Pilgrims (19 page)

“Or something like that… . I forgot what I was going to say,” he said.

“Maybe it'll come to you later,” said Carl.

“No, you know what you were going to say,” said Eloise. “Tell them what you told me last night.” He looked at her, blushing.

She said, “Father fell in love with that nurse who took care of him. Suzanne. And he's still in love with her and she's waiting for him to decide what he's going to do about it.”

They sat, stunned by the news. Their priest, deliberating whether to pull off the collar and be flesh and blood like the rest of them.

“I'm not good enough for her, I know that,” he murmured. “We don't want to rush into anything.” He was in tears. Suzanne made him bacon spinach salad with vinaigrette dressing and latte with a touch of caramel. She was a gentle woman who wrote poems in a journal with an Elliot Porter photograph of a tree on
each left-hand page. She sat at his bedside and sang to him as she played a guitar, and before his afternoon nap she read Thackeray to him, and every night she poured him a glass of chardonnay with overtones of fescue, goldenrod, meadowlark, and Gorgonzola. And then one night she crawled into bed beside him and said, “Is this okay?” It was more than okay. It was truly splendid.

Father confessed all. He'd been to a therapist who gave him a test—he flashed slides on the wall and you said what you felt about each one, dread, fear, mild dismay, and so forth. “I suffer from demophobia, or fear of crowds,” said Father. “Also, monophobia, the fear of being alone. And theophobia, the fear of God. I am the last person in the world who should be in the priesthood. The absolute last! I am scared in the pulpit, and scared at night in the rectory, and also I think God is going to punish me for being a bad priest.” Suzanne was his great consolation. She was unmarried, 47, smart, sweet, and they liked to go for rides in her car and take pictures of old deserted farm sites. To avoid suspicion, they rendezvoused on a deserted stretch of country road near Holdingford and he parked his car in a dry creekbed and covered it with branches. He wanted to marry her but she was agnostic and felt very guilty about keeping company with a Catholic, what with the church's long history of persecution and intolerance.

Margie put her hand on his and whispered, “Good luck, Father.” What could you say?

“I think it's so wonderful that all of us have gotten along so well,” said Evelyn. “I am having a wonderful time. Trips can be so stressful.”

“The wine helps,” said Irene.

“This is why people travel,” said Margie. “To learn new things.
To learn how to love each other.” She looked straight at Carl as she said it and he smiled uneasily.

Irene said that she couldn't of course speak for others but that she would not mind leaving this café right now and finding another one so as to spend this precious time with each other and not with Mr. Keillor, who she spotted across the piazza, getting out of the police car. She would be happy to take full responsibility.

“You do as you like,” said Margie, “but I told him we were here and so I'm going to stay put.”

So they stayed. Mr. Keillor came walking through the rain, Clint holding the umbrella over part of him.

Marilyn stood up and dinged her glass and said, “When we left home, Corinne had just gotten her Prom dress, a pale yellow silky off-the-shoulder thing, and of course she looks fabulous in it. When strangers see her and they look at us, you can see them thinking,
What is that beautiful Korean girl doing with those
big white people?
But you know, inside, she really is even more Norwegian Lutheran than we are. She said to me, ‘Mom, I'm not going to go to the Prom with anybody. I don't want to make these boys feel bad.' She got asked by six or seven boys, and when she told them no, that raised the hopes of the ones on the B-list, who've been helping her with her 4-H project, which is maple syruping. She's got taps in about thirty trees. When we left the house, there were fifteen boys collecting wood for the fire and there she stood, stirring the sap in a big steel pan like a witch with the black hair streaming down her back and all these boys under her spell and her doling out tastes of the syrup from a wooden spoon. That was what we saw, as we drove away. Our daughter surrounded by suitors. What they don't know about her
is that she is so deeply Lutheran that she is repelled by flattery. This stunning beauty—I can say that, since she's adopted—and if someone tells her she is, she's offended, and if a boy moons around, all damp-eyed and dreamy and writing poems about her raven hair and china skin and so forth and so on, she only feels pity for him. The boys think they're pursuing her and actually she is mothering them.”

“What's your point there?” said Daryl.

She looked at him coolly. “The point is: when it comes to love, we just plain don't know. Nobody knows. It makes no sense. I'm with Margie. It's a miracle when it happens. And if it doesn't, you can live without it.”

Mr. Keillor sat down, damp and extinguished, and said, “Thanks for bailing me out. I was afraid they might raise their price.” And then the pizza came, four enormous discs of pizza, and they dug in. The rain let up a little as they ate. Irene passed a plate to Mr. Keillor who said he was not hungry. “Don't be a martyr,” she said.

