5

THE AUTHOR ARRIVES

I came back to town in late March, parked on Main Street, and walked around. I hadn’t been back since the funeral of Aunt Dot, where I commingled with my cousins, avoiding talk about politics or things I’d written about them in the past or my third marriage, then in its 20th year. Divorce is uncommon in my family, same as going over Niagara in a barrel. It is considered unseemly and is to be avoided by the simple means of selective inattention. Aunt Dot stayed married to Uncle Bud even though he had a horse laugh that ended in a hearty snort, a laugh that startled strangers and small children, but she found a way to overlook it and focus on his good points, his tenderness and generosity, his good workmanship. And she carefully avoided saying anything funny. He was a good man—so what if he whinnied? Aunt Sal stuck with Uncle Eldon though she taught English and Eldon commonly began a sentence, “Her and me brought you a present”—“Her and me are going to Florida this year”—and rather than spend her life correcting him, rather than shooting him, her ear learned to block it out.

My beloved cousins had stayed true to the Sanctified Brethren tradition that they and I were raised in, and they faithfully attended the Gospel Hall north of town for the Breaking of Bread on Sunday morning and the Wednesday Bible reading, whereas I had fallen by the wayside into a deep ditch, seduced by the lures of the Episcopal Church, Catholicism with a small C, a pageant of costumery and smoke and candles and ancient liturgy, whereas the Brethren relied on truth and truth alone. They spoke directly to God and He spoke to them, whereas I was a spectator at a play where a man in a golden robe and a tall hat sprinkled some water on me and made me feel good. In Minneapolis I was a respectable citizen, but when I come to Lake Wobegon, I am a pagan and a writer who told stories that people here would prefer were kept quiet, and I have done it for money. This is treason and thievery. The first memoirist was Judas Iscariot: he wanted the Book of Judas to come out in Latin; 30 pieces of silver was his advance. An old friend of mine, a distinguished old man, a leading citizen of town, when he and I were young, sent away for a pair of binoculars that could see through girls’ clothing. The binoculars were a gyp, but along with them came a packet of French postcards of nude women, rather shadowy and blurry but nonetheless interesting to him and his friends. I was a nice boy and did not wish to bring shame upon my family, so I had never seen pictures of naked women, only some half-naked African women in National Geographic, but I only glanced at them, did not stare. They carried jars of water on their heads, bundles of straw, kindling wood. I didn’t study them closely. Some of them had wooden discs in their lower lips and some wore rings in their noses, or sticks inserted through the middle cartilage. There were many interesting things about them other than breasts. But I looked at his French postcards when he offered them, and it was thrilling. The female form is a fundamental aspect of the natural world, and why should it be kept secret so that a young man, on his wedding night at the hotel, seeing his bride step out of the shower naked, might be alarmed by her splendor and panic and go home to his mother? I stared at his pictures, and he and I planned a swimming party. We were 14. We stole vodka from his house, and we invited six girls and four other boys. We met at the lake and had some vodka, and he suggested we all swim naked. We boys stripped, all except Chuckie, and we dove in the lake, but the girls stayed on shore and swiped our clothes and sat on them, and we were pleading with them: You promised. Hey. You promised. A promise is a promise. The girls laughed and laughed. And he and I slipped away in the dark and we locked the outhouse, as a way of evening the score, and Donna Bunsen, who had urgent needs, came out, banged on the door, then ran into the woods, about 10 feet from us, and squatted and hoisted up her swimsuit and a river came out of her, and when she was almost done, I said, innocently, “I never saw a girl pee before.” Which was the truth. She screamed and let out a huge fart, and I said, “I never heard a girl fart before either,” and she ran back to her friends, sobbing, and from then on, I was a criminal, a Peeping Tom. We hadn’t locked the door with voyeurism in mind, but it was interesting to see what we saw, and I said so and he kept quiet. He was there in the bushes with me, and I know it and he knows it. But he was popular and I was an odd duck, and so I was considered a voyeur with an obsession about girls peeing. A little incident like that sends two people down different paths in life, him into real estate and law, me into writing fiction. After that I exercised great discretion. I went away to college and enjoyed the company of educated women and never heard any of them expel bodily gases—nor did I wish to, I had already been there and heard that—nor did I take an interest in their urination procedures. Eventually, I found a girlfriend who was just as eager to lose her virginity as I was to lose mine. It was our third date. She asked, “When are you going to make love with me?” I didn’t make her ask twice. But back in Lake Wobegon, I was considered a possible pervert.

