Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  “And you were waiting for me to say that?”

  He nodded.

  So he had simply gone on strike. He had withdrawn his services until she asked for them to be resumed. And that led to the romantic getaway to Rome and that led to a half million in cool cash. Everything connects.

  And down to breakfast they went. He took her hand, which had a coffee cup in it, and pressed it to his lips and whispered something like “love of my life” and then bowed and went back to the men’s table where they were studying a map of the Allies’ advance toward Rome through the Padiglione Woods and the Alban Hills. Wally was reading a history of the Allied campaign of 1944. The hilly wooded terrain favored the German defenders who retreated slowly, making the Americans and British pay dearly for each hill. It took five months of bitter fighting before General Clark got his picture taken parading into Rome and marching up the stairs to Michelangelo’s City Hall.

  She said good morning to Wally and Evelyn and Father Wilmer.

  “How are you?” she said.

  “Someday,” said Father, looking down at his scrambled eggs, “women will have their eggs removed, and fertilized in a laboratory, and after the embryo has developed for a few days, they’ll go in and rearrange the chromosomes to give people what they want in a child—math ability, resistance to colds, physical agility, verbal skills, blue eyes, small feet, you name it, you can have it. Every child will be a designer child. No flaws. I saw a program about this on TV last night. The BBC. And let me just say: that is a paradise I will be glad not to be living in.”

  Miss Gennaro’s burial was at 10:00A.M. and the pilgrims were all on deck at nine, dressed for the occasion, though Margie had told them, “You don’t have to go. You really shouldn’t feel obligated. None of us ever met the lady. I’m going because her daughter is the one who called me in January and told me about Gussie. Her mother was a friend of Gussie’s, the old lady who died.”

  “How did she know Gussie?” said Eloise. “She was Italian.”

  “They were very good friends. I’ll explain later.”

  Eloise pulled back the curtain and looked out at the street. “That white truck has been parked there all night,” she said. “Isn’t that suspicious?”

  Margie ignored her.

  “Don’t you think about a terrorist attack?” she said, eyeballing the humanity passing by. “What if a bomb went off? We’d be blown to pieces.”

  “Depends on how close you are.”

  “What a ridiculous way to die—blown up on a trip that I never wanted to take in the first place.”

  “You never wanted to what?” Margie laughed. “You were all over this from the moment I told you. You were flapping around like a hawk on a rabbit. Nobody twisted your arm. So what’s your problem now?”

  Eloise said she was sorry. It was just lack of sleep. Anxiety about her kids. Anger at the Fred situation. “And I’m worried about you,” she said.

  Well, that was a new one. “Worried about what?”

  Eloise looked at her. That serious maternal look. “Are you seeing someone while you’re here?”

  “I’m seeing all sorts of people. I’m looking at you right now.”

  She smiled. “You know what I mean.”

  “Of course not,” she said. But there was a telltale hesitation before she said it. And not enough astonishment written on her face.

  “Be careful, darling,” said Eloise. “Don’t blow up your house for a little excitement, you can get enough excitement from books.” And she got in the van.

  So Eloise knew. Someone had told her, and maybe that someone had told someone else. And if that second someone were Irene or Evelyn, then likely there would be a scene. A righteous woman confronting the sinner. Carl would get wind of it. He’d be terribly hurt. He’d pull back into his shell and it would be up to Margie to resolve the outcome—go home to Minnesota? Stay in Rome?

  That afternoon, she called up the American Overseas School on Via Cassia. Who, a kind lady with a New York accent informed her, were not hiring teachers now, but maybe she should try the Thavis School of Language (“The gifts God gave us are nurtured at Thavis”) so she did and a young man told her that indeed Thavis was looking for a native English speaker to teach full-time starting immediately, salary of $43,000 a year. “Think about it,” he said. Oh, she was thinking about it. Yes, indeed.

  THE FUNERAL

  It was raining when they got to the Protestant Cemetery. Mr. Columbo handed out a few black umbrellas and the pilgrims stood around in the walled graveyard under the cypress trees. Music played softly over loudspeakers in the trees, the Pachelbel “Canon” and then “Ave Maria.” Gravel walks radiated from the entrance, following along boxwood hedges, laurel and oleander. Crosses and upright tablets marked the graves, swathed in green. Signs pointed the way to the tombs of Keats and Shelley. Off to the left was dense vegetation, vines and shrubs overgrown, but most of the plots were neatly set in low stone walls like plant frames. There were a few aboveground crypts but mostly the dead lay in the earth and let nature take its course. One large cypress leaned seriously to one side, loose dirt around its roots, the casualty of a storm, and it looked likely to fall and maybe spring a corpse or two into the air like tiddlywinks.

