The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  When I was ten, I got absorbed in the Flambeau Family novels in the Lake Wobegon library and devoured them all in one summer, one by one, sequestered in my bedroom (The Flambeaus and the Case of the Floating Barolo, and the Flippant Bellhop, and the Flying Bonbons, and the Floral Bouquet, the Flagrant Bagel, the Flamboyant Baritone, the Broadway Flop, the Flustered Beagle, and, finally, The Flambeaus’ Final Bow). The Flambeaus were: Tony, a boy of Manhattan, and his socialite parents, Emile and Eileen. Tony is a junior at Trinity School on West Eighty-ninth, All-City in tennis, an honor student, adored by his wise-cracking girlfriend, Valerie. Tony and his mother, an actress still beautiful at forty-one, and his father, the famed crime-solving microbiologist, live happily together in their art-filled duplex apartment on the twentieth floor of the San Remo, overlooking Central Park, and deal with the nefarious, heinous deeds of the criminal element as they lead their elegant lives, attending the opera and ballet and sampling the culinary delights of little-known restaurants and enjoying the nightly vodka gimlet with the neighbors from across the hall, Ira and Elena, a crime-busting attorney and his ballerina wife.

  For a Lutheran boy whose dad ran the grain elevator in a small town where nobody had ever seen a ballet or knew a gimlet from a grommet, the Flambeaus were a revelation. They were my secret family. Nobody else took out the Flambeau books, especially after I reshelved them under Foreign Language.

  Sometimes, descending the steps of Lake Wobegon High School, I would raise my hand as I came to the curb and imagine a taxi screeching to a stop and a bald cabbie with a cigar clenched between his teeth saying, “Where to, mac?” “The San Remo and step on it.” “Right-o.”

  I set the Flambeaus aside as I got older, but in the back of my mind, I reserved New York for later consideration. I minded my manners and learned to be useful and didn’t feel sorry for myself, and in my heart, even through my stringent college years and the summers spent washing pots and pans in the scullery of a hotel or guiding YMCA canoe trips in the North Woods, I imagined myself possessing an eastern elegance and was confident that someday I would land in Manhattan and be accepted by my imaginary people.

  3.

  MY COUSIN KATE

  The kids in my family were good kids, earnest, dutiful, eager to please, ever fearful of God’s watchful eye, and of course we knew bad kids but they came from bad homes where poor housekeeping and greasy food and poor sleep habits and the influence of a bad parent made it difficult for the kids to be anything but bad. Along the West River Road where I grew up, there were two such families and we all knew who they were (their lawns were bad, too) and didn’t want to be like them. The first kid from a good family who chose badness was my cousin Kate, who rebeled rather dramatically in her teen years and then got even wilder in her maturity. I admired her for that. She was my Huck Finn, frank, fearless, true to herself, and she never looked back or cared what people thought about her. I cared a lot about what they thought about me and so I was devious, but Kate was brazen and after high school she tore off to strange cities to have adventures with drugs and sex and communal living that she still hasn’t told me about. She’s a sweet old lady now, avid about books and movies, and what’s odd about her is that, despite her adventurous life in far-flung places, her voice is so much like her mother’s, my dear aunt, who spent many a night weeping for her wayward daughter and sometimes got in her car at two or three in the morning and drove around town looking for the sinner, hoping to rescue her from the clutches of her fly-by-night friends. And now when Kate speaks, she speaks in the twang of her mother. I am perpetually amazed.

  Saturday night, June 1956, now the sun going down at 7:50 p.m. and the sprinkler swishing in the front yard of our big green house on Green Street, big drops whapping the begonias and lilacs in front of the screened porch where Daddy and I lie, reading, a beautiful lawn, new-mown, extending to our borders with the Stenstroms and Andersons. The dog under the porch scootches down, pressing his groin into the cool dirt. A ball of orange behind the Stenstroms’ house, orange shining in the windows, as if the Mr. and Mrs. had spontaneously combusted. The shadow of their elm reaches to our porch, a wavery branch flickers across my right arm in gray shade. I wish Kate would come by. She said she would but it doesn’t look like she will. I wrote her a poem:

  Kate, Kate,

  She’s so great

  I would wait eight hours straight

  To attend a fete

  For Kate.

