Pilgrims (12 page)

“You really think so?”

“It's perfect. You chose right.”

Her approval confused him. He looked around at this dim little swamp and its mournful occupants and retreated into silence.
The combination of jet lag and alcohol was a pitiful thing to observe. Even Father Wilmer, nursing a whiskey sour, had a sloppy way about him, his eyes full of vague feelings, murmuring inanities about a trip here in 1985 and someone named Harry or Larry, how remarkable it was to be back. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Just unbelievable.”

What's unbelievable about it? We live on one planet, called Earth. The Wright brothers invented the airplane and it's improved quite a bit since then. You get in and a couple of pilots fly you across the Atlantic. Which Lindbergh crossed in 1927. He was from Little Falls, Minnesota. He got up speed, pulled back on the stick, and up in the air he went. Same today. What's the big deal?

And now Wally, feeling boosted by a Manhattan, started telling stories about drinking. How Mr. Berge, three sheets to the wind, had mistaken his wife for a waitress. How Ronnie Kreuger found an article that said nutrients found in beer can prevent affectional deficit disorder and he showed that clipping to people until the paper fell apart. How Barbara Peterson, high on Kahlúa and crème de cacao, had sent her mother's body off to be cremated and deposited inside a green bowling ball … and those Lutheran ministers, twenty-four of them, schnockered on French champagne when they almost capsized Wally's twenty-two-foot pontoon boat. “By George, they wrecked the steering on that boat and do you think those yahoos sent me money to repair it? No, I guess not.” Father Wilmer said it just goes to show there's no such thing as collective guilt—conscience is an individual matter. Daryl said, no, it only showed that Lutherans are cheap.

Father Wilmer said he used to have an old lady parishioner, ninety-two and a shut-in until she found other shut-ins, one of
whom could drive. She owned an Oldsmobile and her name was Dotty. She was only eighty-five. She couldn't get her license renewed because her eyesight was so poor, so she stuck to the back roads. Which she happened to know very well, so poor eyesight wasn't a detriment. You'd see them on Fridays or Sundays, four old ladies in a pink Olds, their heads barely visible above the dashboard, going eighty, eighty-five miles an hour on gravel roads. Dotty had a rule. Never go faster than your age.

Wally asked what this had to do with drinking.

“Dotty didn't drink, but the other three did. To calm themselves down. They went tearing around for a couple of years and then they all died. It was Christmas Eve and they were at Dotty's house for eggnog and planning to go to eleven o'clock Mass. Dotty started the car to warm it up, but she forgot to open the garage door. I guess she was a little tipsy. They were sitting in her apartment, which was in the basement of her daughter's house. She was off at a party at her former husband's. She came home around 1:00
A.M.
and found four dead old ladies in the basement, next to the garage. A choir was singing on the TV and the bubble lights were bubbling on the tree and it was quite peaceful. Agnes—she was the one who came to my church—she didn't want to be a burden to anybody, and in the end, she wasn't. We just picked her up and put her in the ground and pushed the dirt over her and that was that.”

Daryl raised his glass. “Here's to Agnes,” he said. “And all she stands for.”

“They went as fast as they could for as long as they could, and they died sitting still,” said Father Wilmer, wiping a speck from his eye.

Irene said she couldn't understand why men are so fascinated by stories about drinking and couldn't we please change the subject? “To what?” said Daryl. She didn't care. “Anything,” she said. “It isn't possible to talk about anything,” he said. “Only about something. Drinking is something.”

Clint remembered when the Lake Wobegon Lutheran softball team played a bunch of drunken heathens from St. Ann's Episcopal Church who kept a case of Chardonnay chilled in the dugout and whose pitcher wore a martini shaker in a holster on his belt. By the fifth inning, they were staggering around cross-eyed and slurring their words, and yet the game was close. The Episcopalians lunged and flailed at the ball and hit doubles and triples, and the Lutherans took nice level swings and hit easy pop-ups to the third baseman. It was 9–9 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, St. Ann's had two men on base, and their pitcher, blind drunk and talking to himself, stroked a long fly ball to Pastor Ingqvist in right field. The good man stood, crouching, glove at the ready, in perfect position, and the ball bounced off the heel of his glove, and the winning run came lurching home and the heathen shrieked and hugged and poured gin on each other and raised their shirts and bumped bellies as the Lutherans packed up their stuff and headed for the parking lots. The pitcher said to Pastor Ingqvist, “Good game,” and Pastor Ingqvist told him to go fuck himself. People couldn't believe they had heard him say it, so nobody said anything, but Clint heard him. And that's what he said. Pastor quit the team at that point and never played again.

