Pilgrims

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  against the Budapest winters and had also walked with a par-

  ticular dignity.

  Esther approached the cell, and she reached her hand be-

  tween the bars toward her father, who rose with a limp to meet

  that hand. In a half-mad moment, he half-imagined her to be a

  warm apparition of his mother, and, as he reached for her, she

  smiled.

  Her smile directed his gaze from her hand to her face, and

  in that instant, Esther pulled her arm back out of the cell,

  reached into the folds of the blanket around her, and grace-

  fully produced the rabbit. She slid Bonnie — slimmer now, of

  course — through the iron bars and held the rabbit aloft in the

  cell, exactly where her empty hand had been only a moment

  before. Such that Hoffman, when he glanced down from Es-

  ther’s smile, saw a rabbit where before there had been no rabbit

  at all. Like a true enchantment, something appeared from the

  common air.

  “Behold,” suggested Esther.

  Richard Hoffman beheld the silken rabbit and recognized

  her as his Bonnie. He collected her into his square hands. And

  then, after that, he did behold his own daughter Esther.

  A most gifted young woman.

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  The Finest Wife

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  When rose was sixteen years old and five months preg-

  nant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based

  on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue

  bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a

  skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her

  pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body. It

  was as though life was gestating in her thighs and ass and

  breasts, not in her belly. It might have seemed that she was

  carrying all the soft weights of motherhood spread evenly and

  perfect across her whole frame. Those parts of herself that she

  could not quite pack into the blue bathing suit spilled over it

  exactly enough to emotionally disturb several of the judges and

  spectators. She was an uncontested champion beauty.

  Rose’s father, too, saw the pin-up shape that his daughter had

  taken, and, five months too late, he started worrying about the

  maintenance of her graces. Soon after the pageant, her condi-

  tion became obvious. Her father sent her to a facility in Okla-

  homa, where she stayed until she experienced four days of labor

  and the delivery of a stillborn son. Rose could not actually have

  any more children after that, but the lovely figure was hers to

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  keep, and she ended up eventually married, once again on the

  basis of a fine walk in a sweet bathing suit.

  But she didn’t meet her husband until the war was over. In

  the meantime, she stayed in Oklahoma. She had developed a

  bit of a taste for certain types of tall, smiling local men in dark

  hats. Also, she had developed a taste for certain types of church-

  going men and also for left-handed men, and for servicemen,

  fishermen, postmen, assemblymen, firemen, highwaymen, ele-

  vator repairmen, and the Mexican busboys at the restaurant

  where she worked (who reverently called her La Rubia — the

  Blond — as if she were a notorious bandit or a cardsharp).

  She married her husband because she loved him best. He was

  kind to waitresses and dogs, and was not in any way curious

  about her famous tastes. He was a big man himself, with a rump

  like the rump of a huge animal — muscled and hairy. He dialed

  telephones with pencil stubs because his fingers didn’t fit the

  rotary holes. He smoked cigarettes that looked like shreds of

  toothpicks against the size of his mouth. He couldn’t fall asleep

  without feeling Rose’s bottom pressed up warm against his

  belly. He held her as if she were a puppy. In the years after they

  got a television, they would watch evening game shows together

  on the couch, and he would genuinely applaud the contestants

  who had won cars and boats. He was happy for them. He would

  clap for them with his big arms stretched out stiffly, the way a

  trained seal claps.

  They moved to Minnesota, eventually. Rose’s husband

  bought a musky flock of sheep and a small, tight house. She was

  married to him for forty-three years, and then he died of a heart

  attack. He was quite a bit older than she was, and he had lived a

  long time. Rose thought that he had passed the kind of life after

  which you should say, “Yes! That was a good one!” Her mourn-

  ing was appreciative and fond.

  When he was gone, the sheep became too much work, and

  she sold them off, a few at a time. And when the sheep were all

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  gone — spread across several states as pets, yarn, dog food, and

  mint-jellied chops — Rose became the driver of the local kin-

  dergarten school bus. She was damn near seventy years old.

  Rose was no longer easy with names, but her eyes were good,

  and she was a careful driver, as she always had been. They gave

  her an excellent route of kindergartners. First, she would pick

  up the bus itself, at the station behind the gravel pits, over the

  double paths of train tracks. Then she would pick up the neigh-

  bor boy, who lived by the gas station near Rose’s own house.

  Then she’d pick up the crying boy. Then she’d pick up the girl

  whose mother always dressed her in corduroy vests, then the

  boy who looked like Orson Welles, then the disgusted girl, then

  the humming boy, then the girl with all the Band-Aids. At the

  bridge by the Band-Aid girl’s house, she would cross the river to

  the hill road. There, she’d pick up the black girl, the grateful-

  looking boy, the shoving boy, the other black girl, and the out-

  of-breath girl. Last stop was the absent boy.

