Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “What is it?” Archer asked, puzzled. “What in the world have you got there?”

  “A musical comedy. Mr. Barbante and I have been working for six months. About the West.” Pokorny patted the papers lovingly.

  “Oh, yes,” Archer said. “Barbante told me.”

  “He has written such clever things, Mr. Barbante. Witty lyrics. Love songs that are tender yet modern. And the music … I don’t wish to boast, Mr. Archer, but we have already played some of the songs to people, professional people, in the business, and they have been impressed. Hard, professional people, but they were crazy for it. They have told us it is very hopeful. That’s the word that was used, you can ask Mr. Barbante—hopeful.” Suddenly Pokorny sprang up and rushed over to the desk. He put the sheaf of papers in front of Archer. Archer could see that many of the sheets were stained, as though Pokorny made a practice of eating while he worked. “Here—look—” Pokorny said excitedly, standing very close to Archer’s chair. “Pick any sheet at random. Read it, sing it over to yourself. Get a conception of the quality. Of course it is rough, it needs polishing, but even so—try it …”

  “Manfred,” Archer said, pushing his chair back a little. “I can’t read music. I don’t know the first thing about …”

  “Musical comedies can make millions of dollars. Look at the things on the boards today. Twenty, thirty dollars a seat, and they run for three years. Men are millionaires today who didn’t have the price of a cup of coffee at the Automat five years ago. A song can catch on and a man can retire for life. Juke boxes, radio, the movies …” Pokorny was almost incoherent now, rushing on through the wild dreams of grandeur and wealth he was conjuring up for himself. “As an investment—unequaled!” He was almost shouting by now, the sweat soaking his collar. “For two hundred dollars, I give you twenty-five percent of my share. Is that fair?” He peered anxiously into Archer’s face. “Not enough? You feel, I am not generous enough? Fifty percent. I write it down now. Black and white. We can go and have it notarized. Two copies for the files. Just read one song. Hum the melody.” He searched frantically among the papers. “Just this one.” He picked out three sheets of music paper, with words written under the notes. “The title,” he said, “is, ‘I Can’t Tell You.’ ”

  “I’m sure it’s fine, Manfred,” Archer said. “But I told you I can’t read music. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to take your …”

  “Sit back,” Pokorny said hurriedly, as though fearful to let Archer finish his sentence. “It is not necessary to read music. Merely sit back and listen. I’ll sing it for you.” He looked around him wildly. “Where’s the piano? I will accompany myself.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have a piano,” Archer said. “None of us knows how to play.”

  “No matter,” Pokorny said. “Of no importance. I sing without the piano. You will get the idea, just the same. It is necessary to get the picture. It is a play about the West. You know that …”

  “Yes,” Archer said, hoping to prevent Pokorny from singing. “Barbante told me. But …”

  “It is a scene in a dance hall,” Pokorny went on. “The main character is a cowboy. He is bashful, and every Saturday night he comes into the dance hall, all dressed up, and he looks with moon eyes at one of the girls, a soprano. He is a big, rough man, but he is tongue-tied when he looks at Ellie. That’s her name. He wants to say that he loves her, but the words won’t come out.”

  Pokorny stepped back and adjusted his glasses, and peered down at the music in his hand. He cleared his throat loudly.

  “Manfred!” Archer began to feel a kind of panic. “There’s really no necessity. I take your word for it. I have no ear for music and besides I wouldn’t dream of taking a share from you for …”

  Then Pokorny began to sing. He closed his eyes from time to time, to dig more deeply into his inward emotion. “I can milk, I can ride,” he sang, “I can rope when I’m fried, But I can’t tell you—I can preach or palaver, I can shave without lather, But I can’t tell you—I can fight or frolic, Cure a calf with the colic, But I can’t tell you, Can’t Can’t Can’t tell you—”

  Archer watched the fat little man, standing in the middle of the floor, waving his arms in time to the music, sweating in his bright, unpressed tweed suit, singing on key and with feeling, his accent making the words of the song seem incongruous and funny, singing in desperation, singing against exile, putting into the flat, unoriginal little song all his hopes of rescue from forces that long ago had doomed him. As he listened to the song, Archer knew that he was going to give Pokorny the money he had asked for.

