For the Home’s drive to build a recreation hall, there were several financial crises—a sudden hailstorm that wiped out the corn, a stolen wallet, a dishonest stockbroker, a needed operation for the dog Buster—and the money rolled in.
To Ray, whatever good the show did wasn’t worth the price of having Marjery on the premises. One day she tripped along behind him and said, in her Little Becky voice, “How come your pants are so big in front, mister? Can I see?” He beat a fast retreat to his office and closed the door and wrote Patsy a note: “For the last time, ditch the kid. She’s a burr 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. Myself, I would prefer she died of an infected hemorrhoid, like James J. Hill, but perhaps Dad would be sensitive to that.”
For a few weeks, Dad and Jo and Frank sat in the big sunny kitchen and talked, and Little Becky stayed away —off at school, presumably—and Jo, as she fixed soup and sandwiches, would relate some pithy comment the child had made during breakfast. “She’s a smart little tyke,” noted Frank. “Can’t put much past that one, you can’t. Wonder if her father will ever come back, that no-good—” and Dad cut him off. “There’s a lot of human nature in everybody, Frank,” he said. “And that man is more to be pitied than envied. It’s like my father used to say: the angry man drinks his own poison.” Well, Frank couldn’t disagree with that. Soon it was time for the noontime hymn. And then, gathered around the lunch table in the little white cottage under the big oak tree at the end of the lane, their humble home, a place like no other, Dad said a little prayer and tossed in a word of thanks for sending Becky their way. “Amen,” said Frank. “I shouldn’t say it, but I wish that man would never return,” said Jo.
But Ray did not soften. He wanted the child out. Children, he explained to Patsy, are inherently unreliable people, and when you make a child into the star of a show, you are building on quicksand. Children have mercurial moods, are immature, easily spoiled by attention, and they quickly grow up and become unattractive. “Child performers are monsters, every last one,” he said. “You’re going to turn this kid into another Skipper.” David (“Skipper”) Drake was a six-year-old tapdancer from St. Paul who was discovered by Marguerite Montez and taken to Hollywood and became a cocaine addict and threw his mother off the Santa Monica pier.
So the next week, 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° 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 Abbott 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 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 a ton of letters, and Patsy got a note from Ray: “You win, but no more deathbeds for awhile. I’m not as young as I used to be.” And Ray got a note from Katherine Doud (Mom) who was angry that her character had dropped dead and told Ray that Dad had promised her that Mom would stay in the Home until she, Katherine, was off the bottle. “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 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.
Most of the letters expressed thanks to God, advised her to dress warmly, and said that she was their favorite radio performer, but a different letter arrived one day from Mindren, North Dakota. It said:August 16, 1939
Dear Becky,
My name is Francis With, I am almost eleven years of age, and I reside in Mindren with my mother and daddy, my sister Jodie, and my Grampa. We all listen to your program every day while we have our lunch and we think that it is quite agreeable. My uncle Art works for WLT. Perhaps you have made his acquaintance. His name is Art Finn.
I think it would be remarkable if you and Dad made a trip to New York City and spent a week there. You could have a delightful time, and it would be elucidating for the rest of us. I hear that New York is a thrilling location.
My Grampa is Danish, born in Aalborg, and if Mr. Benson wished to relate the story of Grampa’s journey here and how he met my grandmother (dead now, alas) on the program, I would be pleased to send you the story. Please let me or Mr. Art Finn know if this would be suitable. (It’s a good story.)
Yours very sincerely,
Francis With
The letter arrived at WLT in the pocket of the writer. It was his first trip to Minneapolis, his first trip anywhere alone, and he wore a blue jacket and a red tie in honor of the occasion, and a tie tack with a rhinestone. Uncle Art and Aunt Clare met him at the Great Northern Depot and took him home with them, and the next day he and Art went to the top of the Foshay Tower, thirty-one stories high, and stood on the observation deck buffeted by winds and gazed out over the green wooded city to Lakes Calhoun and Harriet and Nokomis and beyond to the farms of Hopkins and Richfield, and then they came to WLT.
“Here’s my radio station here, Franny. That’s where I work. I run that. That’s what I do,” Art said, wheeling into the parking lot behind the Hotel Ogden, waving to the attendant.
“I know,” said Francis.
They took the back stairs up past the Ballroom, the big log stage empty, a thousand empty seats, and up to the third floor to watch Friendly Neighbor from the control room.
“Don’t be too shocked,” Art said. “Little Becky ain’t so little.”
