That Time of Year

by Garrison Keillor

  Denmark was a break from all that. The deck was cleared. I resumed the show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the name The American Radio Company with New York actors and a sixteen-piece band, The Coffee Club Orchestra, led by Rob Fisher, a botanist from Norfolk who, America being the land where people can change their minds, became a Broadway conductor (Chicago, Wonderful Town, Anything Goes, An American in Paris), and we nabbed him in between engagements. He loved that band, designed to play rags, stomps, swing, boogie, B’way, bop, himself bouncing at the keyboard.

  We hired a St. Paulite working at the Academy of Music, Christine Tschida, as our producer, who brought her showbiz fervor (she was a tap dancer) to radio. She had several qualities that I lack: one was business sense and another was glee—when she saw a performance she loved, she jumped up and down. And she had gumption. I am unable to bring myself to ask a favor of a stranger. She didn’t hesitate. She got Allen Gins-berg to come and read from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” He was uneasy about whether I’d be interviewing him, relieved when she said, “No, it’s only the Whitman and you choose the passages.” She talked the New York Public Library into allowing a live broadcast from the Rose Reading Room, the audience sitting at long oak tables with study lamps. A historic first for the library, a day’s work for her. A doo-wop group sang “Book of Love,” Dave Barry sang “Proofreading Woman,” and we did a version of “John Henry” in which he’s a writer and is challenged to race against a steam-powered computer.

  Once, a few days before Christmas, I thought I’d like to close down West 43rd Street so the audience could stand in the street and sing “Silent Night.” The NYPD was slightly incredulous when she called them—“Close what? When? Is this a joke?”—but she got them to send over six cops and they closed two lanes and a thousand people stood and sang “Silent Night.” I still run into people who were there, and they get choked up remembering it, singing Radiant beams from Thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace and looking west toward Times Square. They recalled that snow was falling. There was no snow, it was too warm. But in their memory it was snowing. In my memory, it is a beautiful three minutes of pure childlike sincerity a block away from Yowza Yowza USA. It was moving.

  I created the private eye Guy Noir, muttering out of the corner of his mouth in Brooklynese, complaining about the landlord and other lowlifes, dealing with Mafiosi, gun molls, con men, shysters, chantoozies, footloose dance-hall tootsies, bozos, bimbos, demented duchesses, tycoons, Lutheran galoots, whatever. Walter Bobbie played Pete, who walked into Guy’s office and they got into an argument over some triviality such as “Was it Sal Maglie or Tom Magliozzi who lost Game 5 of the 1956 Series to the Yankees, Don Larsen’s perfect game?” and they shot each other and died after an extended death scene during which the argument continued.

  Guy was anti-Midwest: he minced no words, tolerated no fools unless they were paying clients. He paced his office in the Acme Building, hoping to foil the insidious schemes of the Bogus Brothers (XXX-Large, solid muscle, legs like tree stumps, shaved heads, eyebrows the size of fruit bats, scar tissue from breaking down doors with their foreheads . . . they were known for knocking off irksome guys and making them part of construction projects) and the poet-turned-con man Larry B. Larry, a convicted plagiarist who liked to leave a poem at the scene of the crime, his calling card.

  THIS IS JUST TO SAY

  I have taken the body

  that was in the icebox

  and which you were

  probably saving for evidence.

  Forgive me it smelled bad

  So pale and so cold.

  Every week, the urban misterioso theme song, a smoky-voiced woman sang, “He’s smooth and he’s cool and quick with a gun, a master in the boudoir. A guy in a trench coat who gets the job done. Guy . . . Guy Noir.” It was one of those grim January days when the sun sets around five and people go around bundled up so you can’t tell men from women and when it’s this cold it doesn’t even matter—gender is no more important than shoe size. Your face won’t smile, your heart is a lump of anthracite, your manhood has shrunk to the size of a peanut. This is why October birthdays are so rare.

  Walter Bobbie also played my mom. You have such a lovely voice, Honey. You sound so professional. It’s a shame you can’t find a job. A twohour show on Saturdays—I don’t call that a job. The problem is: you sound so Minnesota. It’s that long O. People hear you talk and they know you were raised on meatloaf and potatoes and your best friend was a Leghorn chicken. Otherwise, you’d have an office with a big walnut credenza and a secretary named Megan. Walter could do it all, hitman, Mom, the prophet Jeremiah, he sang a walloping “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and he sang, from his childhood, a Polish carol, “Gdy się Chrystus rodzi, I na świat przychodzi,” that made us all misty-eyed.

