WLT

Ray was glad to see 1950, he told Frank. The old decade had worn him out and the change would be a tonic. “We’ll get rid of a few more old bastards and some more girls will become legal age,” he said cheerily. For New Year’s Eve, he opened his house, Villa Fred, and threw a WLT party—Vesta was in Florida, speaking at the Tampa Chautauqua on “What Radio Can Do to Change Minds.” Slim and The Blue Movers played jitterbug music and even Dad Benson got tipsy. Late in the evening, he almost fell on Frank and Maria, who had scootched down behind a divan and were necking like a house afire. He gazed down at Maria, her top three buttons unbuttoned and Frank in a lather, and cried: “Good! Go to it! Stolen pleasures are the sustenance of life!” They dressed immediately.

It was a big week. Vince Upton said he wanted to quit Up in a Balloon and Ray talked him out of it. “But I only meant to work here for a summer,” said Vince. “That was twenty years ago. I wanted to earn a few bucks and take Sheridan to Mexico.” He turned to Frank. “Twenty years I’ve been riding around in the damn balloon, Frank, and I’ve never been anywhere.” Ray walked to the window, looked at the Foshay Tower, and gave him the Speech. Frank had heard it six times before. These are hard times. Radio’s in trouble. We’re a family. We have to hold the ship together. We need you. It’s your decision but remember that it affects each one of us. People here look up to you. I know it’s hard. But if you give up, it makes it that much harder for the rest of us to keep on going. Vince stayed.

Ray bought a television the next day. He saw it in a store window on Harmon Place as he walked to work. His doctor was making him walk and Ray was trying to avoid it. “There is nothing between here and there that I want to see,” he said, but then he came upon a crowd peering into the store window. General Television & Tires said the sign. There were six screens inside, and he stopped and watched. One screen showed the head of a blonde woman talking, then a chimpanzee drinking coffee, then a man pointing to a chart, then a car crashing into a wall, and the other five screens showed the crowd on the sidewalk. An immense camera on a tripod took the picture. A dozen people stood in close and watched themselves on the screen and another thirty squeezed in and looked over their shoulders. There was no microphone and nobody said a word. Ray went in and bought one from an old coot in a red checked suit. “You’re lucky, that’s the last one on the floor,” he said. “We’ll see about that. Have it sent to my office,” said Ray.

The television was as big as an icebox and the screen was the size of a dessert plate. They trundled it in and set it against the window and pulled the shade. A pinpoint of light appeared in the center of the screen, which a minute later blew up into a fuzzy picture, a man behind a desk talking, but Ray couldn’t get sound. He turned the volume all the way up and only got a loud hum. “Here, make this work,” he said to Frank.

Roy Jr. was there and Ethel Glen and Uncle Art, and Dad Benson came in, and some people hung back in the doorway, as if the thing might explode. Frank swivelled the antenna and turned a knob that made the picture flip over and over, and he made it go black and then bleached white. Then he turned the channel knob a notch and BLAAAAAAUGHHH—the thing blared so loud he jumped and the people in the door ducked away. He turned it down. “There,” he said. “Just a matter of adjusting it.”

Ray sat behind his desk and Roy Jr. perched on the desk, his arms folded, and Art and Dad took the couch and Ethel leaned against the wall, then sat on the floor, and the people in the doorway edged into the room, a few and then more and then about ten. Everyone was quiet. The man on the screen was reading the news, apparently. He looked up as he finished each sentence. He was young, wore a dark sportcoat, had a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses, and once in awhile he glanced off to his right, nervously, as if someone were holding a gun on him. There was a clock on the wall behind him and a plant on the desk. It looked to be dead.

The news seemed to be about Truman and the Republicans in Congress and a steel strike and the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane in Washington, the President embroiled, people had been killed, but nothing in the news was half as interesting as the young man, not that he was interesting but that he was on television, and that was fascinating. Once he licked his lips, and Ray said, “Look. He’s nervous.” He licked them again.

His script lay on the desk and he took off the pages one by one with his right hand and then, suddenly, for no perceptible reason, he used his left. His eyes appeared dead: when he looked into the camera, he didn’t look all the way in. When he came to the end and looked up and wished everyone a good day and smiled a grim smile, it was a little disappointing. It would’ve been something if he’d knocked the plant off the table, Frank thought.

