WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Downstairs, Patsy Konopka listened carefully. Ginger was moving fast. But the door closed and only one pair of feet came across the living-room floor, Mr. Devereaux’s. He stopped overhead, and stood in the living room, read a letter, then walked into the bedroom. His footsteps sounded like on The Other World where a man awakes at midnight in his bed and gropes around for the lamp switch and touches a cold brick wall and finally finds a match and lights it and gasps, for of course it is a tomb. She hoped he wouldn’t spot the big hole in his floor by the radiator. Sitting at her kitchen table, under the hole, she could hear him breathe up there. He tromped down the hall and stopped for a moment and then she heard his water, gallons of it, like a horse, hit the center of the bowl. And now Mr. Devereaux flushed, and headed to the bedroom. Patsy heard his clothes hit the floor. He lay on the bed. He was touching himself. She listened. She hoped he would not be alone for long. She wondered if he was sensitive to emanations or had any familiarity with the psychic realm.

  She thought a clear thought about him and waited, listening, to hear if he was struck by it, but he continued, and then he gasped, and she returned to Golden Years. “Who is that out there on the street?” asked Edna. “Who?” said Elmer. They were in the cafe, coffee cups rattled, someone was griping about sore feet. “That handsome young man standing by the lamppost, his hands in his pockets, his red mackinaw pulled up around his ears, and his long black hair blowing,” observed Edna. “Oh, him,” said Elmer. Edna said, “Imagine being that young again, with the world laid out in front of you like the county fair. Imagine being twenty.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Hired

  The next morning, despite a grievous headache, he landed the job at WLT. He had gotten the headache Thursday evening. He had been strolling around the block, past the Kenosha and Belfont and Arcola Apartments, none so nice as the Antwerp, and gazed down at the basement windows (frosted) of the YWCA and around past the big limestone Minneapolis Auto Club—he reminded himself to buy a car someday, a Studebaker—and studied the menu in the window of the Pot Pie and the faculty list in the window of MacPhail School of Music—a Maude Moore taught elocution, he should see about lessons so he could become an announcer—and then he retraced the trip in the other direction, planning his great radio career, and in front of the Auto Club he ran into Mr. Odom and accepted an invite to go for a bump at the Red Eye Lounge on Hennepin Avenue and there, in a dark booth, had tried various concoctions, including a bourbon and sour, a vodka sour, and something called a Bombaroo. Mr. Odom, he discovered, had known Daddy from when they attended commercial college in Park River and had been living in Minot when Daddy was en route there and they had planned to have breakfast together the very morning that Daddy died. Mr. Odom had written “The Ballad of Old No. 9” the same day. Frank told him that he didn’t remember much about his dad. They drank a toast to his memory, a couple of Rusty Nails and a Galesburg Gearbox and then something called Molly in the Morning and—though Frank hardly remembered this—he dashed out the front door and deposited the entire evening over the curb and into the gutter. A woman in a sealskin coat stood nearby. She looked away, as if she’d seen this before and wasn’t interested.

  In the morning, Frank rolled out, took aspirin, and climbed into a tepid bath, and tried to think of a speech (“I want to get into broadcasting and apply myself and be useful, sir, and earn your confidence so you will let me go on and do bigger things, and whatever I lack in intelligence I will make up for in hard work”) but the pain came and sat inside his left eyeball, like a long nail. So when he went into the Ogden Hotel, he was in a mood to be calm and not shake his head.

  A sandy-haired red-faced man named Sloan interviewed him. He had a big beak and his hair was combed hard, in straight furrows. He snapped his gum and winked a lot. He glanced at the questionnaire Frank had filled out and said, “No college and no newspaper experience. Good. They don’t go for that here.” He picked his teeth thoughtfully and remarked that Frank’s Uncle Art was probably the smartest man that he, Sloan, had ever met. Then he led Frank upstairs to Mr. Soderbjerg’s office, opened the door, and said, “Go in.”

  There were two men in there, a younger one, lanky, in a nubbly brown wool suit and a portlier one, about sixty, with a mane of white hair and the younger one was saying, “She can’t even boil an egg! Can’t boil an egg!” Then he turned to Frank. “We’re talking about my wife. She can’t boil an egg.”

