Pilgrims Page 2

  Do not speak English. Gesture with hand signals.

  Do not flash large amounts of cash. If you must use an ATM machine, find one on an isolated street, or one that is in a recessed alcove.

  If you feel you’re being followed, go to a police station and be prepared to pay a fee (in cash) for protection.

  Do not ride in cabs or on buses. Walk. Stay close to buildings. Never cross a street except in a throng.

  Do not go out in the evening.

  Avoid bathing, if possible. Strong body odor has been shown to be effective in warding off terrorist attacks.

  Avoid tourist attractions, such as the Colosseum or St. Peter’s or the Spanish Steps.

  Avoid eye contact. Look at the ground. Smiling is not a good idea. Terrorists are offended by laughter and may lash out at people they perceive as lighthearted.

  Do not drink coffee except in tiny cups. People with coffee mugs are presumed to be Americans. Drink tea, with milk.

  Eloise thrust it at Margie. “Oh my God,” she said, “we are in trouble now. See what you’ve gotten us into. A nun gave this to me. A nun.”

  “Listen,” Margie said. “This is hogwash. Pure idiocy. We’re perfectly safe.” She tore the sheet into tiny pieces.

  “You don’t think we should talk this over?”

  “Damn it to hell, Eloise. Just pull yourself together, willya? Get a grip.”

  Eloise was stunned. Margie never cursed—never ever. “You don’t think we should—” Margie took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Listen to me. Just grow up! I mean it! Get over it!”

  Eloise nodded.

  And right there was where Margie took command, pushing Eloise around, telling her to grow up. Anyway, the trip had been her idea from Day One. It was she who called them up in January and said, “Guess what? Carl and I are going to Rome. Want to go?” Where? Italy. Kind of expensive, isn’t it? Hey, a person only lives once. I’ve heard that. How much does it cost? Less than you’d think. So she bought the plane tickets from a web site called Cheapskate.com and booked the hotel and phoned the pilgrims with regular helpful reminders (Passport. Cash card. Adapters for electric shavers) and shepherded them onto the plane in Minneapolis (What if someone else has taken our seat?) and through Schiphol in Amsterdam (Why do we have to wait so long at Passport Control when the Europeans go scooting on through?) and into Rome (Was it okay that I packed some Nut Goodies in my suitcase? What if they search my bag? I see the sign about not bringing food products into Italy—is Nut Goodie a food product? Should I tell the police or should I sneak into a restroom and flush it down the toilet?). And she had dealt with Evelyn who sat there in Amsterdam holding a small cardboard box someone had given her.

  Who was it?

  “I don’t know. He just asked me to take it on the plane for him.”

  Oh my God. Evelyn!

  “What’s wrong?”

  So she grabbed the box and threw it into a stairwell. And she herded them away to a coffee bar where Marilyn had a meltdown while looking at a chicken salad sandwich and burst into tears and said, “Why didn’t I bring Mother along? She would’ve loved to come. I never even thought to ask her. Oh my God. She was probably just waiting for me to say something and I never did. She’s still hale and hearty, she could’ve come and enjoyed this. It might be her last chance. And I didn’t even think to mention it. It didn’t even cross my mind!” And she wept. “I am a bad person,” she said. “God is going to punish me, I know it. I just hope he spares my kids.” Oh, it was the old Midwestern ritual of brutal self-accusation—out of pure vanity people lashing into themselves—how worthless I am!—and thereby dragging sympathy and praise out of you—No, you are not a bad person, you are a good person, and no we don’t hate you, not at all, we all love you. Indeed, we do. So she had comforted Marilyn and rounded up the sheep and moved them to the next plane and on the flight to Rome she had reminded Lyle why they were going to Rome—to put a picture on Gussie Norlander’s grave—and at the Customs counter she said Buon giorno to the policeman who checked her passport and Grazie when he handed it back—and at the baggage carousel she had spotted a porter and tapped him on the shoulder and said “Per favore, signore,” and so well, with rolled R’s and all, that his face lit up and he poured out his heart to her in Italian and she simply raised her hand and said, “Sono Americano—I’d rather speak English. Thank you. Grazie.” And the man grinned and squeezed out some English. She handed him ten euros, he brought a cart for the bags. So cool. Eloise whispered, “Where did you learn that?” “In the movies,” she said.

