Wobegon boy, p.29
Wobegon Boy, page 29
“This is not easy for me to say.” She sounded on the verge of tears, and I thought that if she cried, I might like to join her, but she hung up. She was the one who had fingered me for the douche bag joke. She had taken her wounded Botticellian innocence to Dean Baird and had darkened my name, and now her adolescent misery would be used to wipe Mozart and Puccini off the airwaves, in place of which wounded people would drone about the slights and injustices and abuses they had suffered. Oh well. Mozart and Puccini knew how dangerous beautiful women could be.
I made a nest in bed, pillows and comforter, a quart of mineral water and a bag of blue-corn chips, and the phone rang. It was brother Bill. “How are you?” I said. “Fine,” said Bill. It took him a long time to get to the point. He had to go down a long checklist of small talk, and then, of course, it turned out to be nothing at all. He was feeling down, he said, because he had figured up his retirement accounts and he would need to work for at least eight more years.
He and Elizabeth were considering a trip in June to upstate New York, and could they stay for a few days? Their therapist had recommended a trip.
“I may not be here in June,” I said. “I am about to get fired.”
“Oh, I’m sure it can’t be all that bad,” said Bill.
Marian called at noon. “The knives are out, honey,” she said. “Poor baby. I don’t think you’re going to enjoy coming back.”
“How bad is it?”
“The dean has set April first as the date to switch to a talk format. There was a long meeting about it. He and Susan Mack talked, and he’s definitely got a bee up his butt about giving us niggers a voice.”
“Have we heard from Miss LeWin at all?”
“Didn’t you hear? She died. Almost a month ago. I guess she’d been ill, and she thought she didn’t have long, so she treated herself to a steak dinner and took all her cats and went and sat in her Cadillac in the garage and turned on the engine while her CD player was doing the immolation scene from Die Götterdämmerung.”
“The poor old thing.” I thought of the old lady and her ailing Snowball. What a dark and grievous winter it must have been at The Poplars.
“Her will left a quarter of her estate to her nieces and nephews, and the rest to a guy in Syracuse who’s starting an opera company. It was in the paper.”
So Alan Dale had fought back. Good for him. He had survived my preemptive strike and had counterattacked and taken the field. He had given Miss LeWin a whiff of the sawdust and greasepaint and drawn lovely pictures in the air of great operatic spectacles and enchanted schoolchildren leaning forward in the dark.
Well, that settles your hash, I thought. I fired up the computer and wrote, and rewrote, a letter of resignation.
Dear President Postlethwaite:
It is clear to me that the direction St. James wishes to go with WSJO is one I cannot support, and so I am resigning as general manager. I feel that the station today is a priceless asset to our area. There are radio stations for the aging rock’n’rollers, the religious right, the audience with metal things stuck in their heads, the deer-hunting beer-drinking audience, and this one should be for folks who find spiritual sustenance in great music. Beethoven, Mozart, and Puccini are part of the broad humanistic tradition that we all draw water from, where we find centrist values such as tolerance, curiosity, a sense of justice, and humor. It is wrong to discard this tradition in favor of creating a Wailing Wall, a freak show like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, a radio zoo where people can hear lunatics foam and growl and rush at the bars.
Radio is capable of enlightening and amusing and touching the imagination in ways unique to itself. It should be allowed to rise to its own magnificent heights, not be consigned to social work.
Talk radio is part of the tide of dreariness slopping across America. Franchise architecture, generic shopping malls, popular music as ugly and empty as it’s possible to be, and talk radio. The Cold War is over, the stock market booming, equity bursting at the seams, the twenty-first century winks and beckons, and yet the world’s only superpower, America, the Nation of Nations, is in the dumps; gloom is playing on the sound track, the media wander, lost in narcissism and the fear of death and a slavish servility toward the rich and a knee-jerk contempt for leaders. If ever an era needed bucking up, it’s this one—but academics have given up. You ask them for a vision, they give you dissenting opinions.
I thought, Lighten up. You’re thinking like an old fart.
