WLT (16 page)

One day, Jodie wrote a long tearful letter to Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles in Brainerd and asked to come live with them, and they took her, the little traitor. Francis asked her why she was going away and she said, “Because you're not Christian. I'm going to live with a Christian family.”

Francis couldn't believe she really would go away and leave her own mother and brother in their darkest hour, but the day came and Emma and Charles arrived and Jodie smiled and said goodbye and even kissed him—she had never kissed him before, but she gave him a dreadful dry little peck on the cheek.
You lied
, he thought. Emma told him to be good and take care of his mother. Charles looked ill, as always.

Becky loved it at the Bensons', and her dad and Ginger never did stop on their way back from Moonlight Bay to get her, of course: they needed to go to Morocco first, and then something came up at his ranch in Montana and then he was off to London on a business trip, and by then she was enrolled in school so he decided to let her be. “It's a good place for you,” he said, and considering what a vile father he was, he was right. He dropped in to see her a couple times a year for a minute or two and offered Dad money which Dad always refused.

“Uncle Dad,” Becky asked once, “why doesn't my daddy ever write to me?” “He's a busy man, Beeper,” Dad answered. “Humph,” said Jo.

Jodie almost never wrote to Francis but it was nice to think that she was listening to the radio at the same time he was, that they had something in common, and Francis sent in her name to the
Jubilee
and Leo read it on the Happy Birthday Club.

“Happy birthday to Jodie Marie, the most splendrous sister a boy could ever have—well, isn't that sweet, Jens?”

“Ja, aye tink dat boy, he is a real sewper-dewper kid dere. By yiminy yes.”

After
Friendly Neighbor
, Mother sent him to Kohler's Drugstore for more cough syrup. He stayed out as long as possible, playing in the ditch, digging snow caves until it was dark, then he snuck in the house and dawdled around in the kitchen, as she called again and again, “Francis? Francis?” When he slouched in by her bed, she bawled and held him tight to her bosom and said that he was all she had left in the world now, everything else was meaningless. She reeked of camphor and eucalyptus. The radio was on all day, chattering away beside her bed. She followed all the shows: the Benson family of course and
Up in a Balloon and Down in the Valley
. The house sat soaking in grief. Emma came every week, bringing hot meals in covered dishes wrapped with towels, taking away dirty laundry. It was rich food, which made Mother gassy, and when she pulled back the blankets, a cloud of farts flew out. Emma taught Francis to wash clothes and to use plenty of blueing and wring them out and hang them outside. It was scary in the basement, pumping water into the tub. The kerosene lantern cast a flickering light and sometimes shadows moved and Francis jumped. Maybe Daddy was mad at him for making him go on the train and get burned up, and maybe Daddy told Emma to send Francis down in the basement, down to where Daddy could punish him.

Mother kept the radio on even when the minister called. He perched on the side of her bed and patted her hand and listened to her shows with her. The church sent a stale chocolate cake and a box of old clothes. Once when Francis clomped home after school the minister rushed out of Mother's room pale and distraught and said, “Oh! It's you! Good! You're home!” and jumped around buttoning his collar.

The next day Francis listened through the furnace vent, how the minister told her to lie still and close her eyes for the healing ministry and murmured about the efficacy of skin contact. On the radio, people jumped around on the
Jubilee
and hooted and told jokes and the Norsky Orchestra played and a man whistled like birds and tapped out tunes on his teeth. “Touch her, Lord, and make her whole,” the minister moaned. “Her body is open
unto
Thee. Our sister places her trust in Thee. Lord, she is entirely Thine. Touch her now, touch her and heal her.” There was rustling and murmuring. Francis crept away downstairs and dropped a casserole dish on the floor. The man came to the head of the stairs. “Are you all right?” he said. He was very tall up there and dark with the light behind him. Francis whispered: “Go away.”

He told Emma on Saturday that he was afraid of the minister and she said, “Don't be silly.” He thought of writing to Dad Benson about it. Mother wrote in to the radio all the time. She wrote a get-well letter to Dad and another one to Dad's sister Hannah, who was down sick with a brain inflammation brought on by worry. The name Hannah proved to Mother that the Bensons were Danes too, or at worst, Norwegians. She wrote to Hannah that she herself knew how hard it was to be sick and urged her to have faith in God, though faith had not worked thus far in her own case. She stayed in bed. Christmas passed, a dark gloomy day. Lily Dale sang “Beautiful Jesus” with a choir and the Bensons welcomed carollers to their kitchen and gave them cocoa, but Francis and Mother spent a quiet tearful day. She tried to go to the kitchen and cook a goose and she fell down the stairs and had to be helped to the couch. The doctor came and scolded her for feeling so sorry for herself, and that threw her into a state of collapse.

“Benny, you come back here,” she screamed. “You can't get out of it as easy as that! Benny! I want you back
now!
”

There were more presents than ever, all from Art and Clare and Emma and Charles, and none that he wanted except the lampshade from Art with a Hawaiian girl on it. When you turned out the light, her clothes disappeared and her body glowed in the dark.

