He called her a month later, penitent, pleading, Johnny Mathis singing in the background, and she had to tell him, “Larry, all those reasons I didn’t like you before—they haven’t changed just because you’re drunk.”
It was a movie that shook her to her core. There can be love without possession. You can love someone who is free of your control. You can even love those who defy your control, your enemies. (She mentioned this to Father Wilmer once: “If loving your enemies is ultimate Christian love, then isn’t submissive married love an inferior love?” He didn’t think so but he had other parishioners waiting to talk to him, who weren’t going to try to snag him on theological issues.)
As it turned out, Larry joined the army, which sent him to Germany where he married a Dutch woman and joined her dad’s company and made his fortune building resorts in Sumatra and eventually settled in Brussels, and Margie married Carl and settled down two blocks from her childhood home—ah, the ironies of life. And Larry came back to speak at graduation in 1997, blue pinstripe suit, shoes with tassels, face sandblasted and tanned, hair glistening, and he talked about how Lake Wobegon had taught him to march to his own drummer and light a candle rather than curse the darkness, and there she sat six rows away and didn’t bother to walk up afterward and say hi, and anyway he seemed to be in a hurry to leave. He lived an airborne life, zooming across national boundaries, and she was just little Margie Schoppenhorst, the shy, studious girl who won the spelling bee on “eleemosynary”—meaning “benevolent” or “charitable”—and kicked the butt of former champion Charlotte Tollefson and was very eleemosynary to her. She rose in the world, edited the Literary Leaf and was Class Poet, and expected to rise up with eagle wings and soar off to worlds unknown.
People said, “So what are you going to do now, Margie?” and she said, “Well, I was thinking of going to college in Chicago, but I don’t know now.” She didn’t go away to college because it panicked her to see herself failing miserably and coming home in disgrace and facing the relatives. Poor little Margie: It was just too much for her. So she told people she was “putting it off” for a year. That she “wasn’t ready.” With her college money, she bought a car. She got a job candling eggs. About the same time, she began to feel a feverish hunger to have children. She had her eye on Carl, had for years, she liked the cut of him, a hardworking easygoing man, but decisive—he once got bored with fishing and dove from the boat and swam to shore, leaving his three brothers behind. He once bought a silk shirt with lilacs on it and because the guys at the garage gave him a hard time about it, he made a point to wear it whenever he went to fill up with gas. He did not believe in God (he confessed this to her one Christmas Eve) but he went to church, confident that someday his faith would return. So she went to work at the egg warehouse, candling eggs, and then she married Carl. They made a nice couple. She fell in love with him when she was driving by a construction site on McKinley Street the week after high school graduation and heard hammering and the rhythm of it sounded like someone knocking on the door to her soul.
It was July, a steamy day, a scorcher, and he stood on the scaffolding, stripped to the waist, hammering nails into joists, and the rhythm was seductive. She was on her way to work at the egg warehouse, and she slowed down at the sound of the whamma-whamma-whamma-wham, four beats, and a pause while he pulled a new nail out from between his teeth, and whamma-whamma-whamma-wham, and she took her foot off the gas and the car drifted over into a slough of mud from the water hose running to the cement mixer and got mired in mud up to the hubcaps and stopped. The hammering stopped. He watched her for a minute as she gunned the engine and spun the wheels and mud flew and she knew he was watching her and she gunned it harder. And then he crossed the road and said, “Move over,” and she did, and he got behind the wheel and rocked the car back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and got it up and out of the trench. “You okay?” he said. She nodded. She was dripping sweat.
He was four years older, he’d been in the navy, and then instead of joining Krebsbach Chevrolet, he went to Minneapolis and learned carpentry. But he was dating Anne Marie Meister, who’d moved to Minneapolis the same time Carl went to carpenter school.
Margie went to the egg warehouse and sat in the dimness, lifting eggs off the conveyor and holding them up to the candle, looking for blood specks, cracks, and thought about him and the car rocking back and forth.
