Player Piano (5 page)

The old man was apparently quite deaf, for his voice was erratically loud, then soft. “Don’t recognize my face, Doctor?” He wasn’t mocking, he was frankly admiring, and proud that he could prove himself on speaking terms with this distinguished man.

Paul colored. “I can’t say I remember. The old welding shop, was it?”

The old man swept his hand over his face deprecatingly. “Aaaah, not enough left of the old face for my best friend to recognize,” he said good-humoredly. He thrust out his hands, palms up. “But look at those, Doctor. Good as ever, and there’s not two like them anywhere. You said so yourself.”

“Hertz,” said Paul. “You’re Rudy Hertz.”

Rudy laughed, and looked about the room triumphantly, as though to say, “See, by God, Rudy Hertz does know Doctor Proteus, and Proteus knows Hertz! How many of you can say that?”

“And this is the dog you were telling me about—ten, fifteen years ago?”

“Son of the dog, Doctor.” He laughed. “I wasn’t no pup then, though, was I?”

“You were a damn fine machinist, Rudy.”

“I say so myself. Knowing that, knowing smart men like you say that about Rudy, that means a lot. It’s about all I got, you know, Doctor? That and the dog.” Rudy shook the arm of the man next to him, a short, heavy, seemingly soft man, middle-aged, with a homely, round face. His eyes were magnified
and fogged by extremely thick glasses. “Hear what Doctor Proteus here said about me?” Rudy gestured at Paul. “Smartest man in Ilium says that about Rudy. Maybe he’s the smartest man in the country.”

Paul wished to God the bartender would hurry up. The man Rudy had shaken was now studying Paul sullenly. Paul glanced quickly about the room and saw hostility all around him.

Addled Rudy Hertz thought he was doing a handsome thing by Paul, showing him off to the crowd. Rudy was senile, remembering only his prime, incapable of remembering or understanding what had followed his retirement….

But these others, these men in their thirties, forties, and fifties—
they
knew. The youngsters in the booth, the two soldiers and three girls, they were like Katharine Finch. They couldn’t remember when things had been different, could hardly make sense of what had been, though they didn’t necessarily like what was. But these others who stared now, they remembered. They had been the rioters, the smashers of machines. There was no threat of violence in their looks now, but there was resentment, a wish to let him know that he had intruded where he was not liked.

And still the bartender did not return. Paul limited his field of vision to Rudy, ignoring the rest. The man with thick glasses, whom Rudy had invited to admire Paul, continued to stare.

Paul talked inanely now about the dog, about Rudy’s remarkable state of preservation. He was helplessly aware that he was hamming it up, proving to anyone who might still have doubts that he was indeed an insincere ass.

“Let’s drink to old times!” said Rudy, raising his glass. He didn’t seem to notice that silence greeted his proposal, and that he drank alone. He made clucking noises with his tongue, and winked in fond reminiscence, and drained his glass with a flourish. He banged it on the bar.

Paul, smiling glassily, decided to say nothing more,
since anything more would be the wrong thing. He folded his arms and leaned against the keyboard of the player piano. In the silence of the saloon, a faint discord came from the piano, hummed to nothingness.

“Let’s drink to our sons,” said the man with thick glasses suddenly. His voice was surprisingly high for so resonant-looking a man. Several glasses were raised this time. When the toast was done, the man turned to Paul with the friendliest of smiles and said, “My boy’s just turned eighteen, Doctor.”

“That’s nice.”

“He’s got his whole life ahead of him. Wonderful age, eighteen.” He paused, as though his remark demanded a response.

“I’d like to be eighteen again,” said Paul lamely.

“He’s a good boy, Doctor. He isn’t what you’d call real bright. Like his old man—his heart’s in the right place, and he wants to do the most he can with what he’s got.” Again the waitful pause.

“That’s all any of us can do,” said Paul.

