The River Queen (24 page)

“It must be a museum now,” I said.

“Well, I don't know how more than one person at a time could go through it. It wasn't bigger than your upstairs bathroom. Anyway I worked in retail. Ladies' garments.”

“You mean like dresses, blouses?” I actually didn't know my father worked in ladies' garments.

“Shoes, slips, bras. The whole thing.”

“What year was that, Dad?”

“Oh, it was 1921 or 1922. No, it must have been later because that spring, just before I moved to Hannibal, our downstairs neighbor murdered her husband. My parents were very good friends with him. You know, he took her on a cruise, then came home and he's shaving one morning and she blows his head off.”

“That's awful,” I said, shocked.

“Seems he brought his mistress along on the cruise as well. She was in the next stateroom.” My father gave a wave of his hand. “That kind of thing happened all the time.”

“It did?” I asked, amazed. I wanted to know more about the downstairs neighbor and his mistress and the wife who blew him away, but our eggs came and my father was on another trajectory. He poked at his hash browns. “I wanted them crisp.”

“Shall we send them back?”

He gave a wave of his hand. “Naw, it's all right.” But I could tell he was disappointed. He took a few bites of his eggs and the hash browns. “Not so bad. But I like them crisp.” Then he took a sip of juice. “Now that's good juice. Here, have some.” He pushed the glass my way. “Where was I? Let's see, I was twenty-three years old. So it was later. It was 1925. Anyway, I worked for Klein's Department Store and one day Mr. Klein came in. He came all the way from New York. They were a chain of retail stores. I'm sure you've heard of them. Klein's.”

I nodded, though I wasn't sure I'd ever heard of Klein's.

“Anyway, Mr. Klein came in. He was bald as a bat. At that time I had a full head of hair, you know. In 1925 I had hair as thick as yours. So Mr. Klein comes in and the first thing he does is yank on my hair. He says, ‘How'd you get a head of hair like that? How come I'm rich and bald and you work for me and haven't got a pot to piss in and you've got a head of hair like that?' Mr. Klein liked to joke around, though I only met him once or twice in the year I lived in Hannibal. Anyway, I had hair then, in 1925, but by the time I was thirty-three, ten years later, all my hair was gone. You know that, right? You've got the portrait.”

“The portrait?”

“You know, the picture. We called them portraits then. That's because you went to a studio and sat for them. It wasn't a painting, but we called them portraits. That picture of me. There were only three copies made and one of them is hanging in your house. On your gallery wall.”

The waitress came by with her manager to make sure everything was all right. “Your eggs are getting cold,” she said. “Shall I heat them up for you?”

“Naw, I'm just talking,” my father replied in his most polite voice.

“He's 102 years old,” she told her boss.

“You must be kidding,” the boss said, shaking my father's hand. “What's your secret?”

“Nothing in excess,” my father said, admonishing them both.

I was watching their little exchange, trying to envision this portrait of my father. I have a whole wall of pictures. Ancestors and new arrivals. Those gangsterlike shots of my father from the 1920s. My husband's family. Our daughter floating on a raft. Then I see it. In a dark suit, pinstriped shirt, his hands folded across each other, a soft smile on his face. He's holding something in his hand—a pipe, I think. Something he doesn't smoke. I've had this picture for many years. I've probably walked by it ten thousand times, but I've never given it much thought.

“So I never told you about this portrait, did I?”

I shook my head, nibbling on my now cold toast. “It was from 1935 and I was working on the Chicago Board of Trade. On the summer weekends we'd go out to Union Pier and there was this girl from Memphis. But her family summered in Chicago. They had a house on Lake Michigan and we became friendly. She was from the Bloch family. I'm sure you've heard of the Blochs from Memphis.”

I nodded, though I never had.

“A very rich girl. Anyway, I dated this Bloch girl a few times one summer, but then the summer was over and she was going back to Memphis.”

“Were you still in Hannibal?”

My father waved his hand in the air. “No, you aren't paying attention. I told you. I was in Chicago. At the Board of Trade. Hannibal was a long time ago. This is about the portrait.”

