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FREEDOMWAYS  FOURTH QUARTER 1971

him, when Iris tells him at this point, that she has been sleeping with another man, who promised to get her a TV-commercial acting job, which will at least begin to advance her acting career. Things had become so strained between Sidney and Iris before this point that she also decides to leave him. In the face of his protestation that this is the very time when he and his friends have changed the real world a little bit through their political victory, Iris says he is blind to the fact that "They own Wally...the people you've been fighting...own him completely." She tells him that the reality has escaped him completely: "In a few months he'll be having press conferences to explain how the pinkos and the bohemians duped him in the first place and how he has found his way back to the 'tried and true leadership' of the 'mother party'!" She exits shouting at him, "Sidney, take down that sign. It's like spit in your face!"

Does Sidney really understand the truth of anything at all? We are made to wonder. And to compound this crisis, and this doubt cast upon Sidney and his view of things, there occur several other reversals which seem to discredit his sense of reality. Mavis, whom he has scorned, reveals things which suddenly compel Sidney's respect for her strength, and thus require him to abandon his disdainfully superior attitude toward her "simple" and "conventional" way of life: he simply has not known her. And his friend Alton, having discovered the truth about Gloria which Sidney had hidden from him, confronts Sidney with his part in the deception; and after berating him, gives him a farewell note for Gloria and leaves.

Sidney seems to have lost, all at once, a good friend, the person he loves most, and the confidence he had in his sense of reality. The blows are shattering. While he is drinking to forget these problems, Gloria enters. Weakened by a crisis of her own, her self-respect almost gone, she is clearly desperate when she reads Alton's letter which she had in fact expected. She pours out her own troubles to Sidney and vainly tries to get a hold of her feelings. Then, while Sidney dozes off in a drunken stupor, she goes to the bathroom to kill herself with an overdose of narcotics.

The final scene finds Iris back in the apartment with Sidney. Both are shocked and in grief over Gloria's death. Unexpectedly, Wally enters to express his condolences. But they do not welcome him, for he has indeed sold out to "power" (in some way that is not elaborated on) and the Brusteins know very well that one of the casualties has been, for political expediency, that Wally has abandoned his former

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