Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

“Don’t forget we’re going to need a receipt,” said Daddy. “For the tax deduction, don’t you know.” Suddenly his mind was clear as could be.

  22. SATURDAY MORNING

  Barbara had got wind of the Detmer nuptial cancellation and though she was glad the homicidal groom had left town, she thought the wedding would’ve been a nice distraction and drawn all the gawkers and rubberneckers and humorists—plenty there for them to stare at, between the giant duck decoys and the Elvis impersonator—and let Mother’s ashes quietly splash into the beyond far from the cruel gaze of town. Maybe they should postpone the memorial until after dark. “We could just row her out at midnight and drop her over the gunwales,” she said to Kyle. “Why do we need to do it from a great height?”

  He shook his head. He’d gone to a lot of trouble: why back out now? Grandma had a flair for drama, she went in for big Christmases, a ten-foot tree and caroling with candles, and bottle rockets at midnight on Christmas Eve. You sang “Deck the Halls” and lit the fuses and a trail of sparks whooshed into the winter sky. Birthdays were big, large packages with bows and ribbons, stripey hats, horns blatting, and “Happy Birthday” and “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” and the Minnesota Rouser, everybody marching around the table banging on pans and then the birthday boy and Grandma hooked little fingers and farted for good luck. For his 19th, Grandma got a belly dancer swathed in veils with a diamond in her belly button and her bosom jiggling, gold silk pantaloons riding low on her hips. Flo and Al were embarrassed but not Grandma. She told the lady to “shake, shake, shake,” and then Grandma got up and danced with her. Flo had to leave the room.

  “The ladies in the Bon Marche are going to feast on this,” said Barbara. “They’ll be cackling for a week.”

  “So let ’em cackle. Who cares?” he said.

  Actually she didn’t. She intended to put her house on the market as soon as she sold Mother’s and look for a new job somewhere warm. Work up a professional resume on her computer: Experienced Problem Solver & Life Coach. Tired of the textbook clichés of so-called “experts”? Wish you could discuss your life situation with someone who’s been there and done that? Look no farther. In Lake Wobegon people wouldn’t dream of asking her advice. People in Lake Wobegon imagined that you needed to be the Virgin Mother or the goddess Athena to be worthy of consultation—well, guess again, people. It takes a broken person to heal broken people. These Christians cocked their snoots at anybody who’d ever embarrassed herself in public. Well, tough. She had once, in a giddy mood, got dressed up and strolled downtown twirling a parasol—okay, an umbrella—and singing “Good morning, good morning, to you” from Singin’ in the Rain and doing some of Debbie Reynolds’s steps and trying to get passersby to dance with her—and yes, she was drunk. But so what? Get over it! It happens!

  Aunt Flo called to ask what time the service would begin. “It’s not a service,” said Barbara. “Mother didn’t want one, remember? Anyway, we hope to get going around eleven.” And then she said, “We’d love to see you and Al there.” Poor Flo was a changed woman. Evelyn’s secret romance had humbled her. The bossy quarrelsome Flo who relished a good sharp retort, the Flo who could bring you to tears—that battle-axe Flo had been replaced by a sweet Flo who dropped by the day before with a basket of peanut-butter cookies. She handed it to Barbara, who said, “Come in.” “I can’t,” said Flo, and then she did. And once she got inside, she melted into tears. She sat on the couch and bawled and Barbara held her in her arms and after ten minutes, Flo got up and said, “Thank you,” and left. She probably had cried more this week than in the previous fifty years. Ten minutes was about all she could take, bless her heart.

  Barbara put on a fresh blouse to replace the one Flo had wept on and got out the car keys. “I’m going to get your sister,” she told Kyle, eating his Wheaties and reading yesterday’s paper. He grunted. “I’ll be back in an hour. If Raoul comes, be nice. Remember he’s family.” She headed for Sauk Rapids and went through her Muffy checklist. Muffy liked classical music on the radio, German, Brahms or Beethoven—the nuns had influenced her big time—and she needed to sit in the backseat where she didn’t get so scared and the backseat had to be neat and clean. Muffy didn’t tolerate disorder very well. She could not sleep away from the Poor Clares convent either, which broke Barbara’s heart: she wished that her little girl could spend a night with Mom now and then. But no, it wouldn’t work. Too much stress. And Muffy was 31 years old, a big strapping lady who looked a great deal like her grandma Evelyn. Whether she remembered Grandma clearly, Barbara wasn’t sure, Muffy lived in the moment, but she would attend the memorial and then Flo and Al would bring her back to Sauk Rapids.