  And then the world turned and Walter directed the musical Chicago on Broadway, which ran for years and bumped Walter into a higher tax bracket, but if I met him today outside of Gray’s Papaya on 72nd, he’d be the same Walter and give me the same big grin, and that’s a sweet thing about New York. Underneath the churn of business, friendship is what counts. I still see Rob Fisher once in a blue moon, the most positive man in show business, and it’s like old times. Our old violinist Andy Stein, who played swing with a little megaphone wired to his fiddle, is the same free spirit he always was.

  I got back to New York as Mr. Shawn was leaving The New Yorker and I had lunch with him at the Oak Room. I had a hamburger and fries, he had dry toast and a cup of hot water. It was an awkward lunch, since we weren’t friends and he wasn’t an editor anymore, so what was the point? It was to thank him for what he did for my life by publishing the story in 1974 about the Grand Ole Opry. No doubt about it, the prestige of the magazine was what got me the chance to do A Prairie Home Companion on hyper-status-conscious public radio and gave me decades of pleasure. But he was having none of it. He said, “I take no credit for that. That was Mr. Whitworth’s story.” Closed subject. I tried to be cheery and suggested he start on a memoir. He said, “I wouldn’t know how to begin writing about myself. I’m not a showman like you,” and he said “showman” with no admiration intended. I asked him about Liebling, and that cheered him up. “Joe was the exception,” he said. “He enjoyed his own work. You could hear him laughing down the hall in his office. He’d take the paper out of the typewriter and look for someone to read it to.”

  “So he was a showman then.”

  “You could say that,” said Mr. Shawn.

  “I could write your memoir—‘as told to me,’ ” I said. He said he wouldn’t care to read it, so why would anyone else?

  “You lived a life that nobody will ever live again. You edited a magazine that was loved like no other. You were responsible for publishing ‘In Cold Blood’ and Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Silent Spring’ and Edmund Wilson’s stuff on the Dead Sea scrolls—” He interrupted me: “Any editor who saw those manuscripts would’ve published them.” It dawned on me that Shawn didn’t know about the adoration of thousands of small-town Midwesterners like me who pored over the magazine every week, their badge of membership, proof that they were not provincials. He, the captain, had been so engrossed in his work, he was ignorant of its import and reach. He was the isolated provincial, not us. I picked up the check. There had been plenty of books about the magazine and he declined to add another to the pile.

  Roger Angell wangled me an office at The New Yorker, and I rode the B train to work, standing in the front of the first car as we came through the tunnel, past rows of beams, the sharp curve below 59th to the Seventh Avenue station and then down Sixth Avenue to 42nd. I wrote unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, the gray matter around the cartoons, the real stars of the magazine. I’d been writing for The New Yorker since I was fourteen, though they weren’t aware of it at the time, so I knew the breezy tone of “Talk” and loved the anonymity, writing about the statuary at Woodlawn Cemetery, t
he different styles of pedestrians jumping over large puddles, National Frozen Food Month, restlessness, the meaning of life in Midtown, whatever came to mind. I was befriended by Mark Singer and Ian Frazier, Calvin Trillin, and the legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould, who, as her eyesight dimmed, had become a fan of my radio show.

  I liked to write in the Rose Reading Room at the Public Library and eat lunch in Bryant Park among plantings of tulips and irises, beside a plane of lush grass, looking around at a box canyon of handsome buildings, my face turned up to the sun. I ate egg salad sandwiches with Veronica Geng there, and she and I planned a performance for an Authors Guild dinner, an exchange of love letters between S. J. Perelman and Flannery O’Connor that we had written. Perelman was easy, I just used a thesaurus, but her O’Connor was a piece of genius.

