Pilgrims (16 page)

“Where were you?”

“Went in the hotel to get directions.”

“Where you going?”

She looked up and caught sight of a sign pointing to the Trevi Fountain, fifty meters. “The Trevi fountain,” she said. So they trudged over there, though the four of them had already seen all there was to see of it.

Fresh from Paolo's bed, his juice trickling down her leg—she felt alien in the mob of tourists obsessed with cameras, posing in front of the fountain, the torrential billows of water, the marble seahorses and giants blowing horns, mounds of coins in the pool, a hundred camera flashes per second. “My God, let's get out of here. The tourists!” she said. “But we are tourists too,” cried Eloise who wanted Lyle to take her picture. She stood, her back to the fountain, about to toss a coin over her shoulder, as Lyle examined her camera. “Just point and shoot!” she said.

A man in a black silky jacket, his hair slicked back, stepped up behind Lyle and said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Fifty feet from here, pal, ten beautiful girls waiting for you, the most beautiful girls in the world and none of them has a stitch of clothing on her body whatsoever, not even a pair of socks—they are au naturel, stark naked, topless, bottomless, and one hundred percent nude or your money back—check it out, check it out.”

Lyle was engrossed in the camera and paying no attention.

“None of them over eighteen years of age, we have certificates to prove it,” the man muttered.

And just then Eloise recognized people she thought she knew from a seminar in Minneapolis years ago—she didn't dare say hello to them because she couldn't remember their names—so they beat a retreat and Daryl led them up the Palatine Hill and the Capitoline Hill, reading from the guidebook all the way. Here was the Villa Medici where mad King Ludwig of Bavaria pranced around in the nude, waving sparklers. Here was the Villa Minesoto of the aristocratic family from Minneapoli (Little Naples) who sent a son to America in 1831 to explore the upper Mississippi. Here is the Church of St. Stephen Rotondo (Stephen the Plump), who was martyred by squeezing.
We are doing the same
thing that millions of people have done before us,
she thought.
Looking at the same things, thinking the same, following the
trail. Like migratory birds on the flyway
.

“I can't walk another step,” said Eloise, so they sat down to rest at a little outdoor café. Margie liked Eloise much better jetlagged, grieving. All her leadership qualities leached out of her and now she was purely human again. She was getting over the terrorist stuff but she was thinking about calling Fred for a heart-to-heart. Fred had a videocam on his computer, thanks to the new girlfriend. Eloise could call him and have a video conference. She'd need to put on lipstick first and do her hair. “Don't torture yourself,” said Margie, “let go of it. Forget Fred.”

“What are we trying to forget?” said poor Lyle. He had retired after forty-two years of heroic attempts to teach biology to teenagers, a losing battle, the learning retention rates terribly
low, and now, just when he should be enjoying his freedom, he was losing his mind. “I know we're here for a reason and I forget what it is,” he said.

So she told him. “We're here to put a picture of Gussie Norlander on his grave. He died a hero in the war a long time ago and his old mother wanted people to know who he was.”

“Right. Of course. Who's Fred?”

“Fred is my former boyfriend who stuck a knife in my back, but I still love him,” said Eloise.

He put a hand on Margie's leg. “I love you,” he said. “I have always loved you and I always will. I even have impure thoughts about you. You're remarkable, Margie.”

“You're so sweet.” But she thought,
Look out. No more latenight
walks with Lyle. We've got a loose cannon on the deck.
Please don't let him stand up and expose himself. Please
.

They stopped in the Church of St. John and saw the Scala Sancta, the sacred stairs that Jesus walked to the upper room where the Last Supper took place and also the Sancta Sanctorum Cucina, the kitchen where it was prepared. And the Palazzo sant' Angelo where Pope Leona lived in the tenth century, the legendary female pope (or
papessa
) who came up in the Church as Giovanni di Nebuloso (John the Vague) who, while a holy man and all, did not give concise answers to questions. And he loved to sing
un
forte tremore soprano
and spin around and around in a
pinafore
, but they didn't question him on this because he was a holy man, or, as it turned out, a holy woman. One day, saying high mass, he let out a cry and squatted by the altar and gave birth to a baby girl, who was named Immaculata and became the prioress of the Abbey of St. Estiva, and meanwhile what to do with Pope Leona—
rather than go through a big inquisition and cause scandal and give ammunition to the enemies of the faith, they pronounced the birth a genuine miracle, which any birth surely is, and put the pope into a cloister where she lived a perfectly holy life, and died, and when the Church Fathers met in conclave to elect a new one, they sat in the nude, a tradition carried on to this very day.

Heading home to the Giorgina, they stopped and looked at a sidewalk artist's charcoal portraits. He watched them coolly from his canvas chair, green cap shading his eyes, orange corduroy shirt. The portraits were good, Margie thought, and she said so. “A hundred euros, though,” said Daryl. “Pretty steep. And why do it when we have a camera?” She leaned down toward the artist and smiled and said, “
Scusi
.”

“Good evening,” he said.

