Liberty

by Garrison Keillor

  “Yes. Sulking. Which he’s good at, poor baby.”

  She looked down at Clarence’s old gray metal desk, the green lounge chair, and the framed pictures of his children, the plastic Model T, the souvenir coconut from Hawaii, the little bronze trophy for service to the community, the jar full of coins, the desk calendar from Lindberg Funeral Home, and said, “I would guess that he doesn’t do much work at this desk.” Clint nodded. He opened the big bottom drawer and lifted out a stack of paper. Crossword puzzles, clipped from the newspaper and pasted to white paper, all of them finished, in ballpoint pen. “My brother likes to save all the crossword puzzles he’s done. There are more in a box in the closet.”

  She laid out the great green robe on the desk and ironed it and unplugged the iron and kicked off her sandals and started unbuttoning her blouse. “I should let you be,” said Clint.

  “Oh? Why?” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

  “What about Kevin?”

  “I don’t even know if he and I are still together.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not feeling clairvoyant today. It’s that time of month.”

  She took the blouse off and folded it and then slipped her jeans down over her womanly hips and folded them and then reached back and unfastened her bra.

  “It’s going to be hot under that robe,” she said. She put the bra on the stack of clothes and slipped out of her pink panties and stood for his inspection, hands on her hips. It was her all right: her lovely suggestions of breasts, so subtle and delicate, and the dark conical nipples, her flat abdomen with the deep navel, the wild bush below.

  “Are you marching naked today?” His voice was a little high.

  “I’m wearing a robe.”

  “But underneath?”

  “What you see is what you get.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Dumb question. Dumb fatherly question. What an idiot he was. The woman was offering her nakedness to him. He lusted after her nakedness and she was giving him this as a pure gift, and it would be their secret under the hot gaze of the town. He and she would know and nobody else. An invisible bond between them. Naked Woman Marches in Fourth of July Parade.

  She sat down on Clarence’s desk. Her naked hinder plopped down where so many purchase agreements had been signed, so many hearty handshakes, and she smiled a wan smile and said, “I want to run away with you.”

  “Now?”

  “Independence Day. What better time?”

  She was serious, apparently. She gazed into his eyes as if she were his high school counselor advising him to go to college and she told him that he was unhappy with his life in Lake Wobegon. The marriage was dead. His children were grown and out of his life. The business was failing. He no longer considered himself a Lutheran in his heart. He had no true friends here, only old acquaintances, nobody he could unburden himself to. He wanted a change in his life. She was the agent of change. She was moving to San Francisco in a month, to waitress at her cousin Sydney’s restaurant, the Fillmore Grill, and eventually to go back to school. She wanted to get an MFA in creative writing. Sydney had found her a studio apartment on Irving Street, very nice, right on the streetcar line. She’d move in on Labor Day. San Francisco was a golden place. Salt air and sunshine, never too hot, never too cold, a city of perpetual spring, new beginnings. People sitting outdoors in February, drinking coffee at coffee shops. Her neighborhood, the Inner Sunset, had little bookstores and cafés, Thai and Japanese, Italian, Lebanese, a world of delicacies awaited. They’d live in her studio apartment and he could take his time figuring out what he wanted to do. First, learn to hang out. Sit. Watch the world go by. Be secure in your own being. Accept the meaningfulness of your own existence, apart from your function in the economy and your reputation in the community. Accept being you.

  “That’s the name of the neighborhood? ‘The Inner Sunset’?”

  “There’s the Inner and the Outer Sunset. The Outer is west, right on the ocean. The Inner is east of Highway 1.”

  “I was there when I was in the Navy. We had training in deck guns there.”

  He could see the slight figure of the Chinese woman in the bluish light as she bent over him and asked if it was all right. Oh yes, it was. Very much so.

