No Place for an Angel (30 page)

“Charles! It's you! I couldn't believe it!”

The garments of wifedom had already dropped over her, in spite of all she could do. The next step she made, she moved in them. She greeted him, exchanging a kiss.

As it turned out, Charles was impatient with everything. He had been in town for hours, had flown in on a charter plane from Rome practically with the dawn, had gone all over Siracusa trying to find out where Barry was. Not in the hospital, where he went first, not in any hotel. He began to think he had died. As for Irene, nobody at all seemed ever to have heard of her or to know that an American lady was in town. He had strode about the streets for an hour or more, long-legged and angry and hot, demanding things. “You've made a vast impression,” he crossly told her, mopping the back of his neck. “Nobody in the whole burg knows you're here.” He leaped up. “Mario! Irene said you might stay. Just great of you.” He snatched up Mario's hand to wring it and again Irene saw that whitening face—a shock in full sunlight.

The first Barry knew, the padrona of the pensione was upon him. She leaped through the door without warning. “É arrivato!” “Chi é arrivato?” “II marito della signora. Chi altro?”

Oh Christ, thought Barry. He could see it all. Well, let them thrash it out, he thought. The padrona went on and on. Everyone in town had known immediately. They had all gone chasing here and there. No one could find the signora americana. No one could find her amico. They had come back to the padrona. She had to tell the sick americano.

“I can't walk anywhere,” said Barry. “Non posso stare in piedi.”

She was getting his walking stick out from behind the door. She knew he had been walking up and down the halls, all around his room. She was terribly excited.

“They won't kill each other,” he reassured her. “It doesn't happen in America.”

“Signore,” she urged him. “Deve andar'. Vado io auitar'. Tranquillo. Man' mano. Facciamo tutto.”

So he went hobbling slowly through the sun, uncertain out of doors, helped along to the esplanade by the padrona. But it was more than his room he was leaving, in this urgent recognition of Charles' arrival. With every slow step the framework, the home sense they had set up among them was receding. Why don't we hide from him; why didn't we get together like a city somebody is invading and decide what to do? Wall him out; throw him in the slave pit. Send him word that I died and Irene buried me and now she is gone back to Rome and that is all that is known. Bribe the doctor to draw up a certificate to say that I am dead. Bribe the padrona of the pensione as well. Any ransom was not too much for the continuation of happiness. Yet he could not help but move, step after step, slow, uncertain, occasionally painful. I am doing it, he thought, incredulous. I am destroying what life is all about and what people look the world over to find. And I cannot stop. If we could not defend the city we should have fled. From Charles Waddell, who is a good man come from Cairo where he has been doing good for the world. And there is Irene, there is Mario, sitting docilely before him, fixed by his pale blue eye. And here am I about to join them. The padrona, having launched him onto the esplanade, left him to go on alone. Greeting done, he sank into a chair, forming the total circle. Charles' eye swept over them like a searchlight.

“You all look terrible,” he said.

“Barry nearly died,” said Irene, turning her dark glasses in her hand. “If it hadn't been for Mario to bring me here he would have, I guess. Imagine driving here alone. You don't realize, Charles, what we've all been through. You just can't know.”

Charles' gaze passed her face and strayed out to sea, lighting upon the distant freighter. No one looked at Mario, who felt himself plunged suddenly into an alien element in which no human thing could breathe and all lovers died.

“I've been up against it myself,” said Charles. “Do you know what took so long in Cairo? You remember the bridge program, Mario? Well, they stole the plans.”

In a moment he was deep into it. It may have been the Egyptian government which had supplied the American aid plans to the Communists, who had immediately agreed to carry them out without any discussion whatever. If the government had not been responsible for stealing the plans why had they kept on insisting that these were not the American plans, but merely by coincidence very like them. The Russians had fallen far behind in their own proposals for aid and development loans—their research had not been nearly so thorough as that of the American team. It was therefore possible that the Russians themselves had stolen the plans, but the greater opportunity had lain with the government. Mario thought perhaps one theory might be that the Russians had suggested that the government get hold of the American plans, and Charles said that he had also thought of that. He said that no one would ever know, quite likely. He also thought that in the long run the Russians too would be checkmated in that country, for the government was getting more Moslem nationalist by the minute. “They may have intended to pull the rug out from under both of us. Having sucked in the Russians, they're trying to funnel larger commitments out of us toward a really major expenditure—a dam project in the whole Aswan basin. It's all a chess game, and good God, the filth. This is civilization, paradise, America itself. This morning I expected to find laundromats and the A&P around every streetcorner.”

“He came in a little silver plane,” said Irene to Barry, later on. Barry had fainted in the sun, right after Charles mentioned the A&P, delaying them for another day. The three of them had had to carry him back to the pensione in a taxi. The padrona had decided that one of them had killed the other.

