Bill Shaffer, a twice-divorced, retired philosophy professor living in a small Florida town, gets the news that the best man at both of his weddings and the current husband of his second wife, is getting out of prison. This news propels him on an introspective journey back through time, beginning in 1967, his senior year in high school, and for him, a perilous, traumatic year of emotional, political, and sexual awakening, leading to his exile from the rural Georgia town of his birth, and his separation from the yellow-haired girl who changed everything.
From there, My Secret Radio follows Bill and a richly diverse cast of characters—wives and lovers, family, friends and foes — through five tumultuous decades, from the Deep South of his youth to present day Florida, weaving humor, violent tragedy, love and unsparing self-examination into a multilayered, eloquent masterpiece. My Secret Radio brilliantly explores questions confronting us all: How do we forgive the past? How do learn to embrace what we have become?
Bill Shaffer, a twice-divorced, retired philosophy professor living in a small Florida town, gets the news that the best man at both of his weddings and the current husband of his second wife, is getting out of prison. This news propels him on an introspective journey back through time, beginning in 1967, his senior year in high school, and for him, a perilous, traumatic year of emotional, political, and sexual awakening, leading to his exile from the rural Georgia town of his birth, and his separation from the yellow-haired girl who changed everything.
From there, My Secret Radio follows Bill and a richly diverse cast of characters—wives and lovers, family, friends and foes — through five tumultuous decades, from the Deep South of his youth to present day Florida, weaving humor, violent tragedy, love and unsparing self-examination into a multilayered, eloquent masterpiece. My Secret Radio brilliantly explores questions confronting us all: How do we forgive the past? How do learn to embrace what we have become?
Micanopy, Florida, 2016
Carl Decker, the best man at both of my weddings and current husband of my second wife, Linda, is getting out of prison. Or at least that’s how I interpret Linda’s nervous, halting message. She and I have been divorced for twenty-five years but have yet to recover our interpersonal equilibrium. Carl will be released soon, she says, but he’s not— She pauses, reconsiders, then decides to leave it at that. “Call back Monday morning, Bill,” she tells me finally, and hangs up.
Carl has served about half of his one-year sentence for consumer fraud shenanigans. I speculate that Florida’s penal system is clearing space for more hardened criminals or, more likely, other inmates found Carl too annoying to endure. This last remark might sound tongue-in-cheek, but you don’t know Carl.
No one knows Carl, I wager, as well as Linda and I. My father would’ve said I owe Carl several “horse whippings” for past betrayals. Still, if you squint a little looking at the same circumstances, you might imagine I owe Carl for my daughter Ramona, my career, my house, and even my illusion of freedom. Either way, it’s for the best that a reasonable distance separates us on the days Carl isn’t in prison. Once he’s set free, he’ll return to Tampa, 140 miles from my home in Micanopy (mick-a-NO-pee, not “my canopy”), a small town near Gainesville. Beyond its remoteness from Carl, Micanopy enjoys the virtue of nestling next to Payne’s Prairie, a 21,000-acre nature preserve whose flourishing fauna include a bison herd, wild horses, sandhill cranes, countless gators, and, on rare occasion, those touchstones of my distant Georgia childhood, ruby-throated hummingbirds.
As magical as the Prairie is, however, living next door to a natural wonder had little to do with how I ended up in Micanopy. The town, you might say, came with the house, a sturdy, wood-framed relic I acquired when Linda and I divorced. To be clear, Linda and I spent our married years in a different, far more valuable house in Gainesville, but we sold that house to satisfy Carl’s debts. Why did I allow that? Let’s just say for now that my ex-wife possesses a genius for putting me on the spot.
More to the current point, when Linda and I divorced, our daughter Ramona was eleven. She is now in her mid-thirties, unhappily married herself and mother to sixteen-year-old Olivia, whom she finds moody and intractable. I, on the other hand, see Olivia as feisty, amusing, and appropriately alienated. Right now, I stand in my yard raking up spent cassia blossoms, waiting for Ramona to drop Olivia off for the Labor Day weekend. Dylan’s sneering masterpiece, “Idiot Wind,” seeps out through my open front window, the verse about ending up as a bloody corpse in a ditch catching my ear.
Thanks for the warning, Bob.
