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  Praise for Wobegon Boy

  “Possibly the best thing he’s ever written… . Keillor has put his material to work in a book that delivers all that you’d expect. It’s literate but not condescending. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. And it will break your heart.”

  —The Rocky Mountain News

  “[Keillor is] a master at drama and sadness… . [His] shining writing allows the reader immersion into a parallel universe that has all the elements of our own—but with better stories.”

  —The Detroit News

  “An outstanding, funny, often sad addition to Keillor’s ruminations.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  “In the land of a thousand stories, Keillor is still mining something wonderful.”

  —The Dayton News

  “Keillor has matured in the last decade, and his wit has become even sharper.”

  —The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Keillor returns to the fine form of his first effort from a decade ago, a laugh-on-every-page kind of work.”

  —The Nashville Tennessean

  “Wobegon Boy offers satisfying evidence that Keillor still knows his way around this fertile, literary land.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Keillor does a fine job of balancing his satiric talents with an indepth probing of his main character’s spiritual crisis.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Wobegon Boy is a satisfying … read about some strange, sad and bittersweet moments of life.”

  —The Florida Times-Union

  “Wobegon Boy has depth and coherence as a novel of one man’s spiritual character.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “Keillor’s dark eviscerating humor persists even as he makes an astonishing discovery: Life can be pretty good… . Wobegon Boy is a story of midlife fulfillment, of a belief that you can go home again, literally and figuratively.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WOBEGON BOY

  Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion. He is the author of nine books, all published by Penguin, including Lake Wobegon Days and Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. A teacher at the University of Minnesota and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter.

  WOBEGON BOY

  Garrison Keillor

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1997

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1997

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this book first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:

  Keillor, Garrison.

  Wobegon boy / Garrison Keillor

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-64021-0

  1. Lake Wobegon (Imaginary place)—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3561.E3755W6 1997

  813’.54—dc21 97–27240

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Aldus

  Designed by Jessica Shatan

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To Ellen, Helen, and Marcia:

  three dauntless heroines

  of the present day

  WOBEGON BOY

  Table of Contents

  One Lake Wobegon

  Two The Gibbs Farm

  Three Alida

  Four All That Is Essential

  Five Talk Radio

  Six Mortality

  Seven Old Lover

  Eight Home Alive

  Nine A Tour of Town

  Ten Bankruptcy

  Eleven The Wally Award

  Twelve Dark Lutherans

  Thirteen Thanksgiving

  Fourteen Rome

  Fifteen Byron

  Sixteen Family Matters

  Seventeen Friday

  Eighteen Chatterbox

  Nineteen The Lady in Black

  Twenty The Wake

  Twenty-One Mildred’s Reply

  Twenty-Two Defeat

  Twenty-Three March

  Twenty-Four New York City

  Read Keillor’s latest works from Viking and Penguin

  ONE

  Lake Wobegon

  I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it’s all thanks to a good Lutheran mother. When I was a boy, if I came around looking glum and mopey, she said, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” and the thought of our old black mutt raising his hind leg in the pas de dog and peeing on toast made me giggle. I was a beanpole boy, and my hair was the color of wet straw. I loved to read adventure books and ride my bike and shoot baskets in the driveway and tell jokes. My dad, Byron, was a little edgy, expecting the worst, saving glass jars and paper clips, turning off lights and cranking down the thermostat to keep our family out of the poorhouse, but Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and, above all, Don’t feel sorry for yourself. In Minnesota, you learn to avoid self-pity as if it were poison ivy in the woods. Winter is not a personal experience; everyone else is as cold as you are; so don’t complain about it too much. Even if your cinnamon toast gets peed on. It could be worse.

  Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either. She had sat at the bedside of her beloved sister, Dotty, dying of scarlet fever in the summer of 1934; she held Dotty’s hand as the sky turned dark from their father’s fields blowing away in the drought, she cleaned D
otty, wiped her, told her stories, changed the sheets, and out of that nightmare summer she emerged stronger, confident that life would be wondrous, or at least bearable.

  I was named for my great-grandfather John Tollefson, who landed in Lake Wobegon, in the center of Minnesota, from Voss, Norway, in 1880. Lake Wobegon was a rough town then, where, all on one block, for less than five dollars, you could get a tattoo, a glass of gin, and a social disease, and have enough left over to get in a poker game, but Lutherans civilized it. They were hard workers, indifferent to vice. John and his wife, Signe, came from Voss and begat Einar, and Einar and Birthe (Birdy) begat Byron, and Byron and Mary begat me, John, the third of five children, with Bill and Diana ahead of me and Ronnie (Byron, Jr.) and Judy after.

