Mr. Keillor:
It was terribly generous of you to offer to fly everybody to Rome, and I salute you for that, but I think we need to look at this realistically. Flying three hundred people from Lake Wobegon to Rome for a week is going to cost you more than you are able to pay, I am quite sure, or even a hundred—I mean, you’re talking about a million dollars, right? Judging by the sales of your most recent books, I doubt that you have that much cash to spend. And even if you could afford to send fifty people to Rome, I think you can imagine the hard feelings it would cause when some people get to go and others don’t. It will be brother against brother, children against parents. Marriages will break up. There may be bloodshed. Surely you, America’s Favorite Storyteller and the Chronicler of Small-Town America, can understand this. People here are not as charitable as you may imagine. Perhaps they were nicer sixty years ago when you were young, but not anymore. How will you select the lucky winners? Will you give free trips to the Fifty Neediest People in Town? Hold a lottery and allocate half the prizes to Lutherans and half to Catholics? Hold an essay contest and ask people to write fi ve hundred words on “Pasta, Pizza, and Puccini”? Guess the number of rigatoni shells in the Ford pickup truck?
No matter how you award the prizes, there will be rejects—and the more prizes you give out, the worse the rejects will feel—and the day you return to your beloved hometown to visit your poor old mother, you’ll find a mob of angry people carrying torches who will chase you across the corn stubble late at night and you’ll have to take shelter in the blind man’s cottage and he’ll try to be nice to you but eventually he’ll say, “Why didn’t you take me on that trip to Rome? I had a dream that I went to Rome and the Pope touched my eyes and I could see again. Guess that’s not going to happen now.” And he’ll pull out a gun and shoot you. Or try to. Imagine being chased through a cottage by an armed blind man.
So I suggest that we make an announcement here and now that there was a misunderstanding and you are going to donate some money to the Shining Star Scholarship Fund instead and you will pay expenses for the twelve persons already signed up. How does that sound?
Sincerely,
Marjorie Krebsbach
11th grade English teacher
Lake Wobegon High School
P.S. I meant to tell you that I think that Happy to Be Here is, by far, your best book. It’s funny and very stylishly written. You ought to go back to writing that sort of thing.
And that’s what happened. Mr. Keillor’s accountant, Mr. Ross, called from Minneapolis to say that what with Mr. Keillor’s difficulties with the IRS over the claim of a three-week vacation on Antigua as a business expense—research for a screenplay—there wouldn’t be money to cover an open invitation, but yes, $60,000 to cover expenses for the original twelve passengers, that would be okay, provided he could pay half now and half at the completion of the trip. “Fine,” said Margie. And she put a story in the Herald Star.
News has reached us that Mr. Gary Keillor, the radio show host and author of Happy to Be Here, will be flying to Rome on March 25 with eleven Lake Wobegon residents to honor World War II hero August Norlander (LWHS, ’40). Keillor, who was honored by the Thanatopsians at last week’s luncheon, also clarified an offhand remark made at the luncheon which some misunderstood as an offer to pay passage to Rome for anyone who wished to go. The offer, in fact, was to contribute money to the Sons of Knute Shining Star Scholarship Fund. “We are extremely touched by Mr. Keillor’s generosity,” announced S.O.K. Grand Oya W. Lance Pedersen, “and I know that the boys and girls of Lake Wobegon are, too. Many more people will profit from his generosity than would have from a week’s trip to Rome. I am glad that that was a slip of the proverbial tongue. I always knew his heart was in the right place, working for educational opportunity for our young people.”
She didn’t dare expect Norbert to actually send the money. In her world, depending on men to do the right thing was a risky business—many birthdays would’ve gone unobserved if one expected men to remember them—but he remembered, or some woman who worked for him remembered, and the check arrived by registered mail at the post office on Wednesday and Mr. Bauser was quite excited. Registered letters didn’t come all that often. At first, he suspected legal proceedings, perhaps a settlement of a lawsuit for sexual harassment. He could see through the little cellophane window that a check lay inside. “Guess your ship came in, huh?” he said. He peered through the bars, his moustache twitching, as she signed for the letter. “Norlander,” he said. “That’s your rich uncle?” She smiled. “I knew a Norlander,” he said. “Norbert Norlander. He was my older brother’s best friend. Left here in 1950 and went to Texas and went into the oil business.”
