7

Poverty

ONCE I SLIPPED OUT THE door, nobody knew what I was up to. I rode down to the river or west to the uplands. In winter, we built forts and tromped out a big circle in the snow, with spokes, and played Fox and Geese. We dammed up the spring melt in the ravine. We raced bikes on a dirt road down a hill and practiced skidding and if we fell and skinned our elbows and tore our pants, it was a badge of honor. I roamed freely, and at suppertime, I heard Mrs. Forsberg crying, “DON-ald! JAN-et! JUU-dee!” and the Guntzels ringing a bell for Corinne, and I headed for home and looked in the window and there was my family in the midst of supper, an empty chair waiting for me. They had not noticed my absence. They were busy watching the twins dipping their tiny hands in their Cream of Wheat. I watched them, like a TV show, an interesting cast, Philip next to Dad, Judy next to Mother. They were a story and I was their reader. Who were these people? How did I come to be in this story? I wanted to skip ahead and be fifteen.

One morning, sitting on the railing in front of Benson, waiting for the bell to ring, my tormentor asked, “How much money does your dad earn?” I had no idea but I thought up an enormous number and said, “Three thousand dollars!” and he said, “You’re poor.” He said it as a fact and as I thought it over, he seemed to be right. Mother saving raggedy old clothes in a cardboard box and ripping them into strips to weave into rag rugs. The little storefront we bought our clothes at, run by the old Jew who displayed the goods in cardboard boxes spread out on the floor, and Dad bargained with him. And then there was Mother’s fascination with Gold Bond stamps. You got them with your purchase at SuperValu and pasted them into books, which then you traded for valuable premiums such as TV trays, a brass planter, a lazy Susan. She believed in the Gold Bond motto: Each purchase pays a dividend, you’re saving money as you spend. Pasting stamps into booklets struck me as a poor person’s game.

We rarely ate out but one Sunday after Meeting, we trooped into Bill’s House of Good Food on 38th Street, sat down, looked at the menu, Dad looked at Mother, shook his head, and we all stood up and walked out. Too expensive. Other diners stared at us as we piled into the car and drove to the downtown YMCA for the Sunday buffet in the cafeteria, which was cheaper.

We lived in a new house as nice as the neighbors’. On the other hand, every spring, Dad and Philip and I drove north to Lake Superior near the mouth of the Lester River, where a crowd of men in waders walked into the water with landing nets to haul up pounds of smelt, little fish heading in to spawn, and take them home to fillet and freeze for eating over the summer. Poor people food, free for the taking. We used margarine instead of butter. Mother was a mender of clothes, a darner of socks. I wore hand-me-down clothes, some from cousins, or my older brother, and once from my sister Judy, jeans that zipped up the side. I flinched at going to school in girls’ jeans. “They’re perfectly good jeans,” said Mother. “If it bothers you, leave your shirt tails out.” (But this shirt was a girl’s blouse, with pearly buttons and darts on the side.) Dad bought cans of food at Red Owl marked down 50 percent because the labels had come off. On long car trips, Mother made sandwiches on a cutting board across her lap and passed them back to us children, to save on expenses. One day, coming home from SuperValu, I carried two big glass jugs of milk down the stairs to the back door and tripped and fell, dropped the two jugs, which smashed on the concrete steps, I fell against the door and went straight to my upper bunk and lay in it, sobbing at what I had done. Mother came and put an arm around me and said, “It’s okay. You couldn’t help it.” But I had caused expense to my impoverished family and I wept over it. We were poor; I had destroyed gallons of milk.

And then there was the drama of Christmas. Mother adored Christmas, began her shopping before Thanksgiving, studied the Montgomery Ward catalog, roved around Dayton’s bargain basement, and aimed for perfection—of tree, stockings, gifts, and wrapping: the ribbon and bow, the paper precisely folded—because the appreciation of the perfection makes the recipient delay the opening, which prolongs anticipation, which heightens pleasure. Dad, however, looked on the day as a pagan festival modified with Christian images but not blessed by Holy Scripture—we were to celebrate the Lord’s death, not His birth. If we had the Lord in our hearts, we would not need these candles to feel reverence. And he dreaded the expense. They enacted this argument year after year, and she wound up in tears (“Why do I go to all this trouble when it isn’t even appreciated?”) and he put an arm around her and sort of apologized. It was like having Scrooge and Mrs. Cratchit under one roof, married to each other.

Mother had grown up in a family of thirteen children, whose mother died after a long illness when Mother was seven, and Christmas was a burst of festivity in an austere and fearful world. And so the stockings were hung, milk and cookies put out for Santa Claus, and she sat at the piano and we sang “Silent Night.” Dad did not sing but he listened. Mother’s gifts tended toward the practical, underwear, socks, a tablet and pencils, but one year I got a Lionel model train and an oval of track and was engrossed watching it go around and around through the town I’d made of boxes, and I noticed my mother watching me and the pleasure in her face was that of a child. I unwrapped a miniature garage with gas pumps and a hoist and another one, a printing press with movable rubber type. My father tried to look pleased.

On Lyndale Avenue, in north Minneapolis, stood a large brick building with barred windows and a fence around it, and I got the idea it was the Poorhouse and that we poor people might someday have to live there, as Dad sang in an old song:

I am growing old and feeble

And the days of my youth have gone by,

And it’s over the hill to the poorhouse

I must wander alone there to die.

And it stuck in my mind that prison might be our destination.

