No Place for an Angel (23 page)

Jerry leaned against the wall. Priscilla watched him fiercely, covertly. Had she watched him that way, all her born days?

“You're right, Millard. You're right,” said Jerry Sasser. His sigh seemed to come from the very core of his strange, indecipherable earth; he had always been another country, another planet.

“I've made my mistake,” he said quietly. He sat down, halfway down the stair. “Not but one was ever allowed to me,” he said.

From up above, above the sunken playroom, above the ground floor, too, they could hear the children. They were playing a jumping game, though not directly above the living room where the plaster had been knocked down when the gun went off—they had been warned, those two little Texas girls, against that. Did they want to knock the whole house down? “No, ma'am,” they said.

Priscilla, having looked all her life at Jerry Sasser, suddenly did not want to look any more. She turned to Millard, to her husband, and fell in love with him. She more than fell in love: she loved him. I love you so, she wanted to say. It was like a stroke, from outside or inside, lightning or heart: it all but killed her. In her mind, in her heart, the country westered, stretching west, and her white bones would lie quiet someday beneath ground that the white clean cow skull lay above, and the grass would blow quiet and easy, and Priscilla, in all faith, would know nothing and everything at once, for when time is done there is forever, there is always.

Where is Catherine? she wondered. Where is my sister?

When Catherine knew what would happen she walked out of the house and kept on walking. Just as luck would have it, the five men who had been there got into their car and drove out; they passed her when she was almost to the gate. And they assumed that she knew where she was going and why and that it was okay. They assumed as she lived here and always had and her people owned it all, that she knew her way. So they asked her to ride in a joking way and then they all got out and spoke to her. From within the house Jerry had tripped the switch of the gate for them, else she never would have got out, but how could they know that? They must have imagined she could walk out any time she wanted to. (Thus it was Jerry Sasser who inadvertently let her go.) She said “No, thank you,” and “Yes, how are you?” and “I didn't know you were going so soon,” and “Do come back,” and “See you in Los Angeles.” She said all the right things, just as she had always (except for certain lapses) been so good at doing.

Then she said she was just going out to the highway for the mail, out for a walk. “In this heat,” they said. “These Texas girls,” they said. “They can take anything.”

So she left under the dust of their wheels, she slipped through, or else Jerry wasn't looking maybe. She started walking; she probably had not walked anywhere in years and years and distances are long when you are out West. She seemed to herself like setting out on a journey to an ocean she wasn't even sure was there. But the dust, the dryness, the hidden snakes, and the nag of the constant wind, the bare deceptive unconscious landscape, the heat haze—one was sure of those things.

Jerry was the boy beneath the wagons, she thought. That has been true all the time.

At this everything came clear, as it usually does in the moment in which it closes off from us, from our living continuousness with it, and disappears into history.

How long she stood there beside a country road, alone in Texas, she did not know, but at some point a man stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride to Merrill. He was going there, he said. She got in. The car, though somewhat dusty, somewhat hot, and untidy, was commodious and expensive and this became a real surprise to her when she learned that the man's name was Hickman, because the Hickmans were supposed to be poor white trash and that was why the Lathams built a strong steel mesh fence with a gate electrically controlled from the inside when anyone was out there because the Hickmans were supposed to be anxious to get in and wreck things or set the house on fire out of revenge. But here this man Hickman was as nice as you please and talked and talked about how business was or wasn't—Catherine had reached the point where all business sounded alike.

From Merrill she went on into Dallas. Jerry has a mother, she was thinking, and he never knew it. Professor Sasser told me after the wedding. He said he never wanted to see her, but she lived in Dallas. And I never told Jerry. I didn't want to meet her, hear of her, have to put up with her. I didn't want to. He was ours, Jerry was; he was to be a Latham more than anything else, but now I can call at least and try to find out at least if any of the Sassers in the phone book could possibly be his mother, for even she has a right to know that her husband is dead and you would think that somehow that would have got looked into and attended to by one of the Blood Union of Messiah's Brotherhood, but you never know. The thing you think is surely, surely true is the one thing you might be wrong about. So she went to a phone booth in a cafe in Dallas and telephoned all the Sassers in the book—there were five of them—with five dimes in a little stack on the curved ledge in the phone booth and the smell of other people's expelled breath and spit and worry closed in all around her. Three were at home and were not Jerry's mother and one had moved away and the fifth did not answer, so she would have that to keep her going for a time.

And after that, she thought, and after that? She felt herself to be like the little light in the center of the TV screen that fades interminably and somehow carries your consciousness with it, as long as you care to watch it, and you have to watch it. You have to. It is you.

What's to keep me alive and going after I have called the fifth Sasser in the Dallas phone book and after I have made my weekly call to Latham and found out that he is all right, encompassed in the great care of nature, among those gentle New England woods? What is to keep me from going black?

There was the bee sting. It had not gone away. It had hurt like hell and had swollen and it was still a point of soreness.

And then, she thought, just before that fades, I know what is going to happen. I am going to see Jerry. I am going to look up on a street like this one and he is going to be there. He loves me. I belong to him.

Priscilla and Millard had not heard the two little girls for some time and, wondering where they were, they went upstairs looking for them. It was just Edward and his second wife and the children who had arrived. They had driven up to the door and were getting out and now everybody had to face being nice to them though no one was especially proud to do so, and Priscilla in particular would have given anything to have got out of it.