  “I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but I think it’s time you think about what you want instead of what everybody else wants. Why deny yourself? If you don’t take it now, when will you?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that. He was drifting, falling through space. Infidelity is a bad habit: Once you start, where do you stop? Look at David Diener, divorced twice and en route to the third. Married young, a shy, bookish young man who was overwhelmed when young Marcia showed interest in him and they were married seven years, and one day he was out fishing on the lake and a woman swam up with a bad leg cramp. He helped her into the boat and massaged the cramp and went through the misery of divorce and married the swimmer, Melody. And about seven years later he was fishing again and he and his buddies went to the Moonlite Bay supper club for deep-fried walleye and he laid eyes on a waitress, Marva, who wore red pants, was tall and beautiful and funny and young and when she bent over to set down his hamburger and fries and he looked down her shirt, his brain turned to jelly. He cajoled her into having a drink with him after work and afterward they sat in his car and kissed and he fell in love with her. He sent her a poetry telegram. A messenger came to her door, dressed as a Greek god with golden hair, in a loose-fitting tunic, and he opened a box and released five hundred golden butterflies and recited “Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove” and it was Craig, an old high school classmate of hers, and she started dating him and broke David Diener’s heart and he went into therapy and the therapist, Molly, was warm and funny and two years later they were married. The man is on a roll, but who would want all those complications, the weepy scenes, the packing, the lawyers.

  “I am seeing you sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco,” she said. “It’s a warm day in February and you’re reading the newspaper. You’re wearing a beret and drinking espresso. There’s a yellow notepad on the table and you’ve written on it with a fountain pen. I think it’s a poem but I can’t be sure. You’ve lived in the city for three years and you can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

  They heard the click of the front door and Clint jumped. Angelica got into the robe and put the crown on and Clint eased out the door into the showroom. His brother stood looking out the big plate glass window at the street. Parade-goers were streaming by.

  “You disappeared,” he said.

  “I was just on my way back.”

  “Is there something I ought to know?” said Clarence. In his older brother voice. Low and commanding.

  “About what?”

  His brother turned and faced him. “What’s going on with you?”

  “I am living my life. Trying to.”

  “What’s the problem then?”

  And then Miss Liberty emerged and stood beside him in her great green robe, her seven-pointed crown, her golden torch, her tablet with JULY IV, MDCCLXXVI written on it. “Ready for my close-up,” she said cheerily. “You must be Clarence. I’m Angelica.” She put the torch under her arm and shook his hand. “I’m a friend of your brother’s.”

  “I wish somebody would clue me in,” said Clarence.

  “I hear you like crossword puzzles,” she said. “Well, this is sort of a puzzle but without the clues, so nobody really knows if he gets the right answer or not.”

  “Let’s go do a parade!” said Clint. He offered Miss Liberty his arm and out the door they went. Clarence watched them go. His brother clearly was in trouble and he was supposed to rescue him as we are trained in Boy Scouts to do—Never Turn Away From Someone In Trouble—that was baked into them by Einar their old Scoutmaster—but how do you rescue someone from himself? Clint had been out of control with this Fourth of July business for several years now. The lavish spending
on circus wagons and cannons and horses—good gosh, Clarence had covered for him, made excuses to people—“He just wants what’s best for Lake Wobegon. Wants the world to know about us”—but the bottom line was: Clint was a loose cannon and needed to be reined in.

  And then Clarence looked in his office. A shopping bag on his desk. A woman’s clothes in there. The young lady with Clint. Her clothes, her underwear, for crying out loud. And then it dawned on him. Miss Liberty was buck naked. She was walking around in a green robe and nothing on underneath, just her and her sandals.

  She had to be stopped before she did something foolish and brought the whole Fourth of July crashing down around her head.

  28. THE BIG PARADE

  The parade was assembling and Clint walked along the line, checking the units off one by one. The first big bandwagon was in place, a real Gargantua, forty feet long, fifteen high, big as a semitrailer but with brilliant red and green curlicues and furbelows on the sides, a sixteen-horse hitch, two hairy-legged teamsters in the wagon box, and a six-piece band on top, warming up. “You look fabulous!” he shouted up at them. The musicians looked a little dazed in the sunlight, like nocturnal cave dwellers in captivity.

