No Place for an Angel (22 page)

She awoke and the room was empty, quiet and cool. No one was there but herself. She went in the kitchen and saw that the steak was out thawing on the table. The sack of groceries, fresh butter, rolls, lettuce and watercress for a salad, all brought from Priscilla's, was sitting on the table. She put the things away in the refrigerator. “Jerry?” she said. “Jerry?” There was no answer. She went upstairs and found him asleep. He had kicked off his loafers, but otherwise had fallen just as he was across the spread. A pillow had been dragged free and stuffed beneath his head. How dark he is! Catherine observed. Against the white pillowcase his face looked swart, his hair, lashes and brows so dark they startled her. His head was thrown back and the attitude revealed long lines slanting down his cheeks. He isn't young any more, thought Catherine. God knows I'm not. She stepped out of her shoes and crossed the floor and went to look in the mirror. Her face was lightly and permanently freckled and scarcely ever showed an absence of make-up. She slipped off her blouse and skirt and unpinned her hair. Still hot from the outer day, it fell about her shoulders. Did something flicker in the mirror's depths? The room was shadowy, for the curtains had not been drawn open. She smiled to remember some story of vampires which had intrigued her as a girl—how they cannot be seen in mirrors. She turned, but there was only Jerry, sound asleep on the bed exactly as before.

I'm alone out here with him, she thought, and it came to her from seeing him stir just how long he would sleep and that he would want her when he waked. The thought was like rising out of chill dank water into sunlight and, happening to glimpse the mirror again, she saw the years drop away.

“She's out there alone with him!” Priscilla cried. She put down the telephone for the thirtieth time and circled the room, madly smoking with one hand and tugging at locks of hair with the other. “Out there alone and do you know, do you realize, she's just about crazy as it is. What she says makes no sense at all sometimes.”

“It's just the election,” said Millard. “It could drive anybody nuts, and they're too near the nerve center not to get the full charge.”

“You wouldn't believe it if you saw her snap right in front of your eyes.”

“I'd have to know why.”

“Why! You know Jerry Sasser as well as I do. You just won't admit it. It makes me furious.”

“I think,” said Millard Warner, “that you should spend more time with the children, Priscilla. I ordered some children's books last week. All they are going to remember of life with us is Picasso paintings and what they find in the Post Toasties.” He rubbed his face. “In spite of all I can do, life keeps turning into a vacuum. And you keep raging in it like a windy banshee. What do you want me to do about Catherine? It's obvious that your anger with Jerry Sasser is purely sexual.”

With that Priscilla gave a shriek and went back to the phone.

After two days of this, still hearing nothing of Catherine, and still unable to reach her by phone, she harassed Millard until he drove out with her to the gates of the farm. But the gates were locked and silent, could be opened only from within. At a distance the house looked closed and quiet. Priscilla blew the horn, but as Millard pointed out, the house was too far away from them for the sound to reach it, and besides there was the air conditioning. On the second day, Priscilla made Millard get out the plane and fly over the farm. She wanted to fly so low over the house, trying to look down and see something, that they almost had a crash.

“It's not going to help Catherine one bit if we all get killed,” she said, to which Millard heartily agreed.

On the third day, a long black car with Dallas license plates, chauffeur-driven, carrying strange men inside, eased through Merrill and departed out the road to the farm.

Catherine had gone out for a walk, so she did not see anybody come. She had walked down to Sandy Gulch where the wagons used
to cross, going West in the old days. It was where the frontier started and the sand was still there, though some fencing had been built across it to keep the cattle off it. The bluff made a tough semicircle around the north and east, but to the west there was the flatness stretching out toward one last sweet grove of eucalyptus before the West broke wide and dry and infinite. It was a funny place to have been born in and the boy who had died, she wondered if he hadn't thought it was a funny place to die. She was down by the creek bank by now, walking carefully, as Uncle Dick had taught her to be wary of snakes and quicksand or whatever stung, bit, damaged. There was a sense out in the country, in a hot land, that almost anything could turn into what would destroy you. She sat down near the thin, rusty, half-dried-up, half-stagnant stream, and looked back turning, and saw on top of the bluff the outline of an old man against the sky. She knew it was Uncle Dick. Of course, it wasn't really him—he was dead—and yet it was him more than if it had been. He wore what he had always worn, blue work trousers, an old tan linen coat, and an old panama with a crumpled, shapeless crown, pulled down as low as his ears. She got up at once and began to walk toward him. She wanted to tell him about Jerry. He was the only person she could tell. As she walked he raised his hand and waved to her, the way he always had done. She waved back and kept on walking. At the foot of the bluffs the path wound up. It had been worn so deep by cattle back in the old days—and they had used the old road the wagons had made—that the sides of the path rose like walls, taller than herself, and blotted out all but the steep ascent directly in front of her eyes. When she gained the top there was no one there and she sat down, catching her breath. The sense of his presence was everywhere; she even saw a compassionate expression in a cloud, which, as she watched, wheeled about upon itself, dispersed, changed and moved away. This was goodness—she had always understood; it had nothing to do with ambition, with power, with blood. She had her moment's paradise and knew the streets of heaven to be plain and shady, where the horses stood quietly and dogs lay waiting for their masters, who were greeting old friends and understood each other.

