CHAPTER 14
Poor Children
When Art and Clare got in their big Chrysler to drive back home to Minneapolis, Clare was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. Jodie and Franny stood by the car and she put her hands on their heads. “You poor children,” she said. “We are undaunted,” said Francis, thinking of his other words, global and delinquent and archaic and erode. Art took two quarters out of Jodie’s nose and found a matchbook behind Franny’s ear. Art said, “You oughta come with us to Minneapolis, kiddoes. You’d have a ball there. Go to shows and stay up late and have ice cream for breakfast.” He said to Franny, “I could get you a job at the radio station. You could work for me there.” Clare sighed. “Come on, big shot, time to hit the road.”
After Art and Clare left, the house was silent except for the radio. Mother mooned around, daunted, day after day, her face pale and damp, global, in Daddy’s old brown bathrobe, her dark eyes hollow and her tangled hair hanging down on her shoulders. She eroded. She stayed upstairs and slipped around like a tattered shadow. She lay in bed day after day and held Benny’s big brass railroad watch, scorched black, the glass half-melted and the face crumpled. Every day when Francis came home from school she called out in a shaky voice, “Come here to Mother,” and burst into tears when she saw him. She seemed to sing when she cried, her mouth twisted agape, she shook, her eyes shut, and Francis put his arm around her. And then sometimes he was delinquent. He and Jodie sat at the table and tuned in their shows and ate their soup and Francis studied his vocabulary. They still set a place for Daddy at the end. Though he was archaic.
“He is happier now, in heaven,” said Jodie.
Francis said, “There’s no such place. It’s all a fabrication .” He wasn’t sure he thought this but it felt good to say it. And it was a word on yesterday’s list. But Jodie wouldn’t talk to him then, because he was evil.
“Daddy is with Jesus in heaven,” she said, “and you are the evilest person in the world and you will go straight to everlasting hellfire.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“Good.” Jodie smiled. “I’m glad. Because I want you to go.”
With Jodie not talking and Mother sick in bed, radio was the only friendly voice in the house, especially Francis’s good friends, the Bensons. He wondered about Little Becky: was she a real-life friend of Dad’s too, or just an actress? He guessed she was real and just as sweet as on the show. She sure added a lot to Friendly Neighbor. Her father had given her expensive clothes but never much love, and she was happy as a clam with Dad and Jo and Frank, and Dad had always wanted a grandkid, so it was a good deal for everybody. They got along without a cross word between them. Becky learned to ride a bike one day, she learned to dry dishes, she learned hymns, and one night Tuna gave birth to six kittens at the foot of Becky’s bed. They enrolled her at Elmville School, where Miss Judy, Frank’s mom, became her teacher, the wonderful widow-lady who had made the cake for Dad’s birthday every year since Mom Benson died from the coma, so Francis could imagine that Miss Judy would be dropping by more often and might bring her nephew Little Buddy, who yodelled.
One day, Jodie wrote a long tearful letter to Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles in Brainerd and asked to come live with them, and they took her, the little traitor. Francis asked her why she was going away and she said, “Because you’re not Christian. I’m going to live with a Christian family.”
Francis couldn’t believe she really would go away and leave her own mother and brother in their darkest hour, but the day came and Emma and Charles arrived and Jodie smiled and said goodbye and even kissed him—she had never kissed him before, but she gave him a dreadful dry little peck on the cheek. You lied, he thought. Emma told him to be good and take care of his mother. Charles looked ill, as always.
Becky loved it at the Bensons’, and her dad and Ginger never did stop on their way back from Moonlight Bay to get her, of course: they needed to go to Morocco first, and then something came up at his ranch in Montana and then he was off to London on a business trip, and by then she was enrolled in school so he decided to let her be. “It’s a good place for you,” he said, and considering what a vile father he was, he was right. He dropped in to see her a couple times a year for a minute or two and offered Dad money which Dad always refused.
“Uncle Dad,” Becky asked once, “why doesn’t my daddy ever write to me?” “He’s a busy man, Beeper,” Dad answered. “Humph,” said Jo.
Jodie almost never wrote to Francis but it was nice to think that she was listening to the radio at the same time he was, that they had something in common, and Francis sent in her name to the Jubilee and Leo read it on the Happy Birthday Club.
“Happy birthday to Jodie Marie, the most splendrous sister a boy could ever have—well, isn’t that sweet, Jens?”
“Ja, aye tink dat boy, he is a real sewper-dewper kid dere. By yiminy yes.”
