WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  The old fart’d be flattered out of his pants. He’d make a little flutter of modesty but he’d climb in and start gassing about the McCarthy era and Shell’d drive down Fifth Avenue and then hang a left into a side street and then suddenly clap the chloroform to Frank White’s nose and shove him down on the floor and hold him until he went limp and haul him to the Brooklyn Bridge and throw him over. Then he’d go back to New Hampshire and write the last chapter.

  “Sunk in a deep depression since his impulsive move to Paris, White came to New York for psychiatric treatment. Much as he talked up France and its superior civilization, White was miserable there. He missed the limelight. Once adored by millions as a fount of wisdom, now he was alone, barely able to converse with the newsboy, unable to explain to a plumber that the toilet leaked. Dejected, he and Maria took the $200/day suite at the Sherry Netherland, the same gilded suite where they had shacked up so often in the. past, but the memories only aroused Frank’s black guilt for what he had done to those who had helped him. Eating a $30 room-service breakfast, he was haunted by visions of (name), the first woman he loved, the one who stood by him in poverty and anonymity, who lived in squalor in (town) while he was ensconced in a red drawing room in a fourth-floor suite in a gracious hotel overlooking Central Park.

  “A few days after their arrival, Frank was unable to leave the suite, unable to talk on the phone or eat a sandwich or look in a mirror without weeping. He lay in a bed for three weeks, too infirm to hold a book or a copy of the Times and thus, the man TV Guide once called ‘The Father of Anchors’ was forced to pass the time watching television. He was struck by its unspeakable shallowness and brutality. After a few days, he saw that his life had been wasted and that his so-called talent had been a depraved and vicious one. He tried twice to hang himself with a leather belt, and to throw himself from the window, and to drop an electrical fan into the bathwater, but Maria intervened. Finally he gathered up all his willpower, and he forced himself to appear to improve. He made himself accompany her to dinners and movies. He made himself laugh and carry on conversations. Inside, his guts were busted, but he kept dancing, kept smiling, kept shaking hands, until finally she relaxed her guard, and that night he took a cab to the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. The legendary abutments and harp-like suspension cables immortalized by the poet Hart Crane were wreathed in fog, as he walked to the midpoint, tied his Medicare card to his left ankle for identification, gave $200 from his wallet to a passing tramp and climbed up the rigging and over to the edge. Perhaps he paused a moment, looking down at the roiled waters, and thought of the day, etc. Perhaps he remembered (fill in details)———Did he perhaps feel a twinge of regret for the people he had hurt and the damage he had caused? (Etc.) If so, it lasted only a few seconds, and then his body hurtled down in the darkness. According to the coroner, he died immediately on impact from a broken neck.”

  Shell thought this passage, like a dream, in one smooth flash. And he remembered the line from William Safire —he had clipped it out of the Times and taped it to his refrigerator—“The inconceivable becomes the inevitable: that’s leadership.” The line referred to Bush’s war, but it was so true, it applied here, too. One man can take things into his own hands. The unthinkable becomes unavoidable.

  He had worked hard on Frank White. He had earned some property rights there and now he owed it to himself to kill him. He crossed 59th Street and looked at the Corvettes in the showroom window. Where could he obtain chloroform? Perhaps from a pet store. Tell them he had an old mutt he had to put away. They’d stock chloroform or something like it, and a bottle big enough to kill a big dog would be sure to knock out Frank White for an hour. He didn’t think chloroform could be traced in the blood. Maybe they wouldn’t even perform an autopsy, especially if there was a suicide note. Which would be a nice touch for the book.

  All this brilliance was making him hungry. The hot-dog wagon was right there, ten feet away; he got an Italian sausage on pita bread, onions, peppers, tomato, hot sauce, the works, two bucks, and ate it as he crossed Fifth Avenue.

  He could get Frank White to write his own suicide note in the form of an autograph.

  Simple. It’d go like this. Before the business about Roy Cohn, he’d say, “Mr. White, my mom is your biggest fan and I wonder if you’d write a note to her. She always loved your sign-off on the News Tonight. Could you write: Dear Mother, Good night and good luck. Frank White? Gosh thanks. She’s going to be thrilled.”

  Or maybe in the car, parked on the side street, prior to the chloroform.

