Little cars buzzed by, little boxes on wheels, only room for the driver and a friend and a bag of groceries. A closet on wheels. Around the corner came a procession of twelve men in black carrying red parasols and chanting something in Latin or Italian that sounded like a credo but might have been a cheer for a school team except they were in their thirties and forties. Priests? Soccer players? They wore no priestly collar and they smelled of powerful cologne. They pushed past her and nobody else paid them heed and so neither did she. She stopped to look at posters (NO AL NUCLEARE) with ominous yellow barrels. A man pushed a cart along the street, selling Italian flags, postcards, plastic Popes, bottled water, little Pinocchios, Blessed Virgin Mary napkins and paper plates, rosaries and crucifixes, and orange pop. She bought a can and popped it open. Less fizz than in America and it tasted of real oranges. She passed a farmacia and a shop selling black scarves and mantillas. An interesting cul-de-sac where the street simply came to a stop and a passageway began. A handsome naked man stood in a recess in one wall, his stone chest and flat abdomen, his stone penis and scrotum, a cloak draped over his left arm. He could’ve wrapped it around him but chose not to.
He reminded her of Daryl Hansen, that goofy kid who went to Chicago and changed his name to Darren Anton, joined the Lindsay Longet Dance Experience, became gay. When the Longet company came to the State Theater in Minneapolis, the Hansens were there in the front row, Mr. and Mrs. and some aunts and cousins, about twelve of them, and they got to see their boy in a dance called “Diagonal Incarnation #7” in which he appeared to be naked but the Hansens said nothing about that when they went backstage afterward and neither did Darren. They only talked about the weather (cold) and the new dog (dachshund) and their vacation plans (Black Hills). He said he missed home. They said the dancers all seemed so talented.
Just beyond the statue, two old men sat on plastic chairs facing each other, a chessboard across their knees, the black queen gone, the white bishops sniping at the king. Above them, a sign POPOLARI LIBERALI and a gargoyle stuck out its tongue and hissed at passersby. She stopped to admire an old apartment house, five stories, tile roof with about twenty little chimneys and flower pots, and the most wonderful rough golden yellow finish to the stucco, chipped, worn, mottled, streaked—in Lake Wobegon, they would’ve repainted it pronto but here it stood as is—the rough texture made it look like a Van Gogh painting of a building. A great work of art sitting and pretending to be an ordinary building. She turned left into a narrow street. One lane of parked cars, one of traffic, two narrow sidewalks. Four- and five-story buildings jammed together on either side, the top floors catching the sunlight, the lower ones in perpetual shadow. The long arm of a construction crane over it. The graffiti on the wall was beautiful, indecipherable, like the signatures of statesmen on a treaty ending a war.
And then she remembered her cell phone—with European service—and she dialed Maria Gennaro’s number. It rang a strange burry ring and Maria answered. “Where are you?” she cried, and when Margie told her—Via del Pellegrino—Maria said, “You’re not far from my house. Sit down and have a coffee. I’m there in five minutes.”
MEETING MARIA
She sat down in the Spagnolo Giardini and ordered espresso. The very first espresso of her life. Her first morning in Rome and she felt like a native. “Nativo. Natale. Indigeno. Locale. Naturale,” said the dictionary. Learning the language was going to be a cinch. (Facile. Ordinario.) No sweat. (Senza sudare.) A piece of cake. (Un pezzo di torta.) The coffee came in a demitasse. She put a spoonful of sugar in and drank it, a bitter syrup, and signaled for another. And a croissant. And before the second coffee came, a tall woman stood grinning in front of her. She wore a black shirt and slacks, green wool jacket, brown oxfords, and carried an enormous umbrella and a canvas shoulder bag. Margie stood up and Maria took her hand. She doffed her red woolen cap and kissed Margie twice on each cheek, left cheek smack smack and right cheek smack smack. And held her close and tight and then at arm’s length and laughed. A handsome head on a long neck, her black hair streaked with gray and parted in the middle and pulled back in a silver clip. She had the long Norlander nose and she had Gussie’s sweet smile. “Now at last I have a sister,” she said and hugged Margie again. And held on.
Margie got tears in her eyes. It had been so long since anyone had found her so interesting. Nobody in Lake Wobegon hugged her like this.
