WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Women and Radio. His life in a nutshell.

  An earnest young Methodist minister named Joe Simpson, the son of a former WLT program director, came around to sit and read from First Corinthians. As he saw it, spiritually speaking, it was the bottom of the ninth with Ray sitting on a five-run lead, and the Lord waiting for him in the dugout, hands outstretched, well done, thou good and faithful pitcher. The old man closed his eyes. “I don’t think God is going to be that glad to see me,” Ray whispered.

  “But God’s promise of eternal happiness to those who love Him—”

  “I didn’t love Him that much, if the truth be told.”

  “You don’t mean that. You’re not feeling so good, that’s all.”

  “Damn right I’m not. I’m dying.”

  “Is there anything you want to get off your conscience?”

  “Yes. Women and radio. My big sins.”

  “I’m praying for you, Mr. Soderbjerg. The Lord’s will be done.”

  “I just wish he’d do it and get it over with.”

  Roy visited him, though Ray had sent him a note saying not to come.

  I am over here dying, and before I am done I want to say goodbye to you.

  Goodbye.

  Also I want to forgive you for anything you did, whatsoever, no matter what. All of it. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  I am sorry that we didn’t sell the station in 1937 as we could have. The Denhams would have bought out 51% for $100,000 which was quite a chunk of change then as you know, but that is all water under the dam. A person has to live one day at a time and not look back. That is my principle. My will, if you are interested, leaves everything to the University.

  There is no need for you to come over here at all, and in fact I don’t want you to. Death is private. I am very well cared for and don’t wish to have spectators. So don’t visit. We have had thousands of visits and lunches, and that is enough. I am no fun to visit anymore. This is the disadvantage of dying, that you feel so bad while you’re doing it, and though it’s sad to think “I’ll never see them again,” it’s much worse to see them again and get no pleasure from it.

  Roy read this and went straight over to Ray’s house, and Ray was feeling good enough to get dressed and sit in the solarium. A big white wicker chair was pulled up next to the windows, between the potted hydrangeas. The waterfall was turned off. Ray sat in the chair, in a black sweater and slacks, under a blue comforter, smoking a cigar, looking out across the snowy lawn, toward the garage. “I oughta get out the Buick and drive her, she’s been sitting there for two months,” he said. “Good car. You want it?”

  “You said not to come, but I came anyway, because I have to tell you something. You don’t want to hear it, but I have to say it, otherwise I wouldn’t be your brother, I’d just be a false friend.”

  “I don’t want to see you,” said Ray.

  “That’s okay. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “You shouldn’t. You’re a cheater and a jerk. You ought to stop and consider that.”

  “That’s what you had to tell me—?”

  “If we had bought that land and built that building like I told you, the family would’ve earned millions plus the profits from the station. But no, you sign us up with the Ogden instead, and we pay rent through the nose, and you keep paying and paying and paying and paying, more and more and more, so who gets rich off this? Not your family, not the people who are loyal to you and work for you, but your landlord! Pillsbury! The rich guys walked away with the money, Ray. And the rest of us got chickenfeed. You know that’s right. You screwed all those women and you screwed us too. We worked our butts off and made the business go, and you hurt us. You did dirt to the people who loved you. That’s all I’ve got to say. I’m sorry you’re dying.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. ”

  “Then get out of here. And don’t show your ugly face at my funeral.”

  . “I’ll come if I feel like it, and I’ll sit in the front row and look at your big nose sticking up out of the coffin. And I’ll listen to the minister who never met you in his life tell what a wonderful person you were, and I’ll follow your coffin out to Lakewood Cemetery and see you lowered into the ground and I’ll toss in a handful of dirt but it’ll have a stone in it. When you hear a big thunk on the lid, know that that’s from me. And afterwards I’ll go to Charley’s Cafe Exceptionale and have oysters and a martini and a prime rib and a bottle of the best red wine and I’ll have a beautiful woman sitting across the table from me holding my hand and laughing at my jokes even if I have to pay her to do it.”

