The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  A fat little woman in a sealskin coat came up to the closed door of the booth and stared accusingly at Archer, seated reflectively inside, with the phone on the hook. She stood very close, every hair on her coat impatient for conversation.

  Archer put a nickel in the slot and called Vic’s number.

  “Hello. Hello.” It was Nancy’s voice, and he could tell from the hurried tone that Nancy was busy with her children. She had a special way of answering the phone when the children were distracting her.

  “Hello, Nancy,” Archer said.

  “Clement.” Nancy’s voice was welcoming, as always, but he, could tell she was keeping a weather eye on a son. “How are you?”

  “Great,” Archer said. “Just great.” In the radio business, you got into the habit of saying that, even if you had just been told you had to have an operation, or if your wife had left you or you were suffering from the year’s most important hangover. “How’s young Clement?” he asked, remembering the night before.

  “Oh, Clement,” Nancy wailed, “he’s got the measles. And I’m watching Johnny like a hawk, waiting for spots to come out on him. And we have guests coming for dinner, and I don’t know what to do. Did you ever have measles, Clement?”

  “At the age of five. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No,” Nancy said. “And that’s what’s so awful. Vic didn’t. He’s never had anything. Clement, is it measles or mumps that make you impotent if you get them when you’re grownup?”

  Clement grinned in the phone booth. “I think it’s mumps.”

  “You’re not sure, though?”

  “No.”

  “I forgot to ask the doctor when he was here and now his nurse can’t get hold of him and I’ve got to know in time to warn off the people who’re coming to dinner, if it’s measles,” Nancy rushed on. “There’re four grown married men coming to dinner, and how would I feel if …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Is Vic there?”

  “No,” Nancy complained. “He rushed off. You know him when anyone’s sick. He despises them if they’re still sick after a half-hour. He was horrible to young Clement. Should I tell him to call you when he gets in?”

  “No,” Archer said carefully. “Never mind. It’s not important. Tell him I’ll give him a ring tomorrow.”

  “Young Clement wants to say something,” Nancy said. “Hold on. I’ll carry the phone in to him.”

  “Hi,” the childish, bold voice said over the phone, after a moment.

  “Hello, Clement,” Archer said. “Are you in bed?”

  “Yes,” the boy said. “I have spots. And I have fever. And Johnny can’t come into the room. He’s waiting for his spots. He can only talk to me from the door. I have a hundred and two. If you come here you can come in my room. You can tell me a story.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, Clem.”

  “OK. I have a new puzzle. I worked it four times already.”

  “You’re getting real smart, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I only have trouble with the yellow pieces. The doctor said I could have ice cream. Good-bye.” The boy banged the receiver down before Nancy could reach the phone.

  Archer was smiling as he came out of the booth and onto the street again. Somehow, as he walked, he felt less baffled and alone, because a small, yellow-haired boy with measles had invited him to come to the familiar sickroom and tell him a story while his brother waited at the door for his own spots to turn up. In a curious way, too, it made the whole situation seem less forbidding. Comfortingly, it seemed absurd to be accusing a man whose four-year-old son was in bed with such a homely disease and whose wife was worrying about whether her male dinner guests would be made impotent from exposure to an infant’s measles of plotting the overthrow of the Government of the United States by violence. Perhaps that was the true purpose of the everyday annoyances of life, to insulate us from the naked damage of theory.

  And young Clement was his namesake and godson and he had stood at the altar, holding the child as it was baptized, taking on the responsibility of its welfare if it ever became necessary … He remembered how touched he had been that day that Nancy and Vic, who by that time knew all about him, his weaknesses, his failures, had used his name for their second son.

  He had come to New York because Herres had made it possible.

  “Look, you’ve got to get out of here,” Herres had said the last night of a five-day visit during the Easter vacation, during the year following his graduation. He and Nancy had been in New York about eight months, and while Nancy so far had not landed anything, Herres was already doing fairly well on daytime radio shows. Neither of them had as yet been offered a part in a play. “If you stay on here at the college, hating it the way you do,” Herres had gone on earnestly, as they sat alone in Archer’s study, “you’re going to turn into a sour, garrulous, dried-out old orange by the time you’re forty.”

