“That is quite a story,” she said. “I am thinking about the banana cream pie. Trying to decide between that and the blueberry pie with ice cream.” She ordered the banana cream, which turned out not to be fresh, rather mushy and tasteless, a disappointment, but Mother is not one to complain. She would’ve eaten the whole lump of mush, but I insisted she order the blueberry. “And let this go to waste?” she said. “Yes,” I said. So she did. It was a first for Mother. The blueberry was everything the banana cream was not.
“Life is short,” I said. “Get pleasure while you can.”
“It is not short. Look at me.”
“So did you go to California and meet Clark Gable?”
She took a deep breath. “If Elsie or Florence were around, I’d ask them. They remembered everything.”
“So how does it feel to be ninety?”
She grimaced. Ridiculous question. “I wish I could get back to where I used to be. I would give anything to be eighty again.”
She looked around the room, the big windows looking out on the lake at twilight, the candles on the long table at the end of the room and the eight people sitting around it. “I don’t know who anybody is anymore.”
“The Frauendiensts, the Schoppenhorsts, the Schmidts, and the Zieglers. You don’t know them because they’re Catholic.”
She was getting sleepy, I could tell. “Does the name Frayne Anderson mean anything to you?”
“What should it mean?”
“When you were going under the anesthetic, you told me you dated him before you knew Dad. I asked you about him because I saw a picture from 1935 or so at Minnehaha Park of you with flowers in your hair and dancing with a man with a mustache who was not Dad and you were laughing. You told me it was Frayne Anderson and he played the ukulele and you and he used to sing, Roses love sunshine, violets love dew, angels in heaven know I love you. You used to go trapshooting with him and you said you might’ve married him except he didn’t believe in the Resurrection. He was a theosophist and believed in the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, but not the Resurrection. So you broke up with him and Dad came along and you married him.”
“Well, isn’t that something. Frayne who?”
“Anderson. He was in the theosophists and he told you how the Gnostics of the third century believed that Jesus had commanded us all to be fishermen in a gospel called the Codex Angularis, written down by an apostle named Sandy, who liked to sleep on the beach. He was one of the original twelve, but they later revised it and took him out and put Judas Iscariot in because it made a better story. And Sandy said that nowhere had Jesus commanded anybody to work hard day after day. Jesus had said, Don’t worry about what you shall eat or what you shall wear. Don’t worry about money. Jesus didn’t get up and go to work in the morning. He did some teaching and preaching and healing and a lot of hiking, and he was a fisherman. But the men who put the New Testament together threw out a lot of what Jesus said, such as ‘Blessed are they who fish for they shall have more time.’ And ‘Answer not when thy wives shall rebuke you, neither make reply. Keep silent. And again, I say, keep silent.’ You told me all of that.”
Mother said nothing. I don’t think she even heard me. She was now half-asleep. I paid the check and Carolyn the waitress and I got her into the car and I drove her home and as we came up the driveway, she said, “I can’t marry you, Frayne.” I said, “That’s okay. I understand.” I helped her to the door and opened it. “Thank you for the evening, Frayne,” she said. “Don’t come in. I’ll be fine.” And I guess she was. I called her in the morning and she remembered the steak and the glass of wine. “Don’t tell anybody about the wine,” she said. “I hope I didn’t get out of hand.” Not at all, I said. Not at all.
9.
