The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  Vic went over to the telephone at the desk. He picked it up and dialed swiftly and carelessly. In the middle of the process, a strange expression came over Vic’s face. He listened intently, holding the instrument close to his ear, his eyes downcast and serious. Briefly he glanced at Archer and opened his mouth, as though he wanted to say something. But the phone was answered before the words came out.

  “Hello,” Vic said into the phone. “Clem? How’re things?” He held the phone a little away from his ear and Archer could hear the high, shrill, excited voice of the child at the other end of the line. “That’s good,” Vic said. “How was the lamb chop? Nice and rare? That’s it. Never let them get away with it. The world is full of people who’ll try to cook a man’s lamb chop to death if you’re not careful. Apple sauce, too. Oh, that sounds delicious. That’s just what I’m going to have for dinner, myself. Have you been nice to Johnny and Miss Tully? Remember, I’m depending on you, Clem.” Vic smiled gravely into the phone at the boy’s answer. “OK, son. I’ll tell her. Good night. I’ll be home early. No, not that early. I’ll read to you tomorrow night. Tell Johnny I said to behave himself. Cheers.” He put the phone down slowly, staring at it. “Ever since Saturday afternoon,” Vic said to Archer, “he insists that everybody say ‘Cheers’ to him at least once every fifteen minutes.” Vic didn’t move away from the desk. “Clement,” he said, “did you know your phone was tapped?”

  Archer was staring at the evening paper on his lap. He looked up. “What was that?”

  “Your phone is tapped,” Vic said. “Did you know it?”

  “What?” Archer said dazedly.

  “Your phone is …”

  “Yes. Yes. I heard you.” Archer stood up and went over to the desk. He looked down stupidly at the black plastic instrument with the white divided dial. 1, ABC 2, DEF 3, 0, at the end, all by itself, to call the Operator. “No, I didn’t know. How do you know?” He looked sharply at Vic to see if he was joking.

  Vic wasn’t joking. “During the war,” he said, “I had a friend in the OSS. They showed him how to recognize it by the tone. He let me listen in on a telephone booth in Washington that was tapped. In a restaurant frequented by certain gentlemen from governments in exile.”

  Archer looked down incredulously at the innocent-seeming piece of machinery, no different from ten million others all over the country. He picked it up and listened. It sounded like every other telephone he had ever put to his ear.

  “Dial a few numbers,” Vic said in a low voice. “You’ll hear a kind of echo after each click.”

  Archer hesitated a moment. Then he dialed four times, at random. The echo was there. He put the phone down. His first emotion was anger. “God damn it,” he said. “God damn it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Vic said carelessly. “There’re probably fifty thousand taps on at this minute in this country. Maybe a million. You’ve got a lot of company. Tribal custom of the people.”

  “Who does it?” Archer asked. He was surprised at the thickness of his voice and the difficulty with which he formed the words. “Who the hell does it?”

  Vic shrugged. “The FBI, most likely. They’re busy little boys.”

  “You mean to say they have a man sitting somewhere all day and all night just listening to my phone?” Ludicrously, as he said it, he thought of the money it would cost the Government, three shifts a day, three men, with a fourth one for relief. How much did an FBI agent get? Four thousand, five thousand a year? Multiplied by four.

  “No,” Vic said. “I don’t imagine so. They have recording sets. It all goes onto wax and somebody collects them and listens at his leisure.”

  Helplessly, Archer thought of a hard-faced young man in a slouch hat, like the ones you see in the movies, sitting alertly in an official-looking room, listening to Kitty ordering roast beef and lettuce from the market; to Gloria, in the slack part of the day, calling her niece in Harlem, complaining about finding Mr. Archer’s pipe ashes all over the tables; to Jane agreeing to attend a football game with Bruce and going over the date the next day with her best friend, giggling icily and heartlessly about the transparency of the male sex; to Archer talking to O’Neill, asking him if he had a hangover, too, after the last night’s drinks at Louis’ bar. And to what other invitations, purchases, secrets, expressions of hope, of weariness, weakness, intimacies?

