Lake Wobegon Days (48 page)

“I always meant to send you to Europe and I never did,” Charlotte said. “I meant to send you on a cruise to romantic places. That was always my dream, to send you and Daddy to Bermuda, Buenos Aires. Or China. China would be nice. Wouldn’t it? And now it’s too late.” Charlotte looked so sad, Ella said that she never had the slightest interest in going, which upset Charlotte. “You mean I was a fool to think that all those years?” she said. “I dreamed and hoped for nothing?”

“It was a nice thought,” Ella said, “and that’s what counts.”

“It’s the greatest disappointment of my life that I never sent you anywhere.”

“Oh, now. I’m very content. My brother was the traveler in the family. He didn’t need to be sent, he was gone before you ever noticed he’d been back.”

Her older brother, Spark, was a pioneer in Lake Wobegon aviation. He flew to St. Louis and back when he was nineteen. In 1925, following service in the Army Air Corps, he bought a Curtis-Ingham, flew straight from Lowe Stokes Field near Atlanta to the family farm west
of town and crashed in a field of beans and walked to the house and slept for twenty-seven hours while the neighbors came by to admire his uniform. He was tall and slender and strong as a whip, and he sported a full mustache, a white neckerchief, and a scar on his cheek. He had not flown nonstop because he was anxious to be home, he simply had a nonstop nature, and after a day on the ground, he was ready to take off, but the Ingham had busted a strut and his mother burst into tears if he so much as mentioned flying, so he took up farming for a year, which he hated, and the following fall, as soon as the beans were in and the field safe for takeoff, he revved up the Ingham and roared away into the sky. He went to Brazil, he went to the Arctic. Five years later, he disappeared on a flight over North Dakota. His mother listened at night for his engine overhead. No trace of him was ever found. Years later, Ella had his name carved on her parents’ grave marker.

The Class of 1960 saved up $322.65 in two years of holding car washes, dances, and a pancake breakfast, and then in our senior year, we doubled our capital with the lucrative popcorn and ice cream concession at football and basketball games. There was talk of giving it to the Junior Red Cross. The spring before, the Red Cross thermometer rose only to $34, a scandal, so in September, at our class meeting, President James Tollefson presiding, our adviser Miss Falconer suggested that we seniors turn our concession money over to good works. The Red Cross, she reminded us, is always there when you need it, providing help to people in floods, fires, earthquakes, famine, and epidemics. Schools smaller than ours raised hundreds of dollars every year. “I have a feeling that you’re mature enough to consider helping those less fortunate than ourselves,” she said. Donna Andreson, president of the J.R.C., said, “I think this would be the greatest thing we could do with this money and I think it’d be a wonderful example to other kids.” We voted it down, 69-7. She was so mad, she stalked out of the room and went and sat in the girls’ lavatory.

It was our money, though, and we had the right to spend it however we wanted to, and we didn’t want to give it to charity. We wanted
to
see
something from it. Russell suggested a big senior class blowout: shoot the wad, buy steak dinners, beer, hire a band, do it in Minneapolis where people know how to party. “Why not?” he said. “It’s our money.” But we were, as Donna said, “a class with high ideals.” Our ideals didn’t include the Red Cross but they didn’t include an orgy either. Most of us agreed with Donna Bunsen when she said, “I want our money to go for a gift to the school, to buy something that we’ll be remembered by.”

It was only September, we had eight months left, and yet nostalgia lay heavy on our hearts and the premonition that in real life we would cease to be special. In this quiet little pond, encouraged by doting teachers, we felt successful and shining in
some
way, but once graduated we would disappear into the crowd of faceless adults and be like everyone else, old, a little tired, disappointed, and things not work out. College would be too hard and flunk us; the Army would unmask us as cowards; marriage would turn sour and love would die. One way or another, we would find disgrace, as others had. A man who had quarterbacked the Leonards in 1951 when the team was 10-0 and went to Grand Forks and won the Potato Bowl: he was in St. Cloud Reformatory for stealing $219 from a blind person. A good student and a member of the Student Council, now doing time behind bars. There were others like him. When Donna Bunsen said, “I want our class gift to be something special that we can all be proud of,” she was right, and she didn’t have to add: “This may be one of the last things we’ll ever do right”—we all knew that.

Previous class gifts didn’t say much for them. The portrait of Henry Ford from the Class of 1920 honored a man nobody cared about; 1928’s trophy case was an embarrassment (half empty), and the marble water fountain, compliments of 1931, was a big waste of money. The gold auditorium curtain from 1951 was ugly, and the globe in the library was all but useless. The gift of the Class of 1917, it was a world that no longer existed. A plaster bust of Shakespeare was the legacy of 1947, a nice idea, but succeeding generations had gone to work on it with crayons and made the Bard look like an old cocktail waitress.

After we voted down the less fortunate, President Tollefson opened the floor for nominations and got (1) a stained-glass window, (2) a piano, (3) sending Clara the cook to cooking school (ha ha),
(4) a clock, (5) a student-citizenship trophy, and each had a few supporters and the rest of us groaned. That wasn’t what we wanted at all!

When Marjorie stood up, I thought she was going to nominate a gift to the missionaries, she was that sort of person. She focused her big watery green eyes on us and said, “I think we should do something to recognize teachers. We owe so much to them, and someday we’ll think back and remember, so I think the money should be spent on a tribute to teachers.” I couldn’t see Miss Falconer, our adviser, sitting in back, but she was probably beaming at Marjorie like a lighthouse. “I nominate an oil painting of a teacher who has been very important to us, and I nominate Miss Falconer as the teacher.”