I walked down Main Street, braced myself for hostile looks, but instead was shocked by how the town had changed. I had tried to preserve it in my stories and now I saw the reality. It was like going to Pompeii and finding a Walmart. The Alhambra Theater is a seniors center now—old men look up at the gilded ceiling and remember where they sat when they took liberties with their girlfriend and then glance across the table and there she is, 78 years old and glaring at you as if you were thinking dirty thoughts, which you haven’t for years. There is an ATM now at the State Bank; Old Man Ingqvist despised the idea of doling out money, no questions asked, but he died, and a month later, in it went, over his fierce posthumous objections. The Sons of Knute Lodge was sold to Dittman Fitness, and now people ride stationary bikes where once the Grand Oya presided over the Earls of Trondhjem in their robes and polar bear pelts. The Knutes came to an abrupt end with the Depression generation; nobody born after 1940 wanted anything to do with fraternalism, the gilded throne, the old Norwegian songs, the elaborate rituals, and the bowing and turning, the oaths and swords and scepters. Art’s Baits & Night O’ Rest Motel became Allied Self-Storage for people to keep their junk in, a morgue for useless stuff you can’t bear to part with. The statue of the Unknown Norwegian was moved from Main Street because people were sick of explaining to visitors that it’s not a war memorial, it’s that nobody knows who the guy is, a tall dignified man with glasses and mustache who was well-known once and then wasn’t anymore—and then a dirty word was painted on the Unknown’s chest that Bud worked two days to clean off and did clean it off but it was still there in people’s memory. Dumbass. It was permanently blighted. So now he stands in front of Bunsen Motors with “Our Founder” painted on his chest; he was made family and that took care of the problem.

Jack’s Auto Repair is gone. Jack didn’t approve of automatic transmission and refused to work on automatics, and he eased into retirement that way. You’d walk by and see him under a car up on a hoist and listening to “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” He was a good mechanic and specialized in hopeless cases and he loved jazz, everything up to and including Ellington. The place was sold to Krebsbach Chev for storage. I walked by the joint and the silence was mournful, the music was missing.

The fire barn is the same, except the warning notice is gone from the front door. Art had his office there. He lived for snow-plowing, and in the warm months he took out his frustrations by leaving warning signs in the park: “DON’T DRIVE ON THE GRASS. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU?” “NO CLEANING OF FISH ON PICNIC TABLES. IT ATTRACTS BEES. NO EXCEPTIONS, WHERE WERE YOU BROUGHT UP? A BARN?” And an enormous hand-lettered sign on the door of the fire barn:

DOORBELL IS BROKEN. I WILL FIX WHEN I GET AROUND TO IT. SO IF YOU PUSH THE BUTTON AND I DON’T COME TO DOOR, THAT IS WHY. DON’T GET YOUR UNDIES IN A BUNCH. IF THERE IS AN EMERGENCY SUCH AS A FIRE (DUH!) PULL THE ALARM, DON’T RING BELL. AS I SAID BEFORE, IT IS BROKEN. WHEN WILL IT BE FIXED? I DON’T KNOW. I’M WAITING FOR PARTS. IT’S COMPLICATED. ROME WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY. AND DON’T OFFER TO FIX IT YOURSELF, I HAVE BEEN DOWN THAT DEAD END BEFORE. P.S. IF YOU HAVE READ THIS NOTICE ALL THE WAY TO HERE, YOU MAYBE NEED TO FIND SOMETHING BETTER TO OCCUPY YOUR TIME. P.P.S. DO NOT REMOVE THIS NOTICE, IT IS HERE FOR A PURPOSE. THANK YOU.

