The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  Archer chuckled. He didn’t mean to, and it surprised him. “Don’t they read the newspapers?” he asked. “Don’t they read that I’m in the vanguard of Fascism and that I’m a tool of the big corporations?”

  “They don’t read anything but old letterheads and inscribed copies of Mein Kampf,” Burke said bitterly. “Ask me. I’m the boy who knows. Nobody would listen to me a year ago, when they pinched me out of the line. Maybe they’ll listen now. People’ve been yellow and they’re paying for it now. They didn’t defend me or the others when we got the boot to the seat of the trousers. They just pretended it had nothing to do with them and prayed they wouldn’t get it next if they kept their mouths shut. Well, they got it next, and you’re getting it next, because those’re the tactics, soldier, defeat the buggers in detail, make them commit themselves piecemeal, never let them fight in mass.”

  “Burke,” Archer said wearily, “will you forget for a moment that you were once a military commentator and talk in something that sounds like English? What’re you driving at?”

  Burke looked offended. “Sorry if my vocabulary doesn’t please you,” he said stiffly. “What I’m trying to say is that this is the time for everybody to get together and fight for everybody’s life. Actors, writers, directors, commentators. And now is the time. Pokorny’s suicide makes a perfect peg for it. Poor little jerk of a man lying in a pool of blood because those bastards on Blueprint did a job on him. It’ll give a focus to the whole thing and people who wouldn’t lift a finger otherwise’ll be shocked enough for a day or two to rally round. What I came here to say, Clement,” Burke said, “is that there’s going to be a meeting tomorrow night after the theatre, so that actors who’re playing in shows can get to it. A protest meeting against the blacklist and everything it stands for. All shades of political opinion. Figure out some way of protecting artists and semi-artists like you and me—” Burke smiled bleakly “—from being pushed over the cliff. And we want you to make a speech.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Archer. “Before you go on I want to make something clear to you. I’m absolutely opposed to the Communists. You still want me?”

  “I have some interesting news for you,” Burke said. He was trying to smile, but his lips were trembling. “I’m not a Communist. That’s for your private information. And I hate the bastards. That’s for anyone’s information. And I don’t know whether you believe me or not and I don’t care. And you can say anything you want in your speech. Just be there. Present yourself. Just tell what happened to you. Tell what happened to the people on your program. If you don’t want to say anything else, just tell the group how competent or incompetent Vic Herres and Stanley Atlas and Alice Weller are, and what sweet music that poor dead jerk used to write before he took the pills.”

  “Hold it,” Archer said sharply. “What’s this about Herres and Weller? Who brought their names into this?”

  “Tomorrow, son,” Burke said. “In the same article in which they give you the low-level bombardment. It’s all-out now, and the shelters’re all full. Well?” Burke stepped back and cocked his head, narrowing his eyes to look at Archer.

  “Who else is speaking,” Archer said, “from this program?”

  “I asked O’Neill. He’s going to let me know tonight. Don’t worry,” Burke said. “You’ll have plenty of company. In the last year there’ve been two hundred people canned. Bank accounts’re dropping fast enough all around town so that people’re just about ready to open their mouths.”

  “If I made a speech,” Archer said, “who’d have to approve it?”

  “Nobody. You won’t have to show it to anyone. Well?”

  Archer hesitated. He looked around the room. O’Neill had just come back and was standing against the far wall, watching Burke and himself. O’Neill looked like a detective in his dark-blue suit and his black tie.

  “Give me your number,” Archer said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  Burke sighed. “What do you expect?” he asked. “Do you think you’ll see a vision tonight?” But he wrote out his number on a scrap of paper and gave it to Archer. He started to leave, then turned back, embarrassedly. “What I need,” he said, “is a drink. And I happen to be a little strapped. Do you think …”

  “Sorry,” Archer said. “Three hundred is a nice even number. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Burke smiled unhappily. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “Don’t think I blame you a bit. Don’t believe anything you read in the newspapers.”

