The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  Poor Alice, Archer thought, sitting out there in the middle of the room, dowdy, inefficient, remembering that it was Frances herself who had trapped her into sponsoring the congress, knowing that in the spate of accusations no one would take the time to ask her for the accurate history of the affair or even listen to her explanations. Probably, Archer thought, staring fascinated at the slender fashionable figure five feet away from him, probably by now Frances doesn’t even remember it or has come to believe she was in no way involved with it.

  “I have also seen the photostat copy of that particular check,” Frances was saying. She laughed, a high, jumpy giggle. Somehow, that short, almost-deranged burst of disconnected laughter made Frances seem more dangerous than ever. A woman who laughs like that, at a time like this, Archer thought, is beyond reach.

  “And on the day before Mr. Pokorny, who did the music for Mr. Archer’s show, was scheduled to go down to answer charges that he had perjured himself to enter this country from Mexico,” Frances said, “Mr. Archer took Mr. Pokorny to his bank and withdrew two hundred dollars from his account and handed it over to Mr. Pokorny. And I have seen a sworn affidavit from the teller in the bank to this effect.”

  Archer closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to look at the pretty, triumphant, expensive figure on the platform any more. And I thought they were only tapping my phone, he thought, only my phone.

  “Mr. Pokorny,” Frances said, “in case anyone here is in doubt, was an admitted member of the Austrian Communist Party and was married to a high-ranking official of the American Communist Party and was due to be deported by this Government as an undesirable alien and if anyone wishes proof of any of these things I am prepared to furnish it.”

  Unlucky Pokorny, lying in the crowded Long Island cemetery, Archer thought, he will be forever remembered not by his excellent modest music but by his shabby brush with the officials of the Immigration Department and by his connection with his impossible wife.

  “Isn’t it strange,” Frances asked, her voice mischievous, almost coquetting, “that Mr. Archer, who has told you so righteously that he is opposed to Communists, should confine his charitable impulses so strictly to ladies and gentlemen who are, to put it as delicately as possible, so far to the left of center?”

  Archer opened his eyes, feeling himself begin to sweat. The Red Cross, he thought dazedly, the Community Chest, the Urban League, should I tell them about the checks to them? And will anybody listen?

  “What’s more,” Frances moved away from the lectern, going downstage to be closer to her audience for the big scene, “Mr. Archer, in his attempt to keep his friends snugly placed on his program, took the trouble to go down to Philadelphia and vouch to the sponsor of the program that Mr. Victor Herres, whom he has known intimately for fifteen years, is not a Communist, pledging this on his honor. This was very loyal and comradely and had the desired effect. To this day, Vic Herres has not missed a single program. Unfortunately, this charming guarantee was not true. I know it,” Frances said, “and eight or nine of you in this room know it. And we know it for a very simple reason. We know it because Vic Herres was the leader of the Communist cell to which we all belonged.” Again there was that high, disturbing giggle. “Those of us who were privileged to know these two gentlemen,” Frances said softly, “know that they took great pleasure in each other’s company and were seen together almost daily. I will not try to examine here the probability that a grown, intelligent man, a man who has taught history at a college, would not understand the politics of a friend whom he has seen almost every day for fifteen years.”

  Vic, Archer thought, Vic. Why wasn’t he here tonight? Did he know she was going to say these things? Is that why?

  There was a stir in the back of the room and Archer saw Kitty standing up and moving, head bent, eyes down, awkward and unsteady, toward the door. He wanted to call to her, cry, “Don’t go, dearest, don’t leave now …” But Kitty never looked back. She went out, the door sliding silently shut behind her, only Nancy, from across the room, looking up and noticing her exit.

  Where is she going tonight? Archer thought wildly. Will I ever see her again?

  “A good friend of mine,” Frances said into the aching silence of the room, “who is interested in these matters has given me all this information …”

  Who? Archer wondered desperately. O’Neill? Hutt? Miss Walsh? Old man Sandler? An FBI agent? Vic? Vic?

