Pilgrims (10 page)

The next morning, she called Norbert and he asked her if she meant it when she said she'd go to Rome for him. “Yes, I told you I would and I will.” “My lawyer thinks I am crazy to send $150,000 to someone I never even met,” he said. “But it's Mother's money, not mine. And she died in the peace of knowing I would keep my word to her. She knew that her boy's grave would be properly marked.” And Norbert started to cry. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You'd think a man could talk about this and not blubber, wouldn't you. I mean it was sixty years ago. Jesus.” He gave his nose a honk. “He was just a great kid. A great great kid. He got all the bad luck, I got all the good.” He told her he had once performed in the circus, shooting a lighted cigarette out of the mouth of a lady acrobat as she swung on a trapeze and him with his back to her, aiming the rifle over his shoulder, a small rearview mirror attached to his glassses, and later in the show he was wrapped in chains, wrists handcuffed, ankles strapped, and thrown in a tank full of piranhas that went into a feeding frenzy when he dropped in. And then it came out that the rifle shot
blanks and the lighted cigarette had a small explosive device in the tip and there were no piranhas, just ordinary minnows and the frothy water was caused by the carbonated crystals in his pants. “A mob was waiting in the dark as we took down the tent that Sunday night, and I had to be smuggled out in a crate marked
DANGEROUS SNAKES
with two big pythons who were busy swallowing rats. When you escape lynching, everything that happens afterward is a Bonus. I've had a good life. No regrets. Just this one. I never fixed up my brother's grave. I'm counting on you, kid.”

M
r. Keillor went off on a long lecture tour of the West and Eloise was unable to reach him for two weeks, so all the commotion he'd aroused fell on Margie. Eloise had other projects on her plate now—a community concert series, a bike trail around the lake, a plan to consolidate Lake Wobegon schools with the Millet schools, the making of a Lake Wobegon web site, a plan to turn the old depot into a historical museum—every week some brilliant new idea burst forth to occupy her for a few days and then dwindled into the shadows as she got caught up in something new. The trip to Rome was now in Eloise's rearview mirror. Her last word on the subject was that it might make a good story on CNN if Margie would organize a parade to kick it off. A parade in March? No way, said Margie. Too cold. Eloise was telling all Rome applicants to call Margie. The day after Thanatopsis she got sixty-seven calls—
thank God
for voice mail
—one message after another: “Margie, it's Ronnie, Ronnie Schaefer. How're you doing? Listen, I heard that you're planning this trip to Rome in April and Lonnie and I talked about
it and we'd like to come with if you still have openings. Give me a call, would you?” One after another. And fifty-six the next day. People walked up to her in the middle of Sunday morning Mass as the choir sang an irritating song called “I've Got the Joy Joy Joy Joy Down in My Heart”—Carl wanted to go to the Contemporary service now, it began an hour later. She stood there clapping along because if you didn't clap and smile people thought you were an atheist or had PMS, so she clapped unhappily, and people thrust notes in her hands, saying
Put us down for Rome.
Marlene & Ken and There are ten Luegers on the list for Rome,
not eight as Jon told you on Wednesday. Ten (10). Please call if
you have any questions
.

There would've been more calls except that people in Lake Wobegon knew Mr. Keillor's penchant for making up things and so his offer of a Free Ride to Rome was not given as much credence as if, say, Gary Eichten, popular WLT newscaster and host of
Eichten
at the Mike
, had said it. Nonetheless, Margie got tired of telling people that Mr. Keillor was very busy and to hold your horses and not get your hopes up. Darlene asked her six times in two days, “When will I hear about Rome?” and Margie told her that there was a strict quota on non-Catholics traveling to Rome and they were required to carry a rosary. Not required that they actually use it, just have it in their possession.

“Well, I'll be damned,” said Darlene.

Margie skipped lunch at the Chatterbox for three days. She drove to Little Falls to do her grocery shopping. She turned the phone off and pulled the shades.

Judy Ingqvist called to say that she and David couldn't come
since the trip to Rome fell the week before Palm Sunday—D-Day was March 25—so that wouldn't work for them.

“I'm sorry,” said Margie. But she wasn't sorry at all. David Ingqvist was a pill. Anytime you tried to make pleasant conversation with him, he had to tell you how horrified he was by George W. Bush. Margie was a Democrat, so was Carl, but enough is enough. Obama was in office, so let's move on. But it wasn't W who got the pastor's goat so much as his brother Michael. Four years younger, an All-American tackle at Concordia—or he would've been, but he got nailed for steroids and dropped out, turned to pro wrestling as the Messenger of Death, doing nasty pile drivers and spinal twists, then came to Jesus by parachuting into a Billy Graham rally at Daytona Speedway that made the front page of the
New York Times
. Went to Wheaton and took over a tiny geriatric church in Denver and grew it from 75 members to 14,000 in three years by communicating to people that God Is Not an Angry God, He Is a Happy God. You couldn't mention Michael to David, nor even mention Colorado. He would get silent and leave the room.