Meanwhile, tourist traffic—antique and pottery browsers mostly— already creeps slowly up and down Cholokka Boulevard, which is not only my street but Micanopy’s lone commercial artery. Long ago, I could throw a baseball far enough to break the nearest storefront window. That store— the unfortunately named Harry’s Pottery—now affects a vaguely nineteenth-century vintage ambiance, though I well remember it as a hippie head shop with a Peter Max paint job. And before that, I’m told, it served as an actual general store. And before that, something else or nothing else, but the point is that one tends to feel Micanopy moving backward because everywhere else lusts for the future by comparison.
William Bartram tells us in his illustrious Travels that he arrived at this precise location on the cusp of the Revolutionary War, visiting an Indian town called Cuscowilla to gather flower specimens for his patron in Philadelphia. His traveling party had a different purpose—to ratify the treaty of St. Augustine, establishing terms of peace “once and for all” between whites and Indians in Florida. We know how that turned out, but Bartram didn’t. He happily collected his specimens, praised the “friendship” shown by Seminole women to white traders, feasted with his hosts on the choicest pieces of barbecued bullocks and tripe soup, and observed that the town stood “on the most pleasant situation that could well be imagined or desired.”
Quite a claim, but who am I to say? These days, if not “the most pleas- ant situation,” Micanopy is still pleasant—quite a feat in its own right. Local websites tout us as “the cutest town in America.” As long as no one believes that, I will probably stay where I am.
My name, by the way, is William Davis Shaffer. My father had Jefferson Davis in mind, but I tell people my mother named me after Bette Davis. I am a slightly paunchy, retired teacher of philosophy (as opposed to a philosopher). My beard suggests an underfed Ernest Hemingway, and my voice conveys a faded deep-South twang salted with pretentious neo-hippie overtones. If you were to describe my academic career in baseball terms (what with the World Series coming up), I hit .239, mostly in the minors, except for a cup of coffee in the big show with a last-place team. What the “stats” don’t show is how much I loved to play.
So far, I have lived about twenty-four thousand days; the first five thousand spent in the small south Georgia town of Hopperton—pine country—growing up in a well-respected, loving family. Despite these advantages, I acquired tastes and beliefs despised by almost everyone I knew. As for why I count my life in days, it helps me to imagine singular milestones for my otherwise prosaic existence:
“Philosopher William Shaffer Announces Discovery of Reality”
Conversely, lesser events, such as “Local Man Discovers His Hair Is Falling Out” never make the dailies at all. You will understand this explanation better if you know that I often regard my past as a terrible fire I have set, and from which, as this narrative will attest, I have deliberately rescued nothing but a few passionate love letters.
But back to Olivia’s weekend visit. It frees Ramona to prepare for a court hearing Tuesday, the latest episode in the interminable dispute between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Antonio. Naturally, I’m sorry for Ramona’s troubles, even a little sorry for golf pro Antonio, lately fired from a country club for (as I heard it) bedding one trophy wife too many (he claimed his only crime was disparaging the wrong backswing). However this tidbit strikes you, I have seen too much to consider Ramona or Antonio the definitively injured party. I focus my loyalties on Olivia, who, of course, would rather die than admit she needs anything from me. When Ramona pulls up in her overbearing Lincoln Navigator, whiter than anything in the natural world except perhaps bleached bones, she lowers her window but keeps the engine running. Olivia, bearing up Sherpa-like under her bulging backpack, climbs out and stalks past me on her way to the house, slowing down just enough to roll her eyes and emit a conspiratorial groan intended to remind me that her mother is an obsessed pain in the ass.
As are you, my dear, I say to myself.
As far as I can tell, both of them emerged from the womb thinking this isn’t funny and still await a decent punch line. My first impression was probably this isn’t real, which is no more likely to be accurate but at least permits me a laugh or two.
I watch Olivia disappear into the house, then look down absently at a pile of yellow cassia flowers into which a hint of amber sun has seeped, transmuting them to gold. Nearby, chameleons skitter in and out of the bromeliads that line my front walk.
“Dad, can you come over here?”
A bossy tone has overtaken Ramona since she became a critical care nurse, but I don’t mind. I’m glad to see her, something I try to convey, hoping to undermine her wintry view of people. I drop my rake and walk over to her hulking vehicle.
“Hi, honey,” I say. “Nice to see you. You look lovely.” Cool, leath- er-scented air drifts from the Navigator’s cabin.
