WLT

When Roy, who was spending the summer in Moorhead, needed a trigger tube, an ignitron, a triode, and a damper, and wrote to Gene, the letter wound up with Frank, and Frank went and found the stuff and mailed it, which led to correspondence. Roy was beavering away in his workshop on the farm, working on something he called a Resonance Radio, which would let a listener hear the broadcast voice as resonantly as his own, to give listening the same sensation as speaking. The Radio was constructed as a chair with big padded speakers mounted in the back and the headrest and in the arms, conducting sound directly through the torso. “This will be to your ordinary tabletop receiver what the airplane was to the North Coast Limited, and we will be ready for mass production in the spring, soon as we iron out the kinks,” Roy wrote on a postcard. But before it was perfected, he lost interest and moved on. He experimented with egg yolks as sound insulation and invented a microphone that could be thrown, to give a listener the sensation of flight. He wandered briefly into the realm of dual microphones —coming within inches of becoming The Father of Stereo—but gave it up. “Music is too complicated to be reproduced,” he concluded. “Too many different sounds: brass, reed, bowing, plucking, banging, strumming. Radio can no more reproduce music than a man can get pregnant.” He invented a radio jacket with speakers sewn in front and back, but it was too bulky for comfort and the underarm speakers jammed into your ribs and a loud selection made your head hurt.

Discouraged, he locked up, left home, roamed around Europe until November, 1948. He mailed disconsolate postcards from Vienna and Venice and Paris and London, lamenting the waste of his talents—“Wherever I look, I see things that I could have done. If only I had had the discipline. I’m one of those men who goes out to shop and comes home without his pants. Oh well. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and the world be drowned in a sea of pride.” He went to Glomfjord and found Søren Blak and was crushed to discover that the Plato of Radio, angered by poor reception, had hurled his Atwater-Kent into the fjord and now owned a Victrola and was an adherent of Patti Page. Søren felt that “The Tennessee Waltz” summed up life’s essence.

“Only yew know how much I have lost,” he told Roy.

Then, in his tiny cabin on the S.S. Jostrup steaming for New York, Roy hit on the idea of building a radio big enough for the listener to sit in.

“The power of radio is its intimacy and closeness to the listener. This is why the phonograph record on radio is such a disaster. Costwise, it made sense, but it removes the listener so far from the music, the music is lifeless. Too many steps in between: the recording, the pressing, the transmission, the reception—the music is translated five times before John Q. Radio hears it: six, if you include his eardrum. It’s straight out of Rube Goldberg! All the life of the music is dissipated in transporting it! Like a gasoline-tank truck made of lead. Like a picture of a picture of the Mona Lisa’s reflection in a mud puddle. That’s what playing a record on the air is like! The Radio Capsule will give the reality of sound!”

He spent the winter constructing it and in March he brought it down to Minneapolis in a potato truck. The Capsule was five feet high, six feet wide, and eight feet deep, resembled a deep-sea bathysphere, and you entered it through a hatch on the top, backwards, grasping the two steel handgrips and lowering yourself into the seat which lay at a 45-degree angle. It was dark inside, except for the dial overhead, and with the sound on, the contraption seemed to shrink skin-tight around you. The sound came from all directions. It bored right through a person. Most people who tried the Capsule found that, after one minute, they wanted to get out. It needed a little more room, and a little less volume.

Two Capsules were built, one more than the world seemed to require, and Roy moved on. He went on to cornsilk, which should be good for something, he reasoned, and if not for shirts, then rope, or parachutes, and by the time he had failed with cornsilk, he had already moved on in his mind to circularity. He woke up one morning and looked at his alarm clock. The circle! Of course! Why hadn’t he done more with that? All the work he’d done with lines and rays and angles, he’d completely overlooked the realm of sphericity and curvature and rotundity, of circularity and convolution. He peered into his cereal bowl and he studied the toilet as it flushed and he walked around and around the yard thinking about the Circle. And then he took the afternoon off and went bowling. When he came home, though his thumb ached, he sat down and wrote a note to Frank. “Despite my crazy family, I have had a wonderful life. How lucky I am! Tonight I want to get back to the problem of resonation.” That was the great thing about Roy. He never was able to concentrate long enough to become bitter. He kept moving. He forgot well.

Sloan heaped more and more work on Frank, which he was glad to get, and Sloan was glad to free up more of his time for the mail room and attend to the problems of lonely young women in the big city, particularly a girl named Annette, whom he was teaching how to give back-rubs. Sloan had a sore back. But as he devoted himself to her, he failed to notice that Frank was now doing his entire job for him, and doing it quite well, and a few weeks later, Roy Jr. called Sloan in and fired him just as his rear end touched the seat.

