The Troubled Air Part 16

"All the facts." Pokorny pushed the plate away from him. He took out his handkerchief again and wiped his mouth, not quite catching all the leakage. "If I give you all the facts, will you keep them secret?"

"I can't promise anything. Don't tell me anything you feel it would be harmful for me to know."

"Then you would feel I was hiding something from you," Pokorny said, peering near-sightedly at Archer. "You would begin to believe everything you heard about me, because you could not check. I would be a question mark in your brain. 'Pokorny,' you would say, 'he is a doubtful character. He must have plenty to hide.' All right!" Pokorny stood up abruptly, the orange robe swinging open to reveal a pudgy, pale, hairless breast. "I will tell you everything. What's the difference? I can't lie, anyway. I don't have the temperament to hide anything. My face is my own lie-detector. The portable model. Ask me a question, I get nervous, in a minute I give the answer, even if I know I should keep quiet. It's the way I am. I am like the radio networks-I am on the air twenty-four hours a day." He laughed weakly at his own joke, then padded over to a library table on which there was a plate of grapes. He offered the grapes to Archer. "Would you like some? In the middle of the winter. The American way of life. Refrigeration. From the Argentine." He stuffed five or six of the grapes into his mouth, tearing them off the main stem with his teeth and chewing them, seeds and all. "Tasteless," he said thickly, carrying the plate with him and coming back to the table and sitting down. "I eat all the time. It is a disease. I feel that there is a hollow in me. The doctor says I am overweight. The arteries are undecided. They do not know whether they should continue working for me or give their notice." He chuckled again, morbidly, as he put some more grapes into his mouth. "The doctor says I must lose twenty-five pounds or he cannot be responsible. I tell him I don't like to be responsible for my arteries, either, but the doctor doesn't laugh, he doesn't enjoy the European type of humor in the medical field. The calories, he says, are disastrous, he predicts a stroke. I tell him about the hollow inside me, but he says it is all psychological. He is young, very modern, he is always saying 'psychosomatic.' When I die, he will try to perform an autopsy, I'm sure. He looks at me and I can see it in his eye. He is bothered already he will have to cut through so much fat. He will investigate and write a paper on the psychosomatic hollows in Viennese composers with blood pressure. See-I finally have found I can have a conversation with you. Trouble-it loosens the tongue, gives you subject for discussion. The facts." Pokorny ran his tongue around his teeth, sucking at grapeskin. "I promised the facts. And you promised nothing. It is my kind of bargain. That's what my wife would tell me. She is a woman who does not have any illusions about me. You will meet her later, but please do not take everything she says too seriously. She is disappointed in the world-for my sake. She thinks I am neglected and she hits back. Ah-I see you are moving your feet. You are impatient. You are saying, he is a disorderly fat man. Why doesn't he come to the point?"

"Take your time," Archer said carefully, recognizing that Pokorny was nervously postponing the moment when he would have to expose himself. "I have nothing else to do tonight."

Pokorny pushed the plate of grapes away from him. "Don't tell her that I had grapes. She is scientific, too, she knows all about sugar content and fat deposits in the blood vessels. All Americans are scientific, there are amazing articles every Sunday in the New York Times. She is opposed to my having a stroke. She calls the doctor on the phone and informs on me. She says, 'He had two rolls and a quarter of pound of b.u.t.ter for breakfast.' She tells me if I have a stroke and I am paralyzed I will have to find another wife. She is trying to frighten me into being young and healthy. She is very fond of me. She sits and listens to me play my compositions on the piano and she closes her eyes and cries. She has no more ear than a camel, but she cries just the same, out of loyalty. The doctor said s.e.x was dangerous, too. He is very modern, he calls it relations. The strain on the heart muscles. Everything is dangerous these days, grapes, your wife, writing music for the radio. It's the times we live in. When I was younger, it never occurred to us-food, love and music might be fatal." Pokorny sat hunched over the table, restlessly playing with the stained towel around his throat, opening it, pulling it closer, talking more and more swiftly, as though his thoughts were rushing to his tongue, as though the necessity of talking on one subject to a man he had barely spoken to before this had freed a flood of other information that had to come out, in an eruption of confession. Archer tried to keep his face impa.s.sive. He listened carefully, attempting to catch and remember the word here and there that was useful in the spate of revelations. Conscientiously, he tried to keep himself from being disgusted or critical or pitying.

"My wife is at the root of my troubles," Pokorny said. "It sounds ungallant, not the sort of thing an artist from romantic Vienna ought to say. But I love her, so I can be ungallant about her. She is at a meeting tonight, but she will be home soon. She'll look at the soup and tell me I had too much and she'll threaten me that she won't bring white bread into the house any more. She's always at meetings. She's a Communist. She's very important; it's surprising how they listen to her. That's why they're getting after me, the Immigration, they see my wife's name on everything. I will get deported because I married an American lady who was born in Davenport, Iowa. Love is upside-down, too. When there was the strike on the waterfront, she brought a boy here with his head split wide open. Another quarter of an inch and you could have seen his brain. The police were looking for him and we hid him. He slept in our bed and we put a mattress on the floor in here for ourselves. She would walk through blood for her ideas. She would be very dangerous if she got the chance. She should never be put in charge of anything. If I get deported, she will lead a parade to the dock, with signs about the warmongers. I would never recover from it."