I called Alida. I had been saving her for last. When she picked up the phone, music was playing in the background and people were talking. It was an impromptu cocktail party. The chairman was there and a couple of graduate students and Ginger and Neil, who had separated for six months and were getting back together. Her friends Jens and Emily from Copenhagen were visiting her. The music and voices faded as Alida walked into her bedroom and closed the door.
“I can call back later,” I said.
“Nonsense. You’re the man I’m going to marry. I get to talk to you whenever I want. The guests can entertain themselves. They’re smart enough.”
Jens and Emily were perfect houseguests, she said, the kind who get up and fix their own breakfast and clean the kitchen and go away and amuse themselves all day and come home in the evening and tell you stories about things you never knew existed.
“I had no idea,” she said, “that you could visit S. J. Perelman’s apartment on Gramercy Park and see his collection of ascots and buskins and gaiters, his fedoras and dusters and dreadnoughts, tippets and dickeys, his smoking jackets, his dancing pumps, his old yellow MG parked in the garage. Or that the hotel on the Upper West Side where Holden Caulfield stayed—where the elevator man offered to get him a prostitute, remember?—was bought by J. D. Salinger ten years ago and turned into a shelter for streetwalkers, and every year they put on a floor show to raise money for the scholarship fund. It was last night. My friends happened to be walking past the front door and they went in, paid fifty dollars, and there was Salinger onstage in tux and black tie, the emcee, and according to them, he sang ‘Love Walked In’ and did a nice little soft-shoe routine in the middle of it. A charming man with silvery hair. I always thought he was a recluse, but that’s New York for you. Full of surprises.”
She asked if I had read the last chapter of her Balestrand book, which she gave me on the flight home from Minnesota. I had not. “I’m saving it for whenever I’m able to think straight,” I said. “I’m resigning from my job tomorrow. They’re holding meetings behind my back and switching the format to talk.”
“Don’t resign because of that. Resign because you want to move to New York and live with your wife.”
“When do you want me to marry you?” I asked.
“In June,” she said. And then the bedroom door opened and a man spoke to her. “There is a spoon stuck in the dishwasher,” she said. “I’d better get it out.”
I piled up pillows and pulled a quilt around me and read the chapter, a short one.
Balestrand left Washington after the war, an itinerant healer, traveling through New England and upstate New York by wagon, offering colonics and cold baths and poppy tea, and was especially popular among religious eccentrics and spinster ladies. He spent a week in Amherst and treated Emily Dickinson and her sister, Lavinia, and Emily wrote a poem for him:
A slender Fellow—is the Hose—
That comes—into—my Bed—
The Feeling—when the Water flows
The Ringing—in my Head.
The Roaring—of a Cataract
The Fog Bank—in the Room
As if an Arctic Glacier—Cracked—
And made—an Awful—Boom.
How like—a Thunderstorm—it was
And then Withdrew—from Me—
And Afterward—a Pleasant Buzz—
A lovely—Vacancy.
From Amherst, Balestrand traveled west. He was drinking too much opium tea, and his judgment was affected, and he moved in with a band of zealots on a farm near Great Barrington. They believed in an Absolute Being and Universal Omniscience that dwelt in all men but revealed its Sacred Oneness especially to those who ate whole grains and tubers and spoke softly and adhered to Higher Thought and maintained purity of purpose and wore dark colors. These people had no need of colonics; quite the contrary.
Balestrand showed up, a little pale and dizzy, and there was Susan B. Anthony. The great suffragist was visiting the tuberists to recharge her spiritual batteries and also to get away from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she referred to as “the Bitch of Ithaca.” They were having one of their frequent tiffs.
She and Balestrand fell for each other. She took his hand and he fainted dead away and she carried him to her hut, and that was that. He had practiced celibacy as part of his health regimen, believing that sexual congress weakened the system, and now that this seemed not to be true, he abandoned colonics and cold baths and took up love-making as a hobby.