Not long ago, he had been Employee of the Year and won a bronze statuette of Winged Victory inscribed “For Meritorious Service” and “Through Truth, We Prosper” and now he was de-horsed, eating dirt. He found Frank in the hall, waiting for lunch, and punched him in the nose. “To hell with you, you little opportunist,” he said. He marched out the door and around the corner to the Red Eye Lounge, where the usual cloud of barflies, including most of the News Department, sat in the corner working on vodka slings. “To hell with it,” Sloan said, tossing down a Bombaroo and chasing it with a Banshee. “Roy Sodajerk, Jr., is a liar, a tax cheat, a thief from his own family, a raging idiot, a bully, a fraud, and a buggerer of young men. He doesn’t have a brain in his head. He is a greedy rapacious degenerate piece of trash and I am going to squash him like a bug. He will rue this day for years to come! I’ll tell the world all about him and his vicious ways.” Frank heard all this from a darkened doorway—Roy Jr. had sent him over, nose bleeding, with Sloan’s last paycheck—and he thought to himself, Don’t stay in radio too long. Keep your eyes open. Something else will turn up.

What turned up that spring was an actress from Milwaukee. Maria Antonio had black black hair and milk white skin and deep dark eyes, and looked like Donna LaDonna, the Girl of Studio B, must have looked in her bloom. Maria had been hired to play Corinne Archer on Love’s Old Sweet Song, Forrest Hollister’s first love’s daughter who brings the lonely millionaire the news that Lally pines for him in Palm Springs. Then she became Doc Winegar’s niece Dotty on The Best Is Yet to Be, the one who comes in from Chicago and breaks Bud’s heart:

DOTTY: Frankly, we’re not right for each other. Your speech embarrasses me. You talk funny, Bud.

BUD: But I’ve always talked like this.

DOTTY: I know. But I’m returning to Chicago in the fall. You’d never fit in there.

BUD: But I love you. Dotty, you’re the sun, the moon, and the stars to me.

DOTTY: I know. I’m sorry, Bud.

Frank met her in the hallway one morning at nine o’clock. He was bounding up the back stairs two steps at a time with Roy Jr.’s mail, and saw her on the third floor, landing, sitting on the concrete floor next to a bucket. “Don’t mind me,” she whimpered, “I’m only dying.” He asked if he could help, and she said, “No. Please go. I have never thrown up with anyone except members of my immediate family.” He asked what was wrong. She said, “I don’t think I’m pregnant,” and then looked up and grinned, to show it was a joke. The smile seemed to jar her insides, and she leaned her head over the pail and vomited three times. He put his hand on her shoulder, to show that he wasn’t disgusted and that he supported her in this difficult moment. She cleared her throat and spat, phthoo. “That’s the first time I’ve thrown up since I was six years old,” she said thoughtfully.

Then she looked up. “Why, you’re Frank White!” she said. “I know about you. You’re the one who slugged Little Becky.” She stood up. “Well done.” Frank picked up the pail. “I’ll take care of this,” he said. “I hope you’re feeling better. There’s a couch in the Women’s Bureau if you’d like—”

“Bye,” she said. He studied her as she went through the door and down the hall. How perfectly she walked. A green plaid skirt.

For days, he kept running into her. He had worked at WLT for six months and never laid eyes on her and now every day, two or three times a day, there she was, black hair, big smile, and all.

They went to lunch at the Pot Pie. He learned that she was twenty and had had many boyfriends. How many? Lots. She said, “I like older men. They can sit and talk about themselves without demanding that you show complete interest. How old are you?” Frank told her, “Twenty.” She seemed to recognize this as a lie, and to be touched by it. She put her hand on his knee. “That’s nice,” she said. His knee began to swell. He walked with a limp the rest of the afternoon.

He learned that she lived in two rooms upstairs in an old lady’s house on Willow Street, by Loring Park, and that the old lady was deaf as a stone. “We used to dance up there at two in the morning.”

“Who’s we?”

“I used to have a roommate, named Jean.”

“Gene?”

“Yes. Jean. She was my best friend for months but she smoked like a chimney. I tried hiding her cigarettes and it threw her into such a panic, she ripped her best jacket looking through the pockets. She smoked enough for two people, so I asked her to cut out my share, and she moved out in a huff. I tell you. You get no gratitude for trying to be a good influence on people.”