She said, “I shouldn't say this with Mr. Author here, but if he repeats this, I will kill him with my bare hands and that's a promise. The first time they served pizza for hot lunch at school, it was sort of like fried silage with chunks of boiled owl, and anyway none of us were used to it, and by the time school was over and we went to confirmation class, we were full of gas. I remember kids sitting perfectly still in their seats, not leaning to one side or the other, but now and then some gas would escape and sound like a bassoon solo and we'd all smell it and look around and scowl so everyone would know it wasn't ours. We were trying hard not to laugh, and when you try to hold a laugh in, it will explode on you,
sometimes in the form of a fart. Which happened to me. I had my cheeks clamped shut and I was afraid this fart could explode and I would load my pants. And then Pastor Tommerdahl asked me to stand and read today's scripture and I said, ‘Could I please go to the toilet first?' and a couple boys busted out laughing, and I stood up and read the verse about Pentecost in Acts, the second chapter, it says, ‘And when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.'

“And I exploded. It boomed like a cannon and two big strands of mucous shot out of my nostrils and hung there like spiderwebs and I covered my face, the smell was horrible. And you, Clint, you yelled ‘Evacuate!' and we did. That was when I thought seriously about leaving home and never coming back. I wanted to join the air force and move to Colorado. Or the navy. In Norfolk, Virginia. Indecision was what kept me at home. Couldn't make up my mind where to go.”

“Then you fell in love with Clint,” said Eloise.

“Actually she was in love with two other guys,” said Clint. “Couldn't decide between them. So—there I was.”

The waiter brought the check and Carl reached for it, but not with blinding speed, and Father Wilmer got it first. “My treat,” he said. They protested, mildly, and he whipped out a credit card. “It's such a relief to have you in on my secret,” he said.

“And not have Mr. Keillor here, taking notes,” said Irene, giving Mr. Keillor a cautionary look.

“What a beautiful evening. Thank you so much,” said Margie. And she took Carl's arm and stood up and sang and he sang along
with her, quietly, and Eloise joined in, and Father Wilmer, a love song from their childhood.

“What does it mean?” said Daryl, though he knew, of course.
You live in my heart. You bring me joy and sorrow. You'll never
know how dear you are
.

T
hey had arrived in Rome on a Thursday and now it was Tuesday and—Carl reminded Margie—they hadn't found Gussie's grave. She said, “We'll get to it.” She wanted to tell the truth—that he had slipped on ice while AWOL and died of a brain injury and was buried a mile away—but Eloise had made so much of the Medal of Honor citation, Margie thought it was impolite to contradict her. Eloise had passed a photocopy of the citation around the breakfast table, and they each pretended to read it. Though they had heard it read almost every Memorial Day since they were kids. Eloise said, “Here we are, just ordinary people no different than anyone else, and yet here is this story of someone who was just like us and his deed of valor that just boggles the mind. To put a chain on a bomb and swing it like a censer …”

And Gussie's heroism was the reason Wally and Evelyn had come to Rome, as they reminded everyone. “Not here for my own pleasure,” Wally said. “Here to honor a young man's sacrifice.”

It was hard for Margie to stand up and look the legend in the face and say, “No, folks, the truth is he slipped and fell after he
made love to his girlfriend and bumped his head and there were no Germans anywhere around, they'd all headed north because they didn't want to be heroes either.” So Mr. Columbo would drive them out to Anzio and Nettuno in the afternoon to look at the landing site of the Allied invasion and search the American military cemetery. Carl was very uncertain about the adhesive Norbert had supplied for the plastic engraving of Gussie's picture. Carl tried to glue a beer cap to the pavement with it and it wouldn't hold. “We can stick it on with double-sided Scotch tape, take a picture of it, and we're good to go,” said Irene. “Send the picture to the brother and he'll be happy.”

“His brother died Sunday night,” said Margie, “and he died thinking we would do what I told him we'd do.”

“Well, that settles it,” said Wally.

She'd ask Maria to find them a good hardware store. Maria hadn't been heard from since she and Margie had coffee that Friday morning, and then she called after breakfast on Tuesday. Her mother had died. Gussie's great love had died in her sleep wearing a Whippets jersey. Maria seemed distracted. “No, no, no,” she said when Margie offered to come over and help. The burial would be Wednesday afternoon. “No waiting around. Mama wants to join Papa in the cemetery.”

“We want to come,” said Margie. Maria said that would be fine.