  Oliver could not come, it simply was beyond him. He sent flowers and a note. “My thoughts are with you today.” Red carnations and a sympathy card. No note. Just signed Oliver. Not even “love” or “XXOO” or even “O”—just Oliver. He couldn’t help it. He was a man and his social skills were rudimentary. Medieval even. And he couldn’t bear to be around strong feelings. Crying drove him right up the wall. Once at the motel she said she was afraid of him having a heart attack and she got weepy and out the door he went.

  Raoul arrived in town around 9 a.m. Dorothy saw the maroon Pontiac pull up in front of the Chatterbox and the old man in mirror shades climb out and she checked the clock in case he were a serial killer, she could make an accurate report to the police. He wore yellow plaid pants and lizard-green shoes and a sportcoat that looked as if it had been made from the skins of a thousand rainbow trout. It had a liquid glitter to it that caught the eye. Below it was a Hawaiian shirt, tails out. Pink hibiscus. Certainly festive. He took off the mirror shades and put on blue-tinted glasses. He was smoking a small cigar and carried a boom box that was quietly playing, an opera tenor singing love songs in Italian. He extinguished the cigar as he came in the café and wrapped the stub in tinfoil and put it in his pocket for future use. He gave off a strong aroma, sweet and musky, some exotic plant not grown locally. He sat down at the counter, studied the menu, and ordered a stack of buckwheat with two eggs on the side, scrambled, and an 8-oz. sirloin, rare. Black coffee. Cranberry juice. An English muffin, with a slice of cheddar. And then he opened up the Minneapolis paper and scanned the stock listings.

  He ate his breakfast, mopped up every drop of syrup, accepted two refills on the coffee.

  “You’re here for Evelyn’s funeral, I suppose,” said Dorothy, probing.

  “She and I were in nurses’ training together. Minneapolis. Fall of 1941.”

  “She was quite a lady.”

  “She was a fine lady.”

  Dorothy got a cup of coffee for herself and perched on a stool. “I don’t mean to intrude on your privacy,” she said, “but weren’t you on TV? I think my kids watched you on Channel Four.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I was Yonny Yonson.”

  “I knew it!” She threw back her head and laughed. “You kids are driving me to drink! They cracked up every time I said it.”

  “I had a nice long run with that show,” he said. He explained that that was how he and Evelyn got back together, after he divorced June and she split up with Jack.

  “Well, that’s nice,” said Dorothy.

  He said Evelyn wasn’t afraid of death and she just wanted to go quickly.

  “And she got her wish,” said Dorothy.

  He nodded. “My ex-father-in-law took about six months to die. Went to the hospice and June sat and held his hand and he started improving. She never liked him that much so holding hands was a big novelty. He was near death when he arrived and they took him off antibiotics and he bounced back, and got up and started walking around. She thought maybe he was postponing, waiting for the ground to warm up. It was February. She had this handbook on death that said you should talk to the dying person about his life but Arne wanted to talk about his car. He wanted her to go start it every morning, especially when it was colder than ten below. This was in Duluth. Death isn’t easy in Duluth. People
cling to life out of sheer cussedness. Arne came home from the hospice and sat around watching TV and that kept him going another six months. The irritation. He watched my show every day and sent me messages like ‘Get some new jokes’ and ‘Your Swedish accent is lousy. What a fake’ and ‘Don’t sing anymore unless it’s with other people and they’re louder.’ Once I left my fly open and sure enough he called up and said, ‘Your fly is open.’ When he died, I felt like I’d lost my biggest fan. I pissed him off but I sure held his interest.”

  He got up to go and paid his check and slipped a couple ones under the coffee cup, a nice tip. “You say hi to Barbara for me,” said Dorothy. He crossed the street to the Mercantile, studied the beachwear on the manikins in the front window, and strolled down to Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where he asked Cathy the cashier where he could find flowers.