“I had no idea,” she said.
“Word is that you folks’re going on a little trip?”
“A person can always hope.”
He smiled a small sour smile. “Must’ve known him pretty well if he sends you a check.”
“I did him some favors and he insisted on paying,” said Margie. “He’s a sweet old man. Eighty-eight or something.”
And he looked at her with eyes narrowed, thinking Phone Sex. A rich old Norskie in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had paid Margie to sit and whisper suggestive scenarios to him sitting naked in his wheelchair.
Fine. Let him think that. She didn’t care. She stepped outside and heard booming sounds from the lake—the ice cracking on a warm day—and drove in to St. Cloud to deposit the cashier’s check at a bank called Associated Federal in a storefront in the Granite City shopping mall. She’d never set foot in the place, nobody knew her there.
She had picked it out of the yellow pages and called on the phone and a woman said, “Thank you for calling Associated Federal. Need a new shower? Want to redo an old kitchen or add on a bedroom? Home improvement loans are quick and easy at Associated Federal. Just talk to one of our loan associates today. To check your account balance, press 1. To speak to a loan officer, press 2. To ask about our payroll saving plan and 401(k), press 3. To speak to an investment advisor, press 4. For employmentrelated questions, press 5. For all other matters, press 0.” She pressed zero.
Another recorded voice: “If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it now.” A long pause. And then a young man said, “Hello?” He seemed confused about the idea of opening a savings account. He put her on hold. A piano played something that sounded like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And then an older man came on. He apologized. “We’re a new branch,” he said. “Still unpacking the boxes. How can I help?” She wasn’t sure she should deposit a hundred fifty grand with people who didn’t seem to be set up to accept savings, but she made an appointment to come see him. His name was Stanley W. Larson. He enrolled her in the Family of Depositors and presented her with an Associated Federal thermal coffee mug and a rubber gripper to help open tight lids. And a ballpoint pen and plastic pocket protector. She hid the deposit slip in her underwear drawer, and then thought, What if she were killed on the highway like Mrs. McGarry? So she wrote on a Post-it note, This is my legacy to my children, $50k apiece. Spend it. Love, Mom, and stuck it to the slip.
TINY TOWELS
Late their first afternoon in Rome, the pilgrims who had crawled into the sack awoke in a stupor and migrated to the lobby and parked themselves on the saggy seats under the dying ferns and awaited guidance. Daryl had found a brochure for a nighttime tour of Rome, starting at the Janiculum Hill, then “Grand View of the Entire City,” the Trevi Fountain, Campidoglio, the Forum, and winding up at a nightclub called Nero’s Palace featuring Apollo and the Exotica Slave Dancers. The picture showed bare-breasted women in chains and tiny loincloths. “You want to go see naked women dance?” said Margie. “Buy a DVD. Save your money.” Daryl thought that maybe he did. He never had and he didn’t mind admitting that he would like to do this. He looked her straight in the eye. “You have a problem with that?” “None at all,” she said. “What do you want us to do if you’re arrested?”
&n
bsp; He said he had four hundred euros on him so he’d be able to pay off anybody who needed paying off. But the thought of arrest quieted him down and he put the brochure back on the stack.
“I do not have Alzheimer’s, by the way,” said Lyle loudly, to anyone who was listening. “I know you think I do and it’s not what you think. I bumped my head. It could happen to anyone. I was getting something out of a cabinet, I stood up and banged my head on a cupboard door.”
On the plane, he had said it happened when his car got stuck in the driveway when he was in a big rush to get to a meeting of the Organization of Retired Teachers in St. Cloud where a slender young gymnast named Tiffany was to demonstrate the use of the exercise ball for good abs and core, and he dashed into the house for a bag of sand, dropping the car keys in the snow, but didn’t notice, so after getting the sand, he looked all over the house for the keys. Ardis had taken the extra set with her by mistake. And then he couldn’t find his checkbook. He was in a towering rage, cursing, and in his rage, he beat his head against the wall.
Margie said it didn’t matter, he was having fun in Rome and that’s what counts. “Who’s hungry?”
Clint was irked at the lack of room service. He just wanted an egg sandwich. “Any little café or pizza place has it. Ask for panini.” But panini is a grilled sandwich. He didn’t want his sandwich grilled. “Try something new!” she said.
Wally had ventured out earlier and located a McDonald’s and suggested they head there. “Go ahead,” she said. “Leave me out of it.” “I just want to see if theirs tastes the same,” he said.
“You’re in Italy,” she said. “McDonald’s is for Italian teenagers. It’s cool for them. It’s not cool for you. I am going to an Italian restaurant to have risotto and anybody who wishes can join me.”
“Who made you the boss?” said Daryl.
“Where is Mr. Keillor? Did he go find himself a snazzier hotel?” said Irene.
Mr. Keillor, at that moment, was in his room, in bed, watching soccer on TV, hoping it would ease him toward sleep. He wished the pilgrims would invite him to join them in whatever they were doing—dinner, a show, drinks on the balcony. He imagined them cruising up the Via Veneto, sitting in one of those street-corner cafés enclosed in glass, and him standing in a dark doorway, watching them. He envied people who asked for what they wanted. Let’s go out for dinner. Such a simple thing, but he never could do that. The fear of rejection. (Go out to dinner? With you? You must be out of your mind.) He wanted people to offer him what he wanted and force it on him over his helpless protestations.
O please adorable man let me go swimming with you at the granite quarry in our underwear—or less.
O no no no, sweet Irene, you are too beautiful and I could never withstand the carnal temptation.
O please adorable man, it’s dark and nobody will see us and we shall face temptation together, I will hold you in my arms to give you strength.
Well, all right. Just this once. If you insist.
Lack of social skills: that was what made him a writer. Nothing to do with talent whatsoever. He had spent the afternoon dozing and writing and filled sixteen pages of yellow legal pad with a chapter of Veni, Vidi, Vickie and then read it over and it seemed to him that he had dozed off around page four and the story had gotten away from him. There were things there that he didn’t remember writing, a girl in a slinky dress climbing over a wall, a boat sinking on a reef while a man in the forward cabin watches the Sugar Bowl on a huge flat-screen TV, and not much about Rome.
And there beside him on the bed was a copy of Sunset Trails, the monthly magazine of the Elderly Lutheran Citizens Association—Irene had handed it to him on the van. “There’s a poem in here that made me think of you,” she said. He knew he should’ve chucked it in the trash. He knew it. But he opened it up to the Poetry Corner on page five.
Loveliest of trees, the maple now
Is turning yellow on the bough.
In our yard and in the park
It’s luminescent in the dark.
Now of my three score years and ten,
Sixty-six won’t come again.
Subtract from seventy years that sum
It only leaves me four to come.
And since to look at things sublime,
Four years is not a lot of time
I give up ideologies
And great long books and symphonies
And trying to learn Portuguese
And simply walk and look at trees.
It depressed the pants off him. Ordinarily he could forget that he was sixty-six, so long as he stayed away from mirrors, but here it was—four years to go, Old-Timer! Almost made it to the barn, Gramps.
Margie went upstairs and called Norbert in Tulsa and told him the Lake Wobegon contingent was in Rome, safe and sound, and would visit Gussie’s grave in a day or so. “I envy you,” he said.
“They told me today they may have to take my leg.” A mishap with the mambo, a busted knee, a staph infection, it had been one thing after another.
He started telling her about the last time he saw Gussie, an October afternoon, 1942, the corn crop was in, and the pigs had gone to market, and Gussie announced he was going into the army.
“When?” Mother said.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“What’s the rush?”
“Why wait?”
