CHAPTER 22
The Antwerp
He moved back in with Art and Clare. He slept for eighteen hours, woke up, and went around the corner to the Rialto for a triple feature. He dug dandelions out of the lawn. He tried to stay out of the way. And then, in one black day, three terrible things happened —he lost the car, they kicked him out, and a girl laughed at him. The pearl gray Chevy was parked in front of the house and, bang, somebody took it during the night. The cops shrugged. Francis had left the keys in it. Welcome to the city, boy-o. There was no insurance, of course. Tough beans. “Looks like you’re on foot now,” said Art. Frank walked downtown to kill time in Dayton’s and caught the eye of a beautiful girl with long black hair as she bent down to re-arrange the ties in the men’s tie counter, and she looked away and snickered, a withering laugh, like she had seen something in his nose. And then Art took him to the Pascal for a big lunch, duck soup, porterhouse steak, mince pie, the works, and two bottles of beer. Art had a double bourbon. He was not slow getting to the point. Clare was feeling poorly, he said, and he thought it best if Francis got a room at the Antwerp. It was convenient, right next to the Ogden, a nice old brick apartment building that Ray Soderbjerg owned. “A lotta the radio folks put up there, it’s clean and cheap. I’ll take care of your rent until you’re on your feet. I got an appointment for you to see Roy Jr. about a job. You’re in, so don’t worry about it.” Art looked older and wearier than Francis remembered him being a few weeks ago.
“Are you okay, Uncle Art? You look peaked.” In fact, Art looked worse than peaked, he looked to be at the end of his rope.
“That’s Clare that’s sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. But I’m fine,” he said. To prove it, he pulled a quarter out of Frank’s ear.
“By the way, I’ve changed my name to Frank White,” said Frank.
“Okay,” said Art. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
“And thank you for everything.”
Art sighed. “I hope you make friends here,” he said. “That’s important. You’re too much of a loner, Francis. And I can’t be looking after you. You’re on your own now, you understand?”
Frank nodded. He understood it by the fact that Art did not say that he hoped Frank would come have dinner with them often.
Art said, “I’ll take you over to the Antwerp tomorrow. Introduce you to Mr. Odom.”
“Why not today?”
So they drove home to collect his things. Some clothes, a red mackinaw, a couple hundred books, a “Minnesota’s World-Famous Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit Mine” poster (a gift from Art), a plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln, a few games, Pit, Rook, Authors—amazing to think that he lived here for all those years.
“Take the bedspread and a couple blankets,” said Art, in an expansive mood. He peeled off ten twenty-dollar bills. Here.
When he pulled up in front of the Antwerp, Art didn’t make a move to get out of the car. “See you at work,” said Frank and opened the door.
“Did you hear Marjery Moore lost her boyfriend?” said Art, cheerily. “Robert Kellogg, that guy with the tweedly voice who played Vic. The nephew, the one with the dog. On Love’s Old Sweet Song. I heard he knocked her up and kissed her goodnight, drove to the depot, abandoned his car, and took off for Chicago with Victoria Marshall.”
“Peggy?” Peggy was the secretary on Arthur Fox, Detective .
“One and the same. So Monday afternoon both of them got killed. Vic’s car crashed head-on into a lightpole and an hour later Peggy left the office suddenly, without a word, and her body was found in the lake. A dangerous business, radio. But Robert and Victoria are shacked up in Chicago. What a honey she was. Boy, you want to talk about tits, she had a pair of tits woulda made a man out of anybody. Don’t tell the world, but I was the first one who ever had her. Late one night in my car. Good Lord. And I mean that sincerely. I didn’t even say a word. Just slipped my hand down there and held it until she got hot and started to hum. Oh boy. I was driving her home. Pulled over at 38th Street and those panties came off like autumn leaves and she climbed aboard the old pistol and she went around the block a couple times and then I got on top and man, what a girl she was. Cars going by, people peeking in the window—I didn’t care, I was on the stairway to stardom.” Art looked pleased and flushed at the thought of her. “One or two nights like that one, Francis: what more can a man ask?”
Frank’s room was 4-C at the Antwerp, but it was actually three rooms, kitchen, bedroom, living room, furnished with a brown sofa, a dark green table, and a double bed with two shallow troughs in it. His own telephone, GENEVA 2014. “Rent is $30 a month,” said Mr. Odom, the manager. “It’s a nice building with plenty of friendly people, if that’s what you’re looking for. There’s really only three rules around here and I forget two of them. The main rule is secrecy. If you’re having a good time, don’t let your neighbors know about it, especially after ten p.m. and before eight in the morning.”
Frank had hoped his room would face the YWCA next door, and it did, but the windows opposite him were dark and he doubted that one of them would be the locker room. A locker room would surely be in the basement and have frosted windows. But if the YWCA burned and naked women fled into the street, he’d have a front row seat. Meanwhile, he could drop slips of paper down and maybe a ventilator would draw them into the locker room and a naked dripping beautiful girl would find it lying on her towel, GEneva 2014.
Art dropped him there on Wednesday, and by Thursday he had made a friend, a woman named Ginger who was folding clothes in the laundry room when Frank went down to wash a shirt. She had bleached hair and eyebrows redrawn in a look of permanent alarm and wore white pedal-pushers and a translucent blouse. She told him about her divorce and how much she liked being single again and how much she’d love to see Chicago sometime. She held up a brassiere. “What do you think of this?” she asked. “Too seductive?” She had been on WLT herself, she said. “I was an actress and then I was Ray Soderbjerg’s little whore for five years. Now I work at a candy counter. At Kresge’s. Stop in. I’ll give you a Nut Goodie, or something.” Friday morning, Frank would go in to WLT to see Roy Soderbjerg Jr., General Manager. “A cinch,” said Art on the phone. “I got the fix in for you, Francis.” Frank.