  I lie on the white wicker swing, Foxx’s Book of Martyrs before me, reading about the pesky papists piling huge jagged rocks on the faithful French Huguenots, crushing them, while listening to the Minneapolis Millers on the radio lose to Toledo thanks to atrocious umpiring that killed a rally in the third inning. Eruptions of laughter from the Jackie Gleason Show at the Andersons’ to the east of us, the Great One glaring at Audrey Meadows. One of these days, Alice—pow! Right in the kisser! At the Stenstroms’ Perry Como sings about the tables down at Morey’s, at the place where Louie dwells. We are Sanctified Brethren and do not own a television because it does not glorify Christ. I know about these shows only from timely visits to the home of my so-called best friend, Leonard Larson. Accordingly, tucked inside my Book of Martyrs is a magazine called High School Orgies, lent to me by Leonard, opened to an ad for a cologne made from “love chemicals” that will turn any girl to putty in your hands. You dab some behind your ears and hold her in your arms and suddenly all resistance is gone, she is whispering for you to do whatever you like. Plus a book of sure-fire pick-up lines with a bonus chapter, “Techniques of Effective Kissing.”

  On the radio a male quartet sings, “From the land of sky-blue waters, Hamms, the beer refreshing.” From one mail order house in the back pages of Orgies, you can purchase magic tricks, a correspondence course in jiu-jitsu, novelty underwear, and powerful binoculars that can see through clothing. A cartoon man aims his binocs at a high-stepping baby doll and his eyes bug out and his jaw drops and sweat flies off his brow. The cologne makes girls “eager to respond to your every wish, as if in a hypnotic trance,” which sounds like a good deal, but what if someone like Miss Lewis came under your spell? You’d have a scrawny horse-faced old lady teacher in your arms. Maybe a guy should settle for the binoculars. And learn jiu-jitsu in case somebody tries to steal them.

  “Where does the word Saturday come from?” I ask.

  Daddy grunts. He thinks it comes from the Roman god Saturn.

  “But it’s not Saturnay. It’s SaTURDay.”

  Not important to Daddy.

  I spring the next question. “Do you think it’s right for Christians to use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week?”

  He grunts. I have caught him in an inconsistency of faith.

  As Sanctified Brethren, we are the Chosen Remnant of Saints Gathered to the Lord’s Name and Faithful to His Word, the True Church in Apostate Times, the Faithful Bride Awaiting the Lord’s Imminent Triumphant Return, holding fast to the Principle of Separation from the Things of the World. Should we not testify to our faith by changing Saturday to Saintsday? How about Spiritday?

  Daddy ignores this suggestion. He is good at shutting out things he prefers not to address. Above his head hangs a glass bead contraption that dingles in the breeze. It glitters like a kaleidoscope. The dingling drives him nuts, like a phone that nobody answers, but it can’t be thrown out because it belonged to Grandpa, Mother’s dad, and Grandpa is dead. This wicker porch furniture was his before he went to be with the Lord. He sat in this swing in his house on Taft Street and read from Deuteronomy and Leviticus and all about sacrificing calves and what was an abomination unto the Lord and how many cubits long the Temple should be, which made more sense to Grandpa, a practical man, than the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the meek”—what is that supposed to mean?). He was reading from God’s Word and got up to go take a leak and he slipped on a loose rug and fell and broke a hip. What got into the hired girl’s
head that she went and waxed that hall floor? Better she should have put cyanide in his prune juice or blown his brains out with a rifle. Poor Grandpa was hauled to the Good Shepherd Home, where he lay weeping and gnashing his teeth for two years until God finally called him home; meanwhile we had been enjoying his furniture, knowing he’d never need it again.

