Joe was grateful. “You see it, Mother, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” Tom Carlin snapped. He put down the lemonade, untouched. “Joe, I want you to think clearly. Sometimes Uncle Dan doesn’t come here for two or three years. Why? He’s broke. Fancy Dan Carlin! If he doesn’t come with fancy money, he doesn’t come at all. That’s show business. You’re rolling in it to-day, and you’re down to a thin dime to-morrow. Is that what you want?”
“That’s not radio,” said Joe stoutly. “I’m a nobody. If I got on a fifteen-minute five-a-week show to-morrow they’d pay me twenty-one dollars.”
“A week?”
“A day. Six dollars an hour for rehearsal and fifteen dollars for the show.”
Mr. Carlin was incredulous. “Twenty-one dollars for less than two hours’ work?”
“That’s the radio scale.”
There was no arguing with an amazing twenty-one dollars a day. Tom Carlin reached for his lemonade and drained the glass. His wife pushed the pitcher across the porch table. He shook his head and turned the empty glass around and around in his hands.
“I don’t want you to make a mistake, Joe. Show business has no roots. Uncle Dan used to earn three hundred dollars a week as a vaudeville performer; then came moving pictures and after that the talkies. What became of most of the stars of the silent screen? Where are the band leaders who were headliners ten years ago? Artie Shaw’s broken up his band and gone out of business. He found it a health-breaking game. Don’t you see how it works? Where are you?”
Joe said nothing.