It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. We didn’t make it to the state basketball tournament or even get close, but there’s no point talking about that. All those years you watch little guys shooting baskets in the driveway on cold winter afternoons—little guys wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off, sliding around on the gravel, making set shots in the dark—and you think, “Someday these little fellas are going to put our town on the map,” and then they grow up and they’re not quite good enough. They were good with mittens on, dribbling on gravel and rocks, but a smooth floor and a heated gym seem to throw off their game.
It snowed on Wednesday, a heavy wet snow, and all the men were out to shovel, a sociable job when the snow is heavy and you need longer rest periods, especially us older guys who are heading into heart attack country. You shovel ten feet down the walk and take off your parka and stand and talk to your neighbor. “This is the heaviest snow this year,” he says, “it makes you think about getting a snow blower.” It would be ridiculous to die from a heart attack shoveling snow. Clarence’s cousin Dan died on his front sidewalk. He pitched over from a mild heart attack and died of a concussion when his head hit the clean concrete—some snow might have saved his life.
It’s a couple weeks until the exiles return for Easter, and a couple weeks until Father Emil leaves town. After forty-some years at Our Lady, he is retiring and moving south.
People still can’t believe that he really is going to leave them. Friday night there was a dinner dance for Gene and Lois Pfleiderscheidt’s golden wedding anniversary, and there was Father going from card table to card table in Our Lady’s basement, and people thought, “Two weeks and he’ll be gone. I can’t bear it. It’s too sad.” Except Father didn’t look sad at all. He had a Wendy and soon he was showing a Pfleiderscheidt grandchild how to play a polka on an empty beer bottle, blowing across the top to make the oom-pa-pas. He looked younger than when he was young, and some people felt hurt to see him look so good. A man who’s leaving, you’d think he’d have the courtesy to seem confused and pitiful, at least until he gets out of town. They thought, “What’s wrong with us, that he’s so happy to be going away?”
He told a joke to Gene that made Gene lose his breath and get dizzy. They thought, “Well, if that’s how he feels, maybe we don’t need to give him a going-away party.”
He danced a schottische with Lois and her sister Mrs. Luger, and they danced so hard they almost fell over. People thought, “You know, there used to be more dignity in the priesthood in the old days.”
It was a wonderful dinner of roast beef, of course, sliced thick and piled on the potatoes and all of it swimming in sweet salty greasy brown gravy. Everyone came, even people who weren’t hungry and who had a small helping but managed to recover their appetites and have a second and third. The Pfleiderscheidts’ daughters borrowed half the Catholic card tables in town for the occasion; when you put four big beef dinners on a little card table and add eight big elbows, you have a potential for drama: Gene and his brothers, Louie, Bernie, and Whitey, were seated at one of the head card tables, eating in silence, heads down, and gravy starting to run over the gunwales, and Lois zoomed over and said, “Don’t lean on it so hard, what’s the matter witcha, ya got brains or not.”
Gene looked up at her: “What?”
“Getcher elbows off or you’re gonna break that table and everything’ll land in your lap.”
He started to say, “You can’t…” Then he got his elbows off. And his side of the table rose and Whitey’s plate slid almost off but he caught it with only slight spillage. And the gravy stain on his pants matched the old stains, so no harm was done.
Gene and Lois Pfleiderscheidt have complained about each other to everyone else for forty-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days of their marriage. When she sits down with her sister for coffee, she says, “I could just wring his neck,” and he walks into the Sidetrack Tap and says, “I have just about had it with that woman.” Over the years they’ve got hundreds of hours of free counseling and sympathy from people who slowly realized that in some mysterious way Gene and Lois were happy together and their marriage was staying aloft by a law of physics nobody could understand, so advice was wasted on them, and meanwhile some of their counselors’ marriages were becoming shaky. Couples who had seemed like a story out of Catholic Homes and Gardens suddenly got tight-lipped and spooky; meanwhile, Gene and Lois sailed on, complaining to anyone who’d listen that they’d made a big mistake thirty, thirty-five, forty, and now fifty years ago.
Lois was decked out in a red pant suit with black lace up the legs, a black wig, and bright-red lipstick. Gene had come in khaki pants, a green-plaid shirt, a string tie with a silver clasp, and a green nylon jacket that said “Central Seed Corn” on the back. She said to her daughter Louise, “Look at your father, he looks like he was going to the grocery for a quart of milk, he’s trying to get a rise out of me, well, he’s got it.” He said to his daughter Frances, “Look at her, have you ever seen anything like it—is that a Catholic mother? She looks like you could rent her by the dance.”
Father Emil no sooner sat down than Lois grabbed him. She was steaming. She said, “I can’t believe it, I could wring his damn neck. Boy, am I mad. It just burns my bacon. The girls give him one little dinky job to do, and what does he do, he makes a mess of it as usual, like he’s done all his life. Jesus Mary Joseph—” She snatched her granddaughter going by and said, “Quit that chewing on your hair, Rosemary—don’tcha know you get hair in your stomach, it gets all balled up, and it’ll kill you? I mean it. Father?” He was gone. She grabbed her daughter Katherine: “How could he do this to me?” she said. Kathy gave her a weak smile.