Maria sat down and said a few words in Italian to the waiter and said to Margie, “I have waited for this moment for sixty years.” She set the shoulder bag on her lap and opened it and took out five photographs: a blond kid with a big grin and several teeth blacked out, painted freckles, holding a pitchfork; the same kid in the third row of an old Lake Wobegon Leonards football team, a leather helmet under his arm, looking a little tentative; same kid holding up a cornstalk and tassel; him in a Whippets uniform, holding his bat up high, looking determined; a formal portrait of him in steel-rim glasses, a checked sport coat, white shirt with open collar, unsmiling.
“My papa,” she said. “I never knew him. He died before I was born, in the liberation of my city. I grew up with my mother’s memory of him and a feeling of terrible loss. I was a sad little girl. I felt that life could never be as good as it could’ve been if Papa had lived. God cheated me. And so Lake Wobegon was my El Dorado. My paradiso. I was going to visit there when I was twenty-one and then my mother got sick. I planned to go before I turned forty and then suddenly I was forty. Lake Wobegon was where everybody was full of love and sunshine and told jokes and poured syrup over their cakes and danced the hopping dance. Big fish the size of trucks leaping from the water. Paul Bunyan and his blue cow. Cold winters. So cold that words freeze in the air and in the spring they melt on the ground and people sweep them up into baskets. Big farms and tractors, enormous pumpkins that people carve doors and windows in and live inside. Big tomatoes. Thousands of lakes. Birds who make a wild warbling sound like a woman crying.”
“They’re called loons.”
“And they’re real?”
“Yes, of course.” And Margie leaned forward, opened her mouth, tilted her head back, and made the high-pitched gurgley yodelly wail of the loon. The waiter approached, as if ready to apply the Heimlich maneuver.
“Beautiful,” said Maria.
And she pulled out a slip of paper. “I wrote down questions,” she said.
What is the population of Lake Wobegon now, and what was it in 1941 when Papa left home? About the same, two thousand. Why do they call it “Wobegon”? Doesn’t that mean “sad and bedraggled”? Yes, but it’s also an Ojibway word that means “the place where we waited in the rain for you for two days and two nights.” And what about the dogs who play baseball? Mother told me about that. And does the snow get to be three and four meters deep? And do people stand on the ice and fish and are farmers not allowed to marry? We have a baseball team called the Whippets, but they’re men. Old guys. Not very good. I don’t think the snow gets that deep. People do go out on the ice and fish, yes. But farmers marry. Except the Norwegian bachelor farmers.
“The day I called you from New York, I was at my friend Ellie’s apartment on West End Avenue, looking out the kitchen window at the Hudson River and trying to imagine what you looked like. Where you were. I had thought about that phone call ever since I was a kid, picking up a phone and calling Papa’s people, and I used to imagine they’d speak to me (in Italian, of course) and tell me everything was going to be okay, not to worry. It was like having an imaginary best friend. When I dropped out of university, when I got pregnant and then lost the baby, when a man I had loved killed himself by jumping off a bridge, I imagined people from Lake Wobegon telling me to settle down, be patient, the world is full of beautiful things, open your heart, in time you will be okay, and remember: it could be worse. That was Papa’s motto, Mama told me. ‘It could be worse.’ So when I called you, it was such a thrill. I’d told Ellie about Lake Wobegon, the fairy tale of my childhood, and she said, ‘Just
pick up a phone and call.’ I said, ‘I can’t. They’d think I was crazy.’ She said, ‘Call up the high school. They talk to crazy people all the time.’ So that’s what I did.”
Margie ordered a third espresso and a basket of rolls with cheese. Such a revelation—landing in Rome and finding this magical stranger. She had thought about Maria so often since their first conversation almost three months ago, imagined the two of them becoming friends—Oh God, she needed friends, all she had were relatives and neighbors and people from church—and now suddenly here she was. Maria looked her in the eye and told about herself: She was sixty-four years old, she had worked in a big real estate office and was now retired, she had survived breast cancer, she was planning trips to Egypt and India, she had three boyfriends, maybe four, whom she saw now and then on weekends. Mario and Roberto who were married, Gianni who was not, and Benny who she believed was not but she couldn’t be sure. A man could be wonderful for two or three days and after that, you started to find out things you didn’t want to know. Much nicer to have several in rotation. Less danger of being dumped. “They’re always so happy to see me,” she said. “Even Mario, who I’ve been with since his previous marriage.” She saw no advantage to having a child, none whatsoever, and so she didn’t. A simple rational choice. “Children are all stink and noise and if something bad happens to them, you feel horrible for the rest of your life.”