Carl said, “Reminds me of the tornado that smashed up the Ingebretsons' farm and their beautiful lawn and garden and flat
tened the house they'd just fixed up, and the old bachelor farmer across the road who sits drinking brandy all day, his dump wasn't touched, not a beer bottle was broken.”

“I used to find broken beer bottles in my driveway,” said Eloise. “Fred. He was an angry drunk. Angry at himself but he turned it on me. Anger was what made him hook up with a piece of trash. There's a lot of anger in love sometimes. Oh gosh, life is complicated. Have you ever been in love, Father?”

Father Wilmer looked startled.

“I remember that poor man from Millet who was so grieved at his father's death that he chained himself to the iron ring on the lid of the old tomb next to his dad's grave,” said Father. “They had to bring in a special acetylene torch from St. Cloud to burn through the chain, which was some unusual alloy, and meanwhile the constables Gary and LeRoy had to sit and converse with the man. His name was Bill, he was drunk, delusional, but all in all, not a bad person, and as they waited for the welder to come, they asked him what his dad did for a living. ‘Dad is dead,' he said. ‘I know but what did he do before he died?' said Gary. ‘Right before he died, he clutched at his chest and said he wished he hadn't given up whiskey six years before, if he'd known he was going to die anyway, he'd've kept right on, and he fell over dead.'”

“Could we talk about something else?” said Margie.

“Sure,” said Daryl. “Go right ahead.” And he launched into the story of Magendanz whose wife accused him of going ice fishing so he could drink whiskey—“Of course, she was right. That's the problem with women. They're always right”—and that's what he was doing in his fish house, getting deep into his
cups, and that was why he had the shotgun loaded and aimed at the hole in the ice, waiting for the old lunker walleye Pete who had run away with his favorite lure, a Lazy Ike. He had his finger on the trigger when a pickup backed into the ice house and catapulted him out the door and the shotgun blew a hole in the side of the Rasmussen fish house where Mr. Rasmussen at the moment was changing from his insulated pants into his jeans and a few pellets of buckshot burned his bare butt and he exploded out the door and in one swift instant (1) lost control of his sphincter and (2) stepped into a hole in the ice with his left leg up to his thigh. For some reason, he did not break his leg, but he was good and stuck and his family's jewels were chilling on the ice with him there in an awkward position similar to a cheerleader doing the splits, except he is fifty-seven and the splits are no longer possible for him, nonetheless there he was. Until the fish bit his left big toe. And he came screaming out of there. “And doggone it if the fish wasn't hanging on. A decent-size walleye.”

“What a lie that is,” said Margie.

“The plain and simple truth. Ask anybody.”

“You can't ask anybody, you can only ask somebody. And I'm telling you that somebody told you a big fib.” She stood up and put on her jacket. “I'm not hungry,” she said. “I'll see you all later.” Daryl looked at her and said, “You don't like it here?” “It's perfect,” she said, “but I've got to walk off some energy. Have a big time.” Eloise asked her where she was going. “When you're in Italy, you want to see Italy,” she said. It was against the rule—you should stay with the group; she had told her children that a hundred times—but she had to get up and get out and when she passed the sad piano player and the suicidal woman and got out the door
and felt the fresh damp air on her face, she felt 100 percent better. So happy to escape from Earl's and breathe actual air.

She called up Norbert to tell him about how things were going in Rome. He said something about a cousin flying to San Francisco, and when she mentioned Gussie, he said, “How'd you know about that?”

“You told me. This is Margie. Remember?”

“Margie who?”

“Margie Krebsbach from Lake Wobegon.”

“We left there a long time ago. I was twenty-five. My folks went to Iowa and I kept going down to Texas. I'm in Tulsa now.”

“I know. And I am in Rome. I'm going to decorate Gussie's grave.”

He growled. “Only Margie I know is my daughter Margie. She went to Rome a long time ago. She already took care of that. Mother wanted me to go but I couldn't so she went. He was my brother, Gussie. He died in Rome. He was a good man.” And he hung up. Poor man had gone around the bend, Margie thought, but she'd call him back in the morning.

