Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  “The Lord will hold Kate to account for her actions, and for bringing disrepute onto those gathered in His Name, but the Lord will especially hold us to account for our exercise of discipline,” he said, quietly.

  Kate, he said, was 17 and no child and she knew what she was doing when she did it and now she would have to be sent away. There was a home for wayward girls in Indiana. He himself would drive her there if she wouldn’t go with Sugar and she would give birth to her baby there and it would be placed for adoption with a Christian family.

  Mother said, “Why couldn’t we keep her here? We can decide about the baby when the baby comes. And then there’s Roger—”

  Al didn’t like to be questioned once he had explained things and made them clear. He repeated, tersely, what he’d said about separation doctrine, and he added that Kate must show genuine contrition if she didn’t wish to be sent away. She must confess how she had rebelled against God’s teaching, and she should do it in writing. Immediately. Today.

  Mother said, “We’re all sinners in God’s sight, and there is not so much difference between Kate and any of the rest of us, if you ask me.”

  I could hear Daddy say, “Excuse me for a minute,” and get up from the table and Uncle Al say, “We need you here,” and Daddy say he’d be back in a minute and leave the room. Daddy could sense an argument approaching. He couldn’t stand to hear high-pitched emotion of any kind, he couldn’t bear it.

  He shuffled through the kitchen, rattled a pan, opened the back door, and headed for the garage. I guessed he was trying to think of a good reason to be out there. Some urgent necessary thing. Maybe he’d start washing the snow tires or alphabetizing the paint cans by color.

  Ruth said she was so upset she couldn’t think straight. Roger Guppy was no good and she’d known it since he was a child and threw rocks on the playground and almost put another child’s eyes out. She had tried to keep Kate away from worldly influences, a hard thing in this day and age, and the harder she tried, the more Kate resisted. She had searched Kate’s room this morning, top to bottom, and found cigarettes, empty wine bottles, books of all sorts—atheist poetry and worldly novels, Hemingway, Cummings, Steinbeck, Kerouac, that whole crowd—and this—she was showing them something—and there were low outbursts of disgust and then uncle Al said it out loud. “ ‘The Flaming Heart’? What sort of thing is that for a Christian to be reading?”

  Sugar said, “It’s about a tornado or something. The boy is the son of Broadway actors. He’s carried away by a high wind and dropped among Brethren. He stays only because the dog tells him to.”

  “How can a dog tell him to stay?” says Lois, never too swift.

  “It’s fiction,” said Flo.

  “Certainly doesn’t seem too complimentary to Brethren,” noted Al.

  “That isn’t Kate’s,” said the big sister. “That′s Gary’s. He wrote it.”

  It sounded as if Ruth were paging through it. “It’s silly. Get it out of here. Burn it or something.”

  “It’s just been one thing after another,” said Uncle Sugar. “I can’t tell you what we’ve been through.” His voice shook. He said that Kate had broken his heart in two and that if she couldn’t mend her ways it’d be better for everybody if she left and never came back. There was a period of liquid sobbing and shoulder-patting then. And a long honk into a hanky.

  Uncle LeRoy spoke up. He said we should be calm and take the long view and not act precipitously in anger, lest we do harm that can never be repaired. People sometimes haul off in a big huff and do more harm than good.

  Al said, “I’m not in a huff and it isn’t precipitous to insist that Scripture teaching be followed.”

  LeRoy said, “You are too angry, look at you.”

  Al said sharply that anger was the farthest thing from his mind. “Anger has nothing to do with this.”

  Al and LeRoy were often edgy around each other. Al was top dog in the Brethren, the leader of Bible reading, the teacher, the explainer, and LeRoy liked to pretend not to notice him.

  Flo asked LeRoy what he thought should be done. LeRoy said, “I think the boy ought to marry her.” There was silence. Ruth said she could not even imagine such a thing.

  I snuck out of the linen closet and knocked on the brother’s door and opened it. Kate sat on the bed. I said, “I’m sorry you got caught with my story.” She said, “It doesn’t matter. That’s the least of it.”

