The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  “God damn you,” Barbante said. “God damn everybody.”

  He walked away.

  After awhile they went into the bar. They had two drinks and then went uptown to finish the rehearsal.

  21

  KITTY WAS SEATED AT THE TABLE READING THE NEWSPAPER WHEN Archer came down the next morning for breakfast. He had slept late, in a drugged stupor, after the funeral and the long rehearsal and the show. And there had been a sorrowful scene with Kitty, who had read the columnist’s attack on him and had waited up for him to ask him about it.

  Now Kitty was sitting at the table, sipping a glass of milk with her breakfast toast, reading the morning newspaper which she had propped up against the coffee pot. She looked tired, as though the night’s sleep had not refreshed her. It was a gray day and the light in the room was dead and colorless. Archer, dressed in pajamas and a robe, went over behind her and bent over and kissed her cheek. She put her hand up and held his head close to hers for a moment. Over her shoulder, Archer saw that she had the paper opened to the page on which there was the story of Pokorny’s funeral the day before. There was a picture of Barbante, O’Neill and himself going into the funeral parlor. There had been a similar picture in the evening papers the night before and a tabloid had run a glaring headline on the third page under the picture, “Friends Honor Red Suicide.” Kitty was reading the New York Times, and the accompanying article was sober and conservative and full of “it is allegeds” and “It was reporteds.” The word Red was not used in the article and there was a pathetic, short list of the conductors and orchestras which had played Pokorny’s works in America. The Duluth Philharmonic Society, Archer read, the Santa Monica Symphony. The picture was just as bad, though, Archer decided, staring at it. He looked puffy and frightened and his hat was pulled down too far in front, making it seem almost as if he had been trying to disguise himself.

  He didn’t say anything about the article. He kissed Kitty’s face again, lightly, and she dropped her hand. He went around to his place and sat down and drank his orange juice.

  “Want part of the paper, darling?” Kitty asked.

  “No, thanks.” How wonderful it would be, he thought, to be some place where no paper reached you until it was six months old.

  He ate lightly, not relishing his food, eating out of habit, listening to the rustle of the paper as Kitty turned the pages to the advertisements for dresses.

  The phone rang. Kitty looked up, but Archer was on his feet. “I’ll answer it,” he said. “I’m finished anyway.”

  It was O’Neill. “Clem,” O’Neill said, his voice sounding urgent and baffled at the same time, “you’ve got to get up to the office right away.”

  “What’s the matter now?” Archer asked, sighing. “This is Friday and I have a million things to do.”

  “I’m sorry, Clem,” O’Neill said. “But you have to come. It’s Barbante. He’s here now and …”

  “What’s he doing up so early? Is he sick?”

  “He was waiting for me when I came in. He says he’s quitting. Today. You’ve got to talk to him.”

  Archer sighed again. “OK,” he said. “Hold him there. I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  He hung up and went back to the dining room. Kitty looked up at him questioningly.

  “I have to go uptown,” Archer said. Standing, he took a last sip of the coffee. It was cold.

  “Why?” Kitty asked.

  “Nothing important,” Archer said vaguely, starting out of the room. “Barbante is being foolish …”

  “Clement,” Kitty said quietly, “you’re going to remember what we talked about, aren’t you? I’m in on everything from now on …”

  “I remember,” Archer said. “You’re in on everything.” He smiled sourly. “You’ll probably be good and sorry.”

  “No, I won’t,” Kitty said. “Never for a minute.”

  “OK,” Archer said, waving, as he started out of the room, “you’ll get a full report each night at taps. Satisfied?” He grinned at her from the doorway.

  Kitty nodded. “Satisfied,” she said.

  Archer dressed quickly, putting on his overcoat as he ran down the outside steps to the street. He walked to the corner, looking for a cab. The newsstand on the corner had a fresh pile of newspapers, and after a moment’s hesitation, Archer bought a copy of the paper in which he had been attacked the day before. Might as well see what the bastard has to say about me today, he thought. Looking at the papers spread over the stand, with iron weights on them to keep them from being blown away by the wind, Archer realized that his name was prominent in every one of them. Five million people, he realized, smelling the faint aroma of fresh ink that came from the stand, are reading my name today. Clement Archer, Clement Archer, finally famous after a lifetime of obscurity, well known for one day at the age of forty-five, because of the death of a ninth-rate Viennese musician.