She sat down to a great studious silence. President Tollefson wrote “Oil Painting, Miss Falconer” on the board. Then Miss Falconer herself rattled her necklace and stood up. “Oh, my dear Marjorie,” she said, sniffling. “I don’t know when I’ve ever felt more honored—just the idea is an honor, but I can’t let you do this, and I do mean this from the bottom of my heart: there are so
many
teachers, so many fine teachers who are much more deserving of this—for me, just having the
opportunity
to work with so many outstanding young people like yourselves, not only as a teacher but also, I’d like to think, as a friend—this has been reward enough for me.”

Donna Andreson then seconded the nomination. Fern Shoenecker said she was ready to vote. She moved that the nominations be closed. James wasn’t sure about parliamentary procedure. “Vote!” a bunch of girls said. “It’s a democracy.” Eva Wirtz said she withdrew her nomination of the piano, she was in favor of the painting. A bunch of girls clapped, a larger bunch now; the tide was moving toward Miss Falconer in oil. She said she’d be glad to leave the room if we wanted. “No! you don’t need to leave the room,” the girls said. I looked at Lance and he looked at me. We were sick. “Say something,” he whispered. I couldn’t think of what to say. This was some kind of
joke.
We all had Miss Falconer, we knew who she was. She had it in for boys. In choir, every day she looked around to see who hadn’t learned his part—she could smell fear like an animal—and made him stand up and die for a few minutes. To think that we would perpetuate her in a work of art was something we could look back on in later years and get sick all over again. Miss Falconer was the last person I’d want to see in a
painting: oil, finger, or any other kind. She had, all by herself, cured me of a longstanding fascination with choirs. She had almost cured me of music.

The first choir I heard was the Lutheran. Aunt Flo’s house was across the alley from Lake Wobegon Lutheran, and at ten-thirty Sunday morning, as our little flock of Brethren sat on her kitchen chairs and warbled, the chickens taking the melody, the geese and ducks in the vicinity of it, we heard the Lutherans strike up a processional like powerful oarsmen pulling away from the line. I knew that the Lutherans were on weak ground doctrinally and many of them were worldly and smoked and drank beer and even went to dances, but when I heard them sing, I could imagine the choir marching through the church in their magnificent robes of spun gold, the congregation standing, and I envied them the wealth, the splendor, of their song.

Down the street and over one block was Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, and when the Lutherans paused for breath, I heard the strains of mass, Fr. Emil’s voice rising and falling in Latin—those mysterious Catholics! In the spring, the windows open, birds singing, two blocks apart the two choirs squared off against each other in a wonderful match of sanctity, and I wished I was marching with one of them.

A warm Monday morning in April—the first warm morning, suddenly spring—downstairs, Grandma is whistling under her breath, and Mother comes to the stairs and sings our names. And I sing back, “I don’t have any socks. Where’s my shirt? She won’t get out of the bathroom.” But it really is spring and warm out, and today we beg for the luxury of cold cereal instead of oatmeal, Mother’s soul food, and I try to leave the house without my scarf, in a spring jacket, and this time I win, though Mother sings, “You’ll be sorry. You’ll catch cold. Don’t blame me.” And I burst out the door before she can change her mind, and it is spring. Yesterday was cloudy, dull, cold, quiet (or maybe I had wax in my ears), but this morning the birds are out in force, a kingdom of robins and bobwhites and meadowlarks camped out along the route to school, singing invisibly from the trees and tall
weeds thousands of bright notes like reflections of light on water—singing out against this dreary town streaked with mud, the brown grass with the souvenirs of dogs, the last stubborn patches of ice in the woods—and up the street under the bare trees and down from the hill come trios and quartets and duets of children, some of them singing, some of them hitting the singers.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,

We are torturing the teachers, we are breaking all the rules.

We broke into his office and we tickled the principool,

And truth goes marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Teacher hit me with a ruler.

I knocked her on the bean

With a rotten tangerine

And she ain’t gonna teach no more.

And then, in Mrs. Swenson’s seventh-grade class, we stand by our desks and sing with all our hearts, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. For purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain.” It is then, after we sit down and Mrs. Swenson says, “Take out a clean sheet of paper and number from one to fifteen,” that I suddenly remember why I was dreading today in school. Not because of this test—it’s current events, my best subject. Monday is choir day, and today we all go down to the lunchroom and Miss Falconer is going to drill us again in three songs she has been drilling us in since January for the all-district choral concert in May, and which we sang last Monday even worse than we did when we started, and the worst of all were us tenors.

Miss Falconer is an elegant lady, almost like a duchess compared to our mothers—she wears real jewelry and tailored suits and spike heels and white blouses with ruffles, and her glasses, studded with precious gems, hang from a pearl chain around her neck. She is so beautiful, like a lady out of a magazine, that when she looks at me, I can’t look back at her, I look down. “Look at me!” she barks. “How do you expect to sing in rhythm if you don’t look at me? I’m here to direct you.”

Rhythm isn’t our problem in the tenor section so much as the notes
are. We do drag a little but only because each one of us is waiting for the boy next to him to sing the note so he can get it. And just in case the note is wrong, we sing very softly. “I can’t hear you, tenors,” she has said over and over. “Look at me. Watch my hands. And—” And we sing worse, so badly she stops us and sighs a long sigh and says, “This is not that hard, children.”