The Troubled Air Part 7

"On my terms," Archer said, sitting down again, because he felt it would help him overcome his increasing nervousness, "I may find out that all five of the people are innocent. And even on your terms, I may be able to prove that one or two or three of them deserve to be spared."

"I can a.s.sure you," Hutt said, "that there is almost no hope of that. They have been accused and that is just about enough. I don't say that means that they are all equally guilty-but I do say that it means that they are no longer-" he paused, "-useful."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Hutt," Archer said, "I can't go along with that. I can't accept a blanket indictment. They're five different, individual people I know and I've worked with, with five different histories, five different crimes or five different alibis."

"Once again," Hutt said, "let me go back to the premise that you keep avoiding. The premise that we are at war. In a war, actions are approximate, not individual. When we dropped bombs on Berlin, we did not carefully pick out SS colonels and members of the n.a.z.i diplomatic corps as our targets. We dropped them on Germans, because Germans were, in general, our enemies. We never managed to kill Hitler, did we, although we killed thousands and thousands of women, children, and old men who were, I suppose, by peaceful standards, quite innocent. Become modern," Hutt said cheerfully. "Learn to be approximate."

"That's a disease," Archer said. "I prefer not to be infected."

"Perhaps you're right," said Hutt. "But remember that it's a disease that the Communists started. Not us."

"I'm also opposed to the theory," Archer said, "that one must always embrace the enemy's sickness. Look, Mr. Hutt, maybe we're just wasting each other's time ..."

"Oh, no," Hutt whispered hastily, "I've found this most interesting. We never have gotten a chance to really talk seriously about things, Archer. And I must confess I'm not as sure as I sound. And this little conversation has helped clarify quite a few matters for me. I hope it has done as much for you. And for O'Neill."

"I was out late last night," O'Neill mumbled, in his corner. "I'm sleepy. Nothing is clear to me except that I must go to bed early tonight."

Hutt chuckled, indulging his lieutenant. "Perhaps," he said gently to Archer, "perhaps we may 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 might find some comfort in that, Archer. I do. If you're resigned in advance to knowing that you can't act correctly, no matter what you do, maybe you will be relieved of some of the burden of responsibility."

"I have not yet reached that austere height," Archer said, "and I doubt that you honestly feel that you have, too."

Hutt nodded. "You're right. Not yet. Not yet."

"I have to ask you one thing, Mr. Hutt. And I expect an honest answer." Archer saw Hutt's face stiffen at this, but he continued bluntly. "I want to know if anything can change your mind about any of these people. If I can prove that some of them are not Communists or fellow-travelers, and are, in fact, anti-Communist, would you still say they have to be fired?"

"As I said before," Hutt said, "I don't believe you'll be able to prove that."

"If I can prove it, will it make any difference in the way you act?"

"It's all so conditional, Archer ..."

"Because," Archer said, interrupting, "if not, I'd rather know it now."

"Why?"

"Because I'll quit now. This afternoon." He felt his hands begin to shake and despised himself for the fluttering weakness. He stared coldly at Hutt. Hutt leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth, the well-made suit creasing easily across his shoulders.

"There's no need to do that," Hutt whispered finally, his face pointed toward the ceiling. "I'm open." He swung back to face Archer and smiled. "Not very open. But enough."

"Good," Archer said. "Now, may I ask you another question?"

"Of course."

"What about the sponsor? Does he know about this?"

"Unfortunately, yes," Hutt said. "He was sent the article and a letter from the magazine the same day I was."

"What is his reaction?"

"He called me that morning and told me to fire the five people immediately. Really, Archer, you can't blame him."

"I'm not blaming anyone-yet," Archer said. "Now-what if I went to the sponsor with absolute proof and he ...?"

"That would be quite out of the question," Hutt said coldly. "It is the policy of this office to keep all problems about the programs within the organization. You may speak to the sponsor only at his request, when he wishes to invite you on social occasions. On all other matters I am his one and only contact. I hope that's perfectly clear, Archer. Two years ago, on a much smaller matter, I was forced to release an account executive who broke this rule and out of misplaced enthusiasm went over my head to talk to a sponsor. You understand what I'm saying?"

Archer nodded, registering the threat. He stood up. "Well," he said, keeping himself calm, "that does it for now, I guess."

Hutt stood up politely. "I wonder," he said, with uncharacteristic hesitancy, "if I might deliver a small warning, Archer. For your own good."

"Yes?" Archer said, putting on his coat and picking up his hat.

"Be careful. Don't be hasty," Hutt said earnestly. "Don't expose yourself. Don't be quixotic, because the world doesn't laugh at Quixote any more; it beheads him. Be discreet in your methods, and in your choice of friends whom you wish to defend. Don't depend too much upon reason, because you are being judged by the crowd-and the crowd judges emotionally, not reasonably, and there is no appeal from an emotional conviction. Avoid the vanguard because you will attract attention up front, and it is hard to survive attention these days. You're a valuable man and I admire you and I don't want to see you destroyed."

"Wait a minute," Archer said, puzzled. "I haven't done anything. n.o.body's accused me of anything."

"Not yet." Hutt came around from his desk and put his hand lightly and in a friendly manner on Archer's elbow. He seemed dapper and insignificant standing up, away from the cold bulwark of his desk. "But if you become known as a partisan of an unpopular group-for whatever innocent reasons-you must expect to have the searchlight put on you. Your reasons will be investigated-everything about you will be investigated. People you've forgotten for ten years will come up with damaging misquotations, memories, doubtful doc.u.ments. Your private life will be scrutinized, your foibles will be presented as sins, your errors as crimes. Archer, listen to me ..." Hutt's voice sank even lower and it was hard for Archer to hear him even though he was standing next to him. "n.o.body can stand investigation. n.o.body. If you think you can you must have led your life in deep freeze for the last twenty years. If there were a saint alive today, two private detectives and a newspaper columnist could d.a.m.n him to h.e.l.l if they wanted to, in the s.p.a.ce of a month." Hutt dropped his hand from Archer's arm and smiled, to show he was through being serious. "There is a motto," he said, "I am thinking of putting up over the doorway here-'When in doubt, disappear.' "

"Thanks," Archer said, shaken and disturbed because he saw that Hutt was really trying to help him and that Hutt actually did like him-or liked him as much as he could like anyone. "I'll keep all this in mind."

"It was very good of you to come up this afternoon," Hutt said, moving to the door and opening it. "I've enjoyed our little talk."

"Good-bye," Archer said. He waved to O'Neill. O'Neill grunted in the darkness as Archer went out of the office. Hutt closed the door softly behind him.

5.

ARCHER GOT OUT OF THE ELEVATOR IN THE LOBBY OF THE TALL BUILDING in which Hutt had his office and went over to a phone booth in an alcove to one side. He sat down on the little curved bench and stared at the instrument before him. There were four people whom he would have to call some time within the next week and he wondered if there was some particular order which would be most profitable. He felt incompetent and shaken. The two weeks that he had to work in seemed ridiculously short and inadequate. I have a hard enough time deciding what I believe myself, he thought. How can I ever find out what four other people believe in only fourteen days? This is the year, he thought, for a man to be ignorant, confident and rich.

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.

"h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo." 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 G.o.dson 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 appet.i.tes 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 friends.h.i.+p. "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 a.s.sortment 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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, j.a.panese in all my life.

Dig in, men, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 prost.i.tutes. 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 clouds 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.