WLT (15 page)

Aunt Clare and Uncle Art arrived Friday evening from Minneapolis. Francis was in his room, cutting ribs and struts out of balsa wood for a model plane, which Daddy had shown him how. When Art walked in, Art did his vaudeville shuffle (“Hell-o tootsie, hell-o”), and said, “Hey, Franny, did you hear the one about Lena after Ole died, she said to her friend Tina, ‘Oh Tina, he didn't leave me a penny of insurance, the old coot.' So Tina says, ‘But Lena, where'd you get that diamond ring then?' And Lena says, ‘Oh, he left $100 for his funeral and $400 for a big stone and this is the big stone.' ”
Ker-bang. Tingaling
.

Clare made a pot of spaghetti—you need to eat, she said, so they ate. “I need no
coaxing
,” said Francis. After supper they all sat in the living room, except Mother and Emma, and Art had a couple beers and they listened to Wingo Beals and the Shoe Shine Boys on the radio, except Charles, who read
Popular Science
.

Emma and Charles returned to Brainerd in the morning. His stomach was acting up. Art and Clare stayed for a week. Clare sat with Mother in the dark bedroom and fixed meals and cleaned, and Art cracked jokes and had a ball. There was nobody like Art, he was like a big bald kid with a moustache. Nothing was serious, everything was a game to him. “Bet you I can throw this pea in your mouth,” he'd say at dinner and then do it, when Clare was in the kitchen. Art hated peas. He hated all vegetables except sweet corn and seldom got up before ten in the morning and tried to get out of chores. If Clare asked him to run to the store or fix the kitchen faucet, Art would say, “I've got to take care of that furnace first, something's wrong with the air intake,” and give Francis a big wink and slip down the basement and lie around and read
National Geographic
. He had his own copy with nothing but naked women in it, neatly pasted together, which he enjoyed looking at every day. “Catch the hooters on that one,” he'd say, passing the book to Franny. “Boy, she's got a pair of bazongas you could eat off of.” One night he got down his mandolin and sang a song about a girl who ran away with a sailor. Clare told him it was in poor taste to sing such a song so soon after—and she nodded at the children, but Art said it was one of Benny's favorites. And then he sang another:

Mother was unable to attend the funeral. She knew she should but she couldn't. She lay in bed and wept for this terrible failure, her faithlessness to Benny, her unworthiness. He was burned to death and now his wife couldn't even get out of bed to bury him, poor man. She was too weak to get up. “I might as well be dead myself,” she told Francis. The copper coffin sat in a parlor of the undertaker's house. It looked too small to Francis, like a child's coffin. The six of them sat and the minister read from the Bible and smiled reassuringly. There were twenty-six chairs, but the Withs had only lived eight years in Mindren and nobody knew them. Hamburgers sizzled in the kitchen. Francis thought of the train crash song. He touched the coffin, which was cool. Then they drove three blocks in a drizzle to Resurrection Cemetery and put him in the deep black hole. Art took Francis's hand and they walked home. At the cemetery gate, Art stopped and lit up a stogie and said, “That's one less here and one more there, they laid him in the ground. Rest in peace, and now there's more beer for the rest of us.” It was cold and gray and the next day Francis had to go to school. He didn't want to go but Clare said he had to do it for his father's sake.

So he did. After the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Theisen said, “I am sure that we all extend our heartfelt sympathies to Francis With, whose father was killed in that terrible train wreck,” and she passed around a sympathy card and everyone signed it, including Francis, and then they gave it to him. Later, at recess, the children sang:

Poor Francis. Children pranced around and sang this ditty in his face while the big boys pinned his arms and squashed him down on the sharp cinders and the girls hollered, “That's about yer faw-ther!”

“He
wasn't
a Hun, he was Danish!” Francis yelled.
B.S
., said David and Darrell the dogfaced twins. They sang,

He had no brothers to stick up for him, and Jodie was scared of her shadow. She preferred to remain in the school library during recess and read picture books about the lives of rich people in New York City. Jodie cried and the school cook Mrs. Grebe supplied her with extra tapioca pudding with raisins in it, but Francis couldn't cry. He was too scared to cry. Daddy was dead and now Grampa was gone and what would happen to them? A man with a red face had come in a car for Grampa and Grampa trembled as the man put Grampa's hat and coat on him. Then the man held Grampa's arm tight and steered him out the door. This could happen to anybody. And now Mother stayed in bed having a nervous breakdown. Clare waited on her, bringing bowls of soup, which sat getting cold. She had no friends, Mother wailed. Her only friends were on the radio. She listened to the radio from morning to night. And Francis kept up with the Word Club, trying to improve himself.
Arrant
,
confrere
,
agape
,
barbaric
,
eclipse
.

