No Place for an Angel (12 page)

Catherine's father was in a plane crash. He wasn't killed, but shattered one leg which refused to knit. He had to use a brace and crutch and acquired the nickname “President Roosevelt.” He would hobble up and down the one long business street in Merrill and say, “I got inter-rested in a knot of black Angus cattle down near a fence corner, and I forgot I was in the plane. I really forgot it. I thought I was in the Cadillac. Any fool knows you can't run a plane like you run a Cadillac. You
pilot
one and you
drive
the other. I just got my words mixed up and now I've got to pay for it for the rest of my life by answering when people say President Roosevelt. A fellow could preach a sermon on it, if he had half a mind to.” A Mexican who was riding with him got killed in the crash along with a black Angus bull who wouldn't get out of the way. Mr. Latham went to some trouble and expense locating the Mexican's family and paying for the funeral, but beyond this thought scarcely more about him than he had about the bull, though both of them remained in the story, which he went on telling and telling—his something to match the war.

You got to know the war like a person, Catherine and Priscilla agreed. And found out more bad things about it all the time, they would add. Edward, a PFC who did not aspire to be a sergeant, got shipped off to Bahia, of all places. Here he cooled his heels for three years and complained about the officers and the food. Edward, Catherine thought, should always have kept a Gunnison County sunburnt face and a sun-squint to go with his scornful mouth; he should have stayed tall. Instead, ever since he had revealed himself in the shoe business in St. Louis, he had a shopman's pallor and he was short, or rather medium height, and all his complaining now sounded querulous and dense, as though he hadn't once, ever in his life, caught on to the main point.

“He couldn't have shrunk,” said Jerry Sasser, some minutes later.

He and Catherine were sitting on a balcony in a Delaware resort overlooking the Atlantic. It was five years after the war and now they lived in Washington, but had driven here to enjoy a weekend of fine June weather and now it was Sunday afternoon. Jerry lay in a deck chair, his legs stretched out long, his eyes blotted out with dark glasses, awake or dozing, none could tell, not even himself, for pleasantly encompassed with sun, sea smell and distant rush, he drowsed within the area of her voice, his mind as much in his body as in his head.

“He couldn't have shrunk. You grew.”

Catherine laughed. “I guess so. But you've grown taller since the war. I know you have, Jerry.”

She was leaning against the end of the balcony in a white open-backed sun suit, turning her back to the sun. She had roped a bright silk scarf around her tucked-up long blond hair. White became her; she was looking relaxed and attractive, and she knew it.

“I wish we had more time together,” she said.

“Latham,” he said, with a yawn. “Latham's polio worried us to death.”

“But now that's over,” she said. “I really feel that it is, Jerry. I'm convinced he's going to be perfectly all right.”

“Provided he's careful,” Jerry said.

“Yes. Thank God he's old enough to understand. And intelligent and sweet enough to cooperate. He'll be careful.”

“I think so. I think he'd better be.”

“Jerry,” Catherine said, “do you realize that you're the only strong one left? Uncle Dirk and Uncle Mark are gone, Daddy was never the same after the plane crash, Edward ran away, Latham's had polio already, it looks like Priscilla is going to be an old maid—did you ever think about it, Jerry? That you're the only one?”

He sat up restlessly, suddenly tense, leaning forward on the footrest of his deck chair, one knee on either side of the low seat, and for a long moment he became very still. His wife, also, watching him, shielded behind her glasses, felt a growing stillness within her. She often experienced this now, when she observed him. He was handsome, excellent to a fine degree, matured and rendered solid, confident and aware by his officer's experience—wasn't all this a cause for delight? Why should the stillness he sometimes caused in her show an urge to grow mysteriously until it enveloped her in its own space, large as a canyon down whose emptiness she wandered, not even inches tall? Was it because he had his own stillnesses too, sometimes observed to be intense, but they never touched her own? When would it all change back again? He had walked out of the war like this—that was all Catherine knew. He gave her at last a long glance which seemed to increase the length of the balcony lying between them.

“Of course I think about it,” he said. “Why do you think I have nightmares?”

“I didn't know you did, Jerry. You never told me.”

“You haven't heard anything in months, you've been so worried about Latham.”

“That's only natural,” she said, after considering it. “You've been worried too.”

“Maybe I'm sick too,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe to be sick you don't have to be in bed with something they can name. It's the responsibility. Just being alive is a burden. I sometimes wish the name came with it—polio, plane crash, something handy.”

Catherine was astonished. “You've never talked like this! Is it Washington, the world situation? What can you trace it to?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “Postwar let-down, I guess. Hell, I don't know. What you said just now about being the only man in the family—I've thought that myself, so you got me started. In the middle of the night I can wake up and feel it, it's like a pressure here”—he touched his chest—“like something hitting in time with my heart only not quite, sometimes there's just a shade of difference in the rhythm. Whatever it is, it's there all right. I don't think I'm special. I think a lot of people feel this way. There's too much
on
us now, Catherine. In Washington you get it strong, the full blast. For years and years it's going to be this way. There's no end in sight for us. I cannot see any more—this is the worst part—I really cannot see, even if there were an end, what the end would mean, what it would matter.”

“If you came out the other side what would you find? Is that what you mean?”

“That's it. I have to keep running, keep going, keep thinking, working, moving, caring. But I don't know why. I can't see why.”

Catherine longed to help. “I think it's Latham's illness that's depressed you. I felt so down myself, I—”

“Depressed? No, I'm not depressed. It's just that I live with this feeling, and so I can't care.”

“Jerry, that's absurd. You cared when Latham was sick. You know you cared!”