  “There is just one more tasty little nugget,” Frances said, “that I think you ought to know about. Mr. Archer, who has assured us that he is such a staunch democrat and patriot, in 1946 sighed his name to a nominating petition for a Communist candidate for the State Legislature and I have seen the petition and I can produce a copy of it for any one of you who wishes to see it with his own eyes.”

  Archer shook his head slowly, as though to clear it. For a moment he almost believed her, almost believed he had signed what she said he’d signed, acted for the motives she described, plotted as cunningly as she charged.

  “In the light of all this,” Frances said challengingly, “it may strike some of you as queer that the Communists have chosen to attack the man who has fought so well for them. Mr. Roberts, who is sitting there in the third row, smiling up at me, and who so faithfully writes what he is told, has said some very harsh things about Mr. Archer. And Mr. Lewis …” She turned and bowed pleasantly in Lewis’s direction. “Mr. Lewis, who I am happy to acknowledge as a former colleague of mine, continued the attack on this platform tonight.”

  Lewis, who had his legs crossed, recrossed them and stared expressionlessly out at the audience.

  “It is a very clever tactic,” Frances” said, “and one worthy of the people who engineered it. By accusing him themselves, the Communists cleared Mr. Archer of suspicion, giving a great deal more weight to his arguments in their behalf.”

  Oh, God, Archer thought, weirdly amused despite himself. We have reached that stage now. If you are praised you’re guilty, if you have been attacked, you’re more guilty. Suddenly he stood up. He couldn’t tolerate the hot, close room any more, or the trained, sensual, flickering voice. Ponderously, moving carefully, conscious that everyone was watching him intently, Archer stepped down from the platform, and not looking at anyone in the room, walked down the, center aisle to the door. He went through the door, closing it politely behind him.

  He got his coat, remembering to tip the attendant, to whom weddings, reunions and meetings in which people were destroyed forever merely meant a certain number of quarters in the saucer on the small table in front of the cloakroom.

  It was cooler out in the corridor where Archer waited for the elevator and he could feel the sweat that had run down from his armpits grow cold under his shirt. There were women’s steps behind him, hurried and vaguely familiar, but he didn’t turn around.

  “Clement,” Nancy said, “do you mind if I go with you?”

  Archer looked at her. Her face was strained and flushed, and she was fighting to keep her lips from quivering. There was a smell of liquor on her breath, mingling with her perfume. He took her arm and helped her into the elevator when it came.

  24

  OUTSIDE THE HOTEL, THEY WALKED EAST TOWARD THE RIVER ALONG THE cold, deserted street. They didn’t talk for a long time. They crossed several avenues, waiting for taxis that rushed past them, taking people to night clubs. They reached a block with bare trees shaking uneasily in the wind and Archer felt that it was familiar and that he should remember some significant fact about these rows of pleasant houses. Then he realized that it was the street on which Frances Motherwell lived and he remembered the long climb up the steps to her apartment, and the striped draperies and the blobby modern painting and the chocolate walls and Frances telling him about the boy in the Air Force who went to bed with an English girl after dancing with Frances and pretended he had Frances in his arms. Archer also remembered the other boy who had died. Saint Hank, he remembered, from California, who had made a Communist of her and wh
o could be held responsible, in the military cemetery in Metz, for what had happened tonight.

  “She’s crazy, you know,” Archer said. “She’s going to wind up making speeches to the other inmates about visions of the dead and about how the guards rape her every Tuesday night.”

  They walked in silence again, crossing still another avenue, where whores walked their dogs, avoiding policemen, looking for the winter trade.

  “Vic didn’t come tonight, did he?” Archer asked in the darkness, midway between one lamppost and the next. “I looked, but I didn’t see him.”

  “No,” Nancy said gently. “He didn’t come. I don’t know where he is. He started to get drunk about six o’clock and all of a sudden he just put on his coat and went out.”

  Archer nodded. He could feel Nancy’s hand light on his arm. “Nancy,” he said flatly, “am I in love with you? Are you in love with me? Were you ever?”