  “Why do they do it?” Archer asked stupidly. “What’s it for?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Vic said soberly. “You’d have to tell me.”

  Archer stared at his friend. Is he suspicious, too, he wondered. “How about your phone?” he demanded. “Is that tapped, too?”

  Vic rubbed the edge of his jaw. “No,” he said.

  “What does a man do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Vic said gently. “Absolutely nothing.” He looked across at Archer, smiling. It was a strange, rather unpleasant smile.

  “Is there something to be done? Isn’t there someone to see? To explain …?”

  “Write a letter to the New York Times.” Vic grinned crookedly. “Establish radio silence. Move to an island …”

  There was the sound of footsteps descending the stairs, and the mingled voices of Nancy and Kitty. Archer jerked his head around toward the door. Then he swung back, just before the women entered the room. He shook his head warningly. Vic nodded, and Archer knew he wouldn’t say anything about the phone in front of Kitty.

  “Both you boys dead drunk by this time?” Nancy asked.

  “Just about,” Vic said. “Kitty, you look glorious.”

  “I’m glad to see you like fat girls,” Kitty said. She did look beautiful. Her skin was plumped out by her pregnancy, silky and unlined, and her throat looked full and warm as it swept down into the low V of her silk jacket. Her eyes were bright and unshadowed and Archer could tell that she was prepared for joy and triumph as she sat in the audience watching her pretty and talented daughter add glory to the honor of the family that night.

  “Vic,” Nancy said, “I think we’ll have to have another baby. Purely as a cosmetic measure. I want to look like that, too.”

  “Sure,” Vic said. “I’ll ask the boss for a raise for breeding purposes.”

  It all seemed unreal and distant to Archer. Was there a dictaphone hidden in the room, too, he wondered, along with the betrayed telephone? Why not? What would an FBI agent deduce from this conversation? That they were vulgar people, irreverent in the face of Motherhood, and by inference equally unreliable in their attitude toward other capitalized words? Patriotism, Loyalty, the Constitution? He shook his head. Kitty was saying something, and he hadn’t heard.

  “What’s the matter, Clement?” she repeated, staring at him. “You’re miles away. Are you worried about something?”

  “He’s a dreamer of dreams,” Vic said. “He is seeing beauties that are not of this world.”

  “I am dreaming of dinner,” Archer said. “I had a light lunch.” He shook himself slightly and said, “Let’s go,” and they went out in a bustle of fur coats and scarves.

  The auditorium was full and the audience, composed of parents and friends, was indulgent and friendly, laughing heartily at the familiar humor of the play, the loud ex-football hero, the young campus intellectual, the abstracted but upright English professor, the belated flirtatiousness of the professor’s wife confronted with her ex-beau, the meek wisdom of the dean attempting to steer a humorous and respectable course between the roaring demands of the trustees and the principles of academic freedom. The play was all about the trouble the unpolitical English professor gets into by announcing that he is going to read as a model of English composition the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, written before his execution. It was a curious device to use as a basis for a farce, but, watching it from his seat next to Nancy, Archer realized how cleverly the authors had done it, avoiding tragedy yet not vulgarizing the document itself or the principles involved, comfortably assuring the audience by little deft strokes that all would in th
e end turn out well, that the ex-football player for all his bluster was a thoroughly good sort, that the Dean, when forced to a decision, would behave admirably, however much he might sigh over his dilemma, that the trustee would see the light, that no one would be expelled, no one fired, that the wife would return to her husband and the young girl settle with the bright if somewhat radical young man, that all men were decent and susceptible to reason because the playwrights themselves were transparently decent and reasonable men. No wires were tapped and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not mentioned at any point during the evening.