  “I think it’s easier to fix a steak than boil an egg,” said the older one. “First of all, you have no idea what’s inside that egg. Each egg is different. You can’t tell by looking at them. Some eggs, the shell is too thin. The chicken didn’t get enough milk in her diet. So you leave it boiling for two minutes and fifteen seconds and it comes out like an old tennis ball, and the day before, you did your egg three minutes and it came out like a bad cold. No, I’d rather run a radio station than have to boil an egg. The perfect egg is a myth, like the Northwest Passage. It’s a miracle anytime you get one that’s edible.” And he waved at them to clear out. “Anyway, I don’t want to hear about it. I’m going upstairs to bed. I think I slept too fast last night.”

  “Frank,” Mr. Roy Soderbjerg, Jr., said, when they got to his office and he sat down in the big chair and swivelled around and faced out the window, “Frank, I hear from your Uncle Art you’re a good man, and I like the looks of you myself, so as far as I’m concerned you’re hired. I must say I’ve had bad experiences with orphans like yourself, they tend to be treacherous, but you don’t seem sneaky yourself, so I’ll just bring it to your attention. It’s a tendency to avoid. Trust is what we operate on here. We had an orphan once who stole money out of people’s desks, if you can imagine that. He slid around here opening drawers and lifting petty change and anything else he saw, stopwatches, ladies’ necklaces, and finally he tried to take a revolver from my dad’s desk and the gun went off and nailed him in the knee. He lost his leg. Now he hawks umbrellas on the streetcorner. So remember that radio is a great business and it’s all about honesty and if we lose trust with each other, then we’re out on our rear ends. Now go see Sloan and he’ll find you some work to do.”

  Sloan was in the basement, yakking with the mail girls. Frank’s job, Sloan told him, was to follow the Soderbjergs around and take care of things for them. “Just keep your eyes peeled and make sure they’re happy and you’ll be happy.” He told Frank to go out and buy six pounds of Jamaican coffee, three boxes of White Owl cigars, and some greeting cards: twelve dozen Get Well and six dozen Happy Birthday and twelve dozen With Deepest Sympathy—an assortment, not too many floral ones and nothing Scriptural—and then to come back and walk Ray’s dachshund Columbus. He referred to the Soderbjergs as The Sodajerks. “He likes to do his business around the front doors of taverns. When you get back, you can wait around in the lobby for Roy Sodajerk, Jr., to go out for lunch. Nobody likes to eat lunch with the poor bastard, so he may ask you, and if he asks you, go and God help you. Part of your job. He’ll take you to the Pot Pie. Make sure you have a couple bucks with you in case he forgets. Let him sit with his back to the door and you take a seat facing the door. It’s your job to identify incoming friends so when they say hi, he can say their name. Of course, you can’t do that now, being new, but you’ll catch on. The Sodajerks can’t remember the names of their own children. Old Ray Sodajerk runs off to New York every fall with a different broad on his arm and two months later at the Christmas party he’s asking you what her last name was. I tell you, they’re a caution. And if he doesn’t ask you to lunch, then come back here and I’ll show you how to sign their names. We’re a week behind on sympathy cards.”

  Then Sloan went back to discussing something with the girls. Frank fetched the dog, who was old and fussy, and walked him to Woolworth’s and bought the stuff and came back and delivered it. Ray was drowsy from his morning nap. He told Frank that he was out of cigars and Frank gave him the box of White Owls. Ray was impressed. He asked Frank if he played golf. Frank said, no
, he was sorry but he didn’t. Ray said, “Why be sorry? You’ll never meet more boring men than on a golf course. A game for pygmies.” Frank made a note to himself: don’t be apologetic unnecessarily.

  Down in the lobby, he hung around for fifteen minutes near a crowd of fans waiting to see Dad Benson come down from his show. Friendly Neighbor had just celebrated eighteen years on the air, the same age as Frank. The fans were holding signs from their home towns, Waseca, Marshall, Pine City, Menomonie, Decorah, Crosslake, San-born, and getting their Kodaks ready, lining up the shots. One woman had brought her six little children in red satin vests that appeared to be home-made and had their names sewn across the back: Marilyn, Merwin, Marianne, Meredith, Murray, and Miriam. Frank introduced himself to the receptionist, Laurel, who said, “Ray Soderbjerg I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him but Roy Jr. I’d do anything for, believe me. That man is as decent as they come.” Laurel was a peach, he could see that. He was going to invite her to the movies but before he could work in that direction, Mr. Odom came by, pushing a mop. He looked up and said hi.