A woman was cleaning the gutter, sweeping the garbage along with a broom, dumping it into a sort of rickshaw she pulled along. Margie had been brought up to never, never, never, drop trash in the street, but others had not been, the world was their wastebasket, and some of them lived in Rome. The street cleaner wore a white shirt and black vest with orange safety stripes on it, black slacks. She made a great show of effort as she nudged the trash along, as if concentrating on each orange peel, each crumpled receipt, each plastic water bottle. Italians put on a good show of im
portance and bustle, but when you looked closely, you could see that nobody was doing much. The city police hung around in twos and fours, chattering away in their smart blue serge uniforms—belts, brass buttons, epaulets, white patent-leather helmets—but they didn't seem to be on the alert for wrongdoers whatsoever. Except for the storekeepers, nobody seemed to be doing much at all in Rome, just hanging out, enjoying the sunshine.

An old iron drinking fountain stood on the corner, water running. Four nuns and two priests stood next to it, all in full regalia, who appeared to be lost. They looked up one street and then down the other, muttering to each other in some raspy language. A plaque marked the home of Casanova. A black family nearby was speaking French, even the children. Impressive. Up the street, in the distance was (she guessed) the dome of St. Peter's. She hiked toward it, moving through a cluster of old men in old blue suits, white shirts, tufts of chest hair, standing toe to toe shouting and waving their hands. Small cars buzzed past and gorgeous dark women on scooters. Lights blazed in tiny shops selling silver ornaments, women's blouses, copiers. A vegetable stand, wooden crates piled high at either end. A lamp shop with a great confusion of lamps standing on the sidewalk, desk lamps, standing lamps, chandeliers.

Dear God in Heaven, she thought, please make it right between
Carl and me, but if it can't be right, let me know. I don't
want to spend the next six years torturing ourselves over it. I
know that promises were made. I know that. He promised he
would love me always and I don't know that that's the case
anymore. Sometimes these things can't be helped. You can't get
blood from a turnip. So I'm just saying what I mean, which, if
you are omniscient, which I hope you are, you already know,
and I'm only saying that I know it, too. Amen
.

The four nuns turned on their heels, and the priests followed them.
Viva Italia! Just like in the movies!
Somewhere there was Audrey Hepburn on the back of the Vespa, her arms around the newspaper reporter, flying around Rome.

S
he'd seen
Roman Holiday
twice, once at the Paramount in St. Cloud with her high school boyfriend Larry and then years later on TV with Carl, who fell asleep midway through, but years later he gave her the DVD for her birthday. It startled her, the sheer rightness of it. How did he know? A lucky guess? Had she called him Gregory in her sleep? Audrey is a real princess who wants to break out of the cordon of security and protocol around her and experience Real Life, and Gregory Peck takes her for a ride on his Vespa, intending to betray her confidence by writing an exposé for his newspaper. His sidekick Eddie Albert follows at a distance, snapping pictures. But Gregory falls in love, and how could he not? She is Audrey Hepburn, after all. He falls hard and she falls in love with him. And when he returns her to her life of privilege, they say a brokenhearted farewell. And the next day he proceeds through the official receiving line, bows, kisses her hand, and presents her with the story he wrote, which will never see the light of day. He gives her back her privacy, her right to be an individual. The true token of love.

That was the part that impressed Margie every time she saw it. Had Gregory asked her to marry him and had she abdicated her crown and followed him to Chicago or Dallas and borne his babies and ironed his shirts and made his meat loaf while he wrote editorials at the
Gazette
—wrong ending! The sign of his love was to give her the freedom to be herself, a princess, and not pretend that True Love is going to make up for everything.

Larry thought Audrey Hepburn seemed “stuck-up” and that the movie wasn't realistic at all, and that was the end of Larry. He had been a boyfriend of convenience and now he became baggage. Afterward, in the car, when he slipped his hand up her blouse, she took his hand out and said, “I don't feel like it tonight.”

“What's wrong?” he cried. He'd been really counting on holding her bare breast in his hand. He had caressed the brassiere itself a week before and this was the logical next step.

“Maybe I'm stuck-up,” she said. “I just don't feel like it. I don't think you and I are meant to be—”

He begged her to please, please let him show her his love. He breathed Wrigley's Juicy Fruit on her as he explained that for so long he'd been selfish and unable to express love, and then she had shown him what love means, and now he simply wanted to share that love with her because love that is shared with another will grow and grow and eliminate war and bigotry and oppression, and this is how we can change this world—through love, love, love.

“You just want to grab my boobs and you want me to stick my hand in your pants.” She said this as nicely as possible as she placed her hand on the door handle.