  Pokorny finished and there was silence in the room for a moment. He looked shyly at Archer. “Well,” he asked, almost in a whisper, “what did you think of it?”

  “It sounds like a very nice song,” Archer said.

  “Thank you.” Pokorny smiled briefly. “Of course, you understand, it should be sung by a young man, a tenor, a very handsome young man in front of scenery, and with a twenty-five-piece orchestra. There’s a very important passage for the clarinet indicated, too …”

  Archer got out his checkbook. “Look, Manfred,” he said, “I’m going to give you the money. And I don’t want any share of your music …” He started to write out the check.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Archer,” Pokorny said. “Please. I can’t take it as a loan. I insist …”

  “When you can,” Archer said, finishing on the check and noting it on the stub as he ripped the check out and waved it to dry it, “you pay me back. That’s all.”

  “You’re good,” Pokorny said quietly, folding the music sheets. “You’re too good.”

  Archer looked down at the check. Pay to the order of Manfred Pokorny, two hundred dollars, signed Clement Archer. He didn’t hand it to the musician. Suddenly he tore it up. “Come on, Manfred,” he said, standing up and throwing the small bits of paper into the wastebasket. “I’ll give it to you in cash. I’ll walk down to the bank with you. It’s only around the corner. I’m sure the cash will be more useful to you.” But even as he said it, Archer knew that he wasn’t doing it for Pokorny’s sake. A deep feeling of shame overcame him as he looked at the scraps of paper on the bottom of the basket. But he put on his coat and went out with Pokorny, knowing that he had been afraid to have a record in his checkbook of a loan to a friend who was on his way to exile.

  They walked swiftly to the bank. Pokorny spoke very little and waited on the other side of the room while Archer cashed the check. Archer crossed over and gave the ten crisp new bills to Pokorny, who carefully put them into a tattered wallet. The musician looked very tired now, as though his performance had exhausted him. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, in a low voice, avoiding looking at Archer. They shook hands outside the bank and Archer said, “I hope this does it for you, Manfred.”

  “Oh, yes,” Pokorny said. “The lawyer was confident. Very confident.” He looked up at the austere gray stone front of the bank and the large clock that was hanging there. It was nearly ten o’clock. “I suppose I have to hurry,” he said. “The lawyer has to travel two thousand miles today.” He laughed a little. “That’s a queer profession,” he said. “The law. How does anyone decide to enter it?” He looked around him at the quiet street in the heavy winter light. “This is a nice neighborhood. A good place to live.” Finally he met Archer’s eyes. There was a strange, tremulous expression behind the thick glasses. “Ah, don’t worry about me, Mr. Archer,” Pokorny said. “It hasn’t been so, bad here. Many happy years. Even if they send me away …” He shrugged. “In Germany or Russia I would be dead a long time already …” He smiled, surprisingly. “The piece I gave you the other day,” he said. “The recording. My quartet. Do you like it?”

  Archer blinked. He had forgotten to play it. “Yes,” he said. “I thought it was very good. I liked it a lot.”

  Pokorny nodded. “I’m glad,” he said. “Of course—the recording is not first class—the second violin is weak—but …” He shrugged again. “I must go to my la
wyer,” he said. He turned and walked slowly away, an improbable pink figure topped by a lustrous black hat with the brim turned down all the way around.

  Archer watched him for a moment, then went back to his house and tore the check stub out of his book. He ripped it into little pieces and dropped it into the bottom of the basket along with the other scraps of paper.

  19

  POKORNY CALLED AGAIN THAT NIGHT, AT SEVEN-THIRTY, JUST AS ARCHER and Kitty were sitting down to dinner. Gloria came into the dining room and said, “It’s for you, Mr. Archer. It’s a Mr. Pokorny.”