“Okay, Dad,” Ramona responds, continuing to grip the steering wheel and making it clear that she is hip to my game. I don’t consider it a game, and in fact, Ramona does look lovely. In contrast to her mother and daughter—both dark-haired moon children—Ramona gleams like a surfer girl beneath a butterscotch-and-honey mane. And today she is very much put together in a satiny melon-green suit.
“Listen,” Ramona says, pressing on, “I’m sorry to dump Olivia on you at the last minute, but this is the endgame. Antonio leaves for Spain soon, and when he’s gone, he’s gone. We’ve got to convince the court to freeze his assets before it’s too late.”
“We” comprise Ramona and her divorce lawyer, a handsome older man (according to his brochure portrait) who lives in Ocala and keeps racehorses who don’t race. Ramona will spend the long weekend there, and I don’t doubt they will discuss the case at some point. I wave her apology away and smile to myself at her use of the term “endgame.” She and I played countless chess games before even that pastime became too frivolous for her sensibilities.
“It will be nice to get this behind you,” I say.
“Only if I win.”
“Speaking of winning, how’s your mother?” Linda was once a shrewd property lawyer who only took slam-dunk wins to court. Ramona visited her in Tampa recently during a nurse’s convention.
“Fine, if you overlook the fact that she’s nearing the end, at least according to her.”
“My God, is she sick?”
Ramona gives a cynical chuckle.
“Not exactly. Mom insists she’s a ‘crone’ now and must accept a crone’s destiny, which, according to her, means to speak a few prophecies and die. She swears one prediction has already come true, proving she might be close to her final days.”
I thought back. In our very first conversation, Linda had claimed to be part witch. At the time, I chalked this up to the banter of strangers. But she was in earnest, as I would learn soon enough. Now, I don’t want to imply she mixed potions or cast hexes; her “witchcraft” consisted, as far as I ever saw, of claiming “second sight” to demolish my interpretation of events. I wonder now if cronehood means further demolition is at hand.
“You mean crone as in an ugly old lady with a wart on her nose?” Another weighty sigh from Ramona.
“Yes, absent the wart.”
“Well, let’s examine the premise. Does your mother look like a crone to you?”
“She’s a little bit on the skin and bones side, but otherwise, no. Of course, she says the mirror tells a different story from what I can see with just my eyes.”
“I hope she’s a nice crone.” Ramona returns a rueful smile
“Dad, you and I both know she’s whatever kind of crone she wants to be."
I nod. As to whether magic or motive accounts for my ex-wife’s newly acquired crone persona, I have my suspicions, but I’m confident she hasn’t lost her mind. Her stellar defense of her miscreant husband Carl earlier this year marked her first and only case as a criminal attorney, undertaken some years after concluding her career in “immovable property” law—wrangling over easements, title clouds, rights of foreclosure, and boundary disputes. While nothing Linda knew about “open and notorious possession” as a trespassing defense could help her beat Carl’s open-and-shut identity theft rap, she argued with rational grace before a female judge, making the best of a bad hand. Carl, of course, carped about his one-year slap-on-the wrist sentence, but as I heard Linda chide him afterward, “The sisters of mercy have spared you. Show some speck of gratitude.”
Ramona’s cell phone makes a goofy jingle-jangle. She looks down, then up at me, her expression pleading for understanding.
“I know you have to get going,” I say, “but I’m curious. What was your mother’s prophecy, the one that came true?”
“You mean the one that didn’t come true? Mom said, quote, ‘Carl is on his way home.’”
“She said that to you in person, what, two weeks ago?” “Those very words, Dad, I swear.”
Ramona’s tone suggests resignation to an unfortunate new truth about her mother’s mental state. I am merely teetering into confusion.
“Interesting. I got a call from your mother this morning. It was a little cryptic, but I think she said Carl is getting an early release. It could be a coincidence, or she is an oracle, or she’s pretending to be one for some weird reason. I take it you haven’t talked to her since visiting Tampa?” Ramona shakes her head, her face a portrait of the last straw.
“She called me last night. Not a freaking word about Carl; just a wacky question about how much longer she would live, hypothetically, if she quit smoking right now.” Ramona’s exasperation with her mother persists like a low-grade fever. It gives me no joy and Ramona no peace.
“Let’s hope we’re just missing one little puzzle piece that snaps everything sanely into place.”
“You need to get out of the sun, Dad.”
“Point taken. Just trying to be open-minded. By the way, what did you tell your mother about cigarettes and death?”