The next day, he brought her a pot of weak tea with sugar and lemons before the show, and she had him massage her neck muscles to relax her. That afternoon, he was in the Green Room, reading a story in the paper about Milton Berle, when she sat down beside him. He said, “Did you know that more people see Milton Berle’s television program in one night than have seen Hamlet in the past three-hundred-and-fifty years?” She said, “Who’s your favorite movie star?”

“Katharine Hepburn.” It was the correct answer, he could tell from Maria’s face. “Me too,” she said. “Katharine Hepburn is just exactly like how I remember my older sister when I was little. Tall and leggy and striding along and not letting anyone put one past her. When she got married, I came home from her wedding dance and bawled half the night. We shared a bedroom for all those years. I wore all her old clothes. I used her perfume. I tried to talk like her. At night we’d lie in bed and talk about how we’d go to Chicago someday and share an apartment and have jobs and go to swank nightclubs and meet men. That’s where my imagination stopped: meeting men. I couldn’t imagine who they’d be or why we’d want them. She married a sweet guy. They moved to Cincinatti and had two kids and then that was it for her. She gave up being interested in things. She became dull. I suppose he must’ve liked her that way. I think dullness is evil, I really do. I’m afraid of Minneapolis. I don’t want to be like them.” And then, as if she had said too much, she stood up, said goodbye, and strode out the door.

They went to a movie, about a detective who nabs a German spy in a small town in New Hampshire. When a vicious dog, fangs bared, suddenly tensed for the leap onto the detective’s back, Maria squeezed against him.

He walked her home and then they walked around the park, the moon shining on the quiet pond, the empty tennis courts, the horseshoe pits with their upright posts reminding him of what he was all too aware of. “You’re my lucky horseshoe,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “Frank, do you think I should change my name to Anderson?”

“Why give up a great name like Antonio?”

“People think Italian girls are loose.”

Are you? he thought. “I’ll tell you a secret. My real name is Francis With. It sounded so wispy. I changed it for good luck.”

But the good luck was her. She wove her fingers into his and looked him deeply in the eye. “I want to know you,” she said. Well, okay, that can be arranged. She turned her face up to be kissed, and he kissed her on the lips and felt a flick of her tongue. “Again,” she said, so he kissed her again.

They ate lunch together in his little office, sandwiches that he made the night before. He stood in the control room during her shows. The massages moved into the shoulder region and along the spine and under the wings. When he moved forward, along the rib cage, she pressed her arms to her sides, but glanced back and smiled, as if to say, “Not now, but soon.”

When Dotty returned to Chicago, having put a tremor in Bud’s voice and glamored up the poky people of Green Corners, Maria moved to Friendly Neighbor where Dad felt a young actress might settle Marjery down. She was taking to whooping it up during commercial breaks—lighting a smoke and rolling her eyes and saying, “Boy, this bra itches,” or “I wonder what folks would say if they knew Little Becky’s on the rag.” Dad had to ask Faith what that meant.

Worse yet, Marjery suffered from the giggles. The word “cheese” set her off once and once Dad said, “Hunger makes the beans taste better,” and she almost blew a gasket. Faith clapped a hand over the girl’s mouth and hauled her out of the studio—Dad was reminiscing about his late mother at the moment, and had just mentioned how hard she had had it with six children during a drought: hardly the time for Little Becky to shriek and guffaw—so they improvised for a few minutes, until Marjery got control of herself and came back into the studio, and her next line was “Pass the beans, Dad,” and she dropped to the floor by the microphone, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face contorted in ugly helpless laughter. All because she remembered the lines:

Order in the court—
The judge is eating beans.
His wife is in the bathtub,
Counting submarines.

So Patsy had to remember never to put beans in another Friendly Neighbor script, which she added to a long list of forbidden Becky words, such as “chicken,” “crabs,” “prunes,” “turkey,” “spaghetti,” “meatballs,” and “pickle.”

The next day, Dad, still thinking of his mother’s sad life, remarked, “Well, everyone is the judge of their own luck,” and Becky fell down foaming at the mouth again.

So Maria came into the story as beautiful Delores DuCharme, whose car broke down south of Elmville, near Round Lake, en route to Detroit. It was a sunny day and birds sang as she walked along and over the hill and saw Dad and Tiny in the skiff, fishing, about the same moment they spotted her.

TINY: Laws, Misteh Dad, but dey’s a gal oveh dere
who am jes’ ’bout de purtiest lil gal dese ole peepers
has evah peeped ’pon—an if’n she ain’t lost, den mah
name ain’t Tiny.
DELORES (OFF): Yoo-hoo.

