WLT (50 page)

Ray Soderbjerg died on a Tuesday, the morning of the Big March Blizzard of 1951, and his obituary (“Radio Pioneer Succumbs at 73”) was buried under news about rural families marooned in cars a few hundred yards from their homes. Even on
The Noontime News
on WLT, his passing was noted deep into the broadcast, after the school closings and before the basketball scores. The
Tribune
said that he was instrumental in the development of radio as a tool of education and a forum for debate on important public issues, listed some awards won by WLT, said he had died at home, that Vesta was returning from Sweden, that the burial would take place from Mount Olivet and interment in Lakewood Cemetery, noted Ray's membership in the Sons of Knute and Masons and the Brighten the Corner Club, and did not mention a fact dear to Ray's heart: that, for the last week of his life, Patsy Konopka lay next to him in his bed, holding his hand, smoothing his hair.

When she awoke at six that morning, his eyes were open and he spoke to her. He whispered (she thought), “Me today and you tomorrow.” He was having difficulty swallowing so she gave him a, few spoonfuls of whiskey, which helped, and she went to make him a poached egg for breakfast. Even if Ray didn't eat, he still enjoyed looking at a meal. She put the egg on a slice of toast, garnished with parsley, on a china plate covered with a bowl, on a tray with a white linen and a single rose in a silver vase, just like at a swank hotel, and as she fixed the tray, she heard him call, and came in to find him gone. She closed his eyes and straightened his covers and called up Roy Jr. She put on her coat and tiptoed out the back door, as if not to wake him, leaving the breakfast by his bed, and drove downtown to the Ogden.

It was not quite 7 a.m. She carried two shopping bags down the hall past the Green Room, where Leo LaValley was trying to clear his throat, and into Studio B.

The poor old jinxed studio had become a glorified closet, full of boxes of old
Friendly Neighbor
scripts and boxes of
Love's Old Sweet Song
scripts (marked LOSS), and hats and banjos and brass plaques, an empty trumpet case, stacks of newscasts, Leo's file of gags, old banners and placards and posters, unclaimed prizes, lost coats heaped on the piano, and underneath it was the gravel box Shirley had walked on towards the deserted farmhouse where the murderer lurked on
Arthur Fox, Detective
and the framed door Arthur had opened slowly, and the padded box the murderer fired the pistol into, and the box of broken glass Arthur had thrown him through, and around the room were strewn Gene's many notices and bulletins warning people to clean up: “Kindly remove all personal belongings from this room immediately” and “Disorder will not be tolerated in this area. This rule is in effect immediately” and “ALL PERSONAL EFFECTS not claimed by NOON FRIDAY will be disposed of. No exceptions” and Gene's final
cri de coeur
:

Rubbery grayish mold grew in the dusty coffee cups on the floor, next to ashtrays full of historic butts, and there, his head on the carpet spotted with black burn holes, lay Buck Steller, on his back, asleep, in a brown suit and a gold vest, his snap-brim hat under his poor old head, his mouth ajar and arms flung out as if he were singing at the Ritz, his sportscast in his hand. His snoring sounded like he might be saying, “Noooooo, not Massachusetts.” Patsy stepped over him and set down her shopping bags.

Ray had packed them a week before, his eyes shining with exquisite pain, all his treasures. “Someday this stuff will be worth something. I want you to have it,” he said. Old 78s of Jimmy Noone and Bix and the Lunceford band and Johnny and Baby Dodds and J. P. O'Blennis & His Evening Creepers and a signed portrait of Bryan and a bottle of 1928 Chateau Morton and a gold watch and chain and fourteen morocco-bound volumes of Mark Twain and a jar of rare coins and a china teapot and a small carved ivory figure of a naked woman brushing her long hair, her eyes closed, her face turned up toward the sun.

Patsy set the bags in the corner and laid a coat over them. It crossed her mind to take the bottle of wine, or the watch, and then she thought, No, they belong here, and she turned and stepped over Buck and slipped out of WLT and into the cold starry morning.

Maria called Frank to tell him that Ray was dead, and the cigar dealer downstairs answered and said, “He's gone, toots. Got his own apartment. No phone there but he said to tell you to call him at work. He's at WGN. Nice, huh? I think Frankie caught the brass ring. Good luck, toots.”

Frank told her the whole story. “I walked into WGN and asked if they had had time to look at my resume yet, and I sat in the lobby for two hours before the receptionist sent me upstairs. By then it was five o'clock, the woman at the personnel desk was ready to go home. She already had her hat on, a large woman in a pinchback suit and tiny wire-rim glasses. She shook her head and waved me toward a door at the end of the room. ‘Go downstairs and talk to Dave,' she said. ‘I don't have time to deal with this.' So I went downstairs.”