A commercial for Chrysler was next, and it was good —a man in a tux walking from car to shining car and by each car a beautiful woman stood, in an evening gown with long white gloves, and she stroked the car a long loving caress and smiled a sexy smile as she stepped back and gestured down toward its underside. It would’ve been something if her dress had fallen off but you didn’t really need it to, she was all right with it on. Another commercial, for a headache powder, and then a puppet show, a pig and a goose and a horse, and behind the backdrop, a man doing squeaky voices. “Oh boy!” cried the pig. “Heyyyyy!” whinnied the horse. The goose bit them both and they bit back. Then a clown came on and scolded the goose. “What do you say, boys and girls?” he cried. “Should we spank Goosey-Loosey?” There were forty children packed into a little grandstand and they looked wild, demented, they screamed “Yaaaaaay” so loud you could see their tonsils. They punched each other and jumped up and down and waved like maniacs when the camera came at them. Ray went out for a cup of coffee and when he came back, a western was on. “Turn it up,” he said.

A posse rode through the woods and along the river, a long line of riders snaking through the trees. A lone rider raced far ahead, a man in a fringed buckskin jacket who kept looking over his shoulder and urging his horse on—but did not whip him or pull out his six-gun—just rode hell-for-leather and then stood in the saddle and leaped for a tree branch and hauled himself up into the foliage a moment before the posse swept beneath him. Then he jumped down, whistled, and his horse trotted out of the underbrush. He mounted and rode back toward town. There, at that moment, four masked men were tying a struggling woman to a chair. A gag was in her mouth but she tore it out and yelled “Lemme go!” The leader of the four laughed a rich, evil laugh. “Lucky’ll be here, he’s on his way, you just wait and see!” she said, fists clenched, fighting them off for a moment. The leader chortled. “Lucky cain’t come. Lucky’s goin’ to a necktie party,” he said. “And he’s the honored guest!” The four of them laughed as if it were the funniest joke they’d ever heard in their lives. She slipped from their grasp and tore into the next room and barred the door. Lucky came galloping hard along the river, bent low, his head against the outstretched neck of the big palomino. They hit the river full-speed and disappeared in the plume of water and bounded up the other shore and galloped away into the trees. The girl locked the door. The leader of the four stepped back and drew his revolver and blasted the lock.

“Have you seen Dad?” asked Dale Snelling in the doorway. “It’s noon. We’re starting the theme.” Dad leaped up off the couch and careened off down the hall. Ray waved toward the radio—Frank switched it on—the voice of Reed saying, “. . . by Milton, King Seeds and as we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table where Jo is fixing lunch . . .” and a soft clinking of utensils and Faith saying, “Well, I wonder where he is.”

Up in Moorhead, Roy had looked at television too. He wrote to Ray: “Television offers the aural quality of a telephone and the video quality of a very poor snapshot, and to produce this requires an immense and unwieldy technologic apparatus, the equivalent of the brontosaurus. It will fall of its own weight. It simply will not work. It corrupts everything it touches, makes it flat and dull and empty. It is less than photography and less than radio and it combines the two to make something that is nothing but a minus. It is novelty, and it has its day, but when radio returns, when it comes for the second time, television will go the way of Smell-o-Rama. Perhaps it will have some use in hatcheries.”

Frank knew Lily Dale but not that she was Ray’s sister Lottie. He only knew that when her fans showed up to visit with her, he had to make up excuses why they couldn’t. She brought sunshine into their day and they wrote her faithfully and told her how wonderful her singing was, that when they heard her theme song, “Just a Little Street Where Old Friends Meet,” they immediately started to feel cheerful, so they wanted to see her, of course, her oldest, dearest fans.

Lily was young and lovely, coquettish, a true romantic, one of those gloriously cheerful young women who fly through life untouched by sorrow or dismay, but Lottie was fifty-four years old, big and squat, riding in a wheelchair, her face dark and bloated, her eyes black slits, her hair like wisps of moss. Cheerfulness was all she had left in the world. “Oh, don’t look at me!” she cried to Frank, the first time he was assigned to help haul her upstairs. “I haven’t done my hair or anything. Oh, you dear boy —what’s your name? Frank White? Oh, I’ll remember it. I’ll remember it forever. It has the ring of true nobility. Oh, be true to me, Frank.” “Is she crippled?” he asked Gene later. “Polio,” he said. “And weak ankles. One o’ these days, we’ll have to winch her in through the third-floor window.”

And yet, she was a star, as much as anybody, and she knew it. Frank and two janitors lugged her out of the Antwerp every morning and onto the hotel loading dock in her heavy wooden caneback wheelchair and onto the freight elevator, and she smiled like it was the grand staircase of the Ritz. The thick wheels were too wide to go easily through doorways so there was plenty of grunting and janitors muttering, “Son of a bitch! This isn’t going to work. Grab her leg and let’s try it sideways,” but she acted like the Queen of Sheba borne on the shoulders of Nubian slaves.

