That Time of Year

by Garrison Keillor

  I flew to upstate New York where Corinne had taught at Wells College in Aurora and walked into a memorial assembly, an auditorium of young women weeping, unbelieving, a colleague speaking through her tears. Corinne was staunch, indomitable, someone her friends turned to in their darker hours, she was energetic, positive, charismatic, and yet one dark rainy night, April 7, 1986, the night of a new moon, she hit a rock of despair. She was subletting a colleague’s apartment near the lake while he was on sabbatical. She sat down and wrote notes to colleagues about students whose theses she was supervising, and she left instructions for her cleaning lady about what to do with her cats and plants, and then she put rocks in the pockets of her leather jacket and walked to the end of a dock and climbed into a canoe and paddled out to the middle of Cayuga Lake and tipped the canoe and sank and drowned. The next day was sunny. Her body was spotted by a helicopter, washed up in a gully on shore. News spread around campus, and people who knew her gathered and tried to understand her death. She had visited friends in Seneca Falls the night before who were worried about her in her anguished state and tried to get her to spend the night with them, and she would not hear of it. She who had been a caregiver could not accept being cared for. She drove home and called one friend, then another, weeping on the phone, and now they saw what they should’ve done, which was: get in the car and drive over to Corinne’s and sit with her and don’t leave. I said the usual things, “You’re not to blame. She chose this. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.” But I felt responsible too. Back home in February, she found her parents in terrible shape, in decline, trying to maintain their lives, and she felt incapacitated herself, and there I was, Mr. Moneypants, my gaudy life a mockery of her own. Two of her friends took me to her small, dim apartment and showed me her diary. It began with Leeds Cutter’s death in 1962 and ended with her plans to take her life in 1986.

  She worried about a house she’d bought, that she couldn’t make the payments. She was worried about her cat, who had a urinary infection. She went down the list of her friends including Ulla and me, and decided none of us would miss her. On April 6, she had tried to paddle out in the canoe but the wind was too strong. She wrote, My basic affinity for caution and pleasure are standing in the way of resolution. If I could just snap my fingers and end consciousness and life—okay. But to work out a method that will work is harder. The next day she wrote, Some panic allayed primarily because self-destruction in a physical sense is not easy. And then at 2:30 a.m. But the impossibility of my position just awakened me again. I cannot even get through the bills for this month, let alone this summer’s. There is no way out.

  She was buried in Crystal Lake Cemetery in north Minneapolis, where, a few months later, Helen joined her. She was at Hennepin County Medical Center for dialysis, and one day I stopped by to visit her and the nurse looked surprised and said, “I guess you didn’t get the message. Helen died about an hour ago. If you want to see her, she’s in that room there,” she said. I went in and there was Helen, wrapped in a white sheet, looking peaceful, a strip of cloth tied around her jaw to hold her mouth closed. My old friend who, the summer I was twenty and besieged by misgivings, welcomed me onto her porch and sat and listened as I poured out my troubles. And now she was gone. Hilmer died a couple years later and was laid in the cave with his wife and daughter. I grieve for them still. Dark depression was a place Corinne had not visited before. Perhaps her resolute nature kept it at bay, her disdain for self-pity, her duty to be, like Helen, a cheerful, steady presence. And then that resolution failed her. She sat down that cold rainy April night and wrote in her journal and went out in the canoe and sank it.

  In my imagination, her phone rings as she is heading for the door, rocks in her pockets, and she picks it up and it’s me. We talk. I talk about the Guntzel living room with the piano and the fish tank bubbling and the steep hill by the old stone water tank. I remember when she and I were eight and stood on that hill beside the toboggan and she was excited, her hands fluttering at her sides, and she knelt in front and I behind her and shoved off and down the steep hill we flew toward the river and flew off the last hummock and slid across the ice almost out to the middle and stood up and towed it back up the hill and did it again. I describe this and she takes the rocks out of her pockets and tears up her suicide note. She comes home, and we become fast friends and the dark April night is just an interesting story. She comes and lives in our spare bedroom and life goes on.

