The Troubled Air (7 page)

Then Herres joined the Dramatic Society and got the leading part in the spring play.

“Now what did you do that for?” Archer asked him one night. It was a surprising thing for Herres to do. Aside from the football team, he paid no attention to the extra-curricular life of the campus. And he had no friends besides Sully and the Archers and steered away from all group activity. Even in his fraternity he lived alone, more like a guest at a hotel than anything else. “I didn’t know you thought you had any talent.”

“I probably haven’t.” Herres grinned at him. “But I want to keep an eye on Nancy.” Nancy was the star of the Dramatic Society and was talking about going to New York and trying to get on the stage. “I don’t like her walking home at one o’clock in the morning with the leading man, after rehearsing love scenes all night. So now I’m the leading man and she’s trapped.”

It had started as frivolously as that. But just before the play was to go on, Herres had come to him with tickets and had said, very seriously, “Now, listen, Clement, I want you to watch me carefully. Don’t drink too much before you go and watch me as though you weren’t my friend. As though you were a critic on a tough newspaper and you didn’t give a damn for anything.”

Archer had watched conscientiously. The play was
The Hairy Ape,
and while Herres, with his close blond hair and aristocratic face had seemed somewhat too polite for the part of the tortured, gorilla-like stoker, there still was evident enough of the competence and self-assurance with which Herres always conducted himself to keep it from being hopeless. Later that night, Archer had told him this, Herres listening intently, nodding and agreeing when Archer had pointed out crudities and amateurishness, and shaking his hand with unaccustomed emotion when he left and saying, “Thank you. It’s just what I needed to hear. Thanks for being so honest.”

In bed, with the lights out, Archer said to Kitty, “That Vic is a queer one. Acting now. The last thing in the world you’d expect from a boy like that. And really concerned about it.”

“Don’t you worry about Vic Herres,” Kitty said. “All he has to do is lie down under the tree and the fruit falls into his mouth.”

That summer, Herres and Nancy got a job in a summer theatre in the East, working fourteen hours a day, playing small parts, attending classes and painting flats just for their keep. That was the summer Archer finished the play about Napoleon III and threw it away.

The scandal came after the second game of the football season and Archer never got over the feeling that he was partly responsible for it. Herres showed up one evening after practice, played for awhile with Jane, then asked if he could have a minute alone with Archer. In the study he had seemed uncharacteristically ill at ease and Archer had fiddled elaborately at cleaning and filling his pipe to allow Herres time to gather his forces.

“I want to ask you a favor,” Herres had begun.

Oh, thought Archer, he’s in trouble with Nancy and he’s come to an older man for the name of an abortionist.

“I’m in the new play,” Herres went on, gravely. “They gave me the lead. And we’ve been rehearsing two weeks. And I want you to come to the run-through tonight and watch me. And then I want you to be as honest as you were last spring. I’ve worked hard all summer, but I’m still not sure. I want you to tell me whether you think there’s any hope for me as an actor. You’re the only one I know I can trust. And it’s very serious. After you tell me, I’ll explain why.”

“Sure,” Archer said, relieved and ashamed of himself, thinking, I must stop reading all these realistic novels. “I’ll be there right after dinner.”

“And the truth,” Herres said, staring somberly at Archer. “Right out of the feed box. If you kid me, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live, Clement.”

“That’s an unfriendly kind of thing to say,” Archer said, troubled and annoyed.

“I mean it.” Herres got up. “Eight-thirty sharp,” he said as he went out.

Seating himself later in the rear of the empty auditorium, Archer realized he still felt resentful about Herres’ warning, and tried to clear it out of his mind so that he could judge fairly as the curtain went up. The play was Sidney Howard’s
They Knew What They Wanted,
and Herres had the role of the tough young wandering ranch hand who seduces the waitress-wife of the Italian farmer. Nancy played the wife and was astonishingly good, simple, pathetic, sensual, and finally pitiful. Archer refused to make up his mind about Herres until the play was over.

When the curtain was lowered, Herres and Nancy came out from backstage almost immediately. They had not been in costume and Herres came down the aisle pulling on his jacket.

“Let’s get out of here quick,” Herres said as Archer stood up. “Before that idiot Schmidt decides he has some new gems for us.”

