Pilgrims (8 page)

M
r. Keillor was coming to address the Thanatopsis Women's Club at their February luncheon at the Sons of Knute Lodge (“My Life in Broadcasting”), rescheduled from September when, if the truth be told, he'd gotten a better offer (he said it was the flu but the next day he was doing Larry King. LK: “Your last book,
Spittoon
—I laughed so hard, I practically busted my hernia.” GK: “Thanks. It was a joy to write.”) and Judy Ingqvist asked Margie to introduce him.

“He needs no introduction. Everybody knows him too well already,” she told Judy.

“Everybody deserves an introduction. Just don't mention his marriages and he's very sensitive about his age. And his looks. Butter him up a little and pop him in the oven.”

“Why me?”

“Because you're our writer, Margie.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh please—“

“I love that poem of yours. Don't be so modest. It's good.”

“That poem” was a sonnet Margie had written too many
years before. Good grief. And now her old friends' daughters had it read at their weddings.

Margie winced everytime she heard it. So girlish and naive, written when she was eighteen and still dating Larry whom she didn't like, but she wrote the poem and when it appeared in the
Literary Leaf
, people congratulated
Larry
for God's sake. Assuming he and Margie were engaged. God help us. “I didn't know you felt that way,” he said. “I don't,” she replied. It was humiliating. To be known for a thing you'd done so many years ago. Like some old souse in the Sidetrack still thought of as a star quarterback though it had been a thousand bottles of whiskey ago. She had borne three children—three epidurals, three episiotomies, three kids breast-fed and toilet trained, three leaky
boats launched—and now her biological clock had stopped and her life expectancy clock had begun. She was fifty-three. Twelve years to retirement, twenty-seven years to octogenarianhood. But here in “the Little Town That Time Forgot” she still was the brainy girl with her nose in a book who wrote sonnets.

So she would have to introduce Mr. Keillor. —“It doesn't have to be long. Just make him feel at home.”

“Well, the truth is that I'm not such a big fan of his work,” she said. “I've tried to read it and just can't get into it.”

“Just rattle off his awards and tell people his radio show has four million listeners and let it go at that.”

Four million people, tuning in to hear Mr. Keillor's quiet monotone murmuring on about the weather and gardening and how he once threw a tomato at his sister. Unbelievable. How empty people's lives must be. But of course on any given day there are millions in nursing homes, unable to reach the off knob—millions more in correctional institutions where a cruel warden might force entire cell blocks to endure two hours of folksy chuckles. She'd heard his radio show a few times, while running errands on Saturday, twisted the radio dial and there he was, murmuring away, telling stories about a gloomy small town she didn't recognize at all, full of righteous yokels addicted to tuna hot dish.

Oh well.

She dressed up for the occasion, snazzy black pants, pale yellow blouse, and low-heeled pumps, applied some blush and rose lipstick. Then her big down parka. A bitterly cold day and her car wouldn't start and she was about to set out on foot the four blocks
to the Sons of Knute when her father-in-law, Florian, drove by and insisted on helping, an old man laboriously attaching a pair of jumper cables to her battery step by painful step, shimmery snow falling as if inside a snow globe, billows of steam from chimneys, and then she had to invite him in to warm up with a cup of coffee, and he sat and complained about Myrtle and how she wanted to go to Florida in February and if she wanted to go so bad, why couldn't she go, dammit, why did she have to drag him along with her? “So what's going on with you?” he said. And she told him she had some travel plans of her own. Rome. In April.

“Oh my gosh, Myrtle's going to have a fit if she doesn't get to go with you,” he said.

Oh God. No way. Not her shrieking mother-in-law. Her voice could strip wallpaper. “She can't come. You have to be in good shape. We'll be climbing mountains.”

“She's been climbing all over me for fifty-two years. You bet she's in shape!”

It was bitterly cold, so the Sons of Knute cloakroom felt crowded because everybody was twice as big with their big down parkas on, a parade of dirigibles with moon boots and chopper mittens.