  I was supposed to rescue her from the canoe on Cayuga Lake. The horrible dinner was my cue to save her life and I ignored my cue. It’s unbearable to think about and so I don’t, a peculiar talent I have, to box up a dreadful memory and throw it downstairs, and move on to something else, as I am doing right now.

  23

  Climbing Out of the Soup

  I LIKED DENMARK, THE LOOSE elegance, the scrupulous honesty, the timely trains, the stout cheese, the hash they call biksemad, the fried herring, the streets of the beautiful city. I enjoyed hiking through Ørsteds Park and the great earthen walls of Kastellet to the Gefion Fountain with the immense bare-breasted goddess, her whip raised, lashing her oxen as water gushes up from the blade of her plow and sprays from their flared nostrils, and through the streets to Gråbrødretorv—the loveliest square in Copenhagen and the hardest to pronounce, with four separate r’s to swallow, and down to the sea to look at the lights of Sweden across the water. I loved the absence of chauvinism. Danes never said how proud they were to be Danish; they made fun of its insignificance, the guttural language, the high taxes. The sort of bombast required of an American politician—you couldn’t say those things in Danish. I liked the frankness of Danes. You could talk about death, God, sex, politics, how boring Denmark is, how thin the literature is, and the Dane is not offended. You can say anything you like so long as you do not speak badly of the Queen or comment on the peculiarity of her husband. Be an anarchist, if you wish. But even an anarchist must remember to send his mother-in-law a nice card on her birthday and attend her birthday lunch and arrive exactly at the designated time. I liked Ulla’s friends, serious people, well-read, who loved the back-andforth of conversation, give-and-take, no harangues, no monologues.

  In this small country of seagoing people, children start learning English in the fourth grade along with their multiplication tables; everyone is bilingual, even tri- or quadri-, and English is their language for travel. So it makes little sense for an American of 45 to try to learn Danish. Nonetheless, I tried. We went to dinner at a Dane’s apartment, his shelves packed with American and British literature, and he said, “Shall we speak English?” and I said, “Nej, nej, vi er i Danmark, så skal vi taler dansk naturligvis.” I enjoyed the feel of Danish on the tongue, the musicality, the comfort of the many cognates: a table is bord, cup is kop and glass is glas, a knife is kniv (pronounced k-NEE-oo), so with English (Engelsk) under your belt (baelte) you’ve got a good start (starten). But the real reason was pride. I didn’t want to be an Ugly American so I became a Half-Witted One.

  I took my elegant mother-in-law Elly out to lunch, champagne and oysters—“This is what Karen Blixen loved to eat,” she said. She told me about her train trip to Moscow in August 1939 with her lover Jacob, a sailor who had no interest in traveling for pleasure, but he consented to going overland to Russia and they traveled through peaceful countryside and arrived back in Denmark on September 1, the day Germany invaded Poland and the war broke out. She told me about Victor Borge, who played in a jazz club back then and how she danced with him a few nights before he fled to Amsterdam and then New York. She wept as she described the war years, the stringencies, the shame of the German occupation, her brother Harry active in the Danish Resistance helping to smuggle the Jews over to Sweden. Then she brightened up and showed me the picture of our wedding in the newspaper Aftenbladet, the smiling bride and groom standing in a garden. I didn’t tell her how unhappy the bride was only a few months into the marriage.

  We came back to St.
Paul to try to make a Danish Yule and we roasted a goose. We put it in the oven and put candles on our Christmas tree. I got the goose out of the oven in its glass baking dish and hot goose grease spilled on my wrist and I dropped the dish and it shattered, and the carcass skidded across the floor collecting cat hair, dust balls, and glass fragments. We scraped it clean as my family arrived. I opened an expensive white wine, which was too dry for them, and they stood holding their glasses politely as my stepson Morten lit the candles in the next room and when he came out, I threw open the door and there was the storybook tree, ten feet tall, candles burning on every bough, and my mother smothered a scream—her lifelong nightmare there before her eyes, what looked like a Christmas tree fire. We trooped around the tree, singing carols, Mother still quaking, and then we started to open gifts. My family was reluctant to open my gifts—they sensed lavishness, but they had to unwrap them, and indeed, everything was much too much, imported glassware, art work, exotic woolens, wondrous picture books, an atlas the size of a coffee table, and afterward the goose was greasy and the sweet potatoes overcooked and the pie was boughten pie from a bakery, and when finally my family extracted themselves and escaped into the night, I went upstairs and lay on the bed and wept. What I thought was generosity was bullying and boastfulness. Ulla wept because she missed Denmark. We lay in bed, grief-stricken, on the joyfullest day of the year, and after a while, I said, “Det kunne vaer vaerre (It could be worse).” And she said, “How?”

