That was the night Margie was fully intending to tell Carl about the Norlander bequest of $150,000, but now with the hoo-ha about Keillor’s offer, she didn’t need to. It could remain her own secret. What a beautiful secret. The money could sit in the bank accruing interest, awaiting some fine purpose, a trip around the world, maybe. She wanted to tell him. As soon as she got things figured out. Really she did. But it wasn’t the right time. It was her money after all.
“So you’re serious about going to Rome,” he said. “I heard about what you said at the luncheon. Eloise is all up in flames about it. Calling people left and right. You’re going to have a planeload. I’ll bet you’ll get three hundred people now.” She put an arm around his shoulder and said, “If there were three thousand people, I wouldn’t notice, so long as you came with me. This is for me and you. That’s the only reason I want to go. I love you and I think we need to do something nice for ourselves.”
Carl looked away. He didn’t always respond well to pure feeling, especially loving sentiments, and that was why she so seldom expressed them.
“I dunno,” he said. “It’s expensive.”
“You can’t let your life be ruled by a stupid bat,” she said.
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s the Ladderman house. That jerk is going to default on the whole thing and leave me holding a quarter million dollars of half-built house that nobody wants, least of all me. I trusted the guy and now I’ve got to pay. Ignorance comes with a high price. And then there’s Cheryl… .”
He’d dropped in on Cheryl in Minneapolis and there amid the squalor was a stack of pamphlets about something called the Church of the Unified Mind. And there was a ring in her lower lip. Hard to ignore. She looked like a walleye who’d broken the line. And there was a boy named Andrew, with a wispy beard, his pants hanging low like he had a load in there, and when Carl asked him what he was up to, the kid shrugged and said, “Hey. Whatever.” Cheryl was Daddy’s girl. He never had the fights with her that Margie did. It killed him that she was sleeping with a loser.
Margie had been jousting with Cheryl since forever (“You’re not going to wear that to the Prom. Get real. Hello? Sweetheart, the secret of attraction is mystery. You don’t put it out there like fruit on a plate and have boys standing around staring at your rib cage.” “Okay then, I’ll wear a burka to Prom. I won’t dance with anybody, I’ll sit behind a screen. Will that make you happy?” “Honey, if you want, I can make something for you out of cheesecloth, Saran wrap, and some fishing line.” Etcetera, etcetera.) but Carl was new to the game so he was shocked by little things like a no-good boyfriend. And then he saw the lurid tattoo that covered her entire left shoulder including her armpit! When she raised her arm, a cougar snarled at you from a cave. Margie had dealt with the tattoo at Christmas (Darling, that is permanent. Maybe it’s cool now, but ten years from now, I don’t think so. I had an uncle Harry who had a big tattoo on his belly of an American eagle holding Adolf Hitler in its talons. It blurred over time until it came to look like two chickens doing something dirty. Uncle Harry was a very nice man, but if he took off his shirt, people felt sorry for him. A word to the wise.) and Carl found it nearly unbearable. His little girl, disfigured.
He came home from Minneapolis, his eyes red, holding a fifth of Scotch in a paper bag. He’d bought it down there and he’d been nipping at it en route. He said that he now knew that he knew less about life than the average ten-year-old. It was just too overwhelming. He was thinking about pulling up stakes, selling the house, making a new life out West. His old navy buddy Earl had offered him a partnership in his cabinet shop in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, on a hill looking out at the Pacific Ocean. Lots of work, good money, beautiful climate.
“So I don’t think I can go to Rome,” he said.
“It’s the bat,” she said. He shook his head. But she’d heard him one night cry out in his sleep across the hall, “Take her down, Jack. Secure the overheads.” And woke up dripping sweat.
“Come with me to Rome, darling,” she said.
“Well, let me think about it,” he said. Which was his way of saying yes.
Dear Carl. He would need a powerful sedative. You could get this stuff online now, shipped out of Antigua air express in plain brown packages. Placidô worked beautifully. It was good for the heebie-jeebies, the jimjams, the fantods, and much more. Calmed you right down. You didn’t want to look at the brochure that came with it, listing the possible complications—
angina, baldness, colitis, convulsions, collapsed lungs, diarrhea, eruptions, fatigue, fainting, facial tics, fibrillations, gastritis, hearing loss, indigestion, jumpiness, kleptomania, lethargy, mumps, neurosis, open sores, pinkeye, quaking, redness, shingles, tension, upset stomach, varicose veins, whooping cough, eczema, yellow jaundice, and zenophobia.
She ordered 180 tablets for $310. The pills would dissolve nicely in coffee. Give the man a tall latte and his troubles would be over.
