Pilgrims (7 page)

T
he day after Maria phoned in January, Margie called Norbert Norlander to tell him about his Italian niece. His housekeeper answered. ‘He's not here,” she said. “He's suffered a setback.” She gave Margie another number, the Angels of Mercy nursing home on Immaculata Drive. His bedside phone. His voice was growly, like he was turning a crank and grinding peanuts. Probably he'd worked outdoors with heavy machinery and had to shout a lot. “Where'd you get my name?” he said. He got weepy when she mentioned August.

“Jesus God in Heaven, I was all packed up to fly to Rome the week before Christmas. I was going to go over and put his picture on his gravestone. I promised Mother thirty years ago I'd do that and dang it, I just kept putting it off. I was running myself ragged, drilling oil wells down here and going through a divorce and dealing with bladder cancer. Anyway, Gussie's in a military cemetery outside Rome. He was an aide to a Brigadier Somebody, a one-star general, and he was having a great time in Italy, he was hotfooting it around and avoiding heroism and he was in
love with an Italian gal he met during the Anzio landing. She came out in a rowboat with a lantern and guided them in.”

“Gennaro?”

“That's it. How'd you know?”

“Her daughter called me yesterday.”

“Oh. Her. The communist. I cut off contact with her. She's just trying to get money out of this. Don't kid yourself. I'm on to her game. She just wants to get an Italian court to declare paternity and come over here and collect money for child support, take my home, my car. You don't want to mess with her. Talked to her once and she gave me an earful about Vietnam. To hell with her. Anyway, Mom died in '78 and in the hospital she made me promise her on a Bible to go to Rome and find his grave and put Gussie's picture on his gravestone. Mom was a sort of mystic. Being married to my dad, she had to be a mystic—how else was she going to know what was on his mind? She was taking laundry off the line one day and lightning struck the pole and,
bang
, it gave her mystical visions. Gussie appeared to Mom in some of these visions and some days he was happy, some days he just sat with his head in his hands. She baked chocolate-chip cookies for him but he had no appetite. He said things like ‘It wasn't like you think it was.' She said, ‘How was it, Gussie?' He said, ‘Not like you think it was. But it's all over, it doesn't matter,' he said. And then he'd moan. That made her cry and he'd say, ‘Ma, they all died and it didn't matter. Nobody cared. It didn't change a single thing. The world goes on. They just went up the road and died in the mud and the filth and then life went on and it didn't matter. The Germans didn't want Italy and neither did
we. It was all for show. A big opera except they shot the orchestra. What was the point of it?' She spent her last days talking to him. And after she died, by God she started dropping in on me and saying, ‘Why haven't you done what you said you'd do? Honor your brother.' In Mom's family, they always put a picture of the dead person on the gravestone, as a sign of respect. The picture said you were
somebody
. Not just a lump of dirt. You lived, you laughed, you danced the polka. The army inscription is all cut and dried, name, your outfit, date of death, that's all you get, and she wanted him to be
somebody
. She said to me, ‘Norby, he's lying there like a piece of garbage.' I said, ‘Ma, you can't bring back the dead.' She said, ‘No, but we don't have to treat him like trash.'

“She'd saved up money to go to Italy and by the time she had the fare, she was in a wheelchair so the money sat in the bank and then in her will she designated it for the purpose of putting his picture on the gravestone. Ma was a bulldog. Let me tell you. Once she got an idea she stuck with it.

“I promised her I'd go to Rome and put it on his gravestone. And that gave her peace at the end. So finally I was all set to fly to Rome and then I met a woman online and she talked me into going dancing with her and we were doing a mambo and I got dizzy and slipped and tore my knee to shreds and they operated on it and it's still not right and now they're taking me off painkillers. I'm in rough shape. Oh ducky, I wish to hell I could find someone to do this for me.”

“You want me to go to Rome? I can go.”

He was in pain. He sounded like someone was sitting on his
chest. He said, “I never met you, never knew any Krebsbachs when we lived there. I'm sure you come from good people though.”

“Actually, I am a Schoppenhorst,” she said. “Krebsbach is my husband's family. My dad was the butcher. On Main Street, next to Skoglund's. It's gone now. But I'd be happy to do it.” She was afraid he might croak right now and then what?

“It would be such an enormous favor.” His voice broke. He was about to get on the bus to heaven. A nurse came in his room and he put his hand over the phone. Muffled voices. He came back to the phone. He sounded groggy. Maybe they'd shot him up with Percocet.

“A guy always assumes he has more time, you know? And I think maybe mine has run out. So there's no point in being coy about it. If you'd do this for me, I'd be in your debt forever. If you said no, I wouldn't blame you at all. You don't know me from a bale of hay. If you'd go to Rome and find my brother's grave and put his picture on it, if you would do that for me”—he took a deep steadying breath—“I could be at peace with my mother. I don't know about God, but Mother, yes.”

She didn't exactly say yes—she said, “I'll do it if I can get some people to come with me”—but he wept. “That is a huge load off my mind,” he sobbed. “You have no idea. I've thought about this every day for the past ten years.”

And then he dropped the other shoe.

“Ma left the travel money in treasury bonds and now it's $150,000 so if you want to go and take some people with you, there's money for that.”

