15

The Guntzels

O maiden, young maiden, I worry for you.

To marry a writer, you should not do.

He will put on a suit and kneel down in church

But for him marriage is only research.

He will write a novel that’s set in your home

And all your best lines he’ll take for his own.

I MET MARY GUNTZEL AT the Guntzel family cabin on Cross Lake the summer after I quit the paper. I was twenty and living at home that spring, writing poems and dark allegories and was in emotional turmoil over my place in the world, if there was such a thing and whether I was a writer or a bus driver with pretensions, and for solace I walked every evening over to Corinne’s house and sat on the porch with Helen and poured out my heart for an hour or two and she listened. She invited me to spend a couple weeks at the lake with her and Hilmar and Corinne, and of course I said yes. Corinne’s boyfriend, Leeds Cutter, had died in February in the horrible car crash and I had visited her several times at Carleton College, where she was practicing stoicism but in deep mourning. Leeds was on a clear track and meant for great things in the world, we knew that, but we didn’t talk about him, anything you could say was a cliché, it was all so much beyond words. We listened to Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique on a turntable in her dorm room. She was reading Rilke and found comfort in German and tried to translate for me—“It’s impossible,” she said, “like trying to describe stones.” She and Leeds had been necking in his car in her parents’ driveway and her dad discovered them and forbade them to see each other for a few months, and their courtship became more passionate by telephone and letter. He and she talked about marriage, making a family, and buying a farm. He sent her a lamb as a birthday gift. A beautiful plan was forming in the near distance and then the phone rang and she went to the hospital where he died.

I wrote her long letters that spring—“When the burden of life’s problems can no longer be borne, I escape into the healing darkness of a rainy night—rain pelts my face, rivulets of water run down my cheeks, mingled with my tears”—that sort of letter. Once I asked her straight out: “What do you think will become of me? I am twenty. I need to do something that shows direction and purpose. I drifted into the U, into radio . . . then to the newspaper. Now I need to get serious.” Corinne wrote back that she was no judge of my writing but that she did like the poem I sent her.

Come to me in your dark green dress,

Open your arms, be impetuous.

Rest awhile. Let peacefulness

Immerse you as our fingers touch

Nobody’s hand on the steering wheel,

Nobody’s feet on brake or clutch,

Each one following what we feel.

A love poem. I wrote it for her but didn’t say so. Nowhere in the raindrop-spattered letters did I ever say, “I am in love with you, Corinne.” She was in mourning and I was in distress and kept my distance, but I loved her family and went north to Cross Lake. Corinne’s cousin Mary was there with her parents, Marjorie and Gene. It was a simple one-room frame cabin built by Hilmer and his dad, Hugo, back in the Twenties, four double bunkbeds separated by canvas curtains strung on wires, a back door leading out to the outhouse, an old yellow kitchen table and wood stove in the middle, a refrigerator and stove and sink on one side, wicker chairs, a flowery green linoleum floor, a screened front porch looking at the great blue lake, a swinging couch on the porch, a hammock in the trees, a dock down below. A breeze blew through the cabin, from screened porch in front to screen door in rear, and we seven sat around the old yellow kitchen table and played Hearts, each with our drinks, Marj and her Rob Roy, Gene and his Manhattan, Hilmer with a bourbon and soda, and the rest of us drinking white wine. Smatterings of conversation. Whoever held the queen of spades tried to hold her till the dramatic last moment, then lay her down in a trick taken by whoever was ahead.

The Guntzel family was my first look at adult life in which grown children and their parents are free to be themselves in each other’s company. The younger can think aloud and not be dismissed and the elder are offered due respect. This easy tolerance was unknown in Brethrendom, where your doctrinal shoelaces had to be tied properly and the bows knotted. The cabin was very chummy. I loved that. Corinne the socialist declaiming against corporate greed to her father the Republican plumber, afternoons swimming off the dock, card games and Scrabble, drinks on the porch, family gossip, world affairs, curling up with books, and Mary, a piano major at the University, very shy, lying on an upper bunk observing the rest of us from above. Hardly a word passed between her and me, but I called her a few weeks later and asked her to a movie.

