There's Something I Want You to Do

On warm days in late spring or summer, the bridge serves as a kind of promenade, or gallery, for pedestrians, and on such days you are likely to see both visitors and city dwellers walking across it with no particular destination in view. That obese man, for example, with rainbow suspenders, who is wearing a frown and a faraway look, and whose wife — they both have wedding rings — has her hand through his arm for support, might he be a doctor, a pediatrician? Close behind him is a woman mumbling to herself, and you might imagine that she’s translating a poem in her head out of an Eastern European language into English. And on this side, speeding past you, are two people on bicycles, one of them looking vaguely Asian-American, the other, his girlfriend or wife (they pass by too quickly for the idle pedestrian to spot any evidence that they are married) smiling and happily shouting instructions in his direction.

Near Wilde Roast Café, a gay-themed restaurant on St. Anthony Main, you bump into a man who is texting on his iPhone, and you excuse yourself and continue on your way.

The day is beautiful: royal-blue skies, a light breeze, temperature in the high sixties, the sort of day that Sinclair Lewis, who once lived here, would mark in his journal as “p.d.”—that is, a perfect day. These people are gathered here like the Sunday strollers in Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, where the beautiful laziness, the indolence of those out for a breath of air, offers itself as a glimpse of Paradise. Delmore Schwartz, obsessed with that painting, wrote these lines in his poem “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine”:

The sunlight, the soaring trees and the Seine

Are as a great net in which Seurat seeks to seize and hold

All living being in a parade and promenade of mild, calm happiness:

The river, quivering, silver blue under the light’s variety

Is almost motionless.

How I love that poem. But, after all, how much happiness can there be, without its opposite close by, so that we can know what happiness is?

Look: the pedestrians gaze over the bridge’s side at the Falls of St. Anthony, the only falls anywhere on the Mississippi River. Who was St. Anthony, for whom these falls, and this part of the city, were originally named? A much-loved man, born in Lisbon as Fernando Martins, he became a Franciscan and took the name Anthony. Known for his preaching, he did not live long, dying at the age of thirty-five. Legend tells us that when his body was exhumed years after his death, his body was “found to be corrupted” (that is, it was dust), but his tongue was glistening and intact, thanks to the purity of his teachings.

Before Minneapolis was Minneapolis, it was St. Anthony Falls. St. Anthony is still known as the Saint of Lost Things, and even lapsed Catholics will sometimes repeat, “Dear Saint Anthony, please look around. Something is lost that must be found.” He is also thought to restore lost tranquility, and in one such prayer, he is beseeched “to restore to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss.” Father Hennepin, upon seeing these falls for the first time, described them as “astonishing in scope and power.” But much doubt has been cast on his histories, and the histories themselves are considered unreliable. Present-day historians consider Father Hennepin to have been a prodigious liar.

But the day is beautiful, all the same.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These stories had several early readers, and I especially want to thank Stephen Schwartz, Lorrie Moore, William Lychack, Robert Cohen, Eileen Pollack, and Louise Glück for their help. “Forbearance” is distantly based on an anecdote told by Miller Williams decades ago. My thanks to him and to Giuseppe Belli. Thank you to Kyle Kerr for the idea. As ever, my gratitude goes to Dan Frank and Liz Darhansoff.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love

(nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Gryphon, Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He edited The Collected Stories of Sherwood Anderson for the Library of America. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.