The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  Fifteen years. Ending in an overheated banquet room in a fancy hotel with a cleverly dressed, beautiful, neurotic girl making this year’s confession of sin and turning this year’s version of state’s evidence. Ending in the embrace under the lamppost, and the tears, and Nancy’s voice saying, Forget him. Write him off. Wipe us all out. Please.

  Very early, Hutt had warned him. Nobody can stand investigation. Nobody, Hutt had said. If you think you can you must have led your life in deep freeze for the last twenty years. Well, he hadn’t listened, and the investigation had taken place, and it had turned out that Hutt had been right. His life hadn’t been led in deep freeze, and bit by bit it had been shattered. He was defamed and jobless. His wife had lost his son, who might be dying at this moment in the dark building behind him. She had also lost her own respect for herself, because she had proved jealous and ordinary at the climactic moment of their time together and both she and Archer knew that however good their life together might be from now on, it would be a patched life and not whole and complete as it had been before. As for Vic … Investigation had proved him a liar and a betrayer of trust, and there went another fifteen years.

  If he had done what he wanted to do that day in Hurt’s office, Archer thought, if he had resigned immediately, none of this would have happened. He’d be out of work, but he was out of work now, and he would still have a complete wife, a friend. His wife would still have been frail and undependable, his friend untrue—but he wouldn’t know about it. He was forty-five—the necessary illusions might very possibly have stood up the twenty or twenty-five years more that he had to live. Perhaps he had known all this subconsciously and the immediate, almost instinctive gesture of resignation had been a reflex, not so much of courage and loyalty as a panicky and disguised attempt at self-preservation. Perhaps he had known, deep-down, that he was surrounded by people who were, not what they seemed, that he was committed to loyalties and concepts that could not bear investigation, that the structure of the world he had built for himself had depended equivocally on his own naiveté and that when that naiveté was destroyed by fact, the structure on which he rested would be shattered along with it.

  Perhaps, Hutt had said, perhaps we have to resign ourselves to an unhappy fact. Perhaps we live in a time in which there are no correct solutions to any problem. Perhaps every act we make must turn out to be wrong. You couldn’t afford to believe this—but could you afford not to believe it?

  And Barbante had taken it another step. You can die on your feet, or you can die on your knees, Barbante had said, drunk and desolate in Hutt’s office. Surprisingly, thinking of it now, Archer felt that there was more hope in Barbante’s formulation. At least it included the notion of moral choice and hidden in it there was a conception of dignity and the possibility of right though tragic action that was missing from Hutt’s program. The only trouble was that it was an action that had to be performed in the dark, in a twisting, deceptive, obscure medium, with the horizon, in momentary glimpses, always at a different and surprising angle. There is an activity in which I can profitably engage myself in the next twenty years, Archer thought with a queer sense of triumph at having reached this far. I can devote myself to discovering at every moment just how vertical I am. I can commit myself to the single task of keeping my knees from touching the ground.

  He felt cold now. The wind was stronger and bit at his face and his hands were stiff in his pockets. He turned and walked away from the river toward the hospital. He looked up at the top floor and wondered numbly and without emotion if his son was still alive. He thought of the warm, moist room and the shapeless old lady between the plastic boxes, and the struggling, desperate, overreached heart. Curiously, he put his hand under his coat and through his shirt to the skin of his chest. His hand was cold on the skin, but under it his own heart beat steadily and prosaically. If only there were some way, he thought, to give a fraction of this strength, a share of this reliable, unthinking movement, to the crumpled small form on the top floor. If only there were some way to subtract a day of his own heart’s beating, a month, and add it to his son’s. If Graves would work on something like that, he thought grimly, instead of resigning so gracefully to the mysterious intentions of God…

  Archer took his hand out from under his coat and walked slowly up the hospital steps. Most of the lights had been put out in the downstairs hall and at first Archer didn’t see the man who was slumped in a chair in a corner. But then the man stood up and started toward Archer and came under a light and Archer saw that it was Vic.