  True. Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn as a princess spinning around Rome on the back of a Vespa, her arms around Gregory Peck. Margie saw it in high school and Audrey became her patron saint whom she tried to emulate, her ballerina elegance, her bubbly demeanor, though bubbliness did not come naturally in Lake Wobegon. People tended to be dry. A woman who bubbled was considered ditzy. You were supposed to be a little dark. Treat yourself to dark scenarios about your kids, the schools, the elms, the future of the bluebird species. Any effervescence was a symptom of unreliability. If you bubbled, people didn’t want their kids to ride in your car.

  She took a deep breath and put on an Audrey smile and cried, “We are going to have such fun in Italy! Fun such as you cannot even imagine! Boy O boy O boy. This is one for the history books! C’mon, let’s see some happy faces! Smile, darn ya! You people look like somebody peed on your sugar bread. Lighten up! We’re on vacation! Seven glorious nights and six fun-filled days!” She poked Carl. “Right?” “Right,” he said. She got in the shotgun seat in the big white van as Mr. Columbo loaded the bags in back. Enormous bags. The others had packed like refugees who might never see home again. For her: two carry-ons. Underwear, jeans and pullovers, one black dress, one pair of walking shoes. “If I need more, I can buy it there,” she told Marilyn. “It’s only a week.” Marilyn admitted she had brought four sweaters Four sweaters: Four sweaters. Just in case.

  Marilyn, Eloise, Evelyn sat in the second seat; Wally, Irene, Lyle, in the third; Carl, Daryl, Clint, Father, in the backseat. Mr. Keillor stood by the open door, waiting for someone to scootch over. “Jump in,” said Margie. “Where?” he said. “Anywhere.” The seat with the three ladies was full and so was the second, what with Irene parking her carry-on bag next to her. Father Wilmer said, “I’m afraid there’s no leg room back here. It’s tight for me and you have longer legs.” Finally, Irene heaved a sigh and moved the carry-on bag onto her lap and Lyle swung his legs out to allow the radio host to squeeze in between him and Irene—“I have to sit on the outside on account of my knees,” he said. So Mr. Keillor found himself wedged in tight, trapped, like a caged animal. He slipped his left arm around onto the seat back behind Irene—to make more room—and she said, “Don’t.” So he had to sit crooked, Lyle’s elbow in his kidneys. When the van pulled away and bounced in a pothole, it sent shock waves up his spine. Just last Friday, a black limo had picked him up at LaGuardia and taken him to Town Hall for A Prairie Home Companion, where he shared a dressing room with Yo-Yo Ma who was gracious and treated him like Somebody, and now here he was back in the fourth grade among cruel bus mates. “We may need a bigger van,” he muttered. “Some of us may need to lose weight,” said Irene. She sighed a long articulate sigh. Which he remembered suddenly and very clearly from years ago.

  They were juniors in high school. It was May. She and he, sitting on the iron rail by the side door to the gymnasium. Under an old wounded elm tree split by lightning and still alive. Sun pouring down, she in her white blouse and denim wrap skirt, a half circle of sweat under her arms. He, not daring to look at her:

  “I was thinking about going to the Prom but I don’t know. I might have other plans. It’s hard to tell. Were you planning to go?”

  “You mean, to the Prom?”

  “Yes.”

  And then he realized that she did not want to go to the Prom with him nor anywhere else. She did not want to be sitting there besi
de him. There was magnetic repulsion going on. She was about to throw up her arms and scream, “Get this person away from me!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just realized, I can’t go, I told some people I’d do something else. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. She gave him a sidelong glance and in that glance he withered like a delicate shrub in a hard frost. Here he had almost asked her to the Prom, had opened the door to the possibility of his perhaps asking her, and then withdrawn this non-offer. Then she cried, “Hey! What took you so long!!” to some guys in a souped-up Model T pulling up and she ran and jumped in the backseat.

  And now, years later, he was that kid all over again, seventeen years old and six three, 150 pounds, high-water pants, size thirteen shoes, horn-rimmed glasses slipped down on his nose, short hair shaved up high in back, pipsqueak arms, solemn voice that broke into adolescent duck quacks. Why had he come on this trip? Some dark lust for punishment had driven him to travel back to the Land of Pain.