  “I thought you managed the Antwerp Apartments,” said Frank.

  “I do it all, son,” said Mr. Odom. “I’m half janitor, half manager, and the rest of the time I do everything else. I hear you got the job. Congratulations.”

  Mr. Odom asked how he liked his room. Frank liked it fine. “Oh,” said Laurel, “do you live at the Antwerp?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, and wanted to say, Alone. I live alone at the Antwerp, Laurel. I am older than I look, twenty-three in fact, and I am affectionate and congenial and generous to a fault and have fantasies from here to Chicago, but then Roy Jr. came out of the elevator and Mr. Odom melted away and Roy Jr. said, “You have your lunch yet? Good. We’ll go around to the Pot Pie, they have a good sauerkraut soup there. Hello, Miss Larpenteur.”

  Roy Jr. talked all the way across the street and down to the lunchroom, about this, that, and the other thing, and ordered the soup and a plate of chipped beef and resumed talking. He said, “I’ve fired forty-one men in my life and six women and two children. Each one was memorable. Some of them begged for another chance and some of them cursed me with a passion and a resourcefulness they had never displayed before and one of them quietly went away and jumped off the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He hit the ice and it broke his back and he is somewhere today, a helpless cripple, working for a newspaper, I believe. I was his executioner.

  “You’re a young man and you don’t know what it’s like to take away someone’s work, so I’ll tell you. You have to do it quick. The moment his rear end touches the chair, in that exact instant you say it in one sentence: I’m sorry, Jack, but I have decided to let you go—your employment here is ended today. Then you say something for a minute—express sorrow, hope, reminiscence, commiseration—so he can recover, because no matter what kind of an idiot he was, he never thought it would come to this. Then you lean back and let him say his piece. Maybe it does him some good to cuss you out. Fine. Harvey Olson almost jumped over the desk and strangled me when I fired him. He said WLT was a dead end where his talents had gone unrecognized and in two days he’d have a job at twice the pay with people who knew something about radio.”

  Harvey Olson had been fired. The popular breakfast newscaster who said, “Hello and good morning, and may your day be filled with good news!”

  “Harvey invested heavily in Honeywell when they were trying to sell this solar hat, and he lost his shirt, and shoes, and went downhill rapidly. For two years he’d come to work drunk every morning and now the police had found him passed out in his car on University Avenue with his pants loaded—and it was the third time—and when I told him the obvious, he leaned over and screamed at me. Fine. Harvey found another job a year later picking up dead branches for the Park Department, but at least he could look back and know he had had one proud moment in his life, when he called me a dirty bastard. When I fired Dusty Eustis he called me disloyal, a backstabber, a rat, a leech, and probably some other things. Here was a man who tried to get a sixteen-year-old usherette to go upstairs to a room with him and he was angry that his many years of service hadn’t entitled him to this. There is no limit to self-deceit, Frank. I keep looking for the limit and there is none. Not among people in show business there isn’t.

  “The performer I admired the most, I think, was Uncle Albert, actually my dad’s uncle. We hired him about 1927 and he stayed for twelve years until he died. We hired him because he broke his leg and couldn’t be a street preacher anymore with the Salvation Army, which he had been for forty years. He was one of General William Booth’s old stalwarts, and when Booth came over from London, he and Uncle Albert would go nightclubbing in Chicago. Neither of them touched a drop, of course, but General Booth loved to dance. He was wild about the turkey trot, the foxtrot, and the Buffalo, but of course he couldn’t dance with young women, lest it lead to carnal desire, so he danced with Uncle Albert. After a hard day among the down-and-out and a long evening service, the General’d lean over and whisper, ‘How about a little hoofing?’ and off they’d go. Around the hot spots of Chicago, two men dancing together was definitely eccentric. In fact, it was so eccentric that people who were as drunk as everybody in the clubs was didn’t believe their eyes, and so the old gents, decked out in their somber Army regalia, flung themselves around the dance floor in happy abandon, and left refreshed, and woke up at dawn to resume the Lord’s work.

