really beautiful Eternal Life! I
know
that. If I didn’t believe in Eternal Life … I guess I’d just want to die. You
have
to believe in Eternal Life!”

“Perhaps I want to die even less because I don’t believe in it.”

“Knowing that about you, you know it makes me feel so sad. I want to pray for you.”

Rex studied the inside of his glass embarrassedly.

“I guess,” he said slowly, “when I get to thinking about it, I suppose I feel like Jonathan does, really. There’s no proof and no disproof. It’s just a kind of a nice idea.… I don’t know whether I really believe in it or not.”

“Rex!” Her voice was shrill with shock. Her eyes began to flood with tears. “You’ve
got
to believe there’s going to be a beautiful, beautiful Eternal Life! How can you sit there saying things like that? Oh, my God, Rex! You can’t; you just can’t!”

Sitting between husband and wife, the cause of this appalled estrangement, I felt ashamed and mean.

“You never
told
me. I never
knew
that about you.…”

I thought: It is always like this. You can share decades of intimacy with someone; then one day you will find yourself sitting across from them in a bar and they will be as strange to you as a casual acquaintance on a journey.

“You—
atheist!
”

Prairie du Chien looked like the priest’s vision of the Church: it was still around, still struggling; not triumphant. West Blackhawk Street was dominated by the dead hotel. I couldn’t make out what its name had been. Eight wooden letters, cracked and bleached, were still pinned at odd angles to its facade. Once they’d been a bright sky blue; now only a few shreds of paint adhered to the crevices in the grain. They had the tantalizing obscurity of an unfinished crossword puzzle: