He looked up, his ballpoint poised over the notebook. “I hope you didn’t write down all of that about Suzanne,” said Father Wilmer. Keillor looked away. Irene snatched at the notebook again and he whisked it away. “You hand that over or else,” she yelled. He shook his head. He stood up and retreated around to behind the chair and she snatched at him and grabbed his left arm and pinched him so hard he yelped. “You are not going to make a book out of this, you big cheater.” But he certainly was. He’d heard everything and he was now going to tell anybody who cared to know and, if he was lucky, earn back the money he’d spent on the trip.
On the plane coming home to Minnesota, Margie thought of Gussie, the smiling man from Lake Wobegon, a coward in war and a hero in love. He went to the hotel and spent the night with Miss Gennaro and left with a light heart and was taken away from the earth.
In the Minneapolis airport, she finally came to grips with the fact that she’d been cheated of a half million dollars by a desperate woman who had played her cards right and gotten some of her dead father’s fortune. She didn’t want to think so, but then Paolo called.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This must be very painful for you. And I apologize for the pain. But it wasn’t your money, of course. It was hers.”
“How did she know about it?”
“She talked to her uncle and asked him for what was coming to her and he cursed her. He cursed Italy and all things Italian and told her he would burn in hell before he would give her one penny. He was furious. He told her that he was giving it all to you instead. An American.”
A half million dollars. She had been snookered out of a half million dollars.
“So you were in on the plot, Paolo.”
“Actually, my name is Gianni. She asked me to meet you and talk up the real estate. The seduction—that was my idea.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I did. And so did you.”
“And the mother?”
“She died ten years ago. We bought the empty coffin for the occasion and we sold it back to the undertaker.”
“And Father Julio?”
“That’s Mario. Maria’s friend.”
“And you are also Maria’s friend.”
“I am. Our mothers were friends and I’ve known her since I was in college. We were lovers for a while and then not and now we are again. And again, I am very sorry about all of this. When I agreed to help her, I had no idea you would be such a wonderful woman.”
Well, there didn’t seem to be anything more to say so she said good-bye.
A fortune in her fingers and it fell out. Simple as that.
Everyone had heard about the eight-year-old girl in Avon who figured out how to go online and trade derivatives, having gotten $600 from her dad’s Visa card, and in five days she turned it into $37,000 and when he asked her how she did it, she showed him the stock market listings in which she saw shapes of animals and wherever the animal’s left hind foot was, that’s where she put her money. He decided to let her go on investing and in about a month, she was worth a half million dollars. And then she simply lost interest in it. They coaxed her but she was all engrossed in dolls. So her dad tried to employ the left-hind-foot strategy and he lost all the money in three days. Unbelievable. That’s what everyone thought at the time.
And now Margie had gone and done the same thing.
The day they arrived home, a heavy wet snow fell, good snowball snow, and three projectiles hit them, wham, wham, bam, as the two airport vans pulled up in the parking lot of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the pilgrims got out and stretched and looked at the pile of luggage and were reluctant to disband. It was dark, almost 7:00 P.M. A thin crescent moon like a raccoon’s toenail. Clusters of tiny white lights blossoming in trees and a blaze of light beyond from the skating rink on the lake and faint music, an old waltz. From downtown came the grinding sound of Bud’s snowplow blade. One by one they stepped up to thank Margie for putting the trip together and she shrugged and said it was nothing and she was glad if they had a good time. “Did you have a good time?” said Eloise. Margie said, yes, she had had much too good a time. Daryl said he would post all of his pictures on the web and send everyone a link. Father Wilmer invited everyone in to the rectory for coffee and they looked at each other—Should they? Would they? “If I don’t go home now, I’m just going to break down bawling,” said Evelyn. “I love you guys.” Wally nodded. “I feel like I’ve gotten so close to all of you in the past week,” said Evelyn. She dabbed at her eyes. Hard to believe, Margie thought, coming from that crusty old hairyeyeball Evelyn. She never let on that she liked us at all. “We’ve got to get home,” said Irene but she made no move to pick up her bag. Clint opened his bag and got out a sack and passed out tubes of toothpaste, called Sprezzatura, which contained clay from Italy. “A little souvenir,” he said. Eloise got tears in her eyes. “I wouldn’t mind getting some hugs right now,” she said, and so they gathered round her and each gave her a squeeze—how could you not?—and she cried a few tears on each one of them, and then, having hugged her, they got going hugging each other which of course took time, you didn’t want to leave anybody unhugged. Even Irene was moved. “People are going to ask me what we did,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “And I won’t know what to tell them.” “Maybe Mr. Keillor will write it all up,” said Margie and they all laughed. “If he does, let’s all of us promise each other we will not read that book,” said Irene. And they piled their hands together and said “Jinx!” and promised. And then Carl broke it up. He picked up their bags and said, “See you later,” and marched toward home, with Margie, through the snow past two figures in puffy coats and big mittens, giant genderless amoebalike life-forms, flat-footed, silent, who turned out to be Clarence and Arlene.
“How was it?” they said.
“Great,” she said. “How was it here?“
“It was so cold,” said Clarence, “we had to chop up the piano for firewood and we only got one cord and it was flat.” Ha ha ha.
A half million dollars had flowed through her and left not a trace behind, just an enormous vacuum in her heart, and she wanted to tell someone about this terrible loss, but she simply felt numb. As if someone had called and said, “You’ve won the Bill and Melinda Gates Prize for Classroom Excellence, ma’am. Five hundred thousand dollars. Hold the line for Mr. Gates.” And you sat in your kitchen all warm and jittery, thinking about the interviews you’d give. (“I believe we owe our kids the best education we can possibly provide and a teacher has to get herself motivated every single day, every single class, to accomplish that. I could not have done this without the love and support of my husband, Carl, my wonderful children, my colleagues, and my students. Especially my students. Truly, I have learned as much from them as they from me.”) And fifteen minutes later, the same person calls back and says, “Sorry, but we got the wrong name. It’s not you, it’s Marilyn Kropotnik of Lake Winnebago. Our mistake. Bye.” She told herself not to think about it, which made her think about it more keenly. The trips they could have taken, all of them, the kids and Carl and her, a happy family, tanned, relaxed, on a luxury liner in the Mediterranean, Athens and Venice, Barcelona, Algiers. She walked through the snowy dark behind her husband, a prisoner returning to the internment camp, the beautiful illusion of the pilgrimage burst. Why did we go? What was the point of it? What did we get out of all that? she wondered. Seduced by Paolo and swindled by Maria. Is there a legal remedy? No. Nothing that anyone in their right mind would consider for a minute. She had handed a half million dollars over to a virtual stranger without so much as asking for a receipt. Her—a schoolteacher, a college graduate, a mature woman—had made a bonehead mistake that, had any of her children done the same with five hundred dollars, she would’ve been angry. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And when the truth came out—which it would, O gosh yes—Carl would kick her out, her children would turn a cold shoulder, she would have to move to Tampa and live with Mother and Daddy and listen to Limbaugh every day an
d her mother reciting a novena, clutching the rosary in the bedroom.
They walked into the house, which was cold, and Carl disappeared down the basement stairs to check the furnace. Thirtyfour messages on voice mail. She emptied out her suitcase. Threw away the slip of paper with Paolo’s phone number. She walked around her house, room to room, touching the cold walls, studying the little details, trying to remember everything for when she would be old and sick and laid up in Florida. The pictures of the kids on the fireplace mantle. The hollows in the old green sofa. The smooth round stones she had collected along the shore the morning after their honeymoon night at Lamb’s Resort on Lake Superior. She sat down at the kitchen table. Out on the lake, the old Pontiac sat on the ice for the Sons of Knute Guess the Ice Melt Contest, a dollar a shot, the winner to get a Rototiller, the profits to go to the Shining Star Scholarship Fund to enable some bright young person to go to college and never come back to Lake Wobegon again but to live among the glib and the privileged and make cool contemptuous jokes about the people who brought them up and taught them kindness and perseverance and self-control.
