The River Queen (19 page)

25

“W
E'LL KEEP
you clean in Muscatine,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1927 when he worked for the Colliers Advertising Agency. I'm thinking of this as we are heading to Muscatine, a place I only know from Fitzgerald's jingle. He had already published
The Great Gatsby,
but he needed a job. Writers have to do all kinds of things to stay alive, don't they?

I have long identified with migratory patterns of midwestern writers. Cather, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, to name a few. They went east for opportunity, but they never lost their feeling for the Midwest. Twain's greatest works about thirteen-year-old boys in Hannibal, Missouri, were written from the vantage point of Hartford, Connecticut. Cather wrote her novels of the prairie long after she'd left for good. And Fitzgerald's yearning for the Middle West was always there.

What is it about these flatlands and fields of corn and wheat that holds the imagination? Was it what Proust said in his masterpiece? The only paradise is the one we have lost. For me the Midwest represents a simpler time, one of great clarity and few deceptions. As a friend once said, “It's a good place to be from.…”

In 1926 Fred Angell, a resident of Muscatine, steamed a hamburger, instead of frying it, added his own formula of spices, and offered the sandwich to a deliveryman, who declared, “Fred, you know, this sandwich is made right!” Somehow this got translated to “Maid-Rite” and the Maid-Rite sandwich.

Muscatine without Maid-Rite, the saying goes, would be like Muscatine without the Mississippi River. But the river continues to flow, though Maid-Rite, which closed its doors in 1997, is long gone. So are the pearl button factories that once kept this town employed. Once there were eighteen pearl button factories in Muscatine. Now there are three and they only make plastic buttons. The pearl buttons, made from Mississippi mussels, ceased being produced long ago.

Coming into Muscatine, we see old Victorian houses set on the hill above the levee, well out of the flood zone. This is what I'm coming to recognize on the river. The grand houses sit high. We are searching for a landing and hopefully a gas dock and we spot one just below the town. The marina is large and there's a courtesy dock.

“You've got plenty of room,” Tom says to Jerry. “You can even back her in if you want.”

“Naw, I'll just bring her in forward, I think.”

“Looks like you're turning up some sand here.”

“Yep,” Jerry says, not too happy. “I've only got four feet.” But he makes it and we come into a cozy spot on the dock.

Muscatine. The Pearl of the Mississippi. I want to go to the button museum, but it is closed on Sundays. Instead I head for a stroll through downtown. I walk by a plaque.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER, RECORD FLOOD CREST
, 25.58
FEET, JULY
9, 1993. A mark on the wall shows how high the waters rose.

I walk past Lee's Bakers and The Purple Hedgehog, whose window is filled with—guess what—big purple hedgehogs, fairies, wizards, a Bruce Lee poster, a Bob Marley “Mellow Mood” poster, and some very odd pewter figurines that appear to be dragons. I walk by Hubbies, which seems like a kind of men's store/bar with a wooden Indian in the back, a humidor in front. Nothing appears open in downtown Muscatine—not a coffee shop or a pharmacy, not a corner store—though many shops look abandoned and have
FOR RENT
signs in the window.

Tucked between Hazel Green and Her Sewing Machine and a carpet store with banners for the Muscatine Muskies in the window is a pawnshop. Inside I see the usual items. A bowie knife, fishing gear, rifles. Bicycles. Elvis photos. Telescope. Television sets. Lava lamps. But then there are the things I don't expect. Someone pawned his kid's basketball, a toy John Deere farm silo, complete with barn. A pair of chopsticks ($2.75). An alarm clock made up of farm animals ($17.29), a lamp with an angel, guarding children ($39).

But the main thing this shop pawns is musical instruments. Dozens of guitars. Shiny blue ones, a black one with flames licking out of its hole. Plain wood acoustical. All hanging by their necks from the ceiling like so many broken dreams, going as far back into the store as I can see. Saxophones ($399). An antique steel reed accordion made in Germany, complete with its box ($159). A slide trombone ($179). A pair of maracas ($3.99). Two boys on scooters zip past me. These are the first people I've seen. They are followed by a pale child on foot. The boys on scooters seem to be Hispanic or perhaps Native American. Or Middle Eastern. One boy has a scar on his cheek. The other wears a Stars & Stripes Band-Aid across his nose. The boy who is walking has bad teeth.

