The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  When she took over writing Friendly Neighbor, Patsy made the Bensons a little more human. Jo and Frank started bickering over money—Jo sent off for some youth-giving face cream made from bee hormones and ground antlers, and Frank hit the ceiling. “Three dollars! Three dollars?” Frank was liable to drop work at any time and go out fishing for walleyes, though he always came back empty-handed—“Three hours!” cried Jo. “Three hours!”—and one day Patsy had Mom Benson struck by a car while out shopping for underwear and she lay in the hospital in a coma. The coma went on and on. Katherine Doud, the actress who played Mom, was a lush and had come to the studio the day before, stewed to the gills, and the coma was to give her time to go to a sanitarium and dry out.

  • • •

  One day a man in a blue tuxedo strolled into Dad’s feed and seed in Elmville and demanded directions to the Moonlight Bay Supper Club. He was accompanied by a little girl in a pink prom dress and a tall buxom bejeweled woman named Ginger, and you knew the moment she said, “Pleased to make yer acquaintance, I’m shur,” that she and the man were not married.

  The club could be reached only by back roads through the bird refuge and along the banks of the Whispering Willow River. It was a hideaway where the well-to-do cavorted with their paramours, not on the main road, so the directions were complicated. And when Dad said, “And then turn left at the farm with the red barn with the Chaska Chick Starter billboard,” the man blew up—he threw his cane and his top hat on the counter next to a sack of Illini sweet-corn seeds and said, “Boy, isn’t this the rotten luck! Go away for a swell weekend and you wind up stuck in a stupid little burg where people can’t even give you directions out of town! Boy, that takes the cake!”

  He stalked around and fumed for a few minutes; meanwhile Dad struck up a conversation with the little girl. “My name is Rebecca,” she said, very sweetly. “I’m almost ten. If we get to Moonlight Bay, my dad is going to take me swimming.”

  Dad said, “Oh?”

  “Yes! And if I’m real good, we’ll go fishing, too.”

  “Well, if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no trade for tinkers,” remarked Dad.

  They chatted away and she asked him what he sold in this store and he gave her a tour. “This is our most popular tomato seed, the Milton, King Big Red Beefeater,” he said. She’d never seen tomato seeds, didn’t know tomatoes came from seeds. She’d never had a garden in her life, living as she did in a big suite on the thirtieth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, and she skipped along from bin to bin, scooping up handfuls of seeds as if they were jewels, sniffing their sweet dry seedy essence, as her father groused and grumped in the background and demanded a telephone and Ginger smoked a cigarette and whined, “You promised me a nice weekend, Bobbsie. You said we’d go swimming and dancing and we’d do a little cootchie-cootchie-coo—you didn’t say nothing about hanging around in no feed store,” and meanwhile Dad and Becky were getting to be fast friends. She had never ridden a bicycle or thrown a ball or had her own dog or cat, either. “No bike? Oh, you should come and visit us sometime,” said Dad.

  “Ohhhhhh, I wish I could,” she whispered.

  “And you never said word one about bringing the brat along neither,” Ginger said and blew a big cloud of smoke, and her heels went rapraprap like a tack hammer. “Quit foolin around, Bobbsie, and let’s go there and start having some fun, honey. C’mon! Puhleeze?”

  Becky began to weep softly. “Oh, that’s just great!” said her dad. “Bring you along and you bawl like a baby. Look at you!” He took Dad aside. “Lissen,” he said, “sorry I talked so rough before, I’ve been under a lotta pressure. Here’s a hundred bucks. Think you could look after my little girl for a few days until I get back? You and her seem to get along. Whaddaya say?”

  There was a short, sweet pause, where you could hear Dad loathe the man, then he said, “It would be my privilege. She is as welcome here as if she were my own.”

