The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  As I work my way down Cardiff Hill, I’m filled with the desire to check my mail. I’m wishing INTERNET CAFÉ AND CHRISTIAN GIFTS was open, but since it’s not, I stop in at Becky’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, where I pick up a few postcards.

  The radio is on and I hear a news report for the first time in weeks. The president has declared parts of Iowa a disaster area and he’s offering crop relief. Grain barges aren’t moving. The grain is rotting in them. Then Rush Limbaugh comes on. I ask the woman who sells me the postcards if she listens to Rush all day long.

  “Nope, just in the morning,” she says. “Then I put NPR on for the customers.” Well, at least she’s honest.

  I tell her I want to use the Internet. “Christian Gifts is closed,” I tell her.

  “Oh, yeah. They aren’t open during the week. Why don’t you try the public library? They have Internet access there.” And she gives me directions, which upon reflection I think were meant for cars.

  I wander through the town, passing a store that sells and repairs vacuum cleaners. The window is a display of antique vacuum cleaners. I head out of the tourist part of town, passing a fountain that isn’t working and has a statue without a head. I make several wrong turns, climb a hill, and after about half an hour come to where the library was supposed to be, but it turns out to be a funeral parlor.

  There’s no one in sight on the street so hesitantly I walk in. I enter a room of red velvet curtains, gold carpeting. Two rooms are open and one has a casket. This is not how I want to spend my morning so I head back onto the street where a man is now changing a tire and he tells me the library is up another block. Exhausted, I climb the other block. It is a very hot day now and I am grateful for the air conditioning inside the library.

  Two librarians sit in the dark in this cool room of magazines, books, and computer terminals. “I’d like to use the Internet, please,” I ask a rather attractive middle-aged librarian with a shock of white hair.

  She turns to her bespectacled colleague. “She wants to use the Internet.”

  “I need to see your picture ID.” I realize I’d left my wallet and other items I didn’t need for this outing in the hotel.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m traveling and it’s at the hotel. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “You can’t use the Internet without picture ID.”

  I have my precious journal with me and I think it will serve as collateral as it has in the past so I give it a try. “Look, you can hold on to my credit card and my journal while I log on.”

  The white-haired librarian who is facing me makes a sympathetic face as if to say “if it was up to me…”

  “You can’t use the Internet without picture ID,” her colleague replies.

  I am suddenly irate. All that stands between me and communication with the outside world is my New York State driver’s license. I am an upstanding citizen. I have never been arrested for a crime. I have never gotten a speeding ticket. No one has ever needed a swab of my throat or my fingerprints. I take in a deep breath. “Is this about Homeland Security? Do you need to track this for the government? Are we all terrorists and you need to keep a record of who uses your library?”

  The nice woman keeps smiling and the mean one continues filing whatever she’s filing. “It’s just the rules.”

  “I’m a tourist. I’m a traveler. And I’m on a boat. I just want to check my mail.”

  “You need a photo ID.”

  Okay. I’m going to lose it. I’m going to leap across the counter and rip her throat out. Instead I storm out of the Hannibal Public Library, past the sculpture without a head, and make my way back toward the more tourist-friendly part of town. I walk for about a mile until I come to a local Java Jive’s and suddenly the words “iced latte” float into my brain. I walk in and immediately feel better. Dark brews fill the air.

  The woman at the counter seems challenged as she finishes up with the previous customer, handing her her change. Coin by coin. “And what can I get you?” she asks.

  “I’ll have a half-caf, iced, skim latte,” I tell her. She looks at me blankly. “Part decaf, part regular.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want milk?”

  “Just make me a regular latte, iced,” I tell her.

  She starts fiddling with the espresso machine, but she seems distracted and tightly wound. She makes my coffee, but instead of actually giving it to me, she leaves it on the counter and starts cleaning up her work station. “Are you looking for something?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says, “but I can’t remember what.”

  “A straw?” I ask.

  She acts as if a bulb has gone off in her head. “Yes, of course. A straw.”

  “I know what you were doing,” I say. “I do that kind of thing all the time. If I can’t figure out what I want to do or if I’ve forgotten something, I’ll start straightening up. Multitasking.”

  “You know,” she says, “I’m just always like that. Bet if there was a way to download a woman’s brain you’d find like a million things. Take the food out of the freezer, pay the gas bill, walk the dog, go to work, pick the kid up from school, get Christmas cards monogrammed, write thank-you note to your sister, bake cookies for the church bake sale…”

  “And a man’s brain?” I ask, taking my first delicious sip of latte.

  “Oh, God, I bet you’d only find about four things in it. Golf, car, women…,” she says with some scorn.

  “Money.”

  “Well, that pretty much covers it,” she says, handing me my change.

  I haven’t gone very far when I come to one of those standing cutouts where you can put your face in and take a picture. This one is of Tom and Becky. The theme-park aspect of Hannibal—minus Jim, of course—is getting me down. I am standing, staring at the Tom and Becky photo op, when I run into Jerry, who’s just come from breakfast with Tom (no relation to Sawyer) at the Becky Thatcher Restaurant.