“He flew down out of the sky. First a speck, then something the size of a dime, then big as a toy, then a car, a truck, a bus.”

“Maybe not that big,” Barry encouraged her.

“Is this all?” It was a duffle bag of blue canvas laden mainly with books she had brought him to read. He nodded. She pushed back her hair. Her eyes looked smudged with ink. “It was just Charles,” she said. “I'm always glad to see him. That's always true.”

“And Mario?”

“He left last night. I saw him just for a minute. He said he just couldn't stand it any more. He kissed me and walked away. I couldn't stand it, either.”

“I saw you through the restaurant window, after he had gone, I guess. It was raining and you were walking with Charles. You had on a black raincoat, didn't you?”

“Black, yes.”

“I guess it was the perfect thing.” He had thought that at the time, watching the slow, downcast propriety of her walk, the elegant rhythm. Where had she got it? The perfect thing.

She turned her broad wet face aside and tried to laugh. “You mean I was in mourning?” She leaned hard against the edge of the dresser. “Nobody's dead, not even you. We'll all be back in Rome. You were supposed to die.”

“Sorry,” said Barry.

“So nothing's really so bad, is it? I don't know why I'm crying. It's the strain, thinking Charles would guess, make scenes. For me he's still in Egypt. In Cairo a monkey jumped out of nowhere and sat on his head. He was terrified.” She began laughing in earnest. Her tears kept sliding down her face. Barry could see them in the mirror.

“It's the time that's died, you know that,” he relentlessly said.

Eleven o'clock and they faced about, straight as possible, ready as they could ever be. The car horn piped below. Charles had rented a car to drive them back to Rome. They left the room for the corridor and then left both forever. The padrona wept in the hallway. She embraced Barry like a son. The hot street sprang up at them. Their feet moved on.

All that winter in Rome, Charles Waddell kept his own silence. He never mentioned that he noticed his wife was in love, much less gave any indication that he knew it was Mario. He was one of those people who do not believe in romantic love and he could thus maintain a steady pressure among charged and capricious emotions. He did not think she was really going anywhere. He counted on her absolute materialism to conquer all. Yet he suffered. He did not think it would lessen his suffering to talk about it.

Gossip was a danger to him personally because it might become an added threat to his position, and nobody more than he knew how weak that was from day to day. He never said the truth he suspected about the disaster in Egypt. When he told Mario and Irene his news, he was dress-rehearsing for the story he was going, not so much to tell, for even that would have to sound like top-secret, but to force himself to think even he believed, once he got back to Rome. What he knew was that somebody had goofed, trusted too much, got carried away, and let out the American program before any firm preliminary commitment had been agreed to. He even had a fair idea of who it was. His own position was clear; let someone else discover it. He firmly, deliberately, tenaciously, passed the winter, being called a failure in Cairo and a cuckold in Rome. He did his work only perfunctorily, and yet he did do it. A quiet visit he had been meant to make to Bulgaria was quietly canceled. He said nothing. In London for a week of talks on U.S. foreign aid programs, he could feel without needing confirmation that he was being carefully checked over. He lay dormant; never very popular, he had been sought after far and wide because he was important, because his wife entertained well, because together they made an exciting couple. His record, beginning with the Office of War Information, on through army liaison, the Nuremberg trials, European reconstruction programs and now foreign aid in the Middle East, was solid rather than brilliant; he had not shot up rapidly nor had he ever had the rug pulled out from under him.

Now, in quietude, coiled and watchful, he lay cold on people's consciousness, and often on sunny days sat out on his large terrace in the Savoia quarter, having dragged huge pots of roses out with him to take the air. Like many men in whom realism outweighs everything, he got very serious about flowers. Sprayed, pruned, labeled with small rectangular wooden tabs, occasionally even in winter coaxed into bloom, the tub-size pots squatted about him in mysterious council. He did not seem to notice them. His head loomed imperially above them; his eyes read. All winter he called his wife “darling.” “Thank you, darling. . . . Yes, darling. . . . Coming, darling.” She knew that she knew what he knew and would not discuss. It was his peculiar triumph to keep her imagining that the subject was only Mario and not also Egypt.

“But why not bring it up?” she wailed to Barry. “Why not get it out in the open? I think I am honestly mad at him for not helping me with it. And yet I can't start it, I can't.”

Sometimes she rocked with bitter laughter, at others she sank down among the iron filings, chunks of broken plaster, scrapings of pitch from the moulds, all the rubbish of his work, groveling tearfully around like any Sicilian maiden seduced and abandoned (though Mario had done neither of these things). It was a disturbance to Barry that he was the only person she could talk to, and talk she must. He was angry to be indebted to her for saving his life. His work satisfied him less than ever, and so he began to resent her. Siracusa with its firm simplicities of isolation stood solid in his experience like a monument, but Rome was subtle and complex; it was no good pretending after they returned to it that any of them were the same. He tried to tell Irene this.