Schmidt was the director. He had, so he said, once worked for Reinhardt in Germany, and was given to long, philosophical analyses. Herres also called Samson, the football coach, an idiot. Generosity toward his elders, especially the ones who attempted to teach him anything, was certainly not one of Herres’ strong points, Archer reflected, as they hurried out of the auditorium. For a half-second Archer wondered what Herres said about him after a dull Wednesday afternoon history class. The trouble was, Herres was accurate. Schmidt and Samson
were
idiots, or the academic equivalents of idiots.

“Nancy,” Archer said, when they were safely outside, and walking away from the building, “you were awfully good tonight.”

“The second act,” Nancy said. “I wasn’t bad in the second act.”

Archer smiled. That girl, he thought, is practically a member of Equity right now.

“Nancy,” Herres said when they came to Sorority Row, “this is where you say good night to the people and go home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Nancy protested. “It’s early yet.”

“Home,” Herres said quietly. “Clement and I have some things to talk about. Men’s talk.”

“I hate men,” Nancy said, coming as near to a pout as she could manage. “I think men ought to be abolished.”

“Yes, darling,” Herres said, and kissed her, domestically, not paying any attention to the fact that Archer was watching. “Run along now.”

“Aren’t you even going to walk me home?” Nancy sounded aggrieved and Archer realized that she was still wound up and excited by the evening’s performance and wanted to continue sharing the excitement as long as she could.

“No, darling,” Herres said.

“I hope you’re miserable with each other,” Nancy said. But she went off down the street, her figure slim and docile under the shedding trees.

Handling women, Archer thought enviously, watching her, is a talent you’re born with. Either you have it or you never learn it. He could never get Kitty to do what he wanted except on the gravest and most crucial matters.

“I want a beer,” Herres said, starting toward the inn. “Acting is thirsty labor.”

“What if Samson hears of it?” Archer asked, swinging into step beside him. “In the middle of the season? Won’t he be hurt?”

“Screw Samson,” said Herres, and Archer reminded himself he meant to talk to Herres about his language. Ten years later he actually managed to do this.

They didn’t mention the performance until they had settled themselves in the corner of the barroom and had their beers in front of them. Herres drained off half a glass in one gulp, then put the beer down and said, “All right. Let’s have it. And remember—” again the warning “—no pulling punches. You’ve lived in New York and you’ve been seeing shows all your life and you know the difference between an actor and a performing seal. I worked hard all summer but I don’t know whether I’m a bum or John Barrymore. You can save me a lot of grief by telling me the truth tonight. Here’s what I want from you,” he said bluntly. “I want you to tell me whether you think I have a chance to make a career in New York on the stage.”

“Now, Vic,” Archer protested, “nobody can tell you that. There are a thousand accidents that might happen and …”

“Don’t sound like an article on what’s wrong with the American theatre,” Herres said harshly. “I know all about the accidents. They don’t interest me. For one thing, I’m lucky, and if there are going to be accidents, the percentage is in my favor.”

What conceit, Archer thought, what useful, happy conceit! To believe, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, that you’re lucky and the percentage is all in your favor.

“What I want to know from the professor’s mouth,” Herres said, staring at him coldly, “is whether the professor thinks I have enough talent to go to New York and earn my living on the stage. A simple, clear, yes or no, from an enlightened member of the audience.”

“The usual way people decide this,” Archer said mildly, “is if they feel they can’t help themselves. If that’s the only thing they want to do or think they
can
do with themselves.”

“I don’t want to do anything,” Herres said flatly. “And I
can
do a lot of things. So let’s rule that out.”

“All right,” Archer said, feeling bludgeoned, “I think you can do it. I think you have a lot of talent and you’ve improved enormously over the summer and your looks are on your side and I think there’s a good chance you’ll be the darling of all the Wednesday matinees.”

“Good,” Herres said calmly. He finished his beer. “I’m going to New York in June. Watch for my name in electric lights.” He grinned and for the moment looked boyish.

“Now wait a minute,” Archer said. “Don’t just take my word. It’s your whole life and I …”

“Don’t worry, Professor,” Herres patted his arm and smiled. “I won’t blame you when I wind up in the old actors’ home.”

“Now,” said Archer, feeling unpleasantly that, he was being condescended to, “maybe you can tell me what’s behind all this.”