"Look, Manfred," Archer said, dazed by the complexity of the life he was uncovering and feeling that he had to interrupt and warn the man, "you don't have to tell me anything about your wife. That has nothing to do with the program or with you."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Archer," Pokorny said formally, "that is where you're wrong. It has everything to do with it. She is well known. She is extreme. She draws attention to me. I cannot bear attention. I had one hope-to be quiet, to be anonymous. My wife has a file in the FBI this thick ..." Pokorny's pudgy hands indicated ten inches in the air. "What does it say in the file? Mrs. Manfred Pokorny, married to a refugee, who entered this country on an alien's permit in 1940. Never took out citizenship papers. Now working on the radio. Next step, Mr. Hutt. Next step-good-bye. I tell you all these things about my wife because it doesn't make any difference. It's all known. And even if it isn't, all they have to do is ask me. I'm excitable, I'm weak, I'm afraid of prison. The only time I'm calm is when I am composing music. Even when I eat-you noticed-it is like a whirlpool."

"Still," Archer said, almost successfully hiding his dislike of Pokorny's voluble terror, "you haven't told me anything that would warrant deporting you."

"No," Pokorny said, automatically reaching for the grapes again, "not yet. So-in 1940-I made out my application for entering the United States. I was in Mexico. I was living on seven dollars a week. I had a violin, a good violin, a Guarnerius, and I sold it. It was the last thing I had to sell. The Mexicans were getting ready to put me out of their country. My wife-my first wife, I married her in Vienna in 1921-kept telling me she was going to kill herself if we were pushed out again. We had been in France, in Morocco, in Santo Domingo. Some musicians in America-people who had played some of my music-I had a little vogue before the war-in the style of Schoenberg-they vouched for me. On the application they asked me-was I ever a member of a communist party, anywhere ..."

He hesitated. Archer watched him intently. Pokorny was sweating, little rivulets sliding down the loose rolls of fat on his neck.

"What should I say?" Pokorny asked. "I have seventy dollars in my wallet. I am a Jew. My mother and father are already dead in the crematoriums ... it sounds calm when you say it like that. It almost sounds natural. Neat. But when you remember what your mother looked like, standing over the stove, cooking dinner. Dressed up for Sunday in a black lace dress. When you remember going to hear your father in the symphony orchestra ... He played the flute. He never was very good, really, speaking as a musician, now, not as a son ..."

Pokorny's mouth, stuffed with grapes, was trembling, and Archer realized that the composer was on the verge of tears. "Look," Archer said gently, "you don't have to tell me anything more just now. You're feeling badly tonight, your wife told me you had a fever. You probably ought to be in bed. Maybe this is too painful for you. I don't have to hear it now. I'll come back some other time, Manfred, when you're feeling better."

"What do you put on the application?" Pokorny said, ignoring Archer. "America is just over the border. Twenty miles away. Everybody is being kind. Everybody is being sympathetic. Everybody wants to help. If you say yes ..." He shrugged. "You vanish. You sink. You are obliterated. If you say no-two little scratches of the pen-you're alive, you're a musician, you exist ... Yes or no. On a form, the questions sometimes are too simple. Whatever you say is the wrong answer. A man's life can't be described sometimes in yes or no. In Vienna, in 1922, I joined the Austrian Communist Party. There. Now you know. But does yes or no tell anybody what it was like in Vienna in 1922? Inflation, strikes, starving, speeches, promises-can you put that in yes or no? And I quit two months later. Even my wife will have to admit that, and I know she's told the Immigration about me, because she said she would, when I divorced her and married Diana ..."

Diana. Archer felt himself being hypnotized by the name. Diana and Manfred Pokorny. Names for the low-comedy servants in a musical comedy. It was almost impossible to a.s.sign them to tragic parts. Diana Pokorny, with a cornbelt accent, commissar for the waterfront regions. Parents, Archer thought, must have more respect on the day of christening, for the mortal possibilities lying in the future for their children.

"She's crazy," Pokorny said. "My first wife. She is always coming up here making scenes. She brought a pistol once, but it didn't have a hammer on it, but we didn't find that out until later. I give her sixty dollars a week in alimony, but she's always sick and she always keeps trying the most expensive medicines. Now it's cortisone. She knows a doctor who wants to experiment on her, but it costs three hundred dollars for a treatment. And she went to an a.n.a.lyst for six years."

