Pilgrims (5 page)

Embarrassing to live in this time warp. Studies show: early praise promotes personal growth, it makes a big difference if your mother fussed over you. It gives you an expectation of success. But if she didn't, then defeat rises up at every turn. And Mother did not fuss over Marjorie, she looked at her and shook her head. You pay a big price for that, but nobody uses the term “poor self-esteem” because it's what everyone has. Calling people depressed is like calling them Causasian. Yes, and so what else is new? Trot into Skoglund's Five & Dime with its ancient aroma of paper and mucilage and Arnie Skoglund standing waxen-faced behind the glass case with the fountain pens nobody uses anymore and here is Mr. Faust your old history teacher who used to tell you you're gifted and here is your choir director Miss Falconer still crisp and pert as if about to lead the Girl's Sextet in “O Holy Night.”

Embarrassing to be plodding along the same well-worn path as her parents, through the backyards of the lawn chairs, birdbaths, feeders, the old clothes poles, the old neighbors clinking the iced tea on the porches and missing the children who ran away from this dreamy life—the life of clunky antiques and photographs in gold frames. What a backwater it is. You can be within ten miles of here and ask people where Lake Wobegon is and they never heard of it. A clannish tribe that
does not care to
be interesting
. In the Cities, people walk around with flashing
lights in their hair, tattoos of snakes on their necks, wearing shirts made of poppies: for them, uniqueness is a full-time occupation.
Fine. Whatever you want
. And to the west is North Dakota where people go and are never seen again. (It is bigger than it appears on the map.) They drive west and I-94 peters out into gravel roads and then trackless open space occupied by nomadic tribes of Deer People. And here we are between the bright lights to the south and the vast emptiness to the west, a way station, where she had settled (it seemed) permanently. Married Carl, had three kids, and now she was right smack where she started, little Margie Schoppenhorst, Class of 1973. Class Poet.

And now the phone call from Miss Gennaro brought back to her the memory of her ardor for Audrey Hepburn on that Vespa behind Gregory Peck, buzzing through the ancient streets and around the stone-paved piazzas and the beautiful word
bellissimo
that stuck in her mind—she thought of it now and then in odd perfect moments, the morning after a snowstorm, when the rack of lamb came out of the oven
perfecto
, when she glimpsed weeping at a basketball game or a big snort of pleasure or an appreciative belch or a smart-ass retort.
Bellissimo
. The love of life.
La dolce vita
. Buoyant personalities, high-wattage conversations with big gestures, the spirit of carnival and dancing in the streets and the frank enjoyment of the flesh and adoration of the
bambino
but also respectful of geezers, and grinning at the incoming platter of spaghetti. And the land of lovers.

Amore
.

That's what she wanted. Truly. Not to be like Darlene.

Darlene, aching for love and angry at men, and sliding toward
her extremely late forties, despising her ex-husband, Arlen, and still missing him fifteen years later.

After Arlen decamped, Darlene had been very close to her dog, a border collie named Sonny, and people noticed that she was wearing a wig made from the dog's hair. It was an odd color for a woman, grayish blond, and nobody wanted to ask and eventually she told Margie that Sonny had been seeing a therapist for adoption anxiety—she'd gotten him when he was already a year old—and the wig was to help him bond to her. Sonny died in his sleep, in the driveway, run over by a garbage truck. Darlene took to her bed for two weeks. Nobody mentioned that, either.

“Oh for crying out loud, that's just unbelievable,” Doris said after Margie said good-bye to the Gennaro woman. “You bought that, hook, line, and sinker. What's the deal with that anyway? Somebody better fill you in on the birds and the bees, kiddo.”