  —They’re talking about sending you to Indiana.

  —I’d like to see them try.

  —They want you to make a statement of contrition. In writing.

  —Let em write it themselves.

  —If you don’t, they’ll send you away and you can’t come back.

  —Who said I wanted to?

  I wanted to know how it felt to be pregnant. Could she feel the baby inside? What happened? Where was Roger? Did he know about this? What did he say?

  I said, “I could write it for you. I’m a writer.” I said, “Just tell me what happened.”

  She lay back on the bed and pulled the quilt over her. “What do you mean, what happened? I got pregnant, that’s what happened.”

  I said, “But how? When did it happen? Where were you?”

  “I was with Roger,” she said. “It’s nobody’s business.”

  She lay looking into thin air, thinking. Faraway, like ocean surf, the murmur of voices downstairs, our family, trying to piece the world together. She said, “Do you think I’m pretty?” I said yes. She said, “I mean, really pretty?” I said yes. She said, “Do you still like me?”

  I took a deep breath. I looked into the air above her head. I told her that I loved her and that I meant it. She put her hand on mine and we sort of hugged sideways, a quick one, a shy hug. I told her that when this all blew over, I’d take her to Joe’s Bar and buy her a Martini and we’d dance to the “Hyena Stomp.”

  I had her confession sort of worked out in my mind, how she had fallen among evil companions and wasted her inheritance of grace and now was throwing herself on the mercy of those who loved her, though she was not worthy of their love. It was a good confession, contrite but not too abject, leaving certain questions open, and I was all set to type it up, and the next night Roger, who had gone to visit his uncle in Millet and figure things out, called up Kate from a tavern at 10:30 P.M. and asked her to marry him. He said, “I think we should do it. There’s no reason why not.”

  She said, “Have you been drinking?” and he said, “Sure.”

  She said, “Roger, this is for a lifetime, you know.” He said, “Hey. You’re telling me.” But he told her he loved her and that next spring they’d be in New York City probably and none of this would matter anymore.

  29

  Sickness and Health

  Aunt Ruth hustled around and arranged for the Lutheran church the following Saturday evening, the Lutheran ladies to fix the supper, Pastor Tommerdahl to officiate, bouquets of daisies and lilies from Mrs. Hoglund’s garden, Kate’s dress to be a refitting of Ruth’s old white satin wedding dress, and three bridesmaids including the older sister, and three groomsmen (Ding, Milkman, and Jim Dandy). Mother offered to help and Ruth said she was just fine, thank you. “As long as I’ve got something to keep me busy, I’m happy,” she said. Sugar was having conniptions, she told Mother on Friday, not sure whether he should allow the marriage or not, and he spent Thursday in bed, convinced he was on the verge of a cerebral hemorrhage, and wrote out instructions for the disposal of his goods and chattel, but was feeling a little more chipper today. Ruth, on the other hand, stayed up all night sewing a dress for herself.

  “You need your rest,” said Mother.

  “I can rest when I’m dead,” said Ruth.

  Kate, she said, now that they were about to lose her, was sweet as pie, helping around the house and being pleasant at the dinner table and behaving as a young lady should behave.

  The couple would reside with Roger’s parents until they could get a place of their own.
The Guppys had a spare room, what with Ricky being in jail.

  The wedding day dawned bright and fair. The older brother arrived on the Greyhound from Minneapolis and sat himself down at the kitchen table and ate the eggs and bacon Mother fried for him. He was okay, he said. School was okay. Courses were interesting. Grades were good. Liked his dorm room. It was okay. Roommate was okay. He was never around so that was good. Why was the roommate never around? Had a girlfriend, that’s why. The brother smirked. Women. They take up your whole life. The roommate was probably going to flunk out. And for what? Some woman. Hard to believe.

