Player Piano (6 page)

Paul envied Finnerty’s mind, for Finnerty could be anything he wanted to be, and be brilliant at it. Whatever the times might have called for, Finnerty would have been among the best. If this had been the age of music, Finnerty would have been, and in fact was, a top-flight pianist—or he might have been an architect or physician or writer. With inhuman intuition, Finnerty could sense the basic principles and motives of almost any human work, not just engineering.

Paul could have been only what he was, he thought. As he filled his glass again, he supposed that he could only have come to this moment, this living room, into the presence of Anita.

It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to
move in only one plane, and along one line. Finnerty’s arrival was disturbing, for it brought to the surface the doubt that life should be that way. Paul had been thinking of hiring a psychiatrist to make him docile, content with his lot, amiable to all. But now, here was Finnerty, pushing him in the other direction. Finnerty had seemed to see something in Paul he hadn’t seen in the others, something he’d liked—possibly a rebellious streak that Paul was only now beginning to suspect. For
some reason
Finnerty had made Paul his only friend.

“In a way, I wish Finnerty’d picked another day,” said Anita. “It raises all sorts of problems. Baer’s supposed to be on my left, and Kroner on my right; but now, with a member of the National Industrial Planning Board blowing in unexpectedly, I’m not sure who goes where. Is Ed Finnerty bigger brass than Kroner and Baer?” she asked incredulously.

“Look in the
Organization Directory
, if you want,” said Paul. “I think you’ll find the N.I.P.B. is listed ahead of the regional people—but it’s more brain trust than brass. Finnerty won’t care. He’ll probably eat with the help.”

“If he sets foot in the kitchen, the Board of Health will throw him in jail.” She laughed uneasily. It was evident that she found it trying to be a good sport about Finnerty, to pretend that his eccentricities were amusing. She changed the subject. “Tell me about today.”

“Nothing about today. One more, like all the rest.”

“You got the whisky?”

“Yes. I had to go across the river to get it.”

“Was it such an awful ordeal?” she chided. She couldn’t understand why he hated to run errands into Homestead, and teased him about it. “Was it so awful?” she said again, bordering on baby talk, as though he were a lazy little boy coaxed into doing a small favor for his mother.

“Pretty bad.”

“Really?” She was surprised. “Nothing violent, I hope.”

“No. Everybody was very polite, in fact. One of the
pensioners recognized me from the old days and threw an impromptu party for me.”

“Well, that sounds like downright fun.”

“Does, doesn’t it? His name is Rudy Hertz.” Without describing his own reactions, he told her what had happened. He found himself watching her closely, experimenting.

“And that upset you?” She laughed. “You
are
a sensitive darling, aren’t you? You tell me you’ve been through a nightmare, and nothing happened at all.”

“They hate me.”

“They proved they loved and admired you. And, what’s more, they should.”

“The man with the thick glasses as much as said his son’s life wasn’t worth living on account of me.”

“You said that. He didn’t. And I won’t have you saying ridiculous things like that. Do you get some sort of pleasure out of making things up to feel guilty about? If his son isn’t bright enough for anything but the Reeks and Wrecks or the Army, is that your fault?”

“No; but if it hadn’t been for men like me, he might have a machine in the plant—”

“Is he starving?”

“Of course not. Nobody starves.”

“And he’s got a place to live and warm clothes. He has what he’d have if he were running a stupid machine, swearing at it, making mistakes, striking every year, fighting with the foreman, coming in with hangovers.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” He held up his hands. “Of course you’re right. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all—just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don’t, that’s all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change.”

“You’re tired. I’m going to tell Kroner you need a month off.”

“I’ll tell him, if I feel like it.”

“I wasn’t trying to run your life, darling. But you never ask for anything.”

“Let me do the asking, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t. I promise you I don’t mind at all.”

“Did you lay my things out?”

“On your bed,” she said primly. She’d been hurt. “Tuxedo, shirt, socks, studs, cuff links, and a new tie.”

“New tie?”

“Dubonnet.”

“Dubonnet! For Christ’s sake.”

“Kroner and Baer are wearing dubonnet ties.”

“And is my underwear like theirs?”

“I’m sure I didn’t notice.”

“I’m wearing a black tie.”

“Pittsburgh, darling—remember? You said you wanted to go there.”

“Hi ho, dubonnet.” He climbed the stairs to their bedroom, stripping off his coat and shirt as he went.

“Ed!” Finnerty was stretched out on Anita’s bed.

“So there you are,” said Finnerty. He pointed at the tuxedo laid out on Paul’s bed. “I thought this was you. I’ve been talking to it for half an hour.”

“Anita said you’d gone to the club.”

“Anita expelled me out the front door, so I came in the back and up here.”

“Well, I’m glad you did. How are things?”

“Worse than ever, but there’s hope.”

“Fine,” said Paul, laughing uncertainly. “Married?”

“Never. Shut the door.”

Paul closed it. “How’s the Washington job?”

“I’ve quit.”

“Really? Something bigger yet?”

“I think so, or I wouldn’t have quit.”

“Where?”

“No place. No job at all.”

“Not enough pay, or worn out, or what?”

“Sick of it,” he said slowly. “The pay was fantastically good, ridiculously good—paid like a television queen with a forty-inch bust. But when I got this year’s invitation to the Meadows, Paul, something snapped. I realized I couldn’t face another session up there. And then I looked around me and found out I couldn’t face anything about the system any more. I walked out, and here I am.”

