WLT by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

“The phone started to ring off the hook, irate people wondering how WLT could sit and fiddle and sell unguent while American boys were dying in Hawaii. I tried to call and couldn’t get through, but Dad Benson was downtown and heard the news and ran to the station and took over. He told Babe to bring him every scrap of wire copy, and Dad sat in Studio B, the old mausoleum, and told people what was happening and talked in his quiet way about how awful war is but we can only live in peace if our neighbors are willing. But if Hitler and the Emperor wanted war, then they would have it, and though it would be a long hard struggle and there would be sacrifices, we would come through on top because Americans always pull together. Pop and the Melody Hotel gang worked up a version of ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Flying over Home Sweet Home’ and it was so tremendous and rousing that nobody remembered we were almost an hour late with the news. If Dad hadn’t been there, we might’ve been shut down for high treason. You care for coffee? No? Where is the waiter?”

That evening, as Patsy listened to Mr. Devereaux take a shower, she almost wrote him into Golden Years as a French-Canadian hockey player torn with self-loathing when his slap shot kills an innocent passer-by and in terror he plunges naked out the door of the shower room and through the snow seeking absolution and meets Miss Leff-well, she of the lonely nights, who gasps at his nakedness, but offers him her coat, and then he gasps, for she is naked under the coat—hmmm, perhaps, but does it make sense?

She thought of inviting him down for dinner.

Frank’s door banged the next morning, and he walked out the front of the Antwerp, no hat on his head, wild hair over the collar of his Navy peajacket, hands jammed in the pockets, and turned at the curb and stood and looked up at the roof. Maybe, she thought, he could be a young writer whose novel she might read, earthy and full of grunting and moaning, naked perspiring bodies writhing in the dark, and she would provide insights from the womanly point of view (“Here at the bottom of the page, where he cups her breasts, frankly don’t you think the metaphor of young golden apples is trite? And the ‘hard throbbing muscle of his manhood’—why don’t we just call it a cock and be done with it?”). He headed east, past the YWCA, leaning into the wind. Au revoir, mon Philippe. It was the next day before she learned his name. It was printed on a pale pink letter stuck under his door. Francis, it said, I can’t believe that our home is gone and other people live in it and we have nothing, our family is gone. It is a beautiful day today and I hope you will come visit me soon. They hate me here but I don’t care.

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