“Darling!” she cried to Gene. “Come and give us a kiss!” Gene rolled his eyes, but she paid no heed and took his jowly face in her hands and planted two soft sweet kisses on each cheek and said what a joy it was to see him. They might leave her parked in a dark corridor like a broken bicycle but the moment someone appeared around the corner, she smiled and held out her arms. “Oh darling, would you mind fetching a vase for these gardenias! Oh, that’s a dear. How kind of you.” She brought fresh flowers and dispensed them to those who shared her love of beauty, and she praised their new clothes, their hair, and especially their eyes. Eyes revealed the soul within, the longing for beauty. The janitors, Gene, Frank, their eyes spoke of nobility and compassion to her, they were the eyes of poets. Especially Frank.

One day the chair lost a wheel and four of them had to carry her bodily upstairs to Studio A. One took her knees, one her shoulders, one her right haunch, and Frank took her left haunch. She was dead weight and slippery in her silk dress and his left hand slipped into her crotch and he said, “I’m sorry,” but she said nothing, simply bore up with invincible good cheer, ever the duchess, ever regal, even with his hand between her legs and his sweaty face pressed against her immense breast, sobbing for breath, his back scraping the doorpost. He couldn’t move his hand lest he lose his grip and drop her, so onward they struggled, through doors and around tight corners, and her blue dress hiked up above her fat knees, her calves in thick sleeves of fat, big blocks of blubber around her knees, her unspeakable thighs, and yet she smiled graciously, was a star. She acted like being hauled upstairs like a sack of potatoes was her biggest honor to date. If you dropped her in a pigpen, he thought, she’d hoist herself up and find something to admire in pigs.

“How can anyone sing in a world where such things happen? Look at this!” she cried, and thrust out a newspaper story about a herd of starving cattle in Montana, a terrible car crash and the stunned spectators looking at the overturned wreck in which three young people were killed by the westbound Empire Builder, a photo of a dead child in a foreign land, its dark eyes open—“What chance does music have in a world of such suffering, while the rest of us go about our business as if it never happened? It almost makes a person lose heart!” She cried a little, then apologized and dried her tears, and got ready to be Lily Dale.

She prepared by thinking of her mother, who died when Lottie was small, and trying to be exactly like her. Her mother, Helen, never said a bad word about anyone, always looked on the bright side, and accepted trouble and heartache and grievous pain as faint shadows in a world bathed in sunshine. Her mother died of appendicitis at the age of twenty-four. “Isn’t it hard to always be cheerful?” Frank asked her. She said, “For me, yes, but, darling, my mother always wore a smile. She never let sorrow get a foothold.”

John Tippy had been her accompanist since 1931, the year of her debut on WLT, and as closely as Frank could figure, the two of them had stopped talking in 1934. Tippy was a thin, pock-marked man with a blond wig that looked like a very bad hat. She brought the sheet music in a shopping bag, stacked it on the piano, Tippy arrived, took off his coat, and played it. They never looked at each other. She never mentioned having an accompanist or referred to him by name. That suited Tippy just fine. “My musicianship has deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t play for a children’s ballet class,” he told Frank. “By accommodating myself to her voice, I lost all sense of musical phrase and rhythm. I used to be a pianist of some accomplishment, no Paderewski but I did perform the Blount Concerto No. 1 once with the Minneapolis Symphony under Oberhoffer, but I’m nothing but an old box-thumper now. A whorehouse piano-player. That’s me.”

Tippy was a chain-smoker and the old Steinway had a row of burn marks across the lid where he had parked his butts, and his smoking was ruining Lily’s voice, according to her. “Almost twenty years I’ve been breathing his smoke and my voice gets croaky and by the end of the show I can hardly talk,” she said, “so I gave him orders to stop, and he wouldn’t, so I just don’t care to have any more to do with him. Oh, Frank, I wish you played the piano. We’d make such a wonderful team.”

