WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Mother was a little better but not much. She knew him all right but not much else. The insurance money was gone, she thought, and Mr. Mortenson at the bank had sold the house, she thought (but wasn’t sure). The yard was overgrown with weeds, the garage full of trash. He shovelled it out and burned the debris, which gave off clouds of bitter acrid smoke. “I have a good job now,” she said, but had forgotten where it was. She tried to remember and gave up. Oh, life is unfair, she said mournfully. One morning, Mortenson came in and took the clock. “Your mother has run up debts downtown and people are demanding payment, of course. Somebody is willing to settle for this old thing and best to accept before they change their mind.” Francis asked if the house had been sold. The man was vague. It had been optioned, he said, and they would know more soon.

  “Franny, I’m not ever going to get better, am I,” she suddenly said at supper, a spoonful of chicken noodle soup midway to her mouth, and all his reassurances, so hollow, that yes, she would, he knew she would, of course she would, only made clear her doom, and tears fell, and she was right. She was an invalid. She would always be looking toward the door, waiting for somebody to come through it and help her up.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a mess. I can’t even make a decent home for my own kids.” And she wept more. He couldn’t imagine where all the water came from.

  Emma arrived for Memorial Day. Uncle Charles had migraine and kidney stones and could not bear the slightest motion or sound or ray of light, but Jodie was doing well at Wesleyan College in Ohio. “You wouldn’t know her, she’s so grown up.” He asked why Jodie had not come home. Emma said, “Home? Her home is with us. We’re the ones who took her in. Don’t only think of yourself, Franny. Jodie has blossomed into a fine young lady. She couldn’t have got that here. Look at your poor mother. I’m going to have to go sign papers on Tuesday and put her in a hospital. My dad used to say that nothing is so bad but what there’s some good in it, but I don’t see it in her case.” Emma clucked. “Poor thing.”

  After Minneapolis, Mindren seemed like a ghost town. Men stood in the hardware store, looked out the window, as if waiting for something, then went back and sat on a nail keg and talked to Walt, who said what he’d been saying for years: You never know. Only time will tell. It was dry. There was dirt in the air. Men stood watering their lawns, their thumbs in the hose to make a fine spray, pissing away the evenings. The kids were sullen and logy. The minister passed him on the street without a hello. Little kids kept a safe distance, window curtains seemed to rustle when he walked by, blinds were pried open a crack, people whispered.

  A letter came from the Great Northern, a W. L. Ja-mieson, Assistant Superintendent, to say that he, Francis With, as the son of the late Benny, qualified for a college scholarship under the terms of the Hill Trust for Railroad Orphans, left by the late Albert Hill, author of the song “The Wreck of the Fast Express,” and thus he, the superintendent, was pleased to offer him a place in the freshman class at Carleton College in Northfield on September 8, please advise at the soonest.

  As Francis thought about it, this offer did not resound with the clear ring of fate; it sat on the page, a vague invitation to go somewhere and read books and see if something stuck. He sat down to make a list, “What I Want to Do Before I’m Twenty.”

  1. Have sexual intercourse with a beautiful woman

  2. Earn money

  Were there beautiful women at Carleton College? Probably, but they would belong to someone else. Tall cool women in blue plaid skirts and knee socks, their books pressed to their left breasts, matched up with men who moved in their circles. Not him. Men like Frank Fair-mount on The Hills of Home who quarterbacked the Center City Wildcats and went away to Yale and broke Babs’s heart, but of course you knew somebody like Frank would never wind up with a Babs. Bluebirds don’t marry sparrows. He’d match up with a college girl in a blue plaid skirt.

  And then he turned the paper over and wrote:

  Frank With. Frank With. Frank With.

  It was a better name, no doubt about it. He wrote: Frank B. With.

  The problem was the soft last name. It died at the end. With. You said it and people always said, “Who?” He made a list of names: Benson, Burgess, Fox, Upton, Autry. Frank Autry. Frank Rogers. Frank Mix. Frank Armstrong. It was a shameful thing to turn your back on your own name. Especially with your father lying in the ground without a stone over his head. But he had no family left, not to speak of. And then he saw that by adding an e to -With he could get White.

