WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  And yet, she was a star, as much as anybody, and she knew it. Frank and two janitors lugged her out of the Antwerp every morning and onto the hotel loading dock in her heavy wooden caneback wheelchair and onto the freight elevator, and she smiled like it was the grand staircase of the Ritz. The thick wheels were too wide to go easily through doorways so there was plenty of grunting and janitors muttering, “Son of a bitch! This isn’t going to work. Grab her leg and let’s try it sideways,” but she acted like the Queen of Sheba borne on the shoulders of Nubian slaves.

  “What would I ever do without you, you darling darling gentlemen? My faithful, my gallant knights, O! I’ll dedicate the first song to you. Oh, you are such darlings, and how can a lady repay such kindness except with a song?”

  “Darling!” she cried to Gene. “Come and give us a kiss!” Gene rolled his eyes, but she paid no heed and took his jowly face in her hands and planted two soft sweet kisses on each cheek and said what a joy it was to see him. They might leave her parked in a dark corridor like a broken bicycle but the moment someone appeared around the corner, she smiled and held out her arms. “Oh darling, would you mind fetching a vase for these gardenias! Oh, that’s a dear. How kind of you.” She brought fresh flowers and dispensed them to those who shared her love of beauty, and she praised their new clothes, their hair, and especially their eyes. Eyes revealed the soul within, the longing for beauty. The janitors, Gene, Frank, their eyes spoke of nobility and compassion to her, they were the eyes of poets. Especially Frank.

  “Oh, look at me,” she cried. “Your beautiful beautiful blue eyes. I could gaze in them forever. Like mountain pools. Oh Frank, sometimes I wish you were all my own so I could look into those gorgeous blue eyes anytime I wanted to, which would be all the time, darling.”

  One day the chair lost a wheel and four of them had to carry her bodily upstairs to Studio A. One took her knees, one her shoulders, one her right haunch, and Frank took her left haunch. She was dead weight and slippery in her silk dress and his left hand slipped into her crotch and he said, “I’m sorry,” but she said nothing, simply bore up with invincible good cheer, ever the duchess, ever regal, even with his hand between her legs and his sweaty face pressed against her immense breast, sobbing for breath, his back scraping the doorpost. He couldn’t move his hand lest he lose his grip and drop her, so onward they struggled, through doors and around tight corners, and her blue dress hiked up above her fat knees, her calves in thick sleeves of fat, big blocks of blubber around her knees, her unspeakable thighs, and yet she smiled graciously, was a star. She acted like being hauled upstairs like a sack of potatoes was her biggest honor to date. If you dropped her in a pigpen, he thought, she’d hoist herself up and find something to admire in pigs.

  Once she was planted in the studio, the other bearers left but Frank had to stay. He brought her a paper, candy bars, coffee, and dreaded the thought that he might have to take her to the bathroom.

  “How can anyone sing in a world where such things happen? Look at this!” she cried, and thrust out a newspaper story about a herd of starving cattle in Montana, a terrible car crash and the stunned spectators looking at the overturned wreck in which three young people were killed by the westbound Empire Builder, a photo of a dead child in a foreign land, its dark eyes open—“What chance does music have in a world of such suffering, while the rest of us go about our business as if it never happened? It almost makes a person lose heart!” She cried a little, then apologized and dried her tears, and got ready to be Lily Dale.

  She prepared by thinking of her mother, who died when Lottie was small, and trying to be exactly like her. Her mother, Helen, never said a bad word about anyone, always looked on the bright side, and accepted trouble and heartache and grievous pain as faint shadows in a world bathed in sunshine. Her mother died of appendicitis at the age of twenty-four. “Isn’t it hard to always be cheerful?” Frank asked her. She said, “For me, yes, but, darling, my mother always wore a smile. She never let sorrow get a foothold.”

