Pilgrims (13 page)

She believed this with a pure heart and her faith made her a radiant bride. Everybody said so. Their parents saw them together and wept for joy. “You are perfect for each other,” Myrtle said. And it was lovely to be a couple and walk hand in hand at twilight and be greeted with smiles and hellos. A boost in status. So she never went away to college as she had planned—the catalogues of St. Mary's, Loyola, the College of St. Catherine sat on her bookshelf. She earned her B.S. by piecework, much later, after the kids were in high school, at the online University of Western Dakota, and graduated at the age of forty-eight, no party, no gifts, no photographs—she simply got her degree as a PDF file and downloaded it and printed it on heavy paper, framed it, and that was that. Mr. Halvorson hired her cheap—$16,000 a year, well below the bottom of the pay scale—and of course she said, “Gee, thanks,” having been brought up to, and now she taught Shakespeare and Whitman and Ole Rolvaag to a whole roomful of Carls with a few Margies here and there. No more the poet, except for the occasional verse, on request:

“Oh that's so nice,” said Myrtle. And that was the story of Marjorie. She was such a nice person. She did nice things for people.
A failure as an individual, she became half of a couple
. Mother told her, the day she married Carl, “Life is what it is. People want to make it into a carnival and it just isn't. You have to take the good along with the bad. When you have a fight, don't go to bed angry. Kiss and make up and tomorrow will be better.” Mother taught her to get crusted eggs off the bottom of a frying pan by heating soapy water in it, and she was right about that, but now Margie thought that there was something to be said for carnival going. So many miserable people sitting in offices doing meaningless work and pretending to like it and gradually getting stupider and stupider, defeated by the sheer boredom of their lives. Trapped by complicated apparatus—home, family, community—designed to make you happy happy happy but instead it's a prison. You have no real friends. People who know you and love you treat you like dirt and strangers treat you pretty darned well. Her sister Linda went to Costa Rica for a week and danced on the beach in a crowd of men and women who spoke no English and had the time of her life. They were so much nicer than the ones she went to school with. That's the bitter fact of life. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Two thirds of all second marriages. Three fourths of all third marriages! Evidently, experience is not a good teacher.

Well, so what? She still had ambitions, however remote. She was bigger in the hips, and had a broader nose than Audrey's, but did have the narrow shoulders and small breasts, and dark hair cut in a pixie. Didn't have the voice—had a Minnesota voice and said, “Oh for cryin' out loud” and “What kind of a deal is that?” and “Okay then, bye now,” but she felt a certain Audreyness down deep. That indefinable
bellissima
quality. Everyone had some of that in them. She had two love letters from her father to her mother, summer, 1944, addressed to “My dearest Sweetheart” which he was not the type to say, nor “You overwhelm me with joyful desire” nor “I am enchanted by your picture and counting the hours until I hold you once again in my arms” which were in the letters too, and also “You are the only one for me, the great treasure of my days, the happiness that I never dared hope would be mine.” In real life, Daddy was sarcastic, quick to anger, tight with money, and never mentioned enchantment, but it was still in his heart somewhere, whatever led him to write, “How lovely to be with you last night on the porch and to kiss you over and over and let my hand rest near your heart.” Though he'd become a sour man mesmerized by wrestlers on TV screeching, baring their teeth like chimpanzees, swinging folding chairs, nonetheless he had some romantic in him. After all, he had cried when he walked her up the aisle.

She imagined that he sat on the porch with Mother and took a piece of wood and carved himself a little puppet whom he named Marjorie because he was lonely and wanted a daughter who would love him but he was a rough man who yanked the strings and made her dance when she didn't feel like it and so she never became a real girl because she had no genuine feelings of
her own until she saw the movie
Roman Holiday
and here she was in Rome, the fount of true feeling, where, she felt, either she would win Carl back or she would leave him forever.

Why spend years agonizing over it?

Why can't you figure out in seven days how you feel about someone?

N
orbert Norlander died a few hours after she had phoned him from near the Spanish Steps and his lawyer called her with the news. The phone chirped as she was taking a shower at 9:30
A.M.
Late night in Oklahoma. She stood naked, dripping, by the bathroom sink, looking at herself in the mirror. The lawyer was polite, professional. She told Margie that the old man had simply lain down in bed that night and never awoke. “It was very peaceful.”

“Just the way he would've wanted to go.”

“Indeed. So—let me get to the point. In his most recent will, Norbert claims you are his daughter and his kids would like to clarify that.”