Bob’s Barbershop is next door where Bud liked to hang out when he wasn’t putting up notices, or he’d go to the Feed & Seed and talk to Ernie’s wife, Ella, about vacation disasters that justify staying home. Detwiler’s Drugs is still open with the bins of jelly beans and licorice and caramels, the Lake Wobegon Herald Star with the display of engraved wedding invitations in the front window, the sort that were popular 50 years ago, and Ralph’s Grocery with the sign in the window, IF YOU DON’T FIND IT HERE, YOU CAN PROBABLY GET ALONG WITHOUT IT, and Lundberg’s Mortuary in the big white mansion with the pillars out front. (Cremation services are available on request but not advertised, cremation being regarded as atheistic.)

The mansion used to be the Thanatopsis Society, whose members are long departed to their reward. I am old enough to remember hearing those ladies’ voices reciting the last lines of William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis”:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To the silent halls of death, thou go not, like a slave to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, like one who wraps the blankets about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

They ended every meeting with that group affirmation of mortality. On paper, they were Lutherans or Catholics, but by joining the Society, they became secret humanists who believed in human goodness, contrary to the teaching of their parents. The Society sprang up in Victorian times among strong-minded women who kept their opinions to themselves. Men were not admitted to the Society. They were not wanted. The Society did not seek equality for women, it assumed women’s superiority.

Mrs. Hoglund was in the Society, she of the silk blouse and hair coiled on her head, her glasses on a chain hanging across the great promontory of her bosom as she taught her pupils from the bright red John Thompson piano books. She played piano at Society meetings, a Chopin étude to start, and then she accompanied the crowd in “All Things Bright and Beautiful” or “Whispering Hope.” But Chopin was the dividing line. Women could feel Chopin, men could not. On a May afternoon, you could walk around town and hear her pupils practicing for the recital, playing Chopin, and the girls felt it and the boys made it sound like a fight song. Chopin is not about fighting, he’s about losing. I never had piano lessons. We Sanctified Brethren believed in discouraging the talented lest they acquire a superior attitude and encouraging the modest so they’d be able to accompany hymns but no more than that. I can whistle a little bit of Chopin but not much. I lost my chance to play Chopin, it’s gone forever, and that’s why I love his piano music so much.

My grandma, Dora Powell, was a Thanatopsian. She said, “No woman should ever have to depend on a man. For sustenance or inspiration or anything else. Let the man go his own way. The woman has power over the children and that gives her influence over the future. Things are inevitably heading in the direction of justice and mercy and the love of beauty.” What broke up the Society was higher education. Young women went to college, which prepared them for careers in one narrow bureaucracy or another, whereas the Thanatopsians considered themselves Philosopher Queens, not technicians, not managers. When my wife, Jenny, says, “The arts is what separates human beings from the beasts of the forest. If you do not respond to beauty, you are lacking a soul,” she reveals herself as a Thanatopsian.

It was a shock to see my grandma’s temple of the arts turned into a mortuary. Where Orrell Holman lectured on Newton’s Laws and Catherine Jacobson paid homage to the transcendentalists and Lavona Person read Louisa May Alcott and women pledged themselves to lifelong learning and the advancement of the arts, now Mr. Lundberg pumps formaldehyde into dead bodies and turns them into mannikins. This is a shock to memory. Imagine if you went to Washington to see the sights and there’s what you remember as the Supreme Court building, and the banner, MUSEUM OF FREAKS & ODDITIES, 500 MUMMIES ON FULL VIEW.

