Evelyn made annual trips to Las Vegas with Raoul with a couple years off on account of his 1996 heart bypass and subsequent argument over his cigar-smoking. He said he knew she hated cigars and she said no, she only hated cheap ones. He said, “Don’t baby me, I know you hate the smoke.” She said, “Some smoke I like.” He vowed he was going to give up smoking for her sake. She said, “Please don’t. Do it for yourself.” “There you go,” he said, “you want me to quit, you just don’t want to say so.” He said he would quit cigars before the next trip to Vegas, a month away, and when he couldn’t, he was so ashamed of himself—a guy with heart problems and he could not put nicotine aside even for the love of a good woman!—he headed out west to pull him self together and stopped in Bismarck to visit an old girlfriend but she wouldn’t see him, she had gained weight and was embarrassed, so he proceeded westward to Billings where his brother Marvin lived but he was gone, his wife said, hinting that she didn’t much care if he returned. “Where did he go?” asked Raoul. “You’d have to ask him,” she said. He went on to Bozeman to visit his buddy George Moses who had gotten him the job on TV, and George was up north fishing, said Lucile. So he drove off in search of George, chain-smoking stogies, and stopped in Butte late that night for a piece of banana cream pie, and had eaten half of it when two idiots came bursting in with guns drawn and cleaned out the till and then, even though it made no sense, took Raoul hostage. “Why?” he cried. “For insurance,” they said. “Insurance against what?” But they grabbed him and stuck a pistol barrel in his ribs and shoved him out the door—“Cut it out! There’s no need to get rough! I’m seventy years old!”—but that didn’t matter to them. And then they saw a cop car parked in front of the bank and they decided to swipe it. “Are you nuts?” he yelled. They shoved him in the backseat behind the steel grate and sped north on gravel roads, both of them snorting white powder and passing a bottle back and forth. In no time, there were flashing blue lights on their tail and a chopper overhead. “I told you this made no sense,” said Raoul. They blew past a roadblock at the Canadian border, and raced over a plowed field at 100 m.p.h., Raoul bouncing off the ceiling, and through a farmyard, sideswiped a chicken coop, bounced off a propane tank, and struck a half-empty granary and were thrown from the car into a pool of winter wheat. Like so many desperadoes, they were not wearing seat belts. All three were badly banged up, and Raoul suffered broken ribs and a cracked vertebra. He lay in the V.A. hospital in Seattle for almost a month and came back to Minneapolis in a back brace and feeling deflated, and sent her a Thank You card. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “I am a cigar smoker, and you are the love of my life.” And she brought him a box of Muriel Slims, and stood at his door smoking one herself, and said, “These are good! Mild and tasty and long-lasting, just like me!”
Astonishing, Barbara thought. To look at Evelyn, most people’d never guess she had a Raoul in her life. She was a quilter. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, she and the six others in the Ladies Circle gathered in the Fellowship Room, cranking out quilts until she finally turned in her needles: she was 78 and her fingers hurt and besides, there was a quilt glut in town. “How can you?” said Florence. The Circle had been cutting and stitching since Jesus was in the third grade. The idle brain is the devil’s playground, said Flo. “Remember Mildred Anderson the cashier at the First State Bank who absconded to Buenos Aires with a pillowcase full of loot and is still there today for all we know? A perfectly nice woman, or so it appeared, but she never married and so she had time on her hands that she didn’t fill with hobbies (such as quilting), she just sat in her little bungalow and read books like you do, and that’s undoubtedly where she picked up the idea of improving her life at public expense. Quilting might have saved Mildred from plunging into a life of crime the way she did and the cloud of shame she brought on her family.” Mildred’s sister Myrtle was in the Circle, along with Helen, Lois, Arlene, Florence, Evelyn, and sometimes Muriel, and they had a merry old time, chortling about this and that and ragging on each other and savoring old gossip, chewing it over, ruminating, tearing it apart like scholars. That perfectly nice girl with the bouncy blond hair who went away to college to study elementary ed and fell in with a crowd of poets and came home blanched and harrowed. So then she married a fellow she had known for all of thirty-six hours, a forest ranger, Doug, who turned out to be married already—and then, in smoking ruins, she moved to Texas and at last word was selling costume jewelry at carnivals and living in the backseat of a Honda Civic. She had aged thirty years in just seven. All from keeping bad company. The story of her fall was a favorite topic, along with the tippling of Clint Bunsen and his volatile marriage to Ilene, and the California success story of that tramp Debbie Detmer.
*
Debbie had broken her mother’s heart and driven her father into the stony depths of depression. It was as simple as that. Her poor dad was a broken vessel, sitting glued to the Golf Channel, his wife obsessively vacuuming, vacuuming, fixing daily lunches of lima bean soup and baloney sandwiches and grieving for the beautiful only child who had turned into something else, a werewolf perhaps. She had been Luther League state treasurer, Girls’ Nation vice president, winner of numerous music trophies (she played clarinet), Homecoming attendant, the list goes on and on, and one cold January day she walked away from her sophomore year at Concordia to head for San Francisco with her boyfriend Craig “trying to figure out where I’m going.” Nonsense. She was cold, that’s all; Fargo-Moorhead can be brutal in January. The wind sweeps down from Canada and the sky lowers and you get depressed and gain a hundred pounds and want to kill yourself. She had read Kierkegaard in philosophy class and it went to her head. Out in California she spent fifteen years bouncing from one man to another and writing jagged letters home saying that “I now realize that my entire life was a lie”—how can a girl say such a thing to her own parents? An only child? It’s not as if they had replacements.
The ladies clucked and bent to their work, turning scraps of cast-off clothing into warm quilts. (Which were bundled off to Lutheran World Services in Chicago. Where, after prayerful deliberation, they were sold for good money to a wholesale bedding house in Baltimore. The money went to buy vaccines for African children. The quilts were sold in gift shops on the East Coast as authentic handmade Amish for hundreds of dollars.)
And all the while, Evelyn was stealing away now and then to visit her cousin in St. Paul who was non compos mentis in a nursing home, carrying on long conversations with dead relatives, a perfect cover for Evelyn to go two-stepping with Raoul at the Medina Ballroom to the strains of Vic D’Amore and His Chancellors of Dance. Who knew? Nobody. After Evelyn’s death and the whole story came out—the plane tickets, the souvenirs of the Ozarks and Branson and Reno and Daytona Beach, the matchbooks from resorts, the menus of Antoine’s and Bob’s Ribs and Le Coq—the ladies of the Circle wept for Evelyn and sorely missed her but they never discussed the secret life she led. That simply vanished into the Unspoken file. The subject was too painful. And that was the end of the Age of Interpretation. From then on, they discussed their grandchildren and their vacation plans. No more stories.