No Place for an Angel (24 page)

“We'll try to do better,” he said. “Now where are your things?”

Irene had chattered too much at that party, and knew it, and couldn't stop. She blamed it on the martinis, but really she knew too that anyone out of her school past, her days of advance punishment for all the fun she could ever have afterwards, caused her to experience a mysterious self-revulsion. An automatic fracturing of her ego always occurred. Could that miserable-looking creature sitting in those rooms, walking those walks, allowing, in all ignorance, itself to be rawly exhibited in the school annual, possibly be Irene Waddell? It was the threat of being by some sleight-of-hand of fate—midnight striking, coaches changed to pumpkins—whisked back into that purgatory that made Irene nervous. She felt compelled to go up to whatever old schoolmate she saw, recall herself carefully to them, and then stone by stone build up with all the solidity and staying power at the Coliseum, that grand new image that was the real thing.

When Barry joined them, she kept right on going and so out-generaled herself, for, she was not long in seeing, given Barry's susceptibilities and Catherine Sasser's delicate helplessness and her own power to create an occasion, given spring and Rome and gin and that particular baroque garden, things were apt to take a turn before anybody knew it. She hauled up short. It was enough for her to do, simply to launch Barry and Catherine into conversation. She then branched off, circled the garden three times meeting old friends, let herself be led inside by her host, an oil company executive from California, to admire his new De Chirico, and returned to find the garden all but emptied in the twilight, Catherine Sasser hastening off without seeing her and Barry sitting on a stone bench with two empty glasses in his hands.

“You wanted to go with her,” Irene noted, having said her goodbyes. Barry himself had suggested accompanying Irene to the party, as Charles was out of town, and taking her afterwards to eat a pizza.

“Oh, I asked her to come with us,” said Barry. “She had to be somewhere else.”

“She's a Texan. That means she's at the Hassler.”

“No, she has some rooms on the Aventine. She hates it and wants to move.”

“You've somebody else to help, is that it?” In the restaurant Irene read through the list of forty kinds of pizza. Barry was always running errands for people, or handing out free advice. He made half his friends this way. It was all he could do, he always protested. His knowledge of Rome, earned the hard way, from the ground up, was all he had to hand out. The friends usually had a good many more resources than he.

“There was this awful thing,” Irene told him. “She got into this awful thing about her husband. He was in politics right after the war and then he got to working with one of those big Western senators, Ogden, I think, and things went from little to big. You saw his picture everywhere . . . I think Charles met him once or twice in Washington; oh, he knew absolutely everybody. I'm not sure what happened. They went back to Texas during the elections last year and there was something about bribing a magazine to keep a story out. Her whole family got involved in it—they had the money and he had to have it. It got out that she tried to kill him. Anyway, they broke up. There was a lot of gossip about him. I guess he was one too many. She had to go to psychiatrists. . . . Oh, you've no idea.”

“Psychiatrists,” said Barry, making it sound like a word out of fiction or slick movies, and indeed in Italy it did have this connotation. He had once met an Italian psychiatrist, who had told him sadly that all Italians needed his services but none of them thought they did. Barry supposed he was meant to be taking a warning from everything that Irene was going on about, but something in him was not only resisting her, but putting the whole story in a light favorable to the quiet face that had so recently been in soft focus before him. When Irene said psychiatry, he—with an artist's ruthlessness—threw the word out altogether. He gazed out across the pizzeria and thought of Washington, Texas, home cities in the rain. Irene thought she should let things alone. Why couldn't she?

“Barry, listen. She really is one I'd stay away from. Charles will tell you,” she asserted confidently, though if this were to be true somebody would have to get to Charles, refresh his memory on the whole story and reason him into the proper attitude. He was out in the Middle East, figuring out the best uses for American aid to uncommitted nations, and the last person on his mind was Jerry Sasser.

“I can't think that doing a favor for her is going to make the sky fall on me,” said Barry. “Anyway, what are you worried about?”

“Well, I don't know.” She supposed she had overdone it. “Too bitchy for anything, am I?” What did she care? She held onto Barry, lightly, but seriously. A year ago she had saved his life and there were things he was privy to about her. If a woman came who was going to pull him into any strong orbit, Irene herself felt stirred to restless anxiety, wondered about a lover, longed to change something. Barry, not even deliberately, by going on to see Catherine Sasser against her advice, might be setting Irene's claim on him aside. Then again, she thought—amiably inclined—he might not.

“It just so happens the Farlands' apartment is up for grabs and they asked me just yesterday to see who I could get,” he explained. “Then there she was. A perfect set-up. It's warm, it's modern, it's central, it's furnished, the elevator works, they've an honest maid who is a good cook and speaks English. What more could she want to fall into?”

“Okay. Can't you just do that for her and let it be your good deed?”

