Pilgrims (4 page)

She put it in her jewelry box. And then she decided they should go to Rome and find out how to live joyously.

I
t was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, the moon a crescent in the early evening sky, the planets Jupiter and Venus side by side, and then (1) Carl stopped sleeping with her, (2) she took a phone call from a woman named Maria Gennaro in Rome about a World War II hero, August (Gussie) Norlander, (3) she called Gussie's brother Norbert Norlander in Tulsa, and (4) she saw a dead woman at the side of the highway, under a yellow tarp.

Four stories in five days.

It was a Monday at Lake Wobegon High School. She had come down to the office from her eleventh-grade English class, leaving them to work on the quiz on Cummings's “since feeling is first / who pays attention to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you; / wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world / my blood approves.” (
What do you think “syntax of things” refers to? Do
you agree that “feeling is first”? Try to explain the phrase “wholly
kiss you.” Do you regret an instance in which you were a fool?
) She gave the class a little talk about passive aggression—how people can have very specific expectations how things should be done, and yet never tell you what they want. If you ask them, “Is this
okay?” they just say, “Sure. Whatever.” Though actually they hate what you've done, and think you're a fool, incompetent, possibly in Satan's employ. The only way you know this is that they never look you in the eye.
Say what you think
, she told her students.
I want to know how you really feel. So tell me
. They looked at her, suspicious, thinking it might be a trap.
I would rather know
what you truly think than have you make up something to try
to please me
. They weren't sure how to take that. They stared at the poem.

When she (Margie) thought of “wholly to be a fool,” she thought of her niece Melody Krebsbach, Donny's girl, who ran away from home at 15 to be a model. She'd told her mother one morning over the oatmeal, “I've been thinking of leading a nomadic life.” Hard to imagine a girl who loved her bed so much sleeping in ditches, but a week later she was gone. She was devastatingly beautiful, shockingly thin—tiny flat butt, legs like rake handles, a brassiere like two demitasse cups—one good fart would've blown her away—and a month later she was in
Vogue
(“The Urban Guerilla Look”) as Mladia Majerkova and then the pendulum swung over to Bruised Fragility and then American Slut and she looked good in stiletto heels and python pants and orange blouses with no buttons, everything hanging out, but she was so skinny that her underwear fell down if she walked fast, unless she wore boy's briefs, which she couldn't do, and she got on powerful muscle relaxants laced with codeine, and was skidding toward addiction when a juvenile court judge—Melody was 16 at the time—put her into foster care with an Amish family near Lanesboro. Her Amish name was Modesty. She donned the brown woolen dress and white bonnet and learned to churn butter, which
let her express anger in a useful way. No TV, no radio, no cell phone: it was all good for her. She gained fifty pounds and fell in love with an Amish boy and there she is today, the mother of six kids, built like a brick outhouse, churning butter, spinning wool, baking pies.
Kids
. So dramatic. It's got to be high-priced glamour or the life of a serf. No in-between.

Margie came down to the office to pick up her mail and also because she felt a little overwhelmed by what “wholly kiss you” might mean to her pupils and if one of them would pour out a story about sex in the backseat, kids sometimes bared their souls in English class. And then what are you supposed to do? Marilyn Tollerud's son Darren blurted out, in a paper on Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” that he was gay. Was Margie supposed to send the boy to counseling? Tell his mother? She just gave him an A, wrote “Well-constructed—nice use of personal detail—very persuasive” at the top and patted his curly head.
Good luck, son. Welcome to
the land of confusion. We saved a spot for you
.

The superintendent, Mr. Halvorson, was in a bad way that morning, having passed by the girls' toilet and heard young voices singing:

Margie had heard the song long ago, but Mr. Halvorson had been insulated by his high office—he was horrified. “What am I supposed to think about this?” he cried.

“Think positive,” she said. “Or give up. Your choice.”

Doris the school secretary was trying to decipher the beer-stained receipts from the Friday night basketball game and Margie stood by her desk reading a circular from the Professional Organization of English Majors about the burgeoning interest in poetry—writing of poems up 28% among 18–25-year-olds when the phone beeped and Doris picked up: “Who?” And again, “
Who?
” She said “Hold on” and put her hand over the mouthpiece and rolled her eyes. “Some whacko says they're Italian.” Margie picked up. “My name is Maria Gennaro, I'm here in New York,” the woman said. “Excuse my English, it isn't that good. I'm from Rome. Italy. I'm in New York on my holiday and I called to find out where is Lake Wobegon. I do not find it on a map.”

“Well, we're on some maps and not on others.”

“How far is it to drive there?”

“Two or three days, I suppose. Depending.”

“Oh.” The woman was disappointed. “I was hoping I could make it in a day. I have a flight back home on Wednesday.” Hard to imagine. An Italian woman disappointed that she couldn't come visit Lake Wobegon in the dead of winter.

“Do you have family here?”

“I do. Or I did. Do you know a family named Norlander?”

