The Troubled Air (52 page)

He sat down, feeling tired and disappointed with his performance, although the applause was surprisingly warm. It was all so inconclusive, Archer thought. I’m too reasonable for oratory and my energy is too low. Fifteen years ago I might have conceivably made a fiery speech, full of emotion and stirring calls for action, on this subject. But, then, nobody asked me to debate this subject fifteen years ago.

Frances Motherwell was standing at her seat in the front row, holding up her hand. At other points in the room, people were raising heir hands, too, asking for the floor.

“Mr. Chairman,” Frances said loudly and clearly, “Mr. Chairman.”

“Miss Frances Motherwell,” Burke said, motioning to her to come up to the dais. She walked swiftly toward the lectern, in her provocative, energetic way, her skirt swinging lightly around her legs. She stepped up gracefully, youthful, desirable, beautifully dressed, the lipstick bright on her mouth, her large eyes cleverly shadowed with a line of mascara on the lids. She carefully avoided looking at Archer as she stood a little to one side of the lectern, resting one hand on it, her other hand on her hip, her body athletic and full under the expensive dress, her legs long and shining rising from high-heeled black suede shoes. The room was very still, the women watching her warily and with despair, the men with obscure, unpolitical uneasiness. She stood silently for a moment, staring out, making her impression. She was hatless and her hair was very smooth, caught in back by a narrow black bow and she looked as girls in small towns hope they can one day look when they come to the city and conquer it.

The comrades had chosen their opening speaker shrewdly, Archer guessed, getting sex, respectability, talent, wealth, and a gown from a French collection in one glittering and dangerous package. The monolithic approach toward life—in which all aspects, qualities, abilities were always turned into weapons for the cause. Archer stirred uncomfortably, looking at the tense, perfect profile.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Frances said finally, in her husky, disturbing voice, which carried easily to the back of the room without any effort on her part. “I have listened with great interest to what’s been said here tonight. Especially to the opinions of Mr. Archer, who was kind enough to vouch for my abilities as an actress, and who was also kind enough not to mention anything about my politics. Mr. Archer happens to know a great deal about my politics, because a little more than a month ago he asked me and I told him.”

Archer watched her intently, feeling himself grow tense, conscious of the effort that was necessary to sit there quietly and without moving. This is going to be bad, he thought, staring at the handsome, wild face, this is going to be very bad.

“What I told him was simple and explicit,” Frances went on evenly, her diction clear and professional, her voice vibrating with the curious overtone of excitement that had contributed so much to her success. “And I will repeat it here and now.”

Suddenly Archer felt himself grow calm, because it was going to be much worse than he had ever imagined and there was nothing to be done about it any more.

“What I said,” Frances continued, her long, fine hand dropping off her hip and slowly and lightly caressing her silk flank, “was that I joined the Communist Party in 1945.”

She paused and Archer was conscious of the heavy, unnatural silence of two hundred people sitting in one room without movement, without a sigh, a whisper, a cough.

“For your benefit,” Frances said huskily and quietly, staring out over the meeting, “I will say that I am still a member tonight, although when this is over, I am going home and writing in my resignation.” She threw back her head, and her hair, in its little bow, flicked on the back of her neck in a pretty, girlish movement. Her chin was up and her eyes were shining and she looked defiant and exalted. God, Archer thought, she must have turned religious. That was bound to be next on the list. And of course, she would pick an occasion like this, public, emotional and tense, for her announcement. Her hunger for drama and attention, her stage-center nerves, could never be satisfied by private renunciation. Archer remembered stories about Frances suddenly and without warning turning on the lover-of-the-moment at parties and breaking off with him for a real or fancied misdemeanor, humiliating him with savage intimacies and witty and vicious truths and half-truths while the other guests fell painfully silent around her and her stricken gallant. Now, in giving up a political party, she was keeping to the old compulsive pattern of the public tirade she had until now reserved only for the gentlemen who had rashly visited her bed.

Curiously, Archer turned to look at the rows of people in front of him. Many of them, he realized, must be feeling their hearts sink within them as they waited for the revelations in the husky, quivering voice. But the faces were grave and thoughtful and there was no telling, at this distance, who expected to be cut down next.