She and Carl, who had finished carpentry school, dated that summer. They went to a dance, a movie, a couple of awkward dinners, before they discovered that what they both liked was to lie side by side in the grass in the cemetery and read books and also kiss and touch in the careful way that young people necked back in those days. They were married two months later.
Two nights before the wedding, they sat on his parents’ porch and he told her about Anne Marie, whom he’d gotten pregnant, the year before. Her dad was the mayor and he sold life insurance. Carl decided to leave town and packed a knapsack and set out to hitchhike to California but the first car that pulled over to give him a ride was Mayor Meister. He told Carl that he’d have to do the right thing and marry Anne Marie, and Carl said he’d think about it, and just then Mayor Meister got terrible angina pains. He told Carl to get the nitro tablets out of the glove compartment. But there were none there. “Please help me,” said the dying man, and fell into Carl’s arms and died. The nitro tablets were in his pocket. He explained all of this to Anne Marie later but she blamed him for her dad’s death.
Anne Marie was good and depressed. She went to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the Belle Rive Theater in Minneapolis and sat in the dark, crying, and got up to go to the women’s john and went through a door marked no admittance, staff only and there sat a scrawny young man named Chick who was running the projector and she asked him to put his arms around her, which he did, and they started necking, and then they were naked, and the next day he went with her to the courthouse. The baby was born and they named her Tiffany. Anne Marie told Carl the whole story out of pure meanness and when he asked to see his daughter, she just laughed and said, “Fat chance.”
Carl was crying as he told her this—so many forks in the road where he might’ve gone the wrong way and missed out on finding the Margie of his life. What if Mr. Meister hadn’t found him on the highway, what if he hadn’t died and thus made Carl a murderer, what if he’d never come back to Lake Wobegon from the navy? What if, what if, what if. He said that he would love her for the rest of his life and be true to her. She believed him. And then the fire siren blew. He was a volunteer fireman. He jumped up and said, “Come with,” so she did. They raced down the hill to the firehouse.
The truck had left already, they could see flashing red lights at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Sixteen firemen there and Father Emil and Sister Arvonne and a flock of Canada geese, highly agitated, honking. A crowd was gathering. There were two geese inside the church, said Sister, and when she’d gone in to help them, they attacked her. The front doors were open wide.
People suggested that they get brooms or put out corn or ring the church bells. People love a crisis. The crowd grew. There was great excitement. People went home for their cameras. A show was about to begin. Men vs. Geese. And then Carl raised his arms for silence and told everyone to go home. “We can’t get the geese out of the church with all this hullabaloo. Everybody, please, go home. Otherwise, we may injure one of these beautiful birds. And why? For your amusement? Please. Take a picture and go home.”
The firetruck was driven back to the firehouse. People drifted away, reluctantly, not wanting to miss the action, but Carl coaxed them to leave, until he and Margie sat under a tree, just the two of them, on the warm September night, waiting for the geese to come out. The dozen or so geese on the lawn hunkered down, waiting for their colleagues, muttering to themselves. And then the two geese came out the front doors, their hips moving in an elegant sensuous rocking motion, an
d there was a rush of wings, geese dashing across the grass and taking off. The two of them walked into church. It was empty. They checked in the confessionals, up in the loft, nothing. The Blessed Virgin stood, head bowed, her hands reaching out to grasp their hands, and they stood in that deep and profound silence and that was when she first felt married to him. No small thing. To her, marriage was linked to that silence, and to the rush of wings, and to the excitation of the onlookers, and the mystery of their vigil that night.
She felt a saintly dedication to marriage back in those days and read religious manuals on the subject that said the purpose of this Holy Union was to produce offspring and to enjoy companionship, and as such it was ordained by God and sanctified by His church, a Holy Sacrament, Jesus working through the couple to bestow grace on the world. The indissoluble bond of marriage is between the man, the woman, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and each plays a part in keeping the sacred vows of fidelity and honor and obedience.
