by Walter Blum
She stood in the foyer, just under the archway. She had on a dark blue silk dress with a top that came down low. One shoulder, he noticed, was higher than the other and seemed to have been torn. Her hair was in disarray; a strand crossed her right eye and descended to her chin. Her lipstick was smudged. She held her purse across her stomach with both hands, as though fighting against some invisible force that threatened to rip it away. Adam, whose chair faced in the direction of the foyer, was the first to notice her. Max, seeing the direction of his gaze, turned his head.
“How much did you hear?” he said.
“Enough,” she said.
“Is what he said true?” Adam blurted, prepared at that moment to accept whatever explanation she might give, no matter how bizarre, but all she did was glare at him.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I’m tired.”
“Susan…”
“I’ve had a long night. All I want to do is go to bed.”
Tucking the purse under her arm, she swept past the living room and up the stairs. Moments later, the door slammed. Footsteps sounded over their heads. Adam, stirring to life as though he’d been caught in a long, debilitating dream, whirled at Max.
“You bastard!” he hissed.
Max looked toward the foyer and then back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be all right in the morning.” He picked up the copy of Look magazine and began riffling slowly through the pages once more.
21
They slept in separate beds that night, she upstairs, he in an unmade bed in the guest room on the first floor. They nodded to each other in the kitchen that morning, two hostile freight trains on separate tracks. He made breakfast for himself, waffles and a glass of Ovaltine, and consumed it alone. She went back upstairs to the bedroom and turned on the radio. There were no shouts or snarls, no slamming of doors. It was all very quiet, almost eerie. They spoke no more than a dozen words the whole time. He had already decided that if anyone was to bring up the subject of the night before, and Susan’s strange but predictable behavior, it would have to be her.
He felt as though he were trapped in a bubble from which all the air had been removed. Even the blackbirds had ceased their chattering.
By midmorning, he was at the station, trying to make it appear as if nothing happened, working in the back room without a break for lunch, writing down the titles of songs for future programs, setting down on paper some ideas for themes and filing them in a drawer where they could be easily found. It was almost like writing a will. The important thing now was to make sure the show would go on.
He had an early dinner that day at the Canelius Steak House, then settled in for the evening shift. After what had happened, you’d think this particular show would be a disaster, but for some reason the Bell Tower was filled with pleasant vibrations and a soothing hum, as though preparing itself for another flight into the unpredictable. People called with requests, some so unusual he had to search the library shelves to fulfill them. Drawing the microphone as close to his mouth as he could, he stroked it, he wooed it, he made love to it, feeling its sensuousness like a conduit to a world of touch and smell and heat and electricity.
When the show was over he headed home and slept again in the guest room, rose in the morning, slipped out before she’d gotten out of bed, had a quick breakfast at the diner—eggs and grits, exactly the way he hated them—and returned to the station with every intention of spending the hours before air time in the back room once more, organizing, arranging, planning for a future that would never come.
Around eleven-thirty, though, something happened that shattered his routine and flipped Humpty Dumpty back on top of the wall.
Wendy Seeley, Hunter Baines secretary, popped her head in and asked if he could stop what he was doing for a few minutes. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Mr. Baines would like you in his office,” she said.
The others were already there when he arrived. He found himself a chair in the corner and surveyed the assembled staff, people he’d come to know as a kind of oblique family, intimate and yet remote. Hunter Baines sat at the other end of the room, and the first thing Adam noticed was that the familiar silver golfer statuette was missing. The framed copy of the station license had also been removed, leaving a brown stain where the frame had once clung. The license lay on its face on a bookcase, awaiting the moment it would be carted off to an unnamed home. Many of the books were missing, including often used copies of the Broadcasting yearbook.
Baines spoke for less than ten minutes in a low, flat voice meant to hide the emotion that surely must be bubbling below the surface. When he had finished, there was a long silence, as though someone had opened the window, letting in a burst of lethal gas.
“I’m sorry it had to be this way,” Baines apologized.
Only Wally actually seemed pleased with the turn of events. He kept stroking the tips of his bow tie, as though polishing them for the benefit of the new, as yet invisible owner. Larry, in contrast, maintained a stony calm, but the twitching of a muscle in his neck gave him away. Seeley, scrunched up in a steno chair in the back of the room, fought vainly to control the tears. “Couldn’t you have tried the bank for a loan?” she wanted to know in the question-and-answer period that followed.
Hunter Baines tried to explain. “It wasn’t a matter of a loan,” he told her. “I’m just not in a position to keep running the station. There are reasons you don’t know about, and Ted Sauer’s offer was too good to turn down.”
“Ted Sauer is a pig,” Seeley mumbled.
“That may be,” Baines admitted. “But he has the money, and as of this day next week, he will be the new owner of WCAN.”
Adam fought back a sickening desire to scream out his anger. He knew what Ted Sauer and his Top-40 radio would mean: a world that didn’t belong to any of them, a place where none of them would ever feel comfortable. It would mean starting all over, and for him weeks of sending out resumes and demo tapes, pouring through the Broadcasting magazine classifieds for openings, looking for a new job. The timing couldn’t be worse.