  The older brother was not one to regale you with anecdotes about his life and times. He sat, tall, erect, Adam’s apple bobbing, chewing unself-consciously, mouth open, cud rolling around, glasses slid half down his nose, and his mind was not on us at all. I doubt he was entirely aware of why he’d come home for the weekend. He was cogitating over some great problem, numbers were jingling in his head, equations circling, theorems pacing back and forth. Mother took his laundry bag down to the basement. He looked up at me as if trying to recall my name.

  “Mother has purchased a snub-nosed revolver and she’s taken to carrying it in her purse when she goes downtown,” I said. “I think we need to keep an eye on her.” He grunted and ducked his head and shoveled in a fresh load. “Daddy’s hitting the gin something fierce. Drinks it out of a jelly glass like it was lemonade.” His eyelids flickered and his eyes seemed to focus for a split-second and then he was gone again, back doing the math. “Sister stays out until three in the morning and comes home with a sack full of money. Ones and fives, mostly. Some tens. I think she’s working as a hootchy-koo dancer in Millet and giving hand jobs to the railroad men.”

  Mother came in and asked the brother if he wanted to take a bath. What she meant by that was that he smelled bad. But he didn’t get that either. “Sure,” he said, but he didn’t budge.

  I was chosen to accompany Kate to the Bon Marché Beauty Salon that afternoon to sit with her while she had her hair done, which was a signal honor and I accepted with alacrity, having just learned the word alacrity. She asked me to come with because she didn’t care to be alone with those old biddies who’d been gossiping about her and Roger for weeks.

  Saturday was a big morning at the Bon Marché, what with Saturday canasta and afternoon Mass and all, and Luanne’s sister Marilyn was helping out, washing hair at the sink in back. Marilyn did the washing and the bluing and highlighting, and Luanne did the curling and snipping. Mrs. Ingqvist, Mrs. Krebsbach, Mrs. Bunsen, Mrs. Magendanz, sat under beehive dryers along the wall, wrapped in white, reading beauty magazines, their ancient heads getting fluffed under the drying hoods. The whole place had an old-lady aroma, a combination of perfumes and medications and something dry and sour, something left too long on the stove, a cream soup gone bad. Darlene from the Chatterbox was plopped in a styling chair and Luanne was trimming her bangs. Aunt Flo had plenty of stories about Darlene and her string of ne’er-do-well boyfriends and Darlene looked as if each one had taken ten years off her life. She looked 35 going on 72.

  Luanne looked up as we two walked in and saw Kate and said, “Well, here comes the bride!” and gave her a big hug.

  “You look just like someone ought to look on her wedding day,” she said. “Like royalty.”

  She sat Kate in the second chair while she finished up Darlene’s bangs. Luanne said, “I’m so happy for you. Now all we need to do is find a good man for Darlene here.” Darlene frowned. She’d been waitressing long enough to know there was no such creature. “You find me a good man, tell him to come fix my roof and put in a new furnace, then we’ll talk about it.”

  Around the room, the ladies chuckled.

  “It’s supposed to be a hard winter, they say,” said Darlene. She was a heavy woman with sore feet who looked like she’d endured a lot of hard winters. About a thousand, maybe.

  Around the mirror, taped to the glass, were pictures of Luanne’s children and nieces and nephews, her sister who married the dentist and her sister who married Leonard Larsen’s uncle and her brother who owns the biggest greenhouse in Oklahoma and the brother who nobody asks about anymore, it would be impolite. He is in Minneapolis, employed at some sort of job. At least you don’t read about him in the papers.

  —How is your Mother? I imagine she must be rushing around, said Luanne.

  —She’s fine.

  —Lot of work getting married. Where are you kids going on your honeymoon?

  —The Black Hills. But after baseball season’s over.

  —Well, that’ll be nice. Not so crowded then. I always wanted to see Mount Rushmore but Bob won’t go because it means we’d have to visit his sister in Rapid City. She’s the one who can’t stop talking. Talks nonstop. Morning, noon, and night. Talk, talk, talk. Bob and I went to Chicago for our honeymoon, he’d always wanted to see a major-league ballgame so guess what we did for three days. Yup. I took along a magazine and read. He said, “The least you could do is make an effort.” Our first argument. Stayed in a hotel room that smelled of kerosene. It was on the tenth floor and I couldn’t stop thinking, What if the place burned? How would we get out?