Yet she did remember the first few dark days when Latham was so sick and they had crossed the street near the hospital to a drugstore, trying, as they had been advised, to eat and keep their strength up. She had essayed a milkshake and she would remember all her life what a struggle it was to force the rich mixture down her throat, through the denser element of her fear. Jerry had eaten a chicken salad sandwich which kept coming apart on his fingers—he would lick celery and mayonnaise off his hands. He was thin; there was a terrible thin deep line between his eyes. In the mirrored wall opposite they looked aging and tired, but felt as helpless as two lost children with a dollar between them to spend in the drugstore. Jerry said abruptly, as if to himself, “I don't see why our child should get well, more than another person's should. I just can't see it.” “Stop,” Catherine begged. “Don't say things like that. Please don't.” He stopped, but she saw now that she had not made him stop thinking what he thought, nor could she.

The funny thing was that Jerry Sasser, back before the war, down in Dallas, Texas, used to teach a Sunday school class. That had pleased everybody but Catherine, but intent on being a good young wife, she had kept quiet about it, even encouraged him in his folly of earnestly believing that every lesson had some modern application, if one only could spare the time to think it over and see just what it was. Earnest was the word for Jerry Sasser in those days—earnest and sincere and kind. Just the finest boy, everyone told Catherine; just the sweetest boy, they all said. Jerry and Catherine used to lie on the rug together on Sunday evenings, drinking beer and telling stories about when they were children. Most of them were funny stories about Merrill, which they had never realized was such a crazy little place until they moved to Dallas.

Some were not so funny, such as the time Jerry recalled when his father had told him to go up to the history classroom in the Aggie and wait for him. It was a December afternoon and the building was on a high treeless hill, seamed with dry gullies, and a wind was blowing. There was nobody in the building. The history classroom was in the upstairs back corner of the building overlooking the steepest fall of the land. The ceilings were high and the walls white and bare and too much light was coming in through the high curtainless windows—too much light for the sort of day it was, dark and blowing outside but all the light collecting here. The blackboards had all been cleaned and all the maps rolled up but one, which was hanging unevenly and went knock, knock at the corner. Jerry sat at a desk on the back row and waited and waited. His father, who had forgotten him, came just at dusk, after three hours. “Why didn't you come on home, son?” he asked. The question was a sensible one but Jerry couldn't answer it. In the room he had felt himself to be abandoned in a
timeless eternal blank dream, consigned there, with no will of his own. His father was a tall, thin, stooped man and Jerry had heard his patient, mild walk for a long time, first on the walk outside, then in the hall below, then on the stairs, the hall outside and at the door itself, and still he had not moved. “Why did I do such a thing?” he had asked Catherine. “Daddy never meant to punish me in any way, sending me there.” Catherine had tears in her eyes from the story—poor little boy, such a nightmare! “Your father's too gentle to punish anybody anyway,” she pointed out. They spent a good deal of time complimenting their in-laws, trying to “understand” when some little thing went wrong and someone behaved in a puzzling way. They soberly agreed that Latham and Sasser typified the finest qualities that Texas had to offer. Jerry's creed was: “Not cattle, not oil either, but
pee-pul
are the glory of Texas.” Lord, thought Catherine, there are some things to be thankful for. If it hadn't been for the war Jerry would probably still be saying that, at every Rotary Club luncheon from Corpus Christi to El Paso. But no denying that in those days they had had lots of fun. They wore loafers identical except for size—it was fun to pretend you got mixed up. Catherine, who was still in skirts and sweaters, often wore a clean shirt of Jerry's for a blouse. He understood her liking to. “I understand,” he said.

Had he really changed? Were the little boy alone and immobilized in the white high room on a winter's afternoon and the man who now heard something else in his breast beside his heart, one and the same? If this could be the case, it's up to me to do some understanding now, she thought.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked, smiling also.

“Just thinking. Just happy.” She was always happy, more or less, to be with him.

Soon they ran down from their balcony and played with a beach ball on the sand. Jerry swam, but Catherine, who liked water the temperature of Texas swimming pools, sat in the sand and made a house, as she used to make at Sandy Gulch when Uncle Dick took her walking there. She thought of the little girl she had wished for but lost after the war, and now could hope for no others. “You'll have to be your own little girl,” Jerry had told her, a remark she had clung to at the time for its tenderness, but which she now put aside without looking into it. As they were about to return to the hotel, they both looked up and saw a strange and shocking thing.

One of the balconies of the new postwar structure, some distance to the left of their own, had, just a moment or two before, loosened from the wall at one end and was hanging perilously, while bits of cement dropped singly from around the supports of exposed iron rods. A man, clinging to the wall, the windowsill, now the doorknob, was trying to brace himself for shoving a lady with an enormous behind through the door to safety. Even while the outcome was still in doubt the scene was ludicrous and Catherine and Jerry stood laughing helplessly: it seemed they could not stop laughing.

In the car going home, Catherine exclaimed, “We were awful to laugh. Those people might have been killed.”

“It wouldn't have been any less funny if they had been killed,” Jerry said, and they both, at this outrageous thought, fell to laughing again.

A thin rain had set in, enveloping the lush green flats of the country south of Wilmington. She shivered, the air was so damp.

She saw his profile, a regular, smooth outline, a handsome lightness against the night. On a long curve, the car skidded; a truck approaching, slipping slightly also, skimmed perilously near. Catherine straightened, rolled up the window and pulled a sweater out from the tumble on the back seat. We're into a new phase after Latham's illness, she thought. I have to learn new ways.