“I'd give anything not to have to spend any time with those people at all,” she said to Millard, climbing the steps. “They're my own flesh and blood, so I guess that's awful of me.”

“I guess it is,” said Millard, climbing the steps, “but don't let that stop you.”

Suddenly, they kissed.

In the far upstairs bedroom, the one that looked out over the old well, they found the two little girls playing with an old deck of cards they had found. They had counted through them conscientiously; stacking them carefully according to suits: a ten, a four and a jack were missing, they said.

They looked up, laughing over nothing, and their faces, to Priscilla, looked like angels'.

TWO

When Catherine opened her eyes in Rome one spring afternoon she did not at first know where she was, or when it was, or why a young man was standing there. She had become one of those people—numerous in the world we have now—who have lived in so many different points on the globe that they have to think when they wake up, not just what room is this, or what house is this, or what hotel, motel, pension or resort is this, but what city is this in what country and what am I doing in it? Texas, a long shelf of dream over which white clouds passed in stately wind-drawn procession, sailing west, was an ocean away and inland far. She had walked away a year ago. Jerry Sasser's debacle over the magazine had got into the press anyway—a cog had failed to mesh, and not even he (though to have thought of the scheme at all had been audacious, like a final test of the power he had almost but not quite had) could bring it off. Almost, but not quite: it is a bitter phrase. For Senator Ogden, exposed on his civil rights nerve, a most sensitive one, though everybody knew how it was anyway, laid about himself with a staff-cutting “economy drive,” in which heads rolled and were stuck on pikes to ornament the bridges over the Potomac. Jerry's handsome head, so recently on a magazine cover, had been among them. He first got the scalp of the newsman who had double-crossed him, but he still owed his wife's family $100,000. He still owed his wife a divorce which she had said she was unable to face going through at the point when it was mentioned. The doctors all agreed with her and the subject got postponed or mislaid.

The city now was Rome, the time was midafternoon, and the young man who was smiling at her did not look anything like Jerry Sasser.

He was an obviously poor young man, hardly taller than herself, spare and almost awkward, with concerned eyes. It is odd to have been watched while sleeping. It implies that we must absolutely trust or absolutely reject, before we can think or stop or help it, the person whose eyes we meet. When Catherine smiled at Barry Day, it meant that she instinctively trusted him.

“I promised to come,” he said.

Then she remembered that, too. It was at a party yesterday. Now it all came back. The beautiful interior garden with twin baroque staircases lowering into flagstone walks past fountains, small eroded statues, beds of ivy, urns of verbena, trees of oleander. The shelter and rest of vine-covered walls. She was admiring everything when a startling thing happened: she heard her own name spoken behind her and turned and saw no one she knew.

“It's Catherine,” a woman was saying. “It must be Catherine Latham.”

The woman was, in the first place, beautifully dressed. Her dress, a cherry-colored rough silk tunic over a lighter silk mottled in various shades, was unmistakably Roman, as was the style of her smoothly mounted hair. Her voice was confident. If it should turn out that she was utterly mistaken and was addressing someone whose name in Rome one should never mistake for another's, she would not have disturbed herself about it. But she was not mistaken. Catherine supposed that she seldom was.

“I'm sorry,” said Catherine. “I just arrived in Rome. You have to tell me who you are.”

“Everything's a puzzle when you first come. You haven't changed a bit. I have! We were at a school in Baltimore together. I used to come across the street every morning and we went to music classes in that upstairs room where the radiator went hissss.”

“I remember the school,” said Catherine. “I was only there a year, I think.”

“You were from Texas,” the woman continued, “and I wanted to be from there. I wanted to be from anywhere but from right across the street from that school. I was fat and messy and always wiping ink off.” Then she said her name, Irene something, her maiden name, since changed to Waddell.

“Oh, yes, yes, now I remember,” Catherine lied.

“So now you're Mrs. . . . ?”

“Sasser.”

“I can tell you're new in Rome, I can always tell.”

“My husband isn't here,” said Catherine. “I'm alone.”

“You'll have to meet Charles. He isn't here either. You played the piano. I remember.”

“Oh, dear,” said Catherine. “But not in years.” She could not help drawing back a little at this, like a bough the wind had idled aside.

It was right after that that Barry Day had appeared, straying toward the two women out of a babble of voices. . . .

“I remember,” Catherine said to him next day, half sitting up on the couch in her sitting room where she had fallen asleep. “At the party, with that woman I was in school with. . . .”

“Mrs. Waddell,” he said. “Listen, I'm sorry to barge in. I knocked twice and thought I heard you say, ‘Come in.'”

“It's all right. Waddell. Now I remember.”

He was still looking at her, attending to her closely. If you are always saying, “I remember,” the chances are you are not quite sure of memory at all.

“I promised to help you move,” he carefully recalled to her. “I found a place you'll like.”

She glanced around. “My sister and her husband knew these people here and wrote them. They raved about this place.” She grimaced. “It's supposed to be a palace, and look at it.”

“It is a palace,” Barry assured her.

“Bare walls, hard beds, no heat . . . I don't care what they call it.” She leaned back. “I don't like Rome,” she said. “Everybody is poor,” she added. “It's a very poor city.”

Barry was delighted. It took somebody from Texas to sit in an apartment like this on the Aventine with seventeenth-century gold-leaf Venetian furniture and frescoes dating back to the early Renaissance and a view from the windows clear over all of Rome to the Vatican and say, with no self-consciousness whatever, that she didn't like it.