Thanatopsis met in the Knutes' ceremonial room, horned helmets and musty animal skins and Norwegian banners hanging on the walls, framed photos of former Grand Oyas, some stuff in Norwegian, a painting of King Haakon standing in the middle of Main Street (as if!) looking like a man with a migraine. Judy had sprayed the room with lilac mist to mitigate the odor of cigarette smoke. Sixteen round tables, blue tablecloths, a copy of Mr. Keillor's
Love Sonnets
at each place, the room packed with women, Sister Arvonne chattering about the inauguration of Obama and
how thrilled she was to have a president who can open his mouth and talk, and Myrtle Krebsbach in her jet black wig, her cackling laugh like sharp hammer blows, Eloise hollering at somebody across the room. The Catholics were loud, the Lutherans softspoken as a rule. (Except for her, Margie.)

And now Judy Ingqvist was at the lectern, twenty feet away, opening the meeting, tall, dignified, blond, while Eloise was still flapping around the room, whooping, winking, poking, wearing a corsage the size of a toaster. Fascinating to watch her. Wobegonians tended to be polite, leery of giving offense, so they are easy prey for a loud, pushy person like Eloise. “I don't believe it!” she screeched, and whacked Mary Magendanz on the shoulder. “He said
what?
What a crusty old booger he is! Well, we'll clean his clock for him. We'll take him down a notch or two.” The old boys who used to run the town were utterly dumbfounded by Eloise. She blew into town, went to a council meeting two days later, stood up and spoke, and she never stopped. The old boys were only interested in roads, roads, roads, and dead opposed to zoning or libraries or historic preservation, they were all about road grading and dumping gravel and filling potholes and God forbid we should spend money on a public tennis court, what do we need with that? Eloise came in and rousted those old boys and made them cry in their beer. She blew them out of the water. Val Tollefson had asked Bud to haul dead brush out of his (Val's) yard with the municipal truck and Eloise hung him out to dry. Misuse of public funds, plain and simple. She depantsed him in public and the old boys quietly folded their hands and let her walk over him. The power of surprise attack. Meanwhile, Myrtle was talking about pancreatic cancer, and the guest speaker for the day,
Mr. Keillor, sat at the head table, smiling in a non-directional way. He wore a black suit a size too small, a white shirt, and a bright red tie with coffee stains. She noticed a green leaf on his cheek, so she walked up and said hello. “Good to see you,” she said and pointed to her cheek. “You've got a piece of salad or something on your face.” He brushed it away. He looked peeved. A person should be grateful to have facial food pointed out to them, but not him. Oh well. She wondered how he felt when he returned to his old hometown. Did he regret his career of self-display—did he understand that the self he paraded was not the one everyone in Lake Wobegon remembered? To them, he was a small dark cloud of a man given to sarcasm and ridicule, a man of false humility covering enormous self-regard, but on the radio, he was jovial and winsome, Pal to the People, Celebrator of Home & Family & Heartland & Hard Work. He was an ace at the classic American game of playing dumb. An educated man pretending to be a simple peasant, the oldest dodge in the books, the secret of demagogues and flimflam men since time immemorial. Somehow he'd achieved fame of a sort, but at home he was strictly a nonentity. Lake Wobegon High was a small school but many people in the class of 1960 didn't remember him at all. Years later, when he became famous, they saw his picture in the paper and thought,
Who?
Where was he? In some state facility for troubled youth and got
his diploma in summer school? Was he in our school?

She glanced at the sheet his publicist had sent, which mentioned New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, cities he'd performed in, colleges that gave him honorary doctorates, magazines who had published the
drip-
drip-
drip
of his pen. The career did not line up somehow with the spooky teenager he was at LWHS who would
walk up to girls and say, “Do you think that life is real or is it only a dream and if so am I in your dream or are you in mine and if you suddenly woke up would I disappear or would I go into somebody else's?” Seeing him, waiting for his moment to shine, she had an urge to counsel him. (“Take a year off. Two years. Find out who you are. Get reacquainted with your friends. Plant a garden. Find some hobbies.”) And then she felt a burst of resolve.
Go up
there and steal his thunder. Blow this dude away. Show him he
is dealing with serious people, not flibbertigibbets
.