  “For us, Uncle Albert recited poems. By heart, of course. He recited on Jubilee and sometimes on Friendly Neighbor, whenever he happened to be around, and often on the Afternoon Ballroom, the announcer would say, ‘Uncle Albert is in the studio now and I wonder if we couldn’t get him to recite a poem for us. Uncle Albert?’ And the old man, who had tremendous eyebrows, great thorny overgrowths with trailing vines and creepers, approached the microphone. Slashed on his neck was an ugly scar from when a Memphis woman had tried to slit his throat, a close call that led to his conversion. He had a voice like a trombone—he was unable to lower it very much from a volume that would have carried across rivers and stopped lynch mobs—and he had such burning vitality and magnetism in his youth, he was always able to draw big crowds, but he could never win them for the Lord because nobody wanted to come within a hundred feet of him. Too loud. Even when he was old, people braced themselves whenever Uncle Albert walked in the room so they wouldn’t jump and hit the chandelier when he said hello.

  “He was at WLT because he was family. He understood this, and understood that he was not to preach. We had other people who did the preaching. Albert recited poetry. He was paid for this. He never read from a page, which he considered cheating, so his repertoire was limited. He never expanded it. He wasn’t ambitious in any way. He only wanted to be useful.

  “He knew fifty or so poems by heart, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight’ and ‘Excelsior’ and ‘Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,’ and he appeared in the studio whenever the fancy struck, and the announcer had to work him in. Albert didn’t like to sit and he would get to clearing his throat if made to wait too long, a powerful BRRAACH-HEM! like a lion letting other lions know he was here, a signal to announcers that he was ready to recite.

  “When Albert recited, the engineer turned the volume gain down to a sliver, and his voice came through loud and clear.

  BREATHES there a MAN? with soul . . . so DEAD?

  Who NEVER to HIMSELF hath SAID?

  THIS is MY OWN? my native LAND?

  Whose HEART? hath ne’er within him BURNED?

  As homeward his footsteps he hath TURNED?

  From wandering on some FOREIGN STRAND?

  If such there BREATHES . . . GO! MARK HIM WELL!

  “Every year on April 15th, the anniversary of Lincoln’s death, he did ‘O Captain! My Captain!,’ a poem that, in the hands of an amateur, can be rather flat, but, coming from Albert, was a clarion call, warning that the Republic is in constant danger, that any triumph is followed i
mmediately by tragedy, heartbreak, treachery, and despair.

  EXULT, O shores! ... and RING, O bells!

  But I ... with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck . . . my Captain. . . . lies,

  FALLEN . . . cold . . . and dead.

  “This performance never failed to move and captivate. You might expect a grown person in the 20th century to be pretty much immune to the fevers of ‘O Captain! My Captain!,’ but Uncle Albert was a powerhouse, and the radio stars dreaded him. His great moment was at the WLT Barn Dance Tenth Anniversary Show at Williams Arena where he preceded Bob Hope on the bill and gave the greatest recitation of ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ of his life. The old man stood before an audience of seventeen-thousand, which was approximately his lifetime total audience as a preacher, and he flexed his eyebrows and said the poem and killed the captain and wept and cried out and knelt and whispered and saved the Republic, and at the end, the seventeen-thousand had no choice but to stand and cheer—he had closed off the alternatives, such as polite applause—so they stood and wept and shouted until he came out and did ‘Breathes there a man’ and now the audience was beside itself, standing on the chairs, shouting themselves hoarse, throwing babies in the air, clapping till their hands bled, and Uncle Albert returned for a final selection, ‘The Charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg,’ and the people collapsed into one damp quivering heap. The show was now over, though it still had an hour to go, including Mr. Hope’s twenty-minute monologue. The great man stood in the wings, his famous grin a bit taut, his famous ski-jump nose glittering with sweat, and he whispered to Leo, the emcee, who signalled the orchestra, and they played ‘Columbia the Gem of the Ocean’ and then Otto and His Trained Pig did the Leap From The Ladder Through A Flaming Hoop Into The Arms Of The Catcher and the Moonglows sang ‘A Guy Seldom Sees a Gal Like Louise,’ but eventually Hope had to go on stage, which he did, and found that everybody was still thinking about Uncle Albert and was disappointed that he was not him. After the death of Lincoln and the battle of Gettysburg, the rapid-fire gags about golf and dames and Bing and booze seemed pretty small potatoes, and he soon sensed, though blinded by the spotlight, a slow but widespread movement of bodies toward the Exit signs.