  Behind the bandwagon stood the VFW honor guard and two schoolchildren bearing a long silk banner (STAND BY YOUR COLORS—BE TRUE TO YOUR OWN) and the white Chevy Impala convertible with a banner on the side, OUR GRAND MARSHAL, FATHER WILMER—Viola had tried to get TV weatherman Danny Tripp for grand marshal by way of Danny’s hair stylist, but Danny had just signed a six-figure contract to do weather in Salt Lake City so he had no interest in public-service stuff—he was out of here! So the Committee voted in Father Wilmer, over his protests. “I am only a village priest, I’m no big shot,” he said. And there he was, standing by the Impala, still reluctant. “I honestly would rather not,” he murmured, brushing the long wisps of hair across his bald spot, fidgeting like a schoolboy.

  “We voted to honor you and we are going to do it whether you want to or not,” said Clint. “Don’t take it personally. We’re honoring the parish. Sit up there and smile and wave. It’s only a parade. Do your part.”

  Father Wilmer whimpered something about really, really not wanting to and Clint grabbed him by the back of his jacket and shoved him into the car. “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do and this is one of those times, Father.” The priest tripped on the door frame and Clint had to grab the seat of his pants and boost him up toward the ledge on the backseat. “Please let me sit down on the seat. Not up there,” Father pleaded. “You are going to sit up there and damn well look like you’re having a good time. Damn it. No more out of you or I’m going to slap you one. I mean it.”

  Behind the Impala, impatient, ready to go, stood twenty young women of the Tammy Jo Dance Studio Happiness Troupe, shuffling quietly on their taps. “Let’s see smiles! Everybody wants to see smiles!” cried Tammy Jo. “Nobody wants to see frowns.” And then another Impala with Senator K. Thorvaldson, the oldest man in town, 96 according to himself, but some people thought that carbon dating might show him to be ten years older than that.

  Then the 4-H float (LIBERTY, AMERICA’S GLORY. GUARD IT WELL. SO MAY IT EVER BE.) with kids in tricornered hats holding muskets made of broomsticks. And then the second bandwagon, and the third. The fourth brought up the rear, another forty-footer, with a twelve-piece band who would play “Just A Closer Walk With Thee.” The bracing smell of horse perspiration and fresh manure, the big horses standing in place, heads up, nostrils flared. Thrilling. It was hands-down his favorite part of the parade—also the most expensive—and he looked at the crowd of placid onlookers and saw here and there the grinning faces of others moved by the sight of powerful horses hauling gaudy wagons with hot bands atop them.

  Behind the big wagon was a Model T with a bright pink banner on the side, BONNIE SCHELLENBACH, MISS PORK, and a pretty young woman in a white organdy gown, with a sash (MISS PORK) across her bosom. She was a cousin of the Magendanzes. She looked pretty miserable.

  Uncle Sam paced back and forth in his special shoes with two-foot stilts attached. “Sure could use a beer,” he said. Last year he’d been stuck behind a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace” who kept such a slow pace that Uncle Sam lost his balance and toppled over in midstride which of course elicited a big cheer from the crowd.

  He reminded Clint that it doesn’t work to walk slow on stilts. “You have to keep some forward momentum with stilts, otherwise you’re sunk.”

  The American Gothic man stood, pitchfork in hand, in the bright sun, blinking, his bald head already burned a faint red, and Mrs. Gothic stood glaring at him. “I told you to put a hat on,” she said.

  “You ever look at the painting? There’s no hat on him in the painting.”

  Miss Liberty approached them. “Am I supposed to be with you?” she said. Mr. Gothic shook his head. “You’re way up there with the governor,” he said. “You’re not with us, I know that.”

  Mrs. Gothic watched Miss Liberty hike toward the head of the parade, around the gold-booted red-jacketed Will Jones Drum & Bugle boys stepping out to “Yankee Doodle,” and she turned to Mr. Gothic and said, “That woman does not wear anything under that robe. She didn’t last year either. I can tell by the way the robe sneaks into her crack when she walks. And you can see her nipples. She is naked.”

  “You don’t think she’s going to streak the parade, do you?”

  “You’re hoping she does. I know that. Statue of Liberty running naked through the streets—right up your alley.”

  Susan B. Anthony was standing nearby and she agreed about Miss Liberty being up to no good. “Quite a comment on our society, if you ask me,” she said. “Nice weather brings out the worst in people, somehow. It’s been shown time and again.”