“Would you do my picture for sixty euros?” He offered one for seventy-five. “Then make me look like Audrey Hepburn,” she whispered, putting the bills in his palm. And he did, sort of. An Audrey with rounder cheeks and pursed lips. Daryl took half a dozen pictures of her posing for the artist who worked swiftly and rolled up the picture and put it in a cardboard tube. “My, you are a brave one,” said Marilyn. “Bargaining and everything. I wouldn't know how to do that.”

“It's easy,” she said. “Everybody wants more than they're entitled to and sometimes you get what you want and sometimes what you're entitled to.” She thought of the beautiful man whose perspiration was still on her body, whose seed had dried on the side of her leg. He was not an entitlement. She thought she would take the portrait to a printshop and make a copy for him and sign it, “To Paolo, with love from your American, Marjorie.”

C
arl was half awake when she got upstairs. “Have a good day?” he said. “Excellent,” she said. She wondered if he could smell Paolo on her and what if he could? Would he become enraged and smother her with a pillow, like Othello? It was hard to imagine Carl in a towering rage. “I've got a headache,” he said. She offered him an Advil and he shook his head. “It's the Ladderman business,” he said. The bank had faxed him a rather brisk letter, asking him to call at his earliest convenience. “I can't call them, I don't have anything to say. The guy hung me out to dry. If I'm going to lose my shirt, I don't want to know about it yet.”

She closed the bathroom door behind her and got out of her adultery clothes and examined the shiny trail of dried semen on her leg. This was something that was supposed to happen to you at twenty-one, not fifty-three. She was living life out of order. You should go to Italy for your junior year and meet your Paolo at the Hotel Il Paradiso, have a big wonderful affair—have several of them, six or seven, heck, fifteen—and then go home, meet your Carl and marry him. That was the right way. But what
could she do? She wanted to live a rich full life and the door had been closed until now. She'd had the meat loaf and gravy and now someone offered her the shrimp appetizer and the spring roll and the wonton soup. She took a sleeping pill that night and put in ten hours of good sleep and dreamed that Eloise was pushing her cart through Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery and said, “I like your hair that way.” And she awoke and bounded up from bed and showered and dressed while Carl lay bleary eyed, restless. He'd been kept awake by bad dreams. Men with dogs chasing him into a dark swamp toward a cliff. “Hey. Isn't today our wedding anniversary?” she said. Of course it was. How had
that
slipped her mind? She'd never forgotten it before.

He asked her what she'd like to do on their anniversary and she said, “We're here, together. That's enough.” Okay, he said. She wished he'd suggest making love. And then she wasn't sure she wished that at all. Too confusing, two men in 24 hours.

There was a bouquet of daisies waiting for her at the front desk, with a note from Maria:

She called Maria from the lobby. “A sidetrack is a railroad siding where they park boxcars that aren't in use. And a chatterbox is someone who talks a lot.”

“And the Sons of Knute? Who is Knute?”

“He was some old Viking ruler or somebody. And they're a bunch of old men who get together to eat codfish and drink aquavit and sing sad songs in Norwegian about how much they miss the fjords and mountains, which, in their case, they've never seen.”

Maria said that her mother was not having a good day but that she, Maria, wanted to see Margie, so they made a date for lunch at a little café near a church that Maria wanted to show her.

She stepped into the long breakfast room off the lobby hoping to eat alone but there in a blazing rectangle of sunlight was Father Wilmer waving to her, with Wally and Evelyn. So she filled up a plate with two hard rolls and cheese, boiled egg, yogurt and corn flakes, and a mug of strong coffee. Through the sheer curtains she saw passersby on the street, meeting each other, ducking, stepping through each other like dancers in a complicated reel. A busboy stood at attention, brass buttons on his green jacket. An elaborate brass chandelier hung over Father Wilmer's table, the green and white tablecloths freshly starched. “The yogurt is excellent,” he said. “It's from Greece. You pour honey on it.”

“Father was just saying that there is a dress code at St. Peter's,” said Evelyn. “No shorts, but they allow slacks.”

Wally said that Evelyn wanted to get a papal blessing for her aunt in Owatonna who was ninety-two and nearing the end, but nobody knew where you could get them, did Margie? No, she did
not, but it can't be so hard to fool an old lady, can it? “Give her a little St. Christopher's medal, tell her he kissed it, she'll die happy.”

Evelyn shook her head, “I can't believe you'd say that. What's gotten into you?”

Father had pictures of Santa Maria del Popolo where he'd just come from early Mass and was still stunned from the experience. “Such beauty, such reverence,” he whispered. The pictures were out of focus. “Our young people want something contemporary and instead of the Sanctus beautifully sung by a choir, they want people bouncing around with guitars singing, ‘Our God is a wonderful wonderful God'—sing seven words eleven times and clap and grin—they just don't understand the beauty of Latin. It's fading so fast that in ten years nobody will remember what a Sanctus sounds like. Don't get me wrong. I'm as progressive as the next person. But—the classics are the classics.”