“Well, first of all, Mom said she didn’t see any point in quitting if it would only extend her life a few months on the average.”
“And what did you say to that?”
“That she sounded like Carl, that averages didn’t work the way she thought they did, and I had no intention of getting dragged into her bullshit.”
“All of which she graciously accepted, no doubt.”
“She told me to simplify my thoughts and have a good night. She wondered if I had a number for the Cancer Society. I said, ‘no,’ and we hung up.”
I give a meaningless nod, suddenly longing for a stiff drink, groping for some light I can shed. “When I met your mother, she campaigned quite hard to convince me she would die young from diabetes and didn’t care. The prospect of blindness, I imagine. Then she got pregnant and went to war against everything that was trying to take her down. Not a single cigarette for many years.”
“Carl got her started up again.”
I smile and shake my head. “I think she wants to deny life the satisfaction of finding out she cares all that much. Call it spiritual bravado in the face of, well…”
“Maybe that’s what attracted you to her.”
“You mean like she was a falling peach blossom in a Japanese poem?”
“Pretty much nothing like that.”
As I fumble for more words to send her off in decent spirits, Olivia shouts through my front window, asking if she can eat the leftover spaghetti. “Absolutely not,” I shout back.
“I’m eating it,” she screams, upping her volume, “and I’m turning off that shitty music.” Then she’s gone.
“Ah, youth,” I say, trying to convey worldly tolerance. Ramona’s having none of it.
“It’s the opposite of youth. Olivia is a grumpy old lady. And I swear… Listen, Dad, she skulks around like she’s up to no good. If she tells you something, you’ll tell me, right?”
“If it’s dire, sure.”
“She’d rather live with you and visit me,” Ramona observes as she cranks up the Navigator.
“That’s what your mother said about you when we divorced. Pretty much word for word.”
“And she was right.”
“Apples and oranges. Olivia’s just a typical teenage contrarian. She has a cushy life and the luxury of hating it. Who wouldn’t want that deal?”
Ramona stares ahead as if looking out through some private window. “Nobody, until the bill arrives. Listen, Dad; I need to get going. How’s the book coming, by the way?”
“It’s getting there,” I say.
“That’s what you said a year ago.”
“And it’s even truer today. If thoughts would quit occurring to me, I could finish it tonight.”
“Spoken like the slippery sophist you are. Anyway, I’ll be back on Monday afternoon. Check on Mom, okay? I know you don’t want to, but look at it as a chance to rise above.”
“And I’ve done such a superb job so far.”
Ramona, lovely Ramona, peers out with a wry grin and shakes her head.
“Quit fishing for compliments, Dad; it’s beneath you.”
My Secret Radio relates the story of a man on a lifelong journey to find meaning. It touches many genres with themes including 1960s establishment racism, casual drug crime, and long-buried family secrets. A shifting Southern political backdrop frames the adolescence of the protagonist, Bill Schaffer, whose adult life as a philosophy professor is riddled with complications.
Bill Schaffer is well-read, affable, and noble. If he is pedantic, it is characteristic of this meticulous novel. No event is without deeper meaning; references to music, literature, and philosophy proliferate. Bill is the type who looks below the surface. But he lacks personal grit and determination. Moved only by the actions of the supporting cast (themselves two-dimensional tropes), Bill’s meandering path feels static. With 468 pages of his journey to follow, My Secret Radio may be a steep hill for many readers to climb.
While Bill, at every stage of his life, presents himself as reasonable and well-intentioned, he is little more than a sounding box for attitudes reaching the mainstream in the mid-20th century. Though he counts himself progressive in his hometown, Bill doesn’t take part in meaningful social change, content to intellectualize and condescend. Present day, Bill doesn’t notice equivalent modern movements. He is a saint when he keeps a promise not to out a gay classmate. He’s gormless when he covers up for a double-murder committed by a friend.
Hallock buries much of what might shine in My Secret Radio. He combines genres into a mash-up of crime, mystery, romance, and philosophical treatise. Bill Schaffer’s story loses the fight against a barrage of period details, philosophical affectations, and gossipy women. Bill’s intellectualism makes him as intractable as the worst Hopperton, GA hypocrites. His personal life of disappointment and divorce are as inevitable as his abetting a murder is inconceivable. Bill’s tragedy is that a lifetime of knowing better than everyone else doesn’t comprise a fully functioning novel.