  Archer had smiled, nervously. “Don’t be hard on your old instructor,” he had said. “He has his own problems.”

  “You love New York,” Herres went on, simple, logical and young. “You hate this place, you hate teaching. Move on down. It’s not so tough.”

  Not so tough for you, Archer almost said, not so tough for the young and talented and beautiful and lucky. But he didn’t say it. “Have you thought about one interesting point?” he asked instead, trying to keep it light. “The little matter of keeping alive, and keeping a wife and child with good appetites alive at the same time?”

  “Nancy and I talked about it,” Herres said, “and we think it can be managed.”

  “How?”

  “Writing for radio,”

  Archer chuckled.

  “Don’t laugh. You never listen, you have no idea how easy it is. A two-headed Zulu could do it. As long as you can type fast enough, you have nothing to worry about. Look, Clement,” Herres said gravely, “I’ve talked to a couple of people about you already and they’re willing to read some of your stuff. You’ll make more money than you’ll ever make here, you’ll live in a city you like, you’ll be near us, and you’ll have a lot more time to work on anything of your own you really want to do. …”

  “I haven’t the faintest notion of where to begin,” Archer said, although the idea was already beginning to sound reasonable, attractive.

  “I’ll show you,” Herres said. “By now I’ve seen enough of them to qualify. Though for anyone with an IQ of over 70, it shouldn’t really take more than fifteen minutes. I have a lot of time on my hands, especially in the summer, and I’m available for a full course of instruction. …”

  “Ex-student pays election bet,” Archer said. “Teaches ex-teacher how to earn living in big city in only seventeen years.”

  “I tell you you can do it,” Herres said. “I guarantee. And if you need any dough for the move, my bankbook’s yours,” he added carelessly. “Pay me back out of the first million.”

  As it turned out, it took more than a thousand dollars out of Herres’ bankbook before Archer finally got started. And Herres, Archer knew, was far from rich. His father had died the year before and what small money had been left in the estate went to support Herres’ mother. But the money had been offered almost automatically, as though it was inconceivable that it should not be offered. To Archer, whose family had always been poor, the quick and generous proffering of money had always been the touchstone of friendship. “Either you’re prepared to put your money to a friend’s service, without a blink,” his father had said, reversing Polonius, “or do not invite the scoundrel to your house.”

  And it all had had the added charm of coming out well. Herres had persuaded the producer of a five-a-week serial to give Archer a trial, had tactfully coached him over the first three or four weeks, when the issue was in doubt, and had helped celebrate when Archer was signed to a twenty-six-week contract, at three hundred dollars a week. The program was about an immigrant girl with vague and secret royal connections in the old country, an equally vague stretch of territory somewhere
in Northern Europe, and required a steady flow of sentimental invention, as the young lady, with an uncertain accent, fought off seducers, temptations of all kinds, misunderstandings, brushes with the police brought about by the work of jealous older women, poverty, and a large assortment of diseases, many of them fatal everywhere else but on a noonday radio serial. It was murderously hard work for Archer. “My natural prose style,” he told Herres, “is something of a cross between Macaulay and the editorial page of the New York Times, and my idea of how people should behave in fiction comes mostly from James Joyce and Proust. And I never had Bright’s disease and I never tried to seduce a twenty-year-old immigrant, and I actually believe that the innocent always suffer and the evil always prosper in real life. So I can’t say I feel boyishly confident about my equipment on a Monday morning when I sit down and know I have to write five fifteen-minute heartbreaking episodes before Friday night. Still, I can be as sentimental as the next man on a six-month contract. I have a lovely idea for next week. Little Catherine (the name of the program was Young Catherine Jorgenson, Visitor from Abroad) is going to California and she’s going to get caught in an earthquake and be arrested for looting when she goes into a burning building to rescue an old miser in a wheelchair. Ought to be good for ten programs, what with the arrest, the examination by the police, the meeting with the cynical newspaper reporter who is reformed by her, and the trial.”