All she could think was
What a sweetie pie that gruff old Norwegian
was
. In his gratitude, he had adopted her. She thought he had gone bonkers in the last phone conversation she'd had with him, but no.

“Is that so? Are you his daughter? His kids don't remember him saying anything about this.”

“Well, his kids don't have anything to do with it. I don't remember him talking about them either.”

“Do you have any proof?”

“Proof? I think the fact that he sent me $150,000 to go to Rome says something about how he felt.”

“That was from his mother's estate, but never mind.” The lawyer inhaled slowly. “Look. The kids don't want some long draggedout court case. They just want to settle this. They're willing to offer $250,000 for this whole thing to just go away.”

And a door opened in her mind's eye, a door to the bright blue sky with a few white clouds drifting in it. “I think a half million would be better.”

The lawyer inhaled again. “I can offer you as much as three hundred fifty. I recommend you take it. I think that when you stop to think about attorney's fees and the years it would take for this to go through the courts—”

Margie said she thought $350,000 would be just fine. She gave the lawyer the address of Associated Federal in Minnesota. And hung up. She sat down on the toilet. Hard to grasp. Too hard. A woman named Maria called her from New York in January and one thing led to another, and she did a good deed for an old man, and now this. Poor old guy. You read stories like this, she thought—a lonely tycoon leaves a million dollars to a woman who gave him back rubs, or a kind neighbor who mowed his yard, or the pizza delivery boy.

So where were his kids when he lay dying? Skiing in Aspen? They couldn't be all that devoted if they didn't know how bad he wanted Gussie's grave decorated. Probably they'd refused to go
to Rome. They didn't even know he was all banged up in a nursing home and fixing to check out. So phooey on them. She'd take the money. Damned right she would.

She came down to breakfast and heard Evelyn ripping into some rich guy in a story in
USA Today
who had lost half his fortune to Bernie Madoff and now had to sell his homes in Kennebunkport, Santa Fe, and Bainbridge Island. “Well, boo hoo. Poor little you. Tell us about it. People are homeless and starving to death and you want to live in six different places at once. Let me tell you something. Argentina is not weeping for you and neither am I. Just get over yourself and suck it up and find something useful to do other than invest in junk bonds and ride around in boats drinking gin martinis. This is life, honey buns. It isn't a rehearsal. You're living on the same planet as everyone else so wake up and smell the coffee. And I mean it.”

Margie looked up Norbert on the Internet again. Northland Oil. He'd inherited from his father a chunk of an island off the Norwegian coast that turned out to have vast oil fields under it and from that he'd earned a small fortune. Like a true Norwegian, he kept his cards close to his chest, and the two bios she found were vague about amounts, but he'd given two million to the Tulsa Art Museum, so there was serious money around. She thought she should tell someone. Father Wilmer. Or Carl. In the past three months, she had, barely lifting a finger, realized a half million dollars. Success Comes to Margie Schoppenhorst.

She had accepted the $150,000 for herself and Carl to go to Rome on a patriotic pilgrimage to honor an American fighting man who'd given his life for his country, along with the mem
bers of her book club. She was not stingy. No, not at all. She had called up Father Wilmer one afternoon, and told him, “We're going to Rome the end of March. You want to come with?”

“Oh, that's too kind of you,” he said, and she could hear him about to say
Sure, you bet
, getting ready to spit it out. “You can find someone who's a lot more fun than me. I'd only make people uneasy. Especially the Lutherans.”

“No,” she said. “We have a spot for you. I want you to come. Please come along. I am happy to pay your way.”

“Well,” he said, “a person only gets this chance once. I do have some cash squirreled away in a pastoral retreat budget. This sounds like just the ticket.” But she had offered to pay—she didn't hoard her good luck. She had not offered to pay for the others, but then Mr. Keillor took care of that, so it wasn't a problem. But she hadn't been greedy. She had shared.

And now she felt no moral qualms at all about collecting a windfall. She had done the neighborly thing and reached out to Mr. Norlander in his last days and she had brought closure to an old story in his life and lent him some peace as he rode off into the sunset. And she had reaped a bucket of gold. Good for her.

V
acation days! Free to go where you please. She was in high spirits all day and the next. Carl and Daryl wanted to go on a double-decker bus—
Fine! Go!
—and off they went. Eloise collapsed into bed and so did Clint and Irene. Okay for them. Let the sleepers go sleep, she could sleep when she got home. Weariness is only a feeling, you don't have to obey it. Sleep can be postponed. There's coffee. That helps.