  He waved his hand and went out. Why is it, Archer thought, watching the door close, that so many people you feel you ought to help are so objectionable? Maybe, he thought, when I get to the point that Burke’s at now, I’ll be just as objectionable, too.

  Brewer came in, putting on his overcoat, and they all went downstairs—Archer, Barbante, O’Neill, Levy and Brewer—and got into a cab after O’Neill gave the address of the undertaker on Second Avenue. The cab was crowded with the five men in their bulky coats and they talked desultorily about everything but Pokorny or the article about Archer in the newspaper. Archer felt that they looked like a group of men taking an afternoon off from the office to go to the races.

  The undertaker’s chapel was in a small store on the corner of a busy block on Second Avenue in the Twenties. There was an Italian grocery store beside it, with long cheeses hanging in the window. Three news photographers waited outside the entrance to the chapel and they took Archer’s picture and O’Neill’s picture as the two men got out of the cab and crossed the sidewalk.

  Inside there were only about twenty or twenty-five people, sitting on folding chairs facing the casket. They were whispering quietly and they all hushed for a long moment and turned in their chairs as Archer came in with the others. There was no expression on their faces. Most of them seemed to be refugees, with clothes that looked as though they had been bought in second-hand shops in foreign countries and Archer got the impression that they were all huddling together as though they thought they could hide better in a group than singly. There were some flowers, looking sadly pure and springlike in the drab room, and sending a disturbing fragrance into the dank air, mixing with the strong smell of incense that the undertaker used to disguise the odor of previous deaths.

  Archer and the other men from the program sat down as unobtrusively as possible in the rear row of seats. He didn’t know what to do with his hat. Some of the mourners were wearing theirs, but others were bareheaded. There didn’t seem to be a rabbi present, or if there were, he was not dressed in any ceremonial clothes. Archer didn’t want to offend the religious sensibilities of the group, whatever they were, but he felt uncomfortable with his hat on when almost half the other men were bare-headed. With a sudden gesture, he took it off and put it on his knees. Brewer, sitting next to him, watched him, then carefully followed his example.

  Mrs. Pokorny was standing with two men near the casket and she seemed to be arguing with them, although their voices were kept low and Archer couldn’t hear what they were saying. Mrs. Pokorny had on a black dress but it was covered with a grayish cloth coat, obviously the only one she had. Her face, Archer decided, looked no better or worse than it ever had. It was not a face for grief and the lines of anger that were always present there were not intensified by the happenings of the last three days. She had not looked up when Archer entered.

  Suddenly, as though exasperated with the arguments of the two men, who were smaller and slighter than she, and over whom she towered menacingly, Mrs. Pokorny strode down the side of the room, trying to shake them off. But they followed her and the little group came to an uneasy halt in the back of the room, close enough so that Archer could hear snatches of what they were saying.

  “ … I repeat,” Mrs. Pokorny was saying, “he doesn’t need any religious services.”

  “But, Madam,” the shorter of the two men said, pleadingly, “he was a Jew, a prayer must be said for him.” The man had a frail, wan, studious face, like a mathematics professor. He was
about fifty years old and he had an accent. “I don’t think it’s right, at a time like this, Madam,” the man said insistently, “to deny the comforts of religion. I took the liberty of asking Rabbi Feldman here to officiate and he is ready and …”

  “My dear Mrs. Pokorny,” the rabbi said, “out of a sense of respect, as a comfort to his friends, as an appeal to God for the soul of your husband …” The rabbi was young and had a Boston accent, flat and almost Irish-sounding. “A Jew should not be buried without the traditional prayers. For three thousand years …”

  “He wasn’t a Jew,” Mrs. Pokorny said.

  “Mrs. Pokorny …” the little man said faintly, spreading his hands. “I knew him ever since he was a schoolboy in Vienna.”