“Yes. But I don't think they live around here anymore.”

“I am trying to locate them.”

“So these are distant relatives?”

“I don't understand.”

“Cousins?”

“No, my father. His name was August Norlander.”

August Norlander was famous in Lake Wobegon for his heroic death in the liberation of Rome. At the Memorial Day services at the cemetery, someone always told the story about the farm-boy who enlisted in the army after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and who went off to serve in North Africa under Eisenhower and then went ashore at Anzio. One of our own boys, only a few years removed from hoeing corn and playing football, and in the battle for Monte Cassino south of Rome, he met his end. And then someone read the official citation for the Medal of Honor:

It was part of the ritual, along with the Gettysburg Address and “In Flanders Field” and “My country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”—the heroic sacrifice of August Norlander—and it posed certain questions to the inquiring mind: What is the morality of using religious garb for camouflage and calling out a benediction as one is preparing to blow up the very ones you are blessing? Is all fair in war? Young people pondered these things, but meanwhile August Norlander was a legendary figure, striding up a hill, prepared to die in the war against Naziism.

The football field was named for him. Norlander Field. A bronze plaque with his likeness was fastened to the gatepost next to the ticket booth. Wobegon players touched his nose as they trotted onto the field. Sometimes a coach would use August's story as an example of putting yourself on the line for the sake of one's teammates.

He had a daughter in Rome? This was not part of the August Norlander legend. The woman said, “I feel so sad that I have never seen my dad's hometown. And now I'm sixty-four and who knows if I ever will? I came to New York with my sister. Half sister. My dad died before I was born. My mom married another guy, an old friend, but she never forgot my dad. She was in love with him always and she still is. My mom is ninety-three. Her mind is gone except for a few things that are real to her and one of them is my dad. She sits and talks to him all day. I wanted to bring her back something from Lake Wobegon.”

Snow was falling beyond the window. She could make out the steeple of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility in the white haze and the
HOME-COOKED MEALS
sign on the front of the Chatterbox and the red brake lights of cars. People leaned into the wind
sweeping across the lake and lumbered past the skeletal trees and through the clouds of exhaust of cars warming up that never got warm and it just seemed miraculous to look out at winter and hear an Italian woman ask so warmly about Lake Wobegon, wanting to know more about you and where you live. An Italian woman sentimental about her Lake Wobegon roots. You don't get that sort of thing every day. Doris thought it was a complete hoax.

“Nonsense,” she huffed, “tell her to peddle her papers elsewhere.” Daily contact with adolescents had given Doris a suspicious nature. She guessed the Italian woman was out to get money and this would be the first in a series of phone calls aimed at extorting a check.

To Margie, the phone call seemed like a gift. August Norlander had left, a boy of eighteen, and gone to war and fathered a child in Rome who now wanted to find out where she came from. (Had she noticed some odd quirks in herself that might be hereditary? A tendency toward gloomy solitude? A craving for fried herring?) A Roman woman half Minnesotan. A sort of mermaid. Living at the bottom of the sea but curious to come flip-flopping ashore and see what pedestrian life is like. Well, so was Margie curious to get out of her own watery world. Teaching in the same high school she'd graduated from thirty-five years ago. Just like it said in the school hymn—

Well, she had skipped the voyage along the coasts and stayed in the hallowed hallways. Same scarred oak tables, same sweet polish on the maple floors, marble bust of Minerva in the niche by the library, and traces of lipstick from the annual St. Valentine's Day prank.
THE REWARD OF A THING WELL DONE IS TO HAVE DONE IT. EMERSON
in gold lettering by the gym—the place hadn't changed much except for the computers. Same bitter smell of disinfectant in the science lab where she memorized the planets in order—Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto (
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine
Pizzas
)—and here she was, thirty-five years later, two doors down, teaching the past perfect subjunctive.
If only I had done,
if only we had gone, if only they had come
. She'd gone precisely nowhere. The inmate had become a warden. Kids she went to high school with now had ropy necks and liver spots and were planning their hip replacements, but she was stuck in her teen-hood. She still trotted down to the Chatterbox Café for the chili and grilled cheese and noted the same dumb signs on the cash register,
DANGER: DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE
and
DON'T ASK ME HOW I AM—I MIGHT TELL YOU
and
TIPS ARE GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED—CASH ONLY, NO IOU'S
. The same faded prints of Mount Rushmore, the North Coast Limited, the Split Rock Lighthouse. The same smells of coffee, bacon, toast, chocolate malt, burnt beef. The dusty breadth of Main Street, the faded
FOR RENT
signs in the empty storefronts that once purveyed shoes, jewelry, and
menswear. The old, fading small-town blues. And her old pal Darlene, forty pounds heavier, still waitressing after all these years, still saying
Oh for gosh sakes!
and
Who needs it?
and
What kinda deal is that?
or
That's a bad deal you got goin'
there.
Or
What's the deal with him?