“The reason for my resigning is a simple one,” Frances was saying, “and Mr. Clement Archer is connected to it. After I told Mr. Archer that I was a member of the Party, I was called before the leader of my group and harangued. I was told that if I ever admitted membership again I would be dropped in the interests of Party discipline. If I was asked about what I had told Mr. Archer by any committee or any court of law, I was to deny everything, even if it meant being indicted for perjury. I was told point-blank that I was engaged in a conspiracy and that conspirators did not expose themselves and if I had ever thought anything else, it was now time for me to rid myself of such romantic, girlish notions. I was told that I had been under suspicion for a long time in the Party, that I was considered unstable, and that was why no work of any real importance had ever been entrusted to me.” Her voice was bitter and Archer could see that she was still suffering from the blows to her vanity that these revelations had dealt her. If she had been treated more tactfully, Archer thought idly, she’d never be up here tonight.

“I walked away from that meeting,” Frances said, “thinking hard. I had never believed that I was a member of a conspiracy and I thought that the writers and politicians who said that were pimps and prostitutes of reaction …”

Whatever else she has broken away from, Archer thought, she still carries the vocabulary with her.

“Suddenly the blinders fell off,” Frances said. “The people whom I had admired, the men who I thought were working for freedom, justice, peace … Those words.” For the first time she turned and looked at Archer, and she smiled. He remembered her saying the same words about her dead young man in England. “That was all hogwash.” She turned back to her audience. “I saw what they were really like. I remembered how pleased they were when people got hurt on a picket line, when companies closed down and threw men out of work. They’re interested in trouble, in bloodshed, in unhappiness, that’s the only climate they can work in and they know it and if they don’t find it, they make it. They
have
to conspire, because they’re misfits, neurotics, lunatics, and if they had to work in the light of day, everyone would be able to tell in ten minutes how ridiculous and incompetent and dangerous they are.”

We have now reached the point, Archer thought calmly, at which the mad call each other mad.

“I’m a lot of things, I suppose,” Frances went on, her voice challenging and high and filled with the delight of talking about herself, “and many of you here probably have told each other some pretty sharp things about me. But there’s one thing I’m not and never could be. And that’s a conspirator. And certainly not a conspirator against my own country. I don’t do anything in secret.” She grinned, as though a vulgar joke about herself had fleetingly crossed her mind. Then her face grew grave and she spoke seriously, using her talent to sound sincere and repentant. “After I decided that,” she said, “I had to go on to the next step. Was I to keep quiet about what I had seen and heard, what I had learned? Was I going to stand off and watch the machinations, watch people being deluded and used and disillusioned, watch the country being weakened and divided, and never open my mouth? Or was I going to make up for my error and my stubbornness and do my share in repairing the damage to which I had contributed?” Swiftly, with the merest flicker of her eyes and re-arrangement of her position, she changed to a woman who had accepted martyrdom for a noble cause. “It would have been much more pleasant to keep quiet. And it would have been easy. No one demanded anything of me. Only my conscience …”

Archer closed his eyes momentarily, embarrassed. Frances, darling, he thought, you should have gotten someone else to write your lines tonight…

“I’ve stayed up night after night, wrestling with myself,” Frances said, looking like a woman who slept ten hours a night and who had her face massaged five times a week. “And finally, I knew what I had to do. I had to come here tonight and tell what I knew. As a warning, as an example. Now,” she said briskly, cleverly switching from the almost religious level on which she had been working to a conversational and friendly, almost gossipy tone, “now we can go on to more specific things. Mr. Archer, for example. I don’t know why Mr. Archer has chosen to be so discreet about my affiliations,” Frances said, “but I have my suspicions. Mr. Archer is quite a mysterious figure and it’s a little difficult to make a coherent pattern out of what he says and what he does. I used to think he was quite a simple-minded and rather bumbling fellow. But things I have learned about him in the last few weeks, plus the speech tonight in which he successfully said one thing while proposing another, have given me new respect for him. Respect for his cleverness if not for his candor. My politics were not the only thing Mr. Archer has taken pains to hide. He has also hidden the fact that the program for which he was responsible was written for four years by a man who is an avowed and militant atheist. A man whom he approved of so much that he permitted him to be seen in every night club in town with his eighteen-year-old daughter.”