  “I deny he was a Jew,” Mrs. Pokorny said, dwarfing the two men in their dark hats. “He wasn’t anything. He didn’t believe in your God or anybody’s God, and neither do I, and I don’t want your mumbling and your superstition at a time like this.”

  “I don’t believe it, Mrs. Pokorny,” the frail little man said quietly. “He believed in God. I know he did. We had many talks, before your marriage …”

  Archer sat rigidly, embarrassed, wishing he hadn’t come.

  “Now, I’ve had enough of this,” Mrs. Pokorny said loudly. The mourners all heard, but sat stiffly, their heads pointed toward the casket, desperately attempting to pretend that nothing was happening behind them. “There’s going to be a speech by a mutual friend and I’ve agreed to let one of Manfred’s friends play a number on the violin. That’s enough.”

  Once more she walked away from the two men and sat down in the front row, her head outlined against the casket. The two men looked at each other and the rabbi shrugged. “Later we will get together ten friends,” he said softly, “and say a prayer by ourselves, all the same.” He patted the little man’s arm, and they both found seats and sat down.

  A bare-headed man of about forty stood up and faced the mourners. He had a red face, as though he worked in the weather year in and year out, and he was larger than most of the other people present. He looked like a longshoreman, Archer decided, and when he spoke, in a hoarse voice that sounded as though it had cracked many years before, shouting against the wind, the impression was strengthened. This one, Archer decided, is a member of Mrs. Pokorny’s team, and he isn’t too friendly toward God, either.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man said in his hoarse, riverside voice, “and friends of our dead friend. We’re here to pay our respects to a martyr in the struggle for freedom and peace.”

  Oh, no, Archer thought, shocked, it’s not going to be like that! Even Mrs. Pokorny wouldn’t do that. They’re not going to parade the poor, forlorn, chubby, meaningless little corpse and pretend he was a hero of the revolution!

  “But first,” the longshoreman said in the tones of an orator who has quelled many a union meeting and street-corner demonstration, “we will hear a selection on the violin, one that our dear departed friend personally wrote in better days and which his loving and courageous wife has chosen because her husband would have wanted to hear it one more time before he left us. It will be played,” the man said, like a practiced master of ceremonies, “by an old and close comrade of the departed, Mr. Ely Rose.”

  Mr. Rose stood up, wearing a hat and fumbling with a violin case. He opened the case and put it down carefully on the floor. Then he tuned the violin nervously, his long fingers fiddling swiftly with the pegs and getting sharp, twanging, off-tune notes from the instrument.

  Archer closed his eyes in embarrassment for a moment. When he opened them again, Mr. Rose was beginning to play. The music was nondescript, slow, sorrowful, without climaxes, fitting for funerals, and Mr. Rose played with too much feeling, bending his body, closing his eyes, the bow sweeping up past the brim of his hat, his fingers quivering on the strings, making a long, vibrating, sentimental movie-house tremolo of every passage. Archer never felt that he knew enough about music to criticize anybody, but he was sure Mr. Rose was a bad violinist. Archer looked over at Levy. Levy was sitting bolt upright, his handsome, long nose wrinkled, his eyes squinted shut as though he were suffering from some inner pain, and Archer knew that he was right about the violinist.

  Mr. Rose finished. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He almost bowed, then sat down abruptly, holding the violin pressed to his cheek. Some of the women among the mourners were sobbing and some of the men were pushing at their eyes with handkerchiefs.