I walked around the Prairie Home Cemetery, looked at my family’s plot, the empty space next to my parents. Did they want to be that close to me? Uncle Jack, who was on the other side of the empty space, could recite whole passages of scripture by memory backwards, verse after verse, every word in reverse order. It was quite astonishing. I don’t believe he was a believer, but he knew his Bible, some of it anyway. Father Emil’s grave is there under a modest stone, Emil Dworschak, 1924–2020. He asked to be laid to rest among Lutherans where he might do some good. Bud Mueller, the old snowplow man, is next to him. Bud drove a 1957 Dodge dump truck with an Allis-Chalmers plow on front and he made himself irreplaceable by virtue of refusing to allow anyone else to look under the hood. It snowed eight inches the day before Bud died, and he got out of bed and raced around town throwing a wave of snow onto the driveways and sidewalks, burying cars, practically immobilizing the town, and drove home and gave up the ghost. His coffin lies under the old snowplow blade: Mrs. Mueller felt that, in a heavy snowfall, Bud might try to rise from the dead, and the blade is meant to keep him in place. The old town clerk, Viola Tors, is there, a serious mistake on her tombstone—she died in 2016, not 2006, and the stone company says it’ll cost $750 to replace the 0 with a 1 and it won’t look right anyway, and the church runs the cemetery and takes a “Who cares?” approach to the problem, but it is a serious offense, to erase 10 years of a person’s life. Viola was a stickler for accuracy. Her daughter, Eleva, and her daughter, Deb, are in anguish over it. “Grandma would roll over in her grave if she saw it,” said Deb. “Well, tell us if she does, and we’ll go calm her down,” said Irene, who is on the church council. “The stone company says if we fill in the zero and write in a one, it’ll look trashy, like a typo correction. Look at it this way. Viola gets to be 10 years younger.”

I ran into Lenny as I left the cemetery and said hello. Her older sister was a friend of my younger sister. She asked if I’d been eating cheese, which I hadn’t. “We’re having some food poisoning here, so be careful,” she said. I asked how things were in Dallas, and she said, “Greg’s in love with a little tiny folksinger named Sandy. Jeans with holes in the knees, blouse with pearl buttons, hair down to her thighs, sandals, the whole deal. He met her when I hired her to sing at his birthday party, and now she’s got her hooks in him. He went into our IRA to pay off her credit card debt. He quit his job at Apple and became her road manager, driving the motor home and selling CDs at the coffeehouses she plays. So I called a lawyer, and between me and the kids’ college fund, Greg is about to be skinned alive. Sandy sings about poverty, and now Greg will get to experience it firsthand. So everything’s great. How about you? What brings you to town?”

I told her I came because my classmate Marlon asked me to write a brief for my friend Sister Arvonne of the Sisters of Benevolent Persuasion, who died in 2016, for her to be beatified and achieve sainthood. Marlon needed to prove miracles accomplished by her since her death. He and I were two uncool kids and we had been provisional friends in school so he asked for my help with beatifying Arvonne. But that wasn’t the real reason I came. I came to escape humiliation

I moved to Minneapolis right out of high school and strove to be cool—strove, struggled, studied coolness, imitated assiduously, learned the language, adopted a look and kept updating it, wrote satire, became a monologuist, and in 1985 was one of Playgirl’s 10 Sexiest Men in America, while Marlon combed his ducktail, worked on the old cars in his yard, yelled at his wife and kids, ran the Municipal Power Plant. He was in charge of repainting the water tower, and he spelled the name Woebegone on the paper he gave the painters, instead of Wobegon, a mistake that got on the 6 p.m. news in the Cities, a big joke, a town that can’t spell its own name, and he made the mistake of giving an interview in which he said, “There’s more than one way to spell a name”—in other words, his uncoolness had grown with time. And he’d run the Arvonne sainthood proposal through spell-check but there were many mistakes left, bad instead of bade, flour/flower, heel/heal, angle/angel, lie/lay, its/it’s, and dangling modifiers, subject-verb disagreements, and so forth.