But Francis was dazzled by everything—This was where it all came from—the engineers at the control board, three of them, one to man the big black volume knobs, one to
run the turntables and cue the commercials, and a big fat man behind a podium with a green gooseneck lamp on it, who talked over a microphone mounted on a brass ring around his neck to the sound effects man in the studio. The studio was small, with green walls like a lavatory and the actors had to squeeze around each other to get to the microphone, where they made terrific faces, reading their lines, and then stepped back, went slack, yawned, drank coffee, glanced at the morning paper. Jo and Dad looked about like he had imagined, but Frank was much younger, and Becky, of course, was not little. She was an ungainly teenage girl with big feet, smoking a Camel and rolling her eyes. But she looked like fun and he still intended to give her the letter.
“Do you know Little Buddy?” he asked Art during a commercial for Milton, King medicated mulch. Sure, of course he did. Little Buddy was eight, he and his dad Slim Graves sang on Friendly Neighbor, they lived next door to the Bensons. Jo and Frank and Dad—Art knew all those people. “Dad and I play cribbage every Friday night,” he said. Really?
“Yep. Dad even had me on the show once playing the town cop, Rudy. Didn’t you hear that one? Where Dad’s dog Buster gets into the Jensens’ garbage and finds Mrs. Jensen’s wedding ring in the coffee grounds?” Really? That was you?
“Yep. And that man there—that’s Dad’s brother Wilmer who plays his old Negro fishing buddy Tiny.” Really? The sad-faced man in the little brown fedora and the brown suit?
And a minute later, they were back on the air, and the sad-faced man grinned and said, De nevah help to worry much, Mistah Dad. Ain’t no use. Dat’s what I sez. I say, just do de best you kin do, dat’s all. An’ fine you a real good gal. And don’t nevah fo’git to go fishin’. Hee hee hee hee.
“Yep, that’s Dad’s brother who plays Tiny. Even Dad’s wife Beatrice, she’s on sometimes, she plays Mildred, Dr. Goodrich’s nurse.”
“I thought Dad’s wife was named Katherine.”
“Nope. You’re thinking of Katherine Doud. She’s the actress who plays Mom, or used to, but then she turned into a lush. Just lies around her apartment at the Antwerp, fried to the gills. Good looker but a real stewball.”
The show was ending. Francis wrote “lush” and “stewball” in the notebook where he kept new words. He was trying to learn five a day. “Let’s go in and say hi,” said Uncle Art, his hand on the studio door. “No,” said Francis, stricken with unbearable shyness. “Please, no.” So Art went in alone. Francis heard them laughing in there, and Art came out. They took the elevator down to the lobby, which was full of Friendly Neighbor fans. “Look at the deer flies,” Art muttered. “Place is full of them.” The people were waiting, twenty Or thirty, standing modestly behind a rope, quiet, smiling, hopeful, like job-seekers, or orphans. Some of them held gifts, hand-knit socks or bags of vegetables. They waited, almost motionless, as the minutes ticked by, and then suddenly the elevator opened and there was Dad. They all clapped, and he ducked under the rope and walked into the midst of them. Hi Dad. “Hi. How you doing?” Fine. Real good. “That’s good.” Mighty good show today. “Thanks.” You got a minute? “Of course. I’ve always got a minute.”
“How is your back doing?” a woman asked.
Dad looked puzzled. She said, “You strained it last week pushing Pops Simpson’s car out of the snow.”
“Oh,” he said. “My back. Yes, it’s fine. Just a strain. Thought you said my ‘bag’ and I was trying to think what you meant.”
An old man shook Dad’s hand gravely, looking deep into his eyes. “Don’t you think Eunice is ever going to come back? We sure miss her.”
“Oh, I’m sure she will. Nice to see you,” he murmured. “But which niece is that you’re asking about?”
“You think Eunice will come back?”
“Eunice! Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.” He was signing all the pieces of paper they held out to him. He put his arm around an old lady and said, “This is the best part about the radio business, is getting to meet beautiful women close up.” She blushed. He pressed the flesh with her husband and nodded and beamed and squeezed elbows and patted heads and chummed around. He signed an autograph book, posed for a snapshot.
“Is Becky going to come down? Sure be nice to see her.”
Dad smiled and shook his head. “She’s kind of shy, you know. And she was in a hurry to get back to school. But she told me to say hello to you and to say thank you for your letters.”
“What about Carl—?” a woman said. “Carl Farns-worth ? At the Mercantile?”
“Right,” said Dad. “Carl.”
“He was married to Myrt. You know? She worked at the beauty parlor a while back?”
“Right. Myrt.”
“But today you mentioned Carl going to Little Rock with Margaret. He didn’t get a divorce, did he?”
“No, of course not. No, they’ve never been happier. No, that’s just me being forgetful. I must’ve been thinking of Margaret Donohue at the bank.”
