The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  The word “cheating” hit Adam in the spine, and he stiffened against the pain of it. He knew Larry was only trying to be helpful, but there are times honesty can be the most excruciating policy. Of course, it would have been even worse if Larry had offered false hope and a Pollyanna smile, if he’d tried to cover the truth with a mask of deceit. That would have been no sign of friendship at all. Meanwhile, Larry appeared to have developed another line of attack.

  “When you leave the station,” he said, “and you’re driving home, do you normally pass by the Jefferson Davis Hotel?”

  “Sometimes. What are you getting at?”

  “Well, you need a second look. Why don’t you go by there at around the same time—say nine or nine-thirty, maybe a little earlier—and see if they show up again. That way you’ll have some corroboration, something you can use to bolster your case.”

  “My case? I’m not taking this to court.”

  “Of course not, but the principle’s the same. You can’t use one quick, unscientific sighting as proof that something is going on. You have to repeat the experiment, if you’ll pardon the metaphor. I know it sounds cold and calculating, but it’s the only way to get to the bottom of this.”

  “What about the show?”

  “Call in sick. I’ll find a replacement.”

  “That’s not the point. If I stay home, she won’t go out. The only reason she leaves the house is because she knows I’m at the station. Don’t you see? She listens to the show and when she hears my voice, that’s her signal that she can leave the house and go downtown.”

  “Pretend the transmitter had another breakdown.”

  “I’d never get away with it.”

  Larry weighed the consequences. “No, the law’s the law,” he concluded. “Faking a breakdown could get us in a lot of trouble.” His sundae was now a watery mess, and the only alternative he had now was to dip in his spoon and pretend it was a bowl of soup. “You know, you could tape the show.”

  “And pretend I was there when I was really at the hotel?”

  “It would work in the movies.”

  “It won’t work in real life,” Adam said.

  ***

  That night was the worst. Ted Sauer’s visit had soured everyone at the station. Everyone knew what he was there for. Rumor had it that profits were down, the station was struggling to gain listeners and fewer sponsors were buying despite Wally Bascom’s best efforts. A new owner was a foregone conclusion, and that meant top-40. The writing was on the wall. Baines had gotten an offer that was too good to turn down. The new format was knocking on the door, and once across the threshold, the Bell Tower and everything it stood for would be on the way out.

  Adam could barely work himself into the necessary mood. He pulled the microphone as close to his mouth as he could, having long since discovered that the big metal bulb pressed against your mouth was like sleeping with a lover, breathing in her ear, kissing her cheek and the back of her neck even when she wasn’t awake. Normally, he enjoyed this moment. It was all anticipation, with a soupcon of suspense, but tonight he felt as though he were being beaten down, crushed into small pieces by the united forces of gloom.

  He was so consumed by the rhetoric of everything around him that he failed to notice, until it was too late, the commercial that sat clutched in his hand. The mike was open and, if he closed it, everyone within the sound of his voice would know he’d screwed up. Easing up the volume, he resigned himself to giving the best he had to Big Boy Peanut Butter.

  It was one of Wally’s favorites, but for Adam, just getting the words out was an effort. How much easier for Wally to plow his way through a piece of junk like this. But with Wally, all that false friendliness came as naturally as opening your eyes in the morning.

  “Hi there gang,” the commercial began. “Say, how’d you like to be the energy champ of your neighborhood, and really show your heels to the rest of the guys? Well, it’s possible, you know. But first of all, of course, you’ve got to build up your energy, and one way to do that is to eat the kind of foods that supply energy, things like good old Big Boy Peanut Butter.”

  He shuddered. Who dreamed up this garbage? he asked himself. The clichés were so ripe, they had taken to throwing off a noticeable stench. His wrist had begun to throb, too, as it sometimes did when things were not going right. It occurred to him that, if and when Hunter Baines decided to sell the station, commercials like this would likely become less the exception than the rule. The only thing he could do was grit his teeth and pretend he believed what he was saying. He leaned toward the microphone.

  “Just think,” he said, “you get enough energy for three quarters of an hour of hard running from just one sandwich.”

  Coming to work had been difficult enough, sitting down at the microphone, pretending he was alone in the Bell Tower without a care in the world. And now—this. Peanut butter. Somehow, he had to chase the demons that had followed him through the door and into the tower, that had climbed into the room with the purple drapes and the soft, cushioned sofas, that had hopped up on his shoulder and peered into the microphone, the demons that were already waiting to chatter in his ear when the commercial was over.

  “So it’s a fact,” he swore. “Eating plenty of Big Boy Peanut Butter sandwiches is a really swell way to load up on energy, the kind you need to be a hot shot at sports and games, and a whiz at your schoolwork, too. And the wonderful thing is this: Every bite of delicious Big Boy Peanut Butter really hits the spot. It’s packed full of that rich, full peanut butter flavor. Super smooth, too, and Big Boy never gets stale; it’s always fresh and smooth right down to the last dab, way down there at the bottom of the jar.”

  Oh, Lord! He was beginning to feel a little giddy, as though the whole thing were a plot to make him suffer.

