The Philco 70
Plagued by insomnia after deciphering the mysterious message from Harry, Tess lay in bed thinking of Vivian’s story about Ravel’s piano and the Clara Schumann music.
Bits of classical music ran through her head, but she could identify none of them as Schumann.
Finally, around five a.m., Tess gave up on sleep, crawled out of bed, and pulled on the robe and slippers that had waited for her in the closet ever since she left for college.
She thought perhaps the ogre story might relax her the way it had when Harry told it on summer nights at the lake.
She hadn’t revisited the story since high school, but she knew where it waited for her.
She tiptoed up the steep stairs to the attic, careful to avoid the squeaky board on the fourth step as she had on many a summer night as a teenager.
In those days, Tess had fixed up one end of the attic as a sort of hideaway—an old stuffed sofa, a few bookshelves made from boards and bricks, and a broken coffee table duct taped together and holding a few candles melted nearly to the stub.
Here she would sit and read on quiet afternoons or retreat from insomnia in the dead of night.
As Tess reached for the Bankers Box that both served as a side table and held her scores of versions of the ogre story, she noticed a strange gothic silhouette peering out from the shadows.
For a moment, she ignored it, pulling the top off the Bankers Box and inhaling the familiar smell of manila file folders and erasable bond typing paper.
Then a memory clicked into place, and she realized that the silhouette was the old radio from the lake house.
Tess had assumed it had been destroyed the night Harry died—it certainly hadn’t been in the attic during all those hours she had spent here as a teenager.
Apparently, Vivian had moved it up here sometime in the past few years, along with her prom dress and who knew what else.
Tess put the top back on the box of stories and lifted the radio out of the shadows.
She had never picked it up before—only Harry had been allowed to touch it—and she was surprised how heavy it was.
She had to lean back as she carried it down the stairs to keep from falling forward.
She set it on the floor by her bed and plugged it in, then snuggled under the covers.
As she waited for the set to warm up, staring at the picture of herself and Harry in swimsuits she had placed on the bedside table, she had an irrational fantasy that the room would soon fill with the music of Clara Schumann, which would lull her to sleep.
Soon enough, the familiar smell of the warm tubes permeated the air, and she began to hear voices—but these voices she liked to hear.
They took her right back to evenings on the lake, listening to the radio while Harry and Vivian nodded knowingly at each other.
The radio seemed to be pulling in the same station Tess remembered from her childhood.
She listened to the end of a big band show that purported to be coming live from the Excelsior Room (though obviously it had been taped decades ago).
A classic radio mystery followed, and Tess felt the sound of voices telling a story begin to relax the tension she had been carrying in her shoulders.
Both the detective and the narrator were women—surprisingly forward-looking for the 1930s, thought Tess as she let the narrator’s tinny voice wash over her.
“The eye patch was the first thing everybody looked at when they met Alison, and she liked that just fine. It meant while they were staring at the eye patch, she could look at everything else, and what she saw now convinced her of two things. Susan Jenkins had not murdered Jacob Roberts at his home in the Hollywood Hills two nights ago, but she might hang for it nonetheless.” The signal would sometimes fade in and out, as would Tess’s attention, so she had only a rough idea of the case as it unfolded, but certain lines did jump out.
“She could go for a guy like him, if she went for guys at all.” Tess wondered if this was a vintage show after all.
Did they have lesbians in 1930s radio mysteries?
Later the detective had a long conversation with her wife, and Tess became convinced that this was a modern production, done in the style of an old-fashioned radio play.
They had reproduced the patterns of speech and the sound effects and the slightly slapdash nature of the whole production perfectly.
The voices on the radio didn’t soothe her the way Vivian’s stories did or the way she suspected the music of Clara Schumann would, but they helped.
Still, she felt restless, so she climbed out of bed and looked for something to organize.
In her closet she found a mountain of old New Yorkers, and she set to work putting them in order as the mystery on the radio continued.
At first, she arranged the magazines by publication date, but she soon realized that many weeks were missing, so that wouldn’t work.
She needed a classification system that left no gaps and decided on alphabetical order of the first word on page twenty-two—she liked the contradictory nature of a system both totally random and highly specific.
She began to reorganize the magazines, just as the mystery show was giving way to a show in which a host named Juan Ramirez interviewed a British movie star named Reginald Leach.
Tess had never heard of Leach, or of any of the movies they discussed—but she had never been much of a pop culture enthusiast, so this was hardly surprising.
She had made some significant progress arranging the magazines in stacks on the floor of her room and between that and the radio, she felt almost human when the news came on.
“The White Star Liner R.M.S. Titanic arrived in New York today after its two hundredth transatlantic crossing. Governor Franklin Roosevelt strode down the gangplank with a smile on his face, home from his visit with Chancellor Hitler.”
Tess had never been enthusiastic about studying history—preferring the precision of physics and calculus—but even she knew that report was teeming with inaccuracies, things she might never have noticed at age twelve, that summer when the news on the radio was so often mere background noise to games of canasta or Yahtzee.
The report moved quickly through stories about local and state politics and an unsolved murder, all of which meant nothing to Tess, before reaching the feature segment, a profile and life story of what the newscaster called “the biggest star in the world,” Reginald Leach.
Again. Who the hell is Reginald Leach? thought Tess.
Is this whole station some sort of fictional construct—like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast?
By the time she had checked IMDb on her iPad, finding no listing for Reginald Leach, the station had moved on to Classical Music Through the Night, odd as it was now after six a.m.
Tess turned the volume down low and tried to remember what she had heard on this radio as a child.
Had it been wildly inconsistent with reality?
She probably wouldn’t have thought twice about a female detective, and she might not have even noticed that the female detective had a wife—Tess always just wanted to solve the crime.
But had she listened to news reports of repeat voyages of the Titanic and of Franklin Roosevelt walking without assistance without realizing the inconsistencies?
It was certainly possible. She turned the radio around and stared into the open back where the tubes glowed orange.
Was this really a radio? Or was it something else?
She crawled back into bed and lay awake listening to the sounds of Classical Music Through the Night, hoping for a piece by Clara Schumann that never came.
Every time she thought she recognized the opening of a piece, the music would morph into something unfamiliar.
Surely that passage didn’t belong in Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, and she was almost certain some of the notes were not quite right in the spring movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
And who was the great Italian Romantic composer Maria de Sala?
Tess had taken a music survey course during her first semester of college and she was certain that name had never come up.
She finally turned the radio off, and as she drifted into sleep, Tess thought that between Harry’s hidden message and his old radio, there was some very weird shit going on.
But Tess’s focus on that weird shit had somehow calmed the voices in her head and had, for the first time in weeks, distracted her from her depression.
There was a mystery to solve, maybe two, and Tess, who grew up reading Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, loved a good mystery.