  Thirteen passengers. Twelve, if you didn’t count the absent

  boy, as Rose tended not to.

  But on the particular morning that makes this story, the

  neighbor boy, the crying boy, and the corduroy vest girl were all

  absent. Rose thought, Flu? She kept on driving and found the Orson Welles boy and the disgusted girl and the humming boy

  absent also, and she wondered, Chicken pox? After the bridge passed with no girl on it, and the whole hill road passed with no

  children near it, she thought, with some humiliation, Could

  today be Sunday? She recalled, then, having seen no other bus drivers at the gravel pit station, nor any other school bus cross-ing the double paths of railroad tracks. She had not, in fact,

  noticed any other cars on the roads at all. Not that these were

  fast highways, but they were certainly driven roads. They were

  always used roads. And Rose thought lightly, Armageddon?

  But she rode her route out to the end. It was a fine choice that

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  she did, too, because there was someone at the bottom of the

  absent boy’s driveway, after all. Two people, in fact, waiting for

  her. She stopped the bus, demo
nstrated the proper and legal

  flashing lights, cranked the door open, and let them in. They

  were two very old men, one short, one tall. It took them some

  trouble to get up the stairs.

  “A ride for you gentlemen today?” she asked.

  They sat in the seat just behind her own.

  “It smells clean and decent in here, thank God,” one of them

  said.

  “I use a tub and tile cleaner,” Rose answered. “Weekly.”

  The taller man said, “My sweet Rosie. You look terrific.”

  As a matter of fact, she did. She wore a hat and white gloves

  to work every day, as if she were driving those school children to

  church or to some important picnic.

  “You could be a first lady,” the tall one went on. “You could

  have married a president.”

  She looked at him in the wide, easy reflection of her rearview

  mirror, and then gave a pretty little expression of surprise and

  recognition. She looked at the shorter man and made the ex-

  pression again. And this is who they were: Tate Palinkus and

  Dane Ladd. Tate was the man who had knocked her up back in

  South Texas before the war. Dane had been an orderly whom

  she had often kissed and fondled during her recovery from

  childbirth, at the Oklahoma Institution for Unwed Mothers.

  Which was also before the war.

  “Won’t I be damned?” she said. “I sure never thought I’d see

  either of you two again. And right here in Minnesota. How

  nice.”

  Dane said, “Ain’t this Tate Palinkus nothing but a Christless

  old bastard? He’s just been telling me about getting you preg-

  nant.”

  Tate said, “Rose. I did not know that you were pregnant at

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  the time. I did not even hear about that until many years later,

  when I came around asking for you. That is the truth, Rose.”

  “Tate Palinkus,” she said. “You big bugger.”

  Dane said, “Foolin’ around on a fifteen-year-old girl. I guess

  that’s about the worst thing I ever heard of.”

  “Dane Ladd.” Rose smiled. “You big stinker.”

  “She was a hell of a pretty girl,” Tate said, and Dane said,

  “You barely have to remind me of that.”

  Rose shifted her bus and turned it around.

  She said, “You two have surprised my face just about off my

  body.”

  “Don’t lose that sweet face,” Dane said. “Don’t lose that sweet

  body.”

  They drove on. And, as it turned out, there was someone

  waiting at the end of the out-of-breath girl’s driveway, leaning

  on the mailbox. Another very old man. Rose stopped and let

  him on.

  “Precious,” he called her, and he touched the brim of his

  hat. He was Jack Lance-Hainey, a deacon of the Presbyterian

  church. He had once run an Oklahoma senatorial campaign.

  He used to take Rose out for picnics during the 1940s, with

  baskets full of his wife’s real china and real silver. He had taught

  Rose how to climb on top of a man during sex, and how to pick

  up phones in hotel rooms and say, “This is Mrs. Lance-Hainey.

  Might you send me up a bottle of tonic for my terrible, terrible

  headache?”

  Jack sat on the seat across the aisle from the other men, and

  set his hat beside him.

  “Mr. Ladd.” He nodded. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “It is,” Dane agreed. “What a fine country we live in.”

  “It is a fine country,” Jack Lance-Hainey said, and added,

  “And good morning to you, Tate Palinkus, you fertile and lech-

  erous old son of a snake.”

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  “I did not know she was pregnant at the time, Jack,” Tate

  explained. “Not until years later. I would have happily married

  her.”

  And Rose said, under her breath, “Well, well, well . . . That

  is news, Mr. Palinkus.”