  • • •

  So in she came, Little Becky, played by Marjery Moore. Marjery Moore was fourteen but she played a little girl just fine. She was the daughter of Dr. W. Murray Moore, the physician who was treating Dad’s hemorrhoids, a big hearty man and more of a kidder than you’d want your physician to be. His daughter took after him. She was a handful. She smoked Camels, half a pack a day, and swore like a cowboy. Her mother brought her from school at 11:30 and dropped her off at the WLT entrance and she smoked a cigarette in the elevator and another one in the studio before the broadcast. Dad told her, “Honey, those coffin nails are going to hurt your voice,” but she just made a face. “It’s my business if I do. You’re not the boss of me, ya old dodo.”

  It dawned on Marjery within days of coming on Friendly Neighbor that she could get a big rise out of the radio folks by saying off-color things in her Little Becky voice. She could make Dad levitate an inch by tiptoeing up behind him in the hall and crying, “Look at me! I’m naked as a jaybird!”

  “Honey,” he said, “it’s not funny. We got sponsors back here, sponsors’ kids, employees’ families. Don’t ruin it for them.”

  “Well, don’t have a shit fit about it.”

  “Honey, what you do drunk you pay for sober. Sin in haste and repent at leisure. Think about it.”

  “Stuff it, Pops.”

  • • •

  Leo LaValley, the old WLT chief engineer, believed that Becky was a boy. He was certain of it. “We are paying three hundred fifty dollars a week for a so-called child to mince around like a girl, and when the story hits the papers, boys, you and I will be out on the street looking for work. If that kid’s a girl, then I’m Greta Garbo. I keep seeing razor nicks on the little nipper’s cheeks, don’t you?” He stood in the engineer’s booth, looking at the actors through the big slanted glass window, and pointed at Becky, who was lighting a cigarette as Harmon Tremaine the announcer read the commercial (“Cottage Home is chock full of vitamins and protein and all the good stuff that helps little girls like Becky grow up tall and strong, and Cottage Home is the cottage cheese with that mmmmmm-good real honest-to-goodness homemade flavor. Right, Little Becky?” LITTLE BECKY: Oh boy!”), and said, “Some hermaphrodites can pass for children until they experience the change of voice in their late thirties. They have only one gonad, like John Wilkes Booth. He had a piping soprano voice and played women’s roles until he was thirty. Had no lead in his pencil. That’s why he shot Lincoln. Another was Typhoid Harry, the Georgia farm boy who milked his father’s cows day and night and spread the deadly disease that almost wiped out Atlanta. Another hermaphrodite.” He told the other engineers to keep a close watch on Little Becky. “You can tell,” he said. “You’ll know.”

  • • •

  A few days after Becky’s arrival in Elmville, Dad took Patsy for lunch to Richards Treat and told her to get rid of the kid. “She talks like her shoes are too tight. She’s worse than Little Buddy. In fact, she makes him sound almost reasonable.” Little Buddy was the son of Dad’s friend Slim Graves, who came on Friendly Neighbor from time to time to sing maudlin ballads about dying children. “Ditch her,” said Dad. “Have her dad come back from New York and pick her up. Have her die and have Little Buddy sing at her funeral. Do anything, but get rid of the kid.”

  “Dad, we got five hundred letters about that show where she arrived in town. Most popular we’ve ever done. Milton, King want to put her picture on their spring catalogue. They want to put out a Little Becky Scrapbook in the fall, give it away for three empty seed packets. Our contract with them comes up in two months. Little Becky is a moneymaker, Dad. And I want a raise.”

  Dad didn’t like the premise of it. “You take a child away from her own father and what’s next! You want all the kiddos to hate their dads?”

  • • •

  One day Marjery tripped along behind the owner of WLT, Ray Soderberg, and said, in her Little Becky voice, “How come your pants are so bi
g in front, mister?” He beat a fast retreat to his office and closed the door and wrote Patsy a note: “Fire Marjery Moore. She’s a bur in the butt. Give her malaria or something. She could die of an infected tooth like F. W. Woolworth. That would encourage listeners to go to the dentist. Children are inherently unreliable and when you make a child into the star of a show you are building on quicksand. They are easily spoiled by attention, and they quickly grow up and become unattractive.”

