The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  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 the 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.

  As he looked down at the dead musician, Archer knew that he had expected this sight for a long time. Only not with the bathrobe on. Pokorny had even found a ludicrous way to die.

  Archer felt dazed. The room was steamy from the water, which was still warm, and Archer felt hot in his coat. Automatically he took it off and threw it over a clothes hamper, never taking his eyes off the shining bright rayon and the pale globular head under the water. He noticed that Pokorny still had his glasses on, not trusting his naked, inaccurate, ruined eyes for an important event like suicide. Foolishly, Archer picked up the phone and put it to his ear. There was a businesslike, normal, uneventful hum. Archer wondered if Pokorny’s phone was tapped, too, and if someone had been listening and understanding that the man was taking his life when Pokorny had called Archer earlier in the evening. What would the procedure be then, Archer speculated. Would the agent call the police, the Health Department, the Fire Department, to warn them and attempt to get them over quickly to save Pokorny’s life? Or was his function at all times so strictly limited to listening and recording that no extraneous action like rescue could possibly even be imagined?

  Archer bent over clumsily and put his hands into the water, grabbing the body under the armpits. He felt frightened. Pokorny, who in life had never had the power to frighten anyone, was adding this last achievement to his score now. Archer felt the water soak into his cuffs and sleeves and too late noticed that he still had on his wristwatch. The flesh under the armpit was fat and flabby and there was no feel of muscle there. Averting his eyes, Archer pulled. The effort seemed enormous and he heard himself panting. Pokorny slid up against the back of the tub, the water momentarily making his eyeglasses opaque before it ran off. His knees slid down, the robe rippling back over the pale chubby legs. Archer made himself look down as he held the musician’s head and shoulders out of the water. The gray hair was plastered to the sides of the large, knobby head, and the eyes were open, frightened and searching, as though at the last moment Pokorny had been confronted with a terrifying puzzle. His mouth hung open, the little bow lips red and childish, but Pokorny’s mouth usually had been open a good deal of the time, anyway, so he didn’t look any different than when he sat in the control room behind Archer’s chair, disapproving of what Levy was doing with the trumpets. Archer felt with one hand for Pokorny’s heart, disregarding his wristwatch. There was no movement that Archer could detect under the womanish pale breast. He stood up, shaking his hands to get the water from them. Slowly, with seal-like grace, Pokorny slid under the water again, like a man washing his hair. Archer bent to pick the head up out of the water again, then stopped. I could do this all night, he thought, and he’d slide back every time I stepped away.

  He dried his hands on a small guest towel. The towel had a nude woman on it in yellow embroidery. He stared down at the empty bottle and the telephone, suddenly a baleful composition of symbols on the chipped white stool, sleep and communication combined for the purposes of destruction. Almost automatically, he slipped the bottle into his pocket. He had to bend down and pick up the bottle cap, which had rolled into a corner under the basin. Then, carrying his coat, he went into the living room, where Mrs. Pokorny was sitting in her silent contemplation of her folded, brutal hands.

  “Well,” Mrs. Pokorny said loudly, the sound shocking in the bright room, coming from the monumental, immobile figure, “are you satisfied now?”

  Archer sighed. Christ, he thought, is that how she’s going to take it? “Manfred called me about an hour ago,” he said, keeping his voice gentle, “and he sounded queer so I decided to come over. But I never imagined …”

  “I bet he sounded queer,” Mrs. Pokorny said. Her voice was harsh and without inflections. “I bet he sounded damned queer an hour ago.”

  “Have you called the doctor yet?”

  “What’s the doct
or going to do?” Mrs. Pokorny asked, talking down to her hands. “Put the breath of life back into him? Give him a magic injection against suicide?”

  “Anyway,” Archer said softly, feeling that he ought to go over to the huge, square, fleshy woman and touch her shoulder, attempting comfort, but flinching from the act, “anyway, a doctor’ll have to be called.”

  “You call him,” Mrs. Pokorny said. She closed her eyes, but still kept her head in the same rigid position on her thick neck. “I don’t have to call anyone.”

  “The telephone’s in there,” Archer said irrelevantly, glancing down the hall.