  He could joke about it when he was with Herres, but sitting alone in the narrow room at home, facing the typewriter, was another matter. He wrote frantically, then found himself staring blankly at the wall for days, hopeless and disgusted with himself. He began to drink too much, snapped at Kitty and Jane, had trouble with his stomach, slept badly and woke feeling listless and hot-eyed. He went to a stomach specialist who gave him pills, but told him they wouldn’t work and advised long vacations. He wrote his last play during this time, working heavily on the week-end on it, and then quit that.

  Then, when the war came, Herres had gone in early and had been sent out to a camp in Texas, and Nancy, now with an infant son, had gone to join him there. Catherine Jorgenson, the Visitor from Abroad, seemed worse than ever, with the disasters from the battlefields on every page of the newspaper. In 1943, Archer presented himself for enlistment, looking old and uncertain among the young men in the Sergeant’s office. He was not surprised when the Army rejected him, but when he went out of the office he felt defeated and useless. He had to drive himself to his typewriter and there was one morning when he sat staring at it without moving for two hours, then felt himself beginning to weep. He wept uncontrollably in the small, cluttered room, frightened, hoping that Kitty wouldn’t come in, wondering if he ever would be able to stop. He thought of going to a psychiatrist, but he was frightened of that, too. What would a psychiatrist say? he asked himself defensively. Find more congenial work, take Seconal at night, tell me if you hated your father, win the war … Besides, he couldn’t afford a psychiatrist.

  The letter from Vic, in Texas, came soon after that. “Nancy and I have been worrying about you,” Vic wrote, “in between field problems. Before we left you were showing signs of radio-writer’s disease. In engineering it’s called metal-fatigue. When there’s been too much strain for too long a time on a piece of steel, the molecules rearrange themselves, and whoops! there goes the bridge. We don’t want your molecules rearranged, please. We want you to be nice and sound and ready to support us when I come home waving my bloody stumps and telling everybody how I won the war. So we applied ourselves to the problem. ‘What job is there in radio,’ we asked ourselves, ‘that entails absolutely no strain on the brain?’ One minute later, we came up with the answer. ‘Director!’ And, naturally, directors get paid more than anyone else, too. Actually, it was Nancy’s idea, and I kissed her for you and told her she was a bright girl, even if she was a second lieutenant’s wife. I took the liberty of writing about you to a man I know, name of Hutt, dreary man, but with a lot of jobs in his pocket. Hutt and Bookstaver. You know the bastards. I gave him pitch number one, how sensitive you were, how intelligent, how cleverly you handle people, other interesting inventions. He’s a muck-a-muck in the OWI, but he gets up to New York from Washington at least once a week to count his money, and he’ll expect your call. Don’t wear your Phi Beta Kappa key when you go to see him. He’s a big man for the common touch. If you get the job send me a can of Spam as my commission. Notice the APO number at the bottom of this letter. The Army is arranging for me to travel. I never felt so kindly disposed to Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Japanese in all my life.

  Dig in, men, the bastards are using live ammunition. Love, Vic.”

  When Archer got the job, at more money than he had ever made before, he bought a pair of topaz earrings and sent them to Nancy, because Nancy had pretty ears and wore rings in them whenever she could. He took to the work easily and got a raise and a more important show six months later and after awhile he forgot that there ever was a morning when he had sat before his typewriter and wept.

  The noise of an automobile horn made him jump. He blinked and looked around him. He had been walking aimlessly and automatically and he saw that he had wandered over to Fifty-third Street. The entrance to the subway was across the street and he decided to go home. He bought a newspaper and went down the subway steps.