  The next day, Little Becky got terribly sick, and Dad was in something of a panic, what with Jo and Frank away on a car trip to Michigan and no money on hand for a specialist—and finally she was knocking at death’s door, 105-degree fever, babbling about angels and bright heavenly emanations—“Uncle Dad, Uncle Dad, they have such beautiful faces.” Marjery talked through a bath towel to get the faint voice of the dying child, and Dad said, all choked up, “Lord, I never doubted You until now, but—how can You let this child suffer? Lord, take her home or work a miracle, but please, Lord, do it soon.” The switchboard was jammed with sobbing fans—more than $20,000 was raised in one week for the children’s wing of Abbot Hospital. Becky’s fever continued. She babbled about nimbuses and auras and wholeness and purity. A few days later, Ray relented and gave Marjery a six-month contract, and the next day Dr. Jim burst in the door with a brand-new serum flown in from the city. Buster barked for joy and Jo and Frank came back with a tidy sum inherited from a Michigan uncle they never knew they had, and Becky said, “Uncle Dad, why are you crying?” “Oh, don’t mind me,” he muttered. “I’m just a foolish old man, that’s all. And sometimes I wish I were smarter. It seems like life is half over before we know what it is. But you close your eyes and get some sleep now.”

  BECKY: Why is Dr. Jim here?

  JIM: Just came to make sure my girl is all right.

  DAD: You rest now, honey.

  BECKY: Uncle Dad?

  DAD: Yes?

  BECKY: Heaven is the beautifulest place I ever saw. It was all bright and starry and full of music, like a carnival except the rides were free, and Jesus was there and jillions of angels, and there was no sadness there, no crying, or nothing, just happiness, but still, I’m glad they sent me back to be with you, Uncle Dad.

  DAD: I’m glad, too, little Beeper. You rest now, honey, I’ll just sit here beside your bed and hold your hand.

  BECKY: Oh, and there was a nice lady who said to say hello to you. Her name was Benson, too. Florence Benson.

  DAD: Mom!

  He rang up the Home and found out Mom had passed peacefully from this life a few minutes before. The first person to come bearing condolences was a neighbor lady, Miss Judy, who brought a pan of fresh banana bread and Becky’s geography lesson (South America) and fixed a pot of coffee and told Dad that he should always feel free to count on her.

  WLT got hundreds of letters, and Little Becky recovered, and Ray got an angry note from Katherine Doud (who played Mom), who hadn’t been informed that her character would drop dead and told Ray that Dad had promised her that Mom would stay in the Home until she, Katherine, had quit drinking. “He is a dirty rotten liar and a cheat and maybe it’s time you know that he is having an affair with Faith Snelling, Dale’s wife,” she wrote. Dad? In the sack with the actress who played his daughter, Jo? Ray sent Katherine some money and told her that when she got on the wagon for good she could return for one episode as Becky’s New York mom, visiting Elmville to take the wretched child home. He would pay her handsomely for it. If the fans loved Little Becky before, they were even crazier about her after her terrible illness. They baked pies and cakes for her by the hundreds, enough to keep the oldsters at the Ebenezer Home stuffed for weeks, and they wrote her bags and bags of mail.

  • • •

  “A hermaphrodite!” said Leo LaValley. “A freak of nature, but the outlook for these little fellas is not cheery. They tend to go berserk and walk into a grocery store with a shotgun and shoot the clerk for a couple rolls of quarters. That child is an undeveloped adult male tortured by his own desire for a woman and that’s why the little shit is a big star. Women can hear that throb in her voice. But then that’s true of most singers. A real man’s man can no more sing than a dog can read books. It’s pure frustration that makes for performing talent. All that la-di-da and the big grins, that’s hermaphrodism talking.” He leaned forward and pointed a finger into his own chest. “I,” he said, “have no talent for performance whatsoever. I am quite happy to be normal.”

  8.

