HANNIBAL

30

“YOU KNOW,” my father began, “the river is different up here than it is in Hannibal.” I’d taken him out to breakfast at Heinemann’s in Whitefish Bay in Wisconsin. My father loved breakfast and I was glad to have him alone. My mother was jealous of the attention he always received. It made her angry when we’d sit and talk to him, and she believed, perhaps rightly so, that we were ignoring her. But, as my father liked to say, you couldn’t get a word in “edgewise” if she was around.

That morning my father was all dressed up in a brown camel coat, brown fedora, tweed jacket, and silk tie. He was cold even though it was spring. At that time in his life, he was always cold.

We both ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, crisp, and wheat toast. He was living dangerously and asked for a glass of fresh squeezed juice. “I’m going to be 103 years old,” he told the waitress, and she almost fell on the floor.

“I’m going to squeeze that orange juice myself,” she said and she went to pay special attention to our order. I was asking him about the river. It didn’t take much prodding. He started talking to me about Hannibal. “In Hannibal you can see across it. Up north here there’s all these islands. You don’t even know where the other side is. You know I lived in Hannibal, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course, I know.” He told me about living in Hannibal a dozen times. In fact he’s told all of his stories dozens of times and it seemed as if he’d reached the end of the line with no more to tell. I braced myself for a rerun.

“Well, I lived in Hannibal. Right next to the house Mark Twain lived in. He’d been dead, oh, ten years when I lived there, and I don’t think he’d been back to Hannibal in twenty, but they still remembered him. You know why they called him Mark Twain, right?”

“It’s the pilot’s cry when they’re marking the depths…”

“That’s right. His real name was Samuel Clemens.” Of course I knew all of this. I knew that Samuel Clemens tried out many pseudonyms before he landed on the one that became his signature. “See, if you listen, you learn. Anyway, his house wasn’t any bigger than four booths in this restaurant.”

“It must be a museum now,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know how more than one person at a time could go through it. It wasn’t bigger than your upstairs bathroom. Anyway I worked in retail. Ladies’ garments.”

“You mean like dresses, blouses?” I actually didn’t know my father worked in ladies’ garments.

“Shoes, slips, bras. The whole thing.”

“What year was that, Dad?”

“Oh, it was 1921 or 1922. No, it must have been later because that spring, just before I moved to Hannibal, our downstairs neighbor murdered her husband. My parents were very good friends with him. You know, he took her on a cruise, then came home and he’s shaving one morning and she blows his head off.”

“That’s awful,” I said, shocked.

“Seems he brought his mistress along on the cruise as well. She was in the next stateroom.” My father gave a wave of his hand. “That kind of thing happened all the time.”

“It did?” I asked, amazed. I wanted to know more about the downstairs neighbor and his mistress and the wife who blew him away, but our eggs came and my father was on another trajectory. He poked at his hash browns. “I wanted them crisp.”

“Shall we send them back?”

He gave a wave of his hand. “Naw, it’s all right.” But I could tell he was disappointed. He took a few bites of his eggs and the hash browns. “Not so bad. But I like them crisp.” Then he took a sip of juice. “Now that’s good juice. Here, have some.” He pushed the glass my way. “Where was I? Let’s see, I was twenty-three years old. So it was later. It was 1925. Anyway, I worked for Klein’s Department Store and one day Mr. Klein came in. He came all the way from New York. They were a chain of retail stores. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Klein’s.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of Klein’s.

“Anyway, Mr. Klein came in. He was bald as a bat. At that time I had a full head of hair, you know. In 1925 I had hair as thick as yours. So Mr. Klein comes in and the first thing he does is yank on my hair. He says, ‘How’d you get a head of hair like that? How come I’m rich and bald and you work for me and haven’t got a pot to piss in and you’ve got a head of hair like that?’ Mr. Klein liked to joke around, though I only met him once or twice in the year I lived in Hannibal. Anyway, I had hair then, in 1925, but by the time I was thirty-three, ten years later, all my hair was gone. You know that, right? You’ve got the portrait.”

“The portrait?”

“You know, the picture. We called them portraits then. That’s because you went to a studio and sat for them. It wasn’t a painting, but we called them portraits. That picture of me. There were only three copies made and one of them is hanging in your house. On your gallery wall.”

The waitress came by with her manager to make sure everything was all right. “Your eggs are getting cold,” she said. “Shall I heat them up for you?”

“Naw, I’m just talking,” my father replied in his most polite voice.

“He’s 102 years old,” she told her boss.

“You must be kidding,” the boss said, shaking my father’s hand. “What’s your secret?”

“Nothing in excess,” my father said, admonishing them both.

I was watching their little exchange, trying to envision this portrait of my father. I have a whole wall of pictures. Ancestors and new arrivals. Those gangsterlike shots of my father from the 1920s. My husband’s family. Our daughter floating on a raft. Then I see it. In a dark suit, pinstriped shirt, his hands folded across each other, a soft smile on his face. He’s holding something in his hand—a pipe, I think. Something he doesn’t smoke. I’ve had this picture for many years. I’ve probably walked by it ten thousand times, but I’ve never given it much thought.

“So I never told you about this portrait, did I?”

I shook my head, nibbling on my now cold toast. “It was from 1935 and I was working on the Chicago Board of Trade. On the summer weekends we’d go out to Union Pier and there was this girl from Memphis. But her family summered in Chicago. They had a house on Lake Michigan and we became friendly. She was from the Bloch family. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Blochs from Memphis.”

I nodded, though I never had.

“A very rich girl. Anyway, I dated this Bloch girl a few times one summer, but then the summer was over and she was going back to Memphis.”

“Were you still in Hannibal?”