  Jerry and I greet each other like long-lost friends. It’s as if days, weeks have passed since we’ve seen each other instead of a matter of hours. He tells me that Tom has apparently discovered a 1964 Cadillac in a repair shop and he’s got his head in the engine. Jerry’s just tooling around.

  It’s hot out and there’s a bench under a tree so we sit while I sip my coffee. “Hey, Jerry,” I say, “can I take your picture in the Tom Sawyer cutout?”

  Jerry looks over at the cutout. “Nope,” he says.

  “How about the Becky Thatcher?”

  “How about I take yours?” he says.

  I stare into my coffee for that one. We both demur.

  “Well, I learned a few things about Hannibal,” Jerry says. “You can get all the tourist information you want, but if you’re traveling on a boat you can’t get a loaf of bread or a quart of milk. You need a car to go to the mall to do that.”

  “Yeah, just like all the other towns we’ve been to. And you need a picture ID to use the Internet at the library.”

  We groan. “Don’t you just love this country?” he says.

  “I sure do.”

  Then he pulls out a notebook. “So,” he says, “I ran some numbers and I figured some things out.” He shows me a page of numbers for fuel, for piloting, for a few marinas along the way. For miscellaneous supplies. But not for any boat rental. This is very generous of him. “So,” he says, “if this is okay with you, I can take you to Cairo.”

  “This is great with me,” I tell him. I want to leap up and hug him, but I refrain.

  If I can get to Cairo, I’m thinking to myself, then I’ll have made it to zero in one boat. If I get to zero, I’ll change boats and head south. Somehow. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. Maybe I’ll hop that tow.

  * * *

  Leaving Jerry, I wander through Hannibal, looking for Jim. I see the Mark Twain Museum, Tom & Huck’s Taxi, the Becky Thatcher Restaurant, Becky’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, Cardiff Hill with the statue of Tom and Huck. Tourist office. In this Disneyfied setting
, it’s all lily white. There’s no Jim’s Bar, Jim’s Gas Station, even. No hint that Jim or any black man in literature was ever around.

  I walk into the Becky Thatcher Restaurant where I’m told I can get a good home-cooked meal, though the sign over the counter warns WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ANYONE. The place is packed, but there’s only one black man hunched over his meal at the bar and two black women, sitting in a booth. The women look away when I glance at them.

  The restaurant is done in railroad decor. Railroad cars run along the walls. There are railroad pictures, a railroad calendar, a shelf of toy railroad bridges. There’s a framed clipping that reads THE MARK TWAIN ZEPHYR REACHES THE END OF THE LINE. And a handwritten sign, maybe ten years old, that reads WANTED: RAILROAD PLATES.

  I sit at a table across from three older women and a man. As I’m waiting for Annie, the seventyish-year-old waitress wearing a rhinestone “A” on her chest, I listen to one of the women who does all the talking. “So given the life he’s had, you know, I do what I can. You’d be surprised. A little love can go a long ways.”

  Annie comes by to take the order of the people behind me and I hear a man commenting to her that she looks good. “Just lost thirty pounds,” Annie says. “That way I got to get all new clothes.”

  “You know when he first came to me, well you know how he was…,” the woman doing the talking at the table nearby says.

  “He’d just stay wherever he wanted. You know, in his chair. He’d had such a rough time of it, I didn’t want to rush him or put any pressure on him, you know.”

  Annie comes by and asks me what I’ll have. I feel as if I’m starving and I order the lunch special—baked chicken, hominy, green beans, rice, salad with western dressing, and iced tea. “You gonna want pie? We got lots of homemade pie.” I glance over to where the pie is as Annie rings out apple, cherry, blueberry, coconut, banana cream, and key lime. I am tempted, but I see that the flies are resting pretty much all over the pies, which aren’t covered.

  “I’ll pass on the pie.”

  “I just let him be. Sooner or later he’ll want something and come to me. Oh he’ll sleep with me, you know, but during the day, never sure when he’ll come around.…”

  I’m thinking foster child. Shell-shocked husband. I am deeply engrossed in their conversation and find myself annoyed when the people behind me start to speak in loud voices and I can’t hear what the woman says. I see the solemn nods of her companions.

  Annie brings my meal. “You sure you aren’t going to want a piece of pie?”

  I shake my head and dig in. The chicken is moist and comes off the bones. The hominy has a nice texture and a buttery taste. The green beans were probably cooking for the last few days, but I am starving and it definitely is a home-cooked meal.

  “You know,” the woman goes on, shaking her head now, with real sadness in her eyes, “some days I don’t even see him until I open a can of tuna and then he just jumps right up on the counter.” They’re paying their check now. “I don’t just have a pet,” she tells her companions, “I have a friend.”

  They head out and a new crew is waiting to sit down. Annie comes and waits on them and the man says, “Annie, you look real good.”

  “Well, I just lost forty pounds. I needed new clothes.” Incredible. She’s lost ten pounds since I walked in.

  * * *

  Time is running out and I need to do what I came for. Perhaps I’ve been avoiding it, I think, as I head to the Mark Twain boyhood home. The entire site is a tourist attraction and I cannot begin to imagine my father living anywhere near this spot. More and more I feel his presence slipping away. It’s getting late and Jerry wants to make Two Rivers Marina in Rockport, Illinois, before dark.

