Mayor of the Universe

  “Dad?” he said, looking through the iron railing that surrounded the second-floor open hall.

  “I was just getting my laundry,” said WW, placing a filled plastic basket on a patio table. “Did you just get here?”

  “Yes,” said Wanda, and taking Fletcher’s hand they made their way down the single flight of stairs and to the patio area.

  “You’ve got to get up early to get a machine in this place,” said WW, sitting at the table. “Can you believe a big place like this only has two washers and two dryers?”

  “Dad, I hope you haven’t eaten, said Fletcher. “We’d love to take you out for breakfast.”

  WW scratched his long old-man earlobe. “Uh . . ."

  “What’s the matter, WW?” asked Wanda, taking a seat next to him.

  “No, I . . . well, the thing of it is, I’ve got an appointment. Absolutely forgot about it, and absolutely can’t miss it.”

  “That’s all right, Dad,” said Fletcher, feeling concerned, as well as rejected. He dragged over a plastic chair from another table and sat down. “Is it a doctor’s appointment? Is everything okay?”

  WW waved a hand. “I’ll be singing at my doctor’s funeral is what I’ll be doing. Nah, this is . . . well, it’s a lady friend of mine. Jolene is her name. We go to the racetrack every Friday.”

  “Oh,” said Fletcher, as the sting of rejection intensified. “Well, that’s fine, Dad.”

  “Hey, you could go with us—we’ll be back by supper!” said WW. “You ever been to a horse race? I’ll spot your first bet!”

  “We . . . we need to be on the road by noon,” said Fletcher.

  “I would have canceled, Fletcher, but it’s sort of this ritual we look forward to. You know, when you’re older, there aren’t a lot of—”

  “It’s okay, Dad. Really.”

  The three of them sat in the early-morning California sun, smelling the chlorine a man in a brown uniform was dumping in the pool.

  “Fletcher, will you come to see me again?” asked WW, his voice wavering with age and emotion.

  “Of course, Dad,” said Fletcher, covering his father’s hand with his own and squeezing it. “And maybe you can come out to see Wanda and me.”

  “In Pierre? I don’t know if I want to go back to Pierre. Too many bad memories.” WW needed a new eyeglass prescription, but he was still able to notice the look on his son’s face.

  “Aw, Christ, Fletcher, I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.” His cheeks puffed and sagged as he blew out air. “Another in my long list of stupid things said, stupid things done.”

  “That’s all right, Dad.”

  “You’re a good man, Fletcher.” WW turned to Wanda. “You got a good man, you know that?”

  Wanda nodded. “Do I ever.”

  “Me . . . I guess I just wasted so much time being a big shot. A big shot at the wrong things.” WW slapped his thighs. “Well, them’s the breaks. I should really get this stuff upstairs and get ready. Jolene’ll be here soon.”

  Still, he didn’t move, nor did Fletcher.

  “It’s not what you can do,” said WW suddenly, “it’s what they think you can do!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Fletcher.

  “That was one of the things I used to say to you when you were a little boy. You know, some words of wisdom. I was always trying to think up snappy slogans for you, to help you out in life.”

  “You were?” Fletcher’s recollection was that the things his father shouted at him were more like recriminations than snappy slogans.

  “Sure! Well . . . sometimes.”

  WW fiddled with the plastic woven strips of his laundry basket.

  “You know, I read Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie and all those guys, and in the end all you really need to know is this: life is funny.” Reaching into the plastic laundry basket, he took the hat perched on top of his folded T-shirts and put it on.

  Fletcher’s mouth dropped open. Wanda covered hers with her hands.

  “What?” said WW. While he knew what he had said was true, he didn’t think it merited their exaggerated reaction.

  “That hat,” whispered Fletcher, his hazel eyes wide. “Where did you get that hat?”

  “In the laundry room wastebasket! ” said WW, taking the cap off. “Can you believe someone threw this away?”

  He fingered the lettering on it.