She bought him a new billfold for the trip. His old one was moldy and torn and the bucking bronco was worn off.
And two days later by express mail, a manila envelope arrived, postmarked Tulsa, with n. norlander in big black letters scrawled by an old man on heavy medication, and inside a note to her in his almost unreadable hand.
Dear Margie (if I may),
Ever since you said you’d go to Rome for me, a total stranger, and fulfil my promise to my late Mother I have been crying like a baby for sheer gratitude. I thank you. You are bringing me Peace of Mind, such as I have not known since Mother passed away. I’m sure she is smiling down from Heaven.
My brother August (Gussie) was a true original and had he not died tragically in the bloom of youth I do believe he might’ve gone on to do great things, maybe in the movies. Don’t laugh. He had a way about him that reminded me of Gary Cooper if you remember him. I’ll bet you those wops thought he was from New York or California, not a hayseed from Minnesota. They probably took him for a playboy. Everywhere he wanted to go, he was in like Flynn. He came out of basic training a plain old PFC and within three months he’d become an Army combat librarian, a nice piece of work, dispensing reading material to the boys in foxholes. Then he attached himself to this Brigadier and made himself indispensable, stealing whiskey for him, spying, covering for his sorry butt. He wrote me the whole story. He was no fool, my brother. I thought you should know more about him, so have photocopied letters.
There are more, if you want more. Gussie had a lot to say.
Cordially, in your debt,
Norbert
Paper-clipped to it were six letters in faint typescript on yellowish onionskin paper, letters from Gussie in Italy, 1943–44. She carried them gingerly into the living room and settled down in the deep green easy chair and began to read.
12/31/1943
Dear Lille Bror,
Well, we are making our way slowly toward Rome, shooting at the Germans and trying to keep the Italians from stealing our shoes. You have to chain your Jeep to a lamppost and even so they’ll siphon the gas and strip it of tires and spare parts and leave you the skeleton, all in about thirty minutes. Italians don’t want us here and I don’t blame them. The Germans liked to get drunk and walk arm in arm down the street singing their old college songs whereas Americans split up and go off in search of Italian girls. So they steal our transport to protect their women. The only Americans who get drunk are the married guys. Single men buy some wine and cigarettes and go around hoping to share it with someone. But not me. I’m a Minnesota boy and very careful about the opposite sex so I stay in my billet and read. They just delivered a trunkful of donated books including ten volumes of Mark Twain so here I sit, bombers overhead, reading Innocents Abroad.
I am a driver for Brigadier Alan G. Parker who is, like me, a civilized fellow with no heroic urges whatsoever. He lives in a Palazzo and his office is the size of a basketball court, high ceilings, drapes, gilded plasterwork and he sits at an enormous desk and thinks about psychological warfare, mostly about how to avoid it. My job is to defend his Jeep, procure whiskey, and keep an eye out for any newspaper reporters or Generals in the vicinity. He lives very well and so do I, and I felt guilty about that but I got over it. I am a lucky guy. I was sent here to kill people and have not done it yet. Our boys are in bloody fighting around Cassino, north of here, but my Brigadier doesn’t go to the Front and so neither do I. Call me a slacker and a foot-dragger, but I am not the only one. The army is full of studious bureaucrats with fruit salad for brains who busy themselves with great matters and study maps and file enormous reports and it’s a good way to keep warm and out of harm’s way. Intelligence is the place for a slacker: these guys stay so secret they don’t know where they are themselves. The Germans have their Goebbels and we have ours and meanwhile life and death go on. Men I bunked with aboard the Richards are on the front line where you kill the enemy or make him run or he does something similar to you. A brutal business. A buddy of mine came back from the front wounded. He’d tripped and sprained his ankle. “I got a kraut,” he said. “He was sitting under a tree talking on a telephone and I walked up behind him and he turned and I shot him in the face.” I asked him why he didn’t take the man prisoner.” Why would I do that?” The day after I landed at Anzio, a lieutenant stuck his face in my tent and hollered, “On the line! Pronto!” and I did not pick up my rifle and go. I am a coward. I could’ve been court-martialled for insubordination but it was overlooked. I ambled toward the rear and busied myself counting trucks as they came by and writing the numbers down on a piece of paper. I am nothing but a coward. A pacifist in uniform. A mouse hiding in the corn. At any moment I could feel German talons in my shoulders and go flying through the air, but I will do what I can to avoid it. I am a coward. They name football teams for killers, the Lions, the Bears, the Warriors, except in Minnesota where we’re the Gophers, and that’s what I am, a terrified rodent, hoping to survive.