She visited the Keats-Shelley house, a tiny shrine with a lock of Keats's hair, a pair of his socks, a box of his shoes, two letters from Byron, a teacup, a golf club, a 5-iron.

She and Maria had planned to meet for coffee at a café near the banks of the Tiber. She walked and walked toward where she thought the river was, but didn't check her map, for fear of looking like a tourist. Finally, she saw the coffee bar and stepped through the open door into a beehive of people coming and going. A narrow room. A pleasant aroma of coffee and oranges. She took a deep breath and felt a buzz in her head. No lounging around. Customers stood at the long bar of granite and stainless steel and ordered their coffee from the barmen bopping back and
forth between the espresso machine and the cooler, a hundred bottles of booze on shelves against a mirror, and when your coffee came, you downed it and out the door you went. There was room for a few loungers at three small tables along the wall. Next to a cold chest full of ice cream. Photographs on the wall of Rome in horse-and-buggy days. From the radio came a throbbing baritone singing about his broken heart. A box of breath mints by the register. She took a pack and put down a ten-euro note and ordered her coffee and,
bing bing bing
, a tiny cup was set down in front of her and her change, and she dropped two breath mints into the coffee and stirred it. The man next to her was studying her but he said nothing. She drank the coffee in one gulp and it wasn't bad. It could've been worse. She ordered another, and then her phone rang. It was Maria saying she couldn't make it because her mother had taken a turn for the worse.

She looked around and thought the man next to her was on the verge of talking to her. He was looking at her in the mirror, through the rows of liquor bottles, and when their eyes met there, he looked down at his drink. It smelled of licorice. He was a beautiful man in his thirties with black hair slicked back, tortoise-shell glasses, a black jacket, jeans.

Her coffee came and this time she didn't put breath mints in it. She sipped it. Bitter, but in a good way. The man next to her ordered another drink. Maybe he was getting up his courage to ask her to go somewhere with him, come to his home and see his etchings. Maybe this happened all the time in Rome. And what if he did? What if he said, “You're an American, aren't you? I thought so. I love America. I've been there a dozen times. I live not far from here. Would you like to come and see my artwork?
I am a painter. I'd love to paint you. Have you ever been painted? I think you'd be magnificent. The light is still good. What do you say?” Would she go? Yes, she might. And an hour later, she'd be sitting naked on a couch and he'd be gazing at her body, a big canvas in front of him, a palette in his left hand. And then he'd offer her a drink to relax her. And then…

The man said, “You're American?”

“Yes, I am.”

“
Bellissima
. We were delighted when you elected Obama.”

“So were we.”

“And then the inauguration. My gosh. Aretha Franklin singing in front of the Capitol. And what a speech he gave!”

The man was Italian. Paolo. They shook hands. He was slight, with beautiful hands with long fingers. He taught American literature at a university in Milan. He loved Fitzgerald, Updike, Flannery O'Connor. Did she read those writers?

“I do,” she said. “I teach high school English. We read
The
Great Gatsby
. And an Updike story, ‘Pigeon Feathers,' they like. Not O'Connor. Too dark for my kids.”

He wanted to talk about Fitzgerald, she being from Minnesota and all. The movie
Benjamin Button
—had she seen it? (No.) And she wanted him to be somebody who would take her to a building with a tiny cage elevator and up they'd go to the fifth floor and into an old high-ceilinged studio with skylights and canvases stacked against the walls and she'd undress for him and sit on a couch, her knees primly together, her arms folded over her chest, and he'd look at her fondly and say, “Ah,
bellissima
.” And she would lie down on her back on the sofa, one foot on the floor, her arms up over her head.

“Do Americans spend all their time on the Internet?” he said. “I've heard that.”

“I don't, but my younger daughter told me she goes online after supper and she might be on the computer until three in the morning.”

Hmmmmm
. His handsome face darkened, he shook his head.

“She can be in four or five chat rooms at once. She keeps up her Facebook page and MySpace and HisSpace, which is a Christian web site, and then there's FriendLink and One-plus-One. And she's updating them every day and answering e-mails and trying to be amusing and smart and, my gosh, the work. The sheer amount of typing. Keeping in touch with all these people she's never met and never will meet …”

“So strange, so impersonal,” he whispered. “I prefer this. The human touch.” He put his hand on her arm.

She said she probably should be going, but she didn't go. And he leaned toward her and said, softly and simply, “My hotel is near here if you'd like to come up and have tea.” He almost put his hand on her hand, on the counter. He was going to put his hand there and then it stopped short, in midair.