There was nobody she could tell.

She got to her feet at last and walked back toward the house, white in its softly blowing grove.

Halfway there she heard a shot.

She began to run. “Jerry, Jerry!” she came in calling. The living room was a mess. Plaster had fallen down in great hunks from the ceiling, an elk head had got loose from the wall and was hanging by one peg, the glass face of the old wooden clock was shattered. Jerry was nowhere to be seen, nor was anyone else. There was the sound of talking from the dining room and she ran in there. “It was just a crazy thing,” said Jerry, who was sitting indestructibly at the end of the dining table with papers all around him and five men pulled up to the table. One of the men got up.

“I'm terribly sorry, Catherine. I was looking at the fine old gun collection out here—one of the best I've seen—and one of the early shotguns just went off in my hands. I have a collection of my own, as you know. Of course, some of us get mad enough to shoot each other, or so we say, but it hasn't happened yet. I guess you were terrified, just hearing a shot like that.”

“Yes, yes, I was.”

But it was not till late afternoon that she actually left. She had dressed again by then, and had overheard enough to know what was going on. “But it's Daddy's money,” she thought. “That's the one thing we've never done.”

“But it's Daddy's money,” said Priscilla, later on, to Millard, for they had at last been summoned out to the farm and the electric switch, controlled only from inside the house, had tripped the lock on the distant steel gates, and all the telephones were connected. Jerry had said that Catherine was all right, but it was certain that she wasn't there.

“Where is she?” Priscilla demanded of Millard. “He says she's gone out to be alone and may go to Dallas for a rest, but how do we know? Before all those millions get turned over to him, we certainly have a right to know where our sister is.”

“It isn't millions,” said Millard. “As I understand it, Daddy Latham is buying the magazine in order to sell it right back at a hundred-thousand-dollar loss and that way Jerry gets his publicity wish, Ogden stays out of hot water and the magazine gets to pay its debts and have another year or so to try at being solvent. Then Jerry pays back—”

“How?”

“Well, baby, there are ways and ways.”

It was night and they were standing out near the barbecue pit. Once when Jerry had had a party there for Senator Ogden, they had roasted five steers and as the night was overcast, the light from the barbecue stained the sky far and wide, and Catherine and Priscilla had worn spangled Spanish costumes and looked, everyone said, perfectly marvelous. It was back when Catherine was still having fun.

Now they walked inside and Daddy Latham was sitting there with his foot in the brace stretched out and his cane beside him. He was sitting straighter than usual and his face looked strained; if you touched his money it was like an alteration, a surgery on his soul. Mama Latham sat still, like a lady in a family portrait. She grieved over it all, that it had all had to happen . . . she felt the pity of money, how much turned on it. No matter how much or how little was at stake, it could queer everything. And Jerry had never done anything like this before; it was the crack of doom with him and the Lathams. Was Priscilla glad? She could hardly wait to steer Millard down into the game room. Even a President had been there and had shot a game of pool.

“Listen, listen, now you're the one. You're the one.” She said this to Millard, in her pride.

And he said, “Have you forgotten Edward?”

“Oh, they don't want him,” said Priscilla. “They never have.”

“But why? But why?”

“I don't know . . . he was created to sell shoes.”

Millard sat on the edge of the billiard table and threw a red ball in the air. He looked ironic, somewhat sad, somewhat amused. There was an unmistakable footstep at the top of the stairs that led down into the billiard room.

“And if you are thinking anything,” Jerry Sasser said, mainly down to the two of them, but also to everyone in general, “about Catherine leaving me, you may as well know the truth. She's at home here and she goes for walks here and yonder, but she always comes back. That's the way it could be anywhere, and I'm the one who knows. Catherine is never going to leave me. She can't leave me. She loves me. She's my wife.”

“Then where is she?” Priscilla asked, sulkily, over her shoulder.

Millard got up lazily. Catherine's ghost seemed everywhere. Jerry came halfway down the steps and stopped; he was wearing slacks and a sport shirt and carrying a drink in his hand.

“You should have asked me for the money,” Millard said quietly.

The truth of this came to Jerry Sasser instantly; you could almost, looking at him, see what color truth was. “By God, you're right.”

“For,” said Millard, spinning the ball on the green baize with long pale strong fingers, “I not only have it but I could provide it instantly, I could have kept quiet about it, and I could have understood why it was necessary. I even go so far as to share with you some conviction that it was important for this country that such a low and compromising thing be done.”