  I’m only a tourist in New York, and I’m dazzled by the knowingness, the competence, the pride of waiters who take waiting seriously, cabdrivers who study the city. I admired the editing to be found at The New Yorker, diligent people balancing clarity and comedy and idiom, Mr. Shawn’s penciled comments in the margins of galley proofs gently suggesting “among” replace “between” since there were three people involved, writing, “Isn’t this too confusing even if the confusion is intentional?” I love the fact that, on any given night in New York, you might go to a show that knocks your socks off—maybe A View from the Bridge at the Met or Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks at a little club in Midtown or Sweeney Todd with Patti LuPone strutting on stage and playing the tuba or Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, and as you get older and your socks get tighter, this is more and more exciting. You hear the Berlin Philharmonic play Brahms at Carnegie and you head for the subway, walking on air. You descend into the station packed with people and feel relieved that some of the job of waiting has been done by others—and along comes the train. You sandwich yourself into the crowd, avoiding eye contact, reading the ads for teeth whitener and bunion removal, and feel united with humanity.

  It was good to be back with work to do, maneuvering in English. I started a novel about a radio station in Minneapolis, WLT, with a crippled songstress, Lily Dale, and a radio preacher, the Rev. Irving James Knox, and a gospel quartet, the Shepherd Boys, who liked to light the newscaster’s script on fire. I was back where I belonged. I assembled a collection of stories, We Are Still Married, which was published as the divorce from Ulla went through.

  The marriage to Denmark started to feel like a beautiful piece of foolishness, a necessary mistake. It brought a bountiful benefit: a daughter, Malene, who managed very well to love two antagonists, as only a Dane can; it is a nation of amiable mediators. She was happy at Bryn Mawr College, and one spring she went to LA with me to interview Ronald Reagan for the Times. The editor made it clear that I was to be humorous at the old man’s expense. When we saw Mr. Reagan at his office in Century City, a shadowy version of himself, with a young woman minder to prompt him, it put a whole different light on things. He was not himself. And then my daughter, a fan of 1940s Hollywood, asked about the Warner Brothers Studio days, and the old man’s eyes lit up. She mentioned her favorite movies, and they all starred old pals of his. He was delighted that a college girl liked the old Hollywood. It was a sweet afternoon: I came with cruel intention and she made an old man happy who needed that. I never wrote the story and the Times never asked me to write again. Malene went off to London and there, having dinner with the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine, she met Peter Sheppard, a violinist, and he became my son-in-law and they produced Marius, a grandson. So it was an unhappy marriage with an extravagant bonus. They settled in London, so now I have a reason to go there and a guide who knows all the Wren churches and aspects of English history omitted from history books, such as the square where his ancestor the famous highwayman Jack Sheppard was hanged in 1724 before a crowd of 200,000.

  And in due course, I happened to find my own life, which was a short walk away, up on 102nd Street.

  24

  A Good Life

  I CALLED HER IN THE fall of 1991 on the advice of her older sister, who was a classmate of my younger sister at Anoka High School. She and her sister were violinists, one with the orchestra in St. Paul, one a freelancer in New York. She lived on 102nd, a ten-minute walk away, and I asked her if she’d like to have lunch with me and she said she wished she could but was about to leave on an orchestra tour in Southeast Asia. “Okay, some other time, good luck with the tour,” I said.

  I asked no questions, where in Southeast Asia, what orchestra, what repertoire?—if “Southeast Asia” was the best excuse she could come up with for not meeting a stranger for lunch, okay, but I did think I would call again in a few months when she returned, if indeed she were going away. She sounded lively on the phone, funny, unguarded. I didn’t know her family except that her dad, Ray Nilsson, was clerk of district court in Anoka, an elective office, and I’d seen his campaign signs on the road to my Aunt Jo’s. Jenny knew me, at least she’d been to a show of mine with a friend, she said. “Oh,” I said. I thought, “A friend.” She could’ve said, “My boyfriend,” but had not so if it had been with a boyfriend, perhaps he was one no longer.

  My mind did not go down that path, nor did I tell her that I had a girlfriend, a Dane named Dorrit, a singer and teacher and tennis partner, who wanted a decision from me, and I had decided that, though we were good together, I could not be responsible for the happiness of another Danish woman in America. It was complicated. She went back to Denmark, taught at a gymnasium, married Thorkild. I still loved her. A few months went by, thoughts were thought, I looked out from the terrace across the rooftops, spring came around. In May 1992, I had lunch with Jenny Lind Nilsson at Docks seafood restaurant on 90th and Broadway, at a table by the window. I ordered scallops, she got a lobster roll. There was wine. I liked her smile, the wit of her thrust and parry, her dedication to music. She was thirty-five, had lived in New York since she was seventeen, making her way playing on City Opera tours and at Glimmerglass Opera and whatever else presented itself. She was quick and never at a loss for a comeback.