My father waved his hand in the air. “No, you aren’t paying attention. I told you. I was in Chicago. At the Board of Trade. Hannibal was a long time ago. This is about the portrait.”

I wasn’t exactly paying attention. I thought he was telling me a river story, but now his tale had taken a bend I hadn’t expected to Union Pier and a girl from Memphis I’d never heard him mention before.

“Anyway, this girl, the Bloch girl, her father committed suicide in 1929. She was a pretty girl. She had red hair like a fire and very green eyes. She reminded me of a party. She was bright and pretty. I liked her and I suppose I felt badly for her because of what had happened in her life. So when she was going back to Memphis I asked her if, when the holidays rolled around, she’d like a gift from me. If there wasn’t something I could send her so she would remember me. And she said that she would like a portrait of me. That was all. She just wanted a portrait of me. Now there was this very famous portrait photographer in Chicago, his name was Seymour. He did all kinds of photographs and he was very expensive. So I went over to Seymour’s studio one day…”

I wasn’t completely following the story now about how my father went over to Seymour’s studio. I was thinking about the neighbor whose wife blew him away and the rich girl whose father killed himself and who wanted a picture of my father to remember him by.

“What happened to her father?”

“Well,” my father said, taking a bite of his eggs, “that’s an interesting story. You see, this man, her father, Mr. Bloch, he had a grocery store in Memphis. He was quite successful, but he heard that there was a new kind of grocery store starting up in Minneapolis. A grocery store where employees didn’t wait on you. Instead you served yourself. So he told one of his employees that he wanted him to go up to Minneapolis and find out just what kind of new grocery store was being started up in Minneapolis. So the employee went up and said he’d be back in a week or two. Well, a week went by, two, four, six weeks. That employee never came back.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. They never found him.” My father gave me an impatient look. “This isn’t a story about the employee who disappeared.” My father made a little explosion sign with his fingers. “It’s about the portrait. But since you asked, I’m telling you about Mr. Bloch.”

I nod. “Okay.”

“So Mr. Bloch sends another employee up to find the one that never came home. His name was Clarence Saunders and he told Mr. Bloch that in Minneapolis the grocery stores were changing and someone had an idea called self-service. He told Mr. Bloch all about how the customers never had to wait for the next clerk but could take the items off the shelves themselves. Butter, rice, beans. They just reached up and took it and put it into a cart. Saved a lot of time. Well, Saunders explained this to Mr. Bloch and they opened a store together. It was called the Piggly Wiggly and it was the first supermarket. Ever heard of that?”

I said I had and my father seemed pleased. “Well,” he said, “at least you know something.”

“But what about her father?” This story, like so many of my father’s, begins on the river, then meanders away much as the river side-winds, leaves its bed, only to come back to itself downstream.

“If you listen, I’ll tell you. You keep interrupting me. I’m losing the thread. God, it’s freezing in here.” He pulled his coat around his thin, frail body. “Anyway, they did very well with the Piggly Wiggly until 1929 and the market crashed. The two men lost everything, and Mr. Bloch, who had a 250,000-dollar life insurance policy, jumped out of a window so his family could have the money. He didn’t want his family to have to start over. That’s when they changed the law about life insurance policies and suicide. In 1929. And that’s how his daughter became rich.”

He paused to take another bite. “Good eggs,” he said, “but they’re ice cold. Anyway, all this girl wanted was a picture of me. I would’ve sent her a gold bracelet if she’d asked, but that’s not what she wanted. She wanted a portrait. So I went over to Mr. Seymour’s one day. And there was a doctor there. A famous Chicago doctor. I don’t remember his name. But he was having his picture taken. Mr. Seymour was taking it like this and like that.” My father turns and dodges, showing me how Mr. Seymour was taking pictures. “Anyway, the doctor recognized me and he says to Mr. Seymour, ‘Oh, you have to take that man’s picture because he’s a famous man. He’s on the Board of Trade. You’ve got to take his picture.’

“Well, while I was waiting for Mr. Seymour to take my picture, I was chatting with his girl and I asked her how much it would cost me to have three pictures taken and she said, ‘Oh, three pictures, that would be fifteen dollars.’ Well, that sounded okay to me so I told him to go ahead and take my picture. So Mr. Seymour, he smooths down my hair and hands me a pipe. I never smoked a pipe, but I’m holding it in the portrait. He takes my picture for fifteen, twenty minutes, then I leave. About a week later he sends me the proofs and I pick out the one picture.”

“The one that’s hanging on my wall.”

“That’s right. So, anyway, I order three copies of the picture and send him the fifteen dollars and a few days later Mr. Seymour calls me up. He’s yelling and screaming. ‘What’s this fifteen dollars? These pictures cost more like a hundred and fifty dollars.’ Anyway, Mr. Seymour goes on, blah blah blah, but I tell him talk to your girl. She told me fifteen dollars and fifteen dollars it is. So eventually he agreed and that’s how I got the portrait for fifteen instead of a hundred and fifty.”

“What happened to the pictures?”

“Well, you have one, that’s the one I kept. My mother had one. And I sent one to the girl.”

“And what happened to that one?”

“Oh, she probably tore it up. I don’t know.” He took the last bite of his breakfast. He’d cleaned his plate. “I never heard from her again. I wasn’t going to marry her, anyway. I was a confirmed bachelor then. I shoulda stayed that way. Believe me.” He tapped my hand. “Of course, I wouldn’t have had you.” My father shook his head. “I wish I could remember her first name. I think I broke her heart.”

31

“AFTER ALL these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then,” Mark Twain writes in one of the most nostalgic passages in American literature, “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning, the streets empty, or pretty nearly so.” He was writing of Hannibal, his boyhood home. It had briefly been my father’s home as well. Now we are, after ten days on the river, approaching.