  Ray laughed. “I hope you do,” he said. “Take Patsy Konopka. She’s good to take to restaurants. Has the appetite of a horse and she can talk half the night. Loved every minute I spent with her. I remember we talked for two hours once and ate tiny lamb chops and drank a bottle of wine. We told each other everything. I told her I wanted to sleep with her. She said, ‘I know.’ We had coffee and for dessert we had ice cream wrapped in ice cream. I walked her back home. It was one o’clock in the morning. We stood in the doorway of the Antwerp and we kissed for half an hour. What wonderful kisses! I hope you come to my funeral with a woman as beautiful as her and I wish you the best of luck afterward.”

  A week before he died, he had climbed out of bed to go downstairs and sit in a chair while twelve big fellows in red plaid shirts from the Order of Woodmen presented him with. a brass plaque that made him an honorary Boomer and gave him six big whoops and a zinc pickaroon. “You Have Enriched the Lives of Countless Thousands Through Your Contributions to Broadcasting,” said the plaque, among other things. Roy Jr., a former Chief Whoopdepoop of the Woodmen, had arranged the ceremony, but the fellows had no idea who the sleepy old man in the blue bathrobe was.

  The $800 bought Frank a whole three months. He lived in a dark room above a cigar store, his room smelled of smoke from below, like the essence of Ray ascending. Ten dollars a week for an army cot and a bureau dresser with the mirror gone and no shade on the window and the toilet down the hall filthy, the bathtub unspeakable. He bathed standing up, pouring water on himself with a Mason jar. He walked the streets and haunted the public library and lived on hot dogs. His biggest expense was talking to Maria in Minneapolis. He got a fistful of quarters and called her up almost every night. “Is Merle there?” he asked. She said no. She told him Ray was dying and Dad had retired and Roy Jr. had killed off the old shows. She was working at the perfume counter at Young-Quinlan, a nice job except that her boss kept asking her to the movies. Frank asked her to come and marry him. She said, “Get a job.”

  The cigar dealer lent him a typewriter, and Frank sat and typed his job resume, smoking a Cuban panatela, thinking of Ray. Ray would have some good advice for him, but who would want to talk to a thief? The resume was triple-spaced, four sentences, and offered no personal references. He typed fourteen copies and took them around to fourteen radio stations, but radio was firing, not hiring. He considered going to commercial school and training to become an office manager: $90 for a three-month course, and they guaranteed a job afterward. He thought about becoming a streetcar motorman. One night he rode the Western Avenue streetcar out to Riverview Amusement Park, rode the Silver Flash and the Blue Streak, the Boomerang and Aero-Stat and the Fireball and the Pair-0-Chutes, saw the freak show where Popeye popped his eyes and the hootchie-kootchie dancers and the African Dip where men threw baseballs at a target to dump a black man into a tank of water—a gaudy evening under the blazing lights, the girls in summer dresses brushing against his arms, and then a fortune teller on the midway looked at his palm and told him, “You have the soul of a waiter,” and he recognized the truth of it. Why wait and wait for something wonderful to come along? Why not get a job? He walked three miles home to save a dime.

  Ray Soderbjerg died on a Tuesday, the morning of the Big March Blizzard of 1951, and his obituary (“Radio Pioneer Succumbs at 73”) was buried under ne
ws about rural families marooned in cars a few hundred yards from their homes. Even on The Noontime News on WLT, his passing was noted deep into the broadcast, after the school closings and before the basketball scores. The Tribune said that he was instrumental in the development of radio as a tool of education and a forum for debate on important public issues, listed some awards won by WLT, said he had died at home, that Vesta was returning from Sweden, that the burial would take place from Mount Olivet and interment in Lakewood Cemetery, noted Ray’s membership in the Sons of Knute and Masons and the Brighten the Corner Club, and did not mention a fact dear to Ray’s heart: that, for the last week of his life, Patsy Konopka lay next to him in his bed, holding his hand, smoothing his hair.