“He had gone off on his own and enlisted without a word to anybody and he was to report in Minneapolis the next day. My dad said something like ‘Be sure to take good socks because army socks are thin, you know.’ Mother sat there crying and then she asked Dad if he wouldn’t please say a prayer and he said, ‘I forgot all of them.’ So we didn’t. Dad came from a little island off the coast of Norway and he was still an island man. In his own mind, we were on a big rock pounded by ocean waves and leaving home was a foregone conclusion. We went to bed and Gussie said to me in the dark, ‘I’m never coming back. You know that.’ Well, I did. He wasn’t like us at all. He had his head in a book every chance he got. I’d wake up at night and there he was, by the window, reading by the yardlight. The next morning we ate our corn flakes and Dad says, ‘Well, that’s one less mouth to feed,’ his idea of a joke, and Mother asked Gussie if he could shoot at another man, and Gussie said, ‘If he was going to shoot me, I could.’ And then we said good-bye. He kissed Mother—to shock her, I think—he’d never done that before—we’re Norwegian, you know—and tossed his duffel bag in the trunk of the neighbor’s sedan whose son was enlisting too, slapped me on the back, got in the passenger side, and away he went, with a big grin on his face. He hated milking cows, he hated winter, and he wasn’t all that fond of Dad. He knew there was a better way to live somewhere. He wrote us letters from Kansas and then from North Africa and Italy. He wrote me dozens of letters. He was killed in June 1944, in the city of Rome. Mother and Dad got his personal effects in a package which they never opened and I opened it a couple years ago and it was a lot of books and jazz records and a picture of a woman he knew there.”
“Miss Gennaro.”
“I don’t care to discuss it, frankly. I don’t think those Italians were worth all the trouble we went to.”
She said good-bye and went back to the lobby and the pilgrims were still sitting exactly where she’d left them. No consensus had formed around the McDonald’s concept or the Italian plan, and now Father Wilmer said maybe he would head off to find a church and attend Mass. “Anybody else?” he said, hopefully. Nobody rose to follow him. “Well, maybe I’ll have supper with you all and go to Mass in the morning,” he said.
“What are you up for?” said Carl, who was half asleep. She took his arm, and it was limp, as if he’d suffered a stroke. Jet lag: a nap only makes it worse—bright light and a long walk are the answer. She whispered, “A roll in the hay is what I’m up for.”
“Huh?” he said.
Daryl had seen a restaurant called Earl’s Court that he thought looked good, so they stood mulling this over. “It
serves English cuisine,” he said. “Thus the name.”
“There are plenty of nice Italian places around,” said Margie. “That’s where we are. Italy. Why not eat Italian? I saw one called Il Convivio about six blocks from here.” Actually, it was more like a mile, but once they’d walked six blocks, a mile wasn’t much further.
“This one is close,” he said.
“I’m up for a little hike,” she said. “Who else?”
“Well, who wants to go somewhere nearby?” he said, looking around for votes.
Nobody cared to express an opinion. They sat there by the dying ferns, sheep waiting to be led up the ramp and onto the truck. Finally, Carl said he would vote for nearby. Marilyn said that sounded good to her. Father Wilmer said it made no difference to him. Ditto Eloise. Ditto Lyle. “Let’s go get a quick supper and tomorrow we can hike all over looking for Italian food,” said Daryl, not looking at Margie.
A revolt. She should have squashed it right away and said, “I made reservations at Il Convivio.” And that would’ve been the end of it. A failure of leadership. And democracy had reared its ugly head. People, given their head, choosing the exact wrong thing. She wanted to say: Trust me and let’s go have an authentic Italian experience. Il Convivio: a cheerful little place with old waiters carrying trays of linguini and Chianti and if it’s crowded, we’ll find another one. She’d seen Earl’s Court and it was a bar, dark and loud, but Daryl had gotten his back up. So she accepted defeat and followed them down to Earl’s with its dark green wood and brass lamps and floral carpeting, the fake frescoes, and a pock-faced man at a little electric piano noodling at some tunes that, might, at one time, have been Elton John songs. She recognized “Benny and the Jets,” but played as a lament for the dead. A tall silent suicidal woman led them to a table opposite the long bar. In the murk, there appeared to be three other customers, an old doddering couple in tweedy clothes and a fat lady at the bar, all of them good and liquored up. The suicidal woman passed out plastic drink menus three feet long and Daryl said, “You serve food here?” She pointed to the bottom of the menu: Hamburger, Cheese Toast, Spaghetti with tomato and basil, Caesar Salad, Soup du Jour.
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