Pulling into the small marina, Jerry manages to find the only slip to tie up to in the whole town. As he maneuvers the boat into the narrow passage for the marina, he’s shaking his head. “This is literally the only place. If we hadn’t found this spot,” Jerry says, “we’d be spending the night somewhere else.” He seems proud of himself.

I’m heading to a hotel for the night. I decided to do this long ago, but now I really want to. I am ready for land, running water, clean sheets. There is much fanfare as I leave, the boys giving me shouts and a big wave. “Adios, amigo!” they cry. “Hasta la vista!” as I trudge uphill, backpack bouncing on my back, then hang a left.

I come to Main Street—an avenue of souvenir shops, filled with Huck and Tom T-shirts, Mark Twain playing cards, statues of Tom and Huck, a bookstore that apparently only sells books by and about Mark Twain. The last run of the Hannibal trolley drives by and weary tourists wave. At the Becky Thatcher Restaurant a Tom & Huck’s Taxi offers me a ride. I decline and instead dial the visitor’s center, as a sign instructs, TOLL FREE 1-800-TOM-AND-HUCK, to ask about a hotel, but the tourist office is closed.

Ahead of me I see a big sign—the Hotel Clemens, of course—and I make my way there. In the entrance a giant cardboard cutout of Mark Twain greets me. For a moment I think it’s real. Block letters read HEAR MARK TWAIN HIMSELF, LIVE, AT PLANTER’S THEATER.

Wow, they even channel him here.

I’d dreamed of Hannibal all my life. It was the stuff of my father’s stories and of the books I read. But as I plodded in the heat of a late summer’s afternoon toward my hotel, what greeted me was a theme park. I’ve come to a place of tacky souvenir shops and cardboard cutouts, of fake “real live” shows and tourist choo choo trains. Disneyland on the Mississippi.

I’m considering turning around and heading back to the boat, but I’m sure the boys already have the satellite dish going. And I am longing for a bed that doesn’t roll and a hot meal that doesn’t include pizza crust. But the truth is Hannibal is awful. And it is obsessed, literally obsessed, with its prodigal son (who left when he was a young man and only returned sporadically to revisit his boyhood haunts, to reclaim his river, and for photo opportunities). If I lived here, I’d go mad. Already I feel like someone trapped in the fun house mirrors.

My guess is that at some point Hannibal, not wanting to become a washed-up town like Muscatine, with its pearl button factories closing, or casino-dependent like Dubuque, saw that it had one card to play and it played it well. But how many copies of Huckleberry Finn can one town handle? How many ice-cream parlors and postcard shops and souvenirs and T-shirts all with Mark Twain or some version of his famous characters (with the startling exception of the runaway slave, Jim) printed or emblazoned or in neon signs can one small sleepy river hamlet have? The answer is apparently thousands.

My innkeeper is a dour man whose family originated in Fiji and, for reasons he cannot explain to me, has landed here. Circumstances, he says. There is a long, complicated story that involves broken marriages and children scattered in cities throughout the Midwest. I’m getting more and more depressed when he asks to see my driver’s license. He gazes at it and says, “Hey, your Yanks sure blew it, didn’t they? They had a chance and they blew it.”

I’m not quick on the draw here and think we are talking Civil War, but apparently he is a Yankees fan as in baseball and was disappointed in last year’s World Series. I feel like sharing so I tell him that in fact I was rooting for the Red Sox and he gives me a look of disbelief that borders on disdain, then turns away, punches in some numbers, and hands me my key.

The hotel, which is several stories high and built around a gigantic atrium, seems deserted. An enormous Jacuzzi bubbles in the center of it. All of the rooms have large picture windows. Privacy is achieved with thick, dark curtains. As I take the glass elevator up to four, I think that this could be a very good setting for a horror film. But inside my room is cozy with big beds, clean, but scratchy, definitely not cotton sheets, and, most important for my purposes, a shower.

I shower like someone who doesn’t know where her next shower is coming from, which I don’t. Then I get dressed and flip through the guest directory for some dining suggestions. I decide to pass on Huck’s Homestead Restaurant, which is right across the street, has lots of fluorescent lighting, and specializes in roast beef.

For my big night out I want more refined fare. When I ask the desk clerk for a recommendation, he says Lula Belle’s. Located on Bird Street (the perfect name, it turns out), Lula Belle’s is a former house of ill repute turned fine dining establishment, and I stroll there, a woman of leisure for the time being, under the violet sky of a warm summer’s night.

In the entryway a pair of bloomers in a Lucite frame greets me. I am led into the main dining room, which is virtually empty, and realize I am the youngest person in the place by about thirty years. The maître d’ tries to seat me at a tiny table for two, but I beg for a bigger one. Disgruntled, she seats me at a larger table for four and I thank her. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” I say.

Without a word she hands me a menu and I must admit I haven’t seen so much attitude since I left New York. It’s rather comforting. But I’m a little afraid of her too and decide not to ask what her favorite things are on the menu. I’ll do it on my own. I’m going to pass on the “Awesome Blossom,” which is a fried onion, the Missouri equivalent of the Texas Rose. And I know I’m not going to have the Bordello Bombe for dessert. I order a simple New York strip steak, medium rare, fries, and creamed spinach. A glass of cabernet. Comfort food. I am in heaven. For about five minutes, that is.

As I sit, I watch the others eat in a kind of culinary slow-motion silence. No one is speaking. In this dim-lit room, candles flickering, the voice of Dean Martin croons, “See the marketplace in old Algiers. Send me photographs and souvenirs.…” “Just remember ’til you’re home again/You belong to me,” I sing to myself, completing the lines. I must have made a little noise because an elderly woman, sitting at the next table, gives me a glare. The old loneliness creeps up on me. I hate eating alone and want to ask one of the old couples nearby if they’ll adopt me.