  Kitty made a face. “Tell him to call later, Gloria. Tell him we’re at dinner.”

  Archer half-stood up, then sat down again as Kitty waved her hand at him imperiously. “One hour out of the day,” Kitty said, “they can leave you alone.”

  “OK, Gloria,” Archer said. “Tell him to call in an hour.”

  Gloria went out of the room and Kitty said, “We have steak tonight. Steak can’t wait. That Mr. Pokorny is getting to be a real pest, isn’t he?”

  “A little,” Archer said absently, trying to listen to Gloria’s voice on the phone in the hall. A moment later, Gloria came in, shaking her head.

  “The man says he can’t call you later, Mr. Archer,” she said. “He told me please try you one more time.”

  Archer stood up. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Kitty.

  “Steak costs a dollar a pound,” Kitty said sourly. “Tell Mr. Pokorny that.”

  Archer smiled at her and went into the hall. “Yes, Manfred,” he said into the phone.

  “If it was possible to call you in an hour,” Pokorny said, “I would do it. You believe that, Mr. Archer, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Archer said patiently. “Of course. What’s happening now?”

  “But it is not possible,” Pokorny said. His voice was down to a strange whisper and seemed faraway, rising and falling in strength as though he was moving his head back and forth from the mouthpiece. “It will not be possible. I just wanted you to understand that.”

  “Manfred,” Archer said. “Please speak more loudly. I can hardly hear you.”

  “Of course,” Pokorny said. But his voice still was remote and he spoke very slowly. “I have some information. I thought you might be interested, but I shouldn’t have called during dinner, but later on it would not be possible …”

  “Are you all right, Manfred?” Archer demanded.

  “I am fine. I have had a quiet, peaceful day. I have been all alone. I played the piano all afternoon and no one complained …”

  “Manfred,” Archer said, “you will have to speak more clearly.”

  “The telephone rang,” Pokorny whispered. “Long distance. From Chicago. My lawyer. His flight was excellent, only three hours. Thank you again for the money. You are most generous. I wanted to tell you I thought you were most generous. I wanted to tell you, of all the people I have met in this country, you have treated me with the most consideration. Consideration …” His voice trailed off.

  “Have you been drinking?” Archer asked impatiently.

  “Drinking?” Pokorny’s voice was a little stronger. “I never drink, Mr. Archer. The doctor forbids me. The high blood pressure and the excess weight. The warmest heart, Mr. Archer, I will always remember it, in this day and age …”

  “Clement!” Kitty called from the dining room. “Everything’s getting stone-cold.”

  “Manfred,” Archer said, “I really do have to get back to dinner.”

  “Of course. Extend my apologies to your wife. I thought you might be curious what happened in Chicago. After all, you have a right to know, on your money …”

  “What did happen?”

  “The man, my old friend, the one who used to play the oboe … My lawyer went to him, but he changed his mind. He won’t sign any affidavit about me. ‘To be quite frank,’ he told my lawyer—those were his words—‘to be quite frank,’ he had to consider his position in Chicago, in the insurance world, he could not risk having his name in the papers as a supporter of a man who was being deported as an undesirable alien. You understand, I am what is technically known as an undesirable alien. Especially in Chicago, he said, people are very sensitive these days. He doesn’t know how it is in New York, he has to consider his family and his colleagues. He himself is a naturalized citizen, he does not wish to impose on the hospitality of the country, he said.” Pokorny’s voice trailed off.

  “I can’t hear you,” Archer said. “Hold the phone closer to your mouth.”

  “ … two hundred dollars,” Pokorny was saying when Archer heard him again. “A warm-hearted gift at a time like this. The lawyer flew back and forth. His plane is probably over Ohio this minute, the weather is clear. I apologize. Such waste, these days, when everything is so expensive. All my life I knew I should start a bank account. So much each week. Thrift, like the advertisements say for the banks. For a rainy day, when it is necessary to hire lawyers. Accept my apologies …” His voice drifted off again. Archer could hear a whispered, distant mumbling. Then there was a click as the phone was put down.