“Now, Frances.” Archer stood up, trying to keep his voice from being thick. “I think that’s enough of that.”

“Mr. Chairman,” Frances said to Burke, “I understood the floor was mine.”

“Sit down, Clem,” Burke whispered, pulling at his sleeve. “You’ll only make it worse if you argue with her.”

Slowly Archer sat down. He hated Frances, mostly because she was so plainly enjoying herself.

“Among other things that Mr. Archer conveniently neglected to mention,” Frances went on, the melodious nervous voice dominating the room, “was his curious generosity. Mr. Archer, because of certain activities, has for some time been under surveillance and investigation and several interesting items have come to light. For example, Mr. Archer not long ago gave as a loan or a disguised gift, a check for three hundred dollars to the chairman of this meeting, Mr. Woodrow Burke, and I have seen a photostat of that check. He also gave a check to Mrs. Alice Weller, who was a principal speaker at a congress which our own State Department condemned as subversive and opposed to the interests of our country. Whether he donated this money out of sympathy for the lady’s political views or out of gentlemanly tenderness, I have no way of judging.”

Poor Alice, Archer thought, sitting out there in the middle of the room, dowdy, inefficient, remembering that it was Frances herself who had trapped her into sponsoring the congress, knowing that in the spate of accusations no one would take the time to ask her for the accurate history of the affair or even listen to her explanations. Probably, Archer thought, staring fascinated at the slender fashionable figure five feet away from him, probably by now Frances doesn’t even remember it or has come to believe she was in no way involved with it.

“I have also seen the photostat copy of that particular check,” Frances was saying. She laughed, a high, jumpy giggle. Somehow, that short, almost-deranged burst of disconnected laughter made Frances seem more dangerous than ever. A woman who laughs like that, at a time like this, Archer thought, is beyond reach.

“And on the day before Mr. Pokorny, who did the music for Mr. Archer’s show, was scheduled to go down to answer charges that he had perjured himself to enter this country from Mexico,” Frances said, “Mr. Archer took Mr. Pokorny to his bank and withdrew two hundred dollars from his account and handed it over to Mr. Pokorny. And I have seen a sworn affidavit from the teller in the bank to this effect.”

Archer closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to look at the pretty, triumphant, expensive figure on the platform any more. And I thought they were only tapping my phone, he thought, only my phone.

“Mr. Pokorny,” Frances said, “in case anyone here is in doubt, was an admitted member of the Austrian Communist Party and was married to a high-ranking official of the American Communist Party and was due to be deported by this Government as an undesirable alien and if anyone wishes proof of any of these things I am prepared to furnish it.”

Unlucky Pokorny, lying in the crowded Long Island cemetery, Archer thought, he will be forever remembered not by his excellent modest music but by his shabby brush with the officials of the Immigration Department and by his connection with his impossible wife.

“Isn’t it strange,” Frances asked, her voice mischievous, almost coquetting, “that Mr. Archer, who has told you so righteously that he is opposed to Communists, should confine his charitable impulses so strictly to ladies and gentlemen who are, to put it as delicately as possible, so far to the left of center?”

Archer opened his eyes, feeling himself begin to sweat. The Red Cross, he thought dazedly, the Community Chest, the Urban League, should I tell them about the checks to them? And will anybody listen?

“What’s more,” Frances moved away from the lectern, going downstage to be closer to her audience for the big scene, “Mr. Archer, in his attempt to keep his friends snugly placed on his program, took the trouble to go down to Philadelphia and vouch to the sponsor of the program that Mr. Victor Herres, whom he has known intimately for fifteen years, is not a Communist, pledging this on his honor. This was very loyal and comradely and had the desired effect. To this day, Vic Herres has not missed a single program. Unfortunately, this charming guarantee was not true. I know it,” Frances said, “and eight or nine of you in this room know it. And we know it for a very simple reason. We know it because Vic Herres was the leader of the Communist cell to which we all belonged.” Again there was that high, disturbing giggle. “Those of us who were privileged to know these two gentlemen,” Frances said softly, “know that they took great pleasure in each other’s company and were seen together almost daily. I will not try to examine here the probability that a grown, intelligent man, a man who has taught history at a college, would not understand the politics of a friend whom he has seen almost every day for fifteen years.”