THE DEATH OF BYRON
My father died in March 2001 when I was in Dublin doing a show. He was eighty-eight. My sister Linda called regularly to tell me how he was doing and then he took a steep turn and she called to say he was close to the end and then somebody spoke to her from across the room and she said, “He’s going. . . . I’ll call you later.” And he was gone. I sat in the hotel room and thought of him back in his late thirties, building our house, the whine of his power saw as he cut the two-by-fours and then the six-whap beat of his hammer as he nailed them up to make the studs and rafters. Once a month Dad sat me down on a sawhorse in the garage and cut my hair with scissors and a hand-clipper and tried to make small talk with me but I wasn’t in the mood. I had gotten the notion that a home haircut meant we were poor. It was a gift of attention, to hold your son’s head still and patiently trim a thick growth of hair, and now that he was dead I could appreciate this—the kid with the bedsheet wrapped around him, the man plying unfamiliar tools with great care to give the boy a respectable appearance, unwilling to spend money on personal vanity. This little wisp of memory of his hands on my head made me weep for my father in a Dublin hotel room. I repaid him for the haircuts by presenting him with his last grandchild, my daughter, four years before he died. She visited him toward the end when he lay in bed, and he wriggled his left big toe under the blanket and when she grabbed at it he moved his foot away and made her laugh. This game of hide-and-seek went on and on. All of his other pleasures were gone, but this one was as good as ever.
In Wobegon Boy, John is feeling weary and slow in New York when his father dies back in Lake Wobegon. John flies home to a town he had fled eagerly years before and is startled at how comfortable he feels there now. The small talk, the reticence, the food, the smell of home—he is slightly alarmed at how he, a rebellious son, fits in so well.
John’s father died early on a Tuesday morning in mid-January. He was seventy-three. He collapsed on the basement stairs bringing a bag of frozen peas up from the freezer. John was in New York, asleep, in bed with a young woman named Kyle, the daughter of his friend Ben. She sat up. His brother Bill was on the phone, telling him about the peas, and then Mother came on. “He said he wanted spaghetti for lunch and I said, Well, go down and get me a package of frozen peas, and he said, How about some hamburger, and I said, I got that in the fridge, so he went down and on his way up he sat down on the steps and died. I was on the phone with my sister and when I opened the door to the stairs, he lay there, he was just gone.” She said he had seen a doctor in January—less than a month ago—and everything was fine.
“Well, listen. I’m going to jump in a cab and go out to LaGuardia and I’ll be there by early afternoon. Okay?”
His first thought was that it was a sensible death: to die while still in good health, at home—not sink into geezerhood and shakiness and dementia. Just sit down and give up the ghost.
Bill had spoken to Ronnie in Dallas and Diana in Tucson and everybody would be flying to Minnesota that evening. “It’s snowing like crazy,” said Bill. The funeral would be on Saturday at the Lutheran church.
“I’m on my way,” John said. “My dad died,” he said to Kyle and then noticed that she’d slept in the nude. Odd he hadn’t noticed that before. “I’ve got to go back to Minnesota.”
“Really?” She reached over and patted his hair and smoothed it down. “I’m sorry we didn’t finish making love. We had such a nice start.”
He headed for the bathroom and turned toward his living room lined with bookcases, the window looking out on Columbus Avenue. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
“This is so weird,” she said. “I never was with someone when somebody close to them died. Were you close?”
“No,” he said. “When you leave, could you slip the key back under the door? The cleaning lady comes Friday, so don’t worry about the mess.”
“When will you come back, do you think? I mean, just ballpark.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“I’d like to see you again.”
He murmured something agreeable about that and she said, “Minnesota is in
the Midwest, right?” He nodded. “Are you from, like, a city out there?”
“Small town.”
“Oh. You don’t seem like you’re from a small town.”
“I am.”
He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him and peed. A small town courtesy. She knocked on the door. “Would you like to take a shower together?”
“I’m in a hurry, sorry,” he said. Making out in a hot shower with a soapy girl twenty-five years younger than yourself on the morning your dad died: it didn’t seem right. Not at all.
He packed his dark brown pinstripe suit and a white shirt and caught a cab to LaGuardia. The woman at the ticket counter gave him a look of pity, as if he wore a name tag that said: Dead Man’s Son. The plane was packed. He curled up in a window seat, stuffed two pillows between the seat and the window, pulled the thin blanket over himself, and awoke as the plane taxied through gusts of blowing snow to the lighted windows of the Minneapolis–St. Paul terminal. A little line of drool trickled from the corner of his mouth. The woman in the seat ahead turned and gave him a look of disgust, and John guessed that he had been snoring.