  She didn’t immediately grasp the question. “We have seeds….” No, he wanted flowers. “I’ll call my sister,” she said. “Are irises okay? Or maybe she’s still got some begonias.” Her sister wasn’t home and then Cathy remembered she’d gone to Hibbing. So Cathy drove him over to Deanna’s and picked him a bouquet of glads and he was happy with that. He tried to give her a twenty but she waved it away. “My pleasure,” she said. He thrust it at her. “I couldn’t take money for that. They aren’t even my flowers. It’d be stealing.”

  So when he appeared at Barbara’s door, he held a dozen gladiolas in one hand and the boom box in the other. A boy answered the door and said, “You’re Raoul.” “I’m Raoul,” said Raoul. He fished a picture out of his pocket, of him and a radiant Evelyn in their salad days, on the steps of Swedish Hospital, Minneapolis, June, 1941. They looked like they’d just won the bedroom set and the kitchen range. “My mom’ll be home in a few minutes. Come in. You care for breakfast?” Raoul had had breakfast. He saw the bowling ball sitting on the desk and he got tears in his eyes. “I knew I was gonna cry today,” he told the boy. “I knew it.”

  A little after 10 a.m., Barbara rolled up in her old Pinto. She pulled into the garage and Muffy whimpered in the backseat. “Sorry,” said Barbara. She backed out. The garage was too threatening, dark, cluttered. She parked the car in bright sunlight and opened the back door and Muffy climbed out slowly. “Remember Mom’s house?” said Barbara. “Remember all the fun we’ve had here?” Muffy wore a black skirt and a white blouse and a white hanky on her head; she was trying to look as nunlike as possible. She was more buxom than Barbara recalled from her last visit in April. Maybe the blouse was too tight. Her hair was pulled back severely. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses, a new thing too. “Will we have lunch?” she said quietly. “No, baby, not now. We’re going to bury Grandma first.” She had explained Grandma’s death over and over on the way home and Muffy kept forgetting it. The Poor Clares said she had not been herself lately, more distracted, more obsessive, sometimes going off to her room to weep.

  Barbara had to remind herself not to weep with Muffy around because it distressed her so deeply. You had to keep control of yourself. So why did you bring her to the funeral, lady? Because Mother loved Muffy dearly, and vice versa, and because it was the right thing to do. “We’ll eat lunch later,” she said.

  Barbara gave Raoul a big hug. It was just too much. Oh it was too much. She had been dreading this day and now here he was—and she introduced him to Muffy who had taken a seat in the middle of the couch and sat, hands folded, waiting for something, lunch or something else. A breeze swept in and riffled Muffy’s hair and she put her hands up as if warding off a blow so Barbara went to the window to close it and she heard the jump-rope girls out on the sidewalk.

  Jenny Jenny

  Found a penny

  Looked for gold but there wasn’t any

  Just a nickel

  And a dime

  Not enough for a real good time

  She sat in her yard

  And cried so hard

  Because it hurt

  And teardrops ran down her shirt

  And how many teardrops hit the dirt?

  One, two, three, four.

  “You probably want to come over to Mother’s,” Barbara cried, and she told Kyle, “Talk to Muffy” and she pushed Raoul out the door and took his hairy hand and headed up the street—Bennett and Roger were camped in her house and she wanted Raoul to herself. “You’re too polite to ask,” she said, “but yes, Muffy is retarded. She’s 31. She lives with the nuns. They’re saints. She loves it there. It was the best thing I could do for her.” She steered him up McKinley Street and then detoured down the alley to avoid the Lutheran church. “When she was born, it absolutely broke my husband’s heart. And his will. He couldn’t take it. I think she’s a perfectly fine person. She’s just different.” She walked fast and he stumbled trying to keep up. Past the old garages, the incinerators, the back fence and the little gardens. “I’m putting Mother’s house on the market and as soon as I sell it, I’m going to sell my own,” she said. “I’m out of this town. Lived all my life here. That’s enough.”

  “Where you going to go?” He was wheezing slightly, making his old legs move, his plaid pants going swish swish swish.

  “Mother went through Columbus, Georgia, a few years ago on her way to Florida and I thought I’d take a look at that,” she said. “I’ve been in the north long enough. Time for a change.” She had never said this out loud before. Had never even thought it. It felt good to say. So she said more. “I think it’s much more enlightened than here. They just seem gentler people. They don’t throw you away just because you aren’t rich and successful. I’m more of a socialist. I’m starting to realize that.

