No Place for an Angel (33 page)

“It was anxiety,” Catherine answered at once. “Jerry had to be great and he almost made it. It was the almost that did it. He had to prove something. He could prove it absolutely”—she gave a game little shrug—“only in bed. And he had to keep on proving it, in every bed there was.”

She felt suddenly better. She had astonished herself. But was this true? How neat it all looked, how easy it all was to say. If he were there, if the door were to burst open as it had so many times—? She turned her head sharply aside, drawn by the sense that this very thing was about to happen. Irene had not said anything, but her face had taken on the obscure meditative look of a cat. Catherine had a sudden feeling. “Do you know Jerry?”

Irene looked surprised. “Know Jerry? Of course not.”

“I became rather crazy at times,” Catherine confessed. “I could not tell what was going on. There was a shot fired, for instance—” She stopped, and Irene did not urge her on.

“Very few people
can
tell what's going on,” Irene said. “The world is too complicated. My theory is that even the ones running it don't always know what is going on. I personally think for instance that all last winter Charles did not know what was going on.”

“In his job, you mean?” Catherine innocently inquired, thus giving it away to Irene that Barry had talked about her affair with Mario.

Irene nodded. “He always said he couldn't explain it because it was secret.” She giggled. “I thought he couldn't explain it because he couldn't explain it.”

They both fell to laughing, and the hour being three o'clock, Catherine took her leave.

Irene was left with the essence of this woman's very self lingering about in corners and on chairs. She did not know if she liked it. She perceived a clear spirit groping out of the dark, and terms like this, quite foreign to the Waddell household, must have been brought in from outside. Irene adjusted the strap of her sandal, and wondered if Catherine would make it. She can't leave the dark because Jerry Sasser's back there in it; that's the whole thing.

So she thought and went to let the twins in. They had just come back from visiting Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, were burnished with sun, and voluble with information, their pockets stuffed with shards of mosaics picked up in the ruins and bits of colored marbles. They knew about it all, even to Antinous, and wanted to tell her everything.

FOUR

Barry finally had to leave Rome. He still owed the Italian customs twenty million lire and the harder he tried to pull himself out of this trap the more deeply he got drawn in. The affair became like a giant squid, sucking him down into the depths and squirting ink in his face. He got out from Naples on a Greek freighter sailing to New York. It looked to be the same as the one they had seen in the harbor at Siracusa when he fainted near the Fonte D'Aretusa. He had to leave all his sculptures. He had a dreadful half-dream, half-fantasy on the boat, which was very poorly ventilated, that Linell McIntosh had come back to Rome and found the studio, had announced herself as his wife and was believed, so using her authority to pack up everything there and have it stored somewhere in Rome where no one could be counted on to respect it and where the crates would doubtless after several months be broken into and the contents sold off as junk in the open-air market, the space being needed for opera scenery. His work, his life! He drove himself through layers of anguish and shame, felt defeated by that country which had seemed so fair and free when he had come to it, thinking himself, at that time, defeated by America. Had his years abroad been utterly wasted? They had. Yet so persistent was his curious soul that on the fourth day out he stood on the top deck, doing nothing for hours on end but admiring the sea. Whatever else it did, he reflected, defeat could wash you whiter than snow, as the old hymn of his childhood went. He experienced great peace at the thought of his native land.

It was Catherine who salvaged the work. Irene and Charles left in the early fall, for good. Their European years were done, they said to everyone, a phrase, as applied to them, to grip the heart; it was elegaic and superb. The return of yet another Republican administration, the Hungarian suppression—all had let Charles know that his finest hour was done. He took the pulse of things and foresaw a long dreary bureaucratic struggle with not much by way of new surfaces to leave his mark on. In September when everyone came back to the city, Irene gave a grand party, renting the grounds of the palazzo where they had had their apartment for years, placing a small orchestra on the paved entrance near the stone lions. Lights glowed, candles flickered, couples danced in the hallway and on a raised platform outside. A long table was spread, spumante gushed, and stronger potions also were passed about by white-jacketed waiters and little maids. There were movie stars and writers and diplomats and business executives and counts and countesses, and even the nurse who had delivered the twins, just back from Germany where she had seen the Passion Play and visited Anastasia. She was about to sail for home. Catherine came back from the Lakes where she was visiting somebody wealthy who had a villa, and Mario came, at Irene's suggestion, as Catherine's escort.

