No Place for an Angel (20 page)

“Okay?” Jerry asked.

The boy turned his head. “I guess you didn't get the news, Mr. Sasser.”

“What news?”

“Ain't Professor Sasser out at the Aggie your daddy?”

“Why, yes, he is.”

“Well—Mr. Sasser, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but he died. Yesterday, I think it was, or maybe it was Friday. Friday night. They couldn't find you. I knew because my sister works at the exchange. They tried Washington all night long, trying for you and Senator Ogden, or anybody could tell you. So now they've decided to go on and have the funeral today. It's the only day the church presiders can come up from Dallas.”

Jerry's shoulders collapsed forward. It all seemed so final, so dull and true. He rubbed his hands against his forehead. “Oh, God,” he said finally. “Oh my God.”

“You'll be just in time for the funeral,” the driver encouraged him. “I can take you straight there.”

Catherine had reached out at once to take his hand. “Poor Jerry. Darling, darling, darling.” She so seldom got to say that any more. Her tears fell on his hand. “Don't worry about anything. I'll go to Priscilla's. Very quietly. We'll stop there. She won't tell Mamma and Daddy we're here. We'll make her understand.”

“Do you remember the day—he tried to give you those books, God help him.”

“I took them. I did take them, darling.”

“Thank you, Catherine. Thank God you did.”

They clung together with wet cheeks and as the town thickened around them, they, its most famous couple whom all would have been proud to say they even waved to in passing, drew themselves forward and down until no head showed in the windows. They crouched there until the cab stopped in the Warners' back yard and the opening door let its oven-square of heat.

“Edward's here,” said Priscilla. “Did you know that?”

The sisters were sitting in the living room, where thin layers of sheer draperies kept out the sun.

“Look up the street,” she said, “you can see him.”

Catherine went to the window, cracked the curtains and peeped out. The big white house with the turret was only a few blocks away, across the one long street that was Merrill. Sure enough, there was Edward, walking around in the yard. “If you get close to him,” said Priscilla, “you notice how he's aged. He's got practically no hair left, just a few fringes, and no color at all in his face. I told Mamma he might have something, but she said it had to do with shoe salesmen, that they never have any color. She said his general health was good. He's got another wife.”

“I knew that, of course.”

“I wonder how on earth Maureen kept all that drinking a secret all these years. Edward swears he didn't know it himself until a year before the divorce.”

“There had to be an official story,” said Catherine. “Anyway I'm glad Jerry put me off at the back. Edward would have seen us, otherwise.”

“If you can get by with this in the middle of Merrill, it's a miracle. Remember when we used to think we had to lower every shade in the house to have a drink? It got so people used to watch our shades and then say, Drunk again, when they saw them down. The glass in this house cost me $2,000. It's the kind you can see out of but not into.”

“Hello, Catherine,” said Millard. He handed her a Bloody Mary. “You need a pick-up, I imagine. You going to get out without being seen?”

“I only thought we might because nobody we know belongs to that church Professor Sasser went to. Nobody but members of that church ever knew anything about Professor Sasser. Jerry asked the taxi driver to drive him to the church. It's one way to keep him from telling, to let him in on things.”

“I thought it was all a secret,” said Priscilla, “like lodges.”

“He can sit outside.” Her hand shook with the glass. “I just wanted to get out to the farm and rest. The strain—you've no idea.”

“You can go in the pool around about a quarter of an hour from now. We'll have shade at one end, anyway.”

“I've got a better idea,” said Priscilla. “Go in the guest room and lie down for an hour. Do, do that, sweetie. We
want
to see you, but it's just plain brutal to make you sit up and talk.”

Catherine put down her glass. “I'll do it. Please forgive me. When I've had a good rest, you'll both come out to the farm, Mamma and Daddy and Edward and the girls. Has Edward brought the family?”

Then she was inside the cool dark room with the bed so heavenly soft. Did Edward bring the family and what was the answer to that and what did she care? The only thing he had ever done was run away. Suppose he married forty times, eighteen alcoholics, sixteen prostitutes, and how many did that leave—six whats? What caused divorce? What did it matter? He had never done anything but run away that once. Now he was back, grey and bald with his head full of figures, talking with Daddy about how he saved on taxes this way or that way. Oh, why do I hate? she wondered. Why hate Edward, why hate anyone? We come to a handful of grey dust. Then she fell asleep.

She woke up in ten minutes with a jerk and thought for a minute that she was on an airplane and that it had lurched into another layer of air. Then she knew everything, and got up and dressed, combed her hair and put on her hat. She had to get to Jerry. How could she have left him?

Priscilla was in the kitchen. “I have to go to the funeral,” Catherine said.

“Somebody will see you,” Priscilla said.

“Not if I sneak out the back. The church isn't on the main street, it's down that road by the Negro section. It's my duty, Priscilla. I do know that.”