“Just one. Just for five seconds.”

“No, Larry.”

He was stunned. Tears ran down his acne-scarred cheeks and he wiped his eyes and mumbled something about what if he died in a car crash tomorrow and she had to live for the rest of her life with the knowledge of having denied him the chance to show his love for her.

“Better drive carefully.”

He moaned, he groaned, he banged his head on the steering wheel. “This is not the last time a woman is going to say no to you, Larry, so you'd better get used to it,” she said. Oh that was cruel. And yet it excited her to let him have it. “I'm sorry,” she said, “I like you as a friend but I don't love you. And besides, you want to settle down here and I don't. I want to see the world.” She opened the car door. “I want to see the world with you,” he whispered. Tears glittered in his eyes and he took a swipe at his nose. She could never love a boy who cried like that when he didn't get his way. After she got out of the car and said good-bye and walked into the house, Larry waited for her to change her mind—sat there for an hour before he drove away.

He called her a month later, penitent, pleading, Johnny Mathis singing in the background, and she had to tell him, “Larry, all those reasons I didn't like you before—they haven't changed just because you're drunk.”

It was a movie that shook her to her core.
There can be love
without possession. You can love someone who is free of your
control. You can even love those who defy your control, your
enemies
. (She mentioned this to Father Wilmer once: “If loving
your enemies is ultimate Christian love, then isn't submissive married love an inferior love?” He didn't think so but he had other parishioners waiting to talk to him, who weren't going to try to snag him on theological issues.)

As it turned out, Larry joined the army, which sent him to Germany where he married a Dutch woman and joined her dad's company and made his fortune building resorts in Sumatra and eventually settled in Brussels, and Margie married Carl and settled down two blocks from her childhood home—ah, the ironies of life. And Larry came back to speak at graduation in 1997, blue pinstripe suit, shoes with tassels, face sandblasted and tanned, hair glistening, and he talked about how Lake Wobegon had taught him to march to his own drummer and light a candle rather than curse the darkness, and there she sat six rows away and didn't bother to walk up afterward and say hi, and anyway he seemed to be in a hurry to leave. He lived an airborne life, zooming across national boundaries, and she was just little Margie Schoppenhorst, the shy, studious girl who won the spelling bee on “eleemosynary”—meaning “benevolent” or “charitable”—and kicked the butt of former champion Charlotte Tollefson and was very eleemosynary to her. She rose in the world, edited the
Literary Leaf
and was Class Poet, and expected to rise up with eagle wings and soar off to worlds unknown.

People said, “So what are you going to do now, Margie?” and she said, “Well, I was thinking of going to college in Chicago, but I don't know now.” She didn't go away to college because it panicked her to see herself failing miserably and coming home in disgrace and facing the relatives. Poor little Margie:
It was just
too much for her
. So she told people she was “putting it off” for
a year. That she “wasn't ready.” With her college money, she bought a car. She got a job candling eggs. About the same time, she began to feel a feverish hunger to have children. She had her eye on Carl, had for years, she liked the cut of him, a hardworking easygoing man, but decisive—he once got bored with fishing and dove from the boat and swam to shore, leaving his three brothers behind. He once bought a silk shirt with lilacs on it and because the guys at the garage gave him a hard time about it, he made a point to wear it whenever he went to fill up with gas. He did not believe in God (he confessed this to her one Christmas Eve) but he went to church, confident that someday his faith would return. So she went to work at the egg warehouse, candling eggs, and then she married Carl. They made a nice couple. She fell in love with him when she was driving by a construction site on McKinley Street the week after high school graduation and heard hammering and the rhythm of it sounded like someone knocking on the door to her soul.

It was July, a steamy day, a scorcher, and he stood on the scaffolding, stripped to the waist, hammering nails into joists, and the rhythm was seductive. She was on her way to work at the egg warehouse, and she slowed down at the sound of the
whamma-whamma-
whamma-wham
, four beats, and a pause while he pulled a new nail out from between his teeth, and
whamma-whamma-
whamma-wham
, and she took her foot off the gas and the car drifted over into a slough of mud from the water hose running to the cement mixer and got mired in mud up to the hubcaps and stopped. The hammering stopped. He watched her for a minute as she gunned the engine and spun the wheels and mud flew and she knew he was watching her and she gunned
it harder. And then he crossed the road and said, “Move over,” and she did, and he got behind the wheel and rocked the car back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and got it up and out of the trench. “You okay?” he said. She nodded. She was dripping sweat.

