The Troubled Air (24 page)

“Now, Manfred,” Archer said, remembering that Barbante had warned him about this, “that’s unfair. Whatever else is behind this, it has nothing to do with being Jewish.”

“Yes, it has,” Pokorny spoke softly, but stubbornly. “It always has.”

Archer stared exasperatedly at Pokorny. Atlas, Pokorny, comedian, composer, both remote, untouchable, lost in their private dementia. No matter what food was served them, they always tasted the same single, bitter flavor.

“You say that Mr. Hutt wants to fire four other people, too,” Pokorny was saying, using logic to torture himself. “But with the others he is willing to give them a chance, wait two weeks. But with me—” He smiled unhealthily. “I have the honor to be particularly chosen. I am treated promptly. There is no waiting on line for me. The others, now, they are not Jews, I gather?”

“No.” This is the worst so far, Archer thought. I knew it would be.

“Why do you think I get this personal service, Mr. Archer?” There was even a small smile of triumph on Pokorny’s face, as though he were delighted with his success in debate.

“I don’t know,” Archer said.

“I do,” said Pokorny, almost in a whisper. “Mr. Hutt hates the Jews.”

“Oh, God, Manfred,” Archer said, “that’s outlandish. I’ve never heard him say a word.”

“He doesn’t have to say a word. He looks. When he looks at me, I see the same expression on his face I used to see on the Nazis in Vienna. Waiting. Hating. Confident. Five years later they pushed my father into the furnace.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Archer said. “And that’s not just a way of speaking. I mean it. You’re demented.”

“Maybe.” Pokorny shrugged. “I hope you’re right. I don’t think so. I have had experience. You couldn’t know, Mr. Archer. You’re an intelligent man, but you haven’t had the experience. Also—you’re too good. There’s nothing in your character to answer to that look—to understand it even. And do you know what the worst thing is?”

“What?” Archer asked, wearily feeling that he might as well get the whole thing out now, get it done once and for all.

“When I see Mr. Hutt look at me like that, even for a minute, even just passing him in the hall, I suffer from a trick. It makes me see myself with Mr. Hutt’s eyes. I look at myself and I’m dirty, my face is ugly, my voice is bad, my accent is unpleasant, I am too anxious to please one minute and I yell too loud the next minute. I am not nice to have sitting at the next seat in the theatre or in a restaurant and I understand why it is impossible to allow me into a good club or a hotel. I’m a miser, worrying about money all the time. I’m extravagant, wearing diamonds, throwing my money around. I’m a plotter, I can’t be trusted, I understand the necessity for the furnace …”

“That’s enough, Manfred.” Archer stood up. He felt shaken and furious and he realized it would give him pleasure to slap the fat, aging, disagreeable face on the other side of the table. “I’m not going to listen to any more of that. You’re behaving like a fool.”

Pokorny stood up, too, sniffing wetly, wrapping the stained robe around his pudgy body. “I think maybe you better stop worrying about me, Mr. Archer,” he said. “Never mind about being a witness. It wouldn’t make any difference, anyway. On black and white, I committed a crime. Nothing anybody is ever going to say can change that. I will write you from Austria.” Suddenly he broke. He turned clumsily and shambled over to the wall. He put his head against the wall and Archer could tell he was crying. “How can I go back?” he sobbed. “How can I go back there?”

There was the noise of a door opening in the hall and a moment later Mrs. Pokorny came in. She was at least six feet tall, square set, with a heavy, angry head, surmounted by a closely cut mop of irongray hair. She stood at the doorway, her large hands opening and closing at her sides, staring first at her husband, tragically bent against the wall, and then at Archer.

“Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was booming and harsh. “What did you do to him?”

“I’m Clement Archer,” said Archer, feeling that it was ludicrous to introduce himself so formally at a time like this. “He’s all right …” Archer gestured vaguely at Pokorny. “He worked himself up a bit and …”

“Manfred!” Mrs. Pokorny shouted. “Stop that!” Her face grew very red. She strode across the room and put her hands on Pokorny’s shoulders and turned him brusquely around. Pokorny barely came up to her shoulder. His face was wet and he took the end of the towel that was around his neck and wiped his cheeks. He was trying to control himself, but he couldn’t raise his eyes to look either at Archer or his wife.

What a scene, Archer thought, feeling an almost uncontrollable impulse to flee the room, the house, the man, the problem. What a ridiculous scene. How did I ever get mixed up in something like this?

