At 0900 Mr. Columbo arrived with the van to take them to the airport to fly back to America. Maria could not be there to bid farewell but sent a beautiful bouquet of pink roses.
They had assembled in the lobby at 0630, their luggage in single file. They were a little crestfallen at the thought of returning home though nobody said so, all of them comfortably dressed for travel except Lyle, who wore a black suit, black shirt, and white tie. Irene said, “You look like a boy I knew in high school, he had Roman hands.” Daryl remarked that the high point of the trip for him had been the ruins of the Forum, just to walk where Caesar and Augustus had walked, and now he was going to read up on Roman history. There had been lengthy discussion about How Much Time to Allow and Margie had argued that two hours was more than enough but the more cautious won out, so they were leaving at 0900 for a 1400 flight.
“It can’t hurt to get there early,” said Daryl, and others nodded in agreement.
“Maybe we should have left last night,” said Margie. “Or Tuesday. Well, one last breakfast then.” And they all trooped in to the familiar buffet, the crusty rolls, the parade of cheeses and cold cuts, the juice tank, the corn flakes, the interesting yogurt pot.
They arrived at DaVinci at 1015. Margie gave Mr. Columbo an envelope with five hundred euros and thanked him and there was a group picture and he thanked them and off he went. They checked their bags and got in the security checkpoint line, which reminded Evelyn of the Magendanzes’ trip to Mexico, seven of them, and all of them nervous about traveling out of the country—especially about the danger of losing their passports—so they gave them to Marie for safekeeping, also their billfolds, and she put them into a plastic bag, which the hotel maid thought was garbage and off it went, and the Magendanzes chased off to the dump to search, and tripped an alarm, and took off running, and didn’t dare return to the hotel. They made their way north, hitchhiking, not much Spanish between them, but they got by, doing odd jobs, mowing lawns, cleaning houses, reached the Rio Grande and crossed at night into El Paso, made it home in one piece, and there they found a package from the Mexican hotel with their passports and billfolds.
And now the pilgrims came to the checkpoint, removed their shoes, their jackets, swept through the detectors, headed for the gate. Can’t hurt to get there early? Guess again. The concourse was an aviary of nervous excitation, passengers fluffing themselves up, strutting back and forth, yakking on those dangly cell phones. She could see Carl getting agitated, jiggling his leg, taking deep calming breaths that didn’t calm him at all. A man and a woman sat down near them. She was weeping. “Oh, for crying out loud,” he said. “Grow up.” She told him to go without her. “How long is this going to go on, Doreen?” Evidently she was afraid of flying, which infuriated him. She was a slight woman with reddish hair, a brown raincoat, a green scarf, and tears in her eyes. He told her that if she didn’t get on the plane, that was it, he was done with her, and he meant it.
That was too much for Eloise.
She swiveled around and glared at him and called him a name—a simple two-syllable word for a part of the lower digestive tract that all of us have, whether we use that word or not. He pretended not to hear her, so she said it louder. And then she jumped up and circled around the row of seats and the man jumped up and ran into the men’s room and stayed in there. Eloise stuck her head in the men’s room door and yelled, “I’m out here and I know who you are and you’re not going anywhere!”
It was the old Eloise, back to good health.
She came strutting back to her seat and grinned at Doreen, plopped down, and leaned in toward Carl and Margie. “Did I ever tell you about the time Fred came home from the poker game in Sartell at 3:00 A.M. with a cut over his left eye?”
She had told them, but so what? There was time to kill.
“We’d just broken up and when we were apart, of course, we got along just fine, so we decided to give it one more chance and then he went off to play poker with his old buddies. He comes back to my house around 3:00 A.M. with a big story about how he was winning and couldn’t leave. Well, Mr. Lundberg was waiting outside the house. You remember when the Lundbergs used to sleepwalk. After they went to that revival service in the tent up near Nashwauk. You didn’t know that was why? Well, it was. They stopped in because they were curious and the evangelist was a sweaty man waving a big black Bible and he had two big black dogs who came after the Lundbergs when they refused to kneel down and accept Jesus. They said, ‘We’re Lutheran,’ and the dogs chased them and they’d had dreams about it ever since and that was why they went sleepwalking in their pajamas. So here was Elmer Lundberg out sleepwalking when Fred came sneaking home at 3:00A.M. with a big gash over his eye, bleeding into a towel, and Elmer tried to grab him and Fred just about pissed his pants. He had invented a story about helping a man fix a flat tire and the jack handle hitting his forehead but seeing Elmer put the fear of God in him. He told me the whole truth. He’d been hit by a mirror that fell off the ceiling of a motel room where he’d gone with a girl named Amber who had a thing about older men. He hadn’t gone to play poker, he’d gone to poke Amber and there they were reclining in the Jacuzzi and looking at themselves in the mirror overhead. He opened a bottle of cheap champagne and the cork flew and bounced off the mirror and suddenly their reflections got bigger and bigger. The mirror cracked her on the shoulder and she bled and screamed and somebody hit the fire alarm and pretty soon there were six firemen in yellow phosphorescent jackets piling into the room and when they saw Amber they called for reinforcements.”