  Frank White.

  The names made a nice click like closing the bolt on a .22.

  The night before Emma drove Mother to the state hospital for the insane, he wrote a letter to his father.

  Dear Daddy,

  It is hard, but you know that. Mother is sick. I have been to Dr. and he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her or else he won’t tell me because it’s too terrible. Maybe she will be better when she gets out of Mindren. This is an awful bad place. I know you liked it but without you it isn’t so nice. Daddy, our family has no true friends in this town. They can all go to hell. Grampa is in The Danish Home in Spirit Lake, Iowa. We visited him there and he does not know us anymore, but I do not think he is angry. Daddy, I am going to Minneapolis and get a job from Uncle Art. I want you to be proud of me. I wish we were all here together. I think of you every time I hear a train, and at other times. I will do everything to make you proud of me. I love you very much always and always,

  Sincerely,

  Your son,

  FRANK WHITE

  He stuffed the note in a clean bottle and buried it late that night in the long low mound over Benny’s grave. Mother and Emma left early in the morning, suddenly. Frank dreaded saying goodbye and hung back but Mother seemed cheerful, as if going off to a movie. “Bye!” she called, “See you later!” Emma was coming back with Charles to close up the house as soon as his migraine let up. She said, “Franny, take what you want, of course, and the rest goes to the poor, I guess.” He took his father’s straw hat and Army blanket, a Danish Bible, Grampa’s glasses and slippers, a box of old picture books, and the engine of his Lionel train. He locked the door behind him, dropped the key in the flowerpot, dumped the stuff in the back seat, pulled out of the alley, and the town slipped away in an instant, like dropping your pants.

  WLT came in loud and clear as he drove south. It was like the Bensons were in the car with him. Jo was feeling sorry for Mr. Lassen, whose boy Leon was living a sad profligate life in Chicago and driving his poor father to distraction. The boy was sullen and careless, ran up bills he didn’t pay, wasted the gifts his father generously sent him, and took up with bad companions who meant him no good. “Nothing costs so much as what we get for free. An abundance of things engenders disdain,” said Dad. “A thrifty father makes for a prodigal son.” Frank thought, “Was Daddy thrifty?” He didn’t think so. Anyway, Daddy was dead and in his grave. Maybe a dead father makes for a lively son. He gave her the gas and pulled around a cattle truck and held her right at seventy-five, barrelling through the hazy sunshine as the radio signal got stronger and stronger.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Antwerp

  He moved back in with Art and Clare. He slept for eighteen hours, woke up, and went around the corner to the Rialto for a triple feature. He dug dandelions out of the lawn. He tried to stay out of the way. And then, in one black day, three terrible things happened —he lost the car, they kicked him out, and a girl laughed at him. The pearl gray Chevy was parked in front of the house and, bang, somebody took it during the night. The cops shrugged. Francis had left the keys in it. Welcome to the city, boy-o. There was no insurance, of course. Tough beans. “Looks like you’re on foot now,” said Art. Frank walked downtown to kill time in Dayton’s and caught the eye of a beautiful girl with long black hair as she bent down to re-arrange the ties in the men’s tie counter, and she looked away and snickered, a withering laugh, like she had seen something in his nose. And then Art took him to the P
ascal for a big lunch, duck soup, porterhouse steak, mince pie, the works, and two bottles of beer. Art had a double bourbon. He was not slow getting to the point. Clare was feeling poorly, he said, and he thought it best if Francis got a room at the Antwerp. It was convenient, right next to the Ogden, a nice old brick apartment building that Ray Soderbjerg owned. “A lotta the radio folks put up there, it’s clean and cheap. I’ll take care of your rent until you’re on your feet. I got an appointment for you to see Roy Jr. about a job. You’re in, so don’t worry about it.” Art looked older and wearier than Francis remembered him being a few weeks ago.

  “Are you okay, Uncle Art? You look peaked.” In fact, Art looked worse than peaked, he looked to be at the end of his rope.

  “That’s Clare that’s sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. But I’m fine,” he said. To prove it, he pulled a quarter out of Frank’s ear.

