CHAPTER 8

Patsy

WLT kept growing and growing, and one day Ray spotted a door marked “Artists Bureau.” He had never heard of such a thing. He opened the door and there were six women around a table typing like blazes and a man in a green silk vest jabbering on the phone. “What do you do?” asked Ray. The man told him the Bureau had been in operation for six months, booking WLT artists on tours of the Midwest. “Last month, we did more than $8,000 worth of business,” he said. Slim Jim and His Bunkhouse Gang with Miss Ginny and Her Radio Cowgirls were the No. 1 draw. “They’re packing them in like sliced bread,” he said. Ray had never heard of Slim or the Cowgirls. “Oh, yes,” the man said, “they’re hotter than biscuits.”

WLT’s quarters were so spacious that Ray heard rumors that musicians lived on the premises undetected, sleeping on couches, bathing in the men’s room, cooking their meals on hot plates they kept in desk drawers, hanging their damp undies on radiators to dry, and Ethel told Ray that one of the Radio Cowgirls and the fiddle player in the Rise and Shine Band had moved into Studio B and lived there for six weeks, conducting wild parties where gospel singers high on benzedrine played strip poker and naked ladies waltzed through Accounting at midnight. The Radio Cowgirls, she said, wore short skirts and a lot of fringe and tassels, telltale signs of prostitution, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the gospel singers. The Shepherd Boys could kill a quart like it was lemonade and then they would jump in the sack with anything in high heels, hop out and sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” and feel so good, they’d jump right back in.

“I don’t want you to lose a moment’s sleep over this,” Ray told Ethel. “I will handle it.”

So Ray got to know the Cowgirls, Patsy Konopka in particular. She was slender and lovely and sang alto and favored silk blouses and wore her hair tossed in a short bob. In the Cowgirl photographs, it was her face that your eyes rested on, her vibrancy, the light in her face—he asked her to dinner and invited her up to the sixth floor for a drink.

“You have a look in your eyes that no woman I ever knew ever had,” he observed, edging closer to her on the couch, and she explained that the light in her eyes was due to theosophy and positivism. She had been a theosophist for more than eight months and studied with a Gnostic master in Sioux Falls who could telepathically open a can of coffee. She had learned there the secret of The Oval of Life and the Four Powers (Ability, Capacity, Facility, Vitality) and the Seven Doorways of Celestial Selection. These are brief openings in the cosmos, when a great leap of spiritual knowledge is attainable. Now she was turning her attention more toward ethereology and the science of electivism with its vast lore on the determining power of radiation. Radiation was Patsy’s true passion, the study of the nimbus of light around the body. The practiced eye could read it like a book.

“What do you see in me?” he whispered.

She studied his nimbus and frowned and read his palm and then she asked him to take his shoes off so she could read the lifeline on his soles.

She held his bare foot and thought long and hard. “You are a man of a generous soul but starved for truth. You lie to yourself. You are swift of intuition, but you lack depth. But you are seeking to improve. You know your time is not long. You try to penetrate the darkness. And you are trying to get me to take my clothes off.”

He agreed that this was true and inquired if it were possible.

She said that there is a hand of inevitability that guides these matters and it can only be perceived with time.

They shared a glass of sherry, and then he drank another. They sat cheek to cheek and he told her about New York, how majestic it was in the fall, the rattle of the trains and the deep-carpeted hush of the big hotels and the golden light at dusk on the avenues and the happy throngs pouring into the theaters and afterward the cafes, and he kissed her. He told her that for all her knowledge of electivism, he knew something about pleasure, pure simple enjoyment, which is the main advantage of adulthood: the freedom to amuse ourselves as we like. He kissed all her fingers, then her lips and her ears, and along her neck, and then he opened her blouse. The buttons were like butter.

“I need to know your sense of the emanations of this moment,” she said, softly. “Do you sense the fields of light?” Yes, he did. Her shoulders were so young. He slipped off her blouse—how lightly it slid on her skin— and opened the straps of her light blue chemise. It fell like a leaf to her waist, revealing the two dazzling white emanations of her brassiere.