“Well, looky looky,” said Irene under her breath, and then Mr. Keillor was there, smiling down at them from his great height, in black sweatpants and black sweatshirt (AMOR VINCIT OMNIA), his hair rather long and swirly, his eyebrows enormous. Get those puppies trimmed, she thought. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Good morning,” he said in his honeyed radio voice. “How’s everyone doing today?”
“We’re flying back to face the resentment of our friends and neighbors,” said Irene, never one to mince words. “But that means nothing to you. You’re flying first class. You’re on the gravy train.”
“They upgraded me because I’m platinum,” he said.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” she said. “And poor Lyle here has Alzheimer’s. Think about that for one minute. He had such a good time flying over, he’s been looking forward to the return.” She motioned for him to hand over his boarding pass.
“It’s not Alzheimer’s, actually I just hit my head on a low beam,” said Lyle.
“Please,” said Mr. Keillor. “I need the legroom. I have work to do.”
“I don’t doubt for a minute that you do. Let me see that notebook in your back pocket.” He took a step back and clapped his hand over the pocket. “You’ve been writing down what we say, haven’t you, you little sneak.”
“I’m keeping a journal,” he murmured.
“Heck you are. You’re writing it all down so you can put it in a book and make us look like idiots on parade. Am I right? Well, tell me, what gives you the right to do that? You’re a member of a group, whether you know it or not, and one of the rules when you’re in a group is that you don’t go around blabbing your mouth about what you saw and heard. That is just basic decency. About time you learned it.”
He sighed. The woman was merciless. He closed his eyes. She reached over and pulled his boarding pass out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Lyle, who started to protest and then thought better of it. Mr. Keillor felt the boarding pass slip away and did not bother to open his eyes. He held out his hand and she put Lyle’s boarding pass in it and he picked up his briefcase and trudged toward the Jetway. He headed for 38F—a middle seat—and there in 38E was a woman who beamed to see him. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “Look at this, Wendell. It’s the man from the radio. I’ve listened to you since I was a child. Your stories take me home. Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” she said. He winced. She reached over and patted his shoulder. “Now you tell me if I’m talking too much,” she said. “You just say, ‘Stifle it, Mary Louise.’ Oh my God. I am so excited. Wendell, get the camera. Do you mind if we take a picture? Tell me—how long do you think you’ll keep on doing the show?”
“Forever, I hope.”
And as he said it, he knew that the End was near. A person always imagines there will be more, and then the steel doors clank shut. He closed his eyes. “I should let you be,” she said. “You probably hate this, being pestered by strangers. I can imagine how hard it is, meeting people you don’t know whatsoever and they know all about you from your books and stories. I mean, I know about the Sanctified Brethren and how you always were the last one chosen for the softball team, I know about your fear of water and how that girl laughed at you when you tried to kiss her and I know what kind of hand lotion you used when you masturbated. Jergen’s. Remember? You mentioned it somewhere. I’ve read everything you ever wrote, I know all that stuff. Your fear of damnation. Your ignorance of the names of plants. The time you spilled on the lap of your new seersucker suit. Your agonizing memory loss. Your self-consciousness about your thin wrists. The animosity of your ex-wife. It’s all there! You’ve shared yourself so generously with us fans and now we know you better than we know our own siblings! It’s true! I have no idea what my brother’s sexual fantasies are, and I know a lot about yours. Sometimes I feel like I’m your therapist! I really do! Honest! Your dream about falling off the cliff in the Faeroe Islands into a vast dark abyss—I think I could work with you on that. And your dream about standing onstage at a microphone and the audience like stone statues and nobody comes out from the wings to help you. Oh that was so telling! So evocative! I mean—if you want to sleep, okay, but if you want to talk, I really think we could work on some of these issues.”