  “By the way, I’ve changed my name to Frank White,” said Frank.

  “Okay,” said Art. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  “And thank you for everything.”

  Art sighed. “I hope you make friends here,” he said. “That’s important. You’re too much of a loner, Francis. And I can’t be looking after you. You’re on your own now, you understand?”

  Frank nodded. He understood it by the fact that Art did not say that he hoped Frank would come have dinner with them often.

  Art said, “I’ll take you over to the Antwerp tomorrow. Introduce you to Mr. Odom.”

  “Why not today?”

  So they drove home to collect his things. Some clothes, a red mackinaw, a couple hundred books, a “Minnesota’s World-Famous Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit Mine” poster (a gift from Art), a plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln, a few games, Pit, Rook, Authors—amazing to think that he lived here for all those years.

  “Take the bedspread and a couple blankets,” said Art, in an expansive mood. He peeled off ten twenty-dollar bills. Here.

  When he pulled up in front of the Antwerp, Art didn’t make a move to get out of the car. “See you at work,” said Frank and opened the door.

  “Did you hear Marjery Moore lost her boyfriend?” said Art, cheerily. “Robert Kellogg, that guy with the tweedly voice who played Vic. The nephew, the one with the dog. On Love’s Old Sweet Song. I heard he knocked her up and kissed her goodnight, drove to the depot, abandoned his car, and took off for Chicago with Victoria Marshall.”

  “Peggy?” Peggy was the secretary on Arthur Fox, Detective .

  “One and the same. So Monday afternoon both of them got killed. Vic’s car crashed head-on into a lightpole and an hour later Peggy left the office suddenly, without a word, and her body was found in the lake. A dangerous business, radio. But Robert and Victoria are shacked up in Chicago. What a honey she was. Boy, you want to talk about tits, she had a pair of tits woulda made a man out of anybody. Don’t tell the world, but I was the first one who ever had her. Late one night in my car. Good Lord. And I mean that sincerely. I didn’t even say a word. Just slipped my hand down there and held it until she got hot and started to hum. Oh boy. I was driving her home. Pulled over at 38th Street and those panties came off like autumn leaves and she climbed aboard the old pistol and she went around the block a couple times and then I got on top and man, what a girl she was. Cars going by, people peeking in the window—I didn’t care, I was on the stairway to stardom.” Art looked pleased and flushed at the thought of her. “One or two nights like that one, Francis: what more can a man ask?”

  Frank’s room was 4-C at the Antwerp, but it was actually three rooms, kitchen, bedroom, living room, furnished with a brown sofa, a dark green table, and a double bed with two shallow troughs in it. His own telephone, GENEVA 2014. “Rent is $30 a month,” said Mr. Odom, the manager. “It’s a nice building with plenty of friendly people, if that’s what you’re looking for. There’s really only three rules around here and I forget two of them. The main rule is secrecy. If you’re having a good time, don’t let your neighbors know about it, especially after ten p.m. and before eight in the morning.”

  Frank had hoped his room would face the YWCA next door, and it did, but the windows opposite him were dark and he doubted that one of them would be the locker room. A locker room would surely be in the basement and have frosted windows. But if the YWCA burned and naked women fled into the street, he’d have a front row seat. Meanwhile, he could drop slips of paper down and maybe a ventilator would draw them into the locker room and a naked dripping beautiful girl would find it lying on her towel, GEneva 2014.

  Art dropped him there on Wednesday, and by Thursday he had made a friend, a woman named Ginger who was folding clothes in the laundry room when Frank went down to wash a shirt. She had bleached hair and eyebrows redrawn in a look of permanent alarm and wore white pedal-pushers and a translucent blouse. She told him about her divorce and how much she liked being single again and how much she’d love to see Chicago sometime. She held up a brassiere. “What do you think of this?” she asked. “Too seductive?” She had been on WLT herself, she said. “I was an actress and then I was Ray Soderbjerg’s little whore for five years. Now I work at a candy counter. At Kresge’s. Stop in. I’ll give you a Nut Goodie, or something.” Friday morning, Frank would go in to WLT to see Roy Soderbjerg Jr., General Manager. “A cinch,” said Art on the phone. “I got the fix in for you, Francis.” Frank.