They almost run me over and I have to dash out of their way. On the other side of the street I notice an antiques shop has its door open and I slip inside. It is your usual tchotchke store, filled with ceramic cats, frilly tablecloths, old postcards. I start flipping through the postcards, looking for pictures of the river from earlier times.

A tall man in gray pants comes in with his diminutive blond wife and he's in search of coins. “I want old money,” he tells the woman.

I think to myself, “I could use a little old money too.”

“I like Civil War coins. Anything you've got.” She doesn't have much in the way of old coins, but they start speaking in very loud voices about the price of silver and how it's way up. How nobody can afford silver anymore.

“I've got a Little Daisy butter churn,” the wife pipes in. “I bought it at a yard sale. It didn't have its top so I only got the bottom. I thought I'd be able to find a top.”

“Bet you haven't,” the woman at the desk says as she swats the counter with her flyswatter.

“You're right. I haven't.”

“Well, those are real collector's items now. You won't find much in the Little Daisy line.”

“I've been having trouble finding those old coins as well,” the man booms. “Everywhere I go, I look for them, but silver is getting scarcer and scarcer.”

I pick out a few postcards of Muscatine from the 1930s and, as I go pay for them, I ask the owner if she knows where I can get a cup of coffee in town.

She shakes her head. She's sporting a tattered pink sweater and has cropped orangish hair. Probably younger than me, but looks a lot older. She keeps swatting her own back with the flyswatter. “Can't get any coffee in this part of town. You gotta go down to the malls for that.”

“Well, I don't have a car. Can I walk there?”

She looks at me like I'm crazy. “You don't have a car? How're you getting around without a car?”

“I'm on a boat, actually.”

I may as well have told her that I was traveling by intergalactic spaceship. “You don't have a car?” She's shaking her head. “No way to get to the malls without a car. There's no busses, no cabs.… You have to have a car or you can't get a cup of coffee in this town.” She introduces herself as Cindy. “You know, back in the 1970s Muscatine was a booming town. There was a lot going on here. Good restaurants, things to do. Then they built the malls. That just killed the downtown. There's nothing here anymore,” Cindy says with a wave of her flyswatter. “You can't buy groceries. You can't get toothpaste. You gotta drive to the malls. It's a conspiracy if you ask me.”

“A conspiracy?”

“Yeah, between the chains and the auto industry. I wouldn't put it past them.” She swats a fly on the counter, then swats herself again. “And there's no public transportation here. No taxis. If you're working second or third shift in the factory, you can't get home without a car.” She's still whipping herself with her own flyswatter as if in an act of self-flagellation. “Look at this downtown. There's no restaurants. No cafés. You can't get a loaf of bread or a cup of coffee here. Nothing. The malls ruined all of that. And the cars. They spent eight million dollars on riverfront restoration. Eight million. And what've we got? A nice place to take a walk. That's all.”

Later I will learn something from my husband, who is Canadian. Apparently films that are supposed to take place in the river towns of Middle America (the “fly over” states) are shot in Canada. For example, a film that is supposed to take place in Kansas City is being shot in Winnipeg. This is because Winnipeg looks more like what Americans think river towns should look like—bustling centers of commerce and vitality, not dead centers where nothing happens outside of its strip malls—than Kansas City itself does.

I pay for my postcards and leave. On my way back to the boat, I pass another pawnshop. It too specializes in guitars.

*   *   *

One day, while driving around the Midwest, my father and his brother, Sidney, got an idea. World War II had just ended and my father had gone back to Chicago from Pennsylvania, where he'd been working in the war industry. He had come to run his baby brother's architectural firm. I picture the day. A warm day of Illinois summer. The fields flat, the corn just starting to grow.