“Diana,” Pokorny murmured. He patted the large, flat hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He half-looked at Archer. “I apologize, Mr. Archer,” he said, “for the embarrassment.”

“Sit down,” the woman said to Pokorny. Roughly, before releasing him, she pulled the towel close around his throat and yanked the robe tighter around his chest. “Sit down and behave yourself.”

Obediently, releasing a last few sniffles, Pokorny padded over to an armchair and sat down in it, keeping his head bent and staring at the carpet.

“What did you do to him?” Mrs. Pokorny turned on Archer.

“He didn’t do anything,” Pokorny said hurriedly. “He’s a good friend. He took the trouble of coming up here to explain to me …”

“What did he explain?” Mrs. Pokorny made no attempt to hide the doubt and suspicion in her voice. She stood, enormous, square, ugly, at the other end of the room, looking oversized and out of place among the flimsy furniture and the Tyrolean ornaments on the walls. She had a thick, long nose, with flaring, angry nostrils, and her mouth was wide and thin, cruel as a police sergeant’s.

“Mrs. Pokorny,” Archer began gently, “I came to try to help Manfred if I could …”

“How? By firing him?” Mrs. Pokorny laughed flatly. “Is that how you help people these days?”

“It isn’t his fault,” Pokorny said hurriedly. “He has to do what he is told. He is my friend.”

The word friend, Archer realized, was a talisman for Pokorny, and he clutched it to him like an infant holding a fuzzy toy animal at bedtime.

“If he’s such a friend,” Mrs. Pokorny said, “why doesn’t he keep you on the program? Did he explain that?”

“It’s out of his hands,” Pokorny said, looking up finally. “It’s the old Immigration business again. He was good enough to warn me.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Pokorny said, her large thick face frozen in a grimace of scorn, “they got you to do the dirty work. The tool.”

“Now, Diana,” Pokorny said mildly, “don’t talk like that to Mr. Archer.”

Mrs. Pokorny strode toward Archer, ignoring her husband. “It never occurred to your friend to fight for you, though, did it? His friendship doesn’t go that far, does it? He doesn’t raise a finger to keep you from being sent back to a country where all your people have been murdered.”

“He’s been very good to me, Diana,” Pokorny murmured brokenly. “He’s a very good man, very honest and upright.”

“I’ll believe that,” Mrs. Pokorny said, standing close to Archer, glaring at him, “when I see him do something for you.”

“I don’t know what I can do,” Archer said mildly. He felt curiously removed from the scene and untouched. Mrs. Pokorny, he saw, had a talent for removing any element of sympathy and gentleness from a situation. “It’s very complicated.”

“Complicated!” Mrs. Pokorny sneered. “If it’s not one excuse it’s another with people like you. I know your type, Mr. Archer. Pretending to help, being so honorable and polite all the time, then always finding a convenient way out when it begins to look as though you might be hurt. I know all about you. Weak, useless, ready to let the bosses use you, giving full value for your salaries, licking their boots, lying down and letting them walk all over you when it suits them. Now they want to drive the artists from the country, they want to shut up the ones they can’t send away, and who is the first one they pick on to do their dirty work …” She turned oratorically to Pokorny and made a stiff, heavy, pointing gesture in Archer’s direction. “Your good friend, Mr. Archer.”

“Mrs. Pokorny,” Archer said quietly, untouched, “if you will come down off the editorial page of the
Daily Worker
for a moment, perhaps we can talk about this reasonably.”

“Please, Diana …” Pokorny got up and put his hand appealingly on his wife’s arm as she turned broadside on Archer. She shrugged off her husband’s hand savagely.

“That’s right,” she said loudly. “That’s the line. I expected it, but it came sooner than I thought. One word of truth and you retreat to your standard argument—Red! Red!”

“Not so loud, please,” Pokorny whispered troubledly, looking around him as though he half expected to see secret agents spring from the walls. “Please, isn’t it possible to talk in a lower tone of voice …”

“Hopeless,” Mrs. Pokorny said, louder than ever. “Every once in awhile I let myself be fooled—I think that finally people like you can be educated, that you can be made into useful citizens. Then something like this comes up and I know I’ve been fooling myself. You’re useless. You’re a drag on the future. Finally, you’re always on the wrong side. In the end you and your whole class have to be wiped out.”

“Diana …” Pokorny murmured unhappily.

“Wiped out!” she shouted. “Surgery!”