  Now she rode her abandoned bus route backward, and found

  it fully packed with all her old lovers. She picked up every single

  one of them. At the house of the black girl, she picked up her

  Mississippi cousin Carl, who she had once met on an aunt’s bed

  during a Thanksgiving gathering. By the shoving boy’s mailbox,

  she found a small crowd of old men, waiting together. They

  were all of her postmen, out of uniform. They had all once

  driven airy trucks and kept stacks of extra canvas bags in the

  back for her to lie down on. She couldn’t remember their names,

  but the other men on the bus seemed to know them well, and

  they greeted one another with professional politeness.

  At the other black girl’s house, she picked up two elderly

  veterans, who she remembered as enlisted men, their young

  scalps pink and shaved, their big ears tempting handles for

  tugging and guiding. The veterans sat behind Lane and Tate

  and talked about the economy. One of them was missing an arm

  and one was missing a leg. The armless one punched Tate with

  his good arm suddenly and said, “You’re just a lousy, no-good,

  knock-’em-up-and-leave-’em old prick, aren’t you?”

  “He claims he didn’t know that she was pregnant,” Jack

  Lance-Hainey said, and the postmen all laughed in disbelief.

  “I did not know she was pregnant at the time,” Tate said

  patiently. “Not until years later.”

  “My God,” Rose said, “I barely knew it myself.”

  “That baby got you that nice figure,” Tate offered, and a

  shared murmur of endorsement at this thought passed through-

  out the bus.

  At the grateful girl’s house, she picked up a man so fat he had

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  to reintroduce himself. He was her sister’s first husband, he said,

  and Rose said, “Coach! You troublemaker!” He had been an

  elevator mechanic, who used to meet Rose in the shop at night

  to teach her how to trick-shuffle a deck of cards and how to kiss

  with her eyes open.

  “Those steps are lethal,” he said, red-faced from the climb,

  and the one-legged veteran said, “Who you tellin’, Coach?”

  At the Band-Aid girl’s house, she picked up the bartenders

  from three states who she had fallen for, and at the humming

  boy’s house, she picked up a highway patrolman she’d spent a

  night with in Oklahoma City, back when they were both young.

  He was with a shrimp fisherman and a man who used to drive

  fire engines. They let him on the bus first, because they thought

  he had rank.

  “Ma’am,” the highway patrolman called her, and smiled wide.

  Then he called Tate Palinkus a bad egg, a bad seed, a lowlife, a

  ruffian, and a dirt bag for getting her pregnant, back when she

  was just a kid who didn’t know a worthless son of a bitch from a

  fruit bowl.

  There was an Arizona circuit court judge waiting for her at

  the end of the disgusted girl’s driveway, and he sat down, with

  Jack Lance-Hainey, in the front of the bus. He told Rose she

  still looked good enough to crawl up under his robe any day of

  the we
ek.

  She said, “Your Honor, we are old people now.”

  He said, “You’re a daisy, Rose.”

  She found Hank Spellman kicking rocks around the road in

  front of the Orson Welles boy’s house. He got on the bus, and

  the other men cheered, “Hank!” as if they were truly pleased to

  see him. Hank once sold and installed furnaces, and he had

  always been a popular man. He used to dance with Rose in her

  cellar, keeping time by tapping his hand on her hip. He used to

  slide his hands over her as they danced. He used to take big

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  handfuls of her bottom and whisper to her, “If I’m ever missing

  and you need to find me, you can start looking for me right here

  on this ass.”

  Where the girl who always wore a corduroy vest usually

  waited for the bus, there was a tall old man in a dark hat. He

  had once been Rose’s dentist. He’d had an indoor swimming

  pool and a maid, who would bring them towels and cocktails

  all night without comment. He had to use a cane to get on

  the bus, and his glasses were as thick as slices of bread. He told

  Rose that she was beautiful and that her figure was still a

  wonder.

  Rose said, “Thank you very much. I’ve been lucky with my

  looks. The women in my family tend to age in one of two ways.

  Most of them either look like they smoked too many cigarettes

  or like they ate too many doughnuts.”

  “You look like you kissed too many boys,” the elevator me-

  chanic said.

  “You could have been a first lady,” Lane said again, and Tate

  said thoughtfully, “You were my lady first.”

  There were four former Mexican busboys standing by the

  picket fence of the crying boy’s house. They were old now, and

  identical, each one of them in a pressed white suit with hand-

  some white hair and a white mustache.

  “La Rubia,” they called her in turn. Their English was no

  better than it had ever been, but the armless veteran had fought

  Fascists in Spain, and he translated quite well.

  This was the most crowded that her bus had ever been. It was

  not a very large bus. It was just for kindergartners, and, to be

  honest, it was just for the morning class of kindergartners.

  Naturally, the bus company had given Rose an excellent route,

  but it was not such a strenuous one. She was generally finished