Corinne told me to do it: “You should call Mary. I think she’s in love with you.” So I did. We went to a jazz concert and a week later to an organ recital. We were two awkward outsiders with many inexpressible feelings about music and poetry. She told me she’d gone on a date once and the boy had tried to take her blouse off and she’d jumped out of the car and walked two miles home. I was twenty and had never dated. I admired girls, I loved their company, I couldn’t imagine one being attracted to my hangdog face and long silences. Mary was the first girl to show serious interest in me. Naturally, I was stunned.

We went to the movie Splendor in the Grass, and afterward, in the parking lot, discussing Natalie Wood who declined to have sex with Warren Beatty and thereby wound up in a mental ward, Mary said, “When are we going to make love?” There it was, on the third date. A card laid on the table. I said something wordless, like Mmmmmm. I was a twentyyear-old virgin and I decided not to become a twenty-one-year-old one. A week later, we went to dinner and afterward to her apartment, and her roommate took one look at us and decided to go study at the library and we sat in the dark and necked. A few weeks later, my brother Philip asked me to babysit his little kids while he and Ann-Britt visited friends in Duluth overnight. He said to bring Mary if I wished. She was eager to come. The children went to bed early. She led me into the guest bedroom. I had never been naked with a woman before. I was astonished at how easy it was. So simple, my body knew what to do. I withdrew at the crucial moment—how did I know to do this?—and seed gushed out of me and she laughed to see it. If she’d been disgusted, everything would be different. Life is full of these small but crucial intersections. I had done as she wished me to do.

I think she saw romance as a simple transaction, like what her parents had accomplished, two odd individuals forming a gentle pact to be partners and make a life with its own limits and comforts. Gene was a premature baby, not expected to live. His mother swabbed him with oil and set him in a cigar box on an open oven door at low heat and he survived. He grew up shrimpy, unathletic, injury-prone. Marjorie was a North Dakota farm girl in the Dirty Thirties, her father a dedicated drinker, her brother likewise. Money was scarce; the mother had to fight for the money to put food on the table. When the dust blew, it sifted through the cracks and covered the furniture. Marj had no sweet memories of childhood. She and Gene made a gracious and pleasant home with good china, wall-towall carpeting, tasteful furniture, pictures on the walls, a piano, and she was a good cook, standing over the stove, stirring gravy, a Winston in one hand, a drink in the other, keeping an ear out for the conversation in the living room. She had a kind face, a boisterous laugh, and if Mary sat down at the piano and played Chopin, Marj was transported by the loveliness of the home she had created, it brought tears to her eyes, the clean house, the smell of chicken and gravy, the Chopin, and I meshed into the picture as the boyfriend. She escaped from the Dust Bowl through gracious living. I saw this. She had banished the dust, the drunken men, the Depression by her hard work and her good taste, and her buoyant hospitality. As a writer, I felt obliged to scorn suburbia but that ended at Marj’s doorstep: I was welcome in her home and I admired her spirit.

Having grown up among alcoholics, Marj dreaded harsh words and bad feelings. She ran a tight ship, a contradiction of my dark sophomoric writing: the ball game on TV, sound off. A relish tray on the coffee table. Each of us holding a drink, a smoke. It was very convivial, miles away from the rigid conventions of Brethren table talk. A classic mid-dle-class suburban Sunday held together by the good-natured matriarch, a Republican Methodist reader of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and I enjoyed their company even as their style was what I’d set out to avoid. I was a junior at the U, an editor at the Ivory Tower, trying to be talented, hanging out with artists who used the word “bourgeois” for everything shallow and insipid, and I liked Marj and Gene, bourgeois though they were, more than what I’d seen of bohemian life, the squalor and carelessness and self-infatuation of hippie friends. Eventually, I put Marj into the Lake Wobegon saga as the unflappable Marjorie Krebsbach, and she liked that. She wrote me a kind letter thanking me for “immortalizing” her, a few years after Mary and I broke up.

