WLT (11 page)

One day a man in a blue tuxedo strolled into Dad's feed and seed in Elmville and demanded directions to the Moonlight Bay Supper Club. He was accompanied by a little girl in a pink prom dress and a tall buxom bejeweled woman named Ginger and you knew the moment she said, “Pleased ta make yer acquaintance, I'm shur,” that she and the man were not married.

Dad tried to direct him, but the club was fifteen miles away and could only be reached by back roads through the bird refuge and along the banks of the whispering Willow River. It was a real hideaway where the well-to-do cavorted with their paramours, not on the main road, so the directions were complicated. And so, when Dad said, “And then turn left at the farm with the red barn with the Chaska Chick Starter billboard,” the man blew up—he threw his cane and his kid gloves and his top hat on the counter next to a sack of sweet-corn seeds and said, “Boy, isn't this the rotten luck! Go away for a swell weekend and you wind up stuck in a stupid little burg where people can't even give you directions out of town! Boy, that takes the cake!”

He stalked around and fumed for a few minutes; meanwhile Dad struck up a conversation with the little girl. “My name is Rebecca,” she said, very sweetly. “I'm almost ten. If we get to Moonlight Bay, my dad is going to take me
swimming.”
Dad said, “Oh?”

“Yes! And if I'm real good, we'll go fishing too.”

“Well, if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no trade for tinkers,” remarked Dad.

They chatted away and she asked him what he sold in this store and he gave her a tour. “This is our most popular tomato seed, the Milton, King Big Red Beefeater,” he said. She'd never seen tomato seeds, didn't know tomatoes came from seeds. She'd never had a garden in her life, living as she did in a big suite on the thirtieth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, and she skipped along from bin to bin, scooping up handfuls of seeds as if they were jewels, sniffing their sweet dry seedy essence, as her father groused and grumped in the background and demanded a telephone and tried to call his lawyer and Ginger smoked a cigarette and whined, “You
promised
me a nice
weekend
, Bobbsie.
You
said we'd go
swimming
and
dancing
and we'd do a little ootchie-cootchie-coo—you didn't say
nothing
about hanging around in no
feed
store,” and meanwhile Dad and Becky were getting to be fast friends. She had never ridden a bicycle or thrown a ball or had her own dog or cat, either. “No bike? Oh, you should come and visit us sometime,” said Dad.

“Ohhhhhhh,”
the little girl said. “I wish I could,” she whispered.

“My daughter and I have a big dog, Buster, and a cat named Tuna. We've got an old bicycle just about your size. Maybe your daddy could bring you back someday for a visit.”

“My daddy doesn't like to go on trips with me. Is your daughter my age?”

“Jo ? No, no, she's—old enough to be your mother.” Dad gulped at the thought: a grandchild.

“Oh. My mama is home with a headache so my dad decided to bring Ginger. Sometimes he goes to Europe with my mama. Then I stay home with Françoise. She's our maid.”

“Oh. That's nice. Well—”

“And you never said word one about bringing the brat along neither,” Ginger hissed not far away. She blew a big cloud of smoke, and her heels went
rapraprap
like a tack hammer. “Quit foolin around, Bobbsie, and let's get there and start having some fun, honey. C'mon. Puhleeze?”

Becky began to weep softly. “Oh, that's just great!” said her dad. “Bring you along and you bawl like a baby. Look at you!” He took Dad aside. “Lissen,” he said, “sorry I talked so rough before, I've been under a lotta pressure. Here's a hundred bucks. Think you could look after my little girl for a few days until I get back? You and her seem to get along. Whaddaya say?”

There was a short, sweet pause, where you could hear Dad loathe the man, then he said, “It would be my privilege. She is as welcome here as if she were my own.”

So in she came, Little Becky, played by Marjery Moore. Marjery Moore was fourteen but Dad thought she could play a little girl just fine. She was the daughter of Dr. W. Murray Moore, the physician who was treating Dad's hemorrhoids, and Dad had known her since she was tiny. “Let's give her a chance,” he told Roy Jr.

Dr. Moore was a big hearty man and more of a kidder than you'd want a doctor to be. He'd look at your piles and grab a pair of pliers and call out, “Hang on to your hat!” His daughter took after him. She was a handful. She smoked Camels, half a pack a day, and swore like a cowboy. Her mother brought her from school at eleven-thirty and dropped her off at the WLT entrance and she smoked a cigarette in the elevator and another one in the studio before the broadcast. Dad told her, “Honey, those coffin nails are going to hurt your voice,” but she just made a face. “It's my business if I do. You're not the boss of me, ya old dodo.”

It dawned on Marjery within days of coming on
Friendly Neighbor
that she could get a big rise out of the radio folks by saying things in her Little Becky voice, such as “Hi, mister, want to see my panties?” She could make Dad levitate an inch by tiptoeing up behind him in the hall and crying, “Look at me! I'm naked as a jaybird!”