A sleetstorm outside and olive leaves blowing around, and I go around on foot to reconnoiter and witness the suffering of soldiers trying to fix tents that got blown down, men freezing, cursing, and I ignore them and return to the Palazzo and my snug little room and the fine Armagnac in the Brigadier’s larder. A little glass of it gives a taste of nobility, which there is none of in war whatsoever. Last week three men died, run over by their own trucks, stumbling drunk through the night, and every day somebody misreads the coordinates and American shells fall on American foxholes. More than you will ever know have died from diarrhea. They list them as “battlerelated” but really it was diarrhea. Many purple hearts were men shitting themselves to death. Dying shitless.
You ask if I still believe in God, no, I do not and now I think I never did. Nor do I think Americans are any better than Germans. What I do believe in is the beauty and dignity of the individual and I find dignity in cowardice.
And now I must think of something to write to the folks.
Dear Lille Bror,
Well I found myself an Italian girlfriend as you suggested I do but I don’t know if I will get to make time with her since all the Generals are rushing to get to Rome and have their pictures taken parading down the Via Appia, they don’t care about the Germans so long as they get their big mugs in the paper looking rugged and battle-scarred. I hope that General Kendall of the 88th runs over a land mine and gets aerated sky-high, it would serve him right. His boys are known to shoot at anybody for any reason whatsoever.
Her name is Maria Gennaro and she was a ballet dancer, tall and dark-haired, strong legs and a big rump. She danced in Paris and Venice and signed up for the anti-fascist under ground whereupon she slipped in the bathtub and that was the end of dancing. Now she’s attached to us as a translator. She promises to take me to St. Peter’s and show me when to kneel and when to stand. She knows four languages well and parts of some others. Mainly she helps us keep the partisans from executing the fascists they find. War brings out the worst in people if they aren’t supervised closely. And in the midst of murder and piggishness, I met this lovely and sensible woman. I took her to lunch which meant I had to go AWOL which is easy to do, you just pretend to be lost, and if the MPs accost you, you say, “I can’t find my unit.” We went to a hotel for lunch and the food was good and we talked about morale. She said, “Morale is the ability to believe something that you know isn’t true, namely immortality. The Polacks were sent to attack Cassino and their morale was fabulous and so they got annihilated. They were confident they would walk over the Germans and as a result they took the worst losses. We Italians don’t believe in morale. We love life too much.” She considers me dashing, if you can imagine. She wants to know about cowboys so I tell her some things. I’ve known her three weeks and she has said about a hundred times, “You are so handsome!” I guess she thinks I am handsome. So at lunch I was thinking we could get a hotel room but how would I know if she wanted to or not. I am new to this, you know. She touched my arm when we left the café and said thank you, if that is some sort of signal. She said to me, “When we get to Rome, I could find you an apartment with a garden.” She seemed to imply that she would be there, too. I kissed her good-bye on the cheek and she didn’t slap me, so I’ve got that going for me. She is twenty-eight. I gave her a carton of Chesterfields for the nuns. She lives in a con vent near Anzio though I don’t believe she’s taken the vows herself. I worry about her with all these sex-starved Yanks around. I gave her a.45 pistol and a smoke flare. It may take more than a bullet to stop these guys.
Well, I must go now and win the war.
Your brother,
Gussie
The next morning, she called Norbert and he asked her if she meant it when she said she’d go to Rome for him. “Yes, I told you I would and I will.” “My lawyer thinks I am crazy to send $150,000 to someone I never even met,” he said. “But it’s Mother’s money, not mine. And she died in the peace of knowing I would keep my word to her. She knew that her boy’s grave would be properly marked.” And Norbert started to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’d think a man could talk about this and not blubber, wouldn’t you. I mean it was sixty years ago. Jesus.” He gave his nose a honk. “He was just a great kid. A great great kid. He got all the bad luck, I got all the good.” He told her he had once performed in the circus, shooting a lighted cigarette out of the mouth of a lady acrobat as she swung on a trapeze and him with his back to her, aiming the rifle over his shoulder, a small rearview mirror attached to his glassses, and later in the show he was wrapped in chains, wrists handcuffed, ankles strapped, and thrown in a tank full of piranhas that went into a feeding frenzy when he dropped in. And then it came out that the rifle shot blanks and the lighted cigarette had a small explosive device in the tip and there were no piranhas, just ordinary minnows and the frothy water was caused by the carbonated crystals in his pants. “A mob was waiting in the dark as we took down the tent that Sunday night, and I had to be smuggled out in a crate marked DANGEROUS SNAKES with two big pythons who were busy swallowing rats. When you escape lynching, everything that happens afterward is a Bonus. I’ve had a good life. No regrets. Just this one. I never fixed up my brother’s grave. I’m counting on you, kid.”