The pilgrims were in the Pantheon under the ancient roof, looking at its ancient gray walls pocked with holes from cannon fire, when Maria called. Margie sat on the steps of a church and talked, and then two Gypsy women approached, hands out
stretched, begging, sobbing, keening, pushing strollers with fat dark-skinned weeping babies, and the pilgrims fled around the corner and down an alley past an Egyptian obelisk and a statue of an elephant and into a small church. Margie slipped off to a side altar and lit four candles and said a prayer for the soul of Miss Gennaro and was about to ask to be forgiven for the sin of adultery and then thought, “Not yet. Later.” Ten wooden confessionals stood along one wall, green curtains, brass grilles—inside one, rolled-up carpeting, and in another, cleaning supplies. Once upon a time, a priest sat in here, leaning toward the grille where a sinner spilled the secrets of her heart. Lust, greed, anger, pride. Now, only dust mops and soap and plastic buckets.

Outside and across the street, a little shopwindow displayed crucifixes and manger scenes and little plaster angels. “Can we go in?” Evelyn asked Margie, as if she were the teacher. So in they went, except Margie who looked at the window next door, stacked with books. Big leather-bound, gilt-lettered tomes, all different languages, in tall stacks, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Dante, Tolstoy, Zola, the world's great literature carelessly gathered in a big heap. No marketing (
Read literature and become a
better person
), just heaps of books. Next door, a fancy shop, advertising Hermès jewelry, Chanel bags, Annick Deligny perfume. A poster of Meryl Streep for Dior. “I didn't care for her in that movie where she was the Iowa housewife,” said Marilyn. “She's better as a mean person. I think all of us would be more interesting if we were meaner.”
Huh?

“I mean it. We're brought up to be so sweet and accepting and—we're so goddamn
Lutheran
.”

“I'm not,” said Margie.

“You are, actually. Italy is a real Catholic country—in Minnesota, you Catholics are just Lutherans with statues.”

She stopped and Daryl bumped into her. She ignored him, and waved her hands in a big sweep of Rome. “Catholics are in a struggle with God. A losing struggle but they fight back. Those guys who went to Saturday night Mass and afterward they went off with a girl and a bottle of vodka—they were fighting back. We Lutherans just keep our heads down and hope God isn't paying real close attention.”

“I'm not with her,” said Daryl. “I don't know who she is.”

“Remember Lonnie? She used to date Catholic boys. She'd go out to her dad's hunting shack and sit there and wait for them. She'd invite three or four to make sure somebody showed up. And she kept a loaded pistol behind the sofa cushions just in case things got out of hand. Lonnie's mother was Lutheran but she married a Catholic, so Lonnie was sort of out there on the borders, searching, and meanwhile, she liked to drive boys crazy. She wasn't that good-looking but I suppose in candelight she was presentable if you were eighteen and drinking vodka. She told me, ‘Come on out on a Saturday night and see what a good time is like.' Being Lutheran, I didn't go, but she told me all about it. She had sex with anybody who was in the mood. She was wild. Wore little short shorts and a T-shirt and no bra, and back then, the sight of a woman's nipples was more than a novelty. Some boys got overexcited and that was the reason for the pistol. Lonnie told me that a shot to the chest was the only way to go—don't mess around aiming for the knees.” She tapped her sternum.

“I know nothing about this,” said Daryl. “I was not there.”

“One night, there were three guys there and—well, wait just a minute.” She turned around. “Carl, you were there. You tell.”

“I was where? At Lonnie's cabin?”

“With Donnie and Mark.”

“I was the designated driver,” Carl said. “I never went in the cabin. I stayed with the vehicle.”

The pilgrims had stopped, waiting for more details. “Just ‘fess up,” said Irene. “Nobody's going to tell.”

Carl said that, so far as he could remember, Donnie was with Lonnie and Mark was in the outhouse throwing up. Donnie and Lonnie were entwined on the couch—so Donnie said later.

Marilyn interrupted him. “They were going at it like a couple of bunnies and she was worried about the pistol and she put her hand down there to put on the safety and the gun went off and blew a hole in the sofa and Donnie was halfway across the room in a single bound and she looked at his member, which had suddenly deflated, and she laughed and he grabbed his coat and out the door he went and a year later he was in seminary.”

“This was Donnie Schoendienst,” said Carl. “Not my brother Donnie.”

Margie checked her watch. Eleven-fifteen. She was thinking how nice it would be to see Paolo. Last night, after the festive anniversary supper and the speeches and all, she'd gone hand in hand to the Giorgina with Carl and he kissed her and said, “Thanks for thirty-five years.” She took a shower, put lotion on, dressed in a red negligee, and came out of the bathroom to find him asleep.