“Sure,” Herres said as he waved to the waitress for two more beers. “Nancy MacDonald. She’s going to live in New York after she graduates and there it is. My father has a job for me with General Motors, but that’s in Detroit and Nancy won’t live in Detroit. And I don’t want to be separated from her for a couple of years, while she’s going around with all the pretty boys in New York and finally climbing into bed with them and forgetting her gentleman friend at the Buick plant in the West. And I want to have her with me every day and take our vacations together and see each other for dinner every night.”

This man, Archer thought, is a fanatic on the subject of monogamy. A freak. A post-war, pre-war freak. “Wait a minute,” he said, “have you talked to her about this? About marrying her and living in Detroit?”

“Yes,” Herres said soberly. “Nothing doing. She won’t even say we’re engaged if we live so far away from each other. She won’t be tied down, she says, her first time in New York, just by an idea. That’s what she says a man a thousand miles away is. Just an idea.”

“And because of that,” Archer said wonderingly, “you decide that you’re going to be an actor for the rest of your life? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Herres said. He drank off half his second beer. “Anyway, I like the notion of New York. And I don’t like the notion of Detroit. I know Detroit. So I figured out all the ways I might earn a living in New York, pronto. And acting came up on top. I don’t care what I do. I’d just as soon act as make Buicks. Don’t look shocked, Professor. Nine-tenths of the population of the United States don’t really care what they do. They just kid themselves. You teach history,” he said challengingly. “Is that what you really want to do?”

Archer sipped his beer. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“I know I want to do one thing,” Herres said. “I want to live with Nancy MacDonald the rest of my life. That’s my ambition. Complete. Maybe I’m a disgrace to my family and to the Constitution of the United States, but that’s the way it is. So here’s to marriage and grease paint.” Herres lifted his glass mockingly. “In that order.”

“David Garrick is screaming in pain,” Archer said. “Wherever he is.”

“Let him scream.” Herres smiled. “Let the old faker yell his lungs out. Wherever he is. Visit us in New York on your sabbatical.”

Then, the next day, the scandal broke. Herres walked up to Samson just before afternoon football practice was to begin and told him that he was quitting. As of that minute. To devote all his spare time to the Dramatic Society. Poor Samson, who had had his troubles in years of coaching, who had had boys flunk out on him and turn up drunk at practice and contract gonorrhea on road trips, had never heard of anything like this before. He didn’t believe it and almost wept as he pleaded with Herres to think it over for another week, play just one more game. … But Herres had been pleasant but firm, had given Samson just five minutes of his time, and walked off the field.

The school paper had come out the next day with the story on the front page under their biggest headline of the year, “HERRES QUITS” and there was an editorial on the inside page, in which Herres was called a betrayer of trust, as though he had been caught trying to burn down the Science Building or selling signals to Ohio State.

Samson had come to Archer’s home, feeling in his dim, athlete’s way that Archer was in some manner mixed up in this, and had talked ramblingly about a sense of mutual responsibility, and the old school, and the fact that there wasn’t another quarterback on the squad who could be depended upon to throw a block or call for a kick on fourth down, and had ended by demanding that Archer influence Herres to go back.

“Now, listen,” Archer told Samson, annoyed with him and with Herres, too, for putting him in this absurd position, “my job here is teaching history. I wasn’t hired to recruit athletes. And even if I wanted to help, which I don’t, there’s nothing I can do with Herres. You ought to know him well enough to understand that by now …”

“He’s ungrateful,” Samson said, mournfully. “He’s a boy without spirit. He has no team feeling. He’s a God-damn intellectual.”

“Then you ought to be glad he’s quit,” Archer said, “before he infects all the others.”

“Yeah,” Samson said, running a huge, sorrowful hand across his battered face. “Yeah. He’s doing this, right in the middle of our best season, because he doesn’t like me. Personally. He looks down on me. Don’t shake your head, Archer. The sonofabitch looks down on me. I’m twice his age, but sometimes he treats me like I was his backward nephew. I took it. I’m willing to take it some more for the sake of the school. But I need some help. I got nobody else. There’s O’Donnell,” Samson rambled on, continuing a bitter reverie that had obviously begun the moment Herres had broken the news, “but he hasn’t blocked out a tackle since he was in high school, and besides he’s got a trick knee. And there’s Shivarski, and he couldn’t outrun my mother in a hundred-yard dash. And when it comes to calling signals …” Samson looked up tragically to heaven. “It’s like giving a Swiss watch to an ape in the trees.”