So Margie looked up August Norlander's old obituary in the Lake Wobegon
Herald Star
(“
LOCAL BOY LOST IN ITALIAN ACTION
”) and Googled his brother Norbert Norlander, an oilman in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The call from Maria Gennaro led to Norbert in Tulsa and also sort of led to a trip to St. Cloud to buy an English-Italian dictionary and a
Michelin Guide to Rome
, and on her way home there were police cars and flashing blue lights on Highway 10 and in the southbound lane, a blue Toyota, its rear end smashed in brutally. And a yellow tarp spread on the shoulder. Margie pulled over to the shoulder. Eight men stood around the yellow tarp and lifted it and held it over the body of a woman in a bright red
dress, face down on the ice and gravel, as a young man in a black jumpsuit bent over the body and snapped pictures. She lay with one leg twisted, neck bent. The eight men stood solemn, eyes on each other, not looking down. A light snow was falling. The young man touched the side of the woman's neck. And then they put the yellow tarp back down and a man in an orange hazard vest approached pushing a gurney and Margie pulled away, a witness to the death of Mary McGarry of Little Falls—there was a brief story on the evening news—who died when she braked hard to avoid a deer and her car was rear-ended by another car. Fifty-five, the mother of three, on her way to accept an award at a banquet for having been a foster mother to twenty-one children, pronounced dead at the scene. Her own good works responsible in a way for her death—going to accept an award, killed en route. A victim of her own charity. One minute she's driving and listening to the radio and then a beautiful animal leaps onto the road in a blind panic and the Foster Mother of the Year slams on her brakes, pure reflex, and is slammed from behind and her neck snaps and she is gone. In a burst of reflex and adrenaline, a terrified deer frozen in front of her speeding car, a
whomp
on the brakes, and then it's all over, and now the troubled children will need to find another pair of arms to hold them, Mrs. McGarry has caught a train to a star. Death does have dominion after all. Margie thought she glimpsed the driver who crashed into the woman. A young man in a red plaid jacket leaning against a police car, smoking a cigarette, being interrogated. Long black hair, cowboy boots. A mother bites the dirt, James Dean lives on.

She came home and after supper (chili burgers and cole slaw and rhubarb pie, a sparse conversation about the children, the
usual), while Carl read the St. Paul paper, she got out a green garbage bag and grabbed the centerpiece in front of him, the turtle shell Carl Jr. painted in Boy Scouts (“Slow and steady wins the race”) and threw it in the bag, and the plaster bison, mother and child. (“Bye, Mom.” “Bye, Son.”) He said nothing. She tossed Cheryl's poetry, three poems, printed in a little magazine,
Transcendent Upheavals
. She pulled magnets off the refrigerator—tomatoes, pelicans, orange-crate labels—and the plaque over the table (
GOD BLESS MY MESSY HOUSE
) and the Minnesota loon salt and pepper shakers. Into the bag. He stirred but did not speak. The Scrabble board on the counter. The jar of chicory. The expensive copper skillet, a gift from Carla, seldom used.

When he heard the skillet clank, he looked up and asked what she was doing.

“Cleaning out stuff we don't use anymore. Life is too short to accumulate junk. Who gave us this chicory anyway?”

He didn't know. “That's a pretty expensive skillet to just throw away.”

“It's going to the Goodwill.”

“Oh. Okay.”

And then he said, “Who is Norbert Norlander?”

“What about him?”

“Saw his name written on a slip of paper on the counter.”

Bingo. Now there is a way to get a man's attention. Let him sniff another man in the vicinity. Jealousy, the oldest aphrodisiac in the book. She took her sweet time answering. Poured a cup of coffee. “Norlander,” she said. “Oh. Right. Him. Somebody called the school, looking for him.”

“Where is he?”

“Tulsa.”

“Oh,” he said. “Friend of yours?”

“Not yet. We'll see what develops.” And then she made a perfect exit. Flashed him an Audrey smile and sashayed on out through the door and into the snow and put the garbage bag in the backseat of her car. Snow falling and the air antiseptic clean, the
boomboomboom
of ice cracking in the cold, a clear sky and the constellations in place, Orion and the Dippers and the Great Antelope, Jupiter and Venus snuggled up next to the moon, light shining from the high bell tower of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.
God grant you eternal rest, Foster Mother. God
give you unending joy in His Holy Presence and the Presence of
All His Saints
, she thought, though she had no clear idea that this would actually happen. It was only a thought.

That night she lay in bed, seeing herself lying on the cold roadside under a yellow tarp. A motorist stopped and asked a cop who it was and he said, “Some woman from Lake Wobegon.”

“From where?”

“Little town not far from here.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, you're not missing much.”

“What happened?”

“Deer.”

“Oh.” And he rolled up his window and drove on. Suicidal deer lurking in the ditches, exacting a terrible revenge for hunting season, waiting for good women to come along, women who have eaten venison sausage. You're listening to Mozart on the radio and suddenly antlers explode into your face and sharp hooves do a death dance on your torso.

Death is not far away. So why not travel to Rome and bring a rhubarb pie to a daughter of Lake Wobegon? Bring her a scrapbook of pictures of Main Street at Christmas, the grain elevator, the Catholic church. A bumper sticker (
LAKE WOBEGON, GATEWAY TO CENTRAL MINNESOTA
). A copy of the school hymn. (“Wobegon, I remember O so well how peacefully among the woods and fields you lie./ Wobegon, I close my eyes and I can see you just as clearly as in days gone by.”