  Archer stopped, waiting. Vic came over slowly, shambling, walking in a way that Archer hadn’t seen before. He had a queer, diagonal small grin on his mouth and it looked as though it had been set there a long time.

  “Hi,” Vic said, stopping a few feet away.

  “Hello, Vic,” Archer said. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “How is it?” Vic asked.

  “Kitty’s OK,” Archer said, wondering what OK meant. “The kid is still alive. Or he was still alive the last time I asked.”

  Vic nodded soberly. “I hope …” he began. Then he stopped, self-consciously. He looked very tired and he kept his coat collar turned up, as though he was cold, even in the warm hallway. “Give my love to Kitty,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “I don’t suppose she’d want to see me.”

  “I don’t suppose she would,” Archer said.

  Vic nodded again. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said. “Something that’s probably been puzzling you.” He waited, but Archer didn’t speak. “About that petition,” Vic said. “The one you were supposed to have signed.”

  Archer tried to remember. He knew there was something about a petition that had seemed important at one time, but it was so long ago, and so many things had happened since then, and whatever it was, it no longer was even important enough to remember.

  “The one Frances Motherwell spoke about at the meeting,” Vic explained patiently.

  “Oh, yes,” Archer said.

  “You never signed that,” said Vic.

  “I know.”

  “I did,” Vic said. “I forged your name.”

  “OK,” Archer said disinterestedly. He wanted to get upstairs and ask about the child.

  “We needed a certain number,” Vic said, “and it was beginning to get awfully hard to dig up names.”

  “OK.”

  “If you want,” Vic said, “if you think it will help, I’ll announce it. I’ll send a note to the papers saying it was me all along.”

  “Forget it,” Archer said. He felt uncomfortable and he realized that what he was uncomfortable about was seeing Vic standing there so strangely contrite and beaten. It wasn’t like Vic and he didn’t want to see it.

  “Nancy told me she gave you the gory details about me,” Vic said. “You know the worst.”

  “Yes.”

  “In case you’re interested,” Vic said, still with that queer, slit grin, “I’m not ashamed of any of it.”

  “OK,” Archer said. “You’re not ashamed.”

  “I’m only sorry about one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I behaved like a fool about Frances Motherwell.”

  “I imagine you did.”

  “Not the way you think.” Vic chuckled softly. “Not politically. Sexually. Learned a lesson. Sex is politics, too. Just like economics, art, war. I underestimated the role of the bedroom in the advance of the Revolution. The lady took a liking to me. Four years ago. Always be careful when one of those girls with eyes that pop just a little out of their head begin to yearn over you. First I pretended I was too modest to understand what she was hinting. Then she stopped hinting. Did you know there’s a whole new breed of woman loose in America, who drink four Martinis and go up to a man at a party and say, ‘I’m going to make a pass at you’?” Herres shook his head ruefully. “Result of advanced higher education for girls; the progressive feminization of the male sex brought
about by luxurious living; the alarming increase in homosexuality among artists and college graduates … I don’t know. I behaved in an urbane manner,” Herres said, laughing a little. “Or as urbane as I could be in a situation like that. I explained I had a pathologic addiction to monogamy. I pretended that I was flattered and that perhaps some other time, if I ever got into trouble with my wife … I tried to turn the talk to nobler topics like the drama and the organization of sharecroppers in Tennessee and she’d just laugh, that wild, curdled laugh of hers, and tell me she’d get me in due time. I got to hate the sight of her, but I had to pretend I thought she was fine, and of course in the Party I couldn’t let feelings like that influence me. Then recently she took to writing me the most obscene and specific invitations and calling me up in the middle of night, dead drunk, crying and using words over the phone that you’d be embarrassed to hear in a Marseilles whore-house. Finally, I made the big blunder. I gave it to her. I told her what I thought of her. Big mistake to do with any woman. But with someone like Motherwell, whom you have to depend on—fatal.” He shrugged. “I told her I didn’t like promiscuous women.” He grinned. “That isn’t even absolutely true. There’re some promiscuous women I like very much. Salt of the earth. Merry, useful citizens, easing the burden of being alive in an intolerable civilization. But I didn’t like her. I told her to climb up out of the gutter. I told her she ought to go to an analyst. I told her she ought to get married and have five kids. I told her she disgusted me. For the first time in many years, I indulged myself in an emotional attitude. And I’m paying for it. The wages of virtue,” Vic said, smiling queerly, “is death. Beware of the puritan within. I made the virgin’s error—I overestimated the value of chastity and the lady got up in meeting and paid me off in another coin. If I’d been a little more realistic I’d’ve visited that little chocolate-colored apartment a couple of afternoons a month and put a blindfold on and screwed like a patriot for the International. And Frances Motherwell would still be a silent, satisfied worker for the Cause. Oh, I forget,” Vic said, his eyes amused though his voice was sober. “You don’t like me to use language like that.”