It is two and a half hours from Rome to Amsterdam and then an hour until their nine-hour flight to Minneapolis and Lyle was concerned that due to headwinds or engine malfuntion or whatever, they could easily lose an hour en route and land in Amsterdam too late for the flight to Minneapolis and have to explain their predicament to the Dutch who would put them up in a hostel fifteen miles away in a sleazy neighborhood full of drug addicts. “It’s the little things that kill a trip,” he told Margie. So she asked the gate agent if perhaps they could get on the earlier Rome-Amsterdam flight leaving in thirty minutes. The agent was a stocky woman in her midfifties and she looked at Margie as if she were a second-grader and not one of the bright second-graders. “That flight is full,” she said.
“Maybe there are people on that flight who wouldn’t mind switching with us. Couldn’t you make an announcement on the PA and ask for volunteers?”
“Sit!” the woman cried. “Enjoy the view! Talk among your friends. Tell each other stories. Sing if you like. We can find you a guitar. You can sit here in the gate area for a few hours and have a beautiful time. Enjoy!”
Margie had put a Placidol in Carl’s apple juice and he was still a little twitchy, so she gave him another. He had brought a book to read and then on page thirteen there was a plane crash. He read it in the waiting area and it struck him as more than mere coincidence. Flight 1302—plane crash on page thirteen, second paragraph. Could God make this message any clearer? Panic began to flower in his chest, his pulse throbbed, his heart danced in his chest. Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He remembered the senior class play, Our Town, with Cheryl as Emily Webb, and how overwhelming to see his girl marry George Gibbs and then die and go up the hill to the cemetery, and now he could see himself, holding a black umbrella, sitting next to her. He tried to settle down but heard a grinding sound and turned and saw a small albino child riding a coin-operated whale and Carl put two and two together and clearly he was the Jonah and if he boarded the flight, it would crash.
The agents announced general boarding. He told Margie, “I can’t go. I’ll have to find a boat.” She told him to keep calm. “Take a drink of this liquid protein, see if it doesn’t make you feel better,” she said, and put it to his lips. She tilted the bottle up and he gulped it down. She had dissolved another Placidol in the drink and five minutes later he was quite manageable. She put him in a wheelchair and rolled him through the door and though he let out a little meep as he bumped over the threshold, she got him into seat 37A and herself into 37B and pulled out a pillow for him and a blue blanket that he held against the side of his head. It seemed to comfort him.
“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.
Services will be held Wednesday at 1 p.m. for Marjorie (Schoppenhorst) Krebsbach, 53, of Lake Wobegon, who died suddenly last Sunday of asphyxiation while taking Holy Communion at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where her last rites will take place.
She was an English teacher at Lake Wobegon High School, from which she had matriculated in 1974. She had just returned from a trip to Rome with her husband Carl, who survives her, and a party of ten others, including author Gary Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion.
She is also survived by her children, Carla (Mrs. Bradley) Hoffert of Santa Barbara, California, Carl Jr. of Seattle, Washington, and Cheryl of Minneapolis, her parents, Gottfried (Gus) and Lois Schoppenhorst of Tampa, Florida, and sister Linda of New York City.
Reached at a beach house north of San Francisco where he is vacationing, Mr. Keillor expressed regret at Mrs. Krebsbach’s untimely demise but confessed that he was not surprised. Not at all. In the mellifluous baritone voice so familiar to millions, he said, “She tried to fly too high too fast. I may as well tell you the truth—you’ll find it out anyway. She glommed into a half million dollars from a dying man in Tulsa and flew to Rome, at my expense, and there she had an affair with a stranger she met in a coffee bar. She slept with him the day before her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and then she blew the half million on an apartment… .
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.
They walked into the house, which was cold, and Carl disappeared down the basement stairs to check the furnace. Thirtyfour messages on voice mail. She emptied out her suitcase. Threw away the slip of paper with Paolo’s phone number. She walked around her house, room to room, touching the cold walls, studying the little details, trying to remember everything for when she would be old and sick and laid up in Florida. The pictures of the kids on the fireplace mantle. The hollows in the old green sofa. The smooth round stones she had collected along the shore the morning after their honeymoon night at Lamb’s Resort on Lake Superior. She sat down at the kitchen table. Out on the lake, the old Pontiac sat on the ice for the Sons of Knute Guess the Ice Melt Contest, a dollar a shot, the winner to get a Rototiller, the profits to go to the Shining Star Scholarship Fund to enable some bright young person to go to college and never come back to Lake Wobegon again but to live among the glib and the privileged and make cool contemptuous jokes about the people who brought them up and taught them kindness and perseverance and self-control.
