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“If I sold it to you, I’d worry about it more than if I ran it myself.”
    Ray owned a forty-percent interest, same as Roy, and their sister Lottie owned twenty percent, and she and Roy weren’t speaking to each other, so Ray was sure he had her proxy. She had told Roy her great dream of pursuing a singing career on the radio, a good medium for a girl in a wheelchair. He rolled his eyes and snorted. “Forget it, Lottie. You couldn’t carry a tune in a gunny sack. Don’t waste your life.” Communications between them had broken off at that point.
    Ray invited her to lunch. He drove her downtown to the Young-Quinlan Tea Room, her favorite spot, and wheeled her up in the elevator and there at the table was a big vase of tulips, her favorite. “Oh Ray, you are my shining knight!” she cried, and bit back the tears. During dessert, he told her he didn’t care for radio anymore. “It’s trashy business. It brings down our family name to be associated with it. I’m just glad Mother never knew.”
    Lottie’s big eyes watered up at the mention of Mother. Of the three Soderbjergs, Lottie was the one who looked most like their father Mads, with a big head and a lump of a nose and a face like a shovel. It was Mother who she wanted to be like—beautiful, cheerful Mother—but when Lottie looked in a mirror, there was Dad: poor old Daddy.
    She blew her nose. He continued: “Radio is all flame and no heat. The minute it’s done, it’s all gone, and believe me that’s a mercy because there isn’t a minute of it you’d ever want to be permanent. It’s a dump.”
    He told her he wanted to sell WLT. It had accomplished its purpose and the restaurant was booming and they all had enough money so let somebody else have the headache. The announcers talked too much and never gave you the time of day, the singers were too loud—Dad Benson was all right, down to earth, he got the job done, he didn’t waste your time—but the announcers acted like they were big stars, they sounded moody, they didn’t speak up, they mumbled their words, as if it were enough that they were there, it didn’t matter if they made sense. Announcer . An odd word for a paying job (What do you do? I announce. )—all it was was a donkey who could read words off the paper without knocking over the water glass. Anybody could do the job, but here you had letters from fans saying that this announcer or that was their favorite—like having a favorite elevator operator and admiring him because he stops at the right floor!
    Ridiculous.
    Why would sensible people sit and listen to a boxful of noise? and when all was said and done, what did you have to show for it? Silence. You could’ve had silence in the first place.
    â€œIf your mind is made up, I can’t talk you out of it, I know you well enough to know that,” she said.
    He said his mind was made up. “I’m going to go to New York next week and see if I can’t get a good price for it.”
    She didn’t know that a radio station could be bought and sold. “What do you sell? The transmitting apparatus?”
    â€œNo, the license. The space on the spectrum.”
    â€œBut it just goes through the air, doesn’t it?”
    Anyway, she agreed that he could sell it if he wanted to, whatever it was you sold.

CHAPTER 5
    CBS
    E very spring and fall, Ray went to New York aboard the Broadway Limited, either with Vesta or, more often, with an Other Woman. If he was with Vesta, they put up in a dinky room at the Mayflower, and if he was with an O.W., they camped in the Salad Suite at the Waldorf, with a living room as big as a handball court. He went to the city to eat oysters and steak tartare, buy socks and cigars, to dance to hot music and order the best scotch and wash the taste of boiled vegetables out of his mouth and enjoy a vacation from earnestness. The cigars were