“Diana,” Pokorny grabbed her arm and shook it like a puppy. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You mustn’t say things like that. It isn’t right. It’s …”

“You.” Mrs. Pokorny wheeled and stared down at her husband, her face contorted with loathing. “You go to bed. You’re a sick man. You don’t know enough to blow your nose by yourself. If I let you, you’d kiss his boots after he kicked you. You always disappoint me. I listen to your music and I think you’re a great man. Then I listen to you talk and I wonder where the music comes from. You’re not a man. You’re a worm. And worst of all, you
want
to be a worm.”

“Diana, darling,” Pokorny said reproachfully, backing off.

“I’m going inside.” Mrs. Pokorny strode toward the door. “And tell that man I don’t want to see him in my house again.”

She slammed the bedroom door behind her.

There was silence in the room for a moment. Embarrassedly, Pokorny fiddled with the towel around his throat. Archer ran his hand wearily over his head. Poor Pokorny, he thought, caught at home and abroad. In the line of fire of all batteries of all armies. Every gun zeroed in on the position he has no interest in holding.

“Well, Manfred.” Archer went over to him and patted his shoulder. Pokorny smelled of sweat and onions and Archer felt his fingertips uneasy on the soiled rayon of the robe. “I guess I’d better be off.”

“Yes.” Pokorny looked up at him shyly and painfully. “I’m sorry about Diana.”

“Forget it.” Archer started toward the front door. Pokorny followed him with nervous little steps.

“I told you about her,” Pokorny said. “She’s fanatic. She’s a very strong person and she has convictions.”

Archer couldn’t help grinning. He hid the smile with his hands.

“But there are other sides to her,” Pokorny said earnestly. “She loves me. No woman has ever been tender to me like Diana …”

Helplessly, the vision of the Pokornys in bed together crossed Archer’s mind. The pudgy, shabby man and the dreadnought-shaped, ham-handed woman … Impossible, Archer thought, you must never think of things like that.

“She’s loyal,” Pokorny went on, gathering strength. “She has a deep feeling for art. She gave me back my self-respect.”

Amazing, Archer thought, the words people use to describe what has happened to them.

Pokorny bustled around Archer, helping him on with his coat. “Mr. Archer,” he said, “I want to thank you. For taking the trouble. For coming to see me. For telling me the truth. No matter what happens—I will remember this.”

Archer sighed. “Honestly, Manfred,” he said, facing the composer, “I don’t know what I can do. If anything comes up, I’ll get in touch with you.”

“Don’t trouble yourself with me. Please.” Pokorny ducked, reaching into a cupboard. He came up with a package. “I wonder if I can give you a gift, Mr. Archer,” he said shyly, offering the package. “It’s a quartet of mine. Records. It was just done two weeks ago. It’s the only piece of mine that’s been recorded in this country. Some time—when you have nothing else to do—you might listen to it.”

“Thanks, Manfred. It’s very nice of you …”

Pokorny waved deprecatingly. “It’s just a small piece. Unimportant.” He opened the door. “It will give me pleasure to think of you sitting in your nice study in New York, listening to it. Play it in the evening. When it begins to get dark. It’s nice music for that time of day.”

They shook hands and Archer went out. As he descended the steps he looked up and saw Pokorny standing at the opened door, his faded, long thin hair catching the dim light of the hall lamp.

Outside, Archer looked at his watch. It’s not too late, he thought, maybe there’s still time to take Kitty to the movies. For the late show.

T
HE REHEARSAL HAD GONE BADLY ALL DAY. THE SCRIPT WAS DRAB AND
lifeless and Barbante, who usually could be depended upon to make helpful last-minute changes, seemed languid and disinterested, yawning widely again and again, as though he had been up all night. The lines he suggested seemed to Archer consistently worse than the ones that had to be replaced. The girl who had been chosen to play the part which Frances Motherwell ordinarily would have done turned out to have a cooing ingénue’s voice, cloying and calculatedly sweet and Archer made a mental note that he was never going to use her again. Alice Weller was nervous and came in late on cues. In the final rehearsal she skipped a whole page and forced Archer to start the show all over again. Atlas was slow and outrageously broad and kept looking up at Archer sardonically after each offense, as though daring him to object. Only Vic Herres seemed immune from the general jitters. He looked very tired, but he played as usual, calmly, with quick intelligence, making the scenes he was in seem vigorous and truthful. He had come in late in the afternoon, directly from the airport, and Archer had only been able to speak to him for a few moments. His mother had passed the crisis and seemed on the road to partial recovery.