The only good part was Uncle Art, who passed him the copy of the
Geographic
and taught him the fine points about women. Art was a connoisseur of women and to pass muster with him they had to score high in the Bosom Division, which he divided into: nice titties, torpedoes, real knockers, a pair of headlights, major bazongas, and a shirtful of hooters. If Clare marched through on her way upstairs, Art would suddenly say, loudly, “So how's school coming?” and if Jodie came in and flopped down, he'd have to flip cards for awhile or remove quarters from her nose, but then she had to help Clare with supper, and the men returned to their favorite topic.

“Aw, you're too young, kid, I shouldn't be leading you down the garden path like this,” Art muttered. Franny assured him that he was not too young, that he knew a lot already and was interested in hearing more man-to-man information about women, and that he wouldn't tell anybody where he heard it.

“Well,” Art said, glancing around. “For fooling around with, the girls with the flat chests are your hot babes. The ones with the melons, they get a little old on the hoof, and you have to throw a flag over them feedsacks so they don't bang you on the head, so you want a woman with nice little titties. And a talker. You always want a woman with good chops on her. She'll give you a lot of yap but she'll give you a lot of hubba-hubba too.”

Franny wanted to know more—what is hubba-hubba, for example—but he didn't want to betray ignorance.

“Your daddy was a real ladies' man, now there was a man who knew his way to the bedroom. Not that he two-timed your mom, I'm not saying that, I don't know that, but back in his bachelor days, you never saw anybody could rustle up a nooner like Benny could. He had a cock like a ballpeen hammer. We used to go around north Minneapolis, we knew where all the hot babes were. He was a pistol, your old man. And now he's gone, there's more for you and me, kid. Just remember that. When you're dead, you'll be dead a long long time, so you might as well live when you're alive. Your daddy did.”

“I'm hoping to move to Minneapolis someday,” said Francis, matter-of-factly. “I'm planning to attend the University of Minnesota.”

“You do that, Franny. What'll you study?”

“I want to study to go into radio.”

Art laughed. “Nobody studies radio, kid. They don't teach it in school because it's too much fun. People go to school to be a teacher or a dentist. Radio is just a bunch of guys having a ball. It's incredible. I tell ya, I don't know anybody in radio who works more'n about fifteen minutes a day. It's a gravy train! You want to get into radio, you come and see your uncle Art, I'll put you right up at the head of the parade.”

W
hen Art and Clare got in their big Chrysler to drive back home to Minneapolis, Clare was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. Jodie and Franny stood by the car and she put her hands on their heads. “You poor children,” she said. “We are
undaunted
,” said Francis, thinking of his other words,
global
and
delinquent
and
archaic
and
erode
. Art took two quarters out of Jodie's nose and found a matchbook behind Franny's ear. Art said, “You oughta come with us to Minneapolis, kiddoes. You'd have a ball there. Go to shows and stay up late and have ice cream for breakfast.” He said to Franny, “I could get you a job at the radio station. You could work for me there.” Clare sighed. “Come on, big shot, time to hit the road.”

After Art and Clare left, the house was silent except for the radio. Mother mooned around, daunted, day after day, her face pale and damp,
global
, in Daddy's old brown bathrobe, her dark eyes hollow and her tangled hair hanging down on her shoulders. She
eroded
. She stayed upstairs and slipped around like a tattered shadow. She lay in bed day after day and held Benny's big brass railroad watch, scorched black, the glass half-melted and the face crumpled. Every day when Francis came home from school she called out in a shaky voice, “Come here to Mother,” and burst into tears when she saw him. She seemed to sing when she cried, her mouth twisted agape, she shook, her eyes shut, and Francis put his arm around her. And then sometimes he was
delinquent
. He and Jodie sat at the table and tuned in their shows and ate their soup and Francis studied his vocabulary. They still set a place for Daddy at the end. Though he was
archaic
.

“He is happier now, in heaven,” said Jodie.

Francis said, “There's no such place. It's all a
fabrication
.” He wasn't sure he thought this but it felt good to say it. And it was a word on yesterday's list. But Jodie wouldn't talk to him then, because he was evil.

“Daddy is with Jesus in heaven,” she said, “and you are the evilest person in the world and you will go straight to everlasting hellfire.”

“You don't scare me.”

“Good.” Jodie smiled. “I'm glad. Because I want you to go.”

With Jodie not talking and Mother sick in bed, radio was the only friendly voice in the house, especially Francis's good friends, the Bensons. He wondered about Little Becky: was she a real-life friend of Dad's too, or just an actress? He guessed she was real and just as sweet as on the show. She sure added a lot to
Friendly Neighbor
. Her father had given her expensive clothes but never much love, and she was happy as a clam with Dad and Jo and Frank, and Dad had always wanted a grandkid, so it was a good deal for everybody. They got along without a cross word between them. Becky learned to ride a bike one day, she learned to dry dishes, she learned hymns, and one night Tuna gave birth to six kittens at the foot of Becky's bed. They enrolled her at Elmville School, where Miss Judy, Frank's mom, became her teacher, the wonderful widow-lady who had made the cake for Dad's birthday every year since Mom Benson died from the coma, so Francis could imagine that Miss Judy would be dropping by more often and might bring her nephew Little Buddy, who yodelled.