  “I don’t see why people get so upset about nipples,” said Mr. Gothic.

  “Any more remarks from you and I’ll put that pitchfork where the moon don’t shine,” said his wife. He felt a little plip plip on his head as if a bird might have dropped something. “Do I have something on my head?” he asked. “Hair,” she said.

  Miss Liberty arrived at the head of the parade, which was on McKinley Street beside Krebsbach Chevrolet, and there, behind the twenty-man color guard, their big flags fluttering in the light breeze, was Uncle Sam, leaning against a lamppost, eating a hotdog.

  “Isn’t that hard, walking on little stilts?”

  “Not so bad, once you get the knack of it. It’s the standing around and waiting that kills me.”

  Lyle sat in his golf cart behind the color guard. He had gone home this morning and left the stage wagon to others and they had done a fine job without him and so he was miffed about that. He wore a blue beanie with a little American flag atop it and two bigger flags mounted on the front bumper of the cart and strings of little paper flags all around the canopy. He was trying to get his walkie-talkie to work and it kept squawking at him. “I told you. I’m here, dammit!” he yelled into it. It squawked again. “What?” he said.

  “I think they want you to move to the rear,” said Uncle Sam. “The governor’s late. Clint wants to get the show on the road. Let him bring up the rear.” He looked at Miss Liberty. “Who needs the governor when they have us?” he said. He wiped the mustard from his upper lip and stepped toward her, his arm bent, extended, and she took his hand. They stepped into position and as they did, he could feel, his hand in hers, brushing against her, that the woman was not wearing a brassiere. Mercy. Young women! There were no rules anymore. Oh well. And now he could feel excitement in his red-and-white-striped pants. There definitely was interest down there. He was going to have to get his mind on other things.

  Lyle drove his golf cart around the corner and down the line of the parade, past the first circus wagon to where Clint stood in the middle of the street, a man in a dark suit next to him. “He’s three minutes away,” said the man. Clint ignored him. “Go back to the mayor’s car,” he told Lyle. “Tell them the governor’s
going to ride with her.”

  “I was told he would have his own car,” said the man in the suit.

  “It’s the white Chevy convertible,” Clint told Lyle.

  “So what else do I do?” Lyle said. Clint told him to see to the rear of the parade, keep it tight, don’t let those people lag behind. And make sure the big wagon with the hot band and the elephant hanging on brings up the rear. The elephant would hold a flag in its tail, saying THE END. Cute.

  Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin came hustling up, Franklin straightening his wig. “We’re late, we couldn’t find a parking space,” said Jefferson.

  “There was a parking space reserved for you. Right over there. Behind the church.”

  “I forgot my parking pass.”

  “What do you need a pass for? The space was marked ‘Jefferson. ’ That’s you. Right?”

  “Maybe the governor’s driver is looking for a place to park,” said Todd.

  “It’s almost five o’clock and I’m starting the parade,” said Clint.

  “Give us five more minutes.” Todd put his hand on Clint’s shoulder. Clint took the hand off his shoulder. “We have a pie-eating contest later. Maybe he could participate in that. There’s also a three-legged race.”

  Todd got a solemn look on his face. “We’re talking about the governor of the State of Minnesota.”

  “I could get a manure spreader. How about we have him ride in that?”

  Todd leaned in close and said, “You’re the one looking for an endorsement, buddy, not me. I’d watch my step if I were you.”

  Clint walked over to the big wagon and called up to the teamsters—“You all set?” They gave him a thumbs-up, and he looked up and down the line. Everybody seemed to be in place except for the two Founding Fathers who were heading for the History unit. Amazing. Eight bands at parade rest, and four big teams of wagon horses standing in place and tossing their big heads, switching their stumpy tails, and a clown rocking back and forth on his unicycle, and around the corner on Main Street, the hushed hum and murmur of the crowd sweetly waiting for something to happen—Gary and LeRoy estimated thirty-two thousand people on hand, a new record for attendance—yellow schoolbuses stretched from the Sons of Knute Lodge all the way to the creamery—acres of cars by the grain elevator and the so-called industrial park—gangs of college kids rambled around—fifty seniors from the Good Shepherd Home sat under a canvas pavilion by the bandstand.