One summer, Dad fell off his cousin Harold’s barn roof while nailing shingles and landed headfirst on concrete and fractured his skull, which eventually led to spinal meningitis, and he was never so agile or able again. The three younger kids were farmed out to relatives, and we three older ones boarded the school bus in the morning and sat down to a quiet supper with Mother at night. She didn’t say much, but we knew that it was bad. She warned us that there might not be Christmas this year.

One Sunday, at Meeting, I noticed a shoebox on a table in the coatroom, wrapped in white paper, a slot in the top, and marked “For the Keillor Family,” and I felt ashamed to be the object of charity. And then Christmas began to appear. A smaller tree than usual, a few presents, the smell of baking. And then our father came home. Pale, withdrawn, slow afoot, holding onto railings, but still himself. He lay on the sofa, a blanket over him, and Mother sat at the piano and played “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,” and we sang and he was moved by the beauty of the song and wept a little, and Mother knelt by the sofa and lay her head on his chest and wept with him.

Forty years later, thanks to a best-selling book, I embraced extravagance, hoping to expunge the memory of walking out of Bill’s House of Good Food. I bought box seats at the opera, a pair of emerald earrings at Tiffany’s, paintings, rare books, we dined at La Reserve and La Côte Basque and flew to London and Jenny and I stayed in a suite at Claridge’s where the bellmen wear tails like footmen of the Duke of Earl’s and the chambermaids treat you like movie stars, the price of which would have brought my dad to the point of physical collapse. Jenny enjoyed it, she who knew actual poverty from her freelance years—she loved opera so elegant costumery and bowing and curtsying were right up her alley. In one week, I made peace with the years of potato picking, home haircuts, jeans that zipped up the side, meatloaf suppers, and Melmac dishes on TV trays bought with Gold Bond stamps. Poverty was not our problem. We weren’t poor, only frugal, and my childhood sense of deprivation and Brethrenly strictures became a golden thread in the Lake Wobegon saga that paid for the voyage and the lovely hotel room. You create a fiction based on your family’s pinching of pennies and it appeals to a readership that experienced the same and you use the proceeds to get a hotel room that makes your wife happy: there is a rightness about it.

All feelings of deprivation vanished when our family gathered around our Zenith radio, and the dial lit up and we listened to WCCO, the Good Neighbor station, and KSTP, home of the Sunset Valley Barn Dance on Saturday nights with Pop Wiggins (“Says here that radio’s gonna take the place of newspapers. I doubt it. Y’can’t swat a fly with a radio.”). The horror shows with footsteps on gravel as the monster approached the deserted cabin in the woods where the lost children had taken shelter, whimpering in terror as the hairy beast tore the door off its hinges. Radio could turn your blood cold, space aliens invading a small town and eating somebody’s grandpa but mostly we stuck to comedy. It was the comedians whom Mother loved. I already knew about horror from gospel preachers, descriptions of eternity in the Lake of Fire: what was remarkable was George Burns and Gracie Allen (I got a full-length mirror for my father so he wouldn’t catch pneumonia. Oh? Before, he only had a half-length mirror so when he went outside he forgot his pants.) and Jack Benny, the cheapskate who sawed on his violin and claimed to be 39 (Mary and I have been married forty-seven years and never have we had an argument that made us consider divorce. Murder, yes, but divorce, no.) and Slim Jim and the Vagabond Kid singing “Yonny Yonson’s Wedding” in a soft Scandihoovian accent.

O the meatballs and the herring and the aquavit and beer

And for Lutherans, don’t you know, it was a festive atmosphere

And when I cut the cheese, O they’ll be talking ’bout that all year

’Twas a heckuva time at Yonny Yonson’s wedding.

I raised my hands for silence and then I told a joke,

’Bout Ole and Lena, not meant for decent folk.

And Pastor Larson laughed so hard I thought he’d have a stroke.

And he blew some tapioca out his nostrils.

As Brethren we were to abstain from worldly pleasures and cling to the promise of His return, but we came home from Meeting and I lay on my belly in my Sunday clothes, reading the funny papers, Dick Tracy and Little Iodine, Jiggs and Maggie, Skeezix and the gang on Gasoline Alley. They didn’t proclaim the gospel but I loved them still.

We had true saints in our family, beautiful Aunt Ruby in her wheelchair, stricken by multiple sclerosis, delighted to see us. I felt sorry for her but Mother told me, “Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.” Uncle Duncan and Aunt Ruby had preached the gospel, driving across Canada in a van with Now is the Day of Salvation and Prepare to Meet Thy God in large letters on it, and now here she was, holding out her arms to us. Mother played the piano and we children sang to her, “Heavenly Sunshine” and “I’m on the Faith Line,” and Ruby clapped her hands. The other saint was Aunt Margaret, whose husband had betrayed her with a schoolteacher and she accepted her plight with gladness of heart. Brethren believed that suffering purifies the spirit—those whom God loveth, He chasteneth—give thanks for tribulation—masochism as the road to righteousness—the deep root of Minnesota stoicism. I worried about polio and didn’t want to catch it. I prayed to be spared. It came on suddenly, a weakness in the limbs, then you were paralyzed, maybe needed to be placed in an iron lung to respirate. One should stay away from beaches and swimming pools, breeding grounds for polio. Avoid crowds. The best prevention: stay by yourself. Which was easy for me, being a loner. You won’t catch polio sitting in the basement reading a stack of books from the library. And I didn’t.