“Well, as long as such a smart man as you is here, maybe I could get you to give me some advice for the boy. He just finished his National General Classification Tests. He just about killed himself studying up for them, but it wasn’t any use. He didn’t do nearly well enough for college. There were only twenty-seven openings, and six hundred kids trying for them.” He shrugged. “I can’t afford to send him to a private school, so now he’s got to decide what he’s going to do with his life, Doctor: what’s it going to be, the Army or the Reeks and Wrecks?”

“I suppose there’s a lot to be said for both,” said Paul uncomfortably. “I really don’t know much about either one. Somebody else, like Matheson, maybe, would …” His sentence trailed off. Matheson was Ilium’s manager in charge of testing and placement. Paul knew him slightly, didn’t like him very well. Matheson was a powerful bureaucrat who
went about his job with the air of a high priest. “I’ll call Matheson, if you like, and ask him, and let you know what he says.”

“Doctor,” said the man, desperately now, with no tinge of baiting, “isn’t there something the boy could do at the Works? He’s awfully clever with his hands. He’s got a kind of instinct with machines. Give him one he’s never seen before, and in ten minutes he’ll have it apart and back together again. He loves that kind of work. Isn’t there someplace in the plant—?”

“He’s got to have a graduate degree,” said Paul. He reddened. “That’s policy, and I didn’t make it. Sometimes we get Reconstruction and Reclamation people over to help put in big machines or do a heavy repair job, but not very often. Maybe he could open a repair shop.”

The man exhaled, slumped dejectedly. “Repair shop,” he sighed. “Repair shop, he says. How many repair shops you think Ilium can support, eh? Repair shop, sure! I was going to open one when I got laid off. So was Joe, so was Sam, so was Alf. We’re all clever with our hands, so we’ll all open repair shops. One repairman for every broken article in Ilium. Meanwhile, our wives clean up as dressmakers—one dressmaker for every woman in town.”

Rudy Hertz had apparently missed all the talk and was still celebrating in his mind the happy reunion with his great and good friend, Doctor Paul Proteus. “Music,” said Rudy grandly. “Let’s have music!” He reached over Paul’s shoulder and popped a nickel into the player piano.

Paul stepped away from the box. Machinery whirred importantly for a few seconds, and then the piano started clanging away at
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”
liked cracked carillons. Mercifully, conversation was all but impossible. Mercifully, the bartender emerged from the basement and handed Paul a dusty bottle over the old heads.

Paul turned to leave, and a powerful hand closed on his upper arm. Rudy, his expansive host, held him.

“I played this song in your honor, Doctor,” shouted Rudy above the racket. “Wait till it’s over.” Rudy acted as though the antique instrument were the newest of all wonders, and he excitedly pointed out identifiable musical patterns in the bobbing keys—trills, spectacular runs up the keyboard, and the slow, methodical rise and fall of keys in the bass. “See—see them two go up and down, Doctor! Just the way the feller hit ’em. Look at ’em go!”

The music stopped abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy. Rudy still shouted. “Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”

Paul twisted free and hurried out to his car.

“D
ARLING, YOU LOOK
as though you’ve seen a ghost,” said Anita. She was already dressed for the party at the Country Club, already dominating a distinguished company she had yet to join.

As she handed Paul his cocktail, he felt somehow inadequate, bumbling, in the presence of her beautiful assurance. Only things that might please or interest her came to mind—all else submerged. It wasn’t a conscious act of his mind, but a reflex, a natural response to her presence. It annoyed him that the feeling should be automatic, because he fancied himself in the image of his father, and, in this situation, his father would
have been completely in charge—taking the first, last, and best lines for himself.

The expression “armed to the teeth” occurred to Paul as he looked at her over his glass. With an austere dark gown that left her tanned shoulders and throat bare, a single bit of jewelry on her finger, and very light make-up, Anita had successfully combined the weapons of sex, taste, and an aura of masculine competence.