Paul’s invitation to the Meadows was carelessly displayed by Anita in the front-hall mirror, where no one could fail to notice it. The Meadows was a flat, grassy island in the St. Lawrence, in Chippewa Bay, where the most important men, and the most promising men (“Those whose development within the organization is not yet complete,” said the
Handbook)
in the Eastern and Middle-Western Divisions spent a week each summer in an orgy of morale building—through team athletics, group sings, bonfires and skyrockets, bawdy entertainment, free whisky and cigars; and through plays, put on by professional actors, which pleasantly but unmistakably made clear the nature of good deportment within the system, and the shape of firm resolves for the challenging year ahead.

Finnerty took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered one bent at almost a right angle. Paul straightened it out, his fingers unsteady. “Got the shakes?” said Finnerty.

“I’m chief speaker tonight.”

“Oh?” He seemed disappointed. “Then you don’t ordinarily have the shakes these days? What’s the occasion?”

“Thirteen years ago today, the Ilium Works was placed under the National Manufacturing Council.”

“Like every other plant in the country.”

“Ilium was a little earlier than most.” The union of the country’s manufacturing facilities under one council had taken place not long after Finnerty, Paul, and Shepherd came to work in Ilium. It had been done because of the war. Similar councils had been formed for the transportation, raw materials,
food, and communications industries, and over them all had been Paul’s father. The system had so cut waste and duplication that it was preserved after the war, and was, in fact, often cited as one of the few concrete benefits of the war.

“Does that make you happy, that this has been going on thirteen years?”

“It calls for comment, anyway. I’m going to keep it factual. It isn’t going to be like Kroner’s evangelism.”

Finnerty fell silent, apparently uninterested in pursuing the subject. “Funny,” he said at last, “I thought you’d be pretty close to the edge by now. That’s why I came here.”

Paul twisted his face as he struggled to get his collar button moored. “Well, you weren’t completely wrong. There’s talk of my chatting with a psychiatrist.”

“So you
are
in rough shape. Wonderful! Let’s get out of this damn party. We’ve got to talk.”

The bedroom door opened, and Anita looked in from the hall. “Oh! Ed. Who’s with Baer and Kroner?”

“Kroner’s with Baer, Baer’s with Kroner,” said Finnerty. “Close the door, please, Anita.”

“It’s time to go to the club.”

“It’s time for
you
to go to the club,” said Finnerty. “Paul and I’ll be along later.”

“We’re going together, and now, Ed. We’re ten minutes late as it is. And I won’t be bullied by you. I refuse.” She smiled unconvincingly.

“Let’s go,” said Paul.

“Anita,” said Finnerty, “if you don’t show more respect for men’s privacy, I’ll design a machine that’s everything you are, and
does
show respect.”

She colored. “I can’t say I find you screamingly funny.”

“Stainless steel,” said Finnerty. “Stainless steel, covered with sponge rubber, and heated electrically to 98.6 degrees.”

“Now, look—” said Paul.

“And blushes at will,” said Finnerty.

“And I could make a man like you out of a burlap bag filled with mud,” said Anita. “Anybody who tries to touch you comes away dirty!” She slammed the door, and Paul listened to her heels clicking down the staircase.

“Now, why in hell did you do that?” said Paul. “Do you mind telling me?”

Finnerty lay motionless on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, “but I’m not sorry. Go on with her.”

“What are your plans?”

“Go on!” He said it as though Paul had suddenly intruded just as he was giving form to an important, difficult thought.

“There’s Irish whisky for you in a brown bag in the front hall,” said Paul, and he left Finnerty lying there.

P
AUL OVERTOOK
A
NITA
in the garage, where she was starting the station wagon. Without looking directly at him, she waited for him to climb in beside her. They drove to the club in silence, with Paul feeling let down by the coarse, irrational reality of Finnerty. Over the years, he supposed bitterly, he must have created a wise and warm Finnerty in his imagination, an image that had little to do with the real man.

At the club door, Anita straightened Paul’s tie, pulled her cape down to bare her shoulders, smiled, and pushed into the brightly lighted foyer.

The far end of the foyer opened into the bar, and there two dozen of the Ilium Works’ bright young men, identical in their crew cuts and the tailoring of their tuxedos, surrounded two men in their middle fifties. One of the older men, Kroner, tall, heavy, and slow, listened to the youngsters with ponderous affectionateness. The other, Baer, slight and nervous, noisily and unconvincingly extroverted, laughed, nudged, and clapped shoulders, and maintained a continuous commentary on whatever was being said: “Fine, fine, right, sure, sure, wonderful, yes, yes, exactly, fine, good.”

Ilium was a training ground, where fresh graduates were sent to get the feel of industry and then moved on to bigger things. The staff was young, then, and constantly renewing itself. The oldest men were Paul, and his second-in-command, Lawson Shepherd. Shepherd, a bachelor, stood by the bar, somewhat apart from the rest, looking wise, and faintly amused by the naïveté of some of the youngsters’ remarks.

The wives had congregated in two adjacent booths, and there spoke quietly and uneasily, and turned to look whenever the volume of voices rose above a certain level, or whenever the bass voice of Kroner rumbled through the haze of small talk with three or four short, wise, wonderfully pregnant words.

The youngsters turned to greet Paul and Anita effusively, with playful obsequiousness, with the air of having proprietorship over all good times, which they generously encouraged their elders to share in.

Baer waved and called to them in his high-pitched voice. Kroner nodded almost imperceptibly, and stood perfectly still, not looking directly at them, waiting for them to come up so that greetings could be exchanged quietly and with dignity.

Kroner’s enormous, hairy hand closed about Paul’s, and
Paul, in spite of himself, felt docile, and loving, and childlike. It was as though Paul stood in the enervating, emasculating presence of his father again. Kroner, his father’s closest friend, had always made him feel that way, and seemingly wanted to make him feel that way. Paul had sworn a thousand times to keep his wits about him the next time he met Kroner. But it was a matter beyond his control, and at each meeting, as now, the power and resolve were all in the big hands of the older man.