I ran into him a few years ago at a class reunion, me the distinguished author and sexy American, him the town misspeller, and we exchanged hellos, then two years later, someone shot a video of me sneakily trying to clear my left nostril while trying to look like I was scratching my nose, latching on to a dry clot of mucus that was attached to a long gob of mucus and I happened to be wearing a scholarly robe and sitting on a platform at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa program, about to be introduced as their keynote speaker. The gob was enormous and I had to yank my decorative hanky from my breast pocket and grab the gob with it, but it was awkward and indelicate and unmistakable. This video was stitched to one of me cleaning wax out of my ear with a pencil and one of me reaching up under my suit jacket to pull my underwear out of my crack—1 minute, 45 seconds, of public humiliation, which went up on Facebook, then other platforms, got two million hits, then three, then four, and I became an instant meme, Mister Pickett, and all my coolness was gone forever in one big whoosh, like flushing while seated, and a vast aggregate of people were given the chance to feel superior to me. I wanted to go hide out someplace where people aren’t so tied in to social media, and I thought, Lake Wobegon. Not much Twittering up there except in the trees in the spring, la la. I needed a month or so to accommodate myself to the fact that I’ve lost whatever cool I worked half my life to acquire. In my hometown, I can sit in the cafe and have coffee and someone might ask about my grandpa and when did he arrive in town (1880) and is it true that my grandma was a railroad telegrapher (yes) and how many children were in my mother’s family (13, including her), but nobody is going to say, “Was that you I saw online at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa?” My people have a long memory for hometown events, but the Internet is a river at flood tide and it flows over the rapids and nobody remembers what it looked like yesterday.

I remember a man my age named Ivar Ingqvist, who was Hjalmar’s brother and might’ve taken over the Ingqvists’ bank but he got in an argument with a man from Millet over tomatoes that Ivar was entering in the county fair tomato contest. The Millet man said they were store-bought, imported from Mexico. Ivar said he was crazy. They yelled at each other and the man challenged Ivar to an arm-wrestling match, and Ivar rolled up his sleeve and put his elbow on the table and the Millet man put his down and word got around town—people came running from all over. The table was in the tavern, but it got too crowded so they moved it out in the middle of Main Street and there were hundreds of people crowded around, and more arriving by the minute. Two big fellows in red flannel shirts, elbow to elbow, wiping their hands, applying talcum powder, and Mr. Thorvaldson was the referee. Some boys arrived from band practice with their instruments. Mayor Pete Peterson was there and led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance. And finally, Ivar and the man from Millet locked hands and the referee slapped the table and the men strained, their shoulders swelled up, their backs bent, their faces turned red as tomatoes, sweat poured off them, the crowd was watching, breathless, minute after minute passed, the combatants were forehead to forehead, panting, first Ivar had the advantage, then the Millet man, and suddenly a young woman laughed and that’s when Ivar let a fart. It lifted him up out of his chair. It sounded like a powder keg blew up. People hit the ground. It smelled something fierce. Women fainted and a couple of men. And it took the starch right out of Ivar and the man from Millet pinned his arm and threw his head back and laughed, and the crowd applauded, and Ivar slunk away in humiliation.

He joined a traveling carnival as a champion pie-eater, and after the man who juggled cats and a woman who could belch nursery rhymes like “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water” and a balancing act using milk bottles and bowling balls, Ivar came out and ate three blueberry pies in one minute without spilling on his clean white shirt. The carnival went from town to town, and Ivar took college courses by mail and got his B.A. in history, graduated with a 4.0 average, did a master’s at Yale, started an investment fund, earned a fortune, lived in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in New York, married a Columbia professor, they had four kids, spent a good deal of his fortune helping aboriginal tribes in Kenya develop their lands, he wrote a book about it, and years later he came back to Lake Wobegon, which was pretty much as it had been but nobody recognized him when he walked into the Chatterbox in his Brooks Brothers suit and wingtips. He ordered the Hot Beef Sandwich, and it came and nobody walked up and said, “Hey, Ivar, long time no see,” and then he heard two men arguing about the Lake Wobegon Whippets and one of them said, “I haven’t been to a game in years, they haven’t had a winning season since I was a kid,” and the other man said, “No, they had a winning season the year Ivar Ingqvist let that fart.” He came home to find that he was a historical marker in town, like a famous battle or a flu epidemic. He paid for the sandwich and got in his car and drove away and never returned. In New York, he was a great and good man. In Minnesota, he was an expulsion of gas.