  “That’s very convenient,” Mrs. Pokorny said. “You can have the patient right in front of you and you can describe the symptoms from life when the doctor asks you.”

  Archer took a step toward the bathroom, then stopped. He went to the table and sat down opposite Mrs. Pokorny. Her large, gray face, under the foolish, curled pink feathers, looked blind, with the large, heavily pouched eyes closed and folded in under the thick lids. “Before the doctor comes,” he said softly, “you and I can do something for Manfred.”

  Mrs. Pokorny opened her eyes and stared at Archer. “You’ve done enough for Manfred,” she said. “You can go home now.”

  “He’s got his robe on. In the bath,” Archer said slowly and clearly, trying to penetrate behind the heavy staring eyes. “We could take that off. And …” He took the pill bottle and cap out of his pocket and placed them on the table in front of him. “I could throw this away.”

  “What’re you driving at?” Archer could see the thick, coarse lines around her mouth setting stubbornly.

  “If he was found naked,” Archer said, “just as though he were taking a bath … If there was no sign of the pills. He had high blood pressure. A bad heart. It might very well be that he had an attack—that he died naturally.”

  “He didn’t die naturally,” Mrs. Pokorny said. “He killed himself.”

  “Perhaps,” Archer said. “But if we could re-arrange things just a little bit … There would be some reason for doubt. The newspapers might be kind, the doctor … It would be better for his memory, for you …”

  “Better for you, you mean,” Mrs. Pokorny said flatly and without heat or without expression of any kind. “So that people wouldn’t be able to tell the truth—that you and your kind killed him.”

  “Forgive me for arguing at a time like this,” Archer said, ignoring her hatred. “But if we do anything it has to be now, before anyone comes. I’m not going to try to defend myself. But don’t be vindictive. Try to act calmly and sensibly. Don’t think only of this minute. Try to think of what people are going to remember about your husband ten years from now …”

  “I want people to remember that they killed an artist,” Mrs. Pokorny said, closing her eyes again and speaking blindly and without inflection. “An artist who tried to give them a little music in their lives, a man who never harmed anyone, a man who didn’t know how to take care of himself any more than a two-year-old child. I want them to remember that he was hounded to death by you and the other Fascists …”

  Oh, God, Archer thought, even now, even with her husband only thirty minutes dead, doped and drowned fifteen feet down the hall, she still divides the world by slogans and catch-phrases. Looking at the blank, hating, thick woman who had somehow loved the ridiculous, frightened, finished man inside and who somehow (no one would ever understand exactly how any more) had engendered love in him, Archer knew that there was no hope of persuading her to help him. Pokorny dead was going to be sacrificed to her cause as he had been sacrificed, living, to others’ causes.

  Archer stood up. “What’s the name of your doctor?” he asked wearily. “And how do I reach him?”

  “His name is Gordon,” Mrs. Pokorny said without opening her eyes. “You’ll find his number in that address book on the table in the hall.”

  Archer went into the hall and got the address book. He found the number and entered the bathroom once more. He dialed the number and waited. While he listened to the long, steady ringing on the wire he looked down at Pokorny. The musician rested under water, the bow of his sash neatly and modestly tied, his eyeglasses shining like divers’ windows oil the wavery, resting, escaped face.

  Kitty was still awake when Archer got home two hours later. She was sitting up in bed, her glasses on, giving her a studious look in her lacy nightgown that would have struck Archer as humorous and charming at any other time. The bed was covered with bills and slips of paper and canceled checks and Kitty had ink on her fingers from the envelopes she was addressing. Archer felt exhausted. The doctor had questioned him closely and then the police had been suspicious and asked him tricky questions as though they suspected that he had slipped into the house and held Pokorny’s head under water while his wife was away. Two reporters had appeared and Archer heard Mrs. Pokorny say clearly and loudly over and over again that they had killed her husband. Archer had been in the bedroom talking to a slow-moving detective who made little marks in a notebook while listening to Archer, so he didn’t hear exactly what Mrs. Pokorny had told the reporters, but he thought he heard his name mentioned once or twice and when he finally got out of the house one of the reporters, who smelled from gin and cocktail onions, had walked two blocks with him pretending to be solicitous and trying to pump him.