Archer felt a grin pulling at his mouth and turned his head so that Pokorny wouldn't see it. It was heartless to smile, he knew, but the complexities Pokorny had brought about in his life by his choice of women were, considered at all objectively, melodramatically ludicrous. And somehow, and Archer was displeased with himself at the realization, Pokorny with all his agony did not touch him. Perhaps, Archer thought, if he combed his hair and stopped stuffing his mouth with Argentine grapes ... If he has to go before the Immigration board, Archer resolved, I will make him go to a barber first, and make certain he puts on fresh linen.

"I quit because they were idiots," Pokorny was saying. His voice had become tired and he was resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. His skin was flushed now and he looked as though his fever were mounting. "The Communists. They began to tell me what kind of music to write, what kind of music I should listen to, what I should applaud, what I should not applaud. Politicians who didn't know the difference between a sonata and a bugle call. I was writing an opera then and I found out the librettist had ten thousand collaborators. They didn't listen to an opera with their ears-they listened with a copy of Lenin's collected pamphlets. I figured if they were that wrong in my field that I knew about, they were probably almost as wrong in other fields that I didn't know about. So I drifted out. I wasn't important, I was twenty-three years old-so they didn't bother me and I didn't bother them ... I tell Diana, but it will take an explosion to change her mind. She says I'm an unreliable intellectual." Pokorny essayed a wan smile. "She's half-right, anyway. Still-sitting in that hot little room in Mexico, living off the last of the violin, what do you do when you see the question, 'Were you ever a member of any communist party in any country?' Yes or no. How truthful do you have to be? Who do you hurt? What does a man do to survive? How much are you expected to suffer for two months of your life seventeen years before when you were twenty-three years old, in another country? Now ..." Pokorny shrugged helplessly. "They will produce the paper. They will say is this your signature. They will say is everything written on this paper true. My first wife will be sitting there, looking at me, hating me, knowing all about me. My advice to you, Mr. Archer, is keep away from me, don't try to help me. Deny you ever knew me. Say that the music was delivered by an agent and that he told you it was being written by a man called Smith. Say that you didn't know I was a Jew."

"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, G.o.d, 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 n.a.z.is 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment."

"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 cla.s.s 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. Embarra.s.sedly, 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.

13.

THE 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 ingenue'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 pa.s.sed the crisis and seemed on the road to partial recovery.

Ironically, Pokorny's score had been one of his best, very clever and useful, bridging gaps in the script with nimble arrangements, making flat scenes seem dramatic and tense. Pokorny wasn't in the studio. Archer had called to invite him to the rehearsal, but Mrs. Pokorny, who had answered the phone, had said, coldly, "He can't come. He's sick. He can't get out of bed."

Archer had hired a new composer, a man called Shapiro, who sat uneasily at Archer's shoulder, tapping nervously with his fingers on a stiff notebook all day. Shapiro was a pale young man with lank hair and he did not look promising. As Shapiro listened, Archer could sense the man's spirits almost visibly sinking. Shapiro, it was obvious, knew his talents well enough to realize that he could never do as well as Pokorny. Without saying a word to each other, both Archer and Shapiro knew that there were going to be bad moments ahead in the musical department.

O'Neill came in late, red-faced, moving with elaborate solidity, and smelling of liquor. It was the first time Archer had ever caught O'Neill drinking on the day of a program, so he knew that O'Neill was feeling the strain, too. O'Neill was not wearing his mink-lined coat. He only wore it when he was feeling humorous and satisfied with himself. There's nothing humorous about him today, Archer thought, watching O'Neill sit very straight, bulky in a small chair, keeping his eyes exaggeratedly wide open and making an obvious business of listening to everything that was going on and reacting too often and too energetically. Maybe it has nothing to do with the program, Archer thought, looking for comfort. Maybe he's having trouble with his wife. That'll keep a mink coat in the closet and make three Martinis before five o'clock seemed like a necessity for survival.

Hutt had not appeared all day and there was no sign of the sponsor.

Uptown and downtown, it had been a bad week. Thursday, Archer thought, is a day that one should occasionally be allowed to drop from the calendar. All his life, he remembered, Thursday had been a special day. Somehow, his mother always seemed to take him to the dentist on Thursday. And for the two years that she had forced him to take lessons on the piano, the teacher, a sharp, unpleasant woman with pockmarks, had come on Thursday. And examinations in high school in geometry and algebra, subjects which had baffled him, seemed inevitably to come on Thursday. And the worst fight he had ever been in, which had cost him two teeth, had been on a Thursday afternoon, after a piano lesson. Probably, Archer thought, the day I am killed will turn out to be a Thursday.

Archer gave the cast a break a half hour before the program was scheduled to go on. Most of them left the studio. O'Neill stood up and went out heavily, without talking to Archer. Shapiro left, saying almost apologetically, as though he were not quite sure that he deserved it, "I think I'll get a cup of coffee. Can I bring you anything?"

"No, thanks," Archer said. He sat at the control desk, feeling inelastic and slow, staring through the window at Herres, who was talking desultorily to the sound man.