The Troubled Air (19 page)

“Maybe one thing you do,” Archer said, “is bring a libel suit against the editors of the magazine. Maybe you join with the others who’ve been accused and do it together.”

Atlas grinned. “What is it, Clem?” he said. “You got friends in the legal profession you anxious to make rich? When I was a little boy at my mother’s knee, she told me, ‘There’s only one rule I want you to follow, Son. You can drink corn liquor and you can snuff cocaine and you can sleep with the parson’s wife, but never sue a white man.’ My old gray-haired Mammy down South. And the way things’re going today, half of any jury you could pick’d call you a Red if they found out you voted for Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Whom
did
you vote for?” Archer asked. “What organizations do you belong to? Maybe the time will come when we have to go to the newspapers and fight it out there. Have they got anything on you? What can you prove?”

Atlas grinned. “Ain’t you nosey, Clem?” he said. “Let them go and find out for themselves. They ain’t getting any help from me. Those’re white-folks questions. Let the white folks get the answers. Would you feel better if I told you I voted Republican and I belong to the National Association of Manufacturers? Though I ain’t guaranteeing any of this is the gospel fact. Would it be bad for me if I told you there was a time I was a runner for a policy racket, or don’t that make any difference? You think it’d hurt my fair name if I told them I used to hang around a night club when I first came up from Tampa and go to bed with white ladies for ten bucks a throw? Harlem was lively in those days and there was a surprising amount of traffic in that line of goods.”

Archer stood up, defeated. “OK, Stan,” he said flatly, “have it your own way. I thought maybe if I got the straight dope from everyone we’d all be able to help each other.”

“I ain’t interested in helping anyone,” Atlas said. “Not even myself.”

He sat easily in the deep leather chair, stretching his legs, his bare arms wiry and thick, his eyes steady and baleful, resigned to everything, hating everything.

“All right,” Archer said. “I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

“No need to bother,” Atlas said without moving. He didn’t show Archer to the door.

Outside, in the hall, waiting for the elevator, Archer sniffed. There was a stale, sour smell of cooking. He was annoyed with himself for noticing it.

A
LICE WELLER LIVED HIGH UP ON CENTRAL PARK WEST, IN A BUILDING
that had at one time been luxurious and genteel. By now it was only genteel. The carpets were threadbare and greenish, if they were any color, and the walls of the lobby were a dim olive stucco. The elevator clanked and groaned as it rattled up the shaft and the operator wheezed as he worked the lever.

“Mrs. Weller,” Archer said.

“Fourth floor,” the elevator man said. “Does she expect you?”

“Yes.” Archer sniffed the mingled odors of oil, dust and age, and it brought back the memory of the pleasant evenings he had spent a long time ago in this house, when Alice’s husband, who had been Archer’s friend, was alive. Since his death, Archer had visited Alice less and less frequently, salving his conscience with the knowledge that he had found work for her more or less steadily ever since he had become a director, even though there had been times when he had to fight the producers of his shows to do it.

Alice opened the door herself. She was dressed in a ruinously youthful cotton dress that made her look older than she was. Her hair, just out of curlers, was too tightly bunched over her forehead. She smiled softly when Archer kissed her. “It’s nice to see you here again,” she said, without reproach. “It’s been so long.”

Her hands, Archer noticed, as she hung up his coat, were cracked and red, as though she had done a great many dishes very recently. She led the way into the living room, seeming, in the incongruous dress, not matronly but exhausted.

“Take that chair,” she said, pointing. “The one you used to like has a broken spring.”

Archer sat down obediently, feeling guilty that Alice remembered that he had liked a particular chair. He didn’t remember any of the chairs.

“I think I’ll sit me down here,” Alice said, folding into the sofa, which gave off several grinding squeaks as her weight settled. It was her one affectation, Archer remembered. She said, I must sit me down, and I must wake me up and I must take me home. Probably it had charmed some man a long time ago and she had dimly clung to the trick, feeling momentarily younger each time she used it. Archer had always been uneasy when he heard her talk like that and he realized it still left him uneasy. She sat stiffly on the stiff couch, as though she had somehow lost the knack of grace.

“Ralph will be so glad to see you again,” Alice was saying. “He’s asked for you often.”