  She finished up Darlene, curling a row of bangs over her forehead, and fluffed her and sent her away and turned to Kate and studied her and ran her fingers through her hair.

  —Is it long enough to have it in a chignon? Kate asked.

  —Honey, if you want it in a chignon, that’s how we’ll do it, and if it isn’t long enough, believe me, I have my ways.

  She led Kate back to the sink and sat her down and leaned her back and washed her hair. She said, “When I got married, I saw this picture of Grace Kelly on the cover of Life and her hair was in a French roll and it was so dainty, I did mine exactly like it, except I used a toilet paper roll for a foundation and I forgot to take all the toilet-paper off. I tripped on the hem of my dress coming up the aisle, and the roll fell out and hung there. I must’ve looked like Medusa with a headful of snakes. My mother looked up from the pew and saw toilet paper hanging down from my head and she leaped up and pulled out all the pins and my hair hung down like Spanish moss and that was the final straw, I was all worn out, I’d been up all night finishing my dress, and I stood there and bawled so hard I could hardly get the words out. The minister read as fast as he could go and never looked up. I don’t know what Bob thought, he never said. He just took me to that horrible hotel and three days at the ballpark. I haven’t been to a game since.”

  And then Kate started to weep. Softly, but everyone was suddenly quiet. I saw her in the mirror. Her mouth all rubbery and tears shining on her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’m okay.” She was reading a story in the National Enquirer while Luanne toweled her hair—Woman Marries Martian, Honeymoons on Jupiter, Gives Birth to 40-Lb. Infant with Glass Head—she read the headline and started crying. She cried sweetly, like a little girl, very musical. Nobody said a word. It was so quiet you could hear the little alarm clock on Luanne’s cabinet next to the comb jar, you could hear footsteps on the sidewalk, music tinkling on a radio upstairs.

  A bride crying on her wedding day. It scared me to hear it but the women of the Bon Marché seemed unperplexed.

  “I just wish I knew what I was getting myself in for,” Kate said and cried a little harder.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” said Luanne. “Everybody feels that way.”

  I was getting ready to take Kate away to the hunting cabin up north. To comfort her and protect her from the treachery of the world. To amuse her. To help raise her child. To make everybody happy. To get rich and buy a big house with a swimming pool. A long list of things. If she had said, “Get me out of here, I can’t do this,” I maybe would’ve done it, or something like it, but she didn’t.

  Mrs. Krebsbach said, “Believe me, it’s the wedding that’s the hard part. You slave away for months to make the damn thing nice and, bang, it’s over in thirty minutes and he doesn’t
notice a thing, all he wants is for you to jump into the sack like Ava Gardner. No, once you’re past that, honey, everything that happens afterward is not as bad as you might think.”

  Kate blew her nose delicately and whispered, “I’ll be okay,” and Luanne said, “Of course you will,” and worked on the chignon, using a wad of cotton for a base. And when it was finished, they all stood round the bride, admiring her hair—all the old sorceresses and priestesses and oracles of our town, stood by her, patting her, murmuring priestessly things, and even knowing what they knew about romance and marriage, nonetheless they wished her the best and hoped she and her husband would be very happy together.

  On the way home, I asked Kate if she was okay.

  “Are you kidding? Of course not. I’m sick as a dog. If anybody looked at me cross-eyed, I’d toss my cookies.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I got pregnant, that’s what. I’ve been knocked up!” She shouted it, and it tickled her so much, she yelled again: “I’ve been knocked up by my boyfriend!” And then she started giggling. “I feel like I could have a diarrhea attack and throw up simultaneously. Empty out from both ends. You ever see a woman in a white dress puke and shoot poop at the same time in a church in front of her entire family?”

  Up ahead of us, the Catholic bells were tolling and I said, “Let’s go to Mass.” I thought it’d take her mind off it.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “As long as we have to go in the Lutheran church, why not give the Catholics a shot?”