Pilgrims (23 page)

“You're just fine, honey, you did fine.”

“Are we on the plane?”

“This is the plane.”

“This is.”

“Yes, all of this is the plane.”

“We're going home,” he said. She nodded. “Would you like to come back to Rome?”

He shook his head. “Then I'll come back with Ramon.” She'd never known a Ramon, but it sounded intriguing. “Oh,” he said. He looked out the window at the ground crew moving the jet bridge back. “Do they need help?” he said. And then he closed his eyes and was gone.

She had brought Mr. Keillor's novel
WLT
to read on the plane, and opened it, and when she woke up, the plane still humming along, someone next to her was touching her. It was Lyle, his big black horn-rims slipped down on his nose. “I know we went to Rome,” he said, “but did we do what we went there to do?”

“Yes. We put the picture on Gussie's grave.”

She pulled her camera out of her purse and scrolled down the display of pictures and punched one and handed the camera to Lyle. “See? We did it. It's right there.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm only trying to get it straight in my own mind. I must be going crazy.”

“We'll take care of you, so don't worry.”

In Amsterdam, the flight to Minneapolis was delayed on account of engine problems, so the pilgrims reconnoitered in a little café. Margie was having serious buyer ‘s remorse about that apartment. She was astonished, thinking back on it, at her own impetuousness. Good God. It was a lovely apartment, but where was her common sense? She'd walked in, taken a quick look around, fallen in love with her own romantic fantasy, and shelled out a half million dollars in less time than she'd take to shop for a silk purse. Daddy used to say, “Only hard work will teach you the value of a dollar,” and he was right—money you get for free has no weight or value—and now she was one of those foolish heiresses she used to read about who'd burn through Grandpa's hard-earned wealth in a typhoon of greed and wind up in a welfare hotel in lower Manhattan with needle tracks on their lovely forearms.
Did she really need to own an apartment in Rome,
Italy? Who was going to clean it? When was she going to live in
it? She'd spent her entire windfall on it and had nothing left
over for airfare or maintenance or taxes
… . O God, the sheer idiocy of it.

“What's wrong?” said Eloise.

“Nothing. I'm fine.”

The vastness of the stupidity of it. Her husband needed her. He was struggling for life under a crushing debt, a man trying to carry a house on his back. And she had floated away in a silver balloon and danced on the dew-beaded buttercups and swanned around in her gossamer gown, adored by hummingbirds and katydids, and feasted on rainbow cake and sunrise tea, and opened her heart to the Milky Way, and whispered intimate thoughts to
the wind, and now she was sitting with people who thought they knew her and O God they did not but they were about to know her much too well—she was twelve hours away from Lake Wobegon, and when she rode through the snowy fields and over the hill past the Farmer's Union Grain Terminal and up Main Street past the Sons of Knute and the Chatterbox, the piper would be there, hand out, waiting to be paid.

She stepped out of the café into the busy concourse. A flight to Moscow was announced and another to Seattle. She walked upstream into the mass of humanity and ducked into an alcove where three men sat on the carpeted floor, their laptops plugged in, tapping away, and she called Maria in Rome to ask her to please, please cancel the purchase. If there was a penalty, fine, Margie would pay it, but she had no use for the apartment, the idea was insane. The number rang and rang and then a woman answered in Italian.

“Is Maria Gennaro there?”

The woman said what sounded like a question.

“Maria Gennaro.”

“No,” the woman said.

“Is she coming back?”

There was something in Italian that sounded like a list, maybe a recipe.

“
Inglese?
”

The woman hung up.

Margie dialed the number again. It rang and rang and then a click and a man's voice, a recorded message in Italian.

She called Paolo's number. Six rings and then a click and a
recorded message. The same man's voice. She wrote down the words as she heard them, and called the number three more times to make sure she got them, and she sat down at a coin-operated computer and fed the words into an Italian-English translation program and some of the words it recognized:
Americano, andare
casa
. American, go home.