The lovers felt giddy, surrounded by solemn moralists. In the evening, while the others gathered in the refectory to discuss nature and the soul, Susan and Bolle snuck off to the orchard, and Susan played her accordion and they drank mulberry wine and got silly, which put the tuberists in a terrific huff: they were willing to tolerate all sorts of ideas, but not silliness, and not accordions, and the lovers were asked to pack their things and leave. They traveled to Seneca Falls and lived with Elizabeth Cady Stanton for a time. But Susan and Elizabeth fought like cats, and always over trivial issues—a toothbrush left on the kitchen sink, a pair of scissors misplaced, a book borrowed and not returned, a coffee stain on a tablecloth. Bolle tried to be the peace-maker; he pointed out to the women that they shared a commitment to women’s suffrage and the progressive cause. “Nonetheless,” said Mrs. Stanton, “I hate her hair that way, bleached and curled into ringlets.”
“What is liberation worth if a woman can’t wear her hair as she likes?” Susan replied.
“It harms the cause of equal rights when you show up at speeches looking like a chippy,” said Mrs. Stanton.
“If your followers judge everyone by her hair, they’ll need more than a constitutional amendment to free them,” Susan replied.
Balestrand decided that the constant company of women was not good for a man, that it sapped his innate optimism, and he left Susan a long note saying that he loved her but not under these circumstances and ran away and joined the army. He returned three years later, to find Susan wearing a black floor-length dress, her hair long and worn in a coil, her expression severe, her hands rough and dry. He embraced her, and she recoiled.
“Forgive my high spirits. When you have been left for dead, you become joyful and forget propriety,” said Balestrand. “I want to marry you.”
He explained that he had gone to St. Louis, enlisted in the Seventh Cavalry, and ridden at General Custer’s side as an aide-de-camp on June 25, 1876, when they came over the rise and into the valley of the Little Big Horn and saw ten thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered to meet them, and Custer turned to Corporal Balestrand and said, “Where was the staff work on this? Why am I the last person to find out about these things? Why can’t we get better intelligence?” They dug in and prepared to defend themselves and Balestrand excused himself to go off in the bushes and move his bowels and moments later the Indians came whooping and screeching by and there was a rattle of gunfire and it was all over in five minutes. Meanwhile, the corporal lay in the bushes and pretended to be dead, and the Indians assumed from the smell of him that he was. He lay in the sun for six hours, and at sunset he snuck away and made it to Billings on foot and came east to New York, not telling a soul, out of fear that he might be court-martialed for desertion.
Mrs. Stanton was a shrewd promoter, and she guessed that the Only Survivor of Custer’s Last Stand might draw an audience of men to her suffrage rallies. And two nights later, she spoke on “The Moral Power of the Female” at the Ithaca Chautauqua to a mob of men who came to hear the Survivor and who smelled of ripe fruit. Bolle Balestrand took the stage after Mrs. Stanton, and a man yelled, “You’ve got bread crumbs for brains!” and the crowd rushed forward, hurling eggs and dead things, and hauled him off the stage and punched his lights out. They didn’t want there to be a Survivor; they preferred a clean Massacre so they could imagine the heroic Custer, his golden hair flowing, standing amid the smoke and carnage, bright saber outstretched.
Bolle Balestrand curled up in a ball as they pounded on him. And then he blacked out. When he came to, he was riding over a bumpy road in the bottom of a junk wagon. He landed in Buffalo, took a job as a deckhand on a barge on the Erie Canal, and got to New York, where he shipped back to Norway and wrote his autobiography, Jeg Var Ikke Saa Grei At Blive Kvit (I Was Not So Easy to Get Rid Of), dedicated to Walt Whitman, which came out in 1918, and which nobody in Norway read. All the Norwegians who had any interest in America had already emigrated.
I sat in bed, drinking water and gazing out at the snowy backyard and thinking about the radio station and Dean Baird. In a few months, WSJO would change over, from classical music to talk: the Gay-Lesbian Parenting Hour at one P.M. and the Men Dealing with Impotence Hour at one-fifteen, the Hearing Impaired Hour at one-thirty, Wounded Nephews of Distant Uncles at one forty-five, People in Grief for Former Lovers at two, the Herpes Hour at two-fifteen, People in Search of Closure at two-thirty—each with its own smug host and tiny clientele, its own style of vacuity—and should I fight this? No, I did not think so.