He was four years older, he'd been in the navy, and then instead of joining Krebsbach Chevrolet, he went to Minneapolis and learned carpentry. But he was dating Anne Marie Meister, who'd moved to Minneapolis the same time Carl went to carpenter school.

Margie went to the egg warehouse and sat in the dimness, lifting eggs off the conveyor and holding them up to the candle, looking for blood specks, cracks, and thought about him and the car rocking back and forth.

She and Carl, who had finished carpentry school, dated that summer. They went to a dance, a movie, a couple of awkward dinners, before they discovered that what they both liked was to lie side by side in the grass in the cemetery and read books and also kiss and touch in the careful way that young people necked back in those days. They were married two months later.

Two nights before the wedding, they sat on his parents' porch and he told her about Anne Marie, whom he'd gotten pregnant, the year before. Her dad was the mayor and he sold life insurance. Carl decided to leave town and packed a knapsack and set out to hitchhike to California but the first car that pulled over to give him a ride was Mayor Meister. He told Carl that he'd have
to do the right thing and marry Anne Marie, and Carl said he'd think about it, and just then Mayor Meister got terrible angina pains. He told Carl to get the nitro tablets out of the glove compartment. But there were none there. “Please help me,” said the dying man, and fell into Carl's arms and died. The nitro tablets were in his pocket. He explained all of this to Anne Marie later but she blamed him for her dad's death.

Anne Marie was good and depressed. She went to see
Breakfast
at Tiffany's
at the Belle Rive Theater in Minneapolis and sat in the dark, crying, and got up to go to the women's john and went through a door marked no admittance, staff only and there sat a scrawny young man named Chick who was running the projector and she asked him to put his arms around her, which he did, and they started necking, and then they were naked, and the next day he went with her to the courthouse. The baby was born and they named her Tiffany. Anne Marie told Carl the whole story out of pure meanness and when he asked to see his daughter, she just laughed and said, “Fat chance.”

Carl was crying as he told her this—so many forks in the road where he might've gone the wrong way and missed out on finding the Margie of his life. What if Mr. Meister hadn't found him on the highway, what if he hadn't died and thus made Carl a murderer, what if he'd never come back to Lake Wobegon from the navy? What if, what if, what if. He said that he would love her for the rest of his life and be true to her. She believed him. And then the fire siren blew. He was a volunteer fireman. He jumped up and said, “Come with,” so she did. They raced down the hill to the firehouse.

The truck had left already, they could see flashing red lights at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Sixteen firemen there and Father Emil and Sister Arvonne and a flock of Canada geese, highly agitated, honking. A crowd was gathering. There were two geese inside the church, said Sister, and when she'd gone in to help them, they attacked her. The front doors were open wide.

People suggested that they get brooms or put out corn or ring the church bells. People love a crisis. The crowd grew. There was great excitement. People went home for their cameras. A show was about to begin. Men vs. Geese. And then Carl raised his arms for silence and told everyone to go home. “We can't get the geese out of the church with all this hullabaloo. Everybody, please, go home. Otherwise, we may injure one of these beautiful birds. And why? For your amusement? Please. Take a picture and go home.”

The firetruck was driven back to the firehouse. People drifted away, reluctantly, not wanting to miss the action, but Carl coaxed them to leave, until he and Margie sat under a tree, just the two of them, on the warm September night, waiting for the geese to come out. The dozen or so geese on the lawn hunkered down, waiting for their colleagues, muttering to themselves. And then the two geese came out the front doors, their hips moving in an elegant sensuous rocking motion, and there was a rush of wings, geese dashing across the grass and taking off. The two of them walked into church. It was empty. They checked in the confessionals, up in the loft, nothing. The Blessed Virgin stood, head bowed, her hands reaching out to grasp their hands, and they stood in that deep and profound silence and that was when she first felt married to him. No small thing. To her, marriage was linked to that silence,
and to the rush of wings, and to the excitation of the onlookers, and the mystery of their vigil that night.

She felt a saintly dedication to marriage back in those days and read religious manuals on the subject that said the purpose of this Holy Union was to produce offspring and to enjoy companionship, and as such it was ordained by God and sanctified by His church, a Holy Sacrament, Jesus working through the couple to bestow grace on the world. The indissoluble bond of marriage is between the man, the woman, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and each plays a part in keeping the sacred vows of fidelity and honor and obedience.