Life is short. Why wait for spring? Why lie cooped up in the nest, sick with cabin fever and four months of winter yet to go. Men sat in the Sidetrack Tap, lost in the mists of whiskey dreams, but not Margie. She wanted to go somewhere, see something different. Do it now. Soon she'd have to rescue her elderly parents in Tampa. Mother hated Florida. The heat, the vicious insects, the clamminess of air-conditioning, the snakes, the danger of gator attacks. She kept her equilibrium because every day, Monday through Friday, she tuned in to
Bright Horizons
on the Mutual Radio Network, the story of Broadway star Brenda Stanford and her search for fulfillment as a wife and mother in the sleepy village of Littleton, sponsored by Rainbow Motor Oil. Brenda had suffered extensively—unfaithful men, ungrateful children, greedy relatives, fatigue, boils, temporary blindness, and so forth—but her sunny resolve had never faltered. “Somehow I believe that this will all work out for the good eventually,” she said, and indeed it did. Mother shared this belief although Daddy was pissing his pants and she suffered panic attacks that rendered her pale and breathless for hours. If the mailman rang the buzzer, Mom went to pieces. Meanwhile, Dad was wearing a
button—
ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT OBAMA
and below it, another button—
TREASON
. In their little cul-de-sac in Holiday Gardens, surrounded by retired Jewish schoolteachers from New Jersey, Mom and Dad were the only wingnuts on the block, and now they'd gotten a big black dog named Rush that Dad couldn't handle—he'd fallen twice and been dragged down the driveway. The dog went ballistic whenever he spotted a UPS man or anyone in uniform, and Mom, who was terrified of dogs, spent hours in her locked bedroom saying the rosary, and so Margie would have to fly down there, have a Come-to-Jesus talk, lay down the law, throw away old medications, put Rush up for adoption. A miserable, thankless job. But first, Rome. Pleasure before duty.

She made a list:

1. Find out all about August (Gussie) Norlander.
   
2. Check available flights to Rome.
   
3. Make an appointment with a doctor and get that lump in my left breast looked at. I do not want to die right now with all of this happening. A doctor in Little Falls or St. Cloud. Not the Lake Wobegon Clinic.
   

She had no faith in Dr. DeHaven whatsoever. The man couldn't tell a brain tumor from ordinary dandruff. Or a dilated displacement of the lower delphinium. He'd put you on Hydrofluoric-aminosulfagalactic bioxychloridated lucite and try to shrink your cerebral hyacinth and a month later you'd be billed $45 for the removal of corns.

T
he Hotel Giorgina was just off the Piazza del Popolo, five floors, a white tile building with aluminum trim and dying ficus trees in the front windows, the bust of a bosomy goddess in a niche beside the glass door.

Mr. Columbo opened the van door, set a step stool down, bowed—“
Signore, signori, benvenuto
.” The pilgrims clambered out and trooped into the lobby, towing their luggage. There was coffee in the air, and the yeasty smell of fresh baking. A sleepy old man in a faded brown bellhop outfit sat behind a high desk with a silver call bell on it, potted ferns on either side that appeared close to death. He looked at them with great impassive dignity as if he were the owner of the hotel but might, under certain special circumstances, carry bags up to a room. “
Buon
giorno
,” said the desk clerk, a young man with long pomaded hair, behind a counter. “You must be the Krebsbach party.” The room keys were there in a jumble in front of him, brass keys attached to wooden knobs. Eloise plopped down in a row of red and orange chintz-covered chairs with saggy bottoms, two love seats in the middle. “I could sleep for a week,” she announced. A huge
gilded mirror hung on the wall over marble-topped tables. The furniture had a
donated
look, as if the manager's grandma had sent over her living room before she went to the hospice. Evelyn sat next to Eloise and Irene took a seat too. Marilyn sat down and put her head on Irene's shoulder. The young desk clerk in his rumpled dark suit stood at the reception counter and smiled an official smile. A brass luggage carrier stood alongside the desk. Two small elevators and next to them a narrow stairway, and standing at the elevators, a man and woman with four suitcases, one the size of a refrigerator. “How are we going to get this into the elevator?” she said. “I told you not to bring it,” he said. “What was I supposed to do? Not bring clothing?” she said. “Pack lighter next time,” he said. “Maybe you should've gotten us a hotel with a normal elevator,” she said.

Father Wilmer examined the stacks of newspapers on the marble table:
USA Today, the International Herald Tribune, Il
Tempo, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine
. And a brochure for a tour of Rome, including a performance of
La Traviata
in English. “I feel just fine,” he said to nobody in particular. “Not a bad flight at all. I got halfway through a biography of Chesterton.”

Margie felt a twinge of panic—
What if the reservations didn't
go through? What if I'm surrounded by angry people shouting
in Italian?
—which she stifled. Mr. Columbo was loading the luggage onto a cart, Carl and Daryl overseeing the work.