  “It’s an old Yankees cap, and see, it’s got Whitey Ford’s signature—it’s probably worth a pretty penny.”

  He reached over and plopped it on Fletcher’s head.

  “From me to you, son.”

  He sat for a moment, wondering why Fletcher and Wanda were giggly as lunatics when just seconds before they had acted like they’d seen a ghost. Nothing against them, but in WW’s opinion, his strange son and daughter-in-law were perfectly matched.

  “You mind telling me what’s so funny?”

  “Well, it’s like you said, Dad,” said Fletcher, catching his breath. “Life.”

  23

  Sometimes we turn the page faster than we should.

  That was the thought that ran through Wanda Plum-Weschel’s head as she sat in the teacher’s lounge, casually leafing through a copy of Minnesota Monthly someone had contributed to the magazine pile.

  Uninterested in the ads for cosmetic dentistry and spa weekends available in her neighboring state, she was about to jettison the magazine in favor of Redbook when she flipped back two pages to more carefully study an image her conscious mind had barely registered. It was a photograph of a woman and an announcement under it that read: “Hear prize-winning Egyptian poet Hammar read from her new collection.”

  Wanda’s heart hammered as she telephoned her husband.

  “Fletcher,” she said, “we’re going to Minneapolis on Saturday.”

  “O-kay,” he said.

  In her eighth month of pregnancy, his wife had been making some strange requests, but they usually had to do with food. This appeal entailed a fourteen-hour roundtrip, but Fletcher was of the mind that whatever Wanda wanted, he would help Wanda get.

  “I saw you right away,” said Hammar.

  “I know,” said Wanda. She had been slightly uncomfortable when so many in the audience had turned around in their seats to see the person at whom the poet on stage had directed her forceful stare.

  “You must be Fletcher,” she said, offering her hand.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling as if he were in a trance.

  “You remember his name!” said Wanda.

  “I remember everything about that . . . incident.”

  “Me, too,” said Wanda.

  The poet had directed an usher to escort the Plum-Weschels backstage while she signed books for a long line of people.

  “Boy, how do you rate?” said the chatty young woman. “Isn’t Hammar great? I just discovered her poetry and I love it! She writes like the daughter of Emily Dickinson and Rumi!”

  In the dressing room, Hammar had directed Fletcher to take the chairs that sat under the long vanity and assemble them into a ring at which they now all sat, knees touching.

  “When is your child coming?” asked the woman, and with no self-consciousness she held out her hands, inviting Wanda and Fletcher to take them.

  “Next month,” said Wanda. “We’re thrilled.”

  “As you should be,” said Hammar.

  Even in this exchange, there was an intensity that raised the hairs on the back of Fletcher’s neck.

  “Did you win?” asked Wanda. “Are you the Mayor of the Universe?”

  Years dropped away from Hammar’s face as she smiled. “I won merely by being considered. And you should feel the same,” she said to Fletcher.

  There was a knock on the door, the voice behind it reminding the poet that she must leave in five minutes to catch her flight.

  “To further answer your question, Wanda, I did not officially win. No one did.”

  Both Fletcher and Wanda asked the same question.

  ?
??What?”

  “The Universal Head Council deemed the whole contest, as you say, a bust. They felt none of the Lodge members made a solid enough case as to why their candidate should assume the mayoral mantle. Borlot—you remember, Wanda, she was the chair—said her only defense was that there must have been something in the subatomic atmosphere to make the UHC even consider for a light year that someone from the human race was the one who could save the universe.”

  “Oh my,” said Fletcher, “is it that imperiled?”

  “Her statement was that the universe is at a crossroads; traffic is heavy and there are no stoplights.”

  “That’s exactly what Charmat told me,” said Fletcher. “The night I met Lodge 1212.”

  “But we, the candidates, beg to differ. We all agreed that we would use the talents that drew the Lodges to us in the first place to better direct traffic and put up those stoplights!”

  She leaned into them; the trio was now sitting so close their foreheads almost touched.