  When she awoke at six that morning, his eyes were open and he spoke to her. He whispered (she thought), “Me today and you tomorrow.” He was having difficulty swallowing so she gave him a, few spoonfuls of whiskey, which helped, and she went to make him a poached egg for breakfast. Even if Ray didn’t eat, he still enjoyed looking at a meal. She put the egg on a slice of toast, garnished with parsley, on a china plate covered with a bowl, on a tray with a white linen and a single rose in a silver vase, just like at a swank hotel, and as she fixed the tray, she heard him call, and came in to find him gone. She closed his eyes and straightened his covers and called up Roy Jr. She put on her coat and tiptoed out the back door, as if not to wake him, leaving the breakfast by his bed, and drove downtown to the Ogden.

  It was not quite 7 a.m. She carried two shopping bags down the hall past the Green Room, where Leo LaValley was trying to clear his throat, and into Studio B.

  The poor old jinxed studio had become a glorified closet, full of boxes of old Friendly Neighbor scripts and boxes of Love’s Old Sweet Song scripts (marked LOSS), and hats and banjos and brass plaques, an empty trumpet case, stacks of newscasts, Leo’s file of gags, old banners and placards and posters, unclaimed prizes, lost coats heaped on the piano, and underneath it was the gravel box Shirley had walked on towards the deserted farmhouse where the murderer lurked on Arthur Fox, Detective and the framed door Arthur had opened slowly, and the padded box the murderer fired the pistol into, and the box of broken glass Arthur had thrown him through, and around the room were strewn Gene’s many notices and bulletins warning people to clean up: “Kindly remove all personal belongings from this room immediately” and “Disorder will not be tolerated in this area. This rule is in effect immediately” and “ALL PERSONAL EFFECTS not claimed by NOON FRIDAY will be disposed of. No exceptions” and Gene’s final cri de coeur:THIS IS A PIGSTY. IT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

  NO SMOKING, NO ALCOHOL, NO LUNCHING

  IN THIS ROOM.

  THIS MEANS YOU.

  I HAVE ATTEMPTED REASON, I HAVE OFFERED COM-

  PROMISE, AND NEITHER HAVE GOTTEN US ANYWHERE.

  ANY NORMAL PERSON WOULD BE DISGUSTED. THIS

  ROOM WILL BE PUT BACK INTO WORKING ORDER

  IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL BE FORCED TO TAKE STERN

  MEASURES.

  Rubbery grayish mold grew in the dusty coffee cups on the floor, next to ashtrays full of historic butts, and there, his head on the carpet spotted with black burn holes, lay Buck Steller, on his back, asleep, in a brown suit and a gold vest, his snap-brim hat under his poor old head, his mouth ajar and arms flung out as if he were singing at the Ritz, his sportscast in his hand. His snoring sounded like he might be saying, “Noooooo, not Massachusetts.” Patsy stepped over him and set down her shopping bags.

  Ray had packed them a week before, his eyes shining with exquisite pain, all his treasures. “Someday this stuff will be worth something. I want you to have it,” he said. Old 78s of Jimmy Noone and Bix and the Lunceford band and Johnny and Baby Dodds and J. P. O’Blennis & His Evening Creepers and a signed portrait of Bryan and a bottle of 1928 Chateau Morton and a gold watch and chain and fourteen morocco-bound volumes of Mark Twain and a jar of rare coins and a china teapot and a small carved ivory figure of a naked woman brushing her long hair, her eyes closed, her face turned up toward the sun.

  Patsy set the bags in the corner and laid a coat over them. It crossed her mind to take the bottle of wine, or the watch, and then she thought, No, they belong here, and she turned and stepped over Buck and slipped out of WLT and into the cold starry morning.

