Free Time Travail by Howard Waldman Page A

again for a moment in my mind, all
the days and years that crystallized out at the prompting of those
tinny voices.
     
    The familiar forgotten voice which came in at
about 11:00 am interrupted a blubbering confession. “We do not use
such language on the air,” said the cold, precise contemptuous
voice and that was Mr Anthony and his Court of Human Relations.
    What was the language the other had used? I
wondered now as I had so often in the past. In the late thirties
terms forbidden in print were aired all over the Eastern Seaboard.
The celebrated Anthony voice summed up the scandalized horror
attributed to 53,000,000 potential listeners and allowed him to get
away with it. His reaction was so contemptuous of the blubbering
turd that one couldn’t help feeling sorry for the offender.
External censorship would have fallen far short of what that
intergalactically frigid voice had expressed. How could the censor
be censored? As for the offender, he would never appear again,
dispatched with Mr Anthony’s implacable: “Leave this woman. Return
to your lawful spouse and your five children, etc.” And the poor
shit would blubber: “Thank you Mr Anthony.” But there had been no
forgiveness.
    And now the floodgates of memory opened wide,
a vast flood of corn-syrup threatening to engulf me and I saw them
all, snatched back from the jaws of death, see them all, the
(adult) members of the family gathered about the picturesque
dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning
screen.
    My mother is eagerly bent forward toward the
radio. “What did he say, what did he say, Victor?” My father, one
eye on me sitting in a far armchair to which I have been banished,
pretending to read, straining my ears, is whispering the thing to
my mother.
    I can hear my mother’s scandalized joyous
throat-sound. It’s more real than these cellar walls, than the
sound of the rats.
    I have to get out of it.
     
    The last thing we heard before it suddenly
faded was Red Barber’s soft gentlemanlike southern voice covering a
lost game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Two balls two strikes on Dolph Camilli, .284, the Dodger’s first
baseman and sole slugger. He struck out.
    Harvey, sitting next to me on the cot,
touched my shoulder. He tried to say something to me. Was he
crying? Could he cry? His voice was a croak. The healing effect of
the Pepsi-Cola potion had worn off. Again he had to write. I
couldn’t talk myself although what was choking me was nothing
malignant, I foolishly thought at the time.
    Red Barber went on, suddenly in another
inning, with a neat double-play, then a line-drive to center-field
and Pete Reiser’s leaping catch, back against the wall. Harvey
scrawled away feverishly in big hurried characters,
forward-slanting as though pursued. He ripped out page after page
from the spiral notebook and thrust them at me with one hand while
with the other he went on scrawling on the new sheet. His wig was
askew. Half of his naked skull gleamed red as though he’d been
scalped.
    He wrote in a semi-burlesque style, maybe to
keep the emotion under control, that if he were superstitious he’d
think it was the hand of God. My image pedaling away in the shack
had appeared to him one night like the Virgin at Fatima. He made a
feeble obscene joke about my long-standing non-virginity. Then a
week later I had come again, this time in the flesh and lo voices
came out of the past and in the same night as the voices he’d
understood in a flash why I had been pulled in on the bike despite
the vertical spatial differential.
    What the machine had done as a quirk it could
be made to do at will. It had been frustrating, I had no idea,
being limited to the cellar. He was condemned to viewing old
darkness while life was going on on the floor above. Momma was up
there baking for him, moving about, cleaning and waxing. (Reading
this I imagined her ghostly form, in a red bandanna and wielding a
dust-rag, superimposed on