  The longshoreman stepped forward and began to speak. After the first few sentences, Archer didn’t bother to follow him. Pokorny, it appeared, had been sacrificed to the warmongers because of his courageous efforts in the cause of peace and freedom. Peace and freedom were mentioned often, as though the longshoreman were discussing his private property. There was also a protracted comparison between America today and Germany in 1932, with references to artists, Jews and union leaders. The lying and bloodthirsty press also came in for its share of attention. Actually, Archer thought, half-listening and resentful, a great deal of what this fellow is saying has elements of truth in it. And in a way Pokorny is a victim of the war-scare; in a way there are disturbing similarities between pre-Hitler Germany and America today; orthodoxy at a premium and deviations from a narrowing and intolerant standard are being savagely punished—but the clichés that the speaker was using and the rhetorical, practiced emphasis of his delivery, with its echoes of many identical speeches on other occasions, made it impossible to listen reasonably or be moved or persuaded. Also, picking Pokorny’s inoffensive corpse as a rostrum for political fulminations was hateful to Archer. And to make such a baleful speech to the huddled two dozen elderly exiles who had come softly and tragically to say farewell to one of their number who had thought he had escaped and hadn’t—God, Archer thought, the Communists don’t understand anything because they are not human.

  The speaker neared the end of his peroration in a thunder of warnings and boasts about the hidden strength of the working class. Archer looked over at Mrs. Pokorny. She was staring at the speaker, her face proud, defiant, exalted, as before her eyes she could see her husband, dead, being transformed into a shining symbol which the living, stubborn, shabby flesh never would permit.

  The speaker stopped and there was a sigh from the mourners. By now, everyone had stopped crying. The body could not be viewed, because there had been an autopsy and the top of the skull had been removed to get at the brain. The speaker went over to Mrs. Pokorny and she looked up at him fiercely, clutching his hand, saying, “Thank you, Frank. It was wonderful.”

  The undertaker’s men came in and rolled the casket out a side door and the mourners stood around in little groups, murmuring softly, dissatisfied, unfulfilled by this curious service, wishing that someone had called on God, that some ritual had been observed to bind Pokorny with the three thousand years and the unnumbered dead that were, behind them all.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Levy was muttering angrily. “Fast!”

  “Don’t you want to go over and say something to the widow?” Archer asked.

  “No,” Levy said. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  But the others went over. Archer hung back while Barbante and O’Neill and Brewer shook Mrs. Pokorny’s hand and said the polite things. When Archer approached her, he held out his hand. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

  Mrs. Pokorny looked up at him, granite-faced. She didn’t put out her hand. “This is the one, Frank,” she said to the man who had made the speech.

  Frank shook his head mournfully. “Man, man,” he said, “will you never learn? Will you have to wait until you’re behind the wire?”

  Archer flushed. All around him, the mourners, who seemed bowed and tiny next to him, were watching him curiously, suspiciously. He dropped his hand and went out onto Second Avenue.

  “What I need,” he said, as he joined the others, “is a drink.”

  There was a bar on the next block and silently they all started to walk toward
it, through the housewives doing their morning shopping and the children staring gravely out of their carriages. As they crossed the street, the hearse passed them, and two limousines filled with mourners. Eight people, Archer counted, going a little too fast in the 1940-model Cadillacs to watch the casket being lowered into the grave among the crowded monuments on Long Island.

  “God damn it,” Barbante said, in a low, strangled voice. He was standing on the corner, his hands rigidly at his sides, staring after the funeral procession disappearing briskly among the beer and laundry trucks. “God damn everybody!”

  “Sssh. That’s all right, Dom,” Brewer said soothingly, putting his hand on Barbante’s arm.

  But Barbante ignored him. His voice rose suddenly to a wild shout and his mouth moved in a tortured grimace as though he were in pain. “Pokorny was right,” he said. “He’s the only sensible man on Manhattan Island this minute. And they’re moving him off at forty miles an hour. The only thing is to die. Why wait, boys, why wait? If I had the guts I’d buy a hundred pills this morning.” He looked crazily up at the sky. “If I saw them up there with the bomb,” he shouted, as the housewives moved their children uneasily around him, “I’d yell to them, here I am, drop it right here.”

  “Come on, Dom,” Archer said quietly, embarrassed by the sight of the debonair and foppish man waving his arms and screaming on the street corner. “Let’s have a couple of drinks and calm down a little.” He went over and took Barbante’s other arm. Barbante pulled away.