She said the pulsation of energies was very strong, he should almost be able to feel it. He did. He reached behind her, his left cheek touching her little ear and a delicious wisp of her black hair brushing by, and unclasped the Three Hooks of Advancement and gently removed the garment. He set it on the couch and lightly touched her dark nipples, big as half dollars.

“Now,” she said. “Turn out the light and tell me what color is the nimbus. Around my body you may see a spectrum of shades, shadows tinged with color, called the antinodes and antipodes, but one light is strongest, the parhelion, do you see it?”

“I see so many colors—”

“Which color is strongest to you?”

“White.”

She grimaced. “I thought you might be my true opposite, but I don’t think you see any pulsations at all,” she said. She put her blouse on. “You weren’t even close,” she said.

“Let me try again.”

She smiled. “I am psychic, I know what’s on your mind.”

“I want to know more. You’ve shown me so much I was not aware of and I want to go farther.”

“All you want is to get on top of me and shove it in,” she said. “I want to have sexual concord with your totality.”

He said he was not only interested in that, that he was interested in her, that sex was his way of getting to know her, that he admired her as an artist, that he could get the Cowgirls their own radio show, perhaps a Saturday night spot.

“I’m so sick of yodelling, I could spit,” she said. She told him she wanted to be a writer. Her dream was to write plays and movies and stories that would help people understand the principles of theosophy—not the tangled thickets of exegesis that emerged from the disputes and polemics of the recent past but the simple beautiful spirit of the Theosophist Golden Age in Baltimore in the late 18th century, writers such as Carleton Phipps and Jane Delton Phipps, his daughter. The Phippses were able to say great things in a few words that seemed to have a nimbus of their own.

“Jane Phipps was the one who said, It is always too late for grief. That is a sentence that I keep coming back to and keep finding something new in. Or Patience expects joy. Or First content, then wisdom. Or Fate smiles on the one it fools. Most people think of theosophy as reams of dusty tomes, and some of it is, but so much of it is so simple and pure.”

Ray wished he had guessed blue instead of white. Blue might’ve gotten him a long way. But he couldn’t help himself. He told Patsy that maybe he couldn’t read a nimbus as fast as some people but he could see talent and intelligence, and he offered her a job as a writer at forty dollars a week. She accepted with pleasure.

Patsy Konopka got a desk in the Women’s Bureau, run by Miss Hatch, where two home economists sat and wrote answers to all the questions listeners wrote in, such as how to remove stains from spills on carpets and couches. Service. It was Vesta’s idea. Patsy sat at a big Royal upright and banged away at scripts, practicing the discipline she had learned from the positivists, who believed in automatic writing, allowing one’s innate sense and intelligence free flow and then trusting what you write and not editing it. That was the hard part.

She created Golden Years (1937), about Elmer and Edna Hubbard, who, dissatisfied with the frenzied pace of life in the big city and the emptiness of material success, move to the little town of Nowthen and open a coffee shop and do big favors with an unseen hand. They also become vegetarians and devotees of sunshine. But behind the counter of The Golden Rule Cafe, they seem like an ordinary old couple, patiently attending to customers, especially the blowhards who park on a stool and squawk all afternoon, and only the listener knows that the Hubbards are multi-millionaires who regularly bestow anonymous gifts through the mail. A squawker would enter and plant himself at a corner table and squawk (“Whatsa matter widdis java here? You people clean yer pot widda grease rag or what? Nobody cares ennamore. That’s da problim. Nob’dy cares.”) and then a good person would come in and perch on a stool and bless his lucky stars (“Oh my but life is good! Doggone it! My crop failed and the cow went dry and I need a back operation, but praise the Lord, I’m a lucky guy”), and then maybe you’d get a discouraged good person who sees a world of suffering and wonders why God doesn’t do something about it. Then there was a commercial for DeFlore’s Florists (“Hi, I’m Betty and I’m a DeFlore florist trained to come up with exactly the right floral gift for that special person you want to please”) and then back to Nowthen, the next day: the bewildered and grateful recipient drops in to tell the Hubbards—“A trip to Florida! And another check to cover the cost of Sheila’s teeth! Who in the world could’ve done this?” And Elmer murmurs, “More coffee?”