She believed this with a pure heart and her faith made her a radiant bride. Everybody said so. Their parents saw them together and wept for joy. “You are perfect for each other,” Myrtle said. And it was lovely to be a couple and walk hand in hand at twilight and be greeted with smiles and hellos. A boost in status. So she never went away to college as she had planned—the catalogues of St. Mary’s, Loyola, the College of St. Catherine sat on her bookshelf. She earned her B.S. by piecework, much later, after the kids were in high school, at the online University of Western Dakota, and graduated at the age of forty-eight, no party, no gifts, no photographs—she simply got her degree as a PDF file and downloaded it and printed it on heavy paper, framed it, and that was that. Mr. Halvorson hired her cheap—$16,000 a year, well below the bottom of the pay scale—and of course she said, “Gee, thanks,” having been brought up to, and now she taught Shakespeare and Whitman and Ole Rolvaag to a whole roomful of Carls with a few Margies here and there. No more the poet, except for the occasional verse, on request:
The marriage of Florian and Myrtle
Now crosses the 50-year hurdle.
Let the rabbit dash
And flutter and flash,
I’ve got my dough on the turtle.
“Oh that’s so nice,” said Myrtle. And that was the story of Marjorie. She was such a nice person. She did nice things for people. A failure as an individual, she became half of a couple. Mother told her, the day she married Carl, “Life is what it is. People want to make it into a carnival and it just isn’t. You have to take the good along with the bad. When you have a fight, don’t go to bed angry. Kiss and make up and tomorrow will be better.” Mother taught her to get crusted eggs off the bottom of a frying pan by heating soapy water in it, and she was right about that, but now Margie thought that there was something to be said for carnival going. So many miserable people sitting in offices doing meaningless work and pretending to like it and gradually getting stupider and stupider, defeated by the sheer boredom of their lives. Trapped by complicated apparatus—home, family, community—designed to make you happy happy happy but instead it’s a prison. You have no real friends. People who know you and love you treat you like dirt and strangers treat you pretty darned well. Her sister Linda went to Costa Rica for a week and danced on the beach in a crowd of men and women who spoke no English and had the time of her life. They were so much nicer than the ones she went to school with. That’s the bitter fact of life. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Two thirds of all second marriages. Three fourths of all third marriages! Evidently, experience is not a good teacher.
Well, so what? She still had ambitions, however remote. She was bigger in the hips, and had a broader nose than Audrey’s, but did have the narrow shoulders and small breasts, and dark hair cut in a pixie. Didn’t have the voice—had a Minnesota voice and said, “Oh for cryin’ out loud” and “What kind of a deal is that?” and “Okay then, bye now,” but she felt a certain Audreyness down deep. That indefinable bellissima quality. Everyone had some of that in them. She had two love letters from her father to her mother, summer, 1944, addressed to “My dearest Sweetheart” which he was not the type to say, nor “You overwhelm me with joyful desire” nor “I am enchanted by your picture and counting the hours until I hold you once again in my arms” which were in the letters too, and also “You are the only one for me, the great treasure of my days, the happiness that I never dared hope would be mine.” In real life, Daddy was sarcastic, quick to anger, tight with money, and never mentioned enchantment, but it was still in his heart somewhere, whatever led him to write, “How lovely to be with you last night on the porch and to kiss you over and over and let my hand rest near your heart.” Though he’d become a sour man mesmerized by wrestlers on TV screeching, baring their teeth like chimpanzees, swinging folding chairs, nonetheless he had some romantic in him. After all, he had cried when he walked her up the aisle.
She imagined that he sat on the porch with Mother and took a piece of wood and carved himself a little puppet whom he named Marjorie because he was lonely and wanted a daughter who would love him but he was a rough man who yanked the strings and made her dance when she didn’t feel like it and so she never became a real girl because she had no genuine feelings of her own until she saw the movie Roman Holiday and here she was in Rome, the fount of true feeling, where, she felt, either she would win Carl back or she would leave him forever.
Why spend years agonizing over it?
Why can’t you figure out in seven days how you feel about someone?