I get up and wander around. Apparently Lula Belle’s also runs a kind of bed and breakfast and one can partake of Belle’s River Heritage Collection. Upstairs there’s a Safari Room where you can let your inner tiger roam. There’s the Renaissance Suite, good for wenches of all kinds, and over on Mark Twain Lake a private house can be had, for family reunions, I assume.

I’m envisioning myself a lady of the evening now in corset and bloomers, leading my wildebeest of a man into our safari room suite. I see a short whip, pith helmet. Lion tamer gear. Next I’m in red vinyl and fishnet hose. But again my vision grows gloomy as I think of all the women who have come to the end of their dreams in these rooms. Everything is less funny than it was. This restaurant oozes sadness from its floorboards. I miss my husband, but my thoughts drift to Tom and Jerry.

I picture them, with their feet up on my worktable, having chili and beans out of a can. The moon overhead, the river lapping at the hull. Samantha Jean licking bowls clean. I see them bedding down for the night. Jerry sipping a beer and Tom his diet Dew. Samantha Jean doing her big leap into Daddy’s arms. I contemplate surprising them and returning to the boat.

The waiter signals that my steak is ready. Dutifully I sit down to eat, but my appetite is gone. The steak is, shall we say, not Peter Luger’s, but I love the creamed spinach and am happy for real food. I walk back to the Hotel Clemens in darkness and all of Hannibal is shut down.

That night, as is often the case with me, I can’t sleep. Or that is, I can sleep, but I wake up at three or four, not sure of what I want to do. I ponder taking something from my drug kit, but decide not to. I want to get an early start in the morning and this would just slow me down.

Since I have a television at my disposal, I check out the menu and find an educational program on the early discoverers. The program begins with a premise that has already been preoccupying me. Why do mining towns and river towns become ghost towns?

It is a show on Lewis and Clark and their journey up the Missouri. What is the frontier? the program asks. And the definition: The frontier is opportunity in the form of property. Property, the narrator goes on to explain, was a European notion, invented by white men. The native peoples had no sense of property. To them the world belonged to all.

The frontier kept moving. For a time it was in upstate New York, it was the Alleghenies, it was Tennessee. It was the Mississippi. And then when John Charles Frémont introduced the notion of Manifest Destiny—the idea of taking the land and turning it into a profit-making business—it became the whole of the West.

I am engrossed in the program and it goes on for at least an hour, but when it ends I still can’t get to sleep. It is the middle of the night and I want ice. I slip out of my room in my T-shirt and yoga pants with my ice bucket. The hotel is eerily quiet. Its atrium opens on the empty lobby, lined with plastic potted palms and plants. A weird gurgling noise comes from the Jacuzzi. I find the machine on my floor and push the button. The sound of ice dropping into the bucket reverberates throughout the atrium like cannon fire.

I expect guests to shoot out of their rooms, prepared to evacuate, but no one stirs. I tiptoe back into my room, make myself a glass of cold water, and try to sleep.

32

SOMEHOW THE Hotel Clemens is less creepy by day than it was by night. People actually seem to inhabit its rooms and they have filed in to, what else?, the Tom Sawyer Dining Room for a breakfast of cold cereal, toast, juices, and very watery, but better than what I’ve been consuming, coffee. It is true they all have bluish hair and wear pastel pantsuits, but it’s human life and I’m glad to be among the living.

I take a table beside two elderly gentlemen, brothers it turns out, who are dressed in plaid shirts, pants with suspenders. They look like well-dressed farmers and they are deeply engrossed in the Hannibal visitor’s guide. I hear one say, “Oh, the Gilded Cage. Now what do you think that is?”

The other shakes his head. Then spells out a word. “D-I-O-R-A-M-A. Never heard that word before,” the older one says.

They are quiet for a few minutes, then I see they are open to a certain page of the brochure and completely engrossed. Given that I have the same visitor’s guide in my pack, I take it out as well. I peruse the entries to see what has captured their eye as I wait for my English muffin to toast.

I breeze by Mark Twain’s boyhood home, boyhood home gift shop, Huckleberry Finn House, Becky Thatcher Home, J. M. Clemens Law Office, Mark Twain Museum, Mark Twain Cave Complex, Mark Twain Riverboat, Richard Garey’s Mark Twain himself, Twainland Express Sightseeing Tours, Sawyer’s Creek Fun Park, Mark Twain Clopper, Tom Sawyer Diorama Museum, Tom and Huck Statue, Tom and Becky Appearances. But none of this has interested these dapper gentlemen.

They are very focused on the last page of the visitor’s guide. A page called “Area Agri-Tourism.” There is a photograph of a dozen or so cows’ behinds, taken in such a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. These cows are being milked on a cow-carousel. “Don’t know how they got them up on there,” the older man with the white hair says.

“Must use some kind of a step-up ladder,” the other replies.

“Well, takes time to get a cow to step up on a stool,” the older one says.

Perhaps it’s waiting for my muffin or the overwhelming feeling of needing a real moment that doesn’t involve fictional characters, but I turn to these gentlemen. “I was wondering about this picture as well…” Actually I was wondering why the tourist office would put in such an explicit shot of the private parts of its dairy industry in its tourist paraphernalia, but these guys weren’t fazed.

“Yeah, we always milked them in their stalls by hand. And they knew their stalls, let me tell you,” the white-haired gentleman said. “Cow always knows her stall.”

“This looks pretty complicated to me,” the other brother says. “Cow’s gotta get up on a platform. Probably doesn’t even know where she’s going.”