  “So don’t you forget, gang. Keep up your energy by eating lots of Big Boy Peanut Butter. Ask your mom to bring you home some the next time she goes shopping. Remember, when you get Big Boy, you’re getting America’s favorite peanut butter.”

  He released the record just as the word “butter” slipped from his mouth, fading up the volume and closing the mike in one deft maneuver. The rich, warm sound of Rosemary Clooney’s voice came pouring through the speaker, diluting the bad taste of the commercial, although not enough to make it go away. When Rosey had finished, he segued into a Nat “King” Cole record.

  19

  Strange, how something so small, so seemingly insignificant could make such a difference, and yet without it he couldn’t have worked in radio, at least not at a station like WCAN.

  A piece of cardboard, not much larger than a business card, now tattered from being carried around and put on display whenever an employer asked to see it, was all he needed. A trifling thing, this FCC Third-Class radio engineer’s license, but it made you a “combo man,” which meant you were qualified to do announcing chores and run a control board at the same time. In those days, almost anyone could get one. You wrote away, you took a simple test and presto, they sent you a license by return mail.

  Which didn’t make you an engineer, of course. For that, you needed to study books and take the engineer’s test and earn the right to be called first-class rather than third-class. But suppose he’d done that. Suppose, when the station went off the air that night, and he’d had to close up and leave because lightning knocked out the transmitter—suppose he’d been a real engineer. What then?

  There would have been no reason to phone Dominic to come out and fix the transmitter. He, the engineer, would have stayed and fixed it. After the transmitter was on its way to recovery, he would have stayed at the station until well past midnight, at which time, driving down Graham Avenue past the hotel, he would have never have seen the red Ferrari as he turned up First Street, because it wouldn’t have been there, and he wouldn’t have slowed down and seen, through the glass doors of the hotel’s main entrance, what he wasn’t supposed to see.

  None of this would have happened.


  That was the tape he kept playing over and over in his head, listening to the soundless music, searching for something. He tried to recreate that moment in his mind’s eye. The Ferrari, parked at the curb with the drunk weaving through the gap behind it, and after that, the two of them standing at the registration desk, waiting for the clerk to hand them the keys that would admit them to their room.

  Could the car have belonged to someone else? Suppose there were two red Ferraris in Canelius, driven by two different people, and suppose the man and woman he saw standing at the registration desk were a couple of strangers—Mr. Saperstein and his date, signing in under the name of Smith.

  It had to be a mistake. Earlier, at the breakfast table, toying with the waffles she had prepared especially for him, the steam from a cup of coffee tingling his nose, he knew this was the time to have things out. But he couldn’t do it. It was as if his will had been paralyzed, frozen by the possibility that what he feared might be true. What if she denied being there, and he knew she was lying and he told her so? Where did that take him. And what if she actually told the truth? Could he bear that? It would be like shoving your hand into a fire, knowing you were about to be burned, badly, knowing what would happen to your hand when you pulled it away and saw the charred flesh and waited for the terrible pain that was bound to follow.

  No matter what decision he made, it would be the wrong one. At first, he was sure she must have been coerced, that she couldn’t possibly have gone down there on her own, at least not deliberately, but the facts said otherwise. The timing was too precise. She must have left the house a few minutes after she heard the theme song of his show and the first intro, just as he described it to Larry. She obviously had no way of knowing that the transmitter would be hit by lightning, assuming that’s what happened—or that the station would go off the air for the night. She could have listened on the car radio, but if her thoughts were distracted and if…

  He would not have made a good lawyer. Even with all the facts in hand, he couldn’t make the scenario come together.

  ***

  On the surface, nothing changed. He went to the station every day. He checked into the Bell Tower, pulled the news, read over his commercials, assembled the records he would need from the shelves and transferred them to the rack. He was back-announcing a Sinatra ballad when the light flashed on the board, a call coming in.

  For a misbegotten instant, he thought it might be Susan with a simple explanation for where she’d been the night before. “Hi, babe!” the voice rumbled. It was Beverly again. “How’re things with you?” Beverly boomed.

  “Not bad,” he lied.

  “Marriage treating you right?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “Oh, don’t ever say that, babe. Did I ever tell you about my first husband?”

  What a strange creature radio was. People knew all about you, or thought they did, and the more you told them, the closer they came. But it didn’t work that way. All those ears pinned to his voice, belonged to people who were mysteries. Every word he uttered traveled one way only. They could visualize what he looked like, although the pictures might be wildly wrong, but he had no idea who they were, what they were doing, what they might be thinking when his music was playing or his words were coming out of the speaker.

  In fact, there might be a thousand people out there, beyond the ether, or just one. Or none. One night, alone in the tower when it was particularly dark and quiet, he began musing aloud, wondering if anyone actually heard the show. He invited his listener into whose ear he poured everything that had been bottled up inside him—to call if she was listening. He wanted to believe it was a woman, but anything was possible. Moments later, the light began to flash. He took one call, then another and another, and finally he had to confess that he could take no more, although the light continued to pulse for more than a half hour after that.