It was so good, Patsy came up with another one just like it, Love’s Old Sweet Song (1938), the story of Folwell Hollister, wealthy New York executive, who moves back to his hometown of Hollister Corner after doctors tell him that he has six months to live. Folwell buys the farm he had always wanted, the old Reddin place, and stocks it with prize Orpington hens and blackface Highland sheep and he cuts kindling and hoes the tomatoes and observes the slow graceful turning of the seasons, and then falls in love with Jane Maxwell, his boyhood sweetheart and the woman he should have wed instead of chasing off East, who is married to Thomas Reddin, a louse. To relieve the pain of “a love that cannot be,” Hollister does good for others in small, anonymous ways. It was hard, week after week, to compose rhapsodies to falling leaves and snowy fields, even for a positivist, so one week Mr. Reddin was killed in a gold-mine explosion and Folwell swiftly married Jane, who called him Folly, and the show took a sharp turn. Jane was quite a looker, even at sixty, and Hollister Corner was a place she’d been wanting to escape since she was eleven, and so the Hollisters purchased a large home in Golden Valley, a stone’s throw from Minneapolis, and they founded The Metropolitan National Advertising Agency and became tycoons and only visited the farm on weekends. They travelled to New York twice a year to see the opera and ballet.

“We could go to New York and see the sights and you could be inspired even further,” Ray suggested to Patsy, but when he guessed her color that day (red), he was not even close (white).

Patsy took over Avis Burnette and turned her toward Eastern philosophy. “People of other countries have much to teach us,” she told Craig, who was anxious to marry her. “Have you ever heard of Tsu Li who said that some men’s absence is good company?” He had not.

She created The Hills of Home and The Best Is Yet to Be (1942), further variations on the theme of weary-striver-finds-contentment-in-simplicity, and she even took over Friendly Neighbor when Dad Benson hit a dry spell and was unable to write Jo’s lines. “Don’t know what a woman’ d say in that situation,” he said, and for a few days poor Faith Snelling found blanks on her script:

DAD: Looks like your apple tree is going to bear this
year.
JO: (Something about the tree)
DAD: Good point. Maybe I should.
JO: (More about tree.)
DAD: Well, you know what they say. Never talk about
rope to a man whose father was hanged. Yessir.

Patsy created Arthur Fox, Detective and Another World and The Lazy W Gang and many more, writing a hundred pages a day, automatically, without trying to make it shine. It just came out. One of the Phippses had said that the way to get something done is to do it, and that helped, and so did the old positivist idea that “Nothing comes from nothing,” which Patsy interpreted to mean that you should take what you can wherever it’s available, a story from the newspaper, from novels, from other radio shows, but her main stimulus was time. The approach of a deadline inspired her. The clock ticked, and she wrote, and the big hand crept toward airtime, and the pages came faster and faster. She believed in the power of threes, based on an old theosophist concept of virtue as triangular, and always looked for threes in a story, trios of characters, trilateral story lines, beginning-middle-end, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, quest-defeat-redemption. She believed in the morning, as her father had taught her (“Some work in the morning may neatly be done that all the day after may hardly be won”), and rose early and went straight to work at her typewriter. She believed that friends steal away months and families steal years, so she stayed single and she kept friends at bay by working day and night. She moved into the Antwerp Apartments, next door to the Ogden. She left the Women’s Bureau when she found that references to household spills were creeping into the scripts—Forrest dropping his glass of cranberry juice when Jane tells him that perhaps Thomas may have survived the mine explosion after all, and Babs dropping her platter of Tuna Ting A Ling and prune whip when General Mills announces that he and Fritz have brought home a pet elk on The Hills of Home. Babs wept for the waste of good food and the elk gobbled the fallen casserole right up. “A little disgusting, the sound of elk’s lunch,” Ray told her. “Couldn’t Babs have cleaned it up?” She explained to Ray that she didn’t want the women in her scripts on their knees scrubbing floors. “You should meet my wife,” he said.