He steadily ate pizza and there was nothing she could do with him. She drank wine and her private thoughts mushroomed, giant-size. They always turned to Mario. Given one vacant instant in that beguiling air he would emerge, whole and expectant, out of the broad mouth of the Chianti measure on the table before her. When she shopped alone, every street-corner seemed about to yield him up to face her. Every bus stop appeared to disgorge him among a clutch of other shoulders, to scatter with them along the ceaseless rush of the streets. “Oh there you are! Figurati! Just imagine,” she wanted to cry. “Oh, Mario, it's me! I just happened to see you. What a coincidence!” she could hear herself say. But it didn't happen. She had to seek him on purpose, or he her. Trying to disentangle themselves from each other, the whole winter through, they wrapped themselves in an endless tangle.

“Non mangia, signora?” asked the waiter. He was right; she hadn't eaten anything. Barry, who at least enjoyed a state of decision, in addition to the happy prospect of helping out an attractive new woman, was skillfully wiping up sauce. Decision was a good thing, Irene thought, and with that she made one herself. Suffering was not a good thing, she further recognized, and this obvious fact reinforced her. Okay, I'm going to find him. She almost said it aloud.

She began to eat again.

I had to come, she would say. I had to.

“I had to come,” she said. “I had to.”

He had just passed an ice cream shop where she had been waiting. She had sat at a marble-topped table, inside the shop which was down in a poor quarter on the far side of the Tiber, smoking and waiting. When he went past she hastened out.

They would all know, the young men in the shop, whom she had come to find; they had probably guessed it the instant she alighted from the cab in her Via Condotti costume, her fine shoes passing spilled milk and straw on the rough cobbles, her own rich body's consciousness, vegetating tropically along the way, now grown towering. It would have struck them like a sharp reverberating sound. The men as good as said so. They stopped cleaning floors in the freshly emptied shop and she saw acknowledgment of herself spring up in their eyes. When she asked to sit down for a while, they did not ask if she wanted anything, but nodded without a word. She tucked up a strand of damp hair.

Coming out of the pizzeria with Barry from whom she had parted with scarcely a nod, her mind was filled with Mario. She had noticed, on a sidewalk table with a round dime-colored top, a handful of field poppies left to wilt. The color leaped up and bled at her vision. Crossing the Tiber, she saw light strike through the clouds, just before the dark, and rain fell. Her nerves and senses mingled in the wet spray. The silk of her dress pressed on her like an enclosure of ferns. At the table she felt herself to have been placed suffocatingly beneath a great glass bell showered with spray which kept jetting and spilling, dazzling with fresh hot-house variance down the convex sides. She sat in silk and thought of flower flesh, which bled or wept if broken. Then there he was. The bell lifted; the bird flew.

“Mario! Mario, it's me.”

He had spun around when she spoke like something held already on a very tight string. It was really all she needed to know, just seeing that. She paused as they each steadied themselves.

“I had to come. I had to.”

The words came out differently from anything she had imagined, low, almost meek, in a minor key, her face serious, her wings close-folded and dumb.

“Hai fatto bene,” he replied, after what seemed to her long meditation. “You did well.” He never denied her, never denied that what she was bringing him was first of all his own joy.

Irene had got herself involved with Mario Marcadante the year before on a trip to Siracusa, in Sicily. The journey had not been taken for pleasure; it was strictly emergency, unforeseen, and the reason for it was none other than Barry Day. In a way, it had all been Barry's fault. How tangled life was! Irene thought. Were we all involved in a continuous dance? she wondered. The pattern weaves, we touch, join hands, do steps as best we may, change partners, return and cling and change again. Or is it outside ourselves, like a mosaic, all there all the time? Water splashes over the pattern, over the stones, and they seem to shift and alter; then the water runs off and there it all is, cunningly worked out, just the way it has been all the time. Which was to say that both Mario and Barry had been there all the time, though Mario had so far only been a friend of her husband's, and Barry had so far never been dying before, not that she knew about.

She was absolutely certain he was dying then; in fact, she could never convince herself afterwards, not entirely, that he hadn't, in some sort of way, died.

She had got the message in Rome. “Terribly ill in Siracusa can you get me back to Rome.” It had been addressed to Charles, who was away in Cairo with the American Economic Aid commission he had worked in so long and faithfully.

She stood in her shadowy early summer apartment and knew at once that though Barry had sent the wire to Charles he had meant it for her. It was she whom he meant to come there. Where
did I get this mother thing about Barry? she wondered. It must have happened from the first and she hadn't known it, from seeing right away that he was hungry, that he accepted invitations, theirs, anybody's, out of necessity. And surely she must have known when she passed him back in the winter, in her chauffeur-driven car coming up the Via Nazionale in the late afternoon winter mist, almost rain, and saw him standing in a poor tan German duffle coat, waiting for the lights to shift, she must have recognized when she lifted her hand to him out of the warm car, a signal through the cold wet glimmer of the neon, that his coldness had gone to her heart in a very personal way which caused the pang of it to linger with her. But she had shoved the feeling aside. She was far too busy, she knew too many people, he was on her list and she did what she could for him and that had to be enough. But now that he was ill and had appealed to her, she knew she had to go. This feeling for him had been there all the time; there was no denying it, not in the quiet apartment alone, with Charles away.

How on earth had he got to Siracusa?

She finally learned this: he was too helpless not to tell her everything.