Mr. Columbo was very sorry but he had to hurry away to a tour group from Germany to pick up at eleven and then a French group this afternoon. “You speak all those languages?” said Daryl. “Yes, of course,” he said. “All my life.” He spoke to the bellman who shrugged an elaborate shrug. “He says he must
stay in the lobby and watch the door to keep gypsies away,” said Mr. Columbo. “Can you manage on your own?” Margie nodded. “Certainly. Been doing it all our lives.” He stood waiting and it dawned on her—
duh
—the tip. How much to give him? She fingered the bills in her pocket and pretended to count the bags in the mountain he had piled up, and pulled a bill out and it was a hundred euro note. She thrust it at him and he looked surprised. And then charmed. Grateful. He put his hand over his heart and bowed slightly, and with great delicacy lifted the hundred euros from her hand and tucked it into his pocket, bowed, and exited.

The couple with the refrigerator suitcase had wedged it into the elevator with four other suitcases on top, no room for passengers, so he pressed the button for the second floor and had her hold the elevator while he went up the stairs. “Don't forget that the second floor is actually the third floor,” she said. “What are you talking about?” he said. “They don't count the first floor as the first floor. The second floor is the first floor,” she said. “Why in the world would they do that?” he said. “Just go,” she said. “I'm going,” he said. “Well, we can't hold up the elevator forever,” she said. He put his hands on his hips. “You think you can get up there faster, go ahead,” he said. “Just go,” she said. “I'm sick and tired of your noise,” he said. She looked around at the pilgrims waiting in line behind her. “You're embarrassing me,” she hissed. “Look who's talking,” he said. “Just shut the hell up and go to the third floor and get the damn bags off the fucking elevator,” she said. “We can talk about divorce later.” He stomped up the stairs and she turned to Margie and smiled. “Where are you folks from?” she said.

“Minnesota.”

The woman looked thoughtful. “It gets cold there, doesn't it?”

Margie nodded. “Where you from?”

“Boston. We just flew in. Leo's been working too hard. He's a clinical psychologist. I told him not to drink on the plane but they kept bringing the wine around and he kept saying yes.” She looked at Margie with sorrowful eyes. “This was supposed to be a
happy
time,” she said. “Our first vacation in fifteen years.”

“It'll be fine. You wait and see.” And then the angry ringing of a bell inside the elevator and the woman let the doors close and up it went. “He's usually much nicer than this,” she said.

The Giorgina was an American enterprise, part of the Whitefish hotel chain—the big white fish mounted on a plaque behind the desk—but the beds, it turned out, were small and hard, meant for small peasant people used to sleeping on floors, not grown-up Americans. And the towels—Carl unfolded one, it was a linen dish towel, not a bath towel. He pointed this fact out to her. “Make it work,” she said. He tried to open a shade. It wouldn't go up. “Christ,” he said. He was like a big sullen teenager. Two nights before, he'd sat looking at a picture book from the library,
Rome
,
the Eternal City
, and rolling his eyes. “Get a load of this,” he said, pointing to a church interior, a gilded altar with cherubs suspended overhead. To him, a carpenter, Rome was the capital of European decadence and bad taste. Too much marble, not enough pine. “Unbelievable,” he said, pointing to golden cherubs peeing water into a fountain. “Where do people come up with this stuff?” Bosomy big-hipped signorinas and their greaseball Casanovas lounged on a street corner and checked their cell phones every couple of minutes. Mafiosi like buffalo in pinstripes. Chaos in the
streets. Rivers of cars. Madmen for taxi drivers. A new government every couple of weeks. And now this—tiny towels.

Well, she could've put them in a four-star hotel with marble shower and towels as big as bedspreads. It would've suited her just fine. But Carl detested luxury. She remembered the summer they vacationed for five days at the Happy Bison Motel in Bismarck, North Dakota. A compromise: she wanted to go to San Francisco, he wanted to stay home. His cousin Jim was a bartender at the Happy Bison and he got them a 40 percent discount on rooms. It sat out in a field, looking like a nursing home or warehouse, surrounded by acres of asphalt, and their rooms were next to the lounge where The Hitchhikers played until 3:00
A.M.
Semis went by at 100 m.p.h. all night and the air conditioner sounded like a power lathe. After that tribulation, she should've booked them into the Hotel Eden—something extravagant—but in deference to Carl she'd gone the two-star route. It was his own fault.