She was about to say that she couldn't possibly accept money
from him to go to Italy. And then she swallowed those words and said, “Well, let me think about it.”

After they said good-bye, she wanted to ask him straight out:

Why did Gussie attack the German machine-gun nest? Was his unit pinned down?

What else do you know about the Gennaro woman? She sounded very nice to me. Tell me the truth.

Do you have children? Are you rich? Are you a Republican?

Do you have any nice memories of Lake Wobegon? Were people nice to you?

It dawned on her that night that fate had chosen her to lead a trip to Rome, she who had never so much as led a trip to Melrose or Sauk Centre. There are things that will not be done unless you do them yourself. And she went into training for it. A brisk walk in the morning, fifteen minutes out and turn around and come home. More fruit. Cinnamon tablets and fish oil and vitamin E. Dandelion tea. She had won a great prize, the good faith of the Norlanders, who would handsomely provide for a group of Wobegonians to travel to Italy for the purpose of plastering a picture of their dead son on his tombstone. This much was clear. But how many travelers could fly over and back for $150,000? Maybe a dozen. Who should go? And who does not get to go?

Now there is the question.

No, no, no.
You do not have to take twelve people on this trip.
It does not take twelve people to stick a picture on a gravestone.
You and Carl can do this, the two of you. Fly first class and stay
in a five-star hotel. Why not?

And then she thought, “No. This is a story. You are only a character in it. You're not the author. You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you. You have endured long stretches of tedium and your share of sudden hard blows. You love a man for his good humor and good heart and marry him, try to do the right thing, make a nice home with music playing and the smell of baking, bring your kids up to work hard and tell the truth, and you go through the
miserable arguments (‘You don't care about me and the kids. You don't care what we want or how we feel. We're just baggage to you') and you survive those and then you have to survive the worst blows, the miseries of your kids.”

Their daughter Carla was the brainy one who was supposed to go to college and become a scientist and instead she fell in love with Jack the guitarist and followed him to New York where she lived in various states of illusion for three years—Budding Actress, Soon-to-Be Singer, Author of Memoir—moving from sublet to sublet in far upper Manhattan. When Carl flew out to rescue her, she was staying with an ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend, sleeping on their couch, to save money for singing lessons. She was dressed all in black with a red shawl, dark red lipstick and fingernails, and her hair seemed to be styled at random, in the dark. He asked how she was. Fine. Good.

“I came out to make sure you're not sick.”

“I'm not,” she said.

“Are you pregnant?”

“No,” she said, “I'm not.”

“You're sure?”

“Yes, I took a test yesterday. I'm not.”

Okay. Good. But a large chasm opened up at his feet, and he flew home in a slight panic, which made the bat episode even worse. A month later, Carla met Bradley, fresh out of chiropractic school, and melted right into marriage to him, and now was trying to have his baby, which she believed would save the marriage from the dead weight of Brad's anxiety. He had to avoid chocolate, loud noise, and direct sunlight, and needed to have a child for a sense of “completion,” whatever that meant.

A long story.
Ai yi yi
.

Carl Jr. had quit a good job with Northwest Airlines—“It's getting in the way of my life,” he said—to be a songwriter and barista in Seattle, content to make four hundred lattes a day and write songs about uncertainty and indifference. He had tried to find himself in Minneapolis and now he was trying to find himself in Seattle. He was sort of tracking himself across the country.

He attended Wisconsin Wesleyan for one year, the year that puncturing holes in each other's bodies was the vogue on campus. It was a coed dorm and there was a lot of sex going on and beer flowed freely and they used a leather punch to install new metal in each other. He got an eyebrow ring, a nose plug, a neck ring, and an odd bacterial infection that went on for three years. Something usually found only in owls.

Margie was pretty sure he was gay. He lived with three roommates, two of whom were definitely gay, and he never mentioned girls in a romantic way. No girlfriend. And he dressed gaily and fussed over his apartment. Unlike regular men. You went there and expected to see empty beer bottles on the floor and pizza boxes and underpants with skid marks but instead it was immaculate and had vases with dried weeds in them and lamps with tassels and a black-and-white striped throw over the sofa.

And Cheryl, the spunky one in the family, gone to Minneapolis to be a free spirit and enroll in a community college (Dance Workshop; Introduction to Film; Human Sexuality; and a composition course, Keeping a Personal Journal), and that lasted for a year and now she worked at the cosmetics counter at Wal-Mart and was finding out that life is real (though her Facebook page
showed 865 “friends,” most of whom she had never met). She wore tiny blue rectangular glasses. She never cooked. She sang in a vegan punk band, Dead Babies:

A whole catalogue of trouble. And now Carl didn't want to sleep with her anymore. As Carla used to say: UNFAIR.

But now comes $150,000 walking through the door on its hind legs, hand outstretched, and
Hello Stranger
. She might have to lie and tell Carl she won the money in a contest. Name the Lake Home, Fly to Rome—“Honey! Wowser! Look at this! I won! I won! O boyoboyoboyoboy. They chose my entry, ‘Lake Haven' and now we can go to Rome, you and me, darling.”

And then Mr. Keillor stepped in and made his generous gift to the August Norlander Memorial Expedition.