  I took a break from the radio show in June 1987, flew back to Denmark for Midsummer’s Night and took the train to Svendborg, to our friends Ole and Hanne’s farm, and sat with thirty guests at two long tables in the garden behind their 300-year-old farmhouse looking down a slope of hay meadow toward the fjord. A festive three-hour dinner of shrimp and salmon and salad and lamb and seven songs and six speeches. The lady next to me said, “Skal vi taler Engelsk?”—Nej, nej, I said, but it turned out she was a Brit, a Cambridge grad, the author of a monograph on Milton, and so we spoke English, and made fun of what obsessive planners Danes are, their lives locked into itineraries and agendas. And the after-dinner speeches that night. Very clever, well-crafted, and rather lacking in feeling. She agreed: “It’s a nation of dentists. Everything clean and well-done. No poetry.” She leaned toward me and spoke softly: “Their dirty little secret is how well they got along with the Nazi occupation. They like to talk about how they helped the Jews escape to Sweden, but they leave out the fact that the German commandant told them when the Jews would be rounded up. So the Danes took the Jews across the Storbaelt to Malmo. Big deal. You didn’t see a Danish Resistance like the French. Basically, they put salt in the Germans’ pepper shakers. It was a very comfortable occupation.” We all strolled down to the shore where Ole lit the bonfire and the children came bearing the effigy of a witch on a broom, a black dress stuffed with straw, and threw her on the fire as we sang hymns to Denmark and St. Hans. In the dark, you could see bonfires along the shore for miles. At 2 a.m., we adjourned to the house for coffee and cake. A Dane tried to engage me in a discussion of the American bombing of Vietnam and I told him, politely, to go fuck himself.

  I was working on a novel, Love Me, in which I was the New Yorker writer Larry Wyler, whom Mr. William Shawn fires after Wyler’s piece on backpacking in Alaska (“Our Far-flung Correspondents: Humping the Chilkoot Pass”) is found to contain dozens of sexual euphemisms (“parallel parking,” “the man in the stocking cap rowing the boat,” “warming the bratwurst”) that escaped the eyes of the fact-checkers. I sat in the maid’s room, laughing at my own wit, and when Ulla looked in, I read her the passage and she didn’t think it was funny. A problem a man doesn’t anticipate when he marries into another language. It made me miserable to not be funny at home. We lived in a magnificent apartment, but I was out of place in Denmark. I missed Lake Wobegon. I missed baseball. I do not consider soccer an organized sport; it is only recreational milling. I can manage herring, but I don’t eat fried eel. I missed English in which you know dollars from doughnuts, open and shut, rain or shine. I attended a little Anglican church, and one Sunday when the opening hymn was “All hail the power of Jesus’ name, let angels prostrate fall,” I got teary-eyed.

  We decided to get away and talk, so we rented a stone cottage on a hill on the island of Patmos and spent a month there, reading, biking, lying on the beach, eating in little cafés in town. The month was supposed to draw us together, and it only made us uneasy together. It was a waste of time, two people trying to have a vacation and not face up to the obvious. It is not possible to talk another person out of their unhappiness. She had been lonely before she met me, and now she missed her loneliness. We were impersonating a marriage. One night we had dinner with her father, Jacob, the sailor who had seen the world but always from the same ship, a joyful man who made everyone around him happy, Jacob with whom Elly had taken the lovely train trip to Russia, arriving back home the day Germany invaded Poland. Elly conceived Ulla by him and left him soon after for an optician, Otto. In Jacob, I was sure I saw the man Ulla wished I were, not the diligent farmer of comedy, haunted by Brethren ghosts, but a man who loved to laugh. She was his long-lost daughter, kept from him for almost thirty years, and the sight of her made him very happy. I loved Jacob. Other Danes might be rule-bound, punctilious, but he overflowed with kindness and good humor. There was no language barrier, language didn’t matter, when Jacob laughed we all laughed with him. And between dinner and dessert, he thought of a song and sang it and jumped up and took Ulla in his arms and danced her around the table and she was delighted. She got a look of transport on her face. Sheer happiness. My wife who’d been so disheartened in Minnesota, all she needed was a dance, some lightness and gaiety.