In the café, the pilgrims were trying to come to grips with the true story of Gussie. Margie had told Eloise and she told the others. She was a little stunned still by the revelations, having given a big speech to the high school kids about the boy of nineteen who left these very halls and shipped over to Italy to fight for his country and died a heroic death, and why should they now hear otherwise? Father Wilmer said he thought the truth should be told, but he would be willing to leave it to a vote. Margie didn't care one way or another. The vote was 11–1 for silence. “You get that?” Irene said to Mr. Keillor. She lowered her big head and gave him a long cold basilisk stare. He was writing as fast as he could in a little brown notebook. He didn't look up. He said that he had not come all this way to hear a story that he now could not repeat. “I told you we shouldn't bring him,” she said. Daryl said that by coming along on the trip, he was implying that he would abide by decisions of the group. “No such deal,” said Mr. Keillor.

“You want to destroy this town, don't you?” said Evelyn. “You've always wanted to. And now you have a story you can use to make young people cynical and want to leave town and before you know it, we'll have grass growing in the streets.”

“I was brought up to tell the truth,” he said.

“Why start now?” said Irene. She tried to grab the little notebook out of his hands but he got it away, except for one page that she ripped out. She looked at it. “What does this mean,
a long
cold basilisk stare?
”

He looked up, his ballpoint poised over the notebook. “I hope you didn't write down all of that about Suzanne,” said Father Wilmer. Keillor looked away. Irene snatched at the notebook again and he whisked it away. “You hand that over or else,” she yelled. He shook his head. He stood up and retreated around to behind the chair and she snatched at him and grabbed his left arm and pinched him so hard he yelped. “You are not going to make a book out of this, you big cheater.” But he certainly was. He'd heard everything and he was now going to tell anybody who cared to know and, if he was lucky, earn back the money he'd spent on the trip.

On the plane coming home to Minnesota, Margie thought of Gussie, the smiling man from Lake Wobegon, a coward in war and a hero in love. He went to the hotel and spent the night with Miss Gennaro and left with a light heart and was taken away from the earth.

In the Minneapolis airport, she finally came to grips with the fact that she'd been cheated of a half million dollars by a desperate woman who had played her cards right and gotten some of her dead father's fortune. She didn't want to think so, but then Paolo called.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “This must be very painful for you. And I apologize for the pain. But it wasn't your money, of course. It was hers.”

“How did she know about it?”

“She talked to her uncle and asked him for what was coming to her and he cursed her. He cursed Italy and all things Italian and told her he would burn in hell before he would give her one penny. He was furious. He told her that he was giving it all to you instead. An American.”

A half million dollars. She had been snookered out of a half
million dollars
.

“So you were in on the plot, Paolo.”

“Actually, my name is Gianni. She asked me to meet you and talk up the real estate. The seduction—that was my idea.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“I did. And so did you.”

“And the mother?”

“She died ten years ago. We bought the empty coffin for the occasion and we sold it back to the undertaker.”

“And Father Julio?”

“That's Mario. Maria's friend.”

“And you are also Maria's friend.”

“I am. Our mothers were friends and I've known her since I was in college. We were lovers for a while and then not and now we are again. And again, I am very sorry about all of this. When I agreed to help her, I had no idea you would be such a wonderful woman.”

Well, there didn't seem to be anything more to say so she said good-bye.

A fortune in her fingers and it fell out. Simple as that.

Everyone had heard about the eight-year-old girl in Avon who figured out how to go online and trade derivatives, having gotten $600 from her dad's Visa card, and in five days she turned it into
$37,000 and when he asked her how she did it, she showed him the stock market listings in which she saw shapes of animals and wherever the animal's left hind foot was, that's where she put her money. He decided to let her go on investing and in about a month, she was worth a half million dollars. And then she simply lost interest in it. They coaxed her but she was all engrossed in dolls. So her dad tried to employ the left-hind-foot strategy and he lost all the money in three days.
Unbelievable
. That's what everyone thought at the time.

And now Margie had gone and done the same thing.