  “All right,” Archer said. “Now I have the full and glorious history of Frances Motherwell, who doesn’t interest me very much any more. Now, how about you and me?”

  “What about you and me?”

  “The stuff to Roberts,” Archer said. “The lie before I went to Philadelphia. The attack on me at the meeting. You helped plan that, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Vic said. He looked vaguely around him at the dim hospital lobby, with the low gleam of subdued lights cold off the marble walls. “There was nothing personal in that.”

  “Oh, God’,” said Archer. “Nothing personal.”

  “No,” Vic said. “There was a certain situation that had to be handled. A particular tactic was called for. In a war, when a commander has to expose certain elements of his troops to being cut off and decimated, or allow some civilians who happen to be on the ground to be hurt, that doesn’t mean that it’s a personal transaction between him and them. It was just bad luck. You were exposed and in the line of fire and you had to get hit. That’s all.”

  “That’s all,” Archer said. “Just as a point of interest—nobody told me it was a war.”

  “Read the papers, brother,” Vic said softly. “The communiqués are on every page.”

  “I’m a funny man,” Archer said, ignoring Vic. “I believe that whatever two human beings do to each other, and certainly whatever two people who are friends do to each other, is personal.”

  “You’re a funny man,” Vic said gravely. “You said so yourself.”

  “And if anybody believes in something that prevents him from treating me personally, and that means taking into account the necessity of telling me the truth, the necessity of behaving honorably,” Archer said, “I can’t accept him as my friend. I don’t want to see him any more. Ever.”

  “Honorable,” Vic said. “Slippery word. Subject to a variety of interpretations.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Time changes a word like that,” Vic said. “Geography. Law. Ultimate aims. The weather. Everything. It’s like love. You get into bed with an eighteen-year-old girl in Connecticut and it’s love. You do the same thing in California and it’s statutory rape.” He grinned. “You start a revolution in America in 1776 and you happen to win, so you’re an honorable fellow. Father, I chopped down the cherry tree, oh, what a bright boy am I. Talk about the same thing in 1950 and hanging’s too good for you. You think I betrayed you, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Archer.

  “Another word. Betrayal. Treason. In a more general sense you think I’m a traitor, too, don’t you? Or at least potentially?”

  “Yes,” Archer said slowly. “I do. Nancy told me that when that man was arrested for giving away atomic secrets to the Russians, you said you’d do the same thing if you had the chance.”

  “Nancy talks too much,” Vic said harshly. “But she wasn’t lying. Why not? Listen—during the war, when a German turned against the Nazis and helped us, you thought he was a noble fellow, indeed, didn’t you? Remember all the pretty articles that were written about it—the higher call, the duty to humanity above the narrow duty to your country, the necessity for private revolt to save the very people you were revolting against. All that? Well, I fell for it. I’m a big man,” he said mockingly, “for the higher duty. I’m busy trying to save America from itself. And if I have to lie a little here and there for it, and if I have to say one thing when I mean another, and not advertise everything that comes into my mind in the New York Times, I don’t mind that at all. The guys who sneaked across the German lines with maps of Nazi artillery positions didn’t announce what they were doing over a public-address system, either. Were they dishonorable because they crossed the lines at night?”