Of course it was inevitable. Announcers were known to be gypsies, and if one job didn’t pan out, another was bound to be waiting. But for him the status quo had changed. He was a married man now. He had a house, a few dollars in the bank, he had been touched by the sweet aroma of transient fame and he liked the way it felt, the realization that, at the foot of the Bell Tower, out there beyond the purple drapes and flickering lights, on the other side of the plate-glass windows, people were listening, friendly people who knew his name, who made a point to set their dial at the point of his origin, for whom he was a familiar voice in the spreading night.
But what good was it now? He wanted his success to mean something to her, even planning for two or three if that day ever came. He wanted her to be proud of him. He wanted to show her that he could be more than just a hobo hitching rides on the air waves, a night voice, a chimera. He wanted to show her how much better it could be, if only she’d be patient and follow him in his dream. And then, in less than three days, it had all come crashing down around his ears.
He left the office with a desperate need for air. A gray layer of clouds hung like the tops of tents in a windless sky. A dozen or so yards down the road, behind the studio building, the antenna thrust itself at the clouds. As antennas went it was a modest affair, but today there was a kind of magnificence about it, like a chord in a Bach chorale. Climbing into the car, he turned the key in the ignition, stopped, turned it on again. The engine cranked petulantly, and he pulled back just in time to keep it from flooding. Finally, he managed to coast the car down the hill while coaxing the motor into life. He had gone several hundred yards down the driveway when he realized with annoyance that he had nowhere to go.
Home was out of the question. What if she were still there? What would they say to each other? He couldn’t bear to look at her face or listen to any more of her lies. He might waste a few minutes at the B&B Cafe, bu
t in a town the size of Canelius, what were the chances that he might bump into someone he knew? Certainly, that was the last thing he wanted now. Instead, at the main highway, he turned right and headed north. As if on autopilot, the car began traversing a familiar route and, a mile or two farther, he ended up at a familiar door.
It was as if he were being pushed from behind, by a wind just strong enough to keep him from turning around. Surely, he hadn’t come for some sort of salvation that had eluded him the past two years. Well, with any luck, there would be no one home. Late mornings were often given over to Bible class, addenda to the regular nightly bouts of worship, but that was only a couple of days a week. Repeated pressings of the bell were met with silence, and he was about to turn away when an odd shuffling sound came from inside the house. The door opened reluctantly and Mrs. Warren stood there, dressed in a flowered wrapper with a book in her hand. Her face brightened when she saw him.
“Adam, dear boy! Come in, come in.”
“How are you, Mrs. Warren?”
“Fine, just fine,” she said, moving to one side to let him in.
He should have felt reassured, back in his old haunts. But something wasn’t quite right. The house felt cold and silent. All the loud bustling about, the playing of radios, the moving from room to room—it was as though all this had been wrapped in a blanket and carried upstairs for storage. Mrs. Warren led him into the living room and waited for him to sit before she settled into her customary easy chair with the yellow polka dot slipcover. Instantly, he caught sight of the flowers. They were everywhere—roses on the sideboard, irises on the big old bookcase in the corner filled with knick-knacks instead of books, carnations beside the easy chair where many a homemade sermon had had its inception.
Now he knew what was wrong. “Mr. Warren?”
“In the hands of the Lord, Adam.”
“When?”
“It’ll be three weeks this Wednesday.”
“I don’t understand. How could I have missed it?”
“The announcement was in the paper,” she said.
“But he always looked so strong.”
“He never wanted anyone to know,” Mrs. Warren said softly. “J.D. was like that. We thought it would pass. We thought it was just imagination, but two or three years ago he started having these chest pains, and the doctor said it was just a matter of time.”
“His heart.”
“Like the heart of Jesus. So full of love for his fellow man that it came close to bursting.”
Mrs. Warren, ensconced in her easy chair, reached for the black leather-bound book beside her. But instead of turning to a favorite passage, she left the Bible unopened in her lap. Not that she ever had to refresh her memory, since chapter and verse were all fixed like photographs in the emulsion of her mind. Adam marveled at the serenity that had come over her. Only three weeks after losing a husband, she had become like a rock—the Rock of Ages she often quoted from the book before her.
“How do you do it?” he asked.
She fingered the leather-bound Bible. “It’s all in here,” she said. “If you have faith, nothing is too difficult.”
“I wish I could handle it the way you do,” he said gloomily.
“Marriage not treating you too well?”
He drew back. “I don’t know why you think—”
“Don’t think nothing, Adam, but it’s clear to see there’s a soul in hurt. Anybody can see that. It’s all over you like spores on a pumpkin. My goodness, Adam, if you and your lovely bride have had a little—” she paused to find the right word—“falling out, shall we say—well, would it be too much to suppose—?”
“You’re right, Mrs. Warren.”
“And you want to know what to do?”
“No, I couldn’t ask that of you. I just came—”
“Have you tried talking it out? Have you tried sitting down, the two of you, and putting things to rights?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you can talk out.”
