WLT (13 page)

“I'm almost eleven. Is Becky still upstairs?” he asked.

“She's gone, son.” Dad squinted. “Weren't you up in the control room?”

“Yes,” whispered Francis. “Could you give her this?” He handed Dad the envelope, and the minute Francis gave it over, he started to think of more things he wanted to tell her and tell Dad. He wanted them to know everything about him. He wanted to invite them up to Mindren to meet Daddy and Mother and to show them his room and introduce them to his school. Everyone would clap and Dad would stand up, beaming, and say, “Thank you, boys and girls, and thanks to our good friend Francis With for inviting us.”
Our good friend Francis With
.

F
rancis With rode the Empire Builder back to Jamestown on Sunday, where Daddy picked him up. They were back in Mindren at 10 p.m., and the next morning Francis was in school. He told everyone that he had visited WLT and seen Dad Benson but nobody believed him. As usual, he left school at eleven-fifty on the dot with his sister Jodie and slid into the kitchen chair at one minute of twelve, just in time for the WLT chimes that signaled
Friendly Neighbor
. The chimes sounded exactly like Mother's big wall clock that bonged in the hall, and so he had always imagined that the Benson family lived in an old dark house like theirs and that the Bensons' kitchen table had a blue checked oilcloth on it and sat by the window looking at the muddy backyard and the Bensons' linoleum was faded green too, and their steep stairs smelled of pine disinfectant, and the wallpaper was forget-me-nots, and they used a white enameled thunder jug to pee in at night. Now that he had seen into the studio and knew that none of this was true, it made the show more exciting. And he refused to tell Jodie what Little Becky looked like. That was his secret now.

Francis was ten years and four months old. He was smart, thanks to his regular reading of
The Children's Hour
magazine and his membership in its Word Club. The words rolled around in his head:
brazen
,
genial
,
splendrous
,
succulent
. For lunch, he ate a baloney sandwich, two slices on white bread, lightly buttered, a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and a glass of milk; he could stomach nothing else. He could listen to no other station but WLT.

At noon, Daddy set his big railroad watch to the WLT chimes, snapped the case shut, and put it back in his vest pocket. Mother put the sandwiches and soup on the table, Daddy said grace, and they all ate quietly, listening, except Grampa, who was not in his right mind and also deaf. Grampa called them to the table by shouting, “Vootsie vootsie vootsie!” and then sat in his wicker rocker and talked to himself in Danish as Francis used his new words.

“Pass the salt, please,” said Jodie.

“I am very
amenable
to passing you the salt with
alacrity
,” said Francis.

“So pass it.”

“Are you sure you're not being
mendacious?
”

“You are so impossible.”

“You are very
perceptive
,” said Francis.

It was not such a good show that day. Becky wasn't on and neither was Jo. Mostly, Dad and Frank swapped fishing stories. Dad burned the soup. “There's no feast for the miser,” he remarked. After he and Frank said “Bye now, bye everybody,” there was an Evelyn Pie commercial and then a high husky voice hollered, “Come and get it!” and Excelsior Bread brought them
The WLT Noontime Jubilee
with Whistling Jim Wheeler and His All-Boy Band, Elsie and Johnny, “Ice Cream” Cohen, Norma Neilsen and Fargo Bill, the Olson Sisters, Jens Hansen the Norsk Nightingale, and your host, Leo (“Buy 'em by the Dozen”) LaValley. “Oh boy,” he yelled, “have we got a good one for you today, folks! It reminds me of the old Swede, one time he heard a joke so good he almost laughed. Let's kick 'er off with ‘Pat Him on the Popo, Let's Watch Him Laugh,' okay? Whaddaya say, boys!” The All-Boy Band yelled, “Go get 'em!” and Jim cranked up his fiddle, and they played the popo song and then the Norsk Nightingale sang:

That perked Grampa right up. On Grampa's bad days, he thought he was back in Aalborg as a young man, and on his good days, he was in Aalborg as a boy. The Norsk Nightingale somewhat penetrated Grampa's deafness and he leaned forward over his zwieback and muttered, “Hvad laver de? Hvad siger de?”
What are they doing? What are they saying?
Relax, said Daddy, and he put his hand on Grampa's. If Norma and Bill sang “Red River Valley” or “Beautiful Brown Eyes” or another song he knew, Daddy turned up the radio and sang, and if Whistling Jim played a square dance number, Daddy waltzed around the kitchen with Jodie or Francis standing on his shoes. Grampa said, “Ja ja ja,” and smiled down into his soup. Mother liked Leo and his jokes. “I can never remember a joke one minute after I've heard it,” she said, wiping her eyes from the last one, and sure enough she had already forgotten the punchline, and Francis had to remind her: “The lady says to Lena after church, you look like Helen Brown, and Lena says, I don't look that good in blue either.”

At twelve-thirty, Dad Benson came back and read the news, and Daddy sat and sharpened his pocketknife on a stone, and then more
Jubilee
, and at one o'clock, it was
Up in a Balloon
, a boring show but better than school, and at one-fifteen
Love's Old Sweet Song
, which Mother listened to, and Daddy if he was home. Daddy was an engineer for the Great Northern Railroad and worked the doghouse shift and ate his breakfast at noon.