She stood, gripped the lectern, and her carefully memorized introduction (“It's my honor to introduce a man who literally needs no introduction …”) went up in smoke, poof, and she was left speechless—a sudden sideswipe of the brain that left her afloat in emptiness like a hawk on an updraft from which she saw them with terrible hawklike clarity. Myrtle turning away to dredge up a Kleenex out of her coat pocket. Eloise staring forward, her mind a million miles away. Judy Ingqvist smiling the professional encouraging smile of a pastor's wife. Margie's sister Elaine examining her cell phone. Cindy Hedlund on the verge of an enormous yawn. Arlene Bunsen squinting, her finger exploring a small red pustule under her eye. Irene Bunsen, hands folded so she could look down at her watch. Marilyn Tollerud looking as if she were on the verge of flight, Dorothy sitting placid and content and Darlene next to her brooding over her lonely life. And then Margie let go of the lectern and she said, “Before I introduce today's speaker, I want to talk about something very close to my heart.” And stopped. And the room was utterly still.

“Sixty-some years ago a fine young man named August Norlander left Lake Wobegon and joined the U.S. Army and went off
to North Africa and then to Italy in the winter of '43. Many of you know the story of how he charged a German machine-gun nest single-handed and lost his life and thereby saved his battalion from getting wiped out. As it says in Scripture, ‘No greater love hath a man than he will lay down his life for his friends.' He grew up among us, on a farm just north of here, he enjoyed a happy childhood, rode his bike on our roads, played football for the Leonards, was in the senior class play, and then on a fall day in 1942, he got on a bus and never came back. His old mother grieved for him and it was her fondest dream to go to Rome where Gussie is buried and place a picture of him on his tombstone. As you know, that is an old German custom, and a way of honoring the dead and showing that we remember them. She couldn't make it to Rome, so she asked her son Norbert to do it, and now he's too old to go, and so, in April, Carl and I are going to Rome to finally honor August Norlander as his mother wished. And I hope that some of you will want to come with.”

And people started to clap, and then some of the women jumped to their feet, and Mr. Keillor rose to his feet and clapped, which startled Margie and she stepped modestly away from the podium just as Eloise came galloping up to the front to grab a leadership role. People were standing and applauding, and she stepped up as if the applause were for her!

“Count me in!” she cried. “If you don't mind traveling with your sister-in-law, I'm with you, count me in!” And Myrtle hollered, “I'm with you!” And there were other shouts from women to count them in. Margie held up her hands for silence. “Thank you for your support. And now here is our main speaker, Mr. Gary Keillor.”

Mr. Keillor hesitated. He had been expecting something fuller and richer. He smiled at her as if to encourage her to go on and tell about his books, his radio show, and so forth. Whispers of “Italy” rippled through the room like rain on a roof. He looked uneasy but then he always had: the man was born furtive. He lumbered to the podium as the room buzzed like summer cicadas crying
ItalyItalyItalyItalyItalyItalyRomeItalyItalyItaly
. He stood smiling his odd half smile and listened to the birdsong around the room
ItalyItalyItalyItalyItalyItaly
and he said what an honor it was to be there talking to the women of Lake Wobegon and how women were the most important people in his life and everything good he had done in his life was done in hopes of the approval of women and that he was personally thrilled by the introduction—how about a big hand for Margie Krebsbach? (
APPLAUSE
)—and how August Norlander deserved to be remembered and how he couldn't help but be reminded of Memorial Day services up at the cemetery where the bugler sat in the old oak tree to play “Taps” and the VFW honor guard fired a rifle salute and how he, as a Boy Scout, had stood and recited: