The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  THE BELL TOWER

  Walter Blum

  Copyright © 2019 by Brian Blum

  All rights reserved

  Published in the United States by Blue Pepper Press

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a database or retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9830428-0-8 (eBook), 978-0-9830428-3-9 (paperback)

  www.bluepepperpress.com

  FOREWORD

  My father, Walter Blum, was a magazine writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner for more than 30 years where he covered arts, culture and show business for California Living and Image magazines. Over his career, he interviewed such figures as Victor Borge, Phyllis Diller, Leonard Nimoy, Buddy Hackett and Carl Sagan. He also wrote a biography of local real estate entrepreneur Benjamin Swig and a book on journalistic practices.

  His dream, however, was to publish a novel, and he worked diligently on a number of different books, none of which made it to market. He was writing his final novel—The Bell Tower—when he passed away from complications of lymphoma in March 2009 at the age of 81.

  My father left a nearly finished version of The Bell Tower on his computer, which my brother Dave emailed to me following my father’s death. As I reviewed The Bell Tower, I felt strongly that it deserved to be read. There is a wealth of autobiographical material in the book, which helps illuminate a pivotal period in my father’s life when, like the protagonist in The Bell Tower, he too worked as a radio announcer in a small town in the South, searching for love.

  I took on the task of posthumously editing The Bell Tower. The book you have in front of you is—on the tenth anniversary of his death—in its essence, the book that my father was working on. I took the liberties of removing and, in some cases, slightly altering sections that had not yet been completed (often as highlighted by my father’s own in-line notes).

  The Bell Tower is the most heartfelt of my father’s books, one that I hope will resonate both with those who knew him and readers who will find that his characterization of life in the 1950s brings back memories of a simpler time.

  —Brian Blum

  Jerusalem, Israel

  November 2019

  1

  He came to this place in late February, when the cold was already settled in and white frost lay on the roofs. Icicles tinkled from bushes. The air was like a weasel waiting to snap.

  On nights like this, it was a long drive up a side road beside the creek that would, no doubt, be frozen by morning. The low, green cinder-block building at the end of the road wasn’t much to look at, but its antenna was tall and the countryside flat, so the signal—which was limited to just 5,000 watts—went bouncing around the valley and into thousands of radios, as far north as the state line, as far as the smoky blue hills to the west.

  The isolation didn’t bother him. Others had come to places like this and started their climb to the top, working in small towns, building a name for themselves. Small pay, a handful of listeners, but what the hell. Being young and strong was all that mattered.

  It was the cold that dismayed him.

  Being a Northerner, he had always imagined the South as one vast, warm pudding, its soft side glowing in the sun. But with the coming of winter, Canelius and the towns around it seemed to be sunk in a kind of silent death. The tobacco fields lay brown and stillborn. The skies glowered angrily behind bruising clouds. It was like looking into the eyes of someone who had half vanished from the earth.

  They assigned him to the Early Bird Show when he first came because that’s what he’d done at his last job. He tried—God knows, he tried—to make a success of it, but for some reason his heart refused to leap at being WCAN’s morning man. Maybe it was a lack of will or talent; an inability to sound lively so early in the day. He tried to imagine people laughing at his witticisms, but he couldn’t. He felt ill at ease, like a performing seal.

  Even Larry Kellin, the program manager, noticed his discomfiture.

  It was Larry who suggested he might be better off on the night shift. Larry had a high forehead and a long horse face that seemed at times on the verge of dissolving into tears. He was the sort who agonized over every decision, however simple; it pained him to think that Adam might lose his morning show.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m doing this out of meanness,” he said.

  “You’re firing me?” Adam asked in alarm.

  “No, I just want to make a switch. A simple switch.”

  “Someone else to do the morning show?”

  “I think it would be best.”

  It was. They brought in a big jolly man in his forties named Simon Denning. He was built for mornings—twinkling eyes, a booming laugh and a vocal instrument like a trombone that rose from somewhere in his stomach, gaining power as it passed through innumerable hidden pipes until it struck the microphone with almost supernatural force. Simon could do mornings in his sleep and, after the regular night man went off to Atlanta to try his luck in the big time, Adam took his place.

  It seemed like the perfect solution. It was, in fact, a trap.

  Later, looking back, he could see what had happened to him. Canelius itself was a cocoon, wrapped in itself and barely able to breathe, and inside was an even smaller place that was Adam’s world, a world that existed principally at night. In that world the lights went on only after the sun was gone from the sky and the cold had settled in. It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, where everything you saw turned out to be smaller, more hemmed in, claustrophobic.

  At first, he refused to accept what was happening to him, fascinated as he was with the romantic glamour of this new life. The microphone seduced him; he loved it. The microphone made him invisible. He could pretend to be anything he liked, and all that counted were the words that came out of his mouth, the tone of his voice and, of course, the music he played. The microphone was his nightly companion. He could talk into that blob of metal at any time and nothing could go wrong. The blob simply existed.

  He loved being the man who sat behind the microphone, talking to an audience of invisible beings. He loved being perched in this seat of power, poised to deliver the opening words of that night’s show. He could think of nothing else in life he wanted to do, and because he loved doing what he did, he knew with supernal certainty that someday this would translate into money and success. Eventually, millions would hear his voice and know his name and tune their radios to this spot on the dial.

  But when? Would he have to wait forever? It was hard to see past even the first bend in the road. Night followed night like stiles on a fence, each post measuring itself against the one that came before. When the show was over, he would drive through the empty, post-midnight streets of Canelius as if in a tunnel, while on either side of him the wood-frame houses stared back with curtained eyes. Now and then a light would flicker at a window, and he tried not to think what might be going on behind it. What did these people have to do with him? He was only a figure in a narrative that floated through life in increments a hundred miles apart. He belonged everywhere and nowhere. He was an outsider and he hated the role.

  He rented a room from an elderly born-again Christian named Mrs. Warren. It was, truthfully, little more than a place to lay his head down, small, hemmed in like everything else, a place to read, a place to keep his things.

  In this world where nothing changed, sleep came sporadically and at times he would find himself wide-awake and restless in the middle of the night. When this happened he would get out of bed, drag himself wearily to the big, overstuffed armchair beside the window and pick up whatever reading matter lay piled on the floor. He was an omnivorous reader. M
agazines, newspapers, paperbacks, hardcovers—preferably not new, since his financial resources were limited—it didn’t matter as long as he had something in his hand to read. And so he would occupy himself until morning.

  The others at the station had no clue of this. Why should they? People live in their own cocoons, and during the cold time, very little stirs inside to give the lie to the trance. You could only guess how they felt.

  Now and then Wally Bascom, the sales manager, would stop by to visit during the early evening hours, but Wally’s formula for life was a simple one. Earning commissions, becoming known in the world of commerce, that’s what it was all about. It was so easy to be Wally when you saw the world through sales-colored glasses. People like Adam were wasting their time if they didn’t sell and sell and sell—you had to keep at it until your ass fell off, he would say. Adam knew better, but he couldn’t explain why it should be like that.

  One night Wally stopped by to “do a little paper work,” as he phrased it, which was just an excuse for snooping and arguing and boasting about the wonderful sales he’d made and the deals he had cooking. He had wavy black hair and a pockmarked face. He favored checked sport jackets, loud shirts and a clip-on bow tie, and spoke in a voice redolent of urgency and intensity. He smiled a great deal, although there was something about the smile that grated, possibly because it involved working so hard to endear himself to others. Wally also ran a hit-parade show for teenagers in the afternoon, a half-hour program devoted mostly to delivering pitches for the accounts he sold. In some cases, the ink was barely dry on the contract before he went on the air with it.

  “Listen,” he barked. “You can’t spend the rest of your life in front of a microphone, introducing songs and reading commercials.”

  “Why not?” Adam wanted to know.

  “Because you’re never going to get ahead in this world,” Wally said, trying not to appear too condescending.

  “I’m not interested in getting ahead,” Adam said.

  Wally heaved a deep sigh. “Adam, for God’s sake! Don’t be so dense. You know those little animals—what do they call them, gerbils?—the ones they put in a cage, and all day long they go round and round on this wheel?”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, that’s you. Think about it. One of these days you’re going to want a family. One of these days you’re going to want to move out of that rented room of yours and into an apartment, or maybe even a house like I have, and then where’s the money going to come from? Adam, how old are you? Twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “You think you’re going to stay twenty-three the rest of your life?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You bet your life you’re not. One morning you’re going to wake up and suddenly you’ll be forty, and then fifty—damn it, man, you’ve gotta plan for these things. I used to know a guy who spent every cent of his salary Friday and Saturday drinking and putting clothes on his back. That and his motorcycle were the only things he cared about.”

  “I don’t drink and I don’t own a motorcycle.”

  “You might as well. Listen, this is a great time to be living in. The war is history. The president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, says the country is headed for the biggest boom in its history. The economy’s growing every day, and where are you? Working yourself to death in a dead-end station in a dead-end town where you can get hung by the balls for the rest of your life.”

  “You’re in it too.”

  Wally took out a book of matches, opened it and, caught up in the passion of his message, seemingly forgot what he was doing.

  “Temporarily, yes.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that I’ve got plans. It means that I don’t intend to make Canelius my home for the next five years or even five months.” He leaned across the table, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I’ve got deals cooking in the oven, and one of them is a really big deal with some high-priced contacts, oh yes, and as soon as the roast is done and it’s nice and warm and tender, I’m out of here.”

  Adam smiled gloomily. He had heard all this before—the big deals, the high-priced contacts. He tried to swallow it with a large grain of salt, but it was not easy. He wondered if others saw him as a gerbil, spinning mindlessly on its wheel. Most everyone he met tended to see the mid-1950s as the beginning of a golden age, a time filled with excitement and danger and even a touch of paranoia, if you allowed yourself to be caught up in the weirdness of the atom bomb.

  That night when he drove to work, the conversation with Wally was still churning in his brain, the loneliness crawling over him like an overcoat of ants. Could Wally be right? he wondered. Had he dug himself a hole out of which he might never emerge?

  The familiar wooden houses with their shuttered windows, forever walled off from his gaze, seemed to be shaking their fists at him, daring him to join the warmth of the families inside. He was with them, almost every night, but he was invisible. Suddenly, he pulled over to the curb on a particularly dark and faceless street, slumped down in his seat and listened to the wordless voices. The anger that had been growing in him exploded like a Fourth of July rocket.

  “Damn it!” he swore under his breath.

  He glared at the unseeing houses, aware that they couldn’t help themselves, and yet blaming them for the pain that had always been part of his life. If only there was some way out of this. Surely, if there was a God out there, some sort of power—no, damn it! There had to be something out there listening, something watching. He was tired of always being on the outside, looking in. He wanted a piece of it, whatever was out there.

  “Stop turning your back on me,” he shouted, although he said the words in his head, thank God for that, because it would have been terrible if anyone passing by just then could have heard what he said. He could say all this to the empty air, or into a microphone, but not when there was someone else around.

  His only reply was to bury himself in work, pretend there was no one there but himself. Spend more time in the back room trying out discs on the small, portable record player set up on a table for that purpose. Become an expert on the music of his time—the Sinatras and Comos, the Rosies and Tony Bennetts who were the coin of his craft, the pay he received for being excluded from the real pleasures of life.

  Now he realized how foolish his thoughts had been. He had come to work especially early, prepared to do battle with the demons and, if nothing else, find a way to live with them.

  At six he took over the control board.

  At nine he released the Percy Faith instrumental that was his theme song, and let it play for ten seconds before fading the music down to make his intro.

  While the first number was playing, he carefully cued up the next one. That involved turning the potentiometer control to the off position until it clicked, and then a little farther, setting the needle on the record and revolving the disk backwards one full turn so you avoided the annoying, tell-tale “wow” that sounded when a 78-rpm record started up from scratch. It took a bit of practice, but it was worth learning how to do. The record had to be held lightly with your fingertips, and released just as the volume on the pot was faded up. He had gotten quite good at it. He was the master of this world.

  But only half the master, for tonight he existed in two worlds. Behind the microphone he could be anyone and anything he wanted; outside on the dark street, with the cold wooden houses staring down at him through blind eyes, he was alone on a loveless plain, inventing lies for the pleasure of others, lighting the incense, setting the stage, alone with an agony no one else would ever know.

  Paul Harvey’s taped news analysis from the network was coming to an end now. In that instant he could feel a stab of tension. The minutes were counting down. The network was now into its concluding commercial.

  Flipping the switch for the theme music turntable, he seized the record between thumb and forefinger, holding it gently at its e
dge. The sweep hand on the big clock to his right rose to the hour. The tension oozed out of him. Releasing the record, he waited about ten seconds, gave the station break, faded the music under and, leaning into the microphone, he introduced himself.

  “Hi,” he said softly.

  The theme music simmered in the background. The lights were dimmed. The stage was set. His voice was smooth as silk, inviting his invisible friends to an evening of love.

  “This is Adam Bell, and you’re listening to Evening Shadows. From where I sit, it’s a lovely night in Canelius. The stars are out. It’s just cold enough to put a tingle on your nose. This evening, our subject is the eternal mystery of love, and we have music to fit your mood. A whole evening to spend in each other’s company, to lean back, relax and let go.”

  He reached for the mic switch, ready to segue into the Peggy Lee record.

  “Welcome to the Bell Tower,” he murmured.

  The theme trailed off, the Peggy Lee record faded up. The evening had begun.

  2

  She was, when he first laid eyes on her, sitting at a table in the far corner of the dining room, deep in conversation with a young man in corduroys and a crew cut. He was struck at once by the wonder of it all, the long blonde hair that flowed down her back like a river, the skin like fine white paper before it has been written on, eyes that glowed, teeth that shone when she smiled, which was often when in the company of someone she liked.

  That day she had on something yellow and black that reminded him of a wasp, but without wings. A gold Star of David hung around her neck. He had never seen anything or anyone quite so luminescent; she seemed to be on fire. It was as though lights were playing across her face, changing from blue to red to yellow to green.

  The times did not encourage truthfulness. It was a time when men still placed women on a pedestal. To fall in love was a common enough occurrence, to be in love was serious business. And yet women themselves were seldom taken seriously, the received wisdom being that they were for the most part strange, unfathomable creatures who threaded their way through life in a different universe from men. If you were a man, you kept your distance. Devoting too much thought to females could bring on premature grayness, tenderness of the palate and a tendency to babble.