Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  She made a list:

  Find out all about August (Gussie) Norlander.

  Check available flights to Rome.

  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.

  NARROW STREET

  The 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 thr
ee 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.

  She plunged into a stream of walkers heading across a main drag into a narrow, dark street. A herd of short people, Japanese, dressed as if for a wedding, chittering away, and three Arabic women in black burkas. (Eloise would be having a fit right now, waiting for the bomb to go off.) A man in pajama bottoms and a black T-shirt (“FRA DIAVOLO PIZZA”) and sandals hustled along. A man with corn-silk hair, no shirt, a tweed jacket two sizes too small, whistling. A display of paintings for sale, cheap: ballerinas, St. Peter’s at dusk, a still life of wine bottles, dogs sitting in an empty piazza. A falafel stand tended by a man with a badger face, a kerchief around his head, the radio playing funeral music. The happy jangle of voices around her. A man on the prowl, hands in his pocket, standing in a doorway, the glint of his eyes. He looked as if he might accost her, ask for money, try to sell her a stolen watch, pinch her butt. She whispered under her breath, as she passed, “Don’t mess with me, buddy.” And he didn’t.

  Oh my God. She felt great. Oh my God, the freedom. Overwhelming. Walking tall, going where you cared to go, stopping to stare, moving on. Freedom. Where had she been all her life?

  Well, she’d been raising three children and keeping the ship on course through the storms, maintaining good hygiene and nutrition while standing guard on the scholastic, religious, dental, and moral fronts and keeping up a cheerful demeanor and suppressing outbursts of violence. Kids. They had the stamina of goats. Bouncing off the walls and yammering nonstop. Wore you out so you caught all the viruses they brought home, which they got over in twenty-four hours, and you were a zombie for two weeks. They crawled into bed with you at 2:00 A.M. and threw up. One of them only ate food that is white and another one loved to walk into the room and scream and another one needed to make Getting Dressed in the Morning into an Ibsen tragedy. At night, she was so exhausted that the thought of having sex was like the thought of running the high hurdles. No, she lay in bed thinking of all she must do the next day, organizing the cakewalk for the spring carnival and baking brownies for the bake sale and encouraging the bloom of individuality—Carla the queen bee and Carl Jr. the gifted misfit and Cheryl the comedian—and offering basic financial/transportation/ shopping/counseling services, twenty years of steady interesting work, plus teaching eleventh graders the difference between “anxious” and “eager,” and “nauseated” and “nauseous”—and you get the kids out of the house finally, the last one gone. You give a graduation party for her—nobody gives one for you, no party for graduating parents. (What do you graduate to? Nobody knows.) You must’ve learned something from parenting—and no, there’s nothing. You know less about it than when you began. You learn about prayer. Which you do when there’s nothing to be done. It’s up to You, God. You wish you had prayed more and yelled less. You regret that you didn’t laugh more, that you told them 2,000 times to pick up after themselves when 850 might have been enough. Parenthood was a huge stupefying parenthesis in your life and now you must pick up where you left off (which is where, exactly?) and meanwhile you’ve learned nothing about life except that you want more of
it. The three little Krebsbachs were gone and all the advice she’d dispensed to them didn’t seem so useful to her. Be careful of free offers. Get up early and do what you need to do before you have time to worry about it. The way to do hard things is to do them. Trouble is easy to avoid so long as you stay away from it. Good cautionary advice but she had lost her caution in the course of teaching it to her children. She was hoping for free offers. And to find trouble.

  She strode onward, map in her pocket, no fear of getting lost. If she got lost, not a problem. She was well lost already. Nobody here knew her, nobody expected her to smile and say hello to them. Nobody was going to stop her and ask how is Carl, is Carla pregnant yet, did Cheryl get the job? Nobody would ask why she couldn’t come to the spring choral concert and hear “Shenandoah” for the thirty-seventh time. Nobody would look at her and think, “Back in high school we all thought she was going to go places. Wonder what happened?” Nobody would think, “Gee, I liked that outfit she was wearing yesterday better. And those old brown oxfords have seen better days.” She walked steadily on, crossing busy streets against the light, darting between slow-moving walkers, and when she heard a snatch of English, she turned her head away and quickened her step. She was Marjorie Parmigiano and she was en route to a lunch date with Enrico. She ducked into a shop, snatched a six-foot scarf off a shelf, bright green, paid up, tossed it around her neck, marched on. She had a feeling she was being followed but she didn’t care. This was the way to travel. Solo. Nobody to make small talk with. Like it says on the sign in buses: PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE DRIVER IN UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION. And there is so much of that in the world, people announcing the obvious. In Lake Wobegon, a man stopping another on Main Street: “So you’re in town too, then.” “Ja, I thought I’d come to town. Why not.” Two men announcing their presence. Dumb. No, a person should travel alone so as to skip that stuff and fully absorb the carnival around you, be the silent invisible observer following the path as it opens up through the rolling crowd, finding the gaps, pushing through, your ears, nose, eyes, skin, tongue fully engaged.