No Place for an Angel (16 page)

The men were silent. There were three of them and they had called her in to speak informally, it seemed, but something had got her started talking exhaustively and they let this continue. She felt that this, too, may have been intentional, for by inclination and training they must have been among the most devious people in creation. Their eyes were kind, concerned and quiet. They regarded her from behind desks.

“Perhaps I'm simply not on his level,” she went on, collecting herself. “It's only normal for a man to be attracted to pretty girls and for a man like Jerry they would of course be constantly around him. I asked him to leave me and go with one of them, but he says he loves me and doesn't want anybody else. I think around girls Jerry may be the same as he is around Latham with his leaves and snails and microscopic film: he can't leave till he has everything, until he's taken all there is to take; then he can forget it. He has to understand and that's the only way. Is it so bad? I read somewhere once the only way to understand an oyster is to eat it, and then you've changed it slightly, haven't you?” She thought this rather funny, but the men did not smile.

“What do you think drives him?” one of them asked her.

She had begun to enjoy herself. Her words were coming easily and freely and the captive audience was hers as long as the bills were met, along with the quietly carpeted corridors, the flower-filled salons and sun decks with their views of the snow-topped Rockies and the grand distant cascading green of the lower forests. The thin air seemed Olympian and one began to get glimpses of what one might achieve—a rhapsodic mastery of life. Now they had stopped her.

“Drives him?” she repeated.

“What about his parents, his family? Are his mother and father living?”

“His mother's dead. His father—is a professor in a small college. He teaches economics.”

When she said it like that, the way she always said it, a picture would form, of course, in the listener's mind and that picture would be all right. They would see Jerry growing up, a boy in a modest, but comfortable professor's house, dark living room with a Victorian oil or two, leather-bound sets behind glass shelves, the smell of a study, ink and paper mingling with familiar bathroom and tobacco odors, see him mowing a small lawn in the summer, perhaps, with his father, eating off some really good English china his mother had left, in a dining room—sunniest room in the house—where a bay window overlooked a bed of petunias. But thinking this herself as she had always done in the past as a means of impressing just that image upon a listener, she realized that here and now was not the time to create a false impression, and that made her, like one of Latham's small wild animals going about its usual business in the deep and dappled forest, pause. She saw that she had created the false impression of Jerry's father and of their house and life together not only to help Jerry—though it had at first been mainly that—but also to help herself not to think of the real thing, the true picture, which was not a pretty one.

The truth was that old Professor Sasser was a smelly old man, either from some ailment or from lack of bathing enough, and his house was a dusty little bungalow affair with all the paint worn off, set in a sunken space down below the level of the chipped and broken sidewalk, where the cows had wandered before the cement was dry, the same sidewalk that climbed up the long windy hill to the Aggie. There was a little entrance porch to the house, and two overgrown althea bushes on either side kept you from getting even a glimpse into the two front windows.

Jerry had taken Catherine there first one Sunday afternoon to call on his father. It was a week after they had got engaged and she had yet to darken the door. There were no rugs in the house. It was dingy and smelled like Professor Sasser. The board floors had been swept and there were some wicker chairs in the living room and some silly silhouettes hanging on the walls such as a woman of no taste might have put there—girls in flounced Southern-belle costumes flirting with gentlemen in tailcoats, girls of the 'twenties with long cigarette holders, leaning over wrought-iron balconies in the moonlight. The bookstands were full of books that did not look like books that other people had. They were thick with dark blue and dark green bindings. Catherine supposed they were textbooks. Jerry, who had grown silent and shaky, brought three glasses of iced tea on a red lacquered tray and they all sat there trying to think of something to say and feeling awkward and hot.

“I hear,” said Professor Sasser, “that's you're to be Jerry's wife.”

She nodded. She was trying to fight off thinking of what her mother was certainly going to point out, that being poor was one thing but being clean was another.

“You know, I suppose,” Professor Sasser said, smiling at her, as superior, she thought afterwards, as a cannibal prince, “the one true way to live?”

“I've already told Catherine all about it,” Jerry said quickly, “She's going to read the books.”

“I have put them aside for her,” said Professor Sasser. “I have many students at the agricultural college whose lives have been deeply affected by these precepts.” He reached out a long hand and tapped his strong, yellowed nails upon the covers of a group of books set out on a table nearby. “If you want to understand my son and be a good wife to him, then you must read all of these books. There are many more, but I myself have selected these, out of all available.”

Economics books, she thought, trying to steady herself into some orbit of reason, for even when the eyes of the smiling fanatic are gleaming into our own we still continue to trust that the world is, after all, a sane place, and that the little monsters that are now skipping across the twilight grass to meet us will only turn out to be toadfrogs or rabbits.

Professor Sasser continued to smile. “The mission of Jesus Christ in the world has been widely misunderstood from the very first century onwards,” he said. “This, as Jerry must have long since explained to you, is the first thing to understand.”

“Daddy,” Jerry put in, “I think we both talked it over, don't you remember? We both said it would be better for Catherine just to take the books, and she will take the books, won't you, Catherine?”

“Oh, yes,” said Catherine. “I'll take the books.” She felt Jerry's terrible embarrassment. It was writhing all over the room.

“It goes back,” Professor Sasser continued, smiling, “to the precise, original Hebrew meaning of the word
blood
, in contrast, you would understand if you had studied the original language, to the Greek meaning of the same word. Now, in the Greek—”

“I didn't know you taught Greek!” Catherine exclaimed. She was young then and the solution was born of desperation, but her voice was innocent and soft, her eyes wide, and somehow, somehow, it was going to work.