He rented a black Pontiac and headed north on the Interstate, traffic creeping along at twenty-five miles an hour. The road felt frictionless, as if he were at the wheel of a destroyer on the North Atlantic and the shapes in the mist off to starboard weren’t farmhouses but cargo ships in the convoy, and the windshield wiper was a sonar antenna tracking German U-boats. At any moment the whole thing could blow up, but a man’s got to do his duty, and either you go forward or you go hide somewhere, and, yes, I believe we’re going to win this war.
When he was a kid and the family drove home at night from visiting relatives in the Cities, John always stood behind the front seat, his chin next to his father’s head, watching the parade of approaching headlights, their beams filling up the car with a big whoosh of light. Smelling his dad’s hair oil, his aftershave, trying to get the feel of what it was like to be a man driving a car, John would have been happy to go all night. His dad steered with his left hand low on the wheel, thumb and finger on the spoke, and he never sped or tried to ace out other cars. He drove with his right arm across the seat back, and John watched, imagining driving, how the wheel felt, how it would be to be alone in your own car. Just you.
• • •
It was two in the afternoon when he reached Lake Wobegon, snow drifting in the streets, the house a dim shape in the storm, all the lights on, Mother in a gray housedress waiting at the back door. “How were the roads?” she asked. “Not that bad,” he said. He kissed her on the cheek and she put her arms around him and they clung tightly to each other for a moment. “It’s good to have you all safe under one roof,” she said.
Everybody was there in the kitchen. Ronnie and Bill and Judy. Diana stood up to give him a hug. She had put on some weight since she became a vegetarian. Tears ran down her puffy cheeks. She wore a lacy white dress and big turquoise jewelry, earrings the size of juice glasses, enough beads to fill a bread box.
“Daddy’s gone,” she said. “We’ll never see him again in this whole world.”
Ronnie sat perched on the counter, in green pants and a short-sleeved shirt. His blond hair was cut short, and it glistened with oil, and his face was nicked from shaving. “Nice to see you,” he said in his squawky voice. “Been a while.” His legs dangled down, new white shoes with tassels, white socks.
Bill sat at the table, looking gray and haggard, his face slack, and John shook hands with him, and hugged Judy.
“Hi, stranger,” she said.
“Would you care for spaghetti?” said Mother, already filling a bowl with a long skein of pasta. She dumped a cup of red sauce over it and added another. She set it on the table, with a paper towel for a napkin. “Well,” she said, looking around at their silent faces, “here we all are.”
She told them the story again, that Dad died on the next-to-top basement step on his way upstairs from having taken a box of rubber binders to the basement that Mother had told him to get rid of, binders saved from his years of running the grain elevator, thousands of binders, a lifetime supply. While in the basement, he fetched a bag of peas from the freezer in the laundry room, which he kept full of hamburger patties, fish sticks, vegetables, hash browns, as a hedge against disaster. He also kept silver dollars in a flour sack stashed behind the paint cans under the basement stairs. And then disaster struck as he climbed the stairs. As he approached the top, Mother heard him gasp. She called to him, “What’s the matter?” and he said, “Nothing. I’m all right.” She was making spaghetti sauce. She put a little more seasoning in it, and then opened the door to the stairs a moment later, and he was gone, slumped against the wall, the bag of frozen peas in his right hand. His eyes were open and he was dead. She sat on the stair beside him and put her arm around his shoulders and smoothed his hair and kissed his cheek. She told him she loved him and always would love him. And then she took the frozen peas from his hand and took them up to the kitchen and put them in the refrigerator, and called the rescue squad. They came five minutes later and tried to revive him and Dr. DeHaven came over and pronounced him dead and had him taken to the funeral home, run by Dad’s old buddy Mr. Lindberg.
Diana said, “He was unconscious and you took the peas from him before you called the rescue squad?”