  “For me that means I must figure out how to help the world with my words.”

  “Have you told many people about—”

  “About transforming into a ball of fire? About the grace that allowed me to exist for that sublime moment between the rings of Saturn with alien Lodge members?” Shaking her head, Hammar flicked her swath of black hair behind her shoulders and shook her head. “No, no. All the important things I have to say would be dismissed by those afraid to imagine a world other than their own.”

  “We told a few people at first,” said Wanda. “But we didn’t exactly get a great reaction.”

  “And now,” said Fletcher, nodding toward his wife’s big stomach, “we’ve got the baby to protect.”

  Hammar nodded, her eyes on the bloom of Wanda’s stomach.

  “I do hope you realize, Fletcher,” she said after a moment, “that considering the UHC called off the competition, your disqualification is invalid. Therefore, I urge you to continue with your mayoral duties. All of the other candidates—including myself—are.”

  “Hammar—please!” came the voice behind the door, with a forceful knock.

  “And Wanda,” said the poet, standing up. “You’re a part of this, too. Figure out what you can do.”

  “I will,” she promised, and after a long hug that thrummed with a warm energy, Hammar was off to a reading in Chicago and the Plum-Weschels on their way home, with a stop at the Happy Chef because Wanda was craving a hot fudge sundae with extra pecans.

  “Hello, kids,” said Fletcher to a grade school assembly in Port Angeles, Washington, and after introducing himself he added, “and I’m Mayor of the Universe.”

  It was the 157th time he had introduced himself to a group of children in this way, the first being to the kids at his wife’s school.

  He had originally planned to address only second graders, reminding his wife that Tandy had once said their minds were the most exquisite open flowers in the garden of human thought.

  “Oh, Fletcher,” said Wanda, “I think every teacher feels that way about her students. At least every good teacher. Speak in front of the whole school.”

  She was on maternity leave but brought their daughter Tandala Olive (whose nickname would become Tandy-O) and sat in the back of the auditorium as Fletcher began his presentation by introducing himself as the Mayor of the Universe. She was proud that after the snickering and whispering died down, Katie Charbonneau, now a self-possessed third grader, asked the first question.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Excellent question, and one I asked myself many times,” said Fletcher, coming around the podium to stand at the lip of the stage. “What our mayor does—what any mayor anywhere does—is to help his or her town or city run as well as it can. Our mayor wants to make sure that citizens have what they need, but his real goal is to make people think that Aberdeen is the best place in the world.”

  “It is!” yelled a few young boosters.

  Fletcher smiled. “Then our mayor’s doing his job. My job is to make you think that our universe—and all the towns, states, countries, continents, and worlds it contains—is the very best. When a person thinks he or she’s part of the very best, they want to work hard to keep it that way.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Matt Hefflinger, also a former student of Wanda’s.

  “That’s what you need to find out. For instance, I found out I was very good at having fun—”

  The children giggled and whispered and little Raymond Erk (who would be in Wanda’s class when she returned to teaching after the new year) said, “I like to have fun!”

  “Excellent!” said Fletcher. “Who else does?”

  Every hand belonging to every student and teacher went up, and Mr. Manning, the fifth grade teacher, continued to hold his up after everyone else’s had gone down.

  “Yes, Jim?” said Fletcher, calling on him.

  “What does a person who’s good at having fun do—I mean for a living?”

  “Well, for example, in my wife’s case, and your case—they teach. In your wife’s case—kids, for those of you who don’t know, Mrs. Manning owns the the Cupcake House—you bake. You do whatever makes you happy, because that makes other people happy, and so on and so on.”

  “What if doing bad things make you happy?” asked Luke Peterson, a boy who considered the principal’s office his second home.

  Fletcher pondered what he considered an excellent question.

  “I don’t think you can do bad things when you’re happy. In fact, I think people have to be unhappy to do bad things. And those people need to figure out what makes them so unhappy, and then I’d hope they’d find people to help them not be so unhappy.”