  And he was subsidizing the trip! Oh God. The ultimate irony! Fifty-seven thousand dollars he was paying!

  You escape the cold steel bars of high school and go off to a happy life in radio broadcasting as the host of your own show and then, through weird circumstance, you donate money to pay for your old neighbors to visit Rome and you go along for the honor and they punish you for your good deed. What a dope! Dumbhead! Stoopnagel! You could’ve spent that money on a fourteen-day luxury cruise on the Baltic and instead you are jammed into a van with the Jealous & Resentful!

  The van hurtled down a ramp to the freeway, hit another pothole, which drove a nail into Mr. Keillor’s spine, and flew past construction sites, piles of concrete slabs and logs and gravel, and then a grove of palm trees and twelve-foot rosebushes. They drove through a little village, tangles of fencing and bungalows perched on hills, clinging to steep rocky slopes. It looked like California. Apartment buildings and every apartment with a balcony that overflowed with billows of flowering vines. Margie leaned forward and tried to commit it all to memory. She had expected Italy to be exotic, swarthy men sitting on wine barrels under arbors strumming mandolins, singing in plaintive tenor voices as big-hipped ladies swung their skirts and old nuns laughed and old men argued, hands in the air waving, but of course Italians go to offices too. They have dental appointments. They must go shop for toilet paper and put it on the roller. And then she saw a burst of bougainvillea growing out of an old decrepit apartment building, five stories high. One enormous plant. And then gigantic wisteria plants that looked like they were eating a three-story house. “Look,” she said. And someone said, “What?” And then it was gone. A string of bicyclists crossed an overpass as they sped under and then Carl said, “How long until we get there?” Like a child on a car trip. “Fifteen minutes,” said Mr. Columbo.

  “What if our rooms aren’t ready?” said Carl.

  “Then we’ll walk around and look at the sights,” she said.

  “Won’t they be ready?” said Lyle in a pained voice. “Did we request for them to be ready?”

  Mr. Columbo hit the brakes and took an exit off the freeway—lento, adagio, thought Margie. “Scenic route, very historic,” he said—and now they were speeding through vineyards, the slender gnarled trunks and canopy of intertwined vines webbed above. “Best wine in Italy comes from here. Ghirlandaio. Only two hundred barrels a year and they leave it in the wooden casks for five years and it costs a hundred euros a bottle and it is said to have special powers”—he glanced around, decorously—“to restore the lib-i-do.” He pronounced it in a whisper.

  “What about lipids?” said Daryl.

  “Sign me up for a case,” said Margie.

  They came along a street of houses in pastel shades, coral, pink, pale yellow. A golden house with green shutters. He pulled over in front of a mud-colored building with pockmarked walls. “Artillery shells,” he said. “Americans thought there were Germans inside and they blasted it with mortars and couldn’t knock it down and then a child came running out waving a white bedsheet and they held their fire and then fifty or sixty more kids came out. And then two clowns in whiteface with big floppy shoes and little ooga-ooga horns on their belts. Luigi and Carlo. They were from a circus whose wagons had been destroyed by bombs and their trained dogs had run away and also a llama and an old spotted horse. The two of them got caught in the Allied tank assault and ran for shelter in the castle and found the cellar full of terrified schoolchildren. So they painted themselves up and got into costume and put on a show, whacking each other with the slapsticks. When they heard an incoming shell, Luigi bent over as if to let a great fart and when the shell hit, Carlo fell down and waved his arms to disperse the smell. It was very funny. They did some of their act for the Americans who suspected the clowns might be booby-trapped. They made them drop their trousers right there in front of the schoolchildren, which the clowns did, clowning around, their hands clasped over their privates, eyes rolling, heads bowed. And then a shot rang out. A German sniper on the roof. An American raised his rifle and blasted away and the sniper fell four stories to the pavement and landed with a big crunch and that was the end of the comedy and the war resumed.”

  The van drove on.

  Mr. Columbo slowed down coming through a piazza and pointed off to the left—“There’s the balcony Mussolini came out on when he spoke to the crowds”—and they looked up at the little balcony. “After the war, they went around and shot people they called collaborators, but hell, almost everybody collaborated. If you wanted a nice life, you went along with the Nazis. There weren’t many heroes.”