WINDFALL
Norbert Norlander died a few hours after she had phoned him from near the Spanish Steps and his lawyer called her with the news. The phone chirped as she was taking a shower at 9:30 A.M. Late night in Oklahoma. She stood naked, dripping, by the bathroom sink, looking at herself in the mirror. The lawyer was polite, professional. She told Margie that the old man had simply lain down in bed that night and never awoke. “It was very peaceful.”
“Just the way he would’ve wanted to go.”
“Indeed. So—let me get to the point. In his most recent will, Norbert claims you are his daughter and his kids would like to clarify that.”
All she could think was What a sweetie pie that gruff old Norwegian was. In his gratitude, he had adopted her. She thought he had gone bonkers in the last phone conversation she’d had with him, but no.
“Is that so? Are you his daughter? His kids don’t remember him saying anything about this.”
“Well, his kids don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t remember him talking about them either.”
“Do you have any proof?”
“Proof? I think the fact that he sent me $150,000 to go to Rome says something about how he felt.”
“That was from his mother’s estate, but never mind.” The lawyer inhaled slowly. “Look. The kids don’t want some long draggedout court case. They just want to settle this. They’re willing to offer $250,000 for this whole thing to just go away.”
And a door opened in her mind’s eye, a door to the bright blue sky with a few white clouds drifting in it. “I think a half million would be better.”
The lawyer inhaled again. “I can offer you as much as three hundred fifty. I recommend you take it. I think that when you stop to think about attorney’s fees and the years it would take for this to go through the courts—”
Margie said she thought $350,000 would be just fine. She gave the lawyer the address of Associated Federal in Minnesota. And hung up. She sat down on the toilet. Hard to grasp. Too hard. A woman named Maria called her from New York in January and one thing led to another, and she did a good deed for an old man, and now this. Poor old guy. You read stories like this, she thought—a lonely tycoon leaves a million dollars to a woman who gave him back rubs, or a kind neighbor who mowed his yard, or the pizza delivery boy.
So where were his kids when he lay dying? Skiing in Aspen? They couldn’t be all that devoted if they didn’t know how bad he wanted Gussie’s grave decorated. Probably they’d refus
ed to go to Rome. They didn’t even know he was all banged up in a nursing home and fixing to check out. So phooey on them. She’d take the money. Damned right she would.
She came down to breakfast and heard Evelyn ripping into some rich guy in a story in USA Today who had lost half his fortune to Bernie Madoff and now had to sell his homes in Kennebunkport, Santa Fe, and Bainbridge Island. “Well, boo hoo. Poor little you. Tell us about it. People are homeless and starving to death and you want to live in six different places at once. Let me tell you something. Argentina is not weeping for you and neither am I. Just get over yourself and suck it up and find something useful to do other than invest in junk bonds and ride around in boats drinking gin martinis. This is life, honey buns. It isn’t a rehearsal. You’re living on the same planet as everyone else so wake up and smell the coffee. And I mean it.”
Margie looked up Norbert on the Internet again. Northland Oil. He’d inherited from his father a chunk of an island off the Norwegian coast that turned out to have vast oil fields under it and from that he’d earned a small fortune. Like a true Norwegian, he kept his cards close to his chest, and the two bios she found were vague about amounts, but he’d given two million to the Tulsa Art Museum, so there was serious money around. She thought she should tell someone. Father Wilmer. Or Carl. In the past three months, she had, barely lifting a finger, realized a half million dollars. Success Comes to Margie Schoppenhorst.
She had accepted the $150,000 for herself and Carl to go to Rome on a patriotic pilgrimage to honor an American fighting man who’d given his life for his country, along with the members of her book club. She was not stingy. No, not at all. She had called up Father Wilmer one afternoon, and told him, “We’re going to Rome the end of March. You want to come with?”
“Oh, that’s too kind of you,” he said, and she could hear him about to say Sure, you bet, getting ready to spit it out. “You can find someone who’s a lot more fun than me. I’d only make people uneasy. Especially the Lutherans.”
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