No Place for an Angel (17 page)

It had happened in a city—oh, which one?—they had been in so many. Oh, in Kansas City, of course. Where Ethel lived, the old classmate whose acquaintance now had dwindled to a yearly note on a Christmas card. Ethel had got herself married to the owner and publisher of a string of corn-belt newspapers and every last one of them now supported what Jerry Sasser was committed to regarding as the wrong party, the one the country did not need. Ethel was terribly happy, her husband was rich and respected, she had two fine boys, and did not know how antiquated, not to say wrong, not to say even dangerous, the politics of her entire situation in life had become. It was the part of friends in such a case to warn her, especially since her husband was so influential. However, it must be done tactfully—so, at any rate, Jerry and Senator Ogden agreed after running through a sampling of Ethel's husband's editorials over the past eight years. Catherine was commissioned to call Ethel for a luncheon date. At lunch, if things went well, she was to try and get Ethel and her husband to come up to Senator Ogden's hotel suite for cocktails and even, if things went very well, for dinner. The lure was “to meet Jerry,” who couldn't get away for lunch.

All this strategy proved entirely unnecessary. Ethel's husband, though in editorials he weekly slaughtered and supped on members of Senator Ogden's party, proved to be the kindest and most approachable of men, who invited himself along to lunch, just to meet Catherine, whom he had heard so much about. Ethel was getting too fat and looked expensively dowdy, but her husband was even fatter. He was careful with himself; indeed, they both gave the impression of being very careful about life; one could suppose that they still made out household budgets together and that the items did not include liquor. He held the floor, talking to the two women as though they were little girls; his glance dropped goodness and blessings upon them. One felt after fifteen minutes that he owned Kansas City. The state also was his domain; he played tunes upon it, benevolently hymning its prosperity and common sense. It was he who insisted that they should not wait for the appointed invitation (which they would be glad to accept), but should run up to Senator Ogden's suite right away—“Right away?” Catherine asked. “Well, just let me call.” “You can call from the lobby,” Ethel's husband boomed, and waved for the check. Everything was swept ahead of her, and the tide was all cordiality, hospitality, and the genial conviction of goodness, of doing the right thing, of pressing warmly the opponent's hand, he who was the guest in the plentiful strong household.

Ethel's husband was the sort of man who wore brown suits to which his own male odor was indissolubly attached, and said, “Excuse me,” as he went forging ahead across a hotel lobby. “You must let me call,” said Catherine. “Honey,” said Ethel, “Catherine feels she better call.” “Right, right,” he agreed.

Catherine rang twice but the line was engaged each time. She did not know what to do. Stopping Ethel's husband once was a problem; stopping him twice was an impossibility. They soon found themselves lined up together in the elevator where Ethel's husband removed his hat, a tan straw with a polka-dotted band. “Just let me go first,” said Catherine, as she put her key in the lock.

She felt distinctly that it had been a mistake for them to entrust her with any political maneuvering; that she was not clever enough, nor quick enough, that she had nothing to trade with but sincerity and good will and that since these were genuine she could not turn them off and on at will. They were obviously of no use at all when it came to stopping 260-pound newspaper publishers from going wherever they wanted to go. She was already feeling resentment toward Jerry and Senator Ogden, whom she fully expected to find with their sock feet on the coffee table, drinking beer and scribbling notes and skipping about the country by telephone. Instead the room was empty; it was even in good order. There was a crumpled hankerchief lying on the couch along with a pair of short white gloves, and the telephone was lying off the hook.

Catherine had advanced to the center of the room before these things came together in her mind along with the sounds which were coming through the wall from the bedroom. She went cold all over. It was straight to the depths of her own most secret self that every heightening gasp and murmur from behind that wall went to find its double, magnifying itself unmistakably, and like the single sound reverberating from struck crystal, it overflowed her hearing until she did not know if anyone else could hear or not.