Jodie wrote that she sure loved her new school in Brainerd and she got all As except for one
B
+ and she got a red Schwinn bike for Christmas and would come visit in the spring. She didn't come with Emma on the food visits—she was too busy with her schoolwork, Emma said, and it was better for her not to get upset. “Jodie is more high-strung than you are,” said Emma. “She has an artistic temperament.” Emma was Daddy's older sister. She was beautiful in a fussy sort of way and was proud of her singing, which was ridiculous. When she sang, she whinnied like a horse. The tragedy was hard on her nerves, which were bad to begin with. She was so broken inside, she said, that she could never sing or play the piano again, and Francis hoped she would be true to her word.

His only hope was Art. From those few words, “You ought to come with us to Minneapolis,” spoken between blue clouds of cigar, Francis imagined a happy life in the future, riding the trolleys, going to the ballpark, listening to the radio. Uncle Art was a big man at WLT, The Friendly Home in the Air. He knew all the stars. He sent Francis a copy of the WLT Family Album. It showed Bud & Bessie and Leo and Dad Benson and Little Becky visiting an orphanage and giving a wheelchair to a crippled boy, and it made Francis feel that if he could make it to Minneapolis, he would be all right.

F
rancis wrote Little Becky a second letter:

The kids in Mindren might see him in a new light if a radio star were his friend, but then weeks went by with no reply, and he could see that a letter from Little Becky would make no difference at all. None. These people were not
Friendly Neighbor
people. Obviously. One cold day, they had him pinned and were singing the song about Daddy and Darrell put his ugly dogface down next to Francis's and said with his dog's breath, “Sing it!” and Francis did, loud. This amazed them and they let him up. So he sang it again,
louder
. He stood, grinning, arms out, and sang all their verses including:

They all gawked like he had eaten a toad, it was THRILLING, and some girls tattled to Miss Theisen and reported that Francis used bad language and he was made to sit in the corner and face the blackboard, which made him a true hero, and afterward several boys became his best friend.

Francis was the only one who knew all the verses of the Daddy song and he sang it for them again. They nicknamed him Showman. He got to come in the boys' clubhouse, a Chevy truck sitting on rusted rims by the railroad siding behind the lumberyard, and they all lay in the back of the truck and smoked and argued about ballplayers and looked at each other's wieners and told dirty secrets. Darrell said his sister Sally had a lot of boyfriends and when one of them drove in the yard and honked, she would go out and pull up her skirt and lay in the back seat with him on top of her, his hairy butt bumping like a sonofagun, and her howling like a barnyard dog.

Francis made up a story about Jodie, that she liked to take off her clothes and do backflips and crabwalk up and down the stairs. She had tiny breasts with big brown nipples like Hershey's chocolate kisses. She had thin curly hair between her legs.

Tell more, they said. So he said she had her a boyfriend in Brainerd named James. They went swimming stark naked in the crick and she held his wiener in her hand until it was big as a loaf of bread and then he poked her with it. Tell more. So she had a tiny baby that was born in the middle of the night with a big red mark on its head. They gave it to the fat hairy junkman as he rode along on the junkwagon behind Big Ben clop-clop-clopping down the alley early in the morning. He was singing
Bring me your iron
,
your copper and iron
,
bring me your stee-el
and Jodie dashed out and handed up the new baby.

She gave the baby to the Jew? Yes, the baby went to Jake the Jew, went to the junkyard, and the Jew sold him to other Jews in Minneapolis. He was mailed there in a box. Sold him for fifty dollars and the postage cost 35 cents and the Jew packed a sugar teat for him to suck on. Now Jodie's baby was a Jew. His name was Isaac and his mother and daddy were rich, lived in a house with twenty-seven rooms and seven servants and Isaac had his room, his own car and chauffeur to drive him around to the zoo, to movies, to the ballpark. He was the boy who got to throw out a new ball when the Millers hit a homer. He had seventy pairs of shoes and two hundred pairs of pants and three hundred shirts and six dozen sweaters. Argyll socks and saddle shoes. Leather jackets. Caps and hats, a closetful. And though Isaac was only a kid, he got to sleep every night with a beautiful Spanish woman, her dark hot skin lay next to him, her big ripe breasts, her long legs wrapped around him, holding his little pecker in her hand, singing Bing Crosby songs.

“How do you know?” Because it's true, that's how.

“What if they find out he's not a Jew? They'll kill him.”

“It's worth that chance,” said Francis, “to live in Minneapolis.”

He tried to write Daddy a letter to explain why he had said these dreadful things, but then he thought, “You died. What do you care? You're not my dad anymore. You're only a body in the ground. You're lying in a box with the rain leaking in and you're rotten to the bone and worms are crawling in your ears and eating your brains. Maggots in your nose. Your eyeballs are gone. You got enough problems without thinking about me.”

That summer Mother wanted to go to a sanitarium in Fargo where there was a specialist who treated nervous breakdowns with electrical waves. The nervous system, she explained to Francis, works on electricity, and her currents were irregular and needed to be regulated by the use of a Tremular Calibrator, a large machine like a culvert in which she would lie for four hours a day wrapped in a protective magnetic field and slowly come to feel more and more like herself. The ordinary treatment was for a month but because she had deteriorated so badly, she would need six weeks. The thought of being well again made her happy for one whole evening. She got out of bed and brushed her hair and talked about how, when she came back, they would go to Minneapolis and see the sights. “We'll sing the night away! Champagne and oysters!” she said. “We'll dance on the restaurant tables!”