  Her hand brushed against the bulge of his maleness and suddenly his body seemed to rise as if on an ocean wave. His passion was too powerful to resist. “Oh Jack,” she moaned. He leaned forward so she could better sniff his secret cologne and she began to tear at his shirt buttons. He had viewed her often through his binoculars and well knew the delights that would soon be his.

  And suddenly, on the radio, Bob Motley is in a white froth yelling, “Goodbye mama, that train is leaving the station! Whoooooooooooooo-eeee!” his trademark home-run cry, and Daddy perks up his ears but it isn’t a homer, it’s a long fly out for Miller slugger Clint Hartung: “That ball was on its way out of here, folks! And the wind got hold of it and it’s a heart-breaking out to right field for a great ballplayer and just a wonderful guy! What a shame! And now Wayne Terwilliger comes to the plate.” The crowd goes back to sleep.

  • • •

  The faithful Huguenots, our Protestant ancestors, are dying under the rock piles dumped on them by papists, and with their dying breaths the Huguenots pray for God to forgive their tormenters, a truly wonderful touch. A papist sneers at a lovely Huguenot girl as she raises her hands to heaven, as a load of rocks is piled on her. Expertly, Jack’s tongue probed her hot mouth, she loved it, the little vixen! And now out tromps the older sister from the kitchen all hot and bothered and I must quickly switch Orgies from the Book of Martyrs to an encyclopedia as she cries out, “Why does he get to lie around and read books while everybody else has to do the work around here? He’s supposed to dry the dishes and he just waltzes away and the pots and pans are sitting there in the dish rack!”

  I explain to her the principle of evaporation whereby the air absorbs moisture, and objects such as pots and pans become dry in a short period of time with no help from human beings.

  “Why do you have to be so stupid?”

  I am only being reasonable, I explain.

  She leans over Daddy and touches his shoulder, to bring him back to the point. “Why do I have to do my chores and his, too? It isn’t fair!” You’d think she had spent ten years on a chain gang.

  • • •

  The encyclopedia I stuck Orgies into is from Grandpa’s sixteen-volume set, of which each grandchild received a volume. My volume includes Pax Romana, peacocks, the peanut, “The Pearl Fishers” by Bizet, explorer Robert Peary, the Peloponnesian Wars, the Pend d’Oreille Indians, penicillin, Pennsylvania, the pentatonic scale, the periodic table, the perpetual calendar, perspective, photography (illustrated), the Pimpernel (Scarlet)—Wayne Terwilliger fouls off a Toledo fastball—a full page of Scottish plaids by clan, the planets, the various genuses of plants, the poets laureate of Britain, poisons and their antidotes, poker hands, polo, Catholic popes, presidents of the United States from Washington to Harry Truman, the prevention of forest fires, a history of printing—how could a person not love such a book? And right in the middle, surrounded by Scottish plaids, Jack is doing a push-up over Laura. “Please, Jack, don’t stop!” she murmured, as a wave of pleasure hit her like an express train. They were teachers at the high school and suddenly it was spring, they opened the windows, and now look at them.

  Wayne Terwilliger fouls off another pitch. “It’s a waiting game,” says Bob Motley. “Wayne’s looking for the inside fastball.”

  Daddy says he wishes I would be kinder to my sister and do my share of the chores. The sister has him wrapped around her little finger. She works him like a marionette. She stands behind him, touching his shoulder, and he tells me to go dry the pots and pans. Even though I have today mowed the entire lawn. “I will,” I say. “In a minute.”

  “Why can’t you do what you’re told to do?” she hisses at me.

  “Don’t make a federal case out of everything.” Wayne fouls off another pitch. Still looking for the inside fastball. I tell her that a person can’t poke along washing the dishes and complaining about everything under the sun and expect me to stand and twiddle my thumbs and wait for her. And steady Wayne Terwilliger takes a called third strike (“Un-believable! Un-believable, folks! That pitch to Twig was in the dirt, ladies and gentlemen! How can a man be expected to hit a pitch like that? In the dirt! And the fans here are letting home-plate umpire Larry Cahoon know they’re upset about that call!”) and the Millers are set down, scoreless, and there’s a commercial for Rainbow Motor Oil and then the Burma-Shave Boys (“You can put on suntan lotion, where the ocean meets the sand. / Find he-man perfection and a complexion well-tanned. / You can dream of sweet amore on your surfboard on the wave, / But listen, pal, you’ll get your gal if you use Burma Shave”).