They looked at all this vastness and open space and an idea came to them almost simultaneously. What if we put all the stores in one location, they thought, instead of having them scattered all over the place or just on Main Street? What if you drive to these stores? With the war over, the economy was chugging along. So they began building the first shopping centers all over the Midwest. Elgin, Illinois; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Terre Haute, Indiana.

The buildings they built were precursors to the generic Home Depot or Costco boxes we have today. Charmless, depersonalized malls that began the depletion of Main Street and the downtowns. But then, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was all America wanted, and my father and his brother did well for a time. For two summers I worked in his office and I'd gaze at the sketches and models—the plastic trees, the fake families, the cookie-cutter stores. When he wanted to take me on an outing, we would go to a building or a mall under construction. I'd get a hard hat and we'd walk around, usually with an engineer and a set of plans. My father would say things like, “Let's put dressing rooms in the back” or, “Can't we open up those walls?” He seemed happiest walking along the wooden planks of sawdust-strewn floors.

My father had many dreams. One was to be a rich man, which he was for a while. And then he wasn't. He watched his wealth evaporate in bad deals, lavish spending, and taxes on property sold. In some ways he died impoverished. In his final years, when my parents moved to Milwaukee to be near my brother, my father would dissuade his Chicago friends from driving up to see him. He was embarrassed at his fall from grace.

He had other dreams—those he'd put aside. To be a musician, to “angel” Broadway shows. When I visited him in the last year, we'd watch television, which he couldn't hear. Or we'd sit and gaze at the squirrels building their nests. He marveled at how efficient they were. Other times he'd close his eyes and raise his hand and conduct Brahms or Ellington or
South Pacific.
He'd hum along, signaling for the trumpets to come in, for the drums to drop back. I could sit for hours watching him conduct the music he heard in his head.

I encouraged him to work on his memoirs for a while. After all he was a man who'd seen an entire century. And besides he wanted to be remembered for something he did. That mattered to him more than anything. One Christmas I went home and read the pages he'd written. There were dozens of them, single-spaced. They told of business deals he'd done, shopping centers he'd helped design. Real estate he'd developed.

For a man who was to me a musician and a great storyteller, these pages were incredibly dull. Devoid of imagination. I could barely read them. But perhaps most strikingly, there was no mention of my mother, my brother, or me. He even wrote about a shopping center he'd built the year I was born, but never acknowledged my birth.

“Dad,” I said when I put the pages down. “I'm not even in here. I want to be born.”

“You will be,” he told me with a laugh. “You will.”

But in the pages of his memoir I never was. We never were mentioned. He talked about bricks and mortar, about deals gone bad and others that came out good. But he never spoke of me. Or my mother. Or John. It was as if we never existed at all.

When he turned 102, he saw an item on the news. It seemed that a ferry called
The Lake Express
was being launched between Milwaukee and Muskegon, Michigan, and my father expressed a desire to go for a ride. I was stunned by this request. He was, after all, very old and frail, and it was a six-hour ride on what could turn out to be a cold and choppy voyage. But he was adamant.

Given that I am married to a newshound, I made a few inquiries. Apparently the public relations people for
The Lake Express
liked the idea that a man who was turning 102 wanted to celebrate his birthday on their ferry. Our family was offered free tickets and we were told the press wanted to interview my dad. He dressed that day in a navy jacket, a red and white striped tie, gray flannel slacks. He wore his beige cashmere coat and a gray fedora. Nobody looked as good as my father that day. In a folder in his lap he carried a file that read “Memoir.” I think he planned to hand this to the press. Instead they asked him one or two questions and snapped his picture.

In response to the question about why he wanted to take the ferry, he replied, “Because my arms will hurt less than if I row.” That made the headlines.

For six hours he sat on the deck while my mother, bored and annoyed, grumbled inside. He wore a blanket draped across his legs. When the captain announced that Mr. Morris had just turned 102, Dad gave a wave at the crowd. Strangers came up and congratulated him. He was in his element. He told tales of living through two world wars, of the Great Depression. “Yeah, I remember the invention of the airplane,” he quipped with one passenger. “I predicted it would never fly.”