Francis and Jodie got to hear those shows only if school was out or they were sick; they went back to school at one. It took a minute and a half if you ran. By the time the announcer said, “Don't go away, friends! We'll be right back!” Francis was already heading out the door, but of course the radio stayed tuned to 770, as nobody needed to remind Francis. Their dial was locked tight on WLT because of Uncle Art. WLT was their family's radio station.

Uncle Art was his favorite uncle. He drove a brand-new Chrysler, two-toned. He wore a blue suit with a hanky in the pocket and smoked cheroots. He blew smoke rings that turned either clockwise or counterclockwise and sometimes turned both directions and folded into a figure-8, and he could make smoke come out of his ears. He shot billiards and bet on horse races. He could flip cards into a hat at twenty feet, one after the other, either face-up or face-down, and if you said “What card?” he would tell you as it flew, “Nine of clubs!” and it usually was. Art knew where every card in the deck was: he shuffled cards the way a postman sorts mail. He taught Franny gin rummy, whist, lowball poker and firehouse poker and German poker, and cribbage. He didn't work as hard as Daddy. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow,” was Art's motto. He knew magic and made coins vanish and then come out of your ear and he made his hanky disappear and then turn up in your own pocket and when you pulled his pinky finger, he cut a soft little fart. You could count on this. Art did not miss a trick.

Uncle Art had had a chance to go to New York with Jack Benny who Art met when Art was the house manager at the Shubert Theater, but he stayed in Minnesota out of loyalty to his pals and missed his chance. “He could have had his own show in New York,” said Aunt Clare.

“No shows for schmoes,” said Art.

She said, “He has
such
a good personality and sense of humor and a nice singing voice—he coulda been up there with Jack Benny.”

“Jack Benny was not looking for a mandolin player,” said Art.

Knowing the Benson family personally as he did, Art knew what their homes looked like and what they did for fun, and Francis meant to ask him about this someday. Francis also wanted to know, “Can other families get on the air?” Once Art was Bessie's brother Clyde on
Up in a Balloon
, the one who cast off the lines when the balloon ascended and called out, “Happy landings! Don't take any wooden nickels!” and Francis imagined Bud and Bessie getting out of that balloon and the With family getting into it, but if they had their own show, what would they do about Grampa? He would have to be on the show with them but who could understand Grampa except his own family? A family with Grampa in it was going to have a hard time breaking into radio.

Upstairs, off the dark hall from the three bedrooms, was the sewing room, where Francis had his desk and sat and did his homework. Out the big window was the Sheyenne River, the Mindren Public School, St. Bonifacius Church, and the main line of the Great Northern. The Withs didn't attend St. Bonny, Mother being Lutheran, otherwise the window contained most of the known world, the house and the black asphalt roofs of the stores in downtown Mindren, the chimneys poking up, and the hundred little houses around it. The population of Mindren was 439, and none of them were rich like Bud and Bessie or Mr. Hollister. So many rich people on WLT, like the heiress Mrs. Aldrich Bryant Colfax, who turned up in Johnson Corners on
The Darkest Hour
one January day suffering from amnesia caused by a terrible experience, her baby having been strangled to death when its little wool scarf was caught in the wheels of the baby carriage as Mrs. Colfax, oblivious, wheeled it along fashionable Fifth Avenue, window-shopping. Now she was incoherent, weeping, half-frozen, torn by grief over
something
, she couldn't remember what, and had to be nursed back to health by Mildred, the minister's wife, who knew the terrible story from a scrap of newspaper that fell from Mrs. Colfax's purse. Finally, after weeks, Mrs. Colfax
did
recover, and she left a large legacy to the library, which stupid Mr. Hooley dropped in a snowbank the same day her playboy pal Emerson Dupont arrived to fetch her in a long black Packard, his nose full of vowels—and away they sped, and the money was lost, and nothing to do but wait until spring and hope for the best.

What if a rich man came to Mindren? Francis often imagined this. It would be very gaudy like the circus, and bands would play, and the man would laugh and hand out money on the schoolhouse steps, a hundred dollars for each person, and Francis would save his for college. But in fact the only rich man to come through Mindren was Myron Mindren himself, the man who arrived in North Dakota in 1884, bought a section of land from the railroad, platted the town and sold the lots for a tidy fortune, and hotfooted it to San Francisco.

If it were
him,
Francis thought, he would take his fortune to Minneapolis and use it to do good.

Mindren.
The name was a mumble, impossible to say with any grandeur. It was said of Myron Mindren that he mumbled so badly, his buyers misunderstood the price of the lots and the terms of the deal: they thought Mindren had said that
he
would pay for the school and the park and the opera house, and there was talk of sending a posse to California to bring him back. But then came word that the fortune was gone, lost in the sinking of the
Mary Jane
in a hurricane, and that Mindren himself, having seen the bank men lock up his nineteen-room stone mansion on Nob Hill, had disappeared on foot, aiming for Alaska, leaving his immortality sitting on the North Dakota prairie, broiling in the summer sun, covered with dust, sitting out the long dark bitter winter. The opera house became Mindren Trucking & Transfer, the big Mack truck parked nose-first under what was left of the proscenium arch, a border of plaster leaves and fruit and a dusty angel and a shadow of Norwegian inscription: “Ej Blot Til Lyst.”
Not Only for Pleasure
.