“Well, no, I don't teach Greek, but does that prevent me from studying, learning? No more than it prevents you—”

“I thought you taught economics, and here I learn that you teach Greek, too. That's marvelous!”

“No, I don't reach Greek, but I—”

“But Jerry told me you were a teacher, a professor out at the Aggie.”

“He was entirely right.”

“He teaches economics,” Jerry said. He was looking down at his hands; it seemed he was going to cry.

“What's Greek got to do with economics?” she asked.

When they walked back home together, down the long hill, through the Merrill business section, all shut up for Sunday except the drugstore—it was Easter Sunday, which was why she was home from school—they did not say a word to each other. Reaching, at the opposite end of town, the concrete posts and iron gate before the Latham property, Jerry Sasser spoke at last. “I guess you're finished with me, Catherine.”

She had been so stricken with disappointment on the way home she hadn't even noticed when they passed the drugstore. I knew he was old and he was poor and probably not very presentable—that's all okay—and I even realized he might be dirty, but I never dreamed he was crazy. She kept thinking this, every step of the way. She was terribly disheartened. “I don't know,” she said to Jerry Sasser. “I'll have to think it over.”

He looked down at the books he had been carrying for her. “If I take these back home,” he said sadly, “Daddy will say I—he'll say I—It's just this crazy religion!” he burst out. “When he's not on that, he's not so bad. Really and truly, he's not!”

“Okay,” she said finally. “I'll take the books.” She watched him go away up the long familiar sidewalk. What an awful place to go back to, she thought. I couldn't stand it for even one afternoon; if I had to spend the night there I'd just die—I wouldn't sleep a wink. But he's lived there for years and years. Years and years.

She didn't know what she thought. She watched him all the way up the street until some dust blew across the road and her eye lost him. Then she went disconsolately into the Latham house—the big comfortable white house with the turret. It was there she first recognized that the impression of horror had caught firm hold of her.

Before she went back to school, Catherine hid the books in the attic. She thought of them sometimes in the night, sitting up near the ceiling, behind an old trunk, as a huge spider might sit dormant, hairy and full of blood. She had stolen a glance at the titles:
True Origin of the Blood Union of Messiah's Brotherhood. The One Revelation: Blood Union of Messiah's Brotherhood.
But she never opened them at all.

That summer, after she had not seen or heard from him in three months, Jerry Sasser suddenly reappeared. They saw each other daily at the new swimming pool. In a town as small as Merrill, there was no way not to see one another.

When Priscilla heard that Catherine was in the hospital, she flew up to Denver to see her. Who told her was never clear. She heard in the same way she knew about Jerry's vast infidelities—she was a person who heard things. She called Jerry in Washington. “Sure, Catherine's out there,” said Jerry cheerfully. “Why don't you go out and see her? Tell her I can't get away till next weekend. I was going to call her tonight.”

Priscilla foresaw Catherine wandering about in a snake pit full of women in grey cotton dresses, X-rayed twice daily for suicidal weapons. Instead she found her smartly dressed, reading a novel in a room which looked out on Pikes Peak. The room was full of flowers. Catherine was glad to see Priscilla and had arranged that they were to go into town for lunch together. It was all so very pleasant. “Nervous exhaustion,” Catherine said. “Really. You want to read the chart? I sneaked and saw it myself, one day in the office. Not a word about anything crazy. None of those sixty-four-dollar words. It's just that Jerry has too much energy for me. We have to keep going day and night right on through the election. He just never gets tired.”

“Why do you have to go with him at all?” Priscilla demanded. She had asked too many questions already. Nobody ought to have to put up with so many questions as Priscilla could ask. Nobody would but Catherine. Priscilla regarded Catherine as a sort of saint, or angel.

“Well, he says that I help to make a good impression, ‘to present an image,' is the way they put it. I think that's rather sweet, don't you?”

Priscilla did not think that anything about Jerry Sasser was sweet. About Jerry she felt at bay in the entire family. Her mother and father, she felt, had every reason on earth to see through him; yet her mother never called him common and her father could not see that he was an opportunist. Jerry had always refused, technically, to touch a penny of Latham money, thus endearing himself to Latham hearts. But something more, something more than this was afoot, something that pierced below reason had linked them to Jerry Sasser. He was the son that Edward had failed to be. There was no explanation that Priscilla could discover for this peculiar idea. Her parents and Catherine had decided upon it without once referring any part of it to her. She could only be aware of it, and it enraged her.

Now, in Denver, in a pleasant Scandinavian restaurant with another picture post card view out the broad windows, on a bright chilly spring day, Priscilla felt thwarted again. Catherine looked well, they chatted on and on, the food was good, and with life so pleasant, so American, so secure, what on earth was there to worry about? Priscilla went home feeling foolish. She would take it out on Millard probably. Catherine realized all this, but did nothing about it. With a kiss and a bright smile, she waved her sister off. The thread of vision parted, and she turned back into the hospital with a dark heart.

She entered the pleasant room with all the flowers and closed the door. Every day they are getting closer and closer to it, she thought. Sooner or later, I will have to tell them and they will have to know. I can't keep it from them forever. Jerry must know I have to get it out some way, or he wouldn't have left me here. As she stood and thought of it, she felt it coming back again, starting to flash and race through her nerves as though she were wired for a certain current and once the circuit met a whole network jarred to life to tear at her. At such times she could look at any wall and it would begin to quiver.