  I have to skip much of the first part of the tour and the museum and I head right to the house itself. Making my way through the house, I am unsettled by the cardboard cutouts of Mark Twain that pop up everywhere. The only other people in the boyhood home, well, person really, is a man whose wife cannot climb the stairs. I can see her below. She’s wearing a pink pantsuit and is quite large.

  Her husband, to accommodate her, is shouting down the stairs the various objects he sees. “It’s a bedroom with an old brass bed, table, washbasin, baby picture.” I rush through the rooms. My father was right. It is a tiny tiny house. But I see no evidence of a house next door where my father claimed he lived.

  I decide to try the gift shop. I poke around all the usual Mark Twain memorabilia. Mark Twain books, CDs, videos, maps, statues, Huck and Tom matching mugs, bookends, Becky Thatcher dolls. (Still no Jim.) I want to find a photograph. Proof. Evidence. Why does this matter to me that my father lived next door to Mark Twain’s house? Why does it matter if he told the truth or lied? But it matters suddenly more than I can say. What is a family, in the end, except its memories? And the tales it has carried on.

  An older woman wearing a thin strand of pearls and a powder blue sweater stands at the cash register. “Excuse me,” I ask her, “but my father lived in Hannibal a long time ago. He said he lived next door to this house. But I don’t see how he could have. Do you have a picture of this street from, say, 1922?”

  “No, I’m sorry … I don’t believe so.” I’m turning to leave when she seems to hesitate. She thinks for a moment, tapping a pencil in her hand. “I do have a picture of the last time Mark Twain visited Hannibal. That was in 1902. He’s standing in front of this house. I think it has some of the street.…”

  She goes to the back of the store and returns with a photograph. In it Mark Twain stands in front of his boyhood home, wearing his classic white suit. A photographer taking his picture is also in the picture. A woman walks by in a white dress and bonnet, carrying a dark umbrella. She wears lace-up boots. A spotted dog sits at the photographer’s feet.

  This was taken during Twain’s last visit to Hannibal. Of course he couldn’t have known that at the time. He had simply returned to his boyhood town, which he had written about so lovingly. In the picture his head is turned to the left and a man seems to be speaking to him. Children are gawking. And beside the children is a house that no longer exists. It is a wood frame with back steps that lead to a small balcony. A fence separates it from Twain’s house. And I know my father lived there.

  My father was a man of stories. And his own set of broken dreams. He was an enigma to me and I knew little of his personal life. But if he got you in his clutches, he’d talk your head off. Once my mother and I went shopping and we left Larry listening to my father. We came back three hours later and Larry was in the same place. My father said, “So, I’ve got a sore throat and Larry’s got an earache.” The thing about my father’s stories was that they were pretty much one-way events, monologues that as he got older and older he’d get himself trapped inside of and my mother would make a circular gesture with her hands and say, “Here he goes again.”

  He was himself a very poor listener, but he could go on and on about his friends long gone, about his business interests that had never quite succeeded. He wanted to be as rich as the people he tried to impress. He loved commerce, buildings rising, the smell of paint. Yet he cried during movies and musicals. He couldn’t watch anything violent or sad. In truth my father was a very secretive man, and in the end he didn’t really succeed. He sold buildings and the profits went to taxes. He sold buildings for peanuts that later went for millions. This was one of the things, among the many, that made my mother bitter.

  I knew little of what was really in his heart. Most of what we knew of him were his rages. Nobody could do anything right, and nothing was ever good enough. In the end, life was too entropic. The center pulled apart. He could not control every waiter, every family member. His rages could not make everything right. In his later years he was calmer. He liked to sit in his chair in Milwaukee and look out at the woods behind the assisted living center where they lived. In the winter, just before he died, he and I sat, a heavy snow falling, watching a squirrel secure its nest.

  Du
ring my last visits he grew confused. He thought the pictures on the wall were real people and he began talking to them. He talked to his brother. He talked to his grandchildren, who were living in Hawaii and Brazil.

  When I came into the room, he looked up and asked, “Whatever happened to our vaudeville act, Mary? Did you ever take it on the road?”

  I did a little shuffle and soft-shoe. Disappointed, he shook his head. “Nobody will come and see that,” he said.

  I am standing in the gift shop of the Mark Twain boyhood home next door to the house where my father told me he lived as a young man. I am standing beside this aging woman in a powder blue sweater and pearls and I start to weep. I sob. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t expect this.”

  She nods, “Oh, I understand. Doesn’t matter how old they were.…”

  I walk out to compose myself. I stand in front of this house. I walk up and down the block, which has been turned into a Mark Twain theme park, and I know that my father walked here. He stood on this street and looked at the river. He worked in a department store called Klein’s. I stand on this little street where tourists push past me en route to Judge Clemens’s office or Becky Thatcher’s house and gaze down toward the river. My father stood on this spot. He saw the river every day. What he told me was true.

  I go back into the gift shop. “Is that picture for sale?” I ask her.

  “Yes it is. It’s eight dollars,” the woman says. I nod. “Let me wrap it for you.”