She removed her hat carefully and laid it on the dresser. “There doesn't seem to be anyone here,” she said. “Just have a seat.” Then she went through the bathroom and knocked on the bedroom door. “Is that you, Marianne?” she called. “Marianne, are you there?” With a loud rattle of the knob she opened the door, waited a moment before the dark slit without trying to see inside, then closed it. The sound had shut off like a phonograph.

“I declare,” she said to Ethel and her husband, as she came out smiling, “it's Marianne Ogden, the Senator's daughter. She says that Jerry and Senator Ogden left about fifteen minutes ago. They had an appointment at some club—”

“That would be the Rook Club,” said Ethel's husband, nodding. God, thought Catherine when recalling the scene much later, could anybody's mind get
that
full of Kansas City? She could only suppose that it had. “Marianne,” she went on, “just flew in to see her mother and daddy. She's in school out from Chicago, you know. She's supposed to be catching up on her sleep—there was some dance or other last night—but how she could do it with those Dixieland records going in there I don't know. Or maybe it was the radio. I think she's not wide awake or dressed or she'd come out and meet you.”

So they sat about, chatting for a time and Ethel went to powder her nose, and beyond the wall, the bedroom was as silent as the tomb. As they got ready to leave, Catherine returned to the bedroom door. “We're going now, Marianne,” she called out. “You can sprawl around to your heart's content without dressing.”

When they had gone, Catherine went downstairs and at the desk arranged for a room of her own. She said there was too much telephoning going on in hers and Jerry's quarters and she needed some rest. After she had tipped the bellboy and locked the door, she sat down in the air-conditioned room and the hand of ice that had both paralyzed her normal reactions and shocked her into a strange new pattern of utterly convincing deceit relaxed slowly, melted away. She raised the blinds and opened the curtains to let in some light, took off her shoes, her dress, which she hung up in the closet, and as she could not quit perspiring and shaking, she draped a large bath towel around her shoulders, and sat with her feet propped on the end of the bed, looking out and smoking.

I think I succeeded, she thought. I think I even brought it off. He'll have that to thank me for anyway, for the rest of his life. If he remembers anything at all. If he remembers anything, which I doubt. If you remember anything—anything small and human and unimportant, not powerful—then you are responsible for it; and so he just forgets.

But if I succeeded, she told herself, I succeeded because Ethel and her husband are good. Their politics may be screwy and they aren't very much fun and their ideas get S for stupid; but they are good. They did not suspect that my husband was laying the hat check girl or whoever it was, in the bedroom. They must have known somebody was laying somebody, but they wouldn't embarrass me by noticing and they won't even say out loud to each other that it might have been Jerry. So there is still just as much chance as there ever was that if Jerry can talk to them and Senator Ogden can talk to them they may see the light about their stupid politics, they may get wise to the world and know who is laying who and be as miserable as I am now.

Catherine called down to the lobby for a package of cigarettes and on second thought ordered also a bottle of whiskey. When Jerry found her she was quite drunk.

That was problem enough without starting any quarrel. Jerry barely got her sobered up in time to see Ethel and Ethel's husband again that evening. Ethel insisted on asking all about Marianne, much to Senator Ogden's delight; he could turn to mush when talking of his daughter. And whether it ever came out clearly that Marianne was nowhere within a thousand miles of Kansas City, Catherine did not know or really care. Everybody was getting drunk except Ethel's husband, who began to worry about Ethel. She had got entirely too genial since Catherine and the entourage had showed up in town. She was now longing fuzzily to reminisce. And pictures would soon come tumbling out, photos of children at all ages. “Oh, yes; oh, yes,” said Ethel. “Just a tiny one,” she said. “Ethel,” said Ethel's husband sternly. “Remember where you are!” “Well, now, tell me, Senator Ogden,” said Ethel, “really and truly. Who's going to be the next President of this great country?” Ethel's husband was terribly embarrassed when they finally left. His principles, his city, his state, his politics, his party, his religion—everything seemed to have shaken a bit for him, as though far underfoot the earth had stirred in its sleep. He courteously reminded his wife that her hat was crooked. Yes, a brick or two had shaken loose here and there, and life was going to need looking into a bit.