  “I don’t know anything,” Archer had said again and again. “I don’t know why he did it. Ask Mrs. Pokorny.”

  “Mrs. Pokorny has her own theory, Mr. Archer,” the reporter said. “She has her views of your place in the picture and I think our readers would like to have your side of it, too. We want to be fair to everybody involved,” the reporter said, trying to look fair, upholding the best interests of impartial journalism, trotting alongside Archer because he was walking so fast. “She has some very harsh things to say, Mr. Archer,” said the reporter mournfully, “some pretty strong accusations, and I think all parties involved ought to have a chance to speak for themselves before the story is printed.”

  “I am not involved,” Archer said, wondering how far from the truth he was. “I knew him. He worked for me. We were friendly. I happened to drop in. That’s all. I am not interested in getting into a debate with Mrs. Pokorny.” He waved to a cruising taxi and jumped in, as the reporter leaned into the cab, making it smell like a crowded bar, saying, “Just one short statement of the other side of the case, Mr. Archer. Just one sentence …”

  Archer started pulling the door shut, pressing it against the reporter, and the man fell back, shaking his head in regret at the uncooperativeness of the public in the search for front-page truth.

  When he came heavily into the bedroom, Archer could tell from Kitty’s first glance that she was disturbed about something, too. He prayed that she would wait until morning. He took off his jacket, threw it down and slumped into a chair, overacting his weariness a little in an attempt to make Kitty hold whatever was bothering her for a better time.

  But Kitty was not to be put off. Keeping her head bent and not looking at Archer as she scribbled on an envelope, she said, “I made out a lot of checks. If you’ll sign them and put them back in the envelopes, I’ll mail them tomorrow morning.”

  “OK,” Archer said, rubbing the top of his head slowly.

  “I’ve been looking through the stubs,” Kitty said. “There’re some very strange things in this checkbook.”

  “Are there?”

  “I thought you told me we ought to economize.”

  “Well, so we should. Do you object to that?”

  “I agree. I agree completely,” Kitty spoke very quickly, running the words together in little spasms. Archer recognized the signs. Kitty was suspicious and preparing to be angry. “I’ve cut down on a lot of things. I haven’t bought any clothes for myself or Jane in months. I changed markets because Cucitti’s is five cents more a pound on butter than anybody else.”

  “That’s fine,” Archer said warily, not understanding what Kitty was doing. “That m
ust be quite a saving each month. Probably three, four dollars.”

  “Three, four dollars,” Kitty said flatly. “I’m glad to see you’re so concerned.”

  “Please, Kitty …” Archer stood up and began to take off his tie. “Couldn’t we talk about this some other time? I’m awfully tired tonight.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it some other time. I’m doing the bills tonight and I want to talk about this tonight.”

  Archer went into the closet and hung up his coat and tie. The closet smelled of tobacco and cedarwood and Archer remembered the steamy, close smell of the Pokorny bathroom.

  “You don’t seem to be worried at all about money these days,” Kitty was saying, addressing the closet. “Large-handed would be a nice way of putting it. Debonair.”

  Archer came out of the closet and looked at himself in the mirror over the bureau. His face looked exhausted, long lines falling away from his mouth, and his eyes looked as though he hadn’t slept well in weeks. Irritated with the way he looked, he turned back, leaning against the bureau and facing Kitty. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked gently.

  Kitty riffled through the checkbook. “Check number 35,” she read. “To Woodrow Burke. Three hundred dollars. Do you remember that?”

  Archer sighed. He went over to the chair and sank into it, stretching his legs. “I remember it,” he said.

  “Do you have to sigh like that?” Kitty asked, her voice high and tense.

  “No,” Archer said. “Forgive me.”

  “Why did you give Woodrow Burke three hundred dollars?”

  “He asked me for it. He’s out of a job. He’s broke.”

  “There’re a lot of people who are out of jobs,” Kitty said. “Do you plan to give them all three hundred dollars?”

  “Oh, Kitty …”

  “Check number 47,” Kitty read. “To Alice Weller. One hundred dollars. I suppose she’s out of a job, too.”