WLT (43 page)

Patsy had overslept and missed the Shepherd Boys broadcast that morning and not hearing Frank's voice struck her as an acute deprivation. He had a beautiful voice and she had meant to tell him so, but you had to be careful, look at Reed Seymour. She told
him
once what a nice voice he had and the boy went on the air and tried to be John Gielgud. All that tremulous fluting and whinnying and the shopgirl dips and quavers and the pale Anglican piety and the faint suggestion of pain and loss—while reading a dogfood commercial!—no, you had to be careful telling a young midwestern man that he spoke well. Boys in the Midwest grow up without a word of praise, their parents fearful that a compliment might make them vain, and by the age of nineteen, they are riding so low their boat may be swamped by one small wave. A compliment may go to a young man's head and he may try to be as good as he thinks he is and from then on he won't be able to talk worth beans. No, you had to be careful praising a young man.

Patsy sat spooning her boiled egg out of the shell and thought that maybe she could write Frank into
The Hills of Home
as a young reporter from the Bigville
Beacon
come down from the big city to snoop around town—for what? he won't say, and rumors abound. Buried bodies from gangland slayings? a discrepancy in the bank's books?—and then Fritz and Frieda are sure they know why:
oil
. They begin quietly to buy up land and go deep in hock and accumulate a dozen small parcels around Happy Valley. Then Frank writes a front-page story about a strange bacterium in the drinking water that causes liver disease, and of course the value of real estate falls to nothing, Fritz and Frieda are ruined, and after all those years of drinking six glasses of water a day, their livers ache and their hands turn blotchy.

A good idea, and Frank would be perfect as a young reporter, keen but lovable. He could be a young reporter who arrives in Elmville to investigate something on
Friendly Neighbor
, she thought. Ha-
ha!
He could investigate Delores! The little Italian tramp.

Patsy paced as the ideas jumped into her head.

Delores could be a Mafia gun moll who calls Chicago late at night while the Bensons sleep and conducts mysterious business with a man named Gino, talking tough talk
sotto voce
with a cigarette dangling from her lip, which Frank overhears, but she sees his shadow and slips him a Mickey Finn in his morning juice but Dad takes it instead and slips unconscious to the floor. In the uproar, she grabs the silverware and the taxi arrives and Frank offers to help with her suitcase and it falls open and bundles of fresh C-notes tumble out and she says, “Freeze, buster, I got two guns concealed in my blouse and they're both pointed at you right now!”

Well, maybe not her blouse.

Patsy rolled a page into the typewriter and as she did, she saw her reflection in the glass door of the highboy, her tangled black hair with swashes of gray, the bags under her eyes, the pouches under her chin, and then she held her head high, rose, and closed the door. Intelligence will triumph in the end, she thought. Brains over boobs.

It was a big morning for gossip at WLT, with a knot of people around Laurel at the front desk and more upstairs by Ethel's desk and other groups in the Green Room and the Women's Bureau, and messengers darting from one to the other with fresh bulletins, and the gist of it was that Slim was on the road with the Shepherd Boys and so The Blue Movers had done the Sunrise Waffle show in his place after spending the night around Seven Corners crawling from Larson's Bar to Koerner's Copenhagen Club to Palmer's to the Stockholm where they had had a skinful, whiskey and beer and brandy and peppermint schnapps, and had gotten plotzed, blotto, schnokkered, burned to the ground, so they wound up on the control room floor at 6:15 a.m., too drunk to know who they were or why. A musician friend of Slim's who had chauffeured them to WLT in his truck had picked up a guitar and done the Sunrise Waffle show alone under the name “Mr. Pokey” and had sung a song called, “Baby, I Got a Big Wiener for Your Bun,” and that Ray Soderbjerg, on hearing it at home, had collapsed in the bathtub and died, either from the concussion or by drowning. That the station would be sold to the Wills radio chain, the cheapest SOBs in broadcasting, and that everybody would be fired in two weeks with only one week's worth of severance.

What was true was the part about Mr. Pokey. Itch had the proof, on tape, and the men of WLT—the stuff was too strong for women, Itch said—packed into the control room and they played the Waffle Show over and over. Not only did Mr. Pokey sing the hot dog song—
but he also sang “Ram Rod Daddy” and “You Got Me Dancing in My Pants” and “I'm the Best Banana in the Bunch”—

He sang one after the other, dedicating them to various WLT people—Ray, Patsy Konopka, Faith Snelling, Slim, Wendell Shepherd—“Here's one of Dad Benson's favorite songs”—and was smooth and professional— paused for the commercial and said, “Now here's LaWella with a word from the Sunrise Waffle kitchen,” and LaWella, stunned, came in with a recipe for pigs in blankets (“After the dough has risen, heat your oven to 325 and wrap each wiener in a little muffin of dough, making sure it fits nice and tight”), and then Mr. Pokey said, “Mmmmm-
mmm
, that sure sounds good, Miz LaWella, I hope you'll be making me up some of those little piggies real soon,” and then he sang, “I'm your handyman, I do anything you want me to,” and “Got so much lead in my pencil, I could write you a
book
tonight,” and then poor LaWella returned (“LaWella Wells, tell these folks about your sweet li'l cakes, honey—”) and had to do a commercial about how good Sunrise pancakes are if you spread jelly on them and roll them up tight (“You can use two if you like it thicker, but make sure to put enough jelly in so a little bit oozes out the end when the cakes are rolled”). Mr. Pokey thought those roll-ups sounded just right. Then he closed the show with “Baby, You're My Radio”:

It was quite a morning. The phones rang and rang, and the switchboard lady had to be augmented by two others. “Thank you for calling,” they said over and over, until they were hoarse. “We appreciate hearing your views on our WLT programs. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you.” Quite a morning. Dad Benson fell into a hiccupping fit in the middle of the
Almanac
and Reed Seymour had to finish it for him, while the old veteran was hauled away to a doctor. And minutes later, while Roy Jr. was phoning around, trying to find Frank so he could fire Slim, Miss Lily Dale stopped in the middle of “Charlie Darling,” and she was weeping. On the air. She sobbed, “Oh, my dears, I am so sorry, but this week will be my last here on the little street where old friends meet, unless you all write to WLT or give them a ring this morning and tell them how you feel.” She sobbed. Then she laughed. “Oh, heavens, I know I'm nothing to look at, but how we need these old songs—I know I do—Oh, Mister Tippy, play ‘Ave Maria' for me.” And she sang the hymn to the Virgin, and at the end, after the last long lingering note, she whispered, “That's a song my mother used to sing, and though she's been dead these many years, she lives on in the songs she loved. Please call or write today. Thank you so very much. Goodbye! Goodbye!”

The moment the
On Air
light blinked off, Roy Jr. strolled into the studio and stood, hands on his hips. He shook his head. “Dear Aunt Lottie, what are we ever going to do with you?”

“Keep me and cherish me,” she said. “Bring me flowers. And when I'm too old to sing anymore, have the kindness to shoot me like you would a horse.”

He personally wheeled her to the back elevator and down to the loading dock, avoiding the crowd of forty foaming fans in the lobby, all in a lather that the Friendly Neighbor station could consider dumping a bosom friend after all those years, passing around a petition that vowed that the undersigned would
never
eat Betty Brand Party Wafers again until WLT offered Lily Dale a lifetime contract, and hissing at poor Laurel who had to tell them that, no, they couldn't go upstairs and talk to Mr. Soderbjerg in person. No, he wouldn't come down and talk to them. “How can you work at a place like this and live with your conscience?” a woman screeched at her. Laurel said, “I sleep a lot.”

R
ay was not dead, he had only gone to the dentist. His No. 4 upper tooth, to the left of the incisors, the tooth used to crunch a peppermint stick, had gotten infected around Thanksgiving and the gum swoll up, and he had dosed it for awhile with an elm compress soaked in whiskey, and reduced the pain to a steady throb, but then it got worse, about the time Vesta left for London. There was a meeting there of University Women for World Understanding, and a full bill of speeches by authors and mystics and such, but what sold Vesta on going was the thought that she would miss the WLT Christmas party.
No eggnog, no damp handshakes, no making small talk with people who weren't that smart sober
. So off she flew, and the same afternoon his cheek had ballooned out and the pain was insistent, so he dropped in at Dr. Nordstrom's office. The dentist was reading the paper. He was a stocky young man with thick glasses and his practice was slim because he perspired heavily and breathed hard while working on patients for fear that he might hurt them. Many people found this disconcerting.

The door jingled as Ray entered but the young man was absorbed in the news. “Morning, John!” said Ray. The young man leaped out of the chair, knocking a half dozen steel picks off the tray. He stood with the chair between him and the patient. “What is it?” he said, his eyes big. “An emergency,” said Ray. “Why didn't you call?” the young man pleaded. “I hate to have things just
thrown
at me, with no warning.”

He took an X-ray of the tooth, and then another, and poked at it timidly with a pick, and sprayed it with water, and put a cotton plug under Ray's lip, and looked at the X-rays, and announced that the tooth was infected. He thought about this for a minute. “Then let's pull it out,” said Ray. “I don't have all day.” The young man pondered this. Then he filled an immense syringe with anesthetic and, with a hand that was trembling, eased it into Ray's gum and uttered a soft murmur of pain, “Ohhh!” As he slowly pumped the liquid in, Ray felt the left side of his head go numb.