  Flat slabs of granite lay over the tombs. Some upright columns with busts atop them. A Celtic cross. A manly angel stood on a pedestal, a loose drape hung from his belt and covered his manhood, and nearby a female angel lay facedown on a gravestone, weeping inconsolably for an Evelyn Story (1882–1919) who lay moldering in the dirt below.

  “If you had to die, this’d be the place to be buried,” said Clint. “I’ll bet my kids would visit my grave more often if it were in Rome than if it were back there where it’s going to be.”

  Keats’s marker said:

  This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

  Poor Keats, consumed by self-pity as he lay coughing his heart out, imagining his Fanny in the arms of another, pretty sure that the “Ode to Melancholy” was not a big hit.

  The usual inscriptions (Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Qui riposa in pace). Englishmen from Somerset and Swansea. A Norwegian who died May 19, 1944. James of Charleston, South Carolina, died in 1844 at age seventy. An Ursula Dimpflmeier, 1920–1973. Fifty-three, same age as Margie. An orange tabby cat leaped from stone to stone and Margie’s eye followed it as it landed on a large marble tablet:

  Requiescat in Pace

  Sacred to the memory of

  AUGUST NORLANDER

  Of Minnesota

  Pause here a moment, all ye who read

  The writing on this fine erection

  Which honors a most generous deed

  By a fighting man of great affection

  Who enriched Rome by his own seed

  And now awaits the Resurrection.

  “Did you know he was here?” said Daryl. “Did we make that trip out to Anzio for nothing?”

  “I thought he was here but his brother thought he was out there,” said Margie. “So we had to eliminate one before establishing the other.”

  Eloise said she was confused. Why would they bury him here and not in a military cemetery? Wally was confused too and hoped somebody would clear this up. “Was it because Gussie was not a Catholic?” Margie shook her head.

  Carl got out the plastic engraving of Gussie. “Look. When you tilt it, he smiles,” he said. He showed them and sure enough, Gussie put his head back and grinned. At the bottom it said, OFFICIAL. DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF IMPRISONMENT. The adhesive was supposed to bond plastic to any stone surface, but Carl wasn’t sure that the plastic engraving of Gussie would stick to the stone, seeing as it was so wet. Evelyn thought the stone was so beautiful, it would be a shame to deface it
with a piece of plastic.

  “We promised,” said Margie. “That was the whole deal.”

  They looked at the stone from all angles.

  “That’s an odd inscription,” said Clint. “The part about erection and the donation of seed?”

  “Maybe it’s about seed corn,” said Margie. “I’ll ask around.”

  “Stick the picture on it,” she told Carl. He got out the adhesive tubes and squirted a line of pink gel on the stone above the requiescat and let it sit for a moment, then squirted a thin spray of clear liquid onto the pink. It sizzled. He pulled the plastic engraving of Gussie out of his pocket and pressed it onto the adhesive and pushed.

  A man in a blue suit came running out of the cemetery office, yelling at them. The pilgrims shrank back. “Do not deface the monument,” he yelled. “Or I’ll call the police.”

  “We aren’t defacing it, we are refacing it,” said Margie.

  He pointed at the plastic. “That was not there before.”

  Margie stepped up and poked him in the chest. “That is an American war hero who died in the fight to save Rome from the Nazis. You remove that and you insult me, you insult General Eisenhower, you insult Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, you insult Barack Obama.”

  The man stepped back. He looked around at Marilyn and Daryl, Clint, Irene, Carl, Wally, Evelyn, Eloise, and then his glance landed on Father Wilmer. The man bowed slightly. He said, “Father, don’t let them do bad here.” Father Wilmer nodded to him. The man marched back to the office. He locked the door. Twice.

  “Is it tight?” said Daryl, reaching for the plastic. Margie grabbed his arm. “Don’t touch it.” And she took Carl’s camera and snapped two, four, six, seven shots of it. It looked okay. From a certain angle. A short person would walk in here someday, a boy of ten or eleven, and look at the picture and rise up on his tiptoes and Gussie would smile at him. And the boy would keep this a secret until one day he’d show it to a girl. Look. A dead man smiling at us. A joke on a tombstone. Amid all the drippiness, an American grins and winks.

  As they stood in the rain, a procession came through the gate, led by a man playing a violin, playing very badly, a woman holding an umbrella over him and six men carrying a coffin on their shoulders, followed by a priest and four mourners. They bore their burden toward the old Roman wall at the back of the cemetery where two gravediggers stood beside an open tomb. The marble cover had been removed and stood against the wall. It said GENNARO.

