WLT (23 page)

The others all warbled about Home, Home and Mother, Mother Waiting at Home, The Wandering Boy Coming Home, I Wandered Away But Now I'm Going Back, There's No Place Like Home, but Slim sang “Frankie and Johnny” about the lovers who swore to be true to each other and Johnny went out for the evening and Frankie went down to the corner to get her a bucket of beer and the bartender told her about Miss Nellie Bly and she took her big .44 and got in the cab and got off on South Clark Street and rang the big brass bell and went upstairs and looked over the transom and there he was, on the bed making love, and the gun went Rooty-toot-toot, and they rolled him over easy and carried him to the graveyard in a rubber-tired hearse and they threw her in a dungeon cell and threw the key away. He was her man but he done her wrong. It was as simple as that. You love somebody and they break your heart and you break theirs. It was a
noble
song.

And then one day Slim said on the radio, “Here's a new song that my good friend, Harold Odom, wrote, and I want to do it for you now.” There was some commotion in the background. “Well, boys,” he said, “I apologize for that, but I drank a lot of coffee last night. Anyway, here's the number.”

Francis listened, frozen, his hand on the cupboard door, as if someone had knocked him senseless with a rock, and then he put his head into the crook of his arm and he cried.

T
he most memorable part of West High was the worst: the first day, when his name was called on the loudspeaker and a boy said in a shrill, pansy voice, “Oh Franthith With! Mithter Franthith With!” and for a miserable month he wouldn't let up—“Oh you wicked
With
, you!” he'd squeal, and other boys laughed, and Francis shrank down inside his jacket.

In his freshman year, he gave up the Five Words a Day Plan: in the lunchroom, talking to his only good friend, Francis used the word “insidious” and sensed a coolness in the boy's eyes. He was different enough, he decided, without talking funny. He was small for his age and he had inherited the long Jensen face from Mother's side, the thin nose and the watery blue eyes, the thin lips, a man's face on a kid's body. In sophomore year, he experimented with parting his hair higher and lower and on the right, but it was no use. Though Uncle Art and Aunt Clare dressed him in nice corduroy pants and white shirts and sweaters, he was a queer duck. He avoided sports, lusted after girls, was avoided by girls. Everyone else believed in the war, and Francis secretly did not, a terrible secret. Churchill and his cigar and the V-sign, Roosevelt and his big grin riding in a convertible, Hitler with his little moustache dancing a jig in a French forest, Hirohito on his white horse, the Japs, the Krauts, it was all a story that he tried to have strong, pure feelings about and support the boys by saving scrap metal and buying war bonds and he couldn't. And then suddenly the war was over. Everyone else at West was jubilant and leaped out of their chairs and tore out of school and stood in the street yelling and honking horns and stopping cars and riding around on their running boards. Except Francis, who went home and wondered what was the matter with him.

He was voted Most Anonymous Person in the Class of 1947, and graduated on a hot May afternoon and went home and took a bath. Girls had hugged each other and wept at the ceremony. Two girls had even hugged him, but he had no idea why. School seemed predetermined to him, you went where you were told and you waited there for nothing to happen. Teachers told you so much that wasn't true—e.g. “These are years you will look back on as some of the best of your life”—that you gave up trying to believe them.

He wrote to Mother and said it would be nice if she came to his graduation, and she wrote back and said she couldn't, she could hardly leave the house to go to the drugstore, so how could she come to Minneapolis? “You don't really have a mother. All you have is this funny old lady in her dirty chemise who sits and listens to the radio. How come I don't hear you? Are you ashamed of me?”

One night, Uncle Art offered to send him to the University, but he seemed drunk, and Francis said no, so Art gave him a pearl gray '46 Chevy instead as a graduation present. That was Art's way. Ignore you and never want to be with you and then dump some huge gift on you and expect you to grin and jump up and down. Francis walked around the car twice. “Nice,” he said. “Thanks.”

Art crouched down to inspect the grille. “Leo says you're thinking you want to come to work in radio,” he said.

“I haven't decided,” said Francis.

There was a polio epidemic in Minneapolis. A neighbor boy came down with it. Went swimming at Lake Calhoun and the next day was in the hospital, a cripple. Francis fled north to Mindren, at the wheel of his own car, afraid he might have polio already. North of the city, he saw a Sherwin-Williams billboard, the bucket of paint pouring over the globe, and thought of steering east instead and becoming a gypsy (We Cover the World), but the thought of Mother straightened him out. He drove home.