  John Tippy had been her accompanist since 1931, the year of her debut on WLT, and as closely as Frank could figure, the two of them had stopped talking in 1934. Tippy was a thin, pock-marked man with a blond wig that looked like a very bad hat. She brought the sheet music in a shopping bag, stacked it on the piano, Tippy arrived, took off his coat, and played it. They never looked at each other. She never mentioned having an accompanist or referred to him by name. That suited Tippy just fine. “My musicianship has deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t play for a children’s ballet class,” he told Frank. “By accommodating myself to her voice, I lost all sense of musical phrase and rhythm. I used to be a pianist of some accomplishment, no Paderewski but I did perform the Blount Concerto No. 1 once with the Minneapolis Symphony under Oberhoffer, but I’m nothing but an old box-thumper now. A whorehouse piano-player. That’s me.”

  Tippy was a chain-smoker and the old Steinway had a row of burn marks across the lid where he had parked his butts, and his smoking was ruining Lily’s voice, according to her. “Almost twenty years I’ve been breathing his smoke and my voice gets croaky and by the end of the show I can hardly talk,” she said, “so I gave him orders to stop, and he wouldn’t, so I just don’t care to have any more to do with him. Oh, Frank, I wish you played the piano. We’d make such a wonderful team.”

  Tippy smoked so much, he told Frank, to cover up the smell of Miss Dale’s abdominal troubles. “I can tell the moment she gets cramps, she sort of grins, a death’s-head grin, and she leans slightly to the left and out it comes, silent and deadly, smells like death on a bun. If you had to spend time with an old fartsack like her, you’d smoke too.”

  The two enemies met every morning, back to back, her in the chair under the big boom microphone, and him sliding into the studio and onto the bench at the last possible second, and he played a few bars in F-major, switched suddenly to C-minor, jumped into A-flat, and she sang “Just a Street” in D-major, or sometimes in H-sharp, and chirruped “Hello, you dear dear people,” and sang “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” a request from the Barnums of Bigelow, and dedicated “Gently Bends the Willow” to the dear ones at the Ebenezer Home, and finally, a favorite of the Sorensens in Bagley and also for the Titteruds and the Wallace Petersons, “Backward, Turn Backward, O Time in Thy Flight.” And then a “Bye everyone! Keep looking up! And remember: the way to feel happy is to smile. See you tomorrow!” as the evil pianist slithered at the keys, trying to throw her.

  “It’s my birthday!” she told Frank when he came through the studio door, a present from Ray in hand (a statue of a shepherdess). She wanted Frank to come for supper at her apartment at the Antwerp. She’d fix him meatloaf and potatoes, and play her Galli-Curci records. She wanted to tell Frank her life story so that when she died he could write a proper obituary. He lied and told her that he lived too far away.

  “You could take a streetcar.”

  Well, he couldn’t, not really, due to his sick mother who needed him. She invited him again the next day, and the next. He was sorry. He couldn’t. Due to a friend who was in town. Due to a cold he could feel coming on. Due to tiredness. Due to a prior engagement.

  And then she said, “I hear that you live in my building.” So he had to go and eat dinner with her. Monday night, 7 p. m.

  He asked Mr. Odom to be on the alert for sounds of struggle from Miss Soderbjerg’s apartment.

  “You think the lady is desperate? You could be right, Frank. I remember being in similar situations myself. You see, in a former life, I was a Lutheran pastor in North Dakota, and I—you seem taken aback, son.”

  “I’m flabbergasted. I thought of you as a janitor. And a caretaker.”