  He looked at Wanda for reassurance—he didn’t know if that answer had made much sense—and felt better when she nodded.

  “How did you learn to be a Mayor of the Universe?” asked a fourth grader named Roberta who already knew she was going to grow up to be a microbiologist.

  “Well, it never hurts to study hard,” said Fletcher, playing to his audience, “but I had a lot of help.”

  “From whom?” asked Roberta, who excelled in English, along with every other subject.

  “Oh,” said Fletcher, “from a couple of aliens.”

  He got a big laugh, and he would soon discover that line always got a big laugh.

  Fletcher ended the talk by telling everyone that they should act as if they themselves were Mayors of the Universe and do what they could to make sure the place where they were was the best place ever.

  Soon he was receiving invitations to speak at schools throughout the state as well as in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska. His reputation spread and he had to hire an agent out of Minneapolis to keep up with his engagements.

  He was the keynote speaker for fund-raisers and conventions across the country, and the press noticed.

  “Are you the Mayor of the Universe?” asked a headline in USA Today.

  “Fun: The Ultimate Answer?” was an anchor’s lead-in on a nightly news show.

  “Daddy, he’s talking about you!” said Charles (a name his parents felt honored Charmat without burdening the boy with a name certain to cause undue teasing) pointing at the television set that displayed a picture of Fletcher to the left of the anchorman’s molded hair.

  “Is fun the ultimate answer?” asked Tandy-O. She was a child for whom, her parents were certain, little got past.

  “We think so,” said her mother. “Right, WW?”

  They had convinced Fletcher’s father, after suffering the blows of a minor stroke and the death of his lady friend Jolene, to come live with them. It was an arrangement that lasted a little over a year, until his death, and while Fletcher could never say his father completely changed his stripes, at least the stripes had faded.

  WW could be a cranky grandfather who more than once provoked hurt feelings or tears in his grandkids, but he also participated in tea parties and games of Slap Jack and Mouse Trap and was easily
cajoled into singing a goodnight song. It gave Fletcher immeasurable joy to see his children in their pajamas, jumping on the bed as WW crooned “High Hopes” or “In the Wee Small Hours” or “My Way.”

  Obeying his father’s wishes to have his ashes thrown into the Pacific (“I might have been born a Dakotan,” he wrote in his will, “but a bold guy like WW has got to wind up in California!”), Fletcher stood solemnly on a cliff in Big Sur, looking down at the rough slate-colored water.

  “I keep thinking about where the waves will take him,” he said. “Maybe toward Tandy.”

  “Definitely toward Tandy,” said Wanda.

  Taking a deep breath, Fletcher tipped the urn, and as his father’s ashes blew into the ocean, he was moved to shout, “It’s not what you can do, it’s what they think you can do!”

  “Nice eulogy,” Wanda said dryly, as they watched the gritty cloud of fragments that were WW blow into the Pacific.

  “It’s what popped into my head,” said Fletcher. After thinking for a moment, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “You weren’t the greatest dad, but you were my dad! And you sure had a lot of pizzazz and flair!”

  “Pizzazz and flair—he’d like that.”

  They stood on the cliff for a long time, the stiff ocean breeze flapping Fletcher’s pant legs and flipping up Wanda’s skirt. They watched a ship so far away that it seemed as if it were unmoving, pasted on the horizon. They watched as a teenaged couple set a blanket on the beach and then grab it when they realized they were not out of the range of the ocean’s spray.

  “It’s too bad people don’t get to hear their own eulogies,” said Fletcher presently.

  “Well, we could think that every time we hear someone say something nice about us, or do something nice for us, it’s sort of a eulogy. A living eulogy.”

  “A living eulogy, I like that,” said Fletcher, wrapping his arm tighter around his wife. “How would you eulogize me?”

  Staring out at the horizon, Wanda said, “I would say, out of all the billions of people on the planet Earth, a group of astute aliens thought Fletcher Weschel was the most fun.”