  It was a good place to grow up in, Lake Wobegon. Kids migrated around town as free as birds and did their stuff, put on coronations and executions in the long, dim train shed and the deserted depot, fought the Indian wars, made ice forts and lobbed grenades at each other, dammed up the spring melt in the gutters, swam at the beach, raced bikes in the alley. You were free, but you knew how to behave. You didn’t smart off to your elders, and if a lady you didn’t know came by and told you to blow your nose, you blew it. Your parents sent you off to school with lunch money and told you to be polite and do what the teacher said, and if there was a problem at school, it was most likely your fault and not the school’s. Your parents were large and slow afoot and they did not read books about parenting, and when they gathered with other adults, at Lutheran church suppers or family get-togethers, they didn’t talk about schools or about prevailing theories of child development. They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.

  I remember the day I graduated from tricycle to shiny new two-wheeler, a big day. I wobbled down Green Street and made a U-turn and waved to Mother on the front porch, and she wasn’t there. She had tired of watching me and gone in. I was shocked at her lack of interest. I went racing around the corner onto McKinley Street, riding very fast so I would have big tales to tell her, and I raced down the hill past the Catholic church and the old black mutt ran out to greet me and I swerved and skidded on loose gravel and tumbled off the bike onto the pavement and skinned myself and lay on the tar, weeping, hoping for someone to come pick me up, but nobody came. The dog barked at me to get up. I limped three blocks home with skin scraped off my forearm and knee, my eyes brimming with tears, and when I came into the kitchen, she looked down at me and said, “It’s only a scrape. Go wash it off. You’re okay.”

  And when I had washed, she sat me down with a toasted cheese sandwich and told me the story of Wotan and Frigga. “Wotan, or Odin, was the father of the gods, and his wife, Frigga, was the earth goddess who brought summer, and the god of war, Thor, was the winter god, and the god of peace was Frey. So from Odin we get Wednesday, from Thor, Thursday, from Frey, Friday—Sunday and Monday, of course, refer to the sun and moon—which leaves Saturday and Tuesday. Wotan and Frigga had a boy named Sidney, and Thor had a daughter named Toots, and they fell in love and one day Sidney went to find Toots and steal her away, but Thor sent a big wind and Sidney rode his bicycle too fast and fell and skinned his knee, and that’s why Saturday is a day off, so we can think about it and remember not to ride our bikes so fast.” She gave me a fresh soft peanut butter cookie. She wiped the last remaining tears from my cheek. She said, “Go outside and play. You’re all right.”

  In Lake Wobegon, you learned about being All Right. Life is complicated, so think small. You can’t live life in raging torrents, you have to take it one day at a time, and if you need drama, read Dickens. My dad said, “You can’t plant corn and date women at the same time. It doesn’t work.” One thing at a time. The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the raccoon, a swash-buckling animal who goes screaming into battle one spring night, races around, wins a mate, carries on a heroic raccoon career, only to be driven from the creekbed the next spring by a young stud who leaves teethmarks in your butt and takes away your girlfriend, and you lie wounded and weeping in the ditch. Later that night, you crawl out of the sumac and hurl yourself into the path of oncoming headlights. Your gruesome carcass lies on the hot asphalt to be picked at by crows. Nobody misses you much. Your babies grow up and do the same thing. Nothing is learned. This is a life for bank robbers. It is not a life for sensible people.

  The urge to be top dog is a bad urge. Inevitable tragedy. A sensible person seeks to be at peace, to read books, know the neighbors, take walks, enjoy his portion, live to be eighty, and wind up fat and happy, although a little wistful when the first coronary walks up and slugs him in the chest. Nobody is meant to be a star. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits. That is the Lake Wobegon view of life.