I wasn't exactly paying attention. I thought he was telling me a river story, but now his tale had taken a bend I hadn't expected to Union Pier and a girl from Memphis I'd never heard him mention before.

“Anyway, this girl, the Bloch girl, her father committed suicide in 1929. She was a pretty girl. She had red hair like a fire and very green eyes. She reminded me of a party. She was bright and pretty. I liked her and I suppose I felt badly for her because of what had happened in her life. So when she was going back to Memphis I asked her if, when the holidays rolled around, she'd like a gift from me. If there wasn't something I could send her so she would remember me. And she said that she would like a portrait of me. That was all. She just wanted a portrait of me. Now there was this very famous portrait photographer in Chicago, his name was Seymour. He did all kinds of photographs and he was very expensive. So I went over to Seymour's studio one day…”

I wasn't completely following the story now about how my father went over to Seymour's studio. I was thinking about the neighbor whose wife blew him away and the rich girl whose father killed himself and who wanted a picture of my father to remember him by.

“What happened to her father?”

“Well,” my father said, taking a bite of his eggs, “that's an interesting story. You see, this man, her father, Mr. Bloch, he had a grocery store in Memphis. He was quite successful, but he heard that there was a new kind of grocery store starting up in Minneapolis. A grocery store where employees didn't wait on you. Instead you served yourself. So he told one of his employees that he wanted him to go up to Minneapolis and find out just what kind of new grocery store was being started up in Minneapolis. So the employee went up and said he'd be back in a week or two. Well, a week went by, two, four, six weeks. That employee never came back.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don't know. They never found him.” My father gave me an impatient look. “This isn't a story about the employee who disappeared.” My father made a little explosion sign with his fingers. “It's about the portrait. But since you asked, I'm telling you about Mr. Bloch.”

I nod. “Okay.”

“So Mr. Bloch sends another employee up to find the one that never came home. His name was Clarence Saunders and he told Mr. Bloch that in Minneapolis the grocery stores were changing and someone had an idea called self-service. He told Mr. Bloch all about how the customers never had to wait for the next clerk but could take the items off the shelves themselves. Butter, rice, beans. They just reached up and took it and put it into a cart. Saved a lot of time. Well, Saunders explained this to Mr. Bloch and they opened a store together. It was called the Piggly Wiggly and it was the first supermarket. Ever heard of that?”

I said I had and my father seemed pleased. “Well,” he said, “at least you know something.”

“But what about her father?” This story, like so many of my father's, begins on the river, then meanders away much as the river side-winds, leaves its bed, only to come back to itself downstream.

“If you listen, I'll tell you. You keep interrupting me. I'm losing the thread. God, it's freezing in here.” He pulled his coat around his thin, frail body. “Anyway, they did very well with the Piggly Wiggly until 1929 and the market crashed. The two men lost everything, and Mr. Bloch, who had a 250,000-dollar life insurance policy, jumped out of a window so his family could have the money. He didn't want his family to have to start over. That's when they changed the law about life insurance policies and suicide. In 1929. And that's how his daughter became rich.”

He paused to take another bite. “Good eggs,” he said, “but they're ice cold. Anyway, all this girl wanted was a picture of me. I would've sent her a gold bracelet if she'd asked, but that's not what she wanted. She wanted a portrait. So I went over to Mr. Seymour's one day. And there was a doctor there. A famous Chicago doctor. I don't remember his name. But he was having his picture taken. Mr. Seymour was taking it like this and like that.” My father turns and dodges, showing me how Mr. Seymour was taking pictures. “Anyway, the doctor recognized me and he says to Mr. Seymour, ‘Oh, you have to take that man's picture because he's a famous man. He's on the Board of Trade. You've got to take his picture.'

“Well, while I was waiting for Mr. Seymour to take my picture, I was chatting with his girl and I asked her how much it would cost me to have three pictures taken and she said, ‘Oh, three pictures, that would be fifteen dollars.' Well, that sounded okay to me so I told him to go ahead and take my picture. So Mr. Seymour, he smooths down my hair and hands me a pipe. I never smoked a pipe, but I'm holding it in the portrait. He takes my picture for fifteen, twenty minutes, then I leave. About a week later he sends me the proofs and I pick out the one picture.”

