WLT (24 page)

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.

H
e 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 Pascal 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 to 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.