Mother was a little better but not much. She knew him all right but not much else. The insurance money was gone, she thought, and Mr. Mortenson at the bank had sold the house, she thought (but wasn't sure). The yard was overgrown with weeds, the garage full of trash. He shovelled it out and burned the debris, which gave off clouds of bitter acrid smoke. “I have a good job now,” she said, but had forgotten where it was. She tried to remember and gave up. Oh, life is unfair, she said mournfully. One morning, Mortenson came in and took the clock. “Your mother has run up debts downtown and people are demanding payment, of course. Somebody is willing to settle for this old thing and best to accept before they change their mind.” Francis asked if the house had been sold. The man was vague. It had been optioned, he said, and they would know more soon.

“Franny, I'm not ever going to get better, am I,” she suddenly said at supper, a spoonful of chicken noodle soup midway to her mouth, and all his reassurances, so hollow, that yes, she
would
, he knew she would, of
course
she would, only made clear her doom, and tears fell, and she was right. She was an invalid. She would always be looking toward the door, waiting for somebody to come through it and help her up.

“I'm sorry I'm such a mess. I can't even make a decent home for my own kids.” And she wept more. He couldn't imagine where all the water came from.

Emma arrived for Memorial Day. Uncle Charles had migraine and kidney stones and could not bear the slightest motion or sound or ray of light, but Jodie was doing well at Wesleyan College in Ohio. “You wouldn't know her, she's so grown up.” He asked why Jodie had not come home. Emma said, “Home? Her home is with us. We're the ones who took her in. Don't only think of yourself, Franny. Jodie has blossomed into a fine young lady. She couldn't have got that here. Look at your poor mother. I'm going to have to go sign papers on Tuesday and put her in a hospital. My dad used to say that nothing is so bad but what there's some good in it, but I don't see it in her case.” Emma clucked. “Poor thing.”

After Minneapolis, Mindren seemed like a ghost town. Men stood in the hardware store, looked out the window, as if waiting for something, then went back and sat on a nail keg and talked to Walt, who said what he'd been saying for years:
You never know. Only time will tell.
It was dry. There was dirt in the air. Men stood watering their lawns, their thumbs in the hose to make a fine spray, pissing away the evenings. The kids were sullen and logy. The minister passed him on the street without a hello. Little kids kept a safe distance, window curtains seemed to rustle when he walked by, blinds were pried open a crack, people whispered.

A letter came from the Great Northern, a W. L. Ja-mieson, Assistant Superintendent, to say that he, Francis With, as the son of the late Benny, qualified for a college scholarship under the terms of the Hill Trust for Railroad Orphans, left by the late Albert Hill, author of the song “The Wreck of the Fast Express,” and thus he, the superintendent, was pleased to offer him a place in the freshman class at Carleton College in Northfield on September 8, please advise at the soonest.

As Francis thought about it, this offer did not resound with the clear ring of fate; it sat on the page, a vague invitation to go somewhere and read books and see if something stuck. He sat down to make a list, “What I Want to Do Before I'm Twenty.”

1. Have sexual intercourse with a beautiful woman

2. Earn money

Were there beautiful women at Carleton College? Probably, but they would belong to someone else. Tall cool women in blue plaid skirts and knee socks, their books pressed to their left breasts, matched up with men who moved in their circles. Not him. Men like Frank Fair-mount on
The Hills of Home
who quarterbacked the Center City Wildcats and went away to Yale and broke Babs's heart, but of course you knew somebody like Frank would
never
wind up with a Babs. Bluebirds don't marry sparrows. He'd match up with a college girl in a blue plaid skirt.

And then he turned the paper over and wrote:

 

Frank With. Frank With. Frank With.

 

It was a better name, no doubt about it. He wrote: Frank B. With.

The problem was the soft last name. It died at the end.
With
. You said it and people always said,
“Who?”
He made a list of names: Benson, Burgess, Fox, Upton, Autry.
Frank Autry. Frank Rogers. Frank Mix. Frank Armstrong.
It was a shameful thing to turn your back on your own name. Especially with your father lying in the ground without a stone over his head. But he had no family left, not to speak of. And then he saw that by adding an
e
to
-With
he could get
White
.

 

Frank White.

 

The names made a nice click like closing the bolt on a .22.

The night before Emma drove Mother to the state hospital for the insane, he wrote a letter to his father.