Free The Troubled Air by Irwin Shaw

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