WLT (35 page)

Nawww, takes too much time
. She dropped her robe. Her skin was so pale and thin, her breasts like small turnips. She stepped out of her panties. My gosh. She squirted cream on him and lay down next to him and touched him. He kissed her and she pushed him away. She said to get on top.
You're awful big, sonny, and I ain't, so don't get too excited
. This was exciting and he pushed into her two, four, six times and groaned and out it came.
My, aren't we horny today? Was that nice?
Yes, it really was. Thank you very much. She wiped him off with a cold rag and went in the toilet. He guessed it was time to go. “How was it?” asked Buck, in the car, grinning. Frank looked away.
It coulda been worse
.

Back at the Antwerp he tumbled into bed and tossed like a boat and finally dropped off and woke and slept and then awoke. Downstairs, Patsy sat very still in a chair, sipping a glass of sherry, listening. He was alone, thank goodness. She was afraid, it being his birthday, that that Italian tramp would be climbing into Frank's bed, but it was just Frank, a little drunk, judging from his footsteps, and weary, but home safe. Then Frank groaned and sat bolt upright. “You pig,” he said bitterly. “Oh what a pig you are. What an awful pig. How could you do that! That poor kid. You are such a pig.”

So
, she thought. The Italian tramp had come across, gave the birthday boy a roll in the hay, poor Frank. Those Catholic girls had a way of giving you what you wanted and making you sick with guilt at the same time. Patsy knew the type. Well, it was time to make her move, she thought. The emanations seemed quite clear. There were no intervening currents whatsoever, no shadow thoughts, no psychic hands reaching out of the bushes to draw her back. Her path was absolutely clear. She had never spoken to Frank face to face before but now she would offer herself to him.

She also thought she would get rid of Delores DuCharme and Corinne Archer and place an embargo on any new young female characters until the tramp packed her bags for Milwaukee. Then she dozed off in the chair.

When Frank awoke, it was Sunday morning and Father John was proclaiming his own unworthiness.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
, he intoned and struck himself on the breast three times, the breast where the microphone hung. It felt as if Father John were beating him on the head.

“U
ncle Ray, did you ever meet a woman you didn't want to make love to?” Roy Jr. asked at lunch. Frank blushed, and looked at the waitress coming, butt first, through the kitchen door, hauling a tray.

“Well,” said Ray, thinking carefully, “my mother, of course, died when I was young so I can't say about her, and my sister, I would say, I had no particular desire for after I was old enough to see what all was available. And there were aunts, I must say, who had lost most of their charm, such as it was, by the time I was of age. Other than them—I'd have to think—I suppose there must've been a few. Offhand, though, I can't think of them. ”

Frank had tuna stackups and the cherry cola Jell-O salad. He thought about Maria. The night before, they had gone to see Deanna Durbin, not their favorite star, in
How Bright the Morning
, and he had kissed Maria, or she had kissed him, one kiss so thrilling that she grabbed his leg and he slipped his hand into her blouse. Her bra unclasped in front! What an innovation! He unfastened it, expecting the theater lights to flash and sirens to wail, but instead her breast fell into his hand, a small, friendly breast. Then a man and his wife slipped into the row and sat next to Maria and the woman gave Frank a walleyed look and whispered to her husband. The man shook his head in disgust. Frank withdrew his hand. Deanna Durbin smiled onscreen like she didn't have a brain in her head. A man leaned across the table and took her hand. A closeup of their hands. Frank didn't know what the story was about, but there is only one story, he thought; the only difference is, who is the girl?

Dear Daddy
, he wrote after lunch.
You said you wanted me to go to college but this is better, to be around smart people (some, not all) and listen to them without having to repeat everything back. My boss loves to talk. I sit and listen to him go on and on, and I wonder, “Why is he saying all this to me, I'm nobody, I don't know anything,” but of course he isn't asking me to be anybody. He is a frustrated performer who had to become the manager because they didn't have one of those. He tells me things I know he wouldn't tell his own wife. He told me that he thought it must be happy to be on the air. Just for those minutes, then you might be very unhappy, but those few minutes would be like a dream. I wish I could get on the air myself one of these days. P.S. I am in love.

Frank had asked Roy Jr. for a shot at announcing and Roy Jr. said he was too valuable to waste. “Announcers sit around, waiting. You'd never like it,” he said. “You're a doer.”

So Frank went to Reed Seymour, the Chief Announcer, and invited him to the Red Eye for a beer and by the second pitcher they were on the verge of friendship. Frank said he sure admired people in radio, people who could talk on the air, announcers, and Reed said, “I got into radio because I wanted to impress a girl I knew, a beautiful girl with red hair and green eyes and long legs. I met her at my brother's wedding. She asked me what I did, and I said, ‘I'm in radio.' ‘Oh really,' she said, ‘my gosh that must be scary.'
Nawwww
, I said. So I had to get into radio. I knew how disappointed she'd be if she knew I was lying. It's true.”

Frank said, “But the thought of talking to all those people at one time—even late at night, when nobody's listening, it's still eighty thousand people out there,
listening
. More than you could put in Memorial Stadium. Imagine standing in Memorial Stadium at midnight and reading the news to eighty thousand people.”

Reed said modestly that it was nothing, anybody could do it if you worked at it and had concentration. “When I met her, I was washing dishes at the Curtis Hotel, except I had just been fired for coming to work a week late, so I came over to WLT and I wrote down a lot of experience on the application form—at WABC and KDEF and WGHI and KJKL—made it all up, and they needed somebody, so they took me. You could do it too. A lot of people could.”

Frank said that, no, he didn't have Reed's voice. Reed rolled his eyes. “Oh please,” he said. “You
could
do it.” And pretty soon he talked himself into offering Frank an air shift. “Just a couple hours, on Tuesday, as a tryout, nothing permanent.”

Frank tried not to think about Tuesday and it loomed as big as a mountain, but it wasn't scary, he told Maria. “What scares me is the thought that I might've stayed in Mindren and never got to do it.” She told him he needed to relax and get a good night's sleep. “I know,” he said, wishing she would say more about sleep.
Maybe you could come over tonight
, he wanted to say.

In the morning, he arrived at WLT an hour early. Ethel asked him to run over to Billy and Marty's and pick up a box of cigars, and he said, “Can't. I'm on the air today.” He poured himself a cup of coffee in the Green Room, which was empty, and stood in the corner and practiced saying, “You're tuned to your Friendly Neighbor Station, WLT, 770 on your radio dial, from studios in downtown Minneapolis.” He said it over and over, with his chin on his chest to make his voice deeper, trying to get just the right inflexion, smooth and clean. Then somebody cleared his throat,
ahem
. Gene the engineer, napping in the corner, said, “Hey, who put a nickel in
you?
” Frank went into Studio C to practice and there was Dad Benson, sorting out items for the
Almanac
. He looked up and smiled. “Big day, eh? Well, good luck.”

Studio B was half-full of junk, like a basement, but it was more secret in there, nobody to stare at you through the glass, and it did have the good-luck painting of Donna LaDonna, who lay back and smiled, glad to see him, her two happy breasts, her handsome downstairs. “Good luck, big boy,” she whispered.

His first line in the copybook was “You're listening to WLT, Your Home in the Air, studios in downtown Minneapolis. The time is 10:45.” Then a couple of transcribed commercials, the second one for Grain Belt Beer and at the end of it he said: “Look for Grain Belt at your neighborhood grocery or liquor store.” Then an organ theme, twenty seconds' worth, and then fade, and he said: “And now Sanitary Dairy brings you.... What's for Supper? . . . the popular recipe program devoted to quick and easy dishes that are sure to please the whole family. . . . And remember, when those recipes call for milk, look for the big red Sanitary Dairy label. It's your guarantee of quality. And now, from the WLT kitchen, here's LaWella Wells. LaWella—”

Waiting for 10:42 and then 10:43, his face got hot and his mouth was dry, as if encrusted with baked sand. The control room was crowded with engineers who were all chortling at something, possibly him, hard to say, and the sweep hand came around to the 12 as Alma Melting wound up
Community Calendar
and the engineer Gene gave him a baleful look and the red light flashed on and an awful silence filled the room.
He forgot to put on the headphones. Too late!
He said, “You're listening to WLT, Your Home in the Air,” in his own voice, and then the rest of it, and Vesta Soderbjerg loomed above him through the window as he said, “The Classroom of the Air . . . Mid-America's oldest continuously running instructional program. Today Professor Ferguson resumes his study of world federalism . . .” and then he had forty-five minutes to relax, and then it was Irving James Knox, and when the red light went off, Gene said, in the intercom, “Scratch the Dairy Council spot and do a PSA,” just like Frank was a regular staff announcer. So he hunted up a public service announcement in the big black copybook—found one for Library Week, and put on the headphones and read that during the break, poured his heart into it—sincerely urging people to
please
, support their public library. He did the livestock report (No. 1,2,3 220—240 lb. barrows and gilts, 17.75—18.25, canners and cutters 12.15—12.25) and introduced
Dad's Almanac
(“And now, with the Almanac, here's Dad Benson . . .”) and over the monitor came the familiar husky voice of Dad saying, “Thank you so much, Frank White, and now here's a look at this day in history. . . .”