WLT (32 page)

A posse rode through the woods and along the river, a long line of riders snaking through the trees. A lone rider raced far ahead, a man in a fringed buckskin jacket who kept looking over his shoulder and urging his horse on—but did not whip him or pull out his six-gun—just rode hell-for-leather and then stood in the saddle and leaped for a tree branch and hauled himself up into the foliage a moment before the posse swept beneath him. Then he jumped down, whistled, and his horse trotted out of the underbrush. He mounted and rode back toward town. There, at that moment, four masked men were tying a struggling woman to a chair. A gag was in her mouth but she tore it out and yelled “Lemme go!” The leader of the four laughed a rich, evil laugh. “Lucky'll be here, he's on his way, you just wait and see!” she said, fists clenched, fighting them off for a moment. The leader chortled. “Lucky cain't come. Lucky's goin' to a necktie party,” he said. “And he's the honored guest!” The four of them laughed as if it were the funniest joke they'd ever heard in their lives. She slipped from their grasp and tore into the next room and barred the door. Lucky came galloping hard along the river, bent low, his head against the outstretched neck of the big palomino. They hit the river full-speed and disappeared in the plume of water and bounded up the other shore and galloped away into the trees. The girl locked the door. The leader of the four stepped back and drew his revolver and blasted the lock.

“Have you seen Dad?” asked Dale Snelling in the doorway. “It's noon. We're starting the theme.” Dad leaped up off the couch and careened off down the hall. Ray waved toward the radio—Frank switched it on—the voice of Reed saying, “. . . by Milton, King Seeds and as we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table where Jo is fixing lunch . . .” and a soft clinking of utensils and Faith saying, “Well, I wonder where he is.”

Up in Moorhead, Roy had looked at television too. He wrote to Ray: “Television offers the aural quality of a telephone and the video quality of a very poor snapshot, and to produce this requires an immense and unwieldy technologic apparatus, the equivalent of the brontosaurus. It will fall of its own weight. It simply will not work. It corrupts everything it touches, makes it flat and dull and empty. It is less than photography and less than radio and it combines the two to make something that is nothing but a minus. It is novelty, and it has its day, but when radio returns, when it comes for the second time, television will go the way of Smell-o-Rama. Perhaps it will have some use in hatcheries.”

He is dead wrong
, thought Frank when Ray showed him the letter, but Ray didn't ask him for an opinion, Ray wanted him to do a favor. “It's about my sister Lottie,” he said. “You know. Lily Dale. It's her birthday. Buy her something.”

Frank knew Lily Dale but not that she was Ray's sister Lottie. He only knew that when her fans showed up to visit with her, he had to make up excuses why they couldn't. She brought sunshine into their day and they wrote her faithfully and told her how wonderful her singing was, that when they heard her theme song, “Just a Little Street Where Old Friends Meet,” they immediately started to feel cheerful, so they wanted to see her, of course, her oldest, dearest fans.

No, she was not able to visit. She was at the hairdresser, she was ill, she had gone shopping, she was resting.
Oh
, they said.
Well, tell her hello
.

Lily was young and lovely, coquettish, a true romantic, one of those gloriously cheerful young women who fly through life untouched by sorrow or dismay, but Lottie was fifty-four years old, big and squat, riding in a wheelchair, her face dark and bloated, her eyes black slits, her hair like wisps of moss. Cheerfulness was all she had left in the world. “Oh, don't look at me!” she cried to Frank, the first time he was assigned to help haul her upstairs. “I haven't done my hair or anything. Oh, you dear boy —what's your name? Frank White? Oh, I'll remember it. I'll remember it forever. It has the ring of true nobility. Oh, be true to me, Frank.” “Is she crippled?” he asked Gene later. “Polio,” he said. “And weak ankles. One o' these days, we'll have to winch her in through the third-floor window.”

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.”