  Nancy didn’t answer for a long time. “I suppose so,” she said wearily. “For a moment or two here and there through the years. I suppose there have been times when I wanted to be with you, when I thought that if I said the proper word, you would tell me you wanted me.”

  Archer nodded. “That’s what Kitty told me this afternoon,” he said. Every charge, he thought despairingly, can be proved to be almost true.

  “It’s not strange,” Nancy said. “If a man and a woman see each other so often, if they admire each other, they can’t help speculating how it would be, and half-want it, almost tell themselves they should reach out for it. I wouldn’t ever do anything about it, and I know you wouldn’t either, and I knew it would pass over quickly. The imagination finally invents every possible situation, I guess. You can’t help it and most of the time it doesn’t do any harm. Kitty hates me, doesn’t she?”

  “That’s what she said this afternoon.”

  “What do you think she’ll say tomorrow afternoon?” Nancy’s voice had a sharp edge of bitterness now.

  “Nancy …”

  “Yes?”

  “Did Vic know what Motherwell was going to say tonight? Is that why he wouldn’t come?”

  There was a tiny pause. “No,” Nancy said, and her voice was so low that Archer could hardly hear her. “That wasn’t why he didn’t come.”

  “Nancy …”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? What that girl said?”

  Again there was the pause. “Yes,” Nancy whispered. “It’s true.”

  They crossed under the el. Far off, a train made a small wandering, diminishing noise, going downtown over the lighted bars and the locked shops.

  “I’ve argued with him and argued with him,” Nancy said tonelessly. “It doesn’t do any good. I’ve never won an argument from him yet, except the time I insisted on coming to New York. I don’t have any hope for him, Clement, and you shouldn’t either. I love him and I think I would throw myself off the bridge if he left me, but I don’t have any hope for him.”

  They were walking past garages now, bleakly lighted, and cluttered antique shops. Before she was pregnant, Archer remembered, Kitty spent many afternoons in this neighborhood, to come home excited about the purchase of a Norman commode or a pair of gilt sconces.

  “Do you want to know why Vic got drunk and didn’t show up at the meeting?” Nancy asked harshly.

  “If you want to tell me.”

  “I want to tell you,” Nancy said. “It’s about time you knew all about your friend Victor.”

  “Maybe I know enough,” Archer said.

  “You don’t,” Nancy said. “And you deserve to know the whole thing. There was a conference this afternoon at our house. To decide how this meeting tonight was to be handled. They always do that. They always plan everything out. Frances Motherwell was there and Marvin Lewis and that Roberts, that columnist—and some others. Do you want to hear their names?”

  “No,” Archer said, feeling that he didn’t want to hear anything more, but knowing that he couldn’t stop Nancy now.

  “I eavesdropped,” Nancy said. “After nine years of meetings I finally eavesdropped on one of them. I’ve been fighting with Vic so much about what they’ve been doing to you, I decided I had to hear just what went on. I couldn’t hear everything. But I heard enough. Enough. You know, it was Vic who told Roberts all that stuff about you—about the terms of your contract and the Army and that silly Yogi thing that made you look so foolish.”

  Archer stared down the dark street. A pair of headlights was coming slowly toward them. “Why?” he asked. “Why did he want to do that?”

  “Why?” Nancy repeated violently. “Why? Because he’s fanatic, because he would sacrifice me and Johnny and young Clem and himself and anybody else if he was told it was for the cause, because he’s out of his mind, because he thinks he’s so reasonable and a reasonable man gives up little things like a friend or a wife for the future of the world. Because they decided you were a convenient point of attack. You were vulnerable and you couldn’t fight back very hard because you weren’t important and because they could ring in the Jews and the Negroes neat and easy around you, and because you were the one who went and told Pokorny he was fired and he killed himself and people pitied him. And they figured your program was really finished no matter what happened, anyway. And they knew what sort of man you were and they knew that you wouldn’t let it make any difference, that you’d still fight their battle for them just the same. You were perfect for them and your good friend Vic is so God-damn logical and disciplined and cold as ice. I’ll tell you something you don’t know about your friend. When that man was arrested for giving away atomic secrets to the Russians, he said he would do the same thing if he had the chance. I tried to warn you about going to this meeting tonight, but then I didn’t have the guts and then Kitty came in just when …” Nancy stopped. She was crying and she couldn’t talk through her sobs. Archer put his arms around her and for a moment they stood that way, under the light of a lamppost, looking like two lovers saying good night before parting in the dark winter night.