  CASEY AT THE BAT

  In the Ernest Thayer original, it’s a tragedy when Casey strikes out, but of course that depends on which ballpark you’re in. In my version, the game is not in Mudville, it’s in Dustburg, and people are overjoyed. When I wrote this, the line about the pigeons made me laugh out loud, and I almost laughed out loud at the line about the crowd grabbing hold of the bumpers and rocking him to and fro. A cruel poem.

  It was looking rather hopeful for our Dustburg team that day:

  We were leading Mudville four to two with an inning left to play.

  We got Cooney on a grounder and Muldoon on the same,

  Two down, none on, top of the ninth—we thought we’d won the game.

  Mudville was despairing, and we grinned and cheered and clapped.

  It looked like after all these years our losing string had snapped.

  And we only wished that Casey, the big fat ugly lout,

  Could be the patsy who would make the final, shameful out.

  Oh, how we hated Casey, he was a blot upon the game.

  Every dog in Dustburg barked at the mention of his name.

  A bully and a braggart, a cretin and a swine—

  If Casey came to bat, we’d stick it where the moon don’t shine!

  Two out and up came Flynn to bat, with Jimmy Blake on deck,

  And the former was a loser and the latter was a wreck;

  Though the game was in the bag, the Dustburg fans were hurt

  To think that Casey would not come and get his just dessert.

  But Flynn, he got a single, a most unlikely sight,

  And Blake swung like a lady but he parked it deep to right,

  And when the dust had lifted, and fickle fate had beckoned,

  There was Flynn a-hugging third and Jimmy safe at second.

  Then from every Dustburg throat, there rose a lusty cry:

  “Bring up the slimy greaseball and let him stand and die.

  Throw the mighty slider and let him hear it whiz

  And let him hit a pop-up like the pansy that he is.”

  There was pride in Casey’s visage as he strode onto the grass,

  There was scorn in his demeanor as he calmly scratched his back.

  Ten thousand people booed him when he stepped into the box,

  And they made the sound of farting when he bent to fix his socks.

  And now the fabled slider came spinning toward the mitt,

  And Casey watched it sliding and he did not go for it,

  And the umpire jerked his arm like he was hauling down the sun,

  And his cry rang from the box seats to the bleachers:

  Stee-rike One!

  Ten thousand Dustburg partisans raised such a mighty cheer,

  The pigeons in the rafters crapped and ruined all the beer.

  “You filthy ignorant rotten bastard slimy son of a bitch,”

  We screamed at mighty Casey, and then came the second pitch.

  It was our hero’s fastball, it came across the plate,

  And according to the radar, it was going ninety-eight.

  And according to the umpire, it came in straight and true,

  And the cry rang from the toilets to the bullpen:

  Stee-rike Two!

  Ten thousand Dustburg fans arose in joyful loud derision

  To question
Casey’s salary, his manhood, and his vision.

  Then while the Dustburg pitcher put the resin on the ball,

  Ten thousand people hooted to think of Casey’s fall.

  Oh, the fury in his visage as he spat tobacco juice

  And heard the little children screaming violent abuse.

  He knocked the dirt from off his spikes, reached down and eased his pants—

  “What’s the matter? Did ya lose ’em?” cried a lady in the stands.

  And then the Dustburg pitcher stood majestic on the hill,

  And leaned in toward the plate, and then the crowd was still,

  And he went into his windup, and he kicked, and let it go,

  And then the air was shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

  He swung so hard his hair fell off and he fell down in disgrace

  And the Dustburg catcher held the ball and the crowd tore up the place,

  With Casey prostrate in the dirt amid the screams and jeers

  We threw wieners down at him and other souvenirs.

  We pounded on the dugout roof as they helped him to the bench,

  Then we ran out to the parking lot and got a monkey wrench

  And found the Mudville bus and took the lug nuts off the tires,

  And attached some firecrackers to the alternator wires.

  We rubbed the doors and windows with a special kind of cheese

  That smells like something died from an intestinal disease.