“Are you Catholic?” said Margie.
“I am and I’m not. I love the church, it’s like my Papa, I’m sorry he died but life goes on, right? How about you?”
Well, where to start? “I’m a teacher. I’m fifty-three. I teach high school. Carl and I have three kids. We’ve been married since I got out of high school.”
“Is he the only man you’ve known?”
Yes, he was. The only one.
“Is he good in bed?”
Margie looked down into her coffee. “We’re sort of having problems. We haven’t made love since after Christmas.”
“Then he’s found someone else.”
Margie shook her head. “He’s too busy.”
“No man is too busy. Your husband is out on the town.”
“There is no town to be out on.”
“You’re naive.”
“I live in a little town where secrets don’t stay secrets for long. Women down at the Bon Marché Beauty Salon tell stories. I would have heard something by now. Really.”
Margie explained that Carl was a dogged worker, the go-to carpenter and handyman of town—he got a dozen calls a day from people with problems and he’d say, “Okay, give me a few minutes to get some tools together and I’ll be right over.” Fuse burnt out, door stuck, window busted, toilet plugged, plaster falling—they called Carl and he went and half the time he didn’t even charge them for it. So where would he find the time to arrange secret meetings in motels?
“A man wants what he can’t have. He has one woman, he wants more. The heart longs for the impossible and it doesn’t ever stop, even when it’s broken, it keeps on wanting. Does he drive a truck?”
“An old camper. He keeps tools in the camper part.”
“He’s slipping it into her on top of the tool chest. He’s mounting some lady whose shelves he just nailed to the wall. Ask him about it. Men are scared. You surprise them with a direct question and they’ll either confess or they’ll lie so badly you can see it leaking out of their ears. Do you talk about sex?”
My God, no. Never. She would rather walk naked through the streets than sit and have that sort of conversation. It just was what it was, sex, and certainly they’d never ever talked about it, who did? Nobody she knew. Never argued much, never had much in the way of bad feelings. He was a carpenter, the town handyman, a soft-spoken man, faithful, reverent, clean, brave, and she didn’t know how to ask him, “Why don’t you want to mess around with me?”
Maria pulled out a pack of smokes, offered one to Margie, took one for herself. “I started again,” she said. “After the breast cancer. What the hell. What have I got to lose? I’m not going to worry about dying. Done that already.
“Of course, maybe I’m more realistic about men because I was created by a guy fooling around. I’ve been thinking about my dad so much. I live in a little street in Trastevere below the Janiculum Hill and I go for walks in the evening and I feel like he’s there and he’s restless about something. He wants to get his story straightened out. You’re the first person I’ve told all of this. I know you have a kind heart.”
“To think that August Norlander begat a child in Italy is sort of mind-boggling.”
“So people in Lake Wobegon know about my papa?”
“They named the football field for him. His name is on a brass plaque in the front entrance of the high school. It says LOST IN SERVICE, which the VFW thinks is defeatist, so they raised a stink and now they’re raising money for a new one called THE GREATEST GIFT. He’s right there. And we mention him at the Memorial Day service at the cemetery every May. And they read out loud that story about him charging up the hill in the priest’s robes and blowing up the German machine-gun nest, swinging an explosive on a chain.”
“Yeah, well—it never happened. Take my word for it.”