After Friendly Neighbor, Mother sent him to Kohler’s Drugstore for more cough syrup. He stayed out as long as possible, playing in the ditch, digging snow caves until it was dark, then he snuck in the house and dawdled around in the kitchen, as she called again and again, “Francis? Francis?” When he slouched in by her bed, she bawled and held him tight to her bosom and said that he was all she had left in the world now, everything else was meaningless. She reeked of camphor and eucalyptus. The radio was on all day, chattering away beside her bed. She followed all the shows: the Benson family of course and Up in a Balloon and Down in the Valley. The house sat soaking in grief. Emma came every week, bringing hot meals in covered dishes wrapped with towels, taking away dirty laundry. It was rich food, which made Mother gassy, and when she pulled back the blankets, a cloud of farts flew out. Emma taught Francis to wash clothes and to use plenty of blueing and wring them out and hang them outside. It was scary in the basement, pumping water into the tub. The kerosene lantern cast a flickering light and sometimes shadows moved and Francis jumped. Maybe Daddy was mad at him for making him go on the train and get burned up, and maybe Daddy told Emma to send Francis down in the basement, down to where Daddy could punish him.
Mother kept the radio on even when the minister called. He perched on the side of her bed and patted her hand and listened to her shows with her. The church sent a stale chocolate cake and a box of old clothes. Once when Francis clomped home after school the minister rushed out of Mother’s room pale and distraught and said, “Oh! It’s you! Good! You’re home!” and jumped around buttoning his collar.
The next day Francis listened through the furnace vent, how the minister told her to lie still and close her eyes for the healing ministry and murmured about the efficacy of skin contact. On the radio, people jumped around on the Jubilee and hooted and told jokes and the Norsky Orchestra played and a man whistled like birds and tapped out tunes on his teeth. “Touch her, Lord, and make her whole,” the minister moaned. “Her body is open unto Thee. Our sister places her trust in Thee. Lord, she is entirely Thine. Touch her now, touch her and heal her.” There was rustling and murmuring. Francis crept away downstairs and dropped a casserole dish on the floor. The man came to the head of the stairs. “Are you all right?” he said. He was very tall up there and dark with the light behind him. Francis whispered: “Go away.”
He told Emma on Saturday that he was afraid of the minister and she said, “Don’t be silly.” He thought of writing to Dad Benson about it. Mother wrote in to the radio all the time. She wrote a get-well letter to Dad and another one to Dad’s sister Hannah, who was down sick with a brain inflammation brought on by worry. The name Hannah proved to Mother that the Bensons were Danes too, or at worst, Norwegians. She wrote to Hannah that she herself knew how hard it was to be sick and urged her to have faith in God, though faith had not worked thus far in her own case. She stayed in bed. Christmas passed, a dark gloomy day. Lily Dale sang “Beautiful Jesus” with a choir and the Bensons welcomed carollers to their kitchen and gave them cocoa, but Francis and Mother spent a quiet tearful day. She tried to go to the kitchen and cook a goose and she fell down the stairs and had to be helped to the couch. The doctor came and scolded her for feeling so sorry for herself, and that threw her into a state of collapse.
“Benny, you come back here,” she screamed. “You can’t get out of it as easy as that! Benny! I want you back now!”
There were more presents than ever, all from Art and Clare and Emma and Charles, and none that he wanted except the lampshade from Art with a Hawaiian girl on it. When you turned out the light, her clothes disappeared and her body glowed in the dark.
Jodie wrote that she sure loved her new school in Brainerd and she got all As except for one B + and she got a red Schwinn bike for Christmas and would come visit in the spring. She didn’t come with Emma on the food visits—she was too busy with her schoolwork, Emma said, and it was better for her not to get upset. “Jodie is more high-strung than you are,” said Emma. “She has an artistic temperament.” Emma was Daddy’s older sister. She was beautiful in a fussy sort of way and was proud of her singing, which was ridiculous. When she sang, she whinnied like a horse. The tragedy was hard on her nerves, which were bad to begin with. She was so broken inside, she said, that she could never sing or play the piano again, and Francis hoped she would be true to her word.
His only hope was Art. From those few words, “You ought to come with us to Minneapolis,” spoken between blue clouds of cigar, Francis imagined a happy life in the future, riding the trolleys, going to the ballpark, listening to the radio. Uncle Art was a big man at WLT, The Friendly Home in the Air. He knew all the stars. He sent Francis a copy of the WLT Family Album. It showed Bud & Bessie and Leo and Dad Benson and Little Becky visiting an orphanage and giving a wheelchair to a crippled boy, and it made Francis feel that if he could make it to Minneapolis, he would be all right.