“I understand that.” She shook him gently. “What are you going to read?” “Oh!” said the boy. Her calmness washed the incoherence out of him. “I—I’m not sure,” he said and went upstairs. After that he paced his room with a book. The sun passed over the front of the house and sent long, slanting rays out of the west across the lawn. And still he paced. “Joe!” his mother called. “Do radio actors bother with food?” He ate, spoke to two shadows who were his father and his mother, and went upstairs again. At midnight, when Tom Carlin looked into the bedroom, he found Joe standing in front of the mirror trying to achieve gauntness by lengthening his face and sucking in his cheeks. “I’m reading an Abe Lincoln part,” the boy croaked. “I’m getting in the mood.” Tom Carlin closed the door and stared helplessly at his wife. Kate Carlin’s laugh was pure joy. “Don’t look so tragic, Tom. This is priceless if it doesn’t become a pose.” Joe managed a sizable breakfast next morning, but shrank from lunch. He came downstairs with three books under his arm. “Shaky,” he said, his voice high and cracked. “Why should I be? Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Fred Allen—they all had to audition for the first time. Why should I be shaky?” “Nonsense!” his mother told him. “I’ve seen you with the jitters waiting for the curtain to go up on a high-school play.” He considered that. “You didn’t tell anybody I’m taking an audition? Please don’t.” His mother watched him go down the street. “Tom,” she said, “I don’t think we need to worry about pose.” Cold panic gripped him on the bus. The parts he had read over and over again last night seemed bloodless and thin. He tried to call them up, to recreate them in his mind, but panic scrambled his thoughts. If he was bad.... That’s what gave him the shakes. An audition either started you off or stopped you right there. The blonde receptionist gave him a warming smile. “Your letter must have caught them arranging an audition. Fifth floor, Studio K.” The fifth floor had none of the ornate trappings and blue leather of the fourth floor reception-room. This was the part of the world of radio that did not have to put on a display for the public. There was no glass-walled gallery looking into glass-walled studios. Joe found himself on a barren floor of unpretentious wooden doors, plastered, roughly painted walls, and shabby corridors that led to hidden quarters occupied by the mechanical departments and the engineers. A door almost at the elevator had painted on it: Studio K. But the fifth floor was also FKIP. A speaker filled the barrenness with “Miss America and what she’ll wear. Munson’s brings you to-morrow’s styles.” ...