Marilyn said that she and Daryl would love to come. Or she would love to, and he was agreeable. “He doesn't want to do anything with me anymore. I don't know why. He'll go to a basketball game with anybody who wants to go but if I want to do something, he finds some excuse not to.”

Eloise called to ask if it would be okay to bring Fred.

“Absolutely not.”

“Please. I'm afraid he's going to leave me.”

“No. Too much drama.”

“He quit drinking. Honest. He went to Hazelden after that nonsense in Sauk Centre and he's dry now. But I think he went into treatment just to get away from me and meet some needy young woman and I believe he's met her.”

“The rule is Spouses Only. Fred is not a spouse. He's a louse.”

Eloise started to cry. “He's all I have in this world. Hazelden was so good for him and then he met her and now she's convinced him that he needs to go on his life journey with her. How can he do that to me?
How can he throw me over after all I've
done for him?”

The next day, as Margie was getting home from school, Eloise drove up. She was a mess. Bloated, red-eyed from crying, her long hair tangled up in back, her linen pants a mass of wrinkles. Margie offered her coffee. Eloise asked for vodka. No ice.

“I was the one who got him into AA, for God's sake. Ten years he and I were together. Every Saturday night I made supper for him. I listened to his troubles. He has a genetic intolerance of winter and a compulsive fireplace obsession. He poured out his heart to me. I went to bed with him. I held him until he went to sleep. That time he went crazy at the Fireman's Cookout in St. Cloud with a fire hose between his legs and he shot water at people and knocked them down, I was the one who got him out of jail and into couples counseling. We discovered there are three kinds of relationships—conflict-avoidance, validating, and volatile—and that ours was number three. That took six weeks and cost me $800. Then one very cold night he fell off the wagon and went to Sauk Centre and pissed on a policeman. I rescued him again. Shoveled him into Hazelden for six weeks and paid half the freight and now he goes off with this tootsie who stands up
in AA and tells a long story about what brought her there and he feels sorry for her and now he's
sleeping
with her. It absolutely breaks my heart.” And Eloise fell into Margie's arms and it sort of broke Margie's heart too. As bossy as Eloise was, nonetheless she had propped that man up and treated him with tender kindness and then he dropped her like a used Kleenex and took up with someone twenty-one years younger.

“I must be some kind of horrible person. That he couldn't wait to get away from me.”

“You're not a horrible person. He is.”

“I must be. People hate me.”

“Nobody hates you.”

“Yes, they do. I am just a bad person. I'm loud and controlling and I do nothing but make people miserable. My kids tell me that all the time. And they're right.”

Eloise said she wished she could kill herself. She finished the vodka. “Don't go getting into trouble now,” Margie said, and two minutes later, Eloise backed out of the driveway across the front lawn and destroyed two small spruces and a rosebush. Margie called Father Wilmer. “Eloise is in need of some help. I wonder if you could go over and talk to her.”

“About what?”

“Fred dumped her. You know about Fred.”

“I do,” Father said, with a sigh.

“Now she's gone to pieces and gotten drunk and she's driving around like a crazy person. Somebody needs to tell her to quit being mayor and move to Minneapolis where she can find a man who will be decent to her.”

He murmured something about how much good Eloise does
and maybe we should all rally around her and give her more support. “She doesn't need support. Support won't cut it. She needs intervention. Speak to her, Father. That's your job.”

Father said he would pray for her. Certainly. He would pray for her daily. “Is the trip to Rome on?” he said.

“If Eloise hangs herself with a coat hanger, the trip to Rome is not on.”

He said he would head over now and talk to her.

It was crazy, all the excitement about Mr. Keillor sending them to Rome and Margie having to deal with them all—visions of a 747 full of moochers and freeloaders, the loungers and widerides, the Sidetrack crowd, the investors in lottery tickets, and her the Shepherd of the Lurchers & Losers, trying to move them on and off buses and through crowded sites in a foreign city—great God, the thought of it. How to kill this ASAP?

She wrote up the notice and then decided not to send it out. Most people would recognize it as a fake, but some, blinded by greed, would not, and she did not care to hear their confessions. She wrote up another:

That might do the trick. The thought of teetotaling vegetarianism would pretty well kill off interest, she thought. But why not deal with the problem at its source—she got the Great Benefactor's address and sent him a note:

And that's what happened. Mr. Keillor's accountant, Mr. Ross, called from Minneapolis to say that what with Mr. Keillor's difficulties with the IRS over the claim of a three-week vacation on Antigua as a business expense—research for a screenplay—there wouldn't be money to cover an open invitation, but yes, $60,000 to cover expenses for the original twelve passengers, that would be okay, provided he could pay half now and half at the completion of the trip. “Fine,” said Margie. And she put a story in the
Herald Star
.