“The one that's hanging on my wall.”

“That's right. So, anyway, I order three copies of the picture and send him the fifteen dollars and a few days later Mr. Seymour calls me up. He's yelling and screaming. ‘What's this fifteen dollars? These pictures cost more like a hundred and fifty dollars.' Anyway, Mr. Seymour goes on, blah blah blah, but I tell him talk to your girl. She told me fifteen dollars and fifteen dollars it is. So eventually he agreed and that's how I got the portrait for fifteen instead of a hundred and fifty.”

“What happened to the pictures?”

“Well, you have one, that's the one I kept. My mother had one. And I sent one to the girl.”

“And what happened to that one?”

“Oh, she probably tore it up. I don't know.” He took the last bite of his breakfast. He'd cleaned his plate. “I never heard from her again. I wasn't going to marry her, anyway. I was a confirmed bachelor then. I shoulda stayed that way. Believe me.” He tapped my hand. “Of course, I wouldn't have had you.” My father shook his head. “I wish I could remember her first name. I think I broke her heart.”

31

“
AFTER ALL
these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then,” Mark Twain writes in one of the most nostalgic passages in American literature, “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning, the streets empty, or pretty nearly so.” He was writing of Hannibal, his boyhood home. It had briefly been my father's home as well. Now we are, after ten days on the river, approaching.

Pulling into the small marina, Jerry manages to find the only slip to tie up to in the whole town. As he maneuvers the boat into the narrow passage for the marina, he's shaking his head. “This is literally the only place. If we hadn't found this spot,” Jerry says, “we'd be spending the night somewhere else.” He seems proud of himself.

I'm heading to a hotel for the night. I decided to do this long ago, but now I really want to. I am ready for land, running water, clean sheets. There is much fanfare as I leave, the boys giving me shouts and a big wave. “Adios, amigo!” they cry. “Hasta la vista!” as I trudge uphill, backpack bouncing on my back, then hang a left.

I come to Main Street—an avenue of souvenir shops, filled with Huck and Tom T-shirts, Mark Twain playing cards, statues of Tom and Huck, a bookstore that apparently only sells books by and about Mark Twain. The last run of the Hannibal trolley drives by and weary tourists wave. At the Becky Thatcher Restaurant a Tom & Huck's Taxi offers me a ride. I decline and instead dial the visitor's center, as a sign instructs,
TOLL FREE
1-800-
TOM-AND-HUCK
, to ask about a hotel, but the tourist office is closed.

Ahead of me I see a big sign—the Hotel Clemens, of course—and I make my way there. In the entrance a giant cardboard cutout of Mark Twain greets me. For a moment I think it's real. Block letters read
HEAR MARK TWAIN HIMSELF, LIVE, AT PLANTER'S THEATER
.

Wow, they even channel him here.

I'd dreamed of Hannibal all my life. It was the stuff of my father's stories and of the books I read. But as I plodded in the heat of a late summer's afternoon toward my hotel, what greeted me was a theme park. I've come to a place of tacky souvenir shops and cardboard cutouts, of fake “real live” shows and tourist choo choo trains. Disneyland on the Mississippi.

I'm considering turning around and heading back to the boat, but I'm sure the boys already have the satellite dish going. And I am longing for a bed that doesn't roll and a hot meal that doesn't include pizza crust. But the truth is Hannibal is awful. And it is obsessed, literally obsessed, with its prodigal son (who left when he was a young man and only returned sporadically to revisit his boyhood haunts, to reclaim his river, and for photo opportunities). If I lived here, I'd go mad. Already I feel like someone trapped in the fun house mirrors.

My guess is that at some point Hannibal, not wanting to become a washed-up town like Muscatine, with its pearl button factories closing, or casino-dependent like Dubuque, saw that it had one card to play and it played it well. But how many copies of
Huckleberry Finn
can one town handle? How many ice-cream parlors and postcard shops and souvenirs and T-shirts all with Mark Twain or some version of his famous characters (with the startling exception of the runaway slave, Jim) printed or emblazoned or in neon signs can one small sleepy river hamlet have? The answer is apparently thousands.