“Honey,” he said, “it's not funny. We got sponsors back here, sponsors' kids, employees' families. Don't ruin it for them.”

“Well, don't have a shit fit about it.”

“Honey, what you do drunk you pay for sober. Sin in haste and repent at leisure. Think about it.”

“Stuff it, Pops.”

She liked to goose people, and she was quick and had strong hands. She'd cry “
Whoooo
” and grab up into your hinder and make you flap your arms and fly. Ray saw her creep up behind Reed Seymour one day and give him a good hard one and poor Reed jumped so high his glasses fell off. He tried to kick her but she squirted away and sneered at him, “Missed me! Ha ha! You fairy!”

A few days after Becky's arrival in Elmville, Ray took Patsy for lunch to Richards Treat and told her to get rid of the kid. “I hate kid actors and this one is worse than most. She talks like her shoes are too tight. She's as bad as Little Buddy. In fact, she makes him sound almost reasonable.” Little Buddy was the son of Dad's friend Slim Graves, who came on
Friendly Neighbor
from time to time to sing maudlin ballads about dying children. “Ditch her,” said Ray. “Have her dad come back from New York and pick her up. Have her die and have Little Buddy sing at her funeral. Do any damn thing, but get rid of the kid.”

Patsy ordered lima beans and rye bread and a pot of tea. Ray ordered a steak, medium-rare, with a beer.

“How's Roy these days?” asked Patsy. “What's he up to?”

“Crazy as always. Inventing junk.”

“What sort of junk?”

“The useless kind. A radio couch with loudspeakers in the cushions. Something called a cocking gun, whatever that may be, God only knows. And a radiophone, so you can call up your brother from anywhere and pound his ear for awhile.”

“Interesting. ”

“So?” said Ray. “The kid. Let's dump her.”

“Ray, we got five hundred letters about that show. Most popular we've ever done. Milton, King called and said they want to put her picture on their spring catalogue. They want to put out a Little Becky Scrapbook in the fall, give it away for three empty seed packets. Our contract with them comes up in two months. Little Becky is a money-maker, Ray. And I want a raise.”

Ray still didn't like it. He didn't like the premise of it. You take a child away from her own father and what's next? You want all the kiddoes to hate their dads? Compared to Dad Benson, maybe
their
dads aren't so nice either, maybe they belch and walk around in their underwear, so what? Kids should run away from home so life can be like it is on the radio?

“Ray, people have been reading novels for years. They go to plays, they see movies.”

“There's a difference. You go to a play, you have to
go
someplace. When it's over, you come home. You read a book, you hold it in your hand, you can see it's only writing. Radio, it's right in the home. You turn it on and everybody else has to shut up. A movie is just a picture, but people think that radio is real. They think that it's
real
. Look at your damn
coats
.”

T
he friends and neighbors in radioland thought of the Bensons as real people, as Patsy discovered after Frank complained about Jo's bee-hormone compound costing three dollars and the show received $440.28 in three days, grimy dollar bills clipped to letters that said, “Honey, you go buy any kind of bee compound you want. We love you.”

Anytime the Benson family suffered misfortune, contributions poured in to WLT, even when Dad dropped a piece of glass fruit:

The next day, dozens of glass apples, oranges, pears, and bananas arrived, cases of them, and from then on, Patsy designed the Bensons' troubles for charitable purposes. Once, for the Ebenezer Home's annual spring rummage sale, Dad went walking down to the widow's house one Sunday with a pan of Jo's fresh oatmeal cookies and tore his best suit jumping over a fence when a dog chased him, and the station received more than a hundred good suits in four days. In the fall when the Salvation Army needed warm coats, Dad would do an episode in which, for example, he and Little Becky went to Minneapolis and had lunch at The Forum and somebody stole Dad's coat, and Becky said, “Someday, I'm going to become a
lawyer
and put those men in jail,” and Dad said, “No, Beeper, most people are good at heart. That man must've needed it more than me, that's all.” And within a few days, the coats would be piling up in the WLT lobby by the hundreds, and Dad shipped them over to the mission. Of course, the coats were mostly size 48 and larger, because people thought of Dad as a big fellow, but as Dad said, beggars can't be choosers.

For the Home's drive to build a recreation hall, there were several financial crises—a sudden hailstorm that wiped out the corn, a stolen wallet, a dishonest stockbroker, a needed operation for the dog Buster—and the money rolled in.

To Ray, whatever good the show did wasn't worth the price of having Marjery on the premises. One day she tripped along behind him and said, in her Little Becky voice, “How come your pants are so big in front, mister? Can I see?” He beat a fast retreat to his office and closed the door and wrote Patsy a note: “For the last time, ditch the kid. She's a burr in the butt. Give her malaria or something. She could die of an infected tooth like F. W. Woolworth. That would encourage listeners to go to the dentist. Myself, I would prefer she died of an infected hemorrhoid, like James J. Hill, but perhaps Dad would be sensitive to that.”