“Donovan,” said a woman in back.
“Of course. Quite a gal.”
“We haven’t heard her in a long time. She didn’t leave town, did she?”
No, Dad said, she was fine. Everybody was fine. “How are you?” he asked the kids who were pushed forward to say hello to him, and they murmured, “Fine.” And he bent down and said, “Now, I’m sorry but I keep forgetting your name,” to a girl with Shirley Temple curls—she squirmed with pleasure. “Peggy,” she whispered. Peggy. What a beautiful name. How lucky you are. He worked his way through the crowd and finally came to Francis, who looked straight into Dad’s big red tie with the sunflowers on it. Dad looked down at him. “Let me guess your age,” he said, and squinted hard and squeezed Francis’s skinny shoulders and said, “Thirteen years old! Seventh grade! No?”
“I’m almost eleven. Is Becky still upstairs?” he asked.
“She’s gone, son.” Dad squinted. “Weren’t you up in the control room?”
“Yes,” whispered Francis. “Could you give her this?” He handed Dad the envelope, and the minute Francis gave it over, he started to think of more things he wanted to tell her and tell Dad. He wanted them to know everything about him. He wanted to invite them up to Mindren to meet Daddy and Mother and to show them his room and introduce them to his school. Everyone would clap and Dad would stand up, beaming, and say, “Thank you, boys and girls, and thanks to our good friend Francis With for inviting us.” Our good friend Francis With.
CHAPTER 11
Mindren
Francis With rode the Empire Builder back to Jamestown on Sunday, where Daddy picked him up. They were back in Mindren at 10 p.m., and the next morning Francis was in school. He told everyone that he had visited WLT and seen Dad Benson but nobody believed him. As usual, he left school at eleven-fifty on the dot with his sister Jodie and slid into the kitchen chair at one minute of twelve, just in time for the WLT chimes that signaled Friendly Neighbor. The chimes sounded exactly like Mother’s big wall clock that bonged in the hall, and so he had always imagined that the Benson family lived in an old dark house like theirs and that the Bensons’ kitchen table had a blue checked oilcloth on it and sat by the window looking at the muddy backyard and the Bensons’ linoleum was faded green too, and their steep stairs smelled of pine disinfectant, and the wallpaper was forget-me-nots, and they used a white enameled thunder jug to pee in at night. Now that he had seen into the studio and knew that none of this was true, it made the show more exciting. And he refused to tell Jodie what Little Becky looked like. That was his secret now.
Francis was ten years and four months old. He was smart, thanks to his regular reading of The Children’s Hour magazine and his membership in its Word Club. The words rolled around in his head: brazen, genial, splendrous, succulent. For lunch, he ate a baloney sandwich, two slices on white bread, lightly buttered, a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, and a glass of milk; he could stomach nothing else. He could listen to no other station but WLT.
At noon, Daddy set his big railroad watch
to the WLT chimes, snapped the case shut, and put it back in his vest pocket. Mother put the sandwiches and soup on the table, Daddy said grace, and they all ate quietly, listening, except Grampa, who was not in his right mind and also deaf. Grampa called them to the table by shouting, “Vootsie vootsie vootsie!” and then sat in his wicker rocker and talked to himself in Danish as Francis used his new words.
“Pass the salt, please,” said Jodie.
“I am very amenable to passing you the salt with alacrity,” said Francis.
“So pass it.”
“Are you sure you’re not being mendacious?”
“You are so impossible.”
“You are very perceptive,” said Francis.
It was not such a good show that day. Becky wasn’t on and neither was Jo. Mostly, Dad and Frank swapped fishing stories. Dad burned the soup. “There’s no feast for the miser,” he remarked. After he and Frank said “Bye now, bye everybody,” there was an Evelyn Pie commercial and then a high husky voice hollered, “Come and get it!” and Excelsior Bread brought them The WLT Noontime Jubilee with Whistling Jim Wheeler and His All-Boy Band, Elsie and Johnny, “Ice Cream” Cohen, Norma Neilsen and Fargo Bill, the Olson Sisters, Jens Hansen the Norsk Nightingale, and your host, Leo (“Buy ’em by the Dozen”) LaValley. “Oh boy,” he yelled, “have we got a good one for you today, folks! It reminds me of the old Swede, one time he heard a joke so good he almost laughed. Let’s kick ’er off with ‘Pat Him on the Popo, Let’s Watch Him Laugh,’ okay? Whaddaya say, boys!” The All-Boy Band yelled, “Go get ’em!” and Jim cranked up his fiddle, and they played the popo song and then the Norsk Nightingale sang:Ja, yew shur are mine, Tina, and yure so bewtiful,
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