  Jenny.

  She told me how, on tour in Asia, she had hiked up into the hills above Kuala Lumpur to see a Hindu temple and saw dozens of wild monkeys who were adept at picking tourists’ pockets. She talked about Japan and Brunei and Malaysia. I’d never been to Asia. She talked about the eccentrics in her family, which included everyone, so it was centricity, not eccentricity. Her great-grandfather John emigrated from Sweden to become a streetcar conductor in Minneapolis, and her grandfather Ragnar taught violin at his music school on Lake Street and played in pit orchestras in theaters. Her parents were pianists, and her two sisters and brother were violinists, too. She loved the freelance life—from opera tour to pop show to Broadway pit to church gig; she’d played for Leonard Bernstein and also for the Lipizzaner horses—and though she lived on the edge of poverty, she had no complaints, living with roommates, sometimes their dogs, in tiny apartments in buildings where you might step over junkies asleep in the foyer and the oven is used for a closet and cockroaches pass without comment, and you learn to cure bouts of discouragement by taking long walks. A slight young blond woman, she knew what it felt like to be two steps removed from homelessness. I did not. I had offered myself up to New York back in the summer of 1966, looking for a job, and wasn’t offered one: I couldn’t have endured living on the edge in New York. Jenny did it and thrived on it. Lunch lasted three hours.

  I fell in love with her out of admiration. No money, loved music, no complaints, no regrets. She loved going out at night, and I took her to the Rainbow Room and we danced on a revolving floor to a big orchestra. Alone, I was lost in New York, but as Jenny’s escort, I had a plan and a purpose. She loved to be going places, seeing things. Saturday night, after the show at Town Hall, we strolled across Times Square and up to Picholine restaurant, me in a tux with a classy woman on my arm, an Anokan from Rice Street who’d become a real New Yorker. We went to a manic Fiddler on the Roof an
d the Brahms Fourth at Carnegie. As a child, she’d been taken by her dad to see Carmen and stood through the whole opera, dazzled by Grace Bumbry, so I took her to see Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier singing to the young lover Octavian and proclaiming her erotic fervor for him and at the same time setting him free—and I, the middle-aged man with the young woman up in the cheap seats, was moved to tears. Opera is the impossible art, an outpost of melodrama in an age of irony, sung in foreign languages by abnormal voices, and it can take you by the shoulders and shake you. And in Rosenkavalier, Octavian is my love Jenny Nilsson and I am the Marschallin warning her not to fall in love with an old man, it will only lead to heartache, but I hope she won’t listen.

  I’d been married twice, and that surely raised questions in her mind. I was the past imperfect, and she was the present indicative, but we were good together and she accepted me. I took her to supper at Café des Artistes, with murals of naked ladies gamboling in the woods, and that night she told me she lived with a guy in a walk-up and went to the trouble of explaining that he was a roommate roommate, nothing more, so now I knew she was interested in me and we eased into a life together. I had a big sunny apartment on 90th, she had a futon in an alcove of a dim room on 102nd. I was brought up to share, so we packed her up and she moved twelve blocks south. No reason for delay. I wrote to my friend Thatcher: She’s a violinist, slight and athletic, cheerful by disposition, passionate about music and opera and art, close to everyone in her family, eminently adaptable after years of touring in foreign places, a woman of simple needs after years of supporting herself as a New York freelance musician, and we love each other.

  It was a big year, 1992. She came to my fiftieth birthday party in St. Paul, though I didn’t introduce her as my love. I wanted her to observe my friends and family and not be inspected critically. I got us a big room in the St. Paul Hotel. She took me to Anoka to meet her parents, Ray and Orrell, who were warm and welcoming and generously so, considering their youngest daughter had an older twice-divorced boyfriend who made his living in radio comedy featuring horn honks and glass breakage and seal courtship. They loved classical music and I was a writer of limericks. As clerk of district court, Ray knew that Keillors were not criminals so far as authorities were aware, and he knew my uncle Lawrence was president of the First National Bank, but still. Their warmth was touching. Literally. They were huggers, unlike us Keillors.