  “That was Germany under Hitler,” Archer said. “In America it’s a different …”

  “Different. Different!” Vic said sardonically. “America is immune to everything, including Fascism and the common cough, because God loves us so much. Let me tell you something about America. We’re the most dangerous people in the world because we’re mediocre. Mediocre, hysterical and vain. We’re worse than the worst religious fanatics. We can’t bear the thought that anybody anywhere else might be more advanced or more intelligent or better organized or be closer to the true faith than we are—and we’re ready to knock down a hundred cities in one night to stifle our own doubts. We’re the ruin-bringers. We lick our chops, waiting for the moment to start the planes off the runways. All over the world when people hear the word America, they spit. We call it freedom and we’ll stuff it down their throats like hot lead if we have to. Our idea of freedom includes two hundred million radioactive corpses. And what do you think it’s going to be like here? There’ll be plenty of the free dead here, too, because the rest of the world will see to that. And the ones that aren’t produced by foreigners’ll be supplied by the domestic trade. Look at the newspapers, listen to the radio—everybody in this country is slavering to get his hands at the throat of his neighbor. Give us two, three years of another war and we’ll blow up here like a firecracker. The whites’ll kill the blacks, the Protestants the Catholics, the Catholics anybody they can lay their hands on, the rich’ll machine-gun the poor, the poor’ll turn Fifth Avenue red with blood, if there’s still a Fifth Avenue left that anybody can find. Everybody in this country hates everybody else. All you have to do is follow one political campaign to mow that. And there’ll be a big sigh of relief when the killing season’s officially introduced … And if I have to do a little lying to my poor old history professor now and then in an attempt to postpone all this, let the angels punish me in heaven for it. Nobody who ever accomplished anything ever behaved like a boy scout on Sunday. Look for your scrupulous friends on the losing side of everything. Morality—morality is what the conqueror imposes upon the conquered to make sure they both remain
exactly that. Don’t think I’m taken in by the lies,” Vic went on stubbornly. “Not the Chamber of Commerce lies or the Hitler lies or Hutt’s lies or Pravda’s lies. I don’t believe we’re all brave, free, friendly patriots here and that everything will always be just dandy as long as we salute the flag and pay our income tax on time. And I don’t believe that Russia’s full of merry, singing peasants and the Kremlin is full of saints and that nobody gets killed in the Soviet Union and nobody gets tortured and nobody gets his face pushed in when he happens to say something unpopular. But I say that it’s coming to a showdown and when that time comes, it’s going to be worse here and I’m betting that the Russians’ll be at least fifty-one percent right. And I’ll bet that when that time comes you’ll have to be on our side.”

  “You should have been at the meeting Friday night,” Archer said. “I made an interesting little lecture on just that subject. I’m going to be on my own side.”

  Vic made an impatient gesture. “I heard about your speech. It wasn’t a lecture. It was a suicide note. You’re so God-damn anxious to be pure that you’re making it absolutely certain that you’ll be cut down without the slightest effort. Because nobody on either side’ll raise a finger to help you. It’s going to take a new invention to service people like you, Clement. A cellophane wall. So that when you go to your martyrdom, the firing parties of both sides can hit you at the same time. You’ve outdated the opaque, non-transparent wall for execution purposes, Clem, and you’ll be remembered for your contribution.” He grinned coldly in the shadowy marble hall. “And you’ve done it the old-fashioned way,” he went on. “With all the old ingredients. Honor. Loyalty. Literal truth. You’d’ve been a big success in the fifteenth century, but this year, kid, you’re just a joke. You’re hundreds of years behind the times and the worst of it is that you’re proud of it. And the sad part of it is that there’re so many like you. You want all the benefits of the twentieth century, you want to ride in cars and fly in the air and have an easy, modern, up-to-date, latest-model conscience, but you can’t grind a cylinder or put in a rivet or do any of the dirty work that has to be done to keep people from starving or wars from breaking out. You’re great on results but when it comes to the techniques you suddenly discover your mother won’t let you get your pretty clothes dirty playing with the grease and the heavy machinery.”