It took the lady in 3-C, directly below Frank, several days to find out his name. She had three rooms, too, each with a table and a typewriter in it, and mounds of old scripts in apple crates. Patsy Konopka heard him come in Wednesday night, but was frantically finishing Friendly Neighbor and didn’t pay attention; on Thursday afternoon, when he clomped up the first flight of stairs, her ears perked up—his step told her he was young and slight of build—and when he ascended the second flight, she could hear modesty and purposefulness and decency in him. She was so tired of men: their breezy bullshit, the unbelievable lies they dished out. Lying so artless and bald-faced, you couldn’t imagine why they bothered. She rose from her typewriter, and as he walked past her door on the landing and headed up to the fourth floor, she got a glimpse of him through the peephole. His brown corduroy trousers were two inches short and he carried an armload of groceries and a big hank of brown hair hung in his eyes. “A plain face reveals an honest disposition,” she thought, and then she wondered if he might not be Jeanine’s old lover, Mr. Devereaux, the one she had met in New Orleans, finally arrived to consummate the romance, unaware of Jeanine’s embrace of the Baptist church and her marriage to Rev. Willetts and their joyful departure for the mission fields of the Belgian Congo. She braced herself for the task of filling him in.
“She’s happy, Mr. Devereaux, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it. I don’t think she’s any more Baptist than she is a pumpkin, but we believe in what we wish for, and she wished for a husband. She waited for you and talked about you for three years and how many years does a person have? Finally she said to me, Patsy, I met somebody. And a month later she said, ‘I wouldn’t mind having his shoes under my bed.’ And there you are.”
She sat back down at the typewriter with a page of Golden Years in it, the dreadful Coopers and their lousy money that they kept dishing out anonymously as if it made a cent’s worth of difference. Patsy wished they’d fall off a cliff. She wished she could write: Pistol shots ring out and cries of pain and confusion. She waited for Mr. Devereaux to dash out in the hall and lean over the landing and yell for Jeanine. I told her I’d be back this summer! I only went back to France to see my old mother! It’s true I’m three weeks late, but the freighter I shipped out on was blown Off course west of the Canaries and capsized in the south Atlantic and we drifted in the lifeboat and finally were picked up by an Argentine frigate and taken to Buenos Aires and from there to here, hitch-hiking, it takes more than a couple of days. Why couldn’t she have waited? But Mr. Devereaux calmly walked into the kitchen overhead and put the grocery sacks on the table and started to stash the stuff. He whistled a tune she didn’t recognize at first, and then he stopped and sighed. Why? He rustled among the bags and sighed a longer sigh.
He had forgotten something! Something simple and obvious, like sugar, or salt. She could take him up a jarful, as a welcome gift. His angel from below. Mr. Devereaux, I’m Patsy Konopka, I live downstairs. Among my people, there is an ancient tradition of welcoming new neighbors with a sack of salt and a jar of sugar. May life be sweet and may life have savor.
And then she remembered. She didn’t have any salt or sugar, she ate all her meals at the coffeeshop.
That day, Little Becky returned to Friendly Neighbor after a few days’ visit to some people in Littleton. Marjery seemed morose about her boyfriend running off. She gave Frank a listless look in the Green Room and didn’t recognize him.
BECKY: Dogs really care about you when it seems like nobody else does, don’t they, Dad? (WOOF) If you’re having a hard time, it doesn’t change how they feel about you. When you just need someone to put your arms around, well, a dog is always there—(Dog pants)
DAD: What’s bothering you, honey?
BECKY: I spent all the money from picking radishes on a box of chocolate lozenges and they weren’t any good and they’re all gone.
That evening, Ginger knocked on Frank’s door. She had met him in the laundry, she explained, and wondered if he happened to be busy. If so, she could return later. Frank did not invite her in, not even when she said she was very upset and wouldn’t mind a beer. He told her he was tired.
Downstairs, Patsy Konopka listened carefully. Ginger was moving fast. But the door closed and only one pair of feet came across the living-room floor, Mr. Devereaux’s. He stopped overhead, and stood in the living room, read a letter, then walked into the bedroom. His footsteps sounded like on The Other World where a man awakes at midnight in his bed and gropes around for the lamp switch and touches a cold brick wall and finally finds a match and lights it and gasps, for of course it is a tomb. She hoped he wouldn’t spot the big hole in his floor by the radiator. Sitting at her kitchen table, under the hole, she could hear him breathe up there. He tromped down the hall and stopped for a moment and then she heard his water, gallons of it, like a horse, hit the center of the bowl. And now Mr. Devereaux flushed, and headed to the bedroom. Patsy heard his clothes hit the floor. He lay on the bed. He was touching himself. She listened. She hoped he would not be alone for long. She wondered if he was sensitive to emanations or had any familiarity with the psychic realm.
She thought a clear thought about him and waited, listening, to hear if he was struck by it, but he continued, and then he gasped, and she returned to Golden Years. “Who is that out there on the street?” asked Edna. “Who?” said Elmer. They were in the cafe, coffee cups rattled, someone was griping about sore feet. “That handsome young man standing by the lamppost, his hands in his pockets, his red mackinaw pulled up around his ears, and his long black hair blowing,” observed Edna. “Oh, him,” said Elmer. Edna said, “Imagine being that young again, with the world laid out in front of you like the county fair. Imagine being twenty.”