She had always made fun of the Deluded and now she was one of them. No different from her classmate Charlotte who joined the Church of the Faithful Remnant and spent three years in a compound in Waco, Texas, awaiting the Second Coming, expecting to be Raptured into heaven but it didn’t happen and now she’s in public relations in Houston.
No different from Cousin Del who found his paradise on a mesa in Arizona where he stopped on vacation and paid $250 for a Hopi Experience—four hours, including sweat lodge, sacred mushrooms, Sun Dance, and a visit to the spirit world with a seventy-nine-year-old Hopi seer named Stanley Sassacaowe who looked Del straight in the eye and told him to heal himself by getting rooted in Mother Earth and thereby he would live to be ninety-six and never know one moment of regret. Del, dehydrated, exhausted from dancing, delusional from the mushrooms, bought the whole story. With Diana fighting him every step of the way, he came home, took early retirement from UPS, sold his home, and moved to the Painted Desert and a mobile-home park called Mesaview.
Diana lasted two months and came home. Del stayed. Every January when a blizzard hit Minnesota and the snow was blowing sideways on CNN, he’d call up Marjorie to ask if she was okay. Yes, she’d say, and how are you?
Oh, fine, he’d say, but you could hear the despair in his voice. He missed the challenge of winter. You can shovel snow, you can’t shovel dust. What did he imagine he was going to find down there? Did he think the Hopis were going to initiate him into the Sacred Circle and tell him the Seven Mysteries of the Sand Ceremony? Did he imagine he would be granted the power of time travel and hang out with Jefferson and Adams and also be best pals with his great-grandchildren? Well, it didn’t happen. He was a lonely man sitting on the desert and watching the Golf Channel.
And then the phone rang. ASSOCIATED FEDERAL, said the caller ID. It rang three times and then he hollered up the stairs, “Are you going to get it?” and rather than have him answer and hear the whole wretched story from a stranger and then throw her out into a snowbank, she picked up the phone. It was the nice man who had enrolled her in the Family of Depositors and given her the coffee cup and rubber gripper.
“Mrs. Krebsbach, it’s Stan Larson, how are you doing today?”
Close to death, Mr. Larson. Thanks for asking. I am going to pour some weed killer into that coffee cup you gave me and add hot water and drink it down and walk out in the snow and lie down and die a painful death in approximately twenty minutes, according to what I’ve read online about poisons.
“Glad to hear it. I’m just checking in with you about that money transfer you ordered the other day—were you wanting us to go ahead with that or should we wait awhile longer?”
“What are you saying, Mr. Larson?”
“Well, I just wasn’t sure what you wanted. You told us to wire the five hundred thousand to that bank in Rome but you didn’t give us a delivery date, so I was just waiting here for further instructions. Better safe than sorry. I hope I didn’t misunderstand.”
“You have not wired the money to Rome?”
“Nope. The bank there has sent me a couple dozen sort of terse e-mails asking about it but you didn’t tell me when you wanted it to go so I’m just sitting tight and waiting for the green light.”
She felt a big silent whoosh of the planets realigning themselves into orbit around the Sun rather than Uranus and the tides moving on schedule and the rivers flowing downstream, as originally planned.
“It’s none of my business, of course, and I realize that, but it’s a large amount of money, don’t you know, and I didn’t want to send it until I got confirmation from you. So—I mean, if you want me to, I got it all drawn up here, I can send it in two minutes.”
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Don’t?”
“Don’t.”
“Okay then. I’ll just rip up that transfer then and you have yourself a good evening.”
He was a true Minnesotan. It was in his voice, the droopy vowels, the nasal twang. Good old Minnesota hesitation—that sheeplike Waiting Around for Further Instructions tendency that she despaired of in her students—had saved her from her own foolishness.
She told him to wire $50,000 and to send a message: “Dear Maria, I don’t want the apartment, thank you, but the experience was invaluable. Best wishes, Marjorie.”