  “Then, after those people left the house this afternoon,” she said, fighting down her sobs, “I told him he had to go to you and warn you not to speak tonight, not to come. We had a terrible fight and I said a lot of the things I’m saying now. He yelled at me and he said he should have married someone like Frances Motherwell.” Suddenly she began to laugh. She laughed louder and louder, shaking in his arms, the tears gleaming on her cheeks. “Oh, God, I wish he had been there for that performance tonight! His sainted Motherwell, spilling everything she knew, and a lot of things she never knew, at the top of her pretty voice, after sitting there so hot and revolutionary and such a fine, upstanding conspirator all afternoon! Oh, God, it would have been almost worth it just to see his face as it came tumbling out!”

  Then she began to sob again. Archer held her, feeling lonely and helpless and blank, feeling that many years had gone past without profit.

  “Don’t see him again, Clement, dear,” Nancy whispered up into his face, close to him. “Forget him. Write him off. Don’t see me. Wipe us all out. Please.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Slowly, the sobs stopped and Nancy pulled away. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, like a little girl. “I’m going to go and look for him,” she said quietly, “and bring him home and put him to bed and hold him in my arms and comfort him, because he’ll never be happy again as long as he lives.”

  She turned and started running toward the distant avenue, a small, surprisingly nimble figure in a fur coat, running with a quick, urgent clatter of high heels on the cold pavement, running past the shabby stone houses shut against night and winter and betrayal.

  Archer watched the figure growing smaller and smaller and saw her hail a taxi at the corner and get in. Then the taxi spurted across the intersection, with the red light shining intense and useless against traffic that would not appear on the streets for seven more hours. Then the taxi was gone and Archer never s
aw Nancy again.

  He walked back to Third Avenue and got a taxi under the el and sat in the back, carefully not thinking about anything, until he got home.

  When he opened the front door, he saw Kitty’s coat thrown across a chair. He heard someone moving around in his study and he went in. Jane was there, walking slowly back and forth in front of the window, smoking a cigarette. She had never smoked in the house before and for a moment, before he spoke to her, Archer wondered what the innovation meant.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said. “What’re you doing home?”

  Jane wheeled around as though he had frightened her. “Oh,” she said. “Daddy.” Her voice was flat and without, spirit and she seemed to realize it herself because she threw away the cigarette and made herself smile and said, “People’re beginning to arrive at all hours in this house, aren’t they? Mother just got in, too.” She came over and kissed him. She held him just a little tighter and a little longer than ordinarily before she stepped back.

  Archer scrutinized her. She seemed tired and there was a mottled look to the skin under her eyes. “What’s up, Jane?” Archer asked, seating himself. “I thought you were going away for the week-end.”

  “Oh.” Jane shrugged and went back to the window and Archer had the feeling that she was trying to keep her face turned from him as much as she could. “I changed my mind. Week-ends in the winter get to be a bore in the country.”

  “Come on, baby,” Archer said gently. “What hurts?”

  “Nothing hurts,” Jane said. Then she smiled. “OK, something hurts a little. Man by the name of Barbante went off and got himself married today.”

  “Oh,” Archer said noncommittally. “He told me he had something like that on his mind. I thought he was drunk.”

  “He wasn’t drunk,” Jane said ruefully. “He married a twenty-eight-year-old lady he’s known since the end of the war.” For a moment, Jane’s lips trembled, but she bent over to light a cigarette, and when she raised her head again, her mouth was under control. “He’s a funny man,” she said lightly. “He took the trouble to send me a lot of letters up there at school this last month. Seventeen letters,” she said with childish precision.