Fighting is noble in theory, but when you look at the lives of battling visionaries—Joe Hill, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene Debs, Carry Nation, Father Coughlin, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, Newt Gingrich—you see the price they paid, the loss of the private self, and how the inner fire that drove them to battle also made them not much fun to be with. Joe Hill’s wife, Jill, married a florist after Joe’s execution and happily gave up the labor movement for a life of Girl Scouting and literary teas in Muncie, Indiana, and hoped never to hear the word “solidarity” ever again. Eugene Debs, five-time Socialist candidate for President, was divorced by his wife, Debbie, who said that marriage to a great man was about as enjoyable as sleeping in a bed full of spruce boughs, and she found happiness raising Pomeranians and later playing Aunt Sis on Friendly Neighbors. Dorothy Day’s husband, Ray, never accompanied her on her Catholic Worker tours or walked the picket line; his great passions were raising orchids and weaving baskets and maintaining his collection of Deanna Durbin memorabilia. Ralph Nader’s wife, Nadine, tired of her husband’s abstemiousness and fled to Santa Barbara and opened a gift shop. And poor Gingrich. The cost of leading the Republican Revolution was to become a man whom nobody but major donors cared to eat dinner with. Gingrich’s first wife, Ginger, said that Newt was unable to focus on conversations not about himself, that he was afraid of small children and shrank back from them as if accosted by porcupines.
Warriors are great at creating myth and not so good at hanging around, and they are always trying to enlist you in their battles. A friend asks you to sign a harmless petition supporting medical research, and you do, and the next week there’s a crowd on your front step, waving color photographs of disemboweled dogs, and one of them throws a rock through your window, and you run downstairs and trip on a loose rug and wind up with a lifetime of lower-back problems. And it wasn’t even your battle.
I walked to the office in the morning, passing knots of students who seemed beaten down by school, or the cold, like prisoners in a work camp. They looked as if they had been up all night pecking out a particularly awful term paper, had suffered miserably for a C minus, and were now considering other options in life. Fawn looked up and grimaced when I came through the door. “The dean left you a letter,” she said.
“What a coincidence. I just got done writing one to him,” I said. “How are you doing?”
She snorted and looked down at her desk. “If you really wanted to know, I’d tell you, but you don’t. So I’m fine.”
“Good,” I said. “So am I.” Taped to the wall next to my office door was a notice advertising Holographic Repatterning—“a six-step process that enables you to access your negative unconscious patterns that keep you from your true potential.”
My office seemed shrunken somehow. And it was cold. The thermostat was turned down to sixty-two. And someone had been working at my desk and had left some clippings about self-imaging. On Morning Edition, a man was lamenting the slaughter of songbirds by America’s house cats and calling for a congressional investigation. The letter lay on my desk. It read: “Dear John, In consultation with the President of the College and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Broadcasting, I have come to the decision that a change of direction at WSJO would be in everyone’s best interest. I am enclosing a letter of resignation for you to sign and deliver to my office at your earliest convenience. In return for your prompt signature, I am prepared to offer you six months of leave at full salary. This leave would begin immediately. This decision was made in full realization of your great contribution to WSJO, which will be recognized, upon receipt of your resignation, with the awarding of the College’s Distinguished Achievement Medal at the spring commencement. Your presence at this event is not required, and the Medal can be mailed to you. With very best wishes, Edward Baird, Ph.D., Dean of Students, St. James College.”
Well. I had wanted the pleasure of resigning on my own steam, with a statement of wounded virtue. But six months of paid leave—my, my, my: it was much too good a deal to turn down. I tore up my letter of resignation, signed the one the dean had written, and hiked over to the dean’s office to hand it to him. The day was turning blustery. A gang of students swept by, including a pink-cheeked girl with close-cropped blond hair and pure blue eyes. I thought that what I would miss most at St. James was the pleasure of looking at young women.
