“But a chuckle, a smile, something to signal it isn’t so bad.”
“Say the time and temperature twice. I don’t always catch it the first time around.”
“Now what was it you wanted?” George asked.
“I didn’t know you were so disappointed in me,” Maine told them dejectedly. “I didn’t know you weren’t satisfied.”
“Who ain’t satisfied, Marshall? We’re satisfied. We’re satisfied fine.”
“When we ain’t satisfied you’ll hear we ain’t satisfied.”
“We’ll haul your ass out of there.”
“We’ll fire your ass.”
“We’ll see you never work your ass in this state again.”
“That your voice, you take your ass to Iowa or Dakota nearby, croaks at the state line.”
“We’re satisfied.”
Just keep those cards and letters coming in, Marshall Maine thought.
They had intimidated him. Making one kind of metaphor of his ass as he made another. He saw them now as something closer knit even than family, close knit as interest itself, and himself forever absolved of the hope of kinship with them, reduced by his very value to them to something not just expendable should that value wane, but destroyable as a gangster’s evidence. The ass they spoke of so dispassionately he came to see as more vital somehow than the heart, not their metaphor for his soul at all, but just their prearranged, priority target, the doomed bridge- and railheads of his being. He would be undone in the behind when the time came, there kicked (they would actually do it), scorned. Destroyed in the ass. They were dark, gigantic generals, booted for business and answerable only to themselves. So he was intimidated, and he knew it. And this is what happened.
For the first time in his life he developed mike fright. Not just that stage-wary fillip of excitement, nor even that panicked realization that one’s words are gone, nor yet that temporary, pre-curtain woe in the wings that is often an actor’s capital, a signal, like the rich man’s haunted look, of money in the bank, of reserves of adrenaline to turn terror — no ordinary, innocent commotion, the heart all thumbs, or momentary inability to function that is only function in the act of sparking. Not mike fright at all, really, but some pinched, asbestos quality in himself of unkindling, some odd, aged and deadened dignity. That is, he could speak, could read his scripts and do his commercials, but he had a sense that he was working on slack, a loose-tooth sense of margin. All urgency had gone out of his voice. There was a certain loss of treble, a corresponding increment of heavy bass. It was the voice of a drowned man, slow and waterlogged.
He was forced to make certain changes in his chatter, to bring his talk into accord with the changes in his delivery. Formerly his remarks on introducing a song matched the mood of the song, while filler material provoked an illusion, even at this distance, of KROP’s relationship to show business. (“Now, from the sound track of Walt Disney’s feature-length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the RKO Studio Orchestra plays the wistful ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’ Maestro …” “From the hit Broadway show Showboat of a few years back, the lovely Miss Helen Morgan sings this show stopper, the haunting ‘He’s Just My Bill’ … ”) With his new constraint, however, words like “sound track,” the names of studios, even the titles of films, suddenly made him self-conscious. Catch phrases like “from the motion picture of the same name” caught in his throat. His old attempt to set a human mood—”A romantic confession now, some sweet excuses for a familiar story: ‘Those Little White Lies’”—seemed the grossest liberty of all. The idea of setting a mood for the dark-booted Credenzas was blasphemous, a sort of spoken graffiti.
At first he tried simply to announce the title and identify the singer, but the discrepancy between the tunes and his flat statements was even more disturbing to him than his old chatter. As a consequence he began to play a different sort of music altogether, songs that were so familiar they needed no introduction, love songs nominally still, but from a different period, or rather from no period at all, songs that had always existed, in the public domain years, nothing that could ever have connected KROP with show business: “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Alice Blue Gown,” “I Wandered Today to the Hill, Maggie.” Because they were the sort of songs no crooner anyone had ever heard of was likely to have recorded, he found it difficult to speak the names of the obscure tenors and sopranos who had recorded them, the Fred L. Joneses and Olive Patzes and Herbert Randolph Fippses who had cornered the market on this kind of thing. So he said nothing and looked instead for instrumental versions of the recordings, leaving Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties on his day off and going down to Lincoln on his own authority to the big radio station there, to speak to the music librarian and offer him money for his discards. At first the man didn’t seem to understand what he wanted, until Marshall explained that he did a request show for shut-ins, and invented for him the Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties Old People’s Home, a place, he said, where the staff used the golden hits of yesteryear as therapy, offering the invalided and senile a musical opportunity to re-court their wives, re-raise their children and re-fight their wars, the idea being, Maine said, not to pull the afflicted (he called them that) from their pasts but to push them back into them.
Together they went into the music library, and there he found a cache of exactly the sort of thing he was looking for: “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” played by the Netherlands Deutschgeschreir Orkestra, Jerome Klopf conducting; “I Wish I Was in de Land ob Cotton,” sung by the Luftwaffe Sinfonia; Sir Reginald Shoat leading the Edinburgh Festival Orchestra in a Stephen Foster medley. There were also some fine things by the Hotel Brevert- Topeka’s Palm Court Band.
“Gee,” the librarian said, “I didn’t know we had all this stuff.” “Yes,” Marshall Maine told him. “These will do.” The man put one of the recordings on the library console. “The quality’s not good. This one sounds strained, as if it was transcribed from the short wave.”
“Yes,” Marshall Maine said, “that’s fine. They want that quality— the suggestion of the distant past.” “But they’re all instrumentals.” “Yes, that forces them to remember the words.” “Oh, look here, Lily Pons doing ‘Funiculi Funicula.’” “No,” Maine said sharply. “But if you had choral groups, I might take some choral groups of the right sort.” “Choral groups?”
“It gives them the sense they’re not alone.” So he took back with him a hundred and twelve instrumentals, plus an armful of recordings by a few choral groups — rejecting, for example, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ rendition of “In the Merry, Merry Month of May” in favor of the Utah Military Institute’s Marching and Singing Soldiers’ version of the same song, and the Brockton Riding Academy Mounted Chorus’s “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”
Furnished with these he returned to KROP and put them on the air. He could hear through his long afternoon record show the adulterated strains of the vaguely decomposing music he played, performances that the wind might have blown through, or the sea squeezed. Usually he no longer bothered to announce the songs. Remembering the Credenzas’ warning, he made sure that no dust stuck to the needle. He oiled the turntable, lifted the tone arm smartly when a record was finished and placed it carefully in the right groove of the next selection. Every few minutes he moved his head a precise seven inches from the microphone and gave the time and temperature twice: “It’s two thirty-five. It’s two thirty-five. The temperature is fifty-three degrees. It’s fifty-three degrees.”