No Place for an Angel (15 page)

But the hotel had none either. “Not till Monday, sir,” they said. Jerry left the bags and Catherine with the bellboy and went out to a news shop. “What did they say?” Catherine asked when he returned. He was puzzled, worried. “They said not till Monday, too. Come to think of it, they're right. That magazine never gets to the stands before Monday.”

“Well,” said Catherine, “you know that story Senator Ogden tells about his mother. She was clearing out a closet and found a four-year-old newspaper. She thought the world was going right down the drain. She thought it was that day's paper.”

“You mean I got an old one. Look, maybe the strain has been terrific, but it's not that bad. Christ.” He had somehow managed already, by doing nothing more than stand in the middle of the floor and think, to inspire a collapse in the room's original order. The ashtrays were already full of cellophane, and twisted empty match folders. There was a blob of ash on the rug, and the bedspread looked to have been stirred with a spoon. Now he crouched by the telephone, his coat thrown off in a heap beside him. Twice his hand hovered toward the phone. The stewardess upstairs? Washington? The magazine's local bureau? No need to appear anxious. His hand dropped back.

“You'd better get dressed,” he said to Catherine.

She stood by the window, looking out. “I'm getting very tired, Jerry. You remember what happened in Chicago. Well, Jerry, just this once, I'm asking you please to leave that one alone. Not that she's any different from the rest, not that she'll mean any more or any less, but just this once, please, pass it up.”

He sat wriggling his toes in his sock feet. As always, his energy surmounted her. “She hasn't offered me anything,” he pointed out. “You're thinking of going home to Merrill,” he went on. “You've got all the symptoms. ‘Oh, save me God from this weary corrupt political life and let me get back to the real thing and find my peace of soul!'”

She smiled. He was, in a way—given about a thousand-point handicap—good for her. The more she dodged the more she ran straight into him. But now, chain-smoking, with cuffs turned back on his wrists, he was back with the big worry. “That damned article.”

“Ogden will understand,” she said.

“It isn't a question of understanding,” said Jerry. “It's not a question of anybody's feelings or loyalties or friendship or any human emotion. If I pull the necessary wires to keep Ogden balancing on the tightrope, riding a bicycle with a kitchen chair on his head and a monkey on top of that holding a pink umbrella, to stay in the clear on both sides of the civil rights question in order to keep the Texas vote in the fold, then nobody ought to know how the wires were pulled. But if there's a slip and everybody catches on, and if it further turns out that Jerry Sasser had any part in it, then Ogden is going to have to say I'm a half-witted friend of the family he got to lick stamps for him on weekends. He'll understand, sure. We'll all understand. We'll be the best of friends, before, during and after. It's just a question of who's going to still be around on Election Day Plus One. I'd like to be there,” he concluded in an offhand way, looking at her reflectively, as though she were somebody he had just met the other day. “What dress are you wearing? Tell Jerry. Tell Jerry what dress.”

“Jerry,” said Catherine, “if it hadn't been for Daddy you never would have been dreamed of in a thousand years when they needed somebody for an unexpired term in Congress. You know that, don't you? You do realize it?”

“Catherine, dear—” He had been bending over to open the suitcase, ready to pull out for her, as he had often done before, the dress he chose for her to appear in. She was to provide background music and her dress was important. Now he rose and stood with his feet apart, his eyes closed, his hands halfway toward clenching. “Catherine, dear, we simply don't have the time to embark on one of our super-special quarrels. We'll do it tomorrow. At 10
A.M
., after breakfast, before leaving for Merrill. Appointment for quarrel with Catherine.”

“I only mean to state,” she said, “in a very brief way that takes no time at all—one thing. I could leave you, Jerry.”

“My only darling, you've said it to me time and time again. The last time we thrashed through it stroke by bloody stroke, we agreed to postpone our decision until after the election. You remember? In San Francisco, Mark Hopkins, weekend in August.”

“I remember. You needn't talk to me as if I had gone permanently out of my mind.”

“You agreed to try your level best, remember?”

“I do remember.”

“Well, are you? Honestly, now, are you? Is this your level best? Catherine Latham's level best?”