  “That’s what a Lutheran pastor does, Frank. Lutherans don’t require much theology, just caretaking. When God talked about believers as sheep, He was thinking of Lutherans. Anyway, I was out there on the windswept tundra, ministering to the lonesome and the outright desperate, and believe me, I was set upon by larg
e women on a regular basis. These were farm women, big-boned, meaty women with sinewy arms and powerful haunches and quick on their feet, from years of herding animals, and something about me aroused them—I was younger then and had hair—and I’d be sitting in the kitchen drinking their coffee when suddenly they’d make a play for me. Brush against me, adjust my lapel, straighten my hair. Then they’d be leaning across me to reach for something—Oh, don’t move, they’d say, and reach over for the salt and I’d feel a breast jab my arm, or they’d lean down to pour me coffee and there it is, the old mountain of love, pressed against my shoulder, and pretty soon she’s all over me, arms akimbo, sitting on my lap. There’s a women’s trick from way back, the lap hold. Once I was saying goodbye to a woman who’d been edging around me for an hour, nudging, brushing, rubbing, and sliding, and she cries out, ‘Oh, let me give you a big hug.’ Well, I knew it was a hug I’d never get out of alive, and I took off running and she took off after me—around the chicken coop and the corn crib and into the barn and up to the haymow—and I was about to plunge out the haymow door and into the manure pile when I felt that hay hook grab my jacket and she hoisted me into the air and there I hung, my feet dangling down barely scraping the ground and my hands up over my head, tangled in the jacket that was hanging on the hook. I hung by my wrists for fifteen minutes while she had her way with me and it was ugly and shameful and I don’t want you to ever ask me about it again, but just remember: don’t let her sit on your lap. In a chase, however, I believe you have the advantage of her.”

  It was the most words Frank had ever heard Mr. Odom speak at once. He looked drained, as if he had used up a week’s worth of language and here it was only Monday.

  “Would you like to be addressed as Reverend Odom?” asked Frank.

  “That would please me very much,” he whispered.

  Frank donned his blue jacket and a red tie and spritzed a whiff of Lilac Rémoulade behind each ear and walked down three floors. When Lily Dale opened the door, the apartment was ablaze with candles. He counted sixty. Dinner was on the table, lamb chops and tiny potatoes, and the Victrola was playing soft piano music. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek and she held on to him and gave him an embrace. “Oh, you darling,” she whispered. “You beautiful darling. I do love you, and you know it, don’t you.”

  She ate twelve lamb chops and three big helpings of potatoes and drank quite a bit of wine with dinner, which put her in a weepy mood. She sobbed into her chocolate cake and then had some cognac and brightened up a little. They sat on a green divan. She gave him a pad and a pencil to write the obituary with.

  “My mother was named Helen Pointer and she was such a saint. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in abject poverty, but nevertheless learned to cherish beautiful things, but I believe it was poverty that led her to marry my father, who was Norwegian. His name was Molde and it suited him well. My brothers take after him in certain ways. He was in the ice trade and it suited him well. He was a hard man. Nothing pleased him. He criticized and made fun of everything about me. Nothing was good enough. My only pleasure was when I sang in church. I was the alto soloist at Hennepin Avenue Methodist. It was my one moment of grace and beauty, Sunday morning, and I did that for years and then my brother Ray invited me to sing on the radio station. I remember that moment exactly. It was the moment that saved my life. Everything was so beautiful then, and people were so very kind to me, and so are you, Frank. Take me to bed.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to take me to bed now.”

  And with pounding heart and panic in his brain, so that he could hardly think, he helped her into the wheelchair and pushed her through the hall toward the bedroom. He had waited so long for this moment, had rehearsed in his mind exactly how it should go, where to put his hands, what to whisper, the order of the removal of clothing, the rapid succession of thrilling moves and the seismic upheavals and the moaning and shouting, but he had never imagined that the woman would be as big as this. The thought of intimacy with this immense pile of flesh—where would a person begin? And who had enough lust in his heart to be able to get the job done? Me, he thought. But of course she had meant no such thing. “Help me up,” she said, and he did, and she took a step toward the bed and folded up on it and a moment later she was snoring. He put a comforter over her, turned out the light, cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, and closed the door behind him, leaving behind the pad of paper on which he had written the names of her mother and father.

  CHAPTER 29

  Ballpark

  “One of these days I’m going to tell Roy Jr. I want a real job, not just be his office boy, I’m sick of running errands,” Frank announced to Maria, and that same morning, Roy Jr. asked him, “You like baseball, don’t you? You got your evenings free, right?” And Frank, who thought baseball was slower than watching paint dry and who tried to spend every evening with Maria at the movies, said, “Sure.”