“You know, our daddy was a dairy farmer and we’ve moved a lot of cows in my day. Our daddy gave up the business when I was still a boy, but he made a success of himself in everything he did.”

“Is that so…?”

“He opened a store and made a success with that. He started a farm equipment business and he made a success of that too.”

The other brother nods. “That’s right. Whatever Daddy did, he did it right.” Though they are well into their sixties, I see the sadness in their eyes.

On the Muzak, Dolly Parton is singing “Those were the good old days, but I don’t care to go back.…”

My muffin has popped up and I go to butter it just as the two men get up to leave. “Well, it was nice talking to you,” I tell them.

“Sure nice talking to you too,” they say.

*   *   *

In 217 B.C. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, set out across the Apennines to conquer Rome. Hannibal and his men raped and pillaged for years, laying waste to town after town, during what came to be known as the Second Punic War, but he never managed to subjugate Rome. As I head out after breakfast, I stop at the visitor’s center to inquire what connection might exist between the general and the town.

Several women are working at the desk, but no one is sure if or why Hannibal was named after this particular general. They are all shaking their beehived hair. “There is a town named Carthage nearby,” one of them says. It appeared that no one had ever asked this question before. One of them gets a big reference book and looks it up. She relays to me that there is no relation to the general, but there is a Hannibal Creek.

As I’m leaving the visitor’s center, the Twainland Express chugs past me with tourists sitting in the diminutive cars, chins on their knees. As I stroll through downtown Hannibal, I’ve lightened my load and only carry a small day pack and my journal. Passing the local fire station I see I’ve missed the ham-and-bean dinner at the Methodist church two weeks ago. I descend toward the river where I come to a store that offers INTERNET CAFÉ AND CHRISTIAN GIFTS. But it is closed. I peer inside and see a strange array of Bibles, statues of Mary and Jesus, and computer stations.

Looking up, I realize that I am at the base of Cardiff Hill and begin to climb. It is a hot morning and my pack, though light, weighs me down as I make my way up the many concrete steps of the famed hill where Huck and Tom purportedly played. Twain’s father died when he was eleven and the truth is all of his best stories come from his childhood. It is as if he was stuck at this moment and when he had exhausted all his childhood memories, he had little left of great importance to say. At the top of Cardiff Hill, I pause. From here I have a vista of the town and the river, which, as my father described it for me, I can see across.

For Twain the river was the source of all stories—of Tom and Huck and Jim, of lost boys and miserable slaves, of imprisonment and, ultimately, freedom. Twain learned the river and tried to navigate it. He took his pen name from his riverboating experiences, and the river stayed with him long after he’d moved from its banks. He never became a very good steamboatman, but his love of the river permeates his best work.

In his memoir he writes of “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side, the ‘point’ above the town, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one.” And in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck describes sunrise on the river before him: “Then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along—ever so far away … then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell.” I wonder if this was the vantage point my father saw. If he climbed this hill himself, perhaps with a girl. For it is a romantic spot. If he stood here and felt the cool river breezes upon his face. But somehow I don’t feel his presence. My father seems far away from this town of tourist attractions and T-shirts.

As I work my way down Cardiff Hill, I’m filled with the desire to check my mail. I’m wishing INTERNET CAFÉ AND CHRISTIAN GIFTS was open, but since it’s not, I stop in at Becky’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, where I pick up a few postcards.

The radio is on and I hear a news report for the first time in weeks. The president has declared parts of Iowa a disaster area and he’s offering crop relief. Grain barges aren’t moving. The grain is rotting in them. Then Rush Limbaugh comes on. I ask the woman who sells me the postcards if she listens to Rush all day long.

“Nope, just in the morning,” she says. “Then I put NPR on for the customers.” Well, at least she’s honest.

I tell her I want to use the Internet. “Christian Gifts is closed,” I tell her.

“Oh, yeah. They aren’t open during the week. Why don’t you try the public library? They have Internet access there.” And she gives me directions, which upon reflection I think were meant for cars.

I wander through the town, passing a store that sells and repairs vacuum cleaners. The window is a display of antique vacuum cleaners. I head out of the tourist part of town, passing a fountain that isn’t working and has a statue without a head. I make several wrong turns, climb a hill, and after about half an hour come to where the library was supposed to be, but it turns out to be a funeral parlor.

There’s no one in sight on the street so hesitantly I walk in. I enter a room of red velvet curtains, gold carpeting. Two rooms are open and one has a casket. This is not how I want to spend my morning so I head back onto the street where a man is now changing a tire and he tells me the library is up another block. Exhausted, I climb the other block. It is a very hot day now and I am grateful for the air conditioning inside the library.

Two librarians sit in the dark in this cool room of magazines, books, and computer terminals. “I’d like to use the Internet, please,” I ask a rather attractive middle-aged librarian with a shock of white hair.

She turns to her bespectacled colleague. “She wants to use the Internet.”

“I need to see your picture ID.” I realize I’d left my wallet and other items I didn’t need for this outing in the hotel.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m traveling and it’s at the hotel. I’ll just be a minute.”

“You can’t use the Internet without picture ID.”

I have my precious journal with me and I think it will serve as collateral as it has in the past so I give it a try. “Look, you can hold on to my credit card and my journal while I log on.”

The white-haired librarian who is facing me makes a sympathetic face as if to say “if it was up to me…”

“You can’t use the Internet without picture ID,” her colleague replies.

I am suddenly irate. All that stands between me and communication with the outside world is my New York State driver’s license. I am an upstanding citizen. I have never been arrested for a crime. I have never gotten a speeding ticket. No one has ever needed a swab of my throat or my fingerprints. I take in a deep breath. “Is this about Homeland Security? Do you need to track this for the government? Are we all terrorists and you need to keep a record of who uses your library?”

