The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (22 page)

What does Bogie say to Bergman near the end of
Casablanca
? “We’ll always have Paris.” I reach often for Louise’s hand and hold it.

A great chunk of my “prize for valor” is gone. Who gives a damn? It was all a chimera anyway. I’ve never felt brave in my life. What a wonderful revel this has been—just the two of us wandering freely in Paris and the beguiling French countryside, doing what we can do.

To just hint at the serendipity of our travel, I’ll recall a resonating day we had in the French countryside just before returning to Paris: We were making our way through the northern countryside, driving through a pretty village called Moledor. We stopped for late morning coffee and I noticed a poster advertising a jazz festival in the area going on that very weekend. Moledor seemed to be a lively place with interesting stores and a nice market.

Crowds were coming in for the festival and excitement was mounting. We could hear the opening acts from the square in the distance. Jazz has always excited me, drawn me into its drive and passion. Louise also has great love for this music.

We decided to stay the day in Moledor and treat ourselves. With some effort we found a hotel in a nearby town that could accommodate us for the night. The festival was not a major event, but small and spirited. The groups were all French; some names I remember are Big Band Roquette and Pompon Swing. It was fascinating to hear European musicians swinging the great arrangements of Count Basie and Duke Ellington. There was even a trio that had absorbed the sound of the King Cole Trio, and the pianist sang Nat Cole’s tunes, “Sweet Lorraine,” “Paper Moon,” “I’m Glad There Is You,” with a French accent over the guitar and bass.

There was a break in the program, and Louise and I went to have a small beer in a lively café where people were excited about the music. A big Spanish band called Batucada started its set before we finished our beer. We sat and enjoyed their playing as it resounded through the beautiful medieval square. When we returned to the performance area we saw there were eighteen musicians dressed in light band jackets and spiffy panama hats. A lovely girl was on the stand with them, also wearing a hat, and we waited for her to sing.

The musicians were proud performers and their music was Latin, very warm and crafted—the kind of music that demands that you move some part of your body as you listen. Louise and I were swaying together on our canes, and people were beginning to drift out onto the small dance area in front of the band—mostly solitary dancers wishing to express themselves.

There was one very small woman, with a stocking cap pulled down over her gray hair. She was wriggling and hopping. There was something a bit askew about her, not quite right as she moved, but she was enjoying herself immensely as she squirmed around in front of the bandstand.

Some couples started coming onto the floor, several of them really accomplished dancers, flowing and turning, dipping, passing back and forth as they held hands and tossed their heads lightly. Finally there were some older dancers who joined the rest as the music beckoned irresistibly.

Louise poked me gently, looking at me imploringly. What on earth? She was saying something I could barely hear over the music.

I thought she said, dance. She wanted us to do our cane dance right there in the middle of La Belle France. Oh my God, we were such
anciennes
, such Americans! We would look like fools, I thought. They would call the
gendarmes
, call an ambulance, and rush us to
thérapie
. Please, I thought, Louise, no! I shook my head, but she was pulling on my arm.

I had already been made a spectacle in Barcelona; I wanted no more European mockery, but my beautiful friend was guiding me firmly to the floor. I had forgotten to take a pee before we left the café . . . I was in trouble.

“Louise,” I pleaded. “I don’t remember how to do it.” But she kept me moving along toward the dance floor. “You remember very well!” she said. “It was one of your greatest moments. Come on!”

So, there we were standing on a dance floor in France, facing each other—two American basket cases leaning on their canes. Mercy on my mortifying bones! Spare me! The French were stepping back to see what we would do.

Facing each other we dipped to the left, dipped to the right, then slowly turned all the way around several times on our planted canes. More people were gathering around us now. They were cheering. Great God! We faced each other again, tapped our canes together, then tucked them under our arms, embraced and made a half dozen very slow turns in each other’s arms to the Latin beat. At last we stopped, let go and stepped back, tapped our canes together again and waved them to the crowd to show we were done.

Had we both become clowns? No, no, no. This was our show, it was what we could
do
, and it was enough. There was a quiet pause—then a large French
tumulte
, delighted clapping and cheers, perhaps even greater than it was at Burkhum’s Tap in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. We bowed once more to the crowd. We had become troopers. Selective and brief—but
troopers
. The French wanted us to do it again.
Encore!
they cried.

But no, no. We had given all our art.