  “Go dry the pots and pans,” says Daddy. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “As soon as I move the sprinkler, I will go and put away the pots and pans, which are undoubtedly dry already.”

  “So move it, then,” he says.

  “I’ll go check and see if it’s ready to be moved.” I set the encyclopedia down on the porch swing and put a pillow over it.

  The sprinkler is placed at the exact point where it douses a quadrant of front yard from the birch tree to the sidewalk, allowing a little overlap. I check the grassroots. Wet but not soaked.

  “Not ready to be moved yet,” I say.

  I step to the door and stand, one ear cocked to the game, the sprinkler whirring, the circle of drops flung glittering out into the gathering night. Faint in the distance a tractor chugs. They lay side by side on the classroom floor, their love juices spent. I am going to hell. This is becoming increasingly clear. As Aunt Flo says, you don’t get to be a Christian by sitting in church any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car. What sort of Christian can open up High School Orgies to the picture of resplendent breasts with pointy nipples and feel that happy twitching in his shorts?

  I am going to spend eternity in hellfire for what is twitching in my mind right now.

  “Boy, you never know how kids are going to turn out, do you,” says Grandpa, looking out the window of heaven, wearing his best wool suit and starched white shirt with the armbands, his hair perfectly combed. “I used to think that kid might become a preacher. Now I don’t see how he’s going to stay out of prison.”

  “Yes,” says Jesus, “you never know about these things.”

  He and Grandpa are drinking cups of coffee and eating gingersnaps. Grandpa says, “When are you planning to return to earth?”

  “Soon as I finish this coffee,” says Jesus. “Pretty good, isn’t it.”

  “Never tasted better in my life,” says Grandpa.

  Back when he was on earth, Grandpa used to drop in on Saturday and cry out, “Who wants to go for a ride?” And for years I said “Me!” and went with him, and then one year I said, “I can’t. I have homework. I’m sorry.” Three lies in five seconds. I hated riding around and listening to Grandpa reminisce about who used to live in that house. Once I liked it okay and then I didn’t anymore. I wonder if Grandpa still thinks about how we treated him.

  • • •

  “Why don’t you just go and dry those pots and pans?” says Daddy. “It’ll take you five minutes.”

  “The pots and pans are probably dry by now,” I inform the sister. “All that needs to be done is to put them away in the cupboard and I’ll come in and do that in a moment. Soon as I’m done reading about the Huguenots.”

  “It’s not pronounced hug-you-nots,” she says. “For your information, it’s hue-ge-nots. Hue-ge-nots,” and she leans down and quick as a snake she snatches the naked couple out of the encyclopedia.

  Give it back. Please.

  She gr
ins at me all boney and wolfish, and her muzzle twitches at the smell of blood. She backs away, clutching High School Orgies.

  “Please give me back that magazine,” I say firmly.

  She gazes at it. “What is this?”—her eyes widen in mock horror, she flips through a few pages. “Oh my goodness.” She looks to Daddy but he has spotted a pair of houseflies and is stalking them into the corner, a swatter in hand. Daddy is a sworn enemy of flies. Flies walk around in fecal matter and if you don’t kill them you may as well be eating your dinner off the barn floor with the hogs.

  “You really need to go see a psychiatrist,” she says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Talking about this.” She waves the magazine at me, wrinkling the cover. “Touch not the unclean thing,” says the sister, who is getting a bad Scripture-quoting habit. “Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are holy, let your mind be fixed on these things.” I could club her.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She wants me to beg for mercy but remorse is an endless highway where she’s concerned, I know her, so I must take the 100 percent denial route. I never saw those pictures of that naked couple and their hot love juices. I know nothing about this magazine. I have no idea where the sister found it. I had no idea she was interested in such things. Frankly, I’m shocked.