The nice woman keeps smiling and the mean one continues filing whatever she’s filing. “It’s just the rules.”

“I’m a tourist. I’m a traveler. And I’m on a boat. I just want to check my mail.”

“You need a photo ID.”

Okay. I’m going to lose it. I’m going to leap across the counter and rip her throat out. Instead I storm out of the Hannibal Public Library, past the sculpture without a head, and make my way back toward the more tourist-friendly part of town. I walk for about a mile until I come to a local Java Jive’s and suddenly the words “iced latte” float into my brain. I walk in and immediately feel better. Dark brews fill the air.

The woman at the counter seems challenged as she finishes up with the previous customer, handing her her change. Coin by coin. “And what can I get you?” she asks.

“I’ll have a half-caf, iced, skim latte,” I tell her. She looks at me blankly. “Part decaf, part regular.”

“Does that mean you don’t want milk?”

“Just make me a regular latte, iced,” I tell her.

She starts fiddling with the espresso machine, but she seems distracted and tightly wound. She makes my coffee, but instead of actually giving it to me, she leaves it on the counter and starts cleaning up her work station. “Are you looking for something?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says, “but I can’t remember what.”

“A straw?” I ask.

She acts as if a bulb has gone off in her head. “Yes, of course. A straw.”

“I know what you were doing,” I say. “I do that kind of thing all the time. If I can’t figure out what I want to do or if I’ve forgotten something, I’ll start straightening up. Multitasking.”

“You know,” she says, “I’m just always like that. Bet if there was a way to download a woman’s brain you’d find like a million things. Take the food out of the freezer, pay the gas bill, walk the dog, go to work, pick the kid up from school, get Christmas cards monogrammed, write thank-you note to your sister, bake cookies for the church bake sale…”

“And a man’s brain?” I ask, taking my first delicious sip of latte.

“Oh, God, I bet you’d only find about four things in it. Golf, car, women…,” she says with some scorn.

“Money.”

“Well, that pretty much covers it,” she says, handing me my change.

I haven’t gone very far when I come to one of those standing cutouts where you can put your face in and take a picture. This one is of Tom and Becky. The theme-park aspect of Hannibal—minus Jim, of course—is getting me down. I am standing, staring at the Tom and Becky photo op, when I run into Jerry, who’s just come from breakfast with Tom (no relation to Sawyer) at the Becky Thatcher Restaurant.

Jerry and I greet each other like long-lost friends. It’s as if days, weeks have passed since we’ve seen each other instead of a matter of hours. He tells me that Tom has apparently discovered a 1964 Cadillac in a repair shop and he’s got his head in the engine. Jerry’s just tooling around.

It’s hot out and there’s a bench under a tree so we sit while I sip my coffee. “Hey, Jerry,” I say, “can I take your picture in the Tom Sawyer cutout?”

Jerry looks over at the cutout. “Nope,” he says.

“How about the Becky Thatcher?”

“How about I take yours?” he says.

I stare into my coffee for that one. We both demur.

“Well, I learned a few things about Hannibal,” Jerry says. “You can get all the tourist information you want, but if you’re traveling on a boat you can’t get a loaf of bread or a quart of milk. You need a car to go to the mall to do that.”

“Yeah, just like all the other towns we’ve been to. And you need a picture ID to use the Internet at the library.”

We groan. “Don’t you just love this country?” he says.

“I sure do.”

Then he pulls out a notebook. “So,” he says, “I ran some numbers and I figured some things out.” He shows me a page of numbers for fuel, for piloting, for a few marinas along the way. For miscellaneous supplies. But not for any boat rental. This is very generous of him. “So,” he says, “if this is okay with you, I can take you to Cairo.”

“This is great with me,” I tell him. I want to leap up and hug him, but I refrain.

If I can get to Cairo, I’m thinking to myself, then I’ll have made it to zero in one boat. If I get to zero, I’ll change boats and head south. Somehow. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. Maybe I’ll hop that tow.

*   *   *

Leaving Jerry, I wander through Hannibal, looking for Jim. I see the Mark Twain Museum, Tom & Huck’s Taxi, the Becky Thatcher Restaurant, Becky’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, Cardiff Hill with the statue of Tom and Huck. Tourist office. In this Disneyfied setting, it’s all lily white. There’s no Jim’s Bar, Jim’s Gas Station, even. No hint that Jim or any black man in literature was ever around.

I walk into the Becky Thatcher Restaurant where I’m told I can get a good home-cooked meal, though the sign over the counter warns WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ANYONE. The place is packed, but there’s only one black man hunched over his meal at the bar and two black women, sitting in a booth. The women look away when I glance at them.

The restaurant is done in railroad decor. Railroad cars run along the walls. There are railroad pictures, a railroad calendar, a shelf of toy railroad bridges. There’s a framed clipping that reads THE MARK TWAIN ZEPHYR REACHES THE END OF THE LINE. And a handwritten sign, maybe ten years old, that reads WANTED: RAILROAD PLATES.

I sit at a table across from three older women and a man. As I’m waiting for Annie, the seventyish-year-old waitress wearing a rhinestone “A” on her chest, I listen to one of the women who does all the talking. “So given the life he’s had, you know, I do what I can. You’d be surprised. A little love can go a long ways.”

Annie comes by to take the order of the people behind me and I hear a man commenting to her that she looks good. “Just lost thirty pounds,” Annie says. “That way I got to get all new clothes.”

“You know when he first came to me, well you know how he was…,” the woman doing the talking at the table nearby says.

“He’d just stay wherever he wanted. You know, in his chair. He’d had such a rough time of it, I didn’t want to rush him or put any pressure on him, you know.”