I was living on the West Bank near Seven Corners, in a neighborhood of hippies and dissidents and musicians, everyone living in shifting romantic arrangements, and I hung out at the Mixers bar with cranky old lefties and would-be writers, men bitching about academia, the government, the decline of journalism, ripping into the manager of the Twins, the abject emptiness of corporate life, the deficits of famous writers. It was the Critics Corner and I admired their ferocity. The military was idiocy in action, the English Department was dedicated to the hatred of literature, the Democratic Party was the dull leading the ignorant, the Holy Mother Church was full of pedophiles. It was classic saloon talk, nihilistic but all about personal style. I sat and listened, enjoyed the chatter. They had no money, no great prospects, but plenty of attitude.

They would’ve regarded the Guntzels of Hopkins with a degree of contempt, so I kept the two worlds apart. I enjoyed Hopkins, mowing their lawn, mixing their drinks, staying for supper, even as I maintained a big beard, aimed to be a writer and escape the regimented life, enjoy the company of musicians, artists, iconoclasts of a similar stripe. But sometimes I experienced bolts of lucidity. A poem of mine was published in a literary quarterly, which was nice until I looked at it on the page across from a poem by a real poet, Donald Justice, and saw mine clearly for the fake that it was. I admired his poem: Lights are burning in quiet rooms where lives go on resembling ours. Mine was a rummage drawer of images, nothing more. It was edifying to see what a shitty poem I’d written, and so was the experience of studying in the periodicals room of Walter Library. Prestigious literary magazines were kept there on shelves, and I sat under fine old chandeliers and noticed that nobody ever walked in and picked up those magazines that I longed to be published in. I thought, If that’s prestige, then the ultimate honor is to be embalmed. But plenty of people picked up The New Yorker and looked at the cartoons. There was a lesson here: People will come for the dessert who may then stay and eat the spinach.

I was leading two lives, the life of literary ambition and the life of family comfort, and then I was yanked away when Grandma Dora was felled by a stroke in July 1964. I was back at the U, in summer school, working at KUOM, and I went straight to the Catholic hospital in Onamia and sat at her deathbed for two days, stroking her arm, holding an ice pack to her brow. She had collapsed while vacuuming at Eleanor’s and never recovered consciousness. Her daughters tended to her, Eleanor taking charge. My uncles dropped in the next day and sat at the other end of the room, uneasy, uncertain what to do with themselves. They each came to the bedside, looked at her, then retreated to the other end of the room and sat in awkward silence, having no words, and talked about cars. I was disgusted that they weren’t paying homage to Grandma and reminiscing about her. It was all about cars. They couldn’t bring themselves to express grief. As Brethren, they believed that death transports us into God’s presence so we should rejoice in it, but they didn’t do that either. They talked about the superiority of Ford to General Motors, then they talked about their gardens and building projects. Eleanor told me I should go back to class, but I stayed, holding Grandma’s hand, stroking her hair, pressing a cold cloth to her forehead, moistening her lips with ice chips. Eleanor said, “You have a job. Mother would want you to go to work in the morning.” In this family, tending the dying was women’s work, and I respected that. They pulled the bedclothes off her and they lovingly bathed her, my naked grandmother, the gray clump of hair where each of them had once descended into the world, and I left then, but with a heavy heart, knowing that now the door was closed to the story of Grandpa Keillor and his sister Mary and Grandma’s job as a railroad telegrapher, why her dad John Wesley Powell had moved to Anoka from Iowa—a hundred questions in my mind—that door was now locked forever.

A few days later, when her coffin was carried through the cemetery gate, I stood in the back of the crowd and sobbed and didn’t try to hide it. The men of the family believed in strict adherence to rules, but Grandma admired spunk and ambition. She liked having a writer in the family. She said so. She is ever in my heart. And I still have her farm firmly in my head and the Model T where my cousins and I sat singing mournful songs and at night, lying awake in a strange hotel somewhere, sometimes I imagine myself back to Grandma’s, washing my face in cold water from the hand pump on the back step and coming in for Post Toasties and a cup of Postum. Grandma and I will kneel on the parlor floor as Uncle Jim prays and I’ll go out and collect eggs in the machine shed where the hens have laid them. Uncle Jim hitches up Prince and Ned and lifts me aboard Prince, and I put my arms around his neck as the harness jingles and the wagon creaks, and I smell the new-mown hay and fall asleep on the way to the meadow.