  Archer shook his head and went back slowly to the dining room. Even in his best days, Archer thought, Pokorny talked in complicated circles. Now, battered and worn by his troubles as he was, it was almost impossible to make head or tail of his conversation.

  Kitty was sitting accusingly at her place, ostentatiously waiting without eating, staring at the food on her plate. “From now on,” she said, “we only have stew. Something you can heat for days without ruining it.”

  Archer kissed the top of her head before sitting down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I promise not to answer the telephone any more.”

  He tried to seem interested in Kitty’s small talk about the house, about several new symptoms of her condition, about Jane, but it was difficult to concentrate and he found himself remembering Pokorny’s strange, dwindling whispering on the phone, so unlike him, and picturing the musician alone in the shabby house, his wife probably off at a meeting somewhere, while he played aimlessly on the piano, thinking of the ex-oboe player who had failed him in the sensitive Mid-Western city, trying to get through the hours that still intervened before the next morning’s trial.

  In the middle of the meal Archer decided he had to go over and see Pokorny that night. He almost broke off eating to start at once, but he knew that Kitty would complain bitterly and ask a lot of questions he was in no mood to answer. He ate impatiently and was grateful when Kitty said she was going to go upstairs and do the bills.

  “I’m going out for a walk,” he said. “I need some air. I’ll be back in a little while. Don’t pay the telephone company twice.”

  There were continual small mixups in the bills and in nearly twenty years of marriage he and Kitty had never quite arrived at a sensible system of filing paid and unpaid accounts and it was one of Archer’s gloomy obsessions that he paid most bills at least twice.

  “Go out and cool your head,” Kitty said, “and come back when you’ve learned to keep a civil tongue in your mouth.” But she smiled and kissed him before she went upstairs, to show him she wasn’t taking his charges seriously.

  The weather, as Pokorny had said, was clear, and after a speculative glance at the cold stars above the roofs of the city and a sniff of the crisp air, Archer decided to walk rather than take a cab. He walked briskly, taking deep gulps of air, feeling warm and comfortable under his soft coat, conscious that he had eaten a good dinner and that the exercise was doing him good. He didn’t know exactly what he would do for Pokorny, but he felt that even a fifteen-minute visit with the musician might cheer him a little on this bad night.

  The light in the hall of the old brownstone house in which the Pokornys lived was broken and in the darkness Archer couldn’t find the bell. He tried the door. It was open and Archer went up the dim steps, remembering from his earlier visit that the musician lived on the third floor. The door to the Pokornys’ apartment was standing open. Archer knocked on th
e door frame and waited. There was no sound from within, although light was streaming out from the apartment onto the shabby landing. Archer knocked again and then went in.

  In the living room, seated stiffly at the table, staring down at her hands, Mrs. Pokorny was sitting. She had her hat on, a rust-colored old felt with two curly pink feathers clipped onto the side, absurdly frivolous over the raw, uneven shock of her gray hair. From the way Mrs. Pokorny was sitting, Archer knew that something was terribly wrong. All the lights were up in the apartment and it looked glaring and uncomfortable.

  “Mrs. Pokorny,” Archer said gently, taking off his hat, and standing at the entrance to the room. The woman didn’t move. “Mrs. Pokorny,” Archer said again, coming in.

  Mrs. Pokorny didn’t say anything or look up at him. She raised one hand slowly and pointed behind her, her thick fingers steady and dangerous-looking. Archer went into the narrow hallway, past the enormous, silent woman.

  It was in the bathroom. The tub was full. Pokorny was lying there, with his knees bent and his head under water. For a moment Archer stood there, staring down at the blurred face, magnified by the greenish water in the old-fashioned tub, curved and standing on ornate stubby legs on the tiled floor. Insanely, Pokorny was modestly covered in his orange dressing gown, the sash neatly and tightly tied in a bow over the bulging stomach. On a small stool next to the tub stood a small empty pill bottle and the telephone on a long wire that wound in along the hall from the living room.