  When I was ten, I got absorbed in the Flambeau Family novels in the Lake Wobegon library and devoured them all in one summer, one by one, sequestered in my bedroom (The Flambeaus and the Case of the Floating Barolo, and the Flippant Bellhop, and the Flying Bonbons, and the Floral Bouquet, the Flagrant Bagel, the Flamboyant Baritone, the Broadway Flop, the Flustered Beagle, and, finally, The Flambeaus’ Final Bow). They were all about Tony, a boy of Manhattan, and his socialite parents, Emile and Eileen. Tony is a junior at St. Trillin’s on West Eighty-ninth, All-City in tennis, an honor student, adored by his girlfriend, Valerie. Tony and his mother, an actress still beautiful at forty-one, and his father, the famed microbiologist, live happily together in their art-filled duplex apartment on the twentieth floor of the San Remo, overlooking Central Park, and solve crimes as they go about their elegant lives, hanging out in swank restaurants among high-rolling dudes and chantoozies, knowing who is real and who is from New Jersey. The neighbors across the hall, Elena and Malcolm Strathspey, a Scottish laird and his ballerina wife, come over for gimlets and to talk about ballet, opera, the O’Connell sculptures at the Guggenheim. For a boy whose dad ran the grain elevator in a small town where nobody had ever seen a ballet or knew a gimlet from a grommet, the Flambeaus were an inspiration. They were my secret family. Nobody else took out the Flambeau books, especially after I reshelved them under Foreign Language.

  Sometimes, descending the steps of school, I would raise my hand as I came to the curb and imagine a taxi screeching to a stop and a bald man with a cigar clenched between his teeth saying, “Where to, mac?” “The San Remo.” “Yes, sir.”

  I put the Flambeaus aside as I got older. The miseries of adolescence somehow did not jibe with the Flambeau life, but in the back of my mind, I reserved New York for later consideration, after the tumult died down. Mother said, “John, you are not the first person who ever had hormones, so don’t picture this as a great tragedy. Get over it. You’re okay.” And I was okay. Mother and Dad were un-Flambeau-like; they were reserved and didn’t praise me for fear of spoiling me, and they didn’t hug me beyond the age of six except sideways once or twice, but I was okay. I grew up and minded my manners and learned to be useful and didn’t feel sorry for myself, and in my heart, I imagined myself possessing an Eastern elegance. And when I was thirty, I finally made it.

  It was a desperate move. I was escaping from a girl in Minneapolis who wanted me to marry her and fulfill her dreams and secure her happiness. Her name was Korlyss, she was small and dark and of a mournful disposition, we met at the University and clung to each other for ten years, afraid to give up on a bad investment, I guess. We lived in Prospect Park, a sort of intellectual pueblo east of campus, in a tiny walk-up apartment with scarred tables and gimpy chairs and pine plank bookcases crammed with paperbacks. I was a bartender at The Mixers on Seven Corners, a grad-student hangout, and I sold ads for Minnesota Orchestra programs and did an all-night classical music show on the University station, WLB, and spent a dreary year in graduate school, and Korlyss sold lingerie at Dayton’s. She was waiting for me to get my feet on the
ground so we could marry and be happy. I kept almost marrying her for ten years. She was an extremely nice person. And then, walking along the West River Road one October day when the Mississippi gorge was a carnival of red and orange, she announced she might be pregnant. It just happened, she didn’t know how. “Don’t you love me?” she said. Maybe I did, but I didn’t want to marry her. I offered her all the money I had, about five hundred dollars. She said, “I don’t want your money.” And the next morning, she packed a suitcase and three shopping bags and went to leave and the doorknob came off in her hand. “Maybe it’s a sign that we’re supposed to stay together,” she said. I fixed the doorknob and opened the door. I offered her a ride. “No,” she said. “I prefer to walk.” I looked out the kitchen window and there she was on the sidewalk below, looking up at me, her baggage at her feet, as if she were Mimi in La Bohème. If only I would stick my head out the window and yell, “Okay! I’ll marry you!” then all the neighbors would stick their heads out of their windows and wave their arms and cheer, and the mailman would dance a jig, and the orange school bus would stop, and out would pop a children’s chorus to sing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” But I didn’t.

  I was racked with guilt over Korlyss, believe me, especially when her friends called to say, “She really loves you,” and her mother called, weeping, to suggest counseling. It was the absolute rotten worst thing I had ever done to anybody. I felt sick. I knew I had to leave town. Through a Mixers patron, an Episcopal priest who was fond of Rusty Nails, I heard that St. James College in Red Cliff, New York, on Cayuga Lake, had gotten an FM radio license and needed a manager to build a station. I flew out with a glowing recommendation written by the priest and another by me myself on the WLB letterhead, using the name Myra Groetz, and on the basis of the letters and a confident manner and a breezy interview over lunch and a good bottle of Beaujolais, I was hired for the job by Paul Burton, dean of students, a sleepy man with no chin, who for some reason was delegated to oversee WSJO. “I don’t know the first thing about radio except that I don’t care for it,” he said. “It’s noise, and it’s one big reason why most people in this country go around without an intelligent thought in their noggins.”