“How is he?” Archer asked politely, wondering how long he would have decently to wait before telling Alice what he was here for.

“He’s grown so tall you won’t recognize him,” Alice said, like a mother. “He wants to be a physicist now, he says. You know, the papers’re so full of science these days, and they have professors down to talk to them all the time.” She laughed softly. If you closed your eyes and just listened to the gentle melody of her voice, you would imagine a young, delightful, hesitant girl in the room with you. “I don’t know what’s happened to firemen and jockeys any more,” Alice said. “The things the boys wanted to be when I was a young girl.”

Ralph was her only child. Her husband had been an architect who had just begun to have his initial successes after years of struggle when he had been killed in an automobile accident in 1942. He had been something of a political thinker and had not believed in insurance. Looking around him at the meager room, with its worn furniture and mended curtains, and its air of being fragile and desperate, as though it was inhabited by people who could not bear another shock from life, Archer thought that it would have been better if the architect had not had such original notions and had taken out a policy or two in his wife’s name before he took that automobile ride.

“So many problems come up,” Alice was saying. “Just last week I was offered the role of the mother in the road company of
Breakwater.
It’s a good part and the money was good and they wanted to give me a year’s contract. But it would have meant leaving Ralph alone—sending him to a boarding school. I talked to him about it—he’s amazingly grownup, you can discuss anything with him—and he was very brave about it. But at the last minute I told them no.” She laughed sadly. “I don’t know what I’ll do when he grows up and decides to go off and get married. I’ll probably behave terribly and get drunk and insult the bride.” She waved her hands vaguely, apologizing. “I must shut me up,” she said nervously. “I mustn’t babble on about my family. What about you? You look very well these days, Very distinguished looking. I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, with a painful, dim echo of coquetry.

“I’m fine,” Archer said, because that described it as well as any other one word. “The program keeps me alive.”

Alice chuckled self-consciously. “It also keeps me alive,” she said shyly. “And Ralph.”

That was an unfortunate way for me to put it, Archer thought. The phrase went too deep when you examined it seriously, as Alice was doing.

“You’re on it this week, too,” Archer said, grateful that he could say that much. One hundred dollars more for the complicated process of keeping Ralph and his mother alive. “Quite a nice part. Not very long, but juicy.”

“Thanks, Clement.” Alice’s hands waved in front of her. Her gratitude, Archer thought, is always uncomfortably naked. “Mr. O’Neill called me this morning and told me.”

Archer phoned in a list of people he was going to use each week and O’Neill made the necessary calls each Monday morning. There were going to be some bad Monday mornings for Alice from now on, sitting by the silent telephone, if Hutt had his way. Well, Archer thought, the longer I wait the harder it’s going to be.

“Alice,” he said, rubbing the top of his head nervously, “I’m in trouble.”

“Oh.” Alice took in her breath sharply. An expression of concern washed tremblingly over her face. “Can I help?” she asked.

“Something queer has come up,” Archer said. “About you.”

“About me?” Alice looked surprised, then frightened.

“You know,” Archer said, “for the last year or so, agencies have been dropping people from programs because they’ve been …” He hesitated, searching for the least harmful word. “Because they’ve been accused of being Communists or fellow travelers, whatever that is.”

“Clement,” Alice peered worriedly at him, “you’re not being fired, are you?”

Archer grinned weakly. “No, not at the moment.”

Alice sighed with obvious relief. “These days,” she said, “it’s impossible to tell what’s going to happen next.”

“Alice,” Archer said, determined to get it out without further delay, “the truth is, I’ve been asked to drop you.”

Strangely, she smiled at him. It was a slow, hurt smile, an involuntary twitching of the muscles that had nothing to do with joy, but which, by some trick of mechanics, twisted her mouth upward at the corners. Clumsily, without seeming to notice what she was doing, she lifted her hands and poked aimlessly at the tight curls around her ears.

“But you’re not doing it,” Alice said. “You just said there was a nice part for me this Thursday. And O’Neill called at ten o’clock this morning …”

“Yes,” said Archer, “that’s right. I got us a period of grace.” As he said it he wondered abstractedly why he had said us. “We have two weeks to do something about it.”