“He didn’t need an ambulance, he was dead,” said Mother.
“But how did you know that?”
“He wasn’t breathing. I checked his pulse.”
“You didn’t think you should call a doctor?” said Diana. She looked around at the rest of them. John ate his spaghetti. Bill and Judy drank coffee. They ate cookies from a box that the neighbors had sent over. A string hung over the table, a three-by-five index card (PANTRY LIGHT: DO NOT YANK) taped to it.
“Dr. DeHaven? No, it never occurred to me,” said Mother. He had done a cardiogram on Dad a few weeks ago and said everything looked fine, said Mother.
“He sat there dead and your first thought was to make sure the peas didn’t thaw?” said Diana.
“It was silly, wasn’t it,” said Mother. “I don’t know why I even thought of it.”
And then Diana clapped her hand to her mouth. “Those weren’t the same peas—”
“Yes,” said Mother. “Actually, they were. Of course they were.”
She had put the peas in the spaghetti, with the tomato sauce. The death peas.
“We ate the peas Daddy held in his hand as he died?” Diana whispered.
“Dad touched everything in this house,” said John. “You’re sitting in his chair. What’s the problem?”
He took a forkful and held it to his mouth, smelled the sweet uncomplicated sauce—it reminded him of when he was in sixth grade and his mother had the school send him home every day for lunch. She fed him her spaghetti and they had grown-up conversations. She told him how much she had loved her one year at the University of Minnesota. One year was all that Grandpa Petersen could afford. “I knew I must make the most of it,” she said, “and get all I could in one year,” so she attended every free lecture and concert, haunted the library, soaked up her classes, wasted no time making friends because she only had the one shining year.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said. She held up a brown grocery bag. “Take this over to John Lindberg at the funeral parlor. These are the clothes I want Dad to be buried in.”
John squinted at the bag.
“It’s his work clothes,” she said. “I want him buried in the clothes that we always saw him in. He hated suits and ties.”
• • •
He and Bill walked up the street to Lindberg’s. The snow had stopped falling, and a few conscientious souls were already out shoveling in the dark. It was a light, dry snow, and it glittered where the porch lights shone on it, and in the dark it glowed.
“I wonde
r what it’s like to embalm people you’ve known all your life. To cut their arteries and drain out the blood and clean them up,” said John.
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“But when you take over your dad’s undertaking business in the small town where you grew up, you figure you’re going to know the clientele.”
“He never married, did he,” said Bill.
John said, “Some people shouldn’t.”
Lindberg’s was in the same old big white house with the curved veranda on Cleveland Street, a driveway alongside the house running under the little portico with the double door through which generations of Wobegonians had been carried for their funerals. The old black Cadillac hearse sat, nose out, ready to take Dad to church on Saturday and then to his grave.
They knocked at the back door, and Mr. Lindberg opened it. He was tall and plump, with a wild shock of white hair and watery blue eyes. He wore an old brown wool suit and a brown plaid shirt, a tuft of white hair poking up at the neck. He led them into his tiny kitchen. Beyond was the funeral parlor. The kitchen was his office, his larder, his den, and upstairs was his bedroom. He plopped down on a white kitchen chair and Bill took the other. John leaned against the counter. Mr. Lindberg gave them a sorrowful look.
“This is a hard one for me,” he said. “I knew your dad long as I can remember.” He took a deep breath. “We used to raise hell when we were kids, you know. I’ve been putting off working on him.”
Mr. Lindberg offered them coffee. John said yes, and the old man poured a mugful and said, “How about some whiskey in it to keep the flies off you.” John nodded, and the old man poured a wallop of whiskey in and handed it to him. John took a sip. The smell made his nose hairs tingle.
“Oh yes,” said Mr. Lindberg, “your dad was a rambunctious young man before your mother settled him down. I remember when he took the pastor’s Model A apart on Halloween and reassembled it in the church basement. I imagine you boys didn’t hear about that.”
The Keillor Reader Page 10