She had always made fun of the Deluded and now she was one of them. No different from her classmate Charlotte who joined the Church of the Faithful Remnant and spent three years in a compound in Waco, Texas, awaiting the Second Coming, expecting to be Raptured into heaven but it didn’t happen and now she’s in public relations in Houston.
No different from Cousin Del who found his paradise on a mesa in Arizona where he stopped on vacation and paid $250 for a Hopi Experience—four hours, including sweat lodge, sacred mushrooms, Sun Dance, and a visit to the spirit world with a seventy-nine-year-old Hopi seer named Stanley Sassacaowe who looked Del straight in the eye and told him to heal himself by getting rooted in Mother Earth and thereby he would live to be ninety-six and never know one moment of regret. Del, dehydrated, exhausted from dancing, delusional from the mushrooms, bought the whole story. With Diana fighting him every step of the way, he came home, took early retirement from UPS, sold his home, and moved to the Painted Desert and a mobile-home park called Mesaview.
Diana lasted two months and came home. Del stayed. Every January when a blizzard hit Minnesota and the snow was blowing sideways on CNN, he’d call up Marjorie to ask if she was okay. Yes, she’d say, and how are you?
Oh, fine, he’d say, but you could hear the despair in his voice. He missed the challenge of winter. You can shovel snow, you can’t shovel dust. What did he imagine he was going to find down there? Did he think the Hopis were going to initiate him into the Sacred Circle and tell him the Seven Mysteries of the Sand Ceremony? Did he imagine he would be granted the power of time travel and hang out with Jefferson and Adams and also be best pals with his great-grandchildren? Well, it didn’t happen. He was a lonely man sitting on the desert and watching the Golf Channel.
And then the phone rang. ASSOCIATED FEDERAL, said the caller ID. It rang three times and then he hollered up the stairs, “Are you going to get it?” and rather than have him answer and hear the whole wretched story from a stranger and then throw her out into a snowbank, she picked up the phone. It was the nice man who had enrolled her in the Family of Depositors and given her the coffee cup and rubber gripper.
“Mrs. Krebsbach, it’s Stan Larson, how are you doing today?”
Close to death, Mr. Larson. Thanks for asking. I am going to pour some weed killer into that coffee cup you gave me and add hot water and drink it down and walk out in the snow and lie down and die a painful death in approximately twenty minutes, according to what I’ve read online about poisons.
“Glad to hear it. I’m just checking in with you about that money transfer you ordered the other day—were you wanting us to go ahead with that or should we wait awhile longer?”
“What are you saying, Mr. Larson?”
“Well, I just wasn’t sure what you wanted. You told us to wire the five hundred thousand to that bank in Rome but you didn’t give us a delivery date, so I was just waiting here for further instructions. Better safe than sorry. I hope I didn’t misunderstand.”
“You have not wired the money to Rome?”
“Nope. The bank there has sent me a couple dozen sort of terse e-mails asking about it but you didn’t tell me when you wanted it to go so I’m just sitting tight and waiting for the green light.”
She felt a big silent whoosh of the planets realigning themselves into orbit around the Sun rather than Uranus and the tides moving on schedule and the rivers flowing downstream, as originally planned.
“It’s none of my business, of course, and I realize that, but it’s a large amount of money, don’t you know, and I didn’t want to send it until I got confirmation from you. So—I mean, if you want me to, I got it all drawn up here, I can send it in two minutes.”
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Don’t?”
“Don’t.”
“Okay then. I’ll just rip up that transfer then and you have yourself a good evening.”
He was a true Minnesotan. It was in his voice, the droopy vowels, the nasal twang. Good old Minnesota hesitation—that sheeplike Waiting Around for Further Instructions tendency that she despaired of in her students—had saved her from her own foolishness.
She told him to wire $50,000 and to send a message: “Dear Maria, I don’t want the apartment, thank you, but the experience was invaluable. Best wishes, Marjorie.”
She wasn’t due back at school until Wednesday but she went in on Tuesday and Mr. Halvorson was on the loudspeakers with morning announcements, ratcheting on about students parking their cars in spaces not meant for students as if it were a threat to national security and three freshman boys were hauled in by Mr. DeWin who’d caught them peeking through a vent into the girls’ shower room.
“They have magazines for that, you know,” Doris said. “Or you could look at statues.” And then she saw her… . “Margie!” she cried. “Welcome home! How was Italy?”
Italy was good. Everyone had a good time.
How was the weather?
It rained some but that was okay.
Did you meet the Gennaro woman?