He went down three flights and through a glass door, into a long hall, one wall covered with photographs of burning buildings and famous people shaking hands. He heard voices through a door held slightly ajar by a block of two-by-four. Frank walked in. The room was thirty feet high, the walls covered with green acoustic tile, a radio studio apparently except that a thin blue curtain hung from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, and he was behind it, and the voices and the bright lights were on the other side. “Fifteen minutes!” a man shouted. “He told me fifteen minutes! Where is he?”

“Screw 'm!” said an older man.

“He should be so lucky.”

They were wheeling large machines into position. A circle of light ten feet wide hit the blue curtain, shrank to six, grew back to ten. “If it stays there, I'm going through,” thought Frank.

He opened the curtain. The light blazed in his eyes, but he saw a desk in front of him, a chair, a microphone, a script. In front of the desk were two television cameras. The men were pacing in front of a glass control-room window, but they stopped when Frank appeared.

One of them said, “You're not Ingram.”

Frank said, “I'm White. Ingram isn't coming. I'm ready to go.”

“Who are you?”

“Frank White.”

The older man studied him. He said, “You couldn't have worn a cleaner shirt?”

Frank said, “Gray loaks better on television anyway.”

He sat down in the chair. (Nobody had told him not to sit in it.) An engineer adjusted the microphone and Frank looked through the script. News. Nothing tricky about it. The clock moved toward six and he kept expecting Ingram to come in or somebody to ask him if he had any television experience, but then it dawned on him: he didn't and neither did Ingram or anybody else.

A girl in a dark green dress stood beside the camera, perusing him, and he smiled.
Hi
. She had a magnificent head of waving black hair and such a sweet smile, she looked like Donna LaDonna dressed as a Girl Scout. She stepped up to the desk and patted his forehead with a powderpuff and stroked his cheeks. She smoothed his hair.

“Do you perspire heavily?” she whispered.

“I don't know.”

“Well, you look real nice.”

“Thank you, Donna.”

She stepped back behind the camera. Frank smiled at the thought of what he was thinking, and the red light flashed and Frank looked into the black lens like it was her own dark eyes. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Frank White, and here is the news.”

WGN hired him, he told Maria, and maybe it hadn't been necessary but he had lied and told them he had been the news director at WLT for six years. “Why?” she asked. Because he had told them that he was thirty years old and he needed to account for the time. “And I gave you as a character reference,” he said.

“How can I be your character reference? I'm going to marry you.”

“Once you marry me, I'm on my own, but until then, if anyone asks, tell them I'm a great man,” he said, and then the beauty of it dawned on him, that the voice on the line was her, that she loved him and chose to live with him, and that was that, as clear as a bell. The end of the old days, the beginning of the new.

A
few weeks before Easter, 1991, a few days after

President Bush launched the ground war against Iraq, Frank White's biographer Richard Shell read in People that White was in Manhattan for a few weeks to see his friends and look at art. Shell had been writing the book for almost two years—it was now called
Frank White: The Untold Story
and was due out in the fall from Furness Press—working weekends and summers in a spare office at the junior college in New Hampshire where he taught mass communication. You didn't often see White's name in public print anymore, and Shell was thrilled to catch a glimpse. He clipped out the story, put it under his desk lamp, and studied the photograph.

The old bastard looked remarkably well-preserved. In fact, he looked younger than he had the year before in
Us
. There was a suspicious smoothness under the eyes, a slight ridge below the mouth that might, Shell thought, be a scar from cosmetic surgery. Why not? He had always wondered if cosmetic surgery wasn't the secret reason for White's move to Paris, a city where a famous American could walk around unnoticed and let his face heal up. A facelift would certainly tie in with the theme of White's self-revulsion that ran through the book, the famous self-hatred of the famous. Shell made a photocopy on the office machine, enlarged it, examined it closely. Now the ridge looked more like a scratch, a wound that one might get from an enraged woman. “You miserable bastard, Frank!” she cried, and he ducked as she swung and her long lacquered nails raked the Paris night air and left a thin red gash across his chin. But who was she? Probably not White's wife, Maria. After forty years, does a wife take a swing at her husband? Shell, though unmarried, thought not. Probably it was a mistress. A Parisian mistress. Or a male lover—impossible? Hardly. AIDS? He did not rule it out. In a year, the man could be dead from it.

It was only a hunch, of course, but Shell took a few days' leave from his classes and drove down to New York and staked out the Sherry Netherland Hotel. Probably there wasn't time to check out the facelift, the mistress, the AIDS, but at least he could lay eyes on the bastard and cop a description of him in real life.
Weary, stooped, shivering
,
the naked newscaster trudged down the street
—something like that. The People story, “Frank White's Moveable Feast,” didn't specify the Sherry, only “a suite on the fourth floor of a gracious old hotel overlooking Central Park,” but the Sherry was where the Whites always stayed in New York, according to Wendell Shepherd, a good source. Shepherd was remarkably unbitter toward White, though White had stolen a chunk of money from him to bankroll his jump to TV. “I'd've done the same if it was me,” said the old gospel star.