  Listening to the amusing lines that came across the footlights, laughing with the rest of the audience, Archer felt a nostalgia come over him for the lost, rueful academic world of the play, in which loud-mouthed trustee hundred-percent Americans and callow radical intellectuals could all be treated with the same gentle humor, with forgiveness and delight. When had the play been written? 1938? 1939? Where had that world gone? What would happen if the play had been written this year? Would it be stormed, denounced, investigated, picketed? And who would be right this year … the gentle and witty playwrights or the bitter picketers and investigators? Archer knew that as recently as two weeks ago he would have answered that question automatically.

  Now … seated among five hundred smiling, agreeable-faced people, charmed by the reflection of their own humanity and modest idealism which came from the stage, comfortable and seemingly oblivious to the threats that were hanging over them—now, Archer didn’t know. This is a play, he thought, to be regarded as a historical costume piece, in which the characters are dressed in quaint and admirable moral clothing which no longer is in fashion today. The hand-made moral garment, fashioned to fit the individual man and sewn with a patient, fine seam, Archer thought, remembering Teague, is being pushed off the market by massacre and improved machinery, to be replaced by the standard garment, stiff and padded to cover with an anonymous, uniform, mass-produced garment all personal flaws and beauties. He wondered what the people around him would say if they knew that the father of the pretty young girl assiduously attempting to appear thirty years old on the stage was suspected of treason by the Government and that if any member of the audience called him on the telephone to invite him to dinner the invitation would be overheard, checked and filed against the possibility of future disorders by the police power of the State.

  Archer shook his head, unwilling to wander off once more into these reflections, which had made him suspiciously silent on the ride up to the college and at the dinner table. He made himself pay attention to the stage and regard his daughter critically, so that he could speak intelligently about her performance later on.

  Jane was surprisingly good. Listening to her go over her lines in the living room on Sunday he had felt indulgently that she was gauche and coltishly amateurish. But here, prettily made up, enjoying herself under the lights, warmed by the laughter which greeted her, and surrounded by people of her own age who, if anything, had considerably less talent than she, Jane was attractive and convincing. Even if I weren’t her father, he thought defensively, I’d be impressed. And there’s no doubt about it, by the most stringent objective standards, she’s awfully pretty. She had put her hair up to give her age, and the high heels she wore made her legs seem more slender and someone had had the good sense to pick out a dress for her that lent her robust young figure a graceful maturity for the evening.

  Archer glanced at Nancy, seated beside him. She was sitting back in her chair, her face, in the light reflected from the stage, curiously hungry and intent. She was not smiling as were the other members of the audience and her attention was so directed to the stage that she didn’t notice Archer’s long stare of inspection. What is it in her face? Archer wondered. Disappointment, regret, sorrow for opportunities that have long ago vanished? Does she see herself in Jane, very young, very serious, acclaimed, full of limitless hopes for the future? Does she remember the excitement of the nights when she, too, performed to applause and laughter, and told a young man that she wouldn’t marry him, wouldn’t even become engaged to him because she had a career to make in the theatre in New York? Is she going over in her head, Archer wondered, the claims of love, the blunting of ambition, the arrival of children, the slow submersion of herself in the career of the handsome man two seats away from her, the man who, fifteen years before, had picked his life work with confident haste, merely to be close to her? Was that hungry, drawn face hiding uneasy speculations on the tricks of life, on the subtle work of accident, on the sickening passage of time, on the penalties of love which come disguised as gifts and pleasures? As Nancy watched her friends’ daughter delightedly sweep through the amber lights, was she saying torturedly to herself, “What did I do? What happened to me?”

  Finally, Nancy realized that Archer was staring at her and had been for some time. She turned her head slowly from the stage, as though she hated to miss a single movement there. There were tears in her eyes, trembling and unshed. She put out her hand and Archer held it on the arm of the chair between them. She gripped his hand hard before she turned her eyes back to the stage.

  Archer felt that he had known her forever, that he understood her completely. He would have liked to kiss her to show her that he pitied her and loved her.

  When the play was over they all went back to Jane’s dressing room to congratulate her. There were flowers and several telegrams, stuck professionally on the side of the mirror, and Jane was dabbing happily at her makeup with cold-cream, trying not to smile too widely when her parents and Vic and Nancy came into the room.