  I decided to be frank and admit that the marriage made no sense and had nowhere to go but down. She and I were a contradiction. I was a provincial from Anoka, an earnest striver from the potato fields who flew away to an exorbitant fairy tale to discover that he is not a sailor, not a dancer, he is a patient assembler of sentences, a repairer of paragraphs, capable of an obit, a limerick, a radio sketch, but unable to delight my wife. Money led me astray and now I must give up my illusions and resume my life. One day I packed a suitcase and called a taxi to take me to Kastrup Airport. I carried my suitcase out the ornate front entrance on Trondhjemsgade and did not look back. I felt no hesitation. I boarded a flight to New York and walked into the terminal at JFK and was delighted. I could overhear dozens of conversations at once—I didn’t need to study someone’s mouth in order to grasp what they were saying—I was surrounded by symphonic English and could hear every instrument.

  My great experiment was over, the attempt to become bilingual, European, tolerant, community-minded, secular, egalitarian, rule-following, turn-waiting, a lover of order, and I went back to being my own confused and disorderly self. And New York was the right place to land. Minnesota is my home and family, and New York is colleagues and fellow travelers. I saw it with my dad when I was eleven and then when I was twenty-four and looking for a job. When Malene enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, Ulla and I had bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, and that’s what I came back to—she got the majestic Treaty of Ghent flat on Trondhjemsgade, and I took a cab to my building and up the elevator to the apartment and out on the terrace that looked out over the roofs of brownstones like the deck of a ship anchored in the city, a sea of lights below, cliffs of lighted facades around.

  High in the tower above the terrace, Sinclair Lewis had lived in his last years before he went to Italy to die in 1951. I read Main Street and Babbitt when I was in seventh grade because he was a Minnesota writer and I wanted to be one, too. He fell out of favor, crushed under the weight of a Nobel Prize and his own alcoholism and irascibility, and sat in his tower, awaiting death, aware that he’d been eclipsed by Mailer and Bellow and a new generation and that his own ambition had led him to write a stream of potboilers as his star sank lower and lower. His presence up above was a cautionary rem
inder: Your time is short, your successors are waiting in the wings, you’re not invincible, so be sensible, and above all, avoid winning prizes.

  I stood on the terrace and I called Bill Kling and told him my sabbatical was done. Ulla remained in Copenhagen. Each of us had a fax machine, and some days we’d exchange twenty letters across the Atlantic, accusing, pleading, protesting our love, alternately sentimental and bitter, hopeless, grieving, until there was simply nothing more to say. We were a wonderful romance but we never got to be friends.

  The sabbatical from the show wasn’t a real one: we’d been doing Farewell Shows steadily, even a Farewell Tour, kept saying goodbye until I came back in 1989. But it accomplished what a sabbatical is meant to do: it gave me a break from business and a chance to be a nobody again. The show had burst into phenomenal success in 1985 and landed me in the craziness of fame that America bestows now and then, like a typhoon, flattering offers and invitations, requests for interviews that promise to be flattering, everybody admires you, there is no bad news anywhere, people want you to write something about anything at all, sign your name, answer questions, endorse something—it was unreal and had nothing to do with me. I still thought now and then of the FBI knocking on the door and asking if I was the Gary E. Keillor who failed to report for induction, and I thought how quickly all of this admiration would dry up when the news came out, Prairie Home Host Indicted for Draft Dodging. Nobody would speak my name kindly in public again, I’d be in the paper, head down, handcuffed, on the steps of the federal courthouse, a common criminal.