  “Well, we came here to celebrate a hero,” said Margie. “An American by the name of Gussie Norlander. He was from our town. He died in the liberation of Rome.”

  Mr. Columbo shrugged. “All dead men are heroes, and the rest of us are cowards.”

  They drove on across the Tiber, a shallow snot-green river, with stone walls and broad footpaths on either side, the dome of St. Peter’s looming up.

  “Will we have the opportunity to see the Vatican?” said Father Wilmer, changing the subject.

  “I am at your service,” said Mr. Columbo. “I am here for you. Whatever you want, I am here to provide.”

  “Assuming that is acceptable to Mr. Keillor,” added Father. “I don’t wish to dictate where we go. Probably he has seen it all many times.” He turned to the author. “I heard you had been given a VIP tour of the Vatican once.”

  The author shifted uncomfortably in his seat. His legs were numb and his bladder was about to let go. He told Father Wilmer that at the Vatican, VIP stood for “Vastly Ignorant Protestants” and that his tour guide, Father Reginaldo, had an aversion to crowds and so the tour skipped the Sistine Chapel and the Michelangelo Pietà in favor of the Vatican kitchen and a warehouse where shards of statuary were glued back together.

  “What’s that I smell? Chicken?” said Daryl, and some of the pilgrims snickered.

  In Minneapolis, Irene had read a story about chicken flu in Europe that caused nausea, loud whirring sounds in the eardrums, hallucinations, vomiting and diarrhea—as much as four gallons in one outburst—followed by shame and depression. She had passed the story around to the others, and while they pooh-poohed it—still, the thought of four gallons of poop suddenly blowing out of you was hard to get out of your mind. “What if it’s true?” said Irene. “Better go easy on the chicken until we can test it out.” And she and a few of the others agreed that Mr. Keillor could be the guinea pig. The man had a strong constitution. Let him chow down on some chicken and then keep an eye on him.

  Irene had purchased what she believed to be a chicken sandwich at a food stand in the Rome airport and then noticed the label, cervello, brain. It was fried like an egg, between slices of bread. She unwrapped the tinfoil and looked at Mr. Keillor who was resting his eyes. “How about some breakfast?” she said. He looked at the sandwich. It was the first kind gesture anyone in the group had made toward him, it had been o
ne insult after another—Clint Bunsen saying, “People keep telling me to read your books and somehow I never find the time.” Lyle suggesting he see a doctor about nasal blockage. In the Minneapolis airport, Marilyn Tollerud going on and on and on about Mr. Keillor’s radio rival Ira Glass, Ira Glass, Ira Glass, idol of urbane young women from coast-to-coast, and how much she enjoyed his writing, his mumbly style, and how she listened to podcasts of Ira over and over and over and over. Even Evelyn had let him have it: she said, “I heard you stopped drinking and I thought, Thank God.” (This, from a woman who had tended bar at the Sidetrack Tap and seen men plastered, loaded, bombed, stewed, fried to the gills, falling down shit-faced. He had gotten drunk in the classic WASP style, quietly, alone, at home, late at night, straight whiskey in a glass, listening to Bach organ chorales, weepy, no trouble to anyone … How did he come to be the goat here?)

  The chicken sandwich looked good. “Thank you,” he said to Irene. “That’s very sweet of you.” And he ate it, all of it, aware that everyone in the van was watching him. “Delicious,” he said. “My grandma raised chickens and I used to catch them when she needed to slaughter a few. I don’t know if I ever told you this story—I used a wire clothes hanger to catch them by the ankles—they could run really fast—it was a wire hanger that you unwind to make a long straight wire with a hook at the end—they’d run into the lilac bushes and I chased them—I was probably seven or eight at the time—my dad cut their heads off—anyway, this one time I remember …”

  Margie listened to his convoluted tale as the van slowed in rush-hour traffic. How did this man ever come to be telling stories on the radio? Finally, thank goodness, the van pulled up in front of the Hotel Giorgina and she disembarked. Stood on the sidewalk. Rome. Sunny and warm. A brick-paved street, little Fiats and scooters parked. A broad yellowish concrete walk with marble curbs. Two women approached, arm in arm, in dark heavy coats, one of them walking a little brown dog in a red plaid sweater. Handsome well-put-together women who strode past, paying her no mind, inviting no comment from anybody.