  There was a cab parked across the street at a hack stand and he was just about to hail it when another cab swerved in toward him and the driver opened the door. Archer got in and was about to give the driver the address when the driver of the parked cab jumped out of his machine and shouted belligerently across the street, “What’s going on here? What the hell do you think I park on this corner for? Why don’t you use the local people, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Stuff it, bud,” the driver of Archer’s cab shouted back. “You don’t own the streets.” He jerked in the gear shift and the cab spurted up the avenue. Archer looked but the back window. The other man was standing impotently in the gutter, waving his fist angrily, shouting unheard curses over the noise of the traffic. How can a man be so furious, Archer wondered, so early in the morning?

  He settled back in his seat and opened the newspaper to the page of columns. He saw his name in the first paragraph and took a deep breath. For a moment, he glanced out of the window at the crowded street.

  “Those hack-stand guys,” the driver said. “They think they own the cement. Just because they’re too lazy to cruise. I’ll tell you something. When I take a cab I make it a point never to take one from a stand.” The man had a harsh, angry New York voice and he drove the machine as though he had a grudge against it. He was a thin man with gray hair showing under his cap, uneven against his wrinkled neck.

  There ought to be a law, Archer thought, looking down at the newspaper which was shaking with the motion of the cab, to make all cab drivers keep their mouths shut while on duty. They’re worse than barbers.

  Today, he saw, the columnist had decided to be philosophically analytical about Archer. “What sort of man is it,” Archer read in the second paragraph, “who is chosen these days to do the dirty work for the yahoos of reaction?” Yahoos of reaction, Archer thought wearily, must they write like that?

  “The history of the insignificant hack, Clement Archer,” the piece went on, “is a neat case in point. We’ve done a little research on this frightened little man who tried to hush up the death of a great artist and there are some interesting facts that have come to light.”

  A great artist, Archer thought dully, staring at the page. Death has promoted Pokorny quickly.

  “A nondescript man who wandered from profession to profession,” the columnist continued, somehow making a change of jobs sound like a criminal offense, “Archer pretended, in private conversation at least, to be a liberal when it was fashionable and safe, only to jump to the other side at the first crack of his masters’ whip; Not content with sending a victim of Hitler’s to his grave, this fearful gentleman also lined himself up with the other racist heroes by firing that gifted and beloved Negro comedian, Stanley Atlas, as his very first obedient move. For anyone who happens to believe that Archer was forced into this action, we have absolute proof that Archer has an ironclad contract with the Hurt and Bookstaver Agency which puts ALL HIRING AND FIRING completely in his power.”

  Archer sighed. It was all so nearly true. He did have the contract, although he would have been fired and paid off if
he had attempted to enforce it, and naturally the columnist wouldn’t know about that and if he did would not mention it. And Atlas was gifted, and possibly beloved, especially by those who had never met him.

  “Hack-stand cabbies,” the driver said loudly, over the traffic turmoil. “They cost me thirty-six hundred dollars. I hate them all.”

  Archer kept quiet, hoping that the man would be discouraged. But he wasn’t. “I had a collision,” he went on, hunched angrily over his wheel. “With a trolley car. In Brooklyn. Right in front of a stand. Five cabs. The drivers all there, standing in front of the first cab beating their gums. The trolley was beating the light, those trolleys think the sun rises and sets on them, nobody else has a right to breathe. I was going with the green, and this God-damn trolley just plows into me. Wreckage. I was scattered for fifty yards. I was laid out in the street like icing. There wasn’t enough left of the cab to make a kiddie car. I was blood all over, if you want I could still show you some of the scars. They thought I was dead when the wagon came for me, the doctor was surprised I could breathe, he told me later. My own cab, all paid for. I was in traction eleven weeks and it was summertime, too. I thought my leg was going to drop off. The trolley company sent a man from the insurance, he made me an offer. Four hundred and fifty dollars. For the cab and the personal damages. I spit in his face. If I could’ve moved I’d have choked him with my bare hands.”