Catherine, now coolly sober after having been held under a cold shower by Jerry, who had also choked strong salt water down her until she vomited and finished her off with prairie oysters and dry crackers, allowed herself to be tugged to Ethel's warm bosom. She and Jerry were smiling at Ethel with indulgent affection and Ethel's husband, regarding them, felt them admirable. Hadn't they understood his wife's getting too much to drink? His handclasp showed his gratitude. There was some mention of a further meeting and when the door closed an impression of the Sassers lingered warmly in his mind as he prepared himself for that long talk he was going to have to have with Ethel. . . .

Jerry's story to Catherine was that he had not been the person she had heard at all. She knew this kind of response as a strategy and even saw the good sense to be made of it: as long as you do not say a person has a certain disease you don't have to talk about it. As for herself, she had never been more collected. She sat calmly at the most distant booth in the inevitable drugstore where all their crises had a way of flowering, and whether it was a blessing or a curse that over the length and breadth of a great country you could not tell one of these establishments from another, they had no way of knowing. She had ordered a fountain Coke which she did not particularly want and sat toying with the straw while he dumped milk in his coffee and stirred a vigorous whirlpool. Catherine let him light her cigarette.

“I don't want to argue about it,” she said. “I know what I know. I'm going to leave you after the election, Jerry. I'll drag around with you until November, if that's what you want, but on Election Day Plus One it's got to be goodbye.”

She had thought she would have to steel herself for saying this, but instead it came out naturally, easily, proving to her that it was the right thing. Her very soul felt suddenly clean and clear. Come the Revolution, she thought, come the Liberation. . . .

“I can't see what a great difference it will make to you, once you get used to the idea,” she went on amiably. “You've got what it takes to please a whole nationwide assembly line of little college graduate career girls—”

“Stop it, Catherine. You must be crazy.” He was toying with a match folder, hunched over his coffee which had ceased to swirl but which he had not touched. His eyes were moving restlessly; his voice sounded strained. The thing he had said about craziness bounced away without sticking.

“And you can still fish rabbits out of the hat for Senator Ogden. You aren't ever going to be dumb,” she added, with a touch of pride.

“Catherine,” said Jerry, “we have to consider Latham.”

“He's under no illusions that we're happy,” she told him. “I know that's true. And not because I told him.”

Jerry nodded. “I believe you.”

“After all,” she went on, “he is intelligent.”

“Does he still want to be a naturalist?” Jerry asked cautiously. He seemed aware that he might possibly be walking out on the air. Catherine was always receiving letters from Latham which she passed on to Jerry, though if he read them, he forgot what was in them, and sometimes he lost them. The letters now, for some weeks, had been full of plans for going North as soon as school was out. He would be picking up his wild life program just at the mating season. Why on earth, she wondered, would any man not be interested in a son like Latham? She felt her vision darkening as though with sunstroke. She felt she would faint. She felt as she had when the gasps and soft cries came through the wall, matching her own through the years, like the two halves of one big red Valentine heart, ripped in two.

What is the matter with you, Jerry? she wanted to cry. What in the world is wrong? But they had had that argument, so many many times before. “It isn't me, Catherine,” he used to deny. “It isn't.” “Then what is it?” “It's the world.” “Oh, my God . . .” No, that quarrel was out. And don't get led off into the Latham quarrel either, she counseled herself.

“Want to be a naturalist?” she repeated. “I don't know.”

Jerry seemed to accept that. No recollection of the many letters came to him to contradict it. His eyes flickered from there to here, to the door (he sat facing it), to his coffee (he remembered it and drank some), to her face. Suddenly, he raised his hand in a gesture of greeting and nodded, smiling.

“Who is it?” Catherine asked. But whoever it was was coming to them, a strange Italian gentleman with a large-toothed smile was being so glad to meet her. “Your husband,” he was saying, “he tella me how to vote.”