I walked around town, and some people nodded and said hello and others didn’t seem happy to see me. They give me credit for having married well, but that does not erase their misgivings. Alice walked straight up to me and jabbed her finger at me and said, “You’re going to write a book about this, aren’t you, and make us look like a bunch of nincompoops.”

“Write a book about what?” I said. “I’m here to work for Sister Arvonne’s sainthood.”

“Sainthood, my aunt Sally. You know damn well what I’m talking about, don’t pretend you don’t.”

“I don’t,” I said but now I was getting interested. I figured it was the bad cheese epidemic that Lenny had mentioned and the incidents of free speech.

“You go around giving talks in New York or wherever and making fun of your hometown, and when you need more material, you come tiptoeing back and take notes about flamingo lawn ornaments or meatloaf or Bingo Night or whatever and go write a book about us hicks, and don’t think we don’t know it. All your sophisticated readers get to feel superior at our expense and you collect the dough and what’s in it for us? Tell me that.”

I told her that I am only a working journalist and I report what I see and hear to the best of my ability.

“Best of your ability—well, there’s the catch right there. How about if I call you a backstabbing scuzzbag and sleazeball? You want to put that in your book?”

“If you’d like. If that’s how you want to be quoted. But don’t say it unless you mean it.”

“Do I need to spell it for you? S-c-u-z-z-b-a-g.” And she turned on her heel and stalked away.

So I started taking notes for this book. A man has to have something to occupy himself and the Sister Arvonne project was hopeless. She was a saint in my opinion, but the Catholic Church has its own requirements, such as miracles. Google is a miracle, so is FaceTime, and they’re accomplished by armies of diligent grasshoppers, not by saints. Saints love their neighbors, abstain from cruelty, serve the poor, and do it cheerfully. The miracles Marlon had assembled, such as the boy who was drowning and had a vision of Arvonne telling him to relax and take a deep breath and put his head back, were unremarkable: the kid had simply remembered her teaching him to float. No miracle there, just attentiveness. Most of the evidence of sainthood was along the lines of She was a woman whose great example made me the good person I am today. Her sister nuns testified to her sense of humor; her sister Lois said Arvonne had a delight for children but that’s not about sainthood, it’s about goodness. Arvonne was a Hoerschgen and grew up on the family hog farm near town, the rebellious daughter—her parents were Lutheran and she read Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ in high school and at 17 entered the nunnery of the Sisters of Benevolent Persuasion, known as the Purses because they carried large handbags full of good books. They believed that faith is simple common sense. “Videtur ad finem,” was their motto (Think it through). The best argument for her sainthood was the miracle of the wildflowers. She had planted them in her parents’ pasture and after her death they bloomed in early February, rising up through the snow in full color, long before anything else. The Hoerschgens built a stone wall around the flowers, and it had become a prayer station where women, even unbelieving women, came to kneel and pray for their men to behave decently, but there was no evidence of miracles, unless you count softening of heart and apologizing and other small reformations.

Marlon said they asked for my help because I know important people who could get the word out. “My important people are all Jews,” I said.

“How about journalists?”

“The reporters I know are the ones who write obits.”

“Well, do your best,” he said.

That was what brought me to town last March. It wasn’t to write this book. Writing a book was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to get off-line, off Facebook, stop getting messages from people saying, “I think you’re in this video.” I wanted to be who I am for a change, not who four million people think I am. But as long as I was here, with time on my hands, I started writing about the virus.