The two enemies met every morning, back to back, her in the chair under the big boom microphone, and him sliding into the studio and onto the bench at the last possible second, and he played a few bars in F-major, switched suddenly to C-minor, jumped into A-flat, and she sang “Just a Street” in D-major, or sometimes in H-sharp, and chirruped “Hello, you dear dear people,” and sang “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” a request from the Barnums of Bigelow, and dedicated “Gently Bends the Willow” to the dear ones at the Ebenezer Home, and finally, a favorite of the Sorensens in Bagley and also for the Titteruds and the Wallace Petersons, “Backward, Turn Backward, O Time in Thy Flight.” And then a “Bye everyone! Keep looking up! And remember: the way to feel happy is to smile. See you tomorrow!” as the evil pianist slithered at the keys, trying to throw her.

“It’s my birthday!” she told Frank when he came through the studio door, a present from Ray in hand (a statue of a shepherdess). She wanted Frank to come for supper at her apartment at the Antwerp. She’d fix him meatloaf and potatoes, and play her Galli-Curci records. She wanted to tell Frank her life story so that when she died he could write a proper obituary. He lied and told her that he lived too far away.

“That’s what a Lutheran pastor does, Frank. Lutherans don’t require much theology, just caretaking. When God talked about believers as sheep, He was thinking of Lutherans. Anyway, I was out there on the windswept tundra, ministering to the lonesome and the outright desperate, and believe me, I was set upon by large women on a regular basis. These were farm women, big-boned, meaty women with sinewy arms and powerful haunches and quick on their feet, from years of herding animals, and something about me aroused them—I was younger then and had hair—and I’d be sitting in the kitchen drinking their coffee when suddenly they’d make a play for me. Brush against me, adjust my lapel, straighten my hair. Then they’d be leaning across me to reach for something—Oh, don’t move, they’d say, and reach over for the salt and I’d feel a breast jab my arm, or they’d lean down to pour me coffee and there it is, the old mountain of love, pressed against my shoulder, and pretty soon she’s all over me, arms akimbo, sitting on my lap. There’s a women’s trick from way back, the lap hold. Once I was saying goodbye to a woman who’d been edging around me for an hour, nudging, brushing, rubbing, and sliding, and she cries out, ‘Oh, let me give you a big hug.’ Well, I knew it was a hug I’d never get out of alive, and I took off running and she took off after me—around the chicken coop and the corn crib and into the barn and up to the haymow—and I was about to plunge out the haymow door and into the manure pile when I felt that hay hook grab my jacket and she hoisted me into the air and there I hung, my feet dangling down barely scraping the ground and my hands up over my head, tangled in the jacket that was hanging on the hook. I hung by my wrists for fifteen minutes while she had her way with me and it was ugly and shameful and I don’t want you to ever ask me about it again, but just remember: don’t let her sit on your lap. In a chase, however, I believe you have the advantage of her.”

Frank donned his blue jacket and a red tie and spritzed a whiff of Lilac Rémoulade behind each ear and walked down three floors. When Lily Dale opened the door, the apartment was ablaze with candles. He counted sixty. Dinner was on the table, lamb chops and tiny potatoes, and the Victrola was playing soft piano music. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek and she held on to him and gave him an embrace. “Oh, you darling,” she whispered. “You beautiful darling. I do love you, and you know it, don’t you.”

“My mother was named Helen Pointer and she was such a saint. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in abject poverty, but nevertheless learned to cherish beautiful things, but I believe it was poverty that led her to marry my father, who was Norwegian. His name was Molde and it suited him well. My brothers take after him in certain ways. He was in the ice trade and it suited him well. He was a hard man. Nothing pleased him. He criticized and made fun of everything about me. Nothing was good enough. My only pleasure was when I sang in church. I was the alto soloist at Hennepin Avenue Methodist. It was my one moment of grace and beauty, Sunday morning, and I did that for years and then my brother Ray invited me to sing on the radio station. I remember that moment exactly. It was the moment that saved my life. Everything was so beautiful then, and people were so very kind to me, and so are you, Frank. Take me to bed.”

And with pounding heart and panic in his brain, so that he could hardly think, he helped her into the wheelchair and pushed her through the hall toward the bedroom. He had waited so long for this moment, had rehearsed in his mind exactly how it should go, where to put his hands, what to whisper, the order of the removal of clothing, the rapid succession of thrilling moves and the seismic upheavals and the moaning and shouting, but he had never imagined that the woman would be as big as this. The thought of intimacy with this immense pile of flesh—where would a person begin? And who had enough lust in his heart to be able to get the job done? Me, he thought. But of course she had meant no such thing. “Help me up,” she said, and he did, and she took a step toward the bed and folded up on it and a moment later she was snoring. He put a comforter over her, turned out the light, cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, and closed the door behind him, leaving behind the pad of paper on which he had written the names of her mother and father.