As we moved off the floor, amidst admiring French chatter, I was feeling the power of what we had done. We moved to the edge of the crowd, and I announced to Louise: “I’m getting into this thing. We’re the Cane Dancers. We can really
do
it. Let’s practice and put our show on the road in France.
Frédéric and Gingembre
, we can call ourselves. We’ll be a sensation! The Elderhoofers. We’ll lay them in the aisles in Marseille . . . in Lyon and Toulouse. We’re going to need an agent. We need to make more money to take more trips. Italy! England! Tokyo! Moscow! Louise, we’ll dance our way around the world!”

Louise was giggling. “I wonder if the bream are biting on the Kickapoo today?” she said as she patted my head to cool me off.

Batucada had grooved into another number, a familiar-sounding, slow tango, and everyone was dancing again. Louise and I were tired, we stepped back away from the movement, trying not to topple over, enjoyed the warm sounds, just moving our bodies slightly as we stood leaning and swaying against each other.

An elderly, very tall, Spanish-looking man, came onto the floor and went to the tiny gray woman with the stocking cap, who had been jumping up and down in front of the bandstand. He took hold of her firmly and suppressed her wriggling, made her focus directly on his face as he talked to her gently. He made her concentrate. He removed her hat, lovingly straightened her gray, tangled hair with his fingers. He took her hand in one of his, and with the other reached down to grasp her waist, and they began to tango, a remarkable high and low movement—pause and hold, swirl and stop—clasped hands holding and releasing as he reached down to dip her, turning beautifully, flowing and proud, the two of them, the man content, the woman transformed, amazing together and so opposite.

The man looked far out into the distance over her uncombed hair as they danced. I imagined he might be remembering things from his past—challenges, losses, disappointments, triumphs—looking back because he was old and had little in front of him now, perhaps recalling times when he was too young to even imagine death; perhaps moments of bravery and love long gone, but remembered quietly in this dance with the small woman on an outdoor ballroom floor in France where so many of us were far from our homes and almost finished with our lives.

C
HAPTER
27

Louise

W
e have been back from France and in the home for some time now. Both of us have gotten very sick; then both of us got well again. We take many medicines, our pill boxes spill over. At times we feel strange, a mysterious medicinal, aged drifting, a vagueness which we do not welcome.

There is no need to describe in detail our final exhaustion. Eventually everyone comes to it, this permanent malaise, this denouement one cannot predict or cure when it finally appears. It is always out there, ready to swoop in on us in its time, and when it arrives, it is manifest.

Each part of us seems to be paying up at once: teeth, eyes, legs, ears, arms, mind, heart, spleen, stomach, and intestines go afoul, and lungs, bowels, hair, feet, fingers, tongue. Here is our dust, the age which makes us all smell like diapers and soiled washcloths, which sometimes causes us to slip and fall down like shabby overcoats from closet hangers and lay stunned in crumpled heaps.

It would be easy enough to constantly complain about these final events, but Cyril and I do not feel cheated. Somehow we were also given a charmed finale when we no longer thought such things were possible, experiencing more in the last year together than through all our previous years. It was like a thrilling short novel—mysteries, discovery, romance, adventure, challenge, fear, threat, chase, violence, triumph, travel, love, tenderness, devotion.

Above all, now we have memories of our endearment. Each night in Paris in the weeks before the end of our great trip, Cyril came into my bed and we had our quiet, happy love again, unclothed in the night of the City of Light, together just touching and holding each other until we slept.

I cannot imagine through what impossible mix of human existence these moments were given to us at our conclusion—and yet this bandaged man who knows all the lives, near the last moment for both of us, had sat down beside me in the Soldiers Grove Care Home dining hall and asked me if I had ever heard of Christine de Pisan.

And I had! By the grace of whichever or whatever God you wish to believe in, I
had
known who that obscure medieval woman was; so Cyril and I were given each other for this last bit of time together.

One evening, as he embraced me and I cradled him with my hand, a secretion, a small passage of love, came and completed his life, making him writhe with pleasure. Cyril tossed his battered head back, loudly rejoicing, waving his claws like a snowbird on the sheets, his strawberry nose bright in the soft glow of Paris streetlamps.

I was so happy for him. All his words, all those years—and now this punctuation.

After this happened, Cyril clung to me as if I were about to disappear. Yes, of course, I am about to disappear. But even approaching this final mystery—doesn’t one weep with joy on such occasions? At least we did. Cyril and I, we did, and we do.