“Most things are. Mr. Warren and I had our problems too, but we managed to solve them.”
“How?”
“By facing them. You just grit your teeth and face what has to be faced. It’s as simple as that. We do it all the time. And of course you put yourself in the hands of the Lord and pray.”
“I don’t know how to pray.”
“Just do what comes naturally, Adam.”
“I don’t have your strength, Mrs. Warren.”
He remembered being driven to the emergency room in J.D. Warren’s Dodge pickup, the day he’d fallen downstairs and broken his wrist. All the way there, Warren had regaled him with slightly off-color jokes. There was an air of casual solidity about him, the way he had lifted Adam off the stairs after the accident and, one arm draped over his shoulder, guided him to the pickup. The cheerfulness of a man who has endured oceans of evangelists and daily assaults from the good book and emerged at the other end, unscathed, somehow whole.
“I’m not sure it’s strength,” Mrs. Warren said. “I think maybe it’s more common sense than anything else. Is there any way I can help? Would you like to talk about it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about some coffee?” Mrs. Warren suggested. “A nice cup of coffee might do you good. There’s still some left in the pot from breakfast.”
“I still have a show to do, although not for long.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Probably.”
“Something wrong at the station?”
“The station’s been sold,” Adam explained. He started for the door. Mrs. Warren rose and followed him, holding the Bible in her right hand. “Mr. Baines couldn’t hold on to it any longer.” He decided not to bother her with news of Hunter Baines’ illness. “That’s one of the problems I’m going to have to deal with. The new owner will be bringing in his own team of announcers, and I only have a few days left.”
“Dear me! They are going to keep the preachers, aren’t they?”
“Nobody would dare touch them,” Adam reassured.
“But you’ll be looking for a new job, is that it?”
“So it would seem.”
“Here in Canelius?”
“I don’t think so. There’s only one other station in town, and as far as I know they have a full house.”
“That’s too bad.” Mrs. Warren shook her head. “You know, I’ve only listened to your program a couple of times. I liked the music and I think you sounded just wonderful and you certainly don’t give offense to no one, but it’s on too late at night. We go to bed early in this house, and—well, I imagine the young people probably enjoy what you’re doing more than people our age.”
It struck him how she had used the word “we” in the present tense, as though Mr. Warren were still upstairs and would come downstairs and into the living room at any moment. Is that how it would be with him someday? Would the needle be stuck on some record playing over and over, with him trapped in the next room? He made a silent oath that, rather than live in the past, rather than spend his “golden years” wallowing in memories that did no good, that brought no comfort, he would put a knife through his heart or a bullet in his brain.
He was sorry now he’d stopped off at Mrs. Warren’s. What had he hoped to get from her? Advice, solace, understanding—maybe a bit of all three?
How much simpler it was for her, he thought. He marveled at the power of it. Not a tear shed, not a word of complaint spoken the entire time they’d been together. Faith—blind, unyielding faith—was the analgesic that dulled the pain, that kept her going. He was left with a feeling of enormous admiration, but convinced that it wouldn’t work for him. He had never believed in anything that strongly. Mrs. Warren’s way was beyond his reach. He could read the Bible from morning till night, but its words were straw, its message was meaningless to him.
Back in the car. Driving back to the highway and home. Still thinking of Mrs. Warren. Where now? Home, yes. Try to confront the demons t
hat had wriggled up through the trapdoor of his mind. If she was there, he’d talk to her, but gently. They had to talk. Couldn’t avoid it forever, after all. He’d say what had to be said, ask her the questions, tell her that…
“Adam?”
Instead of home, he’d driven to the station, the last place he wanted to be. He was standing in the outer office, wondering what evil spirit had brought him here. Aware of his mistake, he turned and started for the door, but Seeley had caught sight of him. Her eyes were no longer moist from the meeting earlier that morning, but she was still in a shaky state.
“Adam, what do you think?”
Evidently she was polling everyone at the station, hoping that a consensus might ease her troubled mind. Adam stared at her blankly. He had no idea what he could say that would put her fears to rest. We’re in this together, he realized, but the ship is taking water and before long they would be in different lifeboats drifting in opposite directions.
“What can I say?”
There was an oddly manic look in her eyes. “Maybe we could all get together and buy the station ourselves.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, not unsympathetically. “Where would we get the money?”
“Out of our savings.”
“I don’t have anything in the bank,” Adam said. “Well, at least not enough to make an investment like that. Do you?”
She made a face.
“Enough to buy the station?”
“Well, if we all pooled our resources…”
“No, I don’t think so. And even if I could come up with the money, I have a feeling most of the people here would just as soon be somewhere else.”
“I guess so.”
“We’re not a family any more, Seeley.”
She lowered her eyes. “Well, it was just an idea,” she said as he slipped into the control room and made his way from there to the back room, which had been his home, virtually, for the past couple of days, a place he could pull up around him, like a sleeping bag. Maybe he should stay here for good, he thought. People would know where he was if they needed him, but they wouldn’t have to disturb him. It was the next best thing to taking a seat at the controls in the Bell Tower and lifting off in a burst of fire and smoke.