  “Don’t kiss me,” she said, as Kitty embraced her, “you’ll get all smeary.”

  “This evening,” Vic said solemnly, “it is the pleasure of your reporter to tell you that he was present at that rarest of theatrical experiences—the revelation of a new tragic genius …”

  “Oh, Vic,” Jane said, giggling, “don’t be insufferable.”

  “With all the mature passion of a great artist of thirty,” Vic recited, “Miss Archer dominated the stage at every turn. Beautiful, with a wide, serene brow which reflects an ageless and noble melancholy of spirit, Miss Archer held a fashionable and critical audience in the palm of her long, white hands. To our utter amazement, we learned in the dressing room, where we went to pay homage after the performance, that the dazzling woman who had won every heart that night was only eleven years old.”

  “Daddy,” Jane said, giggling again, “you must make him stop.”

  “You were wonderful, baby,” Archer said. “Really.”

  “I was foul,” Jane said complacently. “I was falling all over myself.”

  “It was so queer, seeing you up there,” Kitty said. “You made me feel so old.”

  Nancy didn’t say anything. Her eyes were still shining in the same strange, hungry way that Archer had noticed in the theatre. She went up to Jane and put her arms around her and held her, hard. For a moment everyone in the room was silent. Then three girls came bursting into the room, full of high, excited compliments, and Jane sat down in front of the mirror and made a pleasant little show of scrubbing her makeup off, while everyone grouped around her, consciously collaborating with Jane and one another to make this moment as high and memorable as possible. Archer looked at the flowers in their boxes. There was his corsage, a pleasant spray of tea roses, and a big bunch of gladioli from the Herreses and an impressive cellophane box with two perfect green orchids in it that was ostentatiously displayed in front of the others. Archer picked up the card. “Be delightful,” the card read. It was signed Dom. Archer put the card down, conscious of a twinge of annoyance, feeling resentfully that Barbante had probably sent the same flowers and the identical message to a dozen other dressing rooms over the course of the years. The orchids looked cold, extravagant, too showy for an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl unpinning her hair in front of her parents after an amateur production. A moment later Barbante came in, followed by Bruce. Archer hadn’t seen the writer
while the play was on and no one had told him Barbante would be present. Bruce looked shy and unhappy.

  “Jane …” Barbante went over and kissed the top of her head, after smiling his greeting at Archer and the others. “Jane, you were charming.”

  “Dom …” Jane switched around in her chair and looked up at him. “Don’t lie. I was unutterable. And the orchids …” Jane waved at the cellophane box. “Everybody look at the orchids. Aren’t they slinky?”

  “Jane,” Bruce said, moving truculently in her direction but not daring to touch her, “you were great. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Archer saw Vic grin slightly.

  “Thanks, Bruce,” Jane said, turning back to her mirror. “It was nice of you to come.”

  “I managed to get away,” Bruce said heavily, suffering. He was a large boy with an infant’s pink complexion. Carefully dressed and shaven, he looked as though he had been boiled briskly and set out to cool before going out for the evening. He looked around him at the flowers. “I didn’t know people were supposed to send flowers,” he said miserably.

  “Don’t make it sound like a funeral, Bruce, darling,” Jane said, winding a towel around her head. Vic grinned more widely and Archer wished there was some way he could, in one moment, put compassion for her contemporaries into his daughter’s heart. Bruce took a step backward and leaned against the wall, anguished and stoical.

  “Now, really, everybody,” Jane said, firmly in the center of the stage, “I do have to change. Why don’t you wait outside and think up some more compliments for me and I’ll be out in a shake.”

  “Isn’t there a bar somewhere near here?” Vic asked. “We can go and toast the prima donna in lemonade.”

  “I have an even better idea,” Barbante said. Archer watched him suspiciously. “Why don’t we all go downtown and celebrate at Sardi’s? That’s what everybody does after an opening night. We’ll sit in the center of the room and let the people admire Jane.”