She walked out the back, by the swimming pool. The hat was black with a large sheltering brim and everyone was shut up in air-conditioned houses from the summer heat, nobody would be out and maybe nobody would look out a back window because people looked out the front windows all the time or talked on the telephone. So maybe if anybody saw her they would take her for Priscilla, though she knew she must weigh twenty pounds less than Priscilla at least after all this strain and running around and quarreling with Jerry. Now just where was that little old brown church hot as a hotbox, covered with some kind of cheap asphalt siding made to look like brick and making itself purposely into a sort of spectacle by being poor and lonely-looking on an old muddy side road, trying to make you feel bad about everything, guilty, as though the only place God would deign to sit down would be on an old muddy side road in a tiny hotbox with orange and purple windowpanes like a cheap movie or even a whorehouse except for the steeple, a place you wouldn't be caught dead in. (Professor Sasser was being caught dead in it right now.) It was going to smell exactly like Professor Sasser. She paused with her hand to her face. The heat prickled into her and out of her. I can't, she thought, I just can't. She thought she would be sick or faint. The name came back to her, the lettered print on the books she never opened because there were spiders pressed inside.
Blood Union of Messiah's Brotherhood
. She could never get Jerry to talk about it. Now surely, she thought, taking heart and finding sudden strength, straightening and walking the path with sure firm steps, surely they can't turn me out. Being Jerry's wife and all, and them pretending to be Christians. Or maybe they even are.

The door had a white knob but was painted brown. She turned the knob and pushed. She entered the vestibule and there already she could smell the books, Jerry's old house, his father, the lacquered tray with the iced tea which did not taste like the iced tea at the Lathams'. If it had been cancer, like Mamma said (though she and Daddy thought everybody had it, being so scared of it themselves), then it took him twenty years to die of it. Or maybe it is the smell of his religion. It got in everywhere, like dust.

From inside, beyond a pair of swinging doors screened in green baize she could hear a swollen murmur of sound. What were they doing? What did they do? Could she find a place near Jerry? Would he be touched and pleased that she had come? Then a man came out. “Are you a member here?” he asked. “No,” she whispered, “but I'm Professor Sasser's son's wife.” “You have to wait outside.” He stepped back inside, as though a fish had come up, spoken, and reentered the water. The air in the vestibule was close and breathless. Catherine put her hand to a slit in the green baize door and leaned to look through it.

The small church was full of people, some seated and some standing up, waiting their time to file by the coffin which was prominently displayed at the front of a rostrum where a long table stood, covered with books. The people who were marching by the coffin each stopped to look inside, then they said something, a sentence or two, some in low tones and some in shrill ones. Then they picked up a pitcher standing on a small table and drank out of the side of it. It was a cracked kitchen pitcher and it came to Catherine in the density of the hot air that there was blood in it. What else could there be? For certainly if sweetly bored Methodist congregations as patient as cows, and slightly more fervid Baptists with intent eyes, could claim to be indulging in something that represented flesh and blood, though it never spoiled their appetite for Sunday dinner, nothing Professor Sasser organized and belonged to was going to stop at representing only; it was much more likely—not even wanting to risk depending on a miracle—the real thing.

She glimpsed Jerry standing in the line and then she felt sick and sank down in the corner behind the green door, her eyes half-closed, her heart hammering, her face and hands like ice. I'm always outside, she thought.

Now there was singing, a weird raised key without music, then the tramp of feet. The door flew open, she was hidden behind it so that no one saw her. The coffin came past, now the outer doors swung open and new air rushed in, somewhat reviving her. “Jerry, Jerry,” she whispered as he came by. She struggled to her feet. Astounded, he saw her. “Catherine!” “I came to be with you,” she faltered. He swung her straight, holding her steady. “Straighten your hat,” he said. She thought she would fall again, but didn't.

Priscilla was at the back picture window overlooking the patio when she saw the two of them together, Catherine and Jerry, coming up the lane. She had watched them all her life, first with little-girl curiosity, then with wonder, envy, admiration, more lately with rage and despair, which still was avid and charged. She kept watching while they opened the door to her and Millard's Cadillac, which was standing in the shade, and sat in it, talking. She saw Jerry lean forward and strike Catherine twice, the blows landing on the side of her cheek and neck near her ear. Catherine crumpled at once below the window level of the car, then she straightened, and leaning forward, put her face in her hands. Priscilla had often thought that she was going to see something like this happen some day but how to act when seeing it through two layers of glass from within a sealed air conditioned room was another matter. She saw Catherine get out of the car and come toward the house which she entered by the opposite wing, returning to the guest room. Jerry meantime left, a dark-suited rapid figure, returning down the lane to the church. He was going to be late to the cemetery.

Priscilla ran out of the front door to meet Millard, who was just now returning from the post office. “He struck her, he struck her! I saw it, Millard.”

“Well, now,” said Millard. “Men have a right to beat their wives.”

“Not like this. Oh, you don't know! You just don't know!”

“There now,” said Millard, “what if your Mother sees you out on the street in chartreuse pedal-pushers?”

When Jerry returned from the funeral, Catherine had not yet come out of her room. Sleeping or crying, who knew which? Priscilla shook back her hair at him. She simply could not help going slightly mad when Jerry Sasser was around.

“I saw what happened in the car, Jerry. You needn't think I didn't. If she weren't my sister you'd never get in this house. You needn't think I don't see through you.”

“I don't know what you mean,” said Jerry Sasser. “What happened in the car?”

“I saw you strike her.”

“There was a bee after Catherine in the car. It stung her. We stopped there to talk because she was feeling tired. She shouldn't have tried to come to the funeral. I told her that.”

“Ever so sweet, aren't you? And then you sweetly killed the bee.”

“I tried to, yes. How sweet I was about it is another thing.”

“Oh, you're smart. Oh, you're bright.”

Millard came in. “I'm sorry to hear about your father, Jerry. Professor Sasser was a fine old fellow. I only wish we'd been more thoughtful, gone down to see him more often. One doesn't realize—” The two shook hands.

“We should have gone,” said Priscilla. “To the funeral, I mean.” She grudged out the words. “I only thought we wouldn't be allowed in your church, not being members.”