  Roy Jr. told him to go sit in the press box for a couple weeks with Buck Steller, The Voice of the Millers, and keep score for him and see how the games were broadcast. “Buck asked for someone to keep score and go for coffee, and you’re him,” said Roy Jr., “but as long as you’re there, keep your eyes peeled and see how much the old weasel is betting on games. You ever hear about the Black Sox scandal? Good. We don’t want that here. Buck came here from Chi Town, he was the Voice of something down there before we got him. So go see what he’s doing.”

  So Frank had to tell Maria that he was off movies for awhile. “I have very cowardly tendencies,” he said. “I’ve got to learn to speak up for myself.”

  She said it was all right, that she didn’t mind if he worked at night.

  “You mean you didn’t enjoy going to movies with me?”

  “We were going to the movies every night.”

  “I thought you wanted to.”

  “I did.”

  “You mean you don’t anymore?”

  She sighed. He took her hand and apologized. A little too fulsomely, because she put her hand over his mouth. Her little warm hand with its slender fingers. He was glad to shut up.

  It wasn’t that Frank loved movies so much as that he liked to sit as close to her as possible. After Friendly Neighbor they went to a matinee of “Up a Tree” with Marie Wilson, Harold Peary, and Henry Morgan, and he put his arm around her and she laid her head on his shoulder and fell asleep. She fit perfectly against his side. He put his face in her black hair and kissed her glorious shampoo and touched her perfect little ear and listened to her peaceful womanly snore. “I love you,” he whispered into her hair. On the screen, the three comics were entangled in a love triangle at a lumber camp, complicated by a flapjack-flipping contest and a log-rolling and a small black bear, and in his arms lay the love of his life, except that she maybe had a boyfriend in Milwaukee named Merle.

  “A friend,” said Maria. “A very dear friend.”

  “How dear?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you after I see him again. He’s not a letter-writer.”

  “How long since you’ve seen him? Not that it’s my business.”

  “It can be your business. I haven’t seen him for more than a year. But what difference does it make?”

  “You ready to make a change?”

  “Change from what? He’s a friend.”

  “Not a boyfriend?”

  “We were very close at one time.”

  Merle was an actor too, that was where they met, she said. They went to acting school together. Did you sleep together? he wondered. Actors did, all the time. Look at Hollywood. But, being actors, they didn’t know their true feelings as other people do. Look at all the divorces. Actors were gypsies, they never knew where the jobs would pop up or when, so they had to suck up to people all the time, grin and kiss and toss their handsome heads and flatter each other up one side and down the other, it was their job to, but actors were also down to earth and looked out for each other and they were free spirits. This one was.
She was so different from other women, she was like a different gender. When you were with Maria, she was utterly present, alert, nose to the wind. When she looked at you, you were the only man in the world, bathed in blue light.

  Outside the Bijou, he took her hand, and they waited for the Nicollet streetcar and when it hove into view over the hill and came screeching along, sparks flying from the trolley arm, he kissed her. And breathed, and kissed her again.

  “I do love you in my own way,” she said, and kissed him a third and sweeter time, and hopped aboard.

  He rolled the sentence around in his mind as he walked to the ballpark. He didn’t know how to read her kisses, she being an actress, a professional kisser, so to speak, and this made no sense either: how could you love somebody in your own way? Love isn’t up to you. You don’t decide it. Love is love.

  Nicollet Field was an old green woodpile of a ballpark, one city block paved with grass, with the pavilion on the southeast corner and bleachers strung out north and west and the green board fence beyond, and in straightaway center field, a four-story apartment building where dim tiny figures moved through the rooms. Nobody stood at their windows and watched, but then the Millers were not a longball team. They were a foul ball team. Heavy chicken wire protected the press box high above home plate, and night after night, as Frank sat up there, wedged in tight between Buck Steller and his pal, The Pressbox Padre, Father John Ptashne, Frank looked beyond the bright green field toward the center-field apartments, the glow of windows, and wished he were in a dark room with Maria.