He woke up when she climbed into bed.

“You know something? I'm really tired,” she said. “I'm going
to turn out my light.” So she did. He didn't move. She said, “You don't mind if I just go to sleep, do you?”

“No, that's fine,” he said. They lay quietly, looking at the ceiling.

She said, “Do you ever wish we hadn't had kids? Do you?”

“Of course not. What a terrible thing to say.”

“Sure, you do. Everyone wishes that. Sometimes. Of course you do.”

“Well, if you know I do, then why do you ask?”

“Just admit that sometimes you have wished that we hadn't had children.”

“Don't be silly. What would we do without kids?”

She could think of things. But the look on his face—plain incomprehension—a good Catholic father. Childlessness would go against God's Will for our lives. God knows best what we need for our happiness and that is why He makes us fertile.
What
would we do without kids?
We would have a romance, that's what we would do. And a moment later, he was dead to the world, on his back, mouth open, snoring. And the worst of it was that she felt relief at not having to make love. She gave him a shove and he rolled over, the rumbling and rasping stopped, she rolled over, her back to his, and fell asleep.

And now she was imagining Paolo, imagining him with another woman—younger, sleeker, cooler, like one of those young mammals on the Spanish Steps, hundreds of young women reclining in the sunlight like a colony of seals on the rocks, young bulls flopping beside them, nuzzling, moaning, and in the piazza below them a great stone boat of a fountain. What did Paolo see in her anyway? She was old. Fifty-three. No longer so interesting
to a man. All the more reason to use what charm she had before she turned into an old hag.

Margie walked ahead, into a street of stucco houses, burnt sienna, golden umber, blood orange, pumpkin, houses the colors of squash and rutabagas and potatoes, past a squash house with green wooden doors and a Laundromat
(WASH & DRY, LAVA RAPIDO
) in a building with a fresco of Apollo chasing Daphne.

Lunch was at a pizza cafeteria and, as always, some of the pilgrims took forever to choose their food. Evelyn pondered the menu as if she were about to purchase a house. So Margie skipped lunch and got a cappuccino out of a machine. She sat down by Marilyn who had chosen a slice of sausage pizza and thought it was not as good as Domino's, frankly. Lyle was lurking nearby. He had been staring at her all morning. Whenever she turned around, there was his big round face, his dark eyes blinking. She had told Ardis she'd take care of him. So she walked over and put a hand on his shoulder and told him to get a slice of pizza. Her treat. He said he needed to talk to her. “Later,” she said.

“Get a load of this,” said Daryl, and thrust a copy of the Rome
Daily American
at her, his big finger pointing to a personals ad (M 4 F):

He smirked at her as if this were some huge joke, a man advertising for romance. Or was it the word “charismatic”?

Or was Daryl letting her know that he knew about her You-Know-What?

“What's so funny about that?” she said.

“I just thought you'd get a kick out of it. Imagine if people did this in the
Herald Star
.”

“Not a bad idea. A man telling you what he's got to offer—”

“Unique? Erotic?”

She leaned toward him and whispered, “Sometimes modesty is used to cover up real inadequacy.”

“Huh?”

She thought that a dependable, erotic, intelligent man sounded like a good deal.

Mr. Columbo came after lunch to fetch them.

Carl was in possession of the plastic engraving and the adhesive materials, though he still seemed jet-lagged. What if he glued his own fingers to the gravestone and they had to call in a chemist to break the bond?

Mr. Columbo jumped out of the van and they jammed inside, except Eloise, who stood on the sidewalk, surveilling the passersby. “Have a good time,” Margie said, but Eloise didn't budge. “I have a premonition,” she said.

“Get in the van.”

She got in the van.

“You're not coming?” Carl said. “I have to lie down,” Margie said. “Jet lag hit me.” And when the van pulled away, she went off to lie down with Paolo. She went to the coffee bar and called his number and he picked up on the first ring and said, “Hello darling
Margie” with a hard g and said he'd been hoping she'd call. Well, she had. “Would you like to come over?” Well, yes, she would. She headed for his hotel, armed with clear directions—down a narrow street with many little restaurants and a bar called Luigi's on the corner, and turn left past a modern art gallery—but Luigi's never appeared. She turned and retraced her steps, but evidently not—the street didn't look the same going in this direction—and she stopped, and was about to ask for directions.
Dove si trova Il
Paradiso?