  White’s mother had killed herself in 1956. She was living alone in a rooming house in Duluth, and one warm spring day she came down to the harbor and jumped off the Lift Bridge. She had to wait for an hour for an ore boat to come steaming in off Lake Superior and the Lift Bridge to lift—in its normal down position, it was too low to permit suicide—and then she waited too long to jump, and jumped onto the upper deck of the boat as it passed beneath, a fall of twenty feet. She landed without a scratch. The crew had been at sea for more than a month and Mrs. White, though despondent, was attractive to them. They took her out for an evening on the town, carousing, dancing, moving from bar to bar along Superior Avenue, and after she had downed a snootful of gin rickeys, she dropped dead on the barroom floor. A leap from the Brooklyn Bridge would be, in a sense, the son’s attempt to finish what the mother had set out to do—a sort of bridge between them (though one needn’t lay that on too heavily)—the last chapter could be entitled “Mother and Son Reunion” and the famous sign-off seen nightly on national television could be seen now as White’s lifelong suicide note, his secret pact with his mother, his covenant with death—Shell crossed 59th, eating the last inch of the sausage, thinking he might need another one. This had been the theme of the book all the way and he had never recognized it before. Suicide. It was written all over White’s life. How had he missed it? The steadiness of the man, what was it but the certainty of one who has Already Made Up His Mind—that Olympian baritone voice, so reassuring to millions, was the voice of a man who knew his own end. He had risen to the heights to please the mother and now he would fall from the heights and rejoin her.

  It was all there. A book that would earn him three million dollars and would be admired, really admired, held up on the front page of the Times Book Review as a work that blazes a new trail in the misty thickets of biography —perhaps the best book on an American life since Henry Adams—he looked up at Sherman, blazing gold on his pedestal, the Sherry Netherland beyond—

  According to witnesses, he never saw the yellow truck. It clipped him on the right side and flung him thirty feet through the air and he landed hard against a lamppost. Witnesses standing across the street heard bones snap when he hit. He lay on the sidewalk for ten minutes, bleeding from his mouth, his ears, his body crumpled like a pile of used clothing, and then an ambulance took him to Lenox Hill Hospital. He had broken his right arm, a collarbone, eleven ribs, his pelvis, his right leg, and crunched two vertebrae, but the cruelest injury, they found, after they had screwed his bones together, was to his brain. When they reduced the Demerol and he was fully awake, the patient had no memory at all and very little intellectual function. The brain CT scan and magnetic resonance imaging showed no lesions, no hematoma. Weeks passed, the patient seemed comfortable and in no distress, but he could not speak, though he was able, gradually, to learn a few words again: Hello. Water. Toilet. Food. Pill. Thank you, though he could not distinguish between Yes and No.

  When he was brought in, he appeared to be about fifty, white, well-nourished, well-kept, and from his clothing, the corduroy jacket, blue button-down shirt, pre-faded jeans, Hush Puppies, the police assumed he was an academic. His billfold, if he had one, had disappeared before the ambulance arrived. Two detectives roamed along 59th Street for an afternoon and part of the next day, inquiring at hotels about missing guests, showing a photo of the man to bartenders and carriage drivers. The doorman at the Sherry Netherland said, �
�It’s about time you guys show up.” He had seen two young men hotwire a green Rambler-on Fifth Avenue! in the middle of the afternoon!—and he had called 911 and here it was a day later before the cops arrive. They gave him a number to call for auto theft—911 was only for emergencies, they explained.

  The only clue—and it was a slim one—was a page of yellow legal-size paper, folded three times, on which somebody—presumably the unknown man—had written notes that referred, apparently, to the television-news celebrity Frank White. The notes did not make sense, being all about White’s suicide, and White was very much alive. In fact, he was staying nearby at the St. Moritz. The detectives went up to see him. They apologized. They were sorry to bother him, extremely sorry, but he invited them in, sat them down, set out a couple glasses of Evian and a fruit plate, chatted with them. Their names were Vince and Sean. They asked him to look at the notes.

  White took the folded yellow sheet. They were sorry, it was an unpleasant business, but could he think of anybody who might write such things about him? Anybody? White read the notes—about his mother, the old sign-off, his depression, his death wish—and looked up and grinned. “There’s been a lot of negative stuff written about me,” he said, “and this is the first I’ve read that didn’t have some truth to it.” He had no idea who could’ve written it.

  They heard a key in the lock and the door opened and a woman appeared, lugging a trunk. “It was only forty dollars, it’s built like a safe, you could ship rocks in it,” she said. She was out of breath. She was tall, rangy like a runner, with cropped gray hair and bright green eyes, and she wore a black ribbed sweater and blue jeans and hiking shoes. Dark glasses propped on top of her head. “My wife Maria,” he said. The detectives stood up to go. They apologized again for bothering him. The man had been struck by a truck, was incoherent, the paper was the only clue to who he was.

  “What paper?” asked Maria. Vince showed her the paper and she read it. “It’s got to be that man who’s writing the book about you,” she said. “Who else would care about this nonsense? It’s that poor man Shell.”

  And so Richard Shell was identified. Lenox Hill was paid $220,000 by his health insurance company, and he was returned to New Hampshire, to a nursing home a few miles from the college, where, after his savings were used up, the state and the county paid for him to be fed and bathed and walked every day. His students looked high and low for the book manuscript, and found it on a disc in his desk at home, and there was talk of editing it for publication, as a memorial to him, but then school let out and everybody went home.