  As the train moaned along the tunnel, he looked through the paper. In Washington congressmen were accusing people high in the government of treason and espionage in favor of Russia. In Europe and Asia, trials were being conducted against dozens of men who were said to be spying for the United States. In various places the execution of traitors was announced. Treachery was widespread on this winter day and you could be hanged or jailed or deported or denounced in many localities. Perjury, also, was general. In the second section there was an article quoting a City Commissioner who had said that all sirens should be taken off fire engines, police cars and ambulances, so that when the people of the city heard a siren it would mean only that enemy planes were approaching and the citizens must prepare to be bombed. Peace, the Commissioner said, would slide into war at a speed greater than the speed of sound. Archer turned to the sports page. A prizefighter had been killed the night before, in the eighth round. Sport, too, was betrayed, death paying the amusement tax. The subway, Archer thought, was the only place to read today’s newspapers. Underground, in a bad light, at a raised fare, with all the riders fearing the worst about each other. Everyone suspecting the man next to him of preparing to pick a pocket, commit a nuisance, carry a lighted cigar, pinch a girl, ask for a job, run for a vacant seat, block the door at the station at which you wanted to leave the train. Archer put the paper down and looked around at his fellow passengers. They do not look American, he thought; perhaps I shall report them to the proper authorities.

  At Fourth Street, Archer got out. People were buying candy and flowers and long loaves of French bread. Across the street, in front of the women’s prison, a police van was unloading a batch of prostitutes. Everything was normal on Sixth Avenue, now called the Avenue of the Americas, although a report had just come out in which it was stated that several of the countries for which the avenue had been named were plotting invasion of several other good neighbors. A thin tree, which had been planted in the concrete by Mayor LaGuardia, since dead, waited for spring among the cold gasoline fumes, its buds closed and secret and admitting nothing. The heads of families bought newspapers on the corners, folding them under their arms, dutifully taking the poison home to be distributed equitably among the generations. There was the smell of Italian cooking from a restaurant garlic on the foreign air. In Italy, there were riots and ceremonial funerals for the victims of the police, and the Pope mourned publicly for convicted priests to the north and east. A girl in black slacks came out of a drugstore, having just had breakfast at four-thirty in the afternoon. She looked sleepy and as though she were going back to her room and her unmade bed to wait for the telephone to ring. There was a narrow rift in the c
louds to the west and the sun appeared there in the green and red sky, falling fast, and making the building fronts look like water colors. The city trembled on the brink of evening, waiting for the first drink.

  How is it, Archer thought, walking slowly, that we do not all commit suicide?

  6

  STANDING IN FRONT OF THE DOOR TO HIS HOUSE, ARCHER HESITATED. Uncertain at his doorstep, he knew he had to decide, now, whether or not he was going to tell Kitty what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.

  At another time, there would have been no question about it. He’d have told Kitty exactly how matters stood and gone to her for comfort and advice. But Kitty had had a very bad time for the first three months of her pregnancy and the doctor had privately warned Archer that there was danger both that Kitty might lose the child prematurely and that the birth, if the pregnancy went the full period, might be very hard. He had warned Archer that Kitty was not to overtax herself physically and to be disturbed as little as possible emotionally for the next few months. Archer had smiled wryly at the doctor’s naive faith that a mere husband could keep a grown woman serene in the middle of the twentieth century, but Kitty, surprisingly, had accomplished serenity by herself. She had been sick in the beginning and her face had become bony and exhausted, but after the third month she had retreated, out of some instinctive sense of self-preservation, into an artificial and beneficial childishness. She had refused to see people who were any drain on her, had stayed in bed most of the time, attaching herself almost solely to Archer, but being playful and easily moved to tears and laughter, like a little girl, and avoiding talking to him about anything serious or unpleasant. Archer understood that Kitty was protecting herself and her unborn child by purposely drifting away from the adult woman of thirty-eight she really was into a warm, artificially reconstructed, self-pampered adolescence. And Archer had gone along with it and noticed with satisfaction that it had worked. She was blooming now, full-fleshed, healthy and in high spirits. When she had the baby, Archer did not doubt she would return to her real self, as mature and reliable as ever.