Annie comes by and asks me what I’ll have. I feel as if I’m starving and I order the lunch special—baked chicken, hominy, green beans, rice, salad with western dressing, and iced tea. “You gonna want pie? We got lots of homemade pie.” I glance over to where the pie is as Annie rings out apple, cherry, blueberry, coconut, banana cream, and key lime. I am tempted, but I see that the flies are resting pretty much all over the pies, which aren’t covered.

“I’ll pass on the pie.”

“I just let him be. Sooner or later he’ll want something and come to me. Oh he’ll sleep with me, you know, but during the day, never sure when he’ll come around.…”

I’m thinking foster child. Shell-shocked husband. I am deeply engrossed in their conversation and find myself annoyed when the people behind me start to speak in loud voices and I can’t hear what the woman says. I see the solemn nods of her companions.

Annie brings my meal. “You sure you aren’t going to want a piece of pie?”

I shake my head and dig in. The chicken is moist and comes off the bones. The hominy has a nice texture and a buttery taste. The green beans were probably cooking for the last few days, but I am starving and it definitely is a home-cooked meal.

“You know,” the woman goes on, shaking her head now, with real sadness in her eyes, “some days I don’t even see him until I open a can of tuna and then he just jumps right up on the counter.” They’re paying their check now. “I don’t just have a pet,” she tells her companions, “I have a friend.”

They head out and a new crew is waiting to sit down. Annie comes and waits on them and the man says, “Annie, you look real good.”

“Well, I just lost forty pounds. I needed new clothes.” Incredible. She’s lost ten pounds since I walked in.

*   *   *

Time is running out and I need to do what I came for. Perhaps I’ve been avoiding it, I think, as I head to the Mark Twain boyhood home. The entire site is a tourist attraction and I cannot begin to imagine my father living anywhere near this spot. More and more I feel his presence slipping away. It’s getting late and Jerry wants to make Two Rivers Marina in Rockport, Illinois, before dark.

I have to skip much of the first part of the tour and the museum and I head right to the house itself. Making my way through the house, I am unsettled by the cardboard cutouts of Mark Twain that pop up everywhere. The only other people in the boyhood home, well, person really, is a man whose wife cannot climb the stairs. I can see her below. She’s wearing a pink pantsuit and is quite large.

Her husband, to accommodate her, is shouting down the stairs the various objects he sees. “It’s a bedroom with an old brass bed, table, washbasin, baby picture.” I rush through the rooms. My father was right. It is a tiny tiny house. But I see no evidence of a house next door where my father claimed he lived.

I decide to try the gift shop. I poke around all the usual Mark Twain memorabilia. Mark Twain books, CDs, videos, maps, statues, Huck and Tom matching mugs, bookends, Becky Thatcher dolls. (Still no Jim.) I want to find a photograph. Proof. Evidence. Why does this matter to me that my father lived next door to Mark Twain’s house? Why does it matter if he told the truth or lied? But it matters suddenly more than I can say. What is a family, in the end, except its memories? And the tales it has carried on.

An older woman wearing a thin strand of pearls and a powder blue sweater stands at the cash register. “Excuse me,” I ask her, “but my father lived in Hannibal a long time ago. He said he lived next door to this house. But I don’t see how he could have. Do you have a picture of this street from, say, 1922?”

“No, I’m sorry … I don’t believe so.” I’m turning to leave when she seems to hesitate. She thinks for a moment, tapping a pencil in her hand. “I do have a picture of the last time Mark Twain visited Hannibal. That was in 1902. He’s standing in front of this house. I think it has some of the street.…”

She goes to the back of the store and returns with a photograph. In it Mark Twain stands in front of his boyhood home, wearing his classic white suit. A photographer taking his picture is also in the picture. A woman walks by in a white dress and bonnet, carrying a dark umbrella. She wears lace-up boots. A spotted dog sits at the photographer’s feet.

This was taken during Twain’s last visit to Hannibal. Of course he couldn’t have known that at the time. He had simply returned to his boyhood town, which he had written about so lovingly. In the picture his head is turned to the left and a man seems to be speaking to him. Children are gawking. And beside the children is a house that no longer exists. It is a wood frame with back steps that lead to a small balcony. A fence separates it from Twain’s house. And I know my father lived there.

My father was a man of stories. And his own set of broken dreams. He was an enigma to me and I knew little of his personal life. But if he got you in his clutches, he’d talk your head off. Once my mother and I went shopping and we left Larry listening to my father. We came back three hours later and Larry was in the same place. My father said, “So, I’ve got a sore throat and Larry’s got an earache.” The thing about my father’s stories was that they were pretty much one-way events, monologues that as he got older and older he’d get himself trapped inside of and my mother would make a circular gesture with her hands and say, “Here he goes again.”

He was himself a very poor listener, but he could go on and on about his friends long gone, about his business interests that had never quite succeeded. He wanted to be as rich as the people he tried to impress. He loved commerce, buildings rising, the smell of paint. Yet he cried during movies and musicals. He couldn’t watch anything violent or sad. In truth my father was a very secretive man, and in the end he didn’t really succeed. He sold buildings and the profits went to taxes. He sold buildings for peanuts that later went for millions. This was one of the things, among the many, that made my mother bitter.

I knew little of what was really in his heart. Most of what we knew of him were his rages. Nobody could do anything right, and nothing was ever good enough. In the end, life was too entropic. The center pulled apart. He could not control every waiter, every family member. His rages could not make everything right. In his later years he was calmer. He liked to sit in his chair in Milwaukee and look out at the woods behind the assisted living center where they lived. In the winter, just before he died, he and I sat, a heavy snow falling, watching a squirrel secure its nest.