The day they arrived home, a heavy wet snow fell, good snowball snow, and three projectiles hit them,
wham, wham, bam
, as the two airport vans pulled up in the parking lot of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the pilgrims got out and stretched and looked at the pile of luggage and were reluctant to disband. It was dark, almost 7:00
P.M.
A thin crescent moon like a raccoon's toenail. Clusters of tiny white lights blossoming in trees and a blaze of light beyond from the skating rink on the lake and faint music, an old waltz. From downtown came the grinding sound of Bud's snowplow blade. One by one they stepped up to thank Margie for putting the trip together and she shrugged and said it was nothing and she was glad if they had a good time. “Did you have a good time?” said Eloise. Margie said, yes, she had had much too good a time. Daryl said he would post all of his pictures on the web and send everyone a link. Father Wilmer invited everyone in to the rectory for coffee and they looked at each other—Should they? Would they? “If I don't go home now, I'm just going to break down bawling,” said Evelyn. “I love you guys.” Wally nodded. “I feel like I've gotten so close to all of you
in the past week,” said Evelyn. She dabbed at her eyes.
Hard to
believe
, Margie thought,
coming from that crusty old hairyeyeball
Evelyn. She never let on that she liked us at all
. “We've got to get home,” said Irene but she made no move to pick up her bag. Clint opened his bag and got out a sack and passed out tubes of toothpaste, called Sprezzatura, which contained clay from Italy. “A little souvenir,” he said. Eloise got tears in her eyes. “I wouldn't mind getting some hugs right now,” she said, and so they gathered round her and each gave her a squeeze—how could you not?—and she cried a few tears on each one of them, and then, having hugged her, they got going hugging each other which of course took time, you didn't want to leave anybody unhugged. Even Irene was moved. “People are going to ask me what we did,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “And I won't know what to tell them.” “Maybe Mr. Keillor will write it all up,” said Margie and they all laughed. “If he does, let's all of us promise each other we will not read that book,” said Irene. And they piled their hands together and said “Jinx!” and promised. And then Carl broke it up. He picked up their bags and said, “See you later,” and marched toward home, with Margie, through the snow past two figures in puffy coats and big mittens, giant genderless amoebalike life-forms, flat-footed, silent, who turned out to be Clarence and Arlene.

“How was it?” they said.

“Great,” she said. “How was it here?“

“It was so cold,” said Clarence, “we had to chop up the piano for firewood and we only got one cord and it was flat.” Ha ha ha.

A half million dollars had flowed through her and left not a trace behind, just an enormous vacuum in her heart, and she
wanted to tell someone about this terrible loss, but she simply felt numb. As if someone had called and said, “You've won the Bill and Melinda Gates Prize for Classroom Excellence, ma'am. Five hundred thousand dollars. Hold the line for Mr. Gates.” And you sat in your kitchen all warm and jittery, thinking about the interviews you'd give. (“I believe we owe our kids the best education we can possibly provide and a teacher has to get herself motivated every single day, every single class, to accomplish that. I could not have done this without the love and support of my husband, Carl, my wonderful children, my colleagues, and my students. Especially my students. Truly, I have learned as much from them as they from me.”) And fifteen minutes later, the same person calls back and says, “Sorry, but we got the wrong name. It's not you, it's Marilyn Kropotnik of Lake Winnebago. Our mistake. Bye.” She told herself not to think about it, which made her think about it more keenly. The trips they could have taken, all of them, the kids and Carl and her, a happy family, tanned, relaxed, on a luxury liner in the Mediterranean, Athens and Venice, Barcelona, Algiers. She walked through the snowy dark behind her husband, a prisoner returning to the internment camp, the beautiful illusion of the pilgrimage burst.
Why did we
go? What was the point of it? What did we get out of all that?
she wondered. Seduced by Paolo and swindled by Maria.
Is there
a legal remedy?
No. Nothing that anyone in their right mind would consider for a minute. She had handed a half million dollars over to a virtual stranger without so much as asking for a receipt. Her—a schoolteacher, a college graduate, a mature woman—had made a bonehead mistake that, had any of her children
done the same with five
hundred
dollars, she would've been angry. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And when the truth came out—which it would, O gosh yes—Carl would kick her out, her children would turn a cold shoulder, she would have to move to Tampa and live with Mother and Daddy and listen to Limbaugh every day and her mother reciting a novena, clutching the rosary in the bedroom.