  It was frightening that all those people were out there, listening. Once the genie had emerged from the bottle, life in the tower could never be the same.

  Two hours later he played his sign-off theme song. He filled out the log, signed it and attached it to the clipboard. He put away the records. He took down a few in preparation for the day to come. Doing familiar things in familiar ways helped him forget what was going on beyond the tower. It was as though a wall had been thrown up to keep out the natives who were encircling the compound. It dulled the thud of drums, the shaking of amulets, the cries of the angry trying to get in.

  Once more, driving home through the darkened city with its flashing red lights, past the hotel and then south toward home, he felt that odd reluctance to complete the night’s routine. Could it be he was afraid of what he might see when he pulled up at the house?

  Approaching the familiar intersection at which the Jefferson Davis Hotel was located, he was tempted to turn right on Main Street and stop off at the B&B for coffee and a piece of pie. It would put a little time between this moment and the end of the journey, which only made him more uneasy. In the entire year they’d been married, he had always looked forward to coming home and seeing her face, kissing her on the mouth, feeling her body as she pressed it against his, sitting at the kitchen table with her as they shared the adventures of the night, and then climbing the stairs to the bedroom for the passion to come.

  But not tonight. Tonight, pulling up the driveway, he realized the house was strangely quiet. The drapes were drawn and there was no light on over the porch. The living room had been vacuumed and the breakfast dishes put away, but nothing had been touched since then. Upstairs, it was the same thing. The bed was made and covered, but there was no indication of it having been used. He felt like a visitor invited over to inspect the house, a prospective buyer.

  Downstairs, he went into the kitchen, got a glass from the cupboard over the sink, a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a piece of leftover carrot cake, carried them into the living room, flipped on the TV and eased into the sofa.

  He had never watched television at this hour, and he was startled to discover that there was nothing on any of the stations but snow. Everyone went off the air at the same time. He could turn on the radio—WLW in Cincinnati had enough wattage to blanket half the country with music—but he didn’t feel like music. All he wanted was to curl up on the sofa with his milk and his carrot cake and think. Try to make some sense of what was happening. Try to figure out where things were going, what he planned to do next because it was obvious the situation couldn’t be permitted to fester like an infected finger, oozing pus and pain in equal amounts.

  At times like this, he found he could sometimes clear his head with a little poetry. He took a volume of verses from the shelf and turned to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In school, he had been moved by the plight of the sailor surrounded by water, dying of thirst and unable to drink. It seemed such a terrible fate. To have what you want and not be able to take it. Things like that happened in poems, in stories, in fantasies—yes, but life was different. In life if you reached out, you could eat the apple or drink the water.

  He laid the open book on his lap and closed his eyes, drifting into a state of dreamless sleep. For how long he didn’t know. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but when the chiming clock on the mantel sounded, he knew it had to be longer than that. As the chiming came to an end, he became aware of a door softly closing. Looking up, he saw her materialize in the entrance to the living room. It was two o’clock. She had on an eggshell blue blouse he had bought her shortly after they were married and a pleated navy skirt that descended below the knee. The top two buttons of the blouse were open. He wasn’t sure if she was wearing a bra.

  “Are you awake?” she asked.

  “I am now.” His eyes were still heavy with sleep, and he could hear the clock ticking loudly on the mantel, as angry as a metronome with the same relentless beat.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late.” Her voice seemed to come from a long distance. “I should have called, but I
didn’t want to interrupt you at the station. It was Daddy. He was having these chest pains, and the minute I saw him I knew I had to drive him to the hospital emergency room—they thought—” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “A heart attack?”

  “That’s what it looked like.” He tried to picture Max Goldman in an emergency room, but it just seemed too improbable. “They took him right in and gave him some sort of tests, and it turned out there was nothing wrong. I guess it must have been indigestion, or maybe nervous tension—he’s been working awfully hard the last few months.” She came over to the sofa and knelt beside him. “But it was just like a heart attack.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She walked over to where he was sitting, sank onto her knees before him and slipped her hands between his. “I am now. But it was so frightening when it happened. At that age, you never know what can happen to a man. I drove him straight to the hospital.” Her hands were cold and he could feel them trembling. “You’re not angry, are you?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I can’t be angry with you.”

  He knew she must be lying, but there was nothing he could do. From now on, if she stayed out late and didn’t get home until after he did, she had an alibi. And naturally, Max would back her up. Any time she felt like it, she could phone him and he’d say he had an attack of angina, or a bout of dizziness, or something that felt like a stroke. He wasn’t that old—no more than sixty—but he was a smooth talker and a great pretender, and any time Susan wanted something from him, she got it.

  It had always been that way. A good father doesn’t refuse his daughter when she needs his help. Love, money, alibis—they were all the same. It was insane, it was diabolical. Everything and anything was an excuse for deceit. He wanted desperately to make passionate love to her. They hadn’t done it in weeks, but he couldn’t bring himself to sex. He could feel his grip on reality oozing away, and as he slipped into a baffled sleep, words came to him from some unbidden place whose meaning eluded him but stayed in his head all night.