She quieted, and turned away under his stare. Inadvertently, he’d gained the upper hand. He had somehow communicated the thought that had bobbed up in his thoughts unexpectedly: that her strength and poise were no more than a mirror image of his own importance, an image of the power and self-satisfaction the manager of the Ilium Works could have, if he wanted it. In a fleeting second she became a helpless, bluffing little girl in his thoughts, and he was able to feel real tenderness toward her.

“Good drink, sweetheart,” he said. “Finnerty upstairs?”

“I sent him on over to the club. Kroner and Baer got there early, and I sent Finnerty over to keep them company while you get dressed.”

“How does he look?”

“How did Finnerty always look? Awful. I swear he was wearing the same baggy suit he wore when he said goodbye to us seven years ago. And I’ll swear it hasn’t been cleaned since then, either. I tried to get him to wear your old tuxedo, and he wouldn’t hear of it. Went right over the way he was. I suppose a stiff shirt would have been worse in a way. It would have showed how dirty his neck is.”

She pulled the neck of her dress lower, looked at herself in a mirror, and raised it slightly again—a delicate compromise. “Honestly,” she said, talking to Paul’s image in the mirror, “I’m crazy about that man—you
know
I am. But he just looks awful all the time. I mean, after all, a man in his position, and not even clean.”

Paul smiled and shook his head. It was true. Finnerty
had always been shockingly lax about his grooming, and some of his more fastidious supervisors in the old days had found it hard to believe that a man could be so staggeringly competent, and at the same time so unsanitary-looking. Occasionally, the tall, gaunt Irishman would surprise everyone—usually between long stretches of work—by showing up with his cheeks gleaming like wax apples, and with new shoes, socks, shirt, tie, and suit, and, presumably, underwear. Engineers’ and managers’ wives would make a big fuss over him, to show him that such care of himself was important and rewarding; and they declared that he was really the handsomest thing in the Ilium industrial fold. Quite possibly he was, in a coarse, weathered way: grotesquely handsome, like Abe Lincoln, but with a predatory, defiant cast to his eyes rather than the sadness of Lincoln’s. After Finnerty’s periodic outbursts of cleanliness and freshness, the wives would watch with increasing distress as he wore the entire celebrated outfit day in and day out, until the sands and soot and grease of time had filled every seam and pore.

And Finnerty had other unsavory aspects. Into the resolutely monogamous and Eagle Scout-like society of engineers and managers, Finnerty often brought women he’d picked up in Homestead a half-hour before. When it came time, after supper, to play games, Finnerty and the girl would generally take a highball in either hand and wander off to the shrub-walled first tee, if it was warm, or out to his car, if it was cold.

His car—in the old days, anyway—had been more disreputable than Paul’s was today. In this direction, at least—the most innocuous direction, socially—Paul had imitated his friend. Finnerty had claimed that his love of books and records and good whisky kept him too broke to buy a car and clothes commensurate with his position in life. Paul had computed the value of Finnerty’s record, book, and bottle collections and concluded that the Irishman would still have plenty left for even two new cars. It was then that Paul began to suspect that Finnerty’s way of life wasn’t as irrational as it
seemed; that it was, in fact, a studied and elaborate insult to the managers and engineers of Ilium, and to their immaculate wives.

Why Finnerty had seen fit to offend these gentle people was never clear to Paul, who supposed the aggressiveness, like most aggressiveness, dated back to some childhood muddle. The only intimation as to what that childhood had been like had come not from Finnerty but from Kroner, who took a breeder’s interest in his engineers’ bloodlines. Kroner had once remarked, confidingly and with a show of sympathy, that Finnerty was a mutant, born of poor and stupid parents. The only insight Finnerty had ever permitted Paul was in a moment of deep depression, during a crushing hangover, when he’d sighed and said he’d never felt he belonged anywhere.

Paul wondered about his own deep drives as he realized how much pleasure he was getting from recollections of Finnerty’s socially destructive, undisciplined antics. Paul indulged himself in the wistful sensation of feeling that he, Paul, might be content, if only—and let the thought stop there, as though he knew vaguely what lay beyond. He didn’t.