Gene was supposed to hire the band, so he got Whitey’s boy Dennis, a drummer, and his band. They play rock and roll on Friday and Saturday nights, when they’re called The Desperadoes, and Sunday nights they are The Happy Hooligans and play old-time, but this was Friday night, and the accordion player, Chuck Weimer, couldn’t come, so Denny only had drums and bass and Randy the organist from The Desperadoes, who is nineteen and has hair down to his shoulders. He was just trying to play some chords around the beat and not move his head too much, because it hurt a lot. When Lois said, “Excuse me, when are you going to play the ‘Blue Skirt Waltz’?” he winced and said, “I don’t do requests, lady. Okay? I’m not into that. I’m a songwriter, you know?”
Dennis hummed the “Blue Skirt Waltz” to him, but Randy couldn’t hear it with his headache so bad—he couldn’t even shake his head. He said very quietly, “I think I need to be by myself for a little while.”
“He’s unbelievable. He hires a band that doesn’t know the ‘Blue Skirt Waltz’! They don’t know ‘Du, du liegst mir im herzen.’ He might as well have got a phonograph and a couple of records.”
At an anniversary dance, the “Blue Skirt Waltz” is required. It’s a rule, same as if you have coffee, you give people cups. You don’t serve it in pails or pour it into people’s cupped hands but have actual cups and saucers, spoons, cream, sugar, and some bars. Or cookies. Or cake. And you sit, and after a while you say, “Have some more?” and they say, “Oh no I can’t, I gotta run,” and you sit and have more. There are rules in Minnesota, this is a civilization here, we don’t just do what we feel like doing—it’s not like California, it’s a civilized place. You must dance to the “Blue Skirt Waltz” and sing “Du, du liegst mir im herzen” at the Pfleiderscheidts’ anniversary dance.
“How can he do this to me?” Lois cried to Father Emil. “I send him out for bread, he comes back with bricks. How could I marry someone so damn dumb you’d think he was a Norskie.”
She reminds him of Elsie in Maryland, his old pen pal. In 1947, Father saw an ad in Collier’s for a pen-pal service; he wrote in and got Elsie’s address and wrote to her, seeing if she’d like to correspond with him. He didn’t mention he was a priest, because it might inhibit her. Instead he said he had just been released from Sandstone Prison for burglary. It seemed like a good act of contrition to be a convicted felon. Elsie wrote back and said she had discussed it with her husband, Vince, and he approved, so it was all right. She was interested in hearing about prison and she was interested in American history and wondered if he knew about raising tomatoes. Thus was born his most wonderful friendship with a woman.
After a few years of letters, Elsie said she and Vince were driving to Glacier Park but they wouldn’t stop and visit him because she thought they’d be better pen pals if they never met. Yes, he wrote, I think you are right. Once he tested her and said he was thinking about the priesthood as a possibility, and she said, “Don’t do it. I think you were meant to be a poet, not a priest. You are far too original in your thinking to ever be part of a system as rigid as the Catholic Church.”
Father Emil likes Lois. She swears a lot and she’s been smoking too much for far too long, but she does bring drama wherever she goes. You remember Lois. Father never can remember her daughters’ names. After being Pfleiderscheidts as girls, they married men named Smith or Gray or White or Brown, and are pretty and nice, and it’s hard to believe they came from this old lady rollicking around in toreador pants, smoking Camels, getting angrier and angrier at her fiftieth anniversary.
Finally a tentative peace is made, thanks to Father Emil, and Randy is set to play the “Blue Skirt Waltz,” which Denny has written down the chords to on a paper sack, and everyone is gathered around for Gene and Lois to dance, but she is still furious. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” she says. He is mad because she’s so mad: “Our fiftieth anniversary and what does she do? She goes and makes a big stink in front of everybody and tries to make me look like a goddamn fool!”
“Dance with her. Please, Daddy. Please.”
“I ain’t going to dance with anyone who’s said the things about me that she has said. I got some pride.”
“Mother, please.”
“If he thinks I’m gonna apologize to him, he better go get a chair, because it’s going to be a long wait.”
“Gene, come on. Just dance with her.”
“I’ve put up with this about long enough.”
“Lois and Gene, please. As a favor to me. I ask you. Please.”
“Well, all right, Father Emil—Jesus Mary Joseph”—and they danced, at arm’s length, not looking at each other, looking for a sympathetic face in the crowd, who would understand what he and she had been through and why now, at last, they had finally come to the end of their rope.
They stood at the end of a brief waltz and everyone clapped. Father led them in singing “Du, du liegst mir im herzen.” He made them hold hands. They held but they didn’t squeeze.
Lois looked fierce, like she was about to give a speech, and Gene looked like he might be silent for the next two weeks.
Their daughter Patty—Smith, or Gray—put her arms around them both and said, one last time, “Please, for our sake.”
But this is a play, and they’re actors, and they’re good at it. And they do do it for our sake, that’s why they do it so loudly, so we can hear. And now, for our sake, the old man puts his arms around the old lady and looks in her eyes and announces, “I love you, Lois,” loud, and she rolls her eyes and blushes and sighs and says, “Well, it’s about time.”