“Two weeks.” Alice’s shoulders drooped and her hands dropped again. “What can you do in two weeks?”

“Don’t give up in advance,” Archer said, annoyed at Alice’s quick acceptance of defeat. “We might do a great deal.”

“I don’t understand.” Alice stood up heavily. She walked toward the window, looking stout, hiding her face from Archer. “I don’t know where to begin. What do they say about me?”

“Hutt received an advance copy of a magazine article,” Archer said slowly and clearly, trying to pierce through Alice’s vagueness. “In it you and several others are said to belong to various Communist-front organizations. Do you belong to any organizations that might be—suspect?”

Alice turned and faced him bewilderedly. “I don’t know.” She seemed distracted, as though she were having trouble focusing her mind on the subject. “I belong to several things. AFRA. Actors Equity. The Parent-Teachers’ Association. Then there’s a league that my husband used to give money to, for protecting Negroes’ civil rights. I sometimes send them five dollars … Do you think it might be any of them?”

“Probably not,” said Archer. “Is there anything else?”

“Well, I certainly don’t belong to the Communist Party.” Alice tried to smile. “I’m sometimes pretty vague but I’d know that, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m sure you would.” Archer smiled reassuringly.

“I haven’t done anything illegal.” Alice’s voice became stronger as she began to get accustomed to the idea that she would have to defend herself and that Archer was there to help her. “I’d know it if I’d broken any laws, wouldn’t I?”

“It isn’t quite as simple as that,” Archer said, “any more.” He was unhappy about being the one who was forced to explain the new, melancholy, uncertain order of things to Alice. “Because of the strained relations between us and Russia,” he said rhetorically, like a schoolteacher, “because of the tensions that have developed since the war—there’s a kind of twilight zone now, in which people are placed without committing any overt acts. It’s a zone of—of moral disapproval, I guess you could call it—for certain opinions, certain associations …”

“Opinions?” Alice laughed softly and sank into a chair, as though she were very tired. “Who knows what my opinions are? I don’t know myself. Oh, dear, you must think I’m an absolute fool. In the last few years I seem to have grown incapable of thinking clearly about anything. I belong in a cartoon—in one of those hats, making a speech to a gardening club in the suburbs.”

“Not at all,” Archer said, feeling that his voice was too brisk.

“Yes, yes.” Alice shook her head ruefully. “You don’t have to be so polite. Even Ralph makes fun of me sometimes, and he’s only fourteen years old.” She picked up a photograph of her son that was on a bookcase and stared at it.

“Last year,” Alice said suddenly, “it might have something to do with what happened last winter.”

“What’s that?” Archer asked, puzzled.

“I got a terrible letter. Printed. In pencil. All misspelled.”

“What letter?” Archer tried to sound patient. “Try to remember everything you can, Alice.”

“It was anonymous. I only read half of it and I threw it away,” Alice said. “I couldn’t bear to read it. It called me the most filthy names. You’d be surprised what people can send through the mails. It said why didn’t I go back to where I came from if I didn’t like it here.” Alice essayed a laugh. “I don’t know quite what they meant by that. My family’s lived in New York for over a hundred years. They threatened me.” She looked up at the ceiling, remembering, the sagging skin of her throat pulled tight. “ ‘We’re going to take care of you and your kind,’ it said, ‘soon. We are forming,’ it said, ‘and it won’t take long now. In Europe they shaved the heads of women like you, but you won’t get off just with a haircut.’ ”

Archer closed his eyes, ashamed for the people he passed every day, unrecognizingly, on the street. “Why didn’t you show it to me?” he asked.

“I couldn’t,” Alice said. “Some of the names they called me you just couldn’t show to anyone. I bought a new lock for the door and I had a chain put on.” She laughed nervously. “It was really nothing. Nothing happened. I even managed to forget about it until today.”

“Have you any idea why that letter was sent to you?” Archer asked, thinking, Now we are entering another field, the field of the anonymous threat to impoverished widows. Live in the big city and expose yourself to all its cultural advantages.

“Yes,” Alice said, surprisingly definite. “It was after that big meeting last winter, that peace meeting at the Waldorf. The one that had those Russian writers and composers …”