  “I am also an atheist. I think my mother was a sort of agnostic, and I’ve gone the rest of the way.”

  “I think she believed in God,” he said. “She said she did. I think she just got tired of church.”

  They were almost to Mother’s now—three houses away—and she decided she’d save her big announcement for later. She had planned it for now but she didn’t feel up to it now. She hardly knew the man. Nonetheless facts are facts. Mother had told her, “You were born a little early. Not out of wedlock, just not far enough in.” And Mother winked. Their old joke. But Barbara had figured it out now. They came to the back gate and she opened it and up the long walk they went past the garden, the pole beans and cucumbers all neatly weeded and hilled up, and onto the back porch. “Muffy loved this yard. I’d bring her over here to play because Lloyd got all quiet and weird around her—” Barbara felt hot tears in her eyes. “My mother was so good to her. She was so good.” She was crying so she could hardly get the words out. “That’s why I brought Muffy to the funeral. Or whatever it is. It was just the right thing to do.” Raoul was very still. She threw open the kitchen door and he walked in, probably expecting the dead to rise and give him a big smacker, and she said, “Do you think I did the right thing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Mother said that Muffy was our greatest trial and our greatest blessing.” And they stepped into the bedroom and looked at the deathbed from which her spirit had risen to worlds unknown and Barbara thought, Oh God I can’t do this. Why am I doing this? What does it matter? and she turned to him and said, “Maybe you already know this but I only figured it out this week.” She put her hand on his shoulder where he stood studying the bed and the slight hollow made by Evelyn over the years. “You are my biological father. I read your letter. You made love to my mother in December 1941. I was born in September, 1942. Mother married Jack in February. I just want to point that out.”

  He stood frozen still for a long minute and there was only the low whisper of breathing, hers and his.

  He looked as if a camera was about to flash and he had to compose himself and form some sort of expression. His brain was brimming over and then it overflowed and he squeezed his eyes shut and cried.

  And she cried. She was already crying, so why not some more. He turned toward her and put his arms around her and they held each o
ther for awhile. She said, “I love you, Daddy.” His face went all rubbery then and he had to take his glasses off and blow his nose. “She married Jack because she was pregnant,” she said. “That’s the answer to the big family mystery. Any port in a storm. Went from the frying pan into the fire. All because of a night at the Dyckman Hotel.” He put his hands in the hollow of the bed and slid them down it, caressing it. He didn’t hear her. He was miles away, off in the past.

  *

  The bus carrying the Danish clergy rolled up in front of the Chatterbox Café at 11 a.m. and a nervous young man named Fred Samuelson emerged, clasping a clipboard. He was fresh out of Luther Seminary, interning at the synod office in Minneapolis, wondering if he actually had a call for the ministry or if maybe he should go into creative writing instead, and his boss Bishop R. W. Ringsak had dumped these Danes on him and told him to show them rural Minnesota and not lose any in the process. Bishop Ringsak had had it with the Danes. What a bunch of princesses! Finicky about food and fussy about hotels—their head honcho Mattias asked if the hotel in Minneapolis would have organic conditioner as well as shampoo and how late would the bar in the lobby be open and where is the nearest newsstand and would they offer the London papers? As if Bishop Ringsak had no other mission in this life but to look after visitors from other lands. Renegade pastors whom the bishop of Copenhagen wanted out of her hair. Well, Bishop Ringsak had other fish to fry, as a matter of fact. He had a scandal brewing out in Minnesota where an interim pastor fresh out of seminary was evidently dating an elderly widow who had deeded her farm to the church via a living will and now that she had romance in her life was thinking of changing it. The pastor, to complicate things further, was a poet (good God!) and had written fairly explicit love poems to this woman that he had read at a poetry reading in Marshall, not far away. There were rumors that the two of them were shacked up together at the End of the World Motel in Canby. And this man was charged with bringing the gospel of Christ to the farmers of Lac qui Parle county!! The Lutheran church was short on pastors and instead of closing up these little country churches—consolidation, a wise business decision, no matter how you slice it—they were sending moral cripples into the field of battle.