It wasn’t a complete surprise to Margie. She had always questioned the priestly garb story—too G.I. Joe–like, and when she got the call in January and accepted that Our Local Hero had made a baby one fine night in 1944, it opened the door to new information. And then Norbert had sent her a few of Gussie’s letters. She had reread them on the plane over, one written during the battle for the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino in which Gussie described the range of snow-topped mountains around it, the ferocity of the Allied bombing, the night sky lit up with cascades of detonations. He had been marching with his platoon along a dirt road through the ruins of a village, and they stopped for smokes, and lay inside a garden wall and lit up, and one man found a battered Victrola in the house and cranked it up and a little orchestra played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and Gussie got up and danced a jig and that was when the brigadier spotted him and took him into custody as his aide-de-camp. The brigadier was on foot, having been de-Jeeped by a pair of colonels, and was lost and dejected and his feet were wet, and there was Gussie jigging in the mud, a big grin on his face, and the brigadier said, “Corporal, you’ve been reassigned to my outfit. Go and find me a vehicle.” Margie did not think the young man dancing to “Bye Bye Blackbird” would charge a German machine-gun nest, swinging an explosive on a chain.
Maria said, “The truth is that Papa never killed anybody. He told Mama that. He was with the brigadier who was a dedicated coward and Papa stuck with him, and then he went AWOL the night before the liberation of Rome and came into the city by bus, arriving before the American army, and snuck into a hotel where my mother was waiting for him. He slept with her and left in the early morning hours, a little hungover, I suppose, and slipped on some ice in the street and hit his head and died in a hospital a week later. She had him buried with Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery. I’ll take you there.”
NORBERT
The day after Maria phoned in January, Margie called Norbert Norlander to tell him about his Italian niece. His housekeeper answered. ‘He’s not here,” she said. “He’s suffered a setback.” She gave Margie another number, the Angels of Mercy nursing home on Immaculata Drive. His bedside phone. His voice was growly, like he was turning a crank and grinding peanuts. Probably he’d worked outdoors with heavy machinery and had to shout a lot. “Where’d you get my name?” he said. He got weepy when she mentioned August.
“Jesus God in Heaven, I was all packed up to fly to Rome the week before Christmas. I was going to go over and put his picture on his gravestone. I promised Mother thirty years ago I’d do that and dang it, I just kept putting it off. I was running myself ragged, drilling oil wells down here and going through a divorce and dealing with bladder cancer. Anyway, Gussie’s in a military cemetery outside Rome. He was an aide to a Brigad
ier Somebody, a one-star general, and he was having a great time in Italy, he was hotfooting it around and avoiding heroism and he was in love with an Italian gal he met during the Anzio landing. She came out in a rowboat with a lantern and guided them in.”
“Gennaro?”
“That’s it. How’d you know?”
“Her daughter called me yesterday.”
“Oh. Her. The communist. I cut off contact with her. She’s just trying to get money out of this. Don’t kid yourself. I’m on to her game. She just wants to get an Italian court to declare paternity and come over here and collect money for child support, take my home, my car. You don’t want to mess with her. Talked to her once and she gave me an earful about Vietnam. To hell with her. Anyway, Mom died in ’78 and in the hospital she made me promise her on a Bible to go to Rome and find his grave and put Gussie’s picture on his gravestone. Mom was a sort of mystic. Being married to my dad, she had to be a mystic—how else was she going to know what was on his mind? She was taking laundry off the line one day and lightning struck the pole and, bang, it gave her mystical visions. Gussie appeared to Mom in some of these visions and some days he was happy, some days he just sat with his head in his hands. She baked chocolate-chip cookies for him but he had no appetite. He said things like ‘It wasn’t like you think it was.’ She said, ‘How was it, Gussie?’ He said, ‘Not like you think it was. But it’s all over, it doesn’t matter,’ he said. And then he’d moan. That made her cry and he’d say, ‘Ma, they all died and it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. It didn’t change a single thing. The world goes on. They just went up the road and died in the mud and the filth and then life went on and it didn’t matter. The Germans didn’t want Italy and neither did we. It was all for show. A big opera except they shot the orchestra. What was the point of it?’ She spent her last days talking to him. And after she died, by God she started dropping in on me and saying, ‘Why haven’t you done what you said you’d do? Honor your brother.’ In Mom’s family, they always put a picture of the dead person on the gravestone, as a sign of respect. The picture said you were somebody. Not just a lump of dirt. You lived, you laughed, you danced the polka. The army inscription is all cut and dried, name, your outfit, date of death, that’s all you get, and she wanted him to be somebody. She said to me, ‘Norby, he’s lying there like a piece of garbage.’ I said, ‘Ma, you can’t bring back the dead.’ She said, ‘No, but we don’t have to treat him like trash.’
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