When Carl came down, she asked him where the Whippets had gotten their name. “I don't know where the name comes from. They did once play against dogs, though. It was a traveling exhibition team, called the King and His Rooks, with a onearmed pitcher named John ‘the King' Kramarszuk, who lost his right arm in a robbery. He stuck up an armored car and told the guard to hand over the money and instead the guard threw it back in the truck and the King reached in for it and the electric door closed and sliced it off at the elbow. He learned to pitch lefthanded during his eight and a half years in Stillwater Prison. He's the pitcher and there are two outfielders and two dogs, Pete and Repete, who cover the infield, and the catcher, Blind Boy Thompson. The King throws a pretty good screwball and he shut
out the Whippets for five innings before Ronnie hit a double but one of the dogs bit him as he headed for second and Ronnie was mad and tried to stretch it into a triple and the dog took the throw in his jaws and tagged him out and then the dog did a backflip.”

They set out from the hotel at 10:00
A.M.
in a downpour, two by two under big black umbrellas, and she tried to hurry them along. She was going to meet Maria. She walked alone, Carl behind her, under Daryl's umbrella. They were teammates on the Leonards basketball team that lost the District trophy to St. Agnes in 1974. Daryl went to the free-throw line with the score tied and one second on the clock and he missed two free throws; one hit the backboard
bonk
and the other bounced off the rim,
bwang
. He attended Augsburg College with hair down to his shoulders and a serape, read
Steppenwolf
and searched for his true self outside the restrictions of society, and the day after graduation he and Marilyn walked around Lake Wobegon with lilacs in their hair talking until 4:00
A.M.
and sat down on the steps of the Central Building. He said, “I met an old alumnus, class of 1964, and that seems so long ago, but it won't be long until 1984 is as far in the past as 1964 is to us,” and from this profound observation they decided to marry, and now he had the same flattop haircut as in high school. He had told this story the night before, standing in the hall outside their room. It was the first time Margie heard it. He was telling Carl about Yorkshire hogs, their durability and their excellent conversion ratio of feed to meat, and their superior loins. “That's where your profit is, in the loins.” Now, walking along, Daryl bent and picked up a wet paper napkin and casually tossed it into a trash barrel fifteen feet
away,
ker-plop
, and she remembered the St. Agnes game and how she sat in the bleachers with a crowd of Lake Wobegon girls and on the
bwang
they all looked at each other and spontaneously burst into tears. They collapsed in toward each other and sobbed and walked out, arms linked, weeping, like women grieving for lost miners, and onto the cold bus. He was supposed to toss that napkin in the barrel back in 1974 against St. Agnes.
Life
happens out of order sometimes
.

Evelyn had developed the irritating habit of saying aloud Italian words she saw that were close to English, such as
libreria,
gastronomia, informazione, vino
, which she assumed the Italians had taken from us and adapted to suit their own peculiar notions of spelling. She stopped to admire a window display of beers and read them aloud.
Birra Moretti La Birra Italiana, Nostro
Azzuro, Doppio Malto
. “Double malt,” said Lyle, dictionary in hand. “You see?” she said. “
Qualita Tradizione
—a tradition of quality. But why put the words backward?” She shook her head.

Carl stopped in front of a hardware store, its displays spilling out onto the sidewalk: ironing boards, ladders, brooms, gardening tools, balls of twine. The building itself seemed about to collapse from the Glory That Was Rome. Everywhere he looked, he saw shoddy workmanship. The old Roman brickwork had survived but the new stuff … “My gosh, look at how they slapped that together,” he said, poking at a marble tile on a café wall. He looked like he was about to pull it off and fifteen more along with it. He looked down and saw concrete that hadn't been properly cured. In their hotel, the wood paneling in the lobby was crooked. “Look at that,” he said, running a finger along the gap. The molding in
their room was off-kilter. The caulking around the pipes in the bathroom, the electric switch, the carpeting—“It's like they hired fifteen-year-olds to do the job”—it bothered him. “You're not the local housing inspector,” she pointed out. He shook his head. “I just don't understand how people can build like this.”

He wanted to head back to the Forum. You could find a tour group and tag along and listen to the guide for free. He and Daryl had done that yesterday. It was neat. And cost nothing.

“The Catholic Church is earning a million bucks a day. The Pope is collecting money online, did you hear?” said Daryl. “It's called PayPal.” The others groaned.

She stopped. “I'm sorry. I forgot something at the hotel. Don't wait. I'll catch up later.”

“What?” said Carl.

“It's a female thing. I'll find you later.” And she slipped away. “Hey!” he was saying, and then she was around the corner, slipping through the throngs, and made her way to the little coffee shop where Maria sat waiting, pouring sugar into an espresso. She was all dressed up in a white jacket and slacks, a gray sweater, a big straw hat. She looked as if she'd spent a couple hours putting herself together. She stood up and they embraced and Margie smelled a faint aroma of sandalwood. Maria grinned. “It's my papa's aftershave. Mother's very fond of it. She's a rather stubborn thing except when she smells this and then she's—what's the expression?—a piece of cake.”