She wasn’t due back at school until Wednesday but she went in on Tuesday and Mr. Halvorson was on the loudspeakers with morning announcements, ratcheting on about students parking their cars in spaces not meant for students as if it were a threat to national security and three freshman boys were hauled in by Mr. DeWin who’d caught them peeking through a vent into the girls’ shower room.
“They have magazines for that, you know,” Doris said. “Or you could look at statues.” And then she saw her… . “Margie!” she cried. “Welcome home! How was Italy?”
Italy was good. Everyone had a good time.
How was the weather?
It rained some but that was okay.
Did you meet the Gennaro woman?
Yes, indeed.
And how was that? All you expected? Or sort of a letdown?
More than I expected. Much more. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow but now I have to get home and fix lunch for Carl.
How’s Carl?
He’s fine too.
She walked home in the dusk, lights on at the Diener home, the Sorgens, the Muellers and Soderbergs and Demarets, the Munches. A winter sunset of pink and purple and gold and platinum. On the sidewalk near church was a stretch of “cat ice” like what she remembered as a kid, ice that had melted underneath to make a thin shelf that when you step on it, it shatters with a sound like breaking glass and the pieces go skittering along the ice shelf. The wonderful feeling when you find a patch of cat ice that no other kid has stomped on and the simple giddy pleasure of destruction is all yours. This sheet was enormous, twenty feet long and six feet wide, and when she put her right foot on it, lightly, to test it, she could see the scuffed oxfords and the kneesocks of her girlhood, the blue pleated skirt of her innocent days—she hesitated for a delicious few seconds and then stomped the length of it and kicked the bigger pieces clattering like tin plates into the street. She stopped at the Chatterbox and Dorothy brought out a slice of apple pie with cheese and chopped jalapeno peppers in it, and a cup of coffee. She said Darlene was sick and she rolled her eyes—“sick” meant depressed. The poor woman had met a man named Frank through Craigslist and now he seemed to be stalking her. Cliff had put the Mercantile up for sale (again).
SOLID RETAIL OPP’T’Y: 8,000 sq.ft. clothing and notions outlet in hist. bldg.w. loyal customer base. Excellent invest ment for motivated self-starter.
“The poor man is angry because he can’t deal with computer inventory. It’s a shame he never had kids. They could’ve explained it to him. But Cliff was married to the store. So I don’t know.�
�� Cliff was a case. He used hairspray every morning to stiffen his wispy blondish hair so he could comb it up into a high hair edifice, like a dome made of spun sugar. He was never meant for retail sales. Meant to be a great dancer and lover. But God forgot to plant him in Las Vegas.
She figured Carl could finish the Ladderman house by spring, what with the infusion of all that cash into Krebsbach Construction, and she could donate the house to Thanatopsis on condition they drop that ugly name and become the Lake Wobegon Women’s Club. A quiet retreat on the southern shore for the good ladies of town to come and sit, read a book, take a nap, write in your journal. No cell phones, please. No wireless. No music, thank you very much. A place where you can hear yourself think. No fundraising, no community projects, no planning meetings.
Nobody will try to harass you into good works. Just come and look out on the lake and contemplate your life and hope to see through your children’s hands waving wildly in your face to the Larger Meaning beyond, assuming there is one. Or if not, then remember the Beautiful Moments behind you.
That evening, over chili and grilled cheese sandwiches, she told Carl that Norbert Norlander had left her a large sum of money in his will and that it was in a savings bank in St. Cloud and should be enough to rescue them from bankruptcy.
“You just found out about this?”
Yes, she said.
He was stunned. He didn’t laugh, he didn’t cry, he got up and walked to the window and stood there, looking out at the street, absorbing the news slowly, and then came back to the table and finished his supper. “That’s good news,” he said, at last.
“You’re a good man, you deserve some good news.”
That night, they lay in bed in the dark and she asked him to rub her back. She lay on her side, back to him, and he rubbed her shoulders and neck and pressed his thumbs along the length of her spine and caressed her butt. He slid up close to her, spooned behind her, his left arm under her head and his right arm around her breasts, his face alongside her neck, his breathing slow and steady.
Pilgrims Page 23