The phone rang. He was on it like a panther, poised, waiting the second ring, no need to sound too eager. “Hello . . . oh, hello. Mrs. Sasser? Why, just a minute. Catherine?” He handed her the phone. It was Jan Radley. “Why, anything you have will be okay, I'm sure,” Catherine said. “I'm wearing, now let's see. . . .” Jerry had already lifted it. “A black and white cotton sheer, off-the-shoulder. Does that help?”

“She didn't call about a dress,” Catherine said, hanging up. “She knows perfectly well what to wear. She called to hear the sound of my voice, to know which way the wind was blowing. I'm getting too good at this.”

Jerry gave her an alarmed glance. Was she going into what he called one of her “truth serum” phases? Once she had circulated around an entire room telling everyone in great confidence and sincerity, something that went like this:

“Oh, well, you see, I'm here along with the wives of other important people just to present an image which ordinary people enjoy. It makes them feel safe when men on the inside are nicely paired off with attractive women who wear pretty clothes and look nice and smile like this. This dress is no accident, though I'm glad you like it. It's necessary, you see, to present an image. One thing to remember.”

It was Senator Ogden who had heard the greater part of this and gleamed from under his eyebrows, summoning Jerry. Jerry had fended his way, talking, through the room, to Catherine's side and, smiling affectionately, with an arm around her shoulders all the way through the door, he had got the hell out of there with her. They walked down the corridor to their room together. Inside, he was terribly gentle. “Did you get too much to drink, darling?”

She put her hand to her brow. “I couldn't think of anything else to talk about. It seemed a relief just to let go and tell the truth, and a pretty good joke too. Anyway I was only quoting you. That night after the evening in San Francisco when you tore Latham's picture you said the same words—”

“Catherine, listen.” He crouched down before her and took her hands firmly in his own. “I've told you many times that I didn't tear Latham's picture. It got torn that night, but
I did not do it.”

“I don't believe that,” she said. “I never believed it. Who else would have done it, if you didn't?”

“Tell me this. Did you see me do it? Did you?”

She drew her hands back from his grasp, struggling to get free. He released her. “I think I saw you.”

“But you aren't sure?”

“Yes, yes, yes! I'm sure. I know, I know it. I know you did it.”

He would not recoil. His face before her, below and before her, did not draw away. He was steady and courageous, and how could she strike, how could she reject, a really steady and courageous man?

“Do you really hate me, Catherine? Do you really hate me so much as all that?”

She broke into a stifled cry, burying her long fingers in her hair. “You were angry when they all left. You were angry. You can't deny that. You were holding the torn picture and you were saying, ‘Catherine, don't show pictures like this any more.' You said, ‘It is necessary to present an image.' You know you said it. You know you did!”

“I'm sorry. I see how you took it and I'm sorry I said that. I've told you over and over how sorry I am. The thing you never wanted to understand was that with that particular group we had to appear young, we had to detail a program of youth, young marrieds, and what they want for the country. So when we get right in there with the babies and the nurseries, pablum, croup, and God alone knows whatever else can happen between midnight and four o'clock, here you whip out a set of photographs of a student at a boy's school in Massachusetts, and say, Here's our son!”

“Oh, it's so funny when you tell it! Oh, it's so awfully funny.”

“Do you really hate me so much, Catherine?” Now he took her hands down out of her hair and held them again, this time in only one hand, while the other went up to smooth back her hair.

“No, I don't hate you. I wish I could hate you. I've tried and I can't, but I wish I could.”

Now with her hands strongly secured, her hair smoothed attentively, she would hear, “If you can't hate me, then maybe you can love me a little?” The face would be there, courageous and strong.

She would think, fighting back the melting point, trying to freeze back the tears: Wait, wait! He doesn't mean it. I know from experience he doesn't mean it. I know better than he does he doesn't mean it. He hasn't got it in him any more to mean anything. Jerry Sasser lost whatever it is that it takes to mean anything during the war. It's been gone ever since and I know it is, I know it is. Still I have to give him my love because it is my love and it belongs to him and if I can't give it I might as well be dead.