  Margie led the pilgrims up the path behind the mourners. All four were women dressed in black, three wearing long black scarves and Maria wearing her black wool cap.

  The pallbearers laid the coffin down beside the crypt, on the wet grass, and stepped back. Margie stood, hands clasped, as the priest intoned a prayer. When he finished, he stepped back and Maria stepped up and said,

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand

  And Heaven in a Flower,

  Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour.

  Every Morn and every Night

  Some are Born to sweet delight

  Man was made for Joy and Woe;

  Thro’ the World we safely go.

  The pallbearers stepped up and gripped the handles and hoisted the coffin up high and over the open crypt and then gingerly lowered it, bending down, and it came to rest, Margie thought, rather unevenly, as if it had been placed in on top of someone else’s bones. The mourners then took handfuls of dirt from a blue plastic bucket and tossed them in and a few yellow blossoms, and the gravediggers and the pallbearers took hold of the marble slab and lifted it up to shoulder height and carried it to the crypt and set it down with a great dull thud.

  Maria turned and smiled at them. “I wanted them to be in the same tomb together, like Romeo and Juliet, but the cemetery wouldn’t allow it. Anyway, they’re close enough, they can whisper to each other at night.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” said Eloise.

  “It’s all right. She was anxious to go. She had been thinking about him a good deal lately.” She turned to look at the crypt and then suddenly turned back to Margie. “Would you have lunch with me?” she said. “And we can look at that apartment.”

  “Should I bring my husband?”

  Maria frowned. “No. Why would you? Men don’t know what we want. We have to figure it out and tell them.”

  FATHER JULIO’S STORY

  The restaurant was called Café Lucca. It was off on a narrow brick-paved street with a cluster of motor scooters parked and bicycles leaning against the building. A cupboard of wine at the entrance and a cold chest with wheels of cheese, a little dining room, about thirty by fifteen, with family pictures on the walls, weddings, christenings, fat babies, under a high arched ceiling. Small square tables, and they sat down at one, Maria and Father Julio and Aunt Magdalena and Margie. vietato fumare, said the sign. Smoking Forbidden. But people smoked anyway. The waiter was a man with white hair swept back, tattoos on his arms, a bowl of spaghetti in one hand, a small child in the other.

  “I’m glad Gussie didn’t die out in the Aleutian Islands somewhere. Or Siberia. If you want people to visit your grave, Italy is the way to go,” she said.

  Maria beamed at her. She sure had Gussie’s nose and his big grin.

  “I want to know all about Lake Wobegon,” Aunt Magdalena said. She said that Maria had drawn thousands of pictures of Lake Wobegon when she was a little girl, crayon drawings of dogs playing baseball and Boy Scouts fighting Indians on horseback, giant fish leaping from the lake. A grain elevator operated by a woman with white gloves and you got on the elevator with a bag of grain and she took you to your floor. The Sons of Knute lutefisk dinner, the fish playing guitars. The Norwegian Lutherans were all handsome like Gussie and carried skis. The German Catholics were small and fat and wore pince-nez glasses and carried whips. The Catholic church was as big as St. Peter’s and full of paintings and sculpture and an ancient American pope was carried in a sedan chair through the streets, lined with pine and spruce. Men with tommy guns rode in long black convertibles, and blonde babes in slit skirts lounged under lampposts.

  Margie asked how Gussie had gotten written up as a war hero and Aunt Magdalena said that the brigadier had done it. He had been visiting a bordello the night Gussie died and he blamed himself for what happened and set about to make it right by inventing a lovely story of heroism under fire. “I liked how he had him swinging a censer that contained a hand grenade. And the part about his vestments turning crimson. That was a nice touch.”

  In fact, Gussie had slipped on a patch of ice and fallen and hit his head and died of brain trauma.