  The driver honked his horn and jerked the car fiercely, hurling it between two trucks. Occupied, he didn’t talk for several moments, and Archer went back to the column.

  “But timidity is this gentleman’s banner,” Archer read, “and he sails under the flag of surrender. He gave up being a teacher, he gave up being a writer, and he gave up being an artist, a liberal and a friend. I do not wish to be uncharitable. In 1942, I have learned, he was rejected by the Army. Since that time, he has taken up Yogi, trying to escape from his sense of failure in deep breathing, vegetarianism and half-baked mysticism. A fellow devotee of Indian culture, a man with whom Archer engages in the weird Oriental rites, is at the moment circulating an appeal for a million names in an effort to present to the UN a motion to outlaw all slaughter animals for food. This gentleman, whose name I am at present withholding to spare him embarrassment at his place of business has assured me that Mr. Archer shares his sentiments and has offer to add his name to the petition.”

  Archer felt himself beginning to sweat in the cold taxi, as read on. “Ordinarily,” the columnist went on, “these high jinx would be dismissed as the harmless if distasteful aberrations of foolish bookworm. But if the believer in Yogi and the crusade against meat suddenly turns up doing the sinister hatchet-work the Imperialist warlords, it is the duty of any honest journalist print the facts. The fact is that the man who was chosen to put the finger on honest and talented artists, is an unstable dabbler outlandish religions who was found unfit to serve his country time of war.”

  Archer dropped the paper to the floor, unable to read any more He felt dazed and helpless. Where did he get this information, Archer thought heavily. Who could have told him these sad and ludicrous secrets? Why does he want to print them? What did ever do to him to make him hate me this much?

  “So I went into court,” the cabbie said, glancing over his shoulder to fix Archer’s attention. “The lawyer said I had a open a shut case against the company. He subpoenaed the five cabbies as witnesses and we asked for a hundred thousand dollars. And what you think happened? You guessed it, brother. The company paid those five bastards. Gave them ten bucks a day to testify against me. I got balls. Eleven weeks in traction in the hospital and I’m still on a cane in the courtroom and I didn’t get the sweat off the judge’s left nut. In 1936. In Brooklyn. It convinced me,” the cabbie said powerfully. “Since that day I volunteer every chance I get for jury duty. I served nine times already. And every time a hand comes up in front of me, I give it to him between the eyes. No matter he’s right or he’s wrong, no matter if he got hit and got be his legs fractured by a truck going the wrong way on a one-way street—I find against him. With satisfaction. I hate every hackie who ever lived.”

  “Shut up,” Archer said thickly.

  “What’s that, brother?” The driver turned around in surprise.

  “I said shut up and drive. That’s all.”

  “Christ,” the driver said obscurely, “you’re one of those.” He mumbled for the rest of the trip, but not loud enough for Archer to hear him, and he didn’t say thank you, even though Archer gave him a quarter tip.

  Those are the people who read the newspapers, Archer thought, as he went into the huge gray building where O’Neill and Barbante were waiting for him. Those’re the people who make up the juries and hand out justice without fear or favor. God, what chance does a man have any more?

  Barbante was standing at the window of O’Neill’s office when Archer came in. The writer needed a shave and he looked as though he had slept in his suit. There were cigarette ashes on his jacket and he was playing with the Venetian blinds on the window, flicking them up and down in jittery, clicking little movements. O’Neill was seated at his desk, doggedly trying to read a script. They weren’t talking and it looked as though they had said everything they possibly could say to each other long ago.

  “Welcome,” said O’Neill grimly, “to Playland.” He stood up and made sure the door was closed.

  “Good morning, Dom,” said Archer quietly. On the way up in the elevator he had made a conscious effort to compose himself. I must behave, he had decided, as though that piece had never come out in the paper and as though no one had ever read it.

  “First of all, Clement,” Barbante faced slowly around from the window, “I want you to understand that I didn’t ask to have you come up here. You didn’t have to disturb yourself on my account.”