So then she would start to cry and then it was as good as over in the strong sure tangle of his closer contact, when the black thoughts shivered away and disappeared as lightly as a dress, and could not, ever, have been true of her and Jerry. Then she would be lying in the dark, released, but with his warmth all within and about her still in the pitch dark, the hot dangerous electric snarl that had been, so shortly before, herself, all smoothed out, and her mind emptied of all but its own tranquility listening to the air conditioner purr away and to Jerry's muted breath and to her own occasional sigh on the pillow still slightly damp—this dampness, these small sighs being all that was left, it would seem, of their crisis.

Just the same, the sort of thing that had happened at that gathering in Ogden's hearing, could not, naturally, be risked. There was just no telling whether she wouldn't get going again some day and what would she say then? For while there were naturally a good many things she missed completely, there were also a good many things she heard and grasped and could articulate. She would of course know better than to say the speeches always threatening to break through. But sometimes she grew possessed and what was the cause? Anger? Or a sense of being—perhaps by Jerry, but more likely she would have preferred to say by whatever had taken up headquarters in Jerry's spirit—deliberately goaded and enraged.

Jerry spent a good many quiet hours with her. His physical energy stood him in magnificent stead: another man might have gone down under the strain. He took her to a psychiatrist, or rather to a whole clinic of them.

This was in Denver. Catherine feverishly inquired of a number of authorities that now seemed assembled to assist her what on earth was the matter with her that she should be here in the first place. In conversation, of course, all roads led to Jerry, and everyone very soon saw that without Jerry there (he had gone back to Washington with Senator Ogden's entourage) nothing could really be accomplished. Catherine herself realized that whereas with Jerry there rare and splendid six-syllable names might be attached to her by way of diagnosis, without Jerry she had to be labeled a victim of nervous exhaustion.

Jerry wired that he simply did not have time to be psychoanalyzed, but that he would be able to spend a weekend with her doctors and perhaps, given enough money, they might consent to thrash out the whole problem in a couple of long-running sessions. Catherine tried her best to persuade the doctors on this point. She said that they had no idea what Jerry was capable of once he began to work at anything. His powers of concentration and retention, his capacity for long hours of discussion, his strange, driving energy . . . she had to stop.

Expressions crossed their faces which she could not interpret—they were “making” all kinds of things out of this, she realized. But it was true; what she was saying was true. She took heart from the presence of truth and pushed on.

“We went up to Maine to visit our son last summer. Our son is not terribly strong. I think I told you—he had polio when he was eight years old. But he has a wonderful spirit, fine and thorough in everything he does, though not remarkably quick like his father. For a long time now he's wanted to be a naturalist. He studies the habits of creatures—fish, birds, deer, wild life of every kind. He got the idea at camp and now he goes every summer to some area in New England—oh, lots of them with the same idea correspond and there are magazines too—they know which areas to study in and what to look for. So my husband—Jerry—and I took him there, to his area, and saw him fixed up in quarters, and then Jerry, just all of a sudden, out of the blue, took an interest in Latham's work. He began to question him before
dinner and all during dinner—we had an early dinner and Jerry wouldn't even take a drink, not even a cigarette—all his habits seemed to drop away and change in this great demand for knowing about Latham. I couldn't have got in a word if I'd wanted to, because Latham had brightened—oh, he was so happy, I've never seen anyone so happy. There was still an hour or so of light, so he took Jerry into the woods with him and showed him everything—how to watch for things, how to get pictures, habits of wild creatures—and then they came back, walking so eagerly in the dark across the meadow and upstairs they went past without a word to me—not that I cared, it seemed a grand thing to see them so absorbed. I thought it would be that way for good now. Latham brought out all his gear and explained the use of everything, showed all he'd done before and all he planned to do. They were up very late, and in the morning I drove Jerry to get the train and went back for a day or so with Latham before driving home. Oh, if I could make you see! That was all there was for Latham—he gave Jerry everything, so willingly, completely, all his treasure, and then what? Why, then nothing. Daddy is gone away, he finally said. And I saw he knew that Jerry had really gone away. He had already forgotten, until it may be useful to him someday to know about pheasants. He had forgotten Latham, too. You know when this happens, when you are forgotten. It was hard, because at the moment he had really entered into Latham's world, every inch. An experience is his when it happens, it's totally his own. He drains it dry perhaps, but he understands—most people leave with an impression, something here”—she touched her heart—“but when Jerry leaves, why, he has it all like something wrapped up to carry off. Maybe this is what separates us. Oh, I don't know!”