  “I was with him,” said Father Julio. “It happened like this. I was a friend of Miss Gennaro’s family and they knew what she was planning and asked me to go and bless the unborn child. There is no rite of the Church to consecrate the union of unmarried, so I had to make one up, and I followed the American to Miss Gennaro’s hotel room and when he went inside, I waited in the hallway. When it was quiet inside, I let myself in and sat by the door to her chambers. I sat there, and heard the joyful sounds of their intertwining, two very passionate individuals, and her sighing and singing, and then at the moment of ultimate joy, I thanked the Lord for His marvelous gift and asked Him to protect the young life and bring it safely into the light of the world to receive the new birth of baptism, and then I fell asleep. The American woke me up. The sun had come up. He said, ‘Forgive me for I have sinned,’ and I said, “Don’t worry. It’s covered. Let me buy you breakfast.” Miss Gennaro was asleep. He covered her with a blanket and tucked it in around her chin and kissed her and left her a note saying he loved her and would see her in a few hours, and he and I walked out to this very café. The Café Lucca. We had an excellent breakfast together and he sat and wrote a letter to his brother and then we left. It was on the sidewalk in front of the café where he died. They had given a party for the liberation the night before and served ice cream and to keep it cold
they had many pounds of dry ice which they now had dumped out on the street to melt and as the American and I walked to the café, we didn’t see the ice. He was just telling me how much he loved Miss Gennaro and Rome and how he would learn Italian and start a tour company to take Americans around Rome and show them the sights and he was very excited about this and he raised his hands to gesture to me—‘It’s going to be beautiful!’ he cried—and he slipped and fell backwards and hit his head and was unconscious. He lay on his side and I ran to the café for help and then went back and blessed him. He looked very blessed already. His eyes were closed and he was peaceful. He died in the hospital of San Giovanni and I said a prayer for him there. I knew an undertaker from my childhood parish and he did the job. I came to the cemetery with Miss Gennaro and the brigadier and saw the American lowered into the ground. It was a sunny morning. She was nauseated. She was sure she was pregnant. She carried an American flag and the bed linens from when they had made love. She was going to bury them with him but couldn’t bear to and kept them folded under her arm. The brigadier was a kind man but not so smart. He gave a little speech about his friend and his aide-de-camp. He said that Corporal Norlander was a gentleman and a scholar and that America had lost a good man. He said that he would remember him forever, to the end of his days. And then he stopped. He had more to say but he had forgotten it. And then he bent down to drop flowers into the grave and his shirt came out of his trousers and I saw the deep crevice of his buttocks. Miss Gennaro said nothing. She was feeling quite distressed, full of grief and also rather ill, so I helped her toward the car. She vomited alongside the wall and again at the curb. Her apartment was in a hotel six kilometers from there. The brigadier gave us money for a taxi but there were no taxis. He didn’t think to offer us a ride. He shook my hand and wished me good luck and away he drove in his Jeep, seeing how he drove down the street, I was glad we weren’t with him. I could hear the clutch grinding when he shifted gears and the Jeep bounced off the curb and almost turned over. We started to walk and then Miss Gennaro stopped. She said, ‘I’m afraid of losing the baby.’ So I carried her in my arms through the Gate of St. Paul and into the city toward the Colosseum. She was quite light and not hard to carry, but I felt the worst carnal temptations holding her body against me. I had my hands under her thighs and she had her hands clasped around my neck. Her thighs were delicate and my hands slipped almost to an indecent position because her dress was silky and it rode up and soon I was clasping bare flesh. I was trembling with excitement. I prayed for victory to St. Benedict who subjugated his own desires by casting himself naked into a thicket of briars and rolling around until he was bleeding all over and thereby conquered the flesh and made possible the great harvest of virtues, but I gained no victory at all. My manhood was quite insistent. People laughed to see us, a priest carrying a beautiful young woman. Rome was very festive that day. The sidewalk cafés were full of people. Strolling accordionists played American songs and she said, “Why couldn’t God have let him see this day?” I carried her to Via Maggio and went into the hotel. People laughed and whistled at me, a priest carrying a girl into a hotel, and little did they know how sorely tempted I was. I laid her on a divan in a parlor off the lobby. She lay there, weeping. ‘I am terrified I will lose the baby,’ she said. ‘If I do, I will kill myself.’ I went to speak to the superintendent. ‘The elevator is broken, I have a lady who is with child.’ He shrugged. Nothing could he do with the elevator. He offered to carry the woman. No, no, no, I said. I didn’t want him to touch her with his big rough hands. So I had to carry her up six floors, resting on each landing. She was crying on my shoulder. The room was tiny and had an old brass bed and a ragged blanket. A picture of the Blessed Virgin on the wall. She turned the picture toward the wall. She said, ‘I wanted the baby because I knew it was the way to keep him, and now I’ve lost him and only have the baby. I can’t bear to be alone. Don’t leave me alone. I’m afraid.’ I didn’t dare stay with her, because of my carnal desire. I said, ‘God will be with you.’ She said she hadn’t believed in God since she was eleven and her father died. So I stayed with her. I slept on the floor and she slept on the bed. Twice I got up and looked at her with lust in my heart and I kicked my shin against the bed until the pain drove the lust from me. I still have the marks.” Father Julio raised his right pant leg and they examined the scarlet dents in his pale skin. He turned to Maria. “So you are not my child, my child.”