  It took the lady in 3-C, directly below Frank, several days to find out his name. She had three rooms, too, each with a table and a typewriter in it, and mounds of old scripts in apple crates. Patsy Konopka heard him come in Wednesday night, but was frantically finishing Friendly Neighbor and didn’t pay attention; on Thursday afternoon, when he clomped up the first flight of stairs, her ears perked up—his step told her he was young and slight of build—and when he ascended the second flight, she could hear modesty and purposefulness and decency in him. She was so tired of men: their breezy bullshit, the unbelievable lies they dished out. Lying so artless and bald-faced, you couldn’t imagine why they bothered. She rose from her typewriter, and as he walked past her door on the landing and headed up to the fourth floor, she got a glimpse of him through the peephole. His brown corduroy trousers were two inches short and he carried an armload of groceries and a big hank of brown hair hung in his eyes. “A plain face reveals an honest disposition,” she thought, and then she wondered if he might not be Jeanine’s old lover, Mr. Devereaux, the one she had met in New Orleans, finally arrived to consummate the romance, unaware of Jeanine’s embrace of the Baptist church and her marriage to Rev. Willetts and their joyful departure for the mission fields of the Belgian Congo. She braced herself for the task of filling him in.

  “She’s happy, Mr. Devereaux, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it. I don’t think she’s any more Baptist than she is a pumpkin, but we believe in what we wish for, and she wished for a husband. She waited for you and talked about you for three years and how many years does a person have? Finally she said to me, Patsy, I met somebody. And a month later she said, ‘I wouldn’t mind having his shoes under my bed.’ And there you are.”

  She sat back down at the typewriter with a page of Golden Years in it, the dreadful Coopers and their lousy money that they kept dishing out anonymously as if it made a cent’s worth of difference. Patsy wished they’d fall off a cliff. She wished she could write: Pistol shots ring out and cries of pain and confusion. She waited for Mr. Devereaux to dash out in the hall and lean over the landing and yell for Jeanine. I told her I’d be back this summer! I only went back to France to see my old mother! It’s true I’m three weeks late, but the freighter I shipped out on was blown Off course west of the Canaries and capsized in the south Atlantic and we drifted in the lifeboat and finally were picked up by an Argentine frigate and taken to Buenos Aires and from there to here, hitch-hiking, it takes more than a couple of days. Why couldn’t she have waited? But Mr. Devereaux calmly walked into the kitchen overhead and put the grocery sacks on the table and started t
o stash the stuff. He whistled a tune she didn’t recognize at first, and then he stopped and sighed. Why? He rustled among the bags and sighed a longer sigh.

  He had forgotten something! Something simple and obvious, like sugar, or salt. She could take him up a jarful, as a welcome gift. His angel from below. Mr. Devereaux, I’m Patsy Konopka, I live downstairs. Among my people, there is an ancient tradition of welcoming new neighbors with a sack of salt and a jar of sugar. May life be sweet and may life have savor.

  And then she remembered. She didn’t have any salt or sugar, she ate all her meals at the coffeeshop.

  That day, Little Becky returned to Friendly Neighbor after a few days’ visit to some people in Littleton. Marjery seemed morose about her boyfriend running off. She gave Frank a listless look in the Green Room and didn’t recognize him.

  BECKY: Dogs really care about you when it seems like nobody else does, don’t they, Dad? (WOOF) If you’re having a hard time, it doesn’t change how they feel about you. When you just need someone to put your arms around, well, a dog is always there—(Dog pants)

  DAD: What’s bothering you, honey?

  BECKY: I spent all the money from picking radishes on a box of chocolate lozenges and they weren’t any good and they’re all gone.

  That evening, Ginger knocked on Frank’s door. She had met him in the laundry, she explained, and wondered if he happened to be busy. If so, she could return later. Frank did not invite her in, not even when she said she was very upset and wouldn’t mind a beer. He told her he was tired.