They brought her home for lunch, naturally, it being lunchtime, and she sat down with Dad and Jo and Becky and Frank, Tiny having excused himself (“I’se gots to go do sumpin’ ’bout the Widda’s terminites, boss. Dey’s get-tin’ just fierce oveh dere”), and Jo gave Delores a bowl of tomato rice soup and a toasted cheese sandwich. “Sure is nice to have Frank back,” said Dad. (Frank had been gone for six months, prospecting in Alaska, because Randolph Cleveland, who had been Frank for all those years, had upped and gone to Chicago, and the new Frank, Dale Snelling, Faith’s husband, who had been playing gangsters and foreigners since the demise of Sunnyvale, didn’t sound much like the old one. Six months, Patsy thought, should be long enough for the folks to forget.) “Thanks,” said Dale. “So what do you do, Miss DuCharme?”

She was a dancer, she said, looking for work in a roadhouse near the Motor City and also looking for her boyfriend Bo, who’d gone there to seek employment in the manufacturing industry.

“What kind of dancer?” asked Becky.

“Hush, eat your lunch,” said Jo.

“Exotic,” said Delores.

The actors looked up. What did she say? They checked the script.

It said “exotic” all right.

On the fourth floor, Ray, rising from his chair to go upstairs for a nap, heard “exotic” and sat down again.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” said Dad. “My late mother loved to dance, but there wasn’t much exotic about the polka, I guess. Not if you’re from Windom.”

“I dance on tabletops in smoky bars full of truck drivers who like to reach up and stick dollar bills in my clothes,” said Delores, hesitantly.

“In your pockets?” asked Dale. “They put money in your pockets?”

“Sort of. And they like to put money up here. And down there.”

WLT performers were strictly cold readers, one and all. The notion of rehearsals was foreign to them. It was a matter of pride to stroll into the studio in time to pour a cup of coffee, drink it, pick up the script, glance at it, and when the red light went on, do what the words said to do. You answered the door, you pulled the trigger, you leaped from the ledge, you walked to the mailbox or to the gallows or to the kitchen—you wept, you thundered, you murmured, you gasped, whatever it said, and when the light went off, you chucked the script into a wastebasket and got the hell out.

And now, drifting down the stream of dialogue that had suddenly become a rapids, the cast backpedalled, reading slowly . . . with long pauses . . . trying to read ahead. “My late mother used to earn money dancing, but only in polka contests there in Windom. She won $25 once,” said Dad, saying each word separately as his eye scanned to the bottom of the page and the top of the next. When would he need to abandon script and maybe tell a story about his mother—“Speaking of my mother reminds me of the time . . .” But what time did it remind him of? What mother stories had he told recently? And would Maria know enough to abandon script too? or when he finished the mother story would she pick up again with men stuffing dollar bills in her pants?

“Sometimes you get $200 a night dancing on tables.”

“Gosh,” said Little Becky. “You get that much just to dance?”

“You can if you dance like men like to see you dance. You do the hootchi-koo and a little this and a little that and then you go sit with them for a few minutes. Have a drink. Talk. Hold their hand. Then maybe if they’re nice—”

Dad swallowed. And then Tiny came back. “Misteh Dad, I’se finished wid dem terminites an’ I’se wondrin’ if’n you got sump’n fer me to do here. Uddawise I’ll jes’ mosey back to th’ Lake.”

It was Wilmer, Dad’s brother, trying to be helpful and offer them an escape. The actors looked up. What did he say? There stood Wilmer—without a script. Wilmer is winging it. Maria looked to Dad. But Faith spoke first. “Maybe you could take a look at my—at my—clematis, Tiny.”

“Yo cli—what?”

Now Homer the sound effects man perked up his ears. He had been clinking coffee cups, rattling silverware, slurping soup, all easy business, but what in blazes is a clematis and what sound does it make? He thought, whirr.

“My clematis. It’s on the back porch.”

Homer looked around behind him. Shit, where’s the screen door? It’s summertime. All I’ve got here is a big heavy oak door and a creaking door and a car door and a jail cell door.

“No sense rushing out there to prune a vine—it’ll wait,” said Dad. Then he heard a body fall. It was Becky. The reference to prunes had felled her and she lay in a heap, her body racked with giggles.

“Sit down and have a cup of coffee,” offered Dale. It was all he could think of to say, Faith having knelt down to stifle the child. But her sobbing could plainly be heard. “Little Becky’s kind of allergic to that clematis. It makes her wheeze. That’s why Jo wants it trimmed back, I guess,” added Dale.

“That’s right!” Faith called up from the floor.

Roy Jr. and Frank and Ray all arrived in the control room in time to hear Dad say, “Well, anyway, we’re pleased you dropped in, Miss Douche.”