And she heard herself say, “I'd love to.”

His hotel was called Il Paradiso and it was smaller than the Giorgina, a tiny lobby, no couches, no bellman, just a hallway with a little office for the clerk, and he led her into an elevator so small she felt suddenly joined to him. Her bare arm touched the sleeve of his jacket where they stood facing front.

“Do you write poetry?” he said.

“A long time ago. But I ran out of things to write about.”

“You could write about this.”

“About meeting you?” She smiled. “Well, I hope I will.”

“You've lived all your life in Minnesota?” The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Yes, she said. He walked down the hall to the second door on the left and unlocked it. She stepped in. There was a double bed and a chair and a desk, a door leading to the bathroom. “I want to get out of Milan and start something new. First, I must earn some money though. I don't think my parents are going to die anytime soon and I don't think they will leave me much.” He gestured toward the bed and she sat down. He picked up an electric teakettle from the floor and took it in the bathroom and ran water into it.

“I've stayed around out of habit, I guess,” she said. “Can't think of another reason.” The single window at the head of the bed looked into a small empty courtyard.

“I don't think people live by habit,” he said. “Everyone has a sense of adventure, don't you think? You must. You're a poet. Poets have to be brave.” He plugged the teakettle into the wall socket and set it on the chair. He sat down on the bed beside her. He put his hands in his lap and looked at her legs.

“I'd like to read your poetry,” he said. She said she didn't have any with her. He nodded. “I hadn't written poems in years and then the other night I woke up with a poem in my head and oddly it was in English. I spent a year at Indiana University. I sometimes dream in English. Still. All these years later. So I dreamed the poem and then I woke up and wrote it down.”

He put his hand on her knee and said, “
Your face and your
green eyes. My knee pressed against your thigh where you sat
crosswise. And the next three hours flew by and my life was
made new by you, my lover, that fragrant night. Nothing to do
but love you, and when it was over, we lay together, me and
you. Like horses in the summer sun, we happy two
.”

“That's very lovely,” she said. Surely he could feel her pulse pounding with his hand on her knee like that. He was gently squeezing it. She was going to tell him to stop, but if she did, then what had she come to Italy for?

“What did you write poems about?” he said.

“Things I thought about when I was a girl.”

“How could you run out of things to write about?” He was feeling around her kneecap. He was thinking about moving up her right thigh, she guessed. She was thinking about stopping him.

“I had children, I had other things on my mind.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes,” she said. Yes was the correct answer, wasn't it? She and Carl were married. But she almost had said, “I don't know.”

“Did you ever write poems for your husband?” She shook her head. She couldn't remember if she had or not.

He turned to her and put his right hand against her left cheek and kissed her very lightly on the lips. And then a second time.

“That was nice,” he said. “Thank you.”

She nodded. Did she nod? Yes, she did. She hadn't meant to, though.

And then he put his right hand on her breast. She quailed. She whimpered.

“What's wrong?”

“I'm scared like a little rabbit.”

“What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of your own feelings? I won't hurt you. I'll only admire you and when you tell me to stop, I will stop.”

He opened her shirt and pulled down the cup of her bra and kissed her breast and licked her nipple.

She stood up. It took all her effort but she made it and didn't fall down or have to brace herself against the wall. “Thank you,” she said. “I really should go. They're expecting me. I'm in charge of a large group. I don't want anybody to get lost.”

He unplugged the teapot. “Can I see you again?”

She whispered, “Where?”

“At the coffee bar. Tomorrow.”

“I will if I can get away.”

“Otherwise, this is my phone number.” He handed her his business card. “You are a very attractive woman. I hope you know that. I would say—magnificent. I was so lucky to meet you. I want to see you again.” He smiled. “Do you and your husband ever make love?”

She blushed and opened the door. “See you tomorrow,” she said. He closed the door and she rang for the elevator. She could hear the engine humming far below. Yes, she and her husband made love. Months ago. It was the day after Christmas, the kids had all left, and she and Carl toppled into bed around 4:00
P.M.
and he rolled over next to her and caressed her, and slipped his hand up her blouse. She reached over and unzipped his pants and put her hand down and there it was, all ready to go. And when he pulled her skirt up, he was in a hurry to get inside her. He got on top and thrust hard and it was over in a few minutes but it was okay. Very much okay.

The elevator door opened and she got in. Had she just committed adultery? She wasn't sure. Should she ask Father Wilmer what constitutes adultery?