During my last visits he grew confused. He thought the pictures on the wall were real people and he began talking to them. He talked to his brother. He talked to his grandchildren, who were living in Hawaii and Brazil.

When I came into the room, he looked up and asked, “Whatever happened to our vaudeville act, Mary? Did you ever take it on the road?”

I did a little shuffle and soft-shoe. Disappointed, he shook his head. “Nobody will come and see that,” he said.

I am standing in the gift shop of the Mark Twain boyhood home next door to the house where my father told me he lived as a young man. I am standing beside this aging woman in a powder blue sweater and pearls and I start to weep. I sob. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t expect this.”

She nods, “Oh, I understand. Doesn’t matter how old they were.…”

I walk out to compose myself. I stand in front of this house. I walk up and down the block, which has been turned into a Mark Twain theme park, and I know that my father walked here. He stood on this street and looked at the river. He worked in a department store called Klein’s. I stand on this little street where tourists push past me en route to Judge Clemens’s office or Becky Thatcher’s house and gaze down toward the river. My father stood on this spot. He saw the river every day. What he told me was true.

I go back into the gift shop. “Is that picture for sale?” I ask her.

“Yes it is. It’s eight dollars,” the woman says. I nod. “Let me wrap it for you.”

She wraps it carefully in tissue, secures it between two pieces of cardboard. As she wraps it, I think how I want to pick up the phone and ask him more. There are a million things I’ll never know and I feel a terrible regret. As I head back to the boat, I know that something is over for me in this journey. Tom and Jerry stand impatiently on the dock, waiting. Samantha Jean is doing her guard dog thing on the flybridge. I should hurry, but I do not quicken my pace.

As I approach the boat, I see a small green step the boys have rigged up for me. “The boating equivalent of the red carpet,” Tom yuks. Back on board Tom and Jerry are ready to rock ’n’ roll. I go to put away my things as Jerry shows me a shelf he has built for me under the sink. “You can keep your books and things there,” he says. “Like your work.”

I drop my backpack onto the bed. A single chocolate mint rests on my pillow. “Tom,” I say, going up to the helm, “did you put a chocolate mint on my pillow?”

He blushes as much as Tom ever will. “You know,” he says, “special treatment. Like a hotel.”

It’s time to push off, but we’re in a tricky spot. We have to back way up in order to exit the narrow channel that leads out of the marina. I hear Tom telling Jerry to “spin her hard. Give her all you’ve got.” Jerry is tense, nervous about backing into another boat. “You’ve got a good hundred feet,” Tom tells him, and then as he takes her back, “Okay, that’s enough. You’re good to go.”

As we pull out of the narrow channel, Tom points to a tow anchored on the side. “Hey, we saw her yesterday. She didn’t make it. She didn’t lock through.”

A barge loaded with freight passes us at full throttle and we get bumped in its wake. We’re back on the river, chugging along. Hannibal recedes. I’m moving on. I’m leaving all this behind.

*   *   *

At Lock and Dam 22 we have a seven-minute wait. “He sure knows his lock,” Jerry says. Tom’s come below and he’s hanging on to a ladder outside that is covered in cobwebs and bugs. “June bugs,” Tom says.

I don’t bother to correct him, but under my breath say, “Mayflies.”

“You know, two years ago, there were so many over at the Pettibone marina that the harbormaster had to get a snowplow to get rid of them.”

“Yuk,” I say, pushing off the wall.

Since we’ve got a little time to kill, Tom tells me he’s bought some things for Kim. “You know, cuz she helped so much. And cuz she saved Sammy’s life.”

“That’s nice of you,” I tell him.

“I got her a necklace. Wanta see it?”

I tell him I do. He lets go of his line and we both head inside, where he reaches into a cubby above my head and pulls out a brown paper bag. The boat gives a little rock, taking on the exiting barge’s wake, and its contents spill onto the couch. I see the necklace, and a gold box, and a pair of silver handcuffs. Tom scoops up the handcuffs with his sheepish smile. “Joke,” he says.

“Okay!” Jerry calls. “We’re locking through!”

We float free and as soon as we come out Tom and I go above. The river’s open. It’s a clear evening and I’m piloting now. If all goes well, we should reach Two Rivers by dark. Tom’s sitting with Samantha Jean in his lap, keeping me company. “You know what I’ll always remember,” Tom says with a laugh. “That night when the barge brought us into Keokuk in the dark. That’s the kind of people you meet out here.”

I nod, moving into the bend.

“You know, this river is a big unknown. She’s a bitch and she can take you down if she wants to. Don’t quote me on that.”

I’m steering and laughing. A flock of pelicans soars above. “But she’s big and she’s mean and she’s full of the unknown.”

Ahead we’re coming up to a barge, heading north, and I get up from the captain’s chair. “You want to take her, Tom?”

“No, you stick with her.”

“Really?” I’m nervous. I’ve never passed another ship before. Thus far my driver’s education has consisted of a very wide stretch of empty river. “Are you sure?”

He nods. “You take her.”

I’m looking at the barge and its place in the river. I’m seeing which way the tow driver is heading. “I think starboard.”

Tom shakes his head. “Port to port.”

I don’t agree. From the way she’s coming, I think I want her to pass me on the starboard side, but Tom’s pretty adamant. I’m waiting for the tow to give a signal and I’m at the point where I need to decide when Jerry peeks his head through the little window below. He seems surprised to see me at the wheel, but he doesn’t skip a beat. “Take her on the starboard. On one whistle.”

“Starboard?” I ask.

“Yeah, their pilot just called.”

I give Tom a little wink and he looks away. At Mile 287.1 I get my one whistle and pass the barge on the starboard side. We catch a little wake and I point her nose into the troughs.

“That’s good,” Tom says. “Now take your river back.”