“That’s not her right name, is it?” whispered Ray.

Dad was perspiring. He held up two fingers. Page 11, he mouthed. Last page. They were on page 9. The others flipped ahead to page 11, except for Wilmer who misunderstood the signal and went back to page 2, the fishing scene. Wilmer arrived there first.

“Ah sho recommends you puts a new wum on dat hook, Misteh Dad. Ah blieves yo fust wum is near ’bout daid.”

Dale didn’t hear him. “Jo, this is the best coffee cake you’ve ever made, I swear,” he said. “But I’d give anything to have a piece of your jelly roll.”

“Miss DuCharme,” said Dad, “let me show you to your bedroom.”

And the organ came up with the closing theme, and Reed did the back-announce, and the studio was still. The actors stood stock still. “Jesus H. Christ,” said Dale.

And that was what made Roy Jr. come striding red-faced into the studio. “Never say a word near a microphone that you wouldn’t want to go out on the air. Never,” he said. Itch the engineer had been so convulsed by “Miss Douche” he forgot to the mike switch and so “Jesus H. Christ” went out to the friends and neighbors in radioland and so did Faith’s “Get your fat little butt off the floor and out the door,” spoken to Marjery but, as Jo speaking in Elmville, it could only have been directed at Delores.

“Don’t ever curse in a studio. Don’t ever assume a microphone is off. You’re professional radio people. You know that.”

“Well,” said Dad, mopping his face, “it could’ve been worse. At the moment, I don’t see how, though.”

And then Mr. Odom popped in to say that Patsy had called to apologize—some pages got left in the script by mistake. “Some mistake,” said Roy Jr. He turned to Ray. “She’s your problem. I can’t do anything with her. You hired her and you’re keeping her here, for reasons that have nothing to do with radio, if you ask me. Fine. Do what you like. But don’t ask me to manage a situation that’s unmanageable.”

“Patsy Konopka is a hell of a writer,” said Mr. Odom.

Roy Jr. turned and cocked his head and blinked. “I didn’t ask for your advice, Mr. Odom.”

“If you don’t want my advice, then don’t talk about Patsy Konopka in front of me.”

“Patsy is fine,” said Dad, “but she isn’t writing for our audience. I don’t know who she’s writing for.”

Ray said he would talk to Patsy, and Roy Jr. went off to call up Marjery’s mother to tell her he was giving Marjery six weeks’ notice.

Listening to the last minutes of Friendly Neighbor from the control room, Frank didn’t find it funny. Not at all. The actors in the studio looked pale and helpless, and Maria trembled for ten minutes after it was over. He hugged her. She laughed and then she cried. “I’m going to get fired,” she said. “They’ll throw me out on the street because I played the bad woman. You wait and see.”

“No, they won’t,” he said. “It’s only a part in a play.”

“I might as well pack up and go back to Milwaukee,” she said. “Oh, Frank. Just when I was getting to like you!”

So Frank ran, three stairs at a bound, up to Roy Jr.’s office. He was still talking to Mrs. Moore.

“Marjery’s a little old for ten. She’s been ten for almost fifteen years and she was fourteen when she started,” he said.

“Maybe Little Becky ought to grow up,” said the mother, hopefully.

“I don’t think she can grow that fast. So I think she ought to go back to her dad. All good things come to an end, and this is one of them. Anyway, I think that Jo and Frank are going to have a baby.”

“I’d like to talk to Ray about this.”

“Honestly, Ray doesn’t deal with this anymore. He turned this all over to me, Mrs. Moore, and I don’t like to be the one to have to tell you, but I am the one, and you just have to accept it.”

“I think that if people knew—if the listeners out there were aware—that you are getting ready to dump Little Becky like she was a sack of potatoes—I think there’d be a real uproar out there if people knew.”

“She’s a popular girl, don’t think I don’t know it. But I think the listeners would be a little surprised if they knew that Marjery’s twenty-nine years old.”

“I know those people, Mr. Soderbjerg. I think they’d be behind us.”

“I’m not taking a vote, Mrs. Moore. I’ve made up my mind.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Roy Jr. hung up and said, “Had your lunch?” and he and Frank strolled over to the Pot Pie. Then Roy Jr. said, “Naw, let’s splurge.” And they walked downtown to Charley’s. They ordered oysters and prime rib steaks. Frank had never eaten oysters before, and when the plates arrived, he thought of asking, “Is it raw?” and then thought, “Naw, of course not.” And ate all six of his, doused in red sauce. He was in love with Maria. He could eat anything.