  “OK,” O’Neill said. “It was my idea. OK.”

  “I made up my mind,” Barbante said, his voice lacking its usual deep timbre and sounding with the first tones of age that Archer had ever noticed in the writer. “I made up my mind to quit last night at exactly ten forty-three in the men’s room of Twenty-One.”

  “Forgive me, boys,” Archer said, taking off his coat and throwing it over a chair. “I came in late and I don’t know the plot.”

  “I met Lloyd Hutt over a basin,” Barbante said flatly. “He was washing his hands and he was dressed in a becoming shade of blue and I made up my mind.”

  “What’re you talking about, Dom?” Archer asked, trying to be patient, wondering if Barbante had read the paper that morning.

  “He was leaning over, being sanitary, and he saw me in the mirror,” Barbante said, “and he said, ‘What the hell is the matter with you anyway, Barbante? I thought I told you to stay away from that funeral.’ ”

  “What?” Archer asked, puzzled. “Did he?”

  “It’s my fault,” O’Neill said. O’Neill looked stubborn and frightened, sitting behind his desk. “Hutt told me to pass the word around that he didn’t want anybody from the program to be seen at the funeral.”

  Archer took his eyes off Barbante and stared at O’Neill. “But you went yourself,” Archer said, feeling that there was a misunderstanding here that would never be unraveled.

  “So I did.” O’Neill sounded defensive.

  “I didn’t hear you tell anyone to stay away from the funeral.”

  “Didn’t you?” O’Neill asked flatly. “That’s queer. Because I never did say it.”

  “Insubordination,” Barbante said. “There will be a court-martial of trusted lieutenants in the morning for the crime of affection for the dead.”

  Archer began to understand and pity O’Neill and like him more than he had ever liked him before. “What the hell,” Archer said to Barbante, “you’re not going to quit because Hutt shot off his mouth a little, are you? You went, it’s over, Pokorny’s buried, at there’s nothing Hutt or anybody else can do about it.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m going to quit,” Barbante said in a curiou
s sing-song Archer suddenly realized that the man was drunk. “My golden type writer is withdrawn from the service.”

  “It’s breach of contract, Dom,” O’Neill said warningly. “And don’t think Hutt won’t use it against you. He’ll keep you from working anywhere else in radio, or maybe anywhere else in anything.”

  “I had a vision among the handbowls,” Barbante said. “I suddenly saw that I couldn’t live if I couldn’t go to funerals of my choice, if that’s the only way you can sell liniment and foot powder the days, I’m not interested any more.”

  “In a way,” O’Neill said pleadingly, “you can’t blame Hutt. He splitting a gut trying to save the program and it’s marked lousy in every paper in town this morning with all our pictures and Pokorny being called the Red composer of University Town and juicy excerpts from that bastard’s funeral oration in black type getting a big play from the hyenas. If I had known we were going to get a performance like that, I don’t think I would’ve gone, either.”

  “Emmet,” Barbante said gently, “don’t lie. Please—you did a nice thing—don’t piss on it now.”

  “I’m not lying,” O’Neill shouted. “I mean it. I went to say goodbye to a poor slob who’d had some bad breaks. I didn’t think I was going to May Day at the Kremlin.”

  “Save it,” Barbante said, “for your interview with Hurt. You’ll need every alibi you can lay your hands on.”

  “Oh, shut up,” O’Neill said. “I’m tired of you.”

  “Cut it out,” Archer said authoritatively. “We’re not going to get anywhere by yelling at each other. Dom,” he said, “I don’t want you to quit. We’re tottering as it is. There’s nobody else who can write this program at the moment and by the time we work in a new man, even if we can find one, we’ll be off the air. You’ll be responsible for putting fifty people out of work.”

  “Sorry, Clem,” Barbante said. “Every man for himself from here on in. Maybe next week there’ll be another funeral I’d want to attend that Hutt didn’t approve of. Maybe you’ll die, or my father, or Joe Stalin, and I’d get the itch to go even if Hutt thought it was bad for drugs.”