Yes, indeed.
And how was that? All you expected? Or sort of a letdown?
More than I expected. Much more. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow but now I have to get home and fix lunch for Carl.
How’s Carl?
He’s fine too.
She walked home in the dusk, lights on at the Diener home, the Sorgens, the Muellers and Soderbergs and Demarets, the Munches. A winter sunset of pink and purple and gold and platinum. On the sidewalk near church was a stretch of “cat ice” like what she remembered as a kid, ice that had melted underneath to make a thin shelf that when you step on it, it shatters with a sound like breaking glass and the pieces go skittering along the ice shelf. The wonderful feeling when you find a patch of cat ice that no other kid has stomped on and the simple giddy pleasure of destruction is all yours. This sheet was enormous, twenty feet long and six feet wide, and when she put her right foot on it, lightly, to test it, she could see the scuffed oxfords and the kneesocks of her girlhood, the blue pleated skirt of her innocent days—she hesitated for a delicious few seconds and then stomped the length of it and kicked the bigger pieces clattering like tin plates into the street. She stopped at the Chatterbox and Dorothy brought out a slice of apple pie with cheese and chopped jalapeno peppers in it, and a cup of coffee. She said Darlene was sick and she rolled her eyes—“sick” meant depressed. The poor woman had met a man named Frank through Craigslist and now he seemed to be stalking her. Cliff had put the Mercantile up for sale (again).
SOLID RETAIL OPP’T’Y: 8,000 sq.ft. clothing and notions outlet in hist. bldg.w. loyal customer base. Excellent invest ment for motivated self-starter.
“The poor man is angry because he can’t deal with computer inventory. It’s a shame he never had kids. They could’ve explained it to him. But Cliff was married to the store. So I don’t know.” Cliff was a case. He used hairspray every morning to stiffen his wispy blondish hair so he could comb it up into a high hair edifice, like a dome made of spun sugar. He was never meant for retail sales. Meant to be a great dancer and lover. But God forgot to plant him in Las Vegas.
She figured Carl could finish the Ladderman house by spring, what with the infusion of all that cash into Krebsbach Construction, and she could donate the house to Thanatopsis on condition they drop that ugly name and become the Lake Wobegon Women’s Club. A quiet retreat on the southern shore for the good ladies of town to come and sit, read a book, take a nap, write in your journal. No cell phones, please. No wireless. No music, thank you very much. A place where you can hear yourself think. No fundraising, no community projects, no planning meetings.
Nobody will try to harass you into good works. Just come and look out on the lake and contemplate your life and hope to see through your children’s hands waving wildly in your face to the Larger Meaning beyond, assuming there is one. Or if not, then remember the Beautiful Moments behind you.
That evening, over chili and grilled cheese sandwiches, she told Carl that Norbert Norlander had left her a large sum of money in his will and that it was in a savings bank in St. Cloud and should be enough to rescue them from bankruptcy.
“You just found out about this?”
Yes, she said.
He was stunned. He didn’t laugh, he didn’t cry, he got up and walked to the window and stood there, looking out at the street, absorbing the news slowly, and then came back to the table and finished his supper. “That’s good news,” he said, at last.
“You’re a good man, you deserve some good news.”
That night, they lay in bed in the dark and she asked him to rub her back. She lay on her side, back to him, and he rubbed her shoulders and neck and pressed his thumbs along the length of her spine and caressed her butt. He slid up close to her, spooned behind her, his left arm under her head and his right arm around her breasts, his face alongside her neck, his breathing slow and steady.
“Are you happy?” he said.
She said she was, knowing from experience that when your lover asks you if you’re happy, you shouldn’t wait too long to answer. If you think about it and do the math, count your blessings, assess your griefs, come up with a projection, an adjusted net total, he will be hurt and after ten seconds he’ll ask what’s wrong and when you say, Nothing, he’ll say, Yes, something is wrong, terribly wrong, and he’ll go veering off into horrible Minnesota self-accusation—I’ve failed you. I am a bad husband, a lousy lover, a failure as a father, a discredit to my race. I deserve to be dragged through the dirt and hurled into outer darkness—so she said, “Yes.”
“Are you really?”
And she was. At that moment she was. He fell asleep in her happiness and gently she extricated herself from his arms and padded downstairs. There was a full moon and the snowy lawns of Lake Wobegon glimmered in the dark. A man in a white leather jacket trimmed with fur who for a moment she imagined was Gussie walked down the street. He walked with a long stride for one who was walking on ice and his head was up and he appeared to be singing.