She stripped off her clothes
wop-
bop-
a-
wop-
bam-
boom,
hoping he'd notice, but he was still sulking, turning the clock-radio dial, hearing gibberish, so she tiptoed into the bathroom (leaving the door ajar to tempt him) and figured out the three knobs in the shower—one was for temperature, one for volume, and one for pulsation—and she washed off the grime of travel and stood under the hot water hoping he'd join her, then gave up, dried herself, using a dish towel, making it work. He sat on the bed, head in his hands. He'd been stunned by the the flight over, the Placidol, the two early-morning beers in Amsterdam, and then there was the towel problem, the bed deficiency, the ventilation
problem. If you closed the window, the room was stuffy, and if you opened it, you heard horns honking—Italians expressing fury, disbelief, self-affirmation, alienation, social criticism—a nation of blowhards passing by. Naked, she bent down and fished the
All U Need 2 No
guidebook to Italy out of his suitcase and tossed it in his lap. “Read up on the ruins,” she said, “and you and I can go look at some later.”

“I am a ruin,” he said. She pulled on jeans, a black T-shirt with gold-sequined minnesota across the front, then thought better, took it off, put on a plain black blouse and a brown jacket. No bra. And her big wraparound Italian starlet sunglasses. She felt good. Three hours of sleep on the plane seemed to suit her quite well. Maybe she'd been oversleeping all these years.

He said, “You're not going to bed?”

No, she was going for a nice long walk around the town.

He begged her not to. As if she'd announced she was going to swim into the ocean and see how far she could get. “Aren't you beat?”

She was a little tired but she hadn't come to Rome to sleep. Why waste the time? We're in Italy. You and me. In Italy.

“Please don't. For my sake. Please.”

“It's Italy, darling. It's a NATO country. They're Catholics, for God's sake. I have a cell phone.” His jaw dropped. She pulled out her cell phone and pushed a number. It rang and then there was the recorded voice of Carla. “It's your mother,” said Margie. “I've run away to Rome with my lover, Carlo. I may not come back. You can have all my pots and pans.
Arrivederci
, darling.”

That seemed to astonish him. She—his wife, Marjorie Krebs-bach,
the English teacher—had figured out how to extend your cell phone coverage to include Europe.

“When will you come back?”

“In a couple hours.”

He seemed so unsettled. Unlike the placid, capable man she was married to. He went in the bathroom and washed his face and lay down on the bed, looking so vacant, so forlorn, she thought maybe she should stay with him, be a good wife and comfort him in his distress.

Nyaa. He already has a mother and one is all you get. Go.
Git. Do something for yourself for once
.

“Bye.”

“A nap might do you good,” he said. She turned away, but when she got to the elevator she wondered what he meant by that. Was he inviting her to make love?

Well, then let him say so. He had waited three months to bring up the subject so let him put it in clear English.
Darling, I
want to rip your clothes off and make crazed love to you
. That's not so hard, is it? He'd made love to her with sweet abandon back when he believed the world was coming to an end in 1999. At midnight on December 31, the world's computers would flicker and die and the electrical grid go dark and planes fall out of the sky, so he stockpiled batteries and gasoline (for a generator). He bought three hundred-pound bags of rice. And pasta. Pistols. And he made love to her that December sort of wildly, roughly, loudly, several times, and then January 1 dawned. Nothing had changed. The clocks had not stopped. The snowplow came clattering up the street. The old guys on the radio were telling the same old jokes. He sold the generator on eBay. They ate rice for
the next two years. Lovemaking went back into low gear. But it was lovely while it lasted, the end of the world.

The elevator door opened and she peered around the corner into the lobby—she did not want to hang out with another pilgrim right now. She wanted to look as Italian as possible. She could buy a silk scarf, Italianize herself. Look aristocratic. Walk purposefully, no map in hand. No sluggish person next to her saying, “Well, look at
that
, wouldja. Wonder how old
that
is.” She was a traitor, a turncoat (literally), abandoning her troops, but so what. Let them sleep. The coast was clear, the old bellman sat behind the bell desk, expressionless, and she scooted out the door and into the street.

She strode down the sidewalk, swinging her arms. A few motorbikes buzzed by, a tiny taxi. A matinee-idol cop stood at the curb and watched from under hooded eyes, hands clasped behind his back. A man in a tailored brown suit walked his dog. The man wore a white apron festooned with silver and gold badges and puffed on a cigarette. His longish black hair, nicely oiled, was swept back on the sides, a sculpted look. Three young women walked arm in arm past her, six high heels tapping on the paving stones, taking long strides. They looked absolutely
bellissima
. Tall and lean and dark, womanly, striding forward into life. Three Audreys heading off to sit in a
caffè
and regale each other with tales of the sad-assed world of offices and copiers and clueless managers in pinstripes.