  Maria called Frank to tell him that Ray was dead, and the cigar dealer downstairs answered and said, “He’s gone, toots. Got his own apartment. No phone there but he said to tell you to call him at work. He’s at WGN. Nice, huh? I think Frankie caught the brass ring. Good luck, toots.”

  Frank told her the whole story. “I walked into WGN and asked if they had had time to look at my resume yet, and I sat in the lobby for two hours before the receptionist sent me upstairs. By then it was five o’clock, the woman at the personnel desk was ready to go home. She already had her hat on, a large woman in a pinchback suit and tiny wire-rim glasses. She shook her head and waved me toward a door at the end of the room. ‘Go downstairs and talk to Dave,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time to deal with this.’ So I went downstairs.”

  He went down three flights and through a glass door, into a long hall, one wall covered with photographs of burning buildings and famous people shaking hands. He heard voices through a door held slightly ajar by a block of two-by-four. Frank walked in. The room was thirty feet high, the walls covered with green acoustic tile, a radio studio apparently except that a thin blue curtain hung from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, and he was behind it, and the voices and the bright lights were on the other side. “Fifteen minutes!” a man shouted. “He told me fifteen minutes! Where is he?”

  “Screw ’m!” said an older man.

  “He should be so lucky.”

  They were wheeling large machines into position. A circle of light ten feet wide hit the blue curtain, shrank to six, grew back to ten. “If it stays there, I’m going through,” thought Frank.

  He opened the curtain. The light blazed in his eyes, but he saw a desk in front of him, a chair, a microphone, a script. In front of the desk were two television cameras. The men were pacing in front of a glass control-room window, but they stopped when Frank appeared.

  One of them said, “You’re not Ingram.”

  Frank said, “I’m White. Ingram isn’t coming. I’m ready to go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Frank White.”

  The older man studied him. He said, “You couldn’t have worn a cleaner shirt?”

  Frank said, “Gray loaks better on television anyway.”

  He sat down in the chair. (Nobody had told him not to sit in it.) An engineer adjusted the microphone and Frank looked through the script. News. Nothing tricky about it. The clock moved toward six and he kept expecting Ingram to come in or somebody to ask him if he had any television experience, but then it dawned on him: he didn’t and neither did Ingram or anybody else.

  A girl in a dark green dress stood beside the camera, perusing him, and he smiled. Hi. She had a magnificent head of waving black hair and such a sweet smile, she looked like Donna LaDonna dressed as a Girl Scout. She stepped up to the desk and patted his forehead with a powderpuff and stroked his cheeks. She smoothed his hair.

  “Do you perspire heavily?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you look real nice.”

  “Thank you, Donna.”

  She stepped back behind the camera. Frank smiled at the thought of what he was thinking, and the red light flashed and Frank looked into the black lens like it was her own dark eyes. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Frank White, and here is the news.”

  WGN hired him, he told Maria, and maybe it hadn’t been necessary but he had lied and told them he had been the news director at WLT for six years. “Why?” she asked. Because he had told them that he was thirty years old and he needed to account for the time. “And I gave you as a character reference,” he said.

  “How can I be your character reference? I’m go
ing to marry you.”

  “Once you marry me, I’m on my own, but until then, if anyone asks, tell them I’m a great man,” he said, and then the beauty of it dawned on him, that the voice on the line was her, that she loved him and chose to live with him, and that was that, as clear as a bell. The end of the old days, the beginning of the new.

  CHAPTER 42

  Epilogue

  A few weeks before Easter, 1991, a few days after

  President Bush launched the ground war against Iraq, Frank White’s biographer Richard Shell read in People that White was in Manhattan for a few weeks to see his friends and look at art. Shell had been writing the book for almost two years—it was now called Frank White: The Untold Story and was due out in the fall from Furness Press—working weekends and summers in a spare office at the junior college in New Hampshire where he taught mass communication. You didn’t often see White’s name in public print anymore, and Shell was thrilled to catch a glimpse. He clipped out the story, put it under his desk lamp, and studied the photograph.