Catherine liked Mario and would always remember dancing
with him. She always liked to dance back in Texas and doing it here again after so long, she felt like a young girl. His face was witty and nice. Why aren't more men like this? she wondered when he laughed. He wore a white dinner jacket and taught her Italian phrases. But mostly he lived within his own silence, keeping to what he knew. When he danced, he was courteous, but he danced his own dream. Irene passed in a haze of green chiffon, her sandals golden on the fine gravel. Once only she danced with Mario. Some people looked and others looked away. It could be thought, so exquisite they seemed in the motions of parting, that they had both wanted it this way because this was so exactly the way it had to be. They were both shaped up for perfection of some sort and so they got the full of it, even the dregs, out of having some great internal demand for the whole of nature and nothing short of it. Mario was a champion, after all, and once rode down the Veneto in a white open-topped car while hundreds cheered and tore at him. He had taken a race for Italy. So that night, nobody upset anything; nobody had once, in all of Rome, felt compelled to speak to Charles, nor would they now. Nothing broke except their hearts.

Tall, preoccupied, noticing everything and nothing, Charles passed here and there among the guests as he might have walked among rose trees. “Do you hate to leave?” a hundred people asked him. “No party can go on forever,” was what he said, one of his sincerer comments. The cheers of V-E day were ringing in his ears; he could close his eyes and see the great tanks in slow triumph on the Champs Elysées.

The next morning Irene herself went down the Veneto, walking alone on yellow leaves beneath the plane trees. This, too, was herself, in full step with her every notion. Who on leaving Europe, on parting from a lover forever, appreciated quite so much the damp yellow leaves fallen on the pavement along the Veneto? Even Charles thought this about her, and knowing full well where she was likely to be going, his heart filled up with tender anguish.

Charles himself was busy sorting papers, waiting for the packers to arrive. He was personally moved by their departure in the light of its historical perspective. Europe had been his theatre since he had been attached to the Office of War Information in London early in the war. He had fought in Italy, had arrived in France in time to see the Liberation of Paris. Irene had come out to him in Nuremberg, having left the twins with his parents in Ohio. She had come with her eyes wide open, ready to discover everything. Maybe some people would say it was herself she discovered. (Charles got restless when conversation like this was thrown at him.) Anyway she picked up momentum from every new experience, and since Europe was in a plundered condition she set about clearing it up to suit herself. He could only guess now that hundreds of American women, in those times so up for grabs, had had at least a go at doing something along these lines. A little money went so very far and there was all the gilt and fine things and bric-a-brac. So she was up and running and he thought it would soon play out and begin to bore her, and that was when, instead, she shifted into top gear and began to scare him. Charles had always taken a Middle-Western view of society; a dinner jacket was something he struggled into with reluctance; receptions, weddings, funerals and every human ritual he took
as a necessary evil, to be got through as painlessly as possible. He generally thought of something else the whole time. But here was Irene, always running in with news of somewhere they could go, of something to be seen and heard, of who was new to meet. Before his eyes he discovered her, first as the center of their growing acquaintance, then of an enlarging swirl which dragged in group after group, and gradually seemed to be taking in all of Europe. A good deal of it trailed with them from Germany to Paris, where new circles formed about them. At the time Rome was mentioned as his next post she already had visited there and laid a social groundwork more formidable than most foreigners on the spot achieved in several seasons.

The first thing all this did, in Charles' view, was knock hell out of his private notions of economy. He had believed in savings, investments, insurance policies, and the planned life. He could now see at one glance the way things were shaping up, that if illness or bad luck ever left him without a job there would be nothing to do but go home to Ohio and pitch hay. When he said this to Irene she thought he was being funny. They had a quarrel which lasted for a week. But he was not too obtuse either to see that she was benefiting him, however indirectly, far more than she was injuring his bank account. Everybody either knew the Waddells, or wanted to know them. Their name was mentioned everywhere. In one respect at least, she never failed him: she was discreet. She never gave away, by a single glance, anything that might work to his disadvantage. He could safely leave her in charge of a roomful of enemies, and return hours later to find them chewing over existentialism, or the Salzburg Festival. The greatest trial in his career, the goof in Cairo, had missed her completely because of Mario. He could suppose with a rueful smile, as he let the packers in, that this had been the great trial in her career as well. She must be gone to meet him now. Her lover. The word, so familiar by now as to be as commonplace as dog and cat—who was sleeping with whom was a big question in the Waddell world—still was not a home word for Charles and never would be. He felt embarrassed to have to think it.

Charles had his appetites but was not primarily a sensual man. He must have known for years, now that he thought of it, that Irene had depths he might awaken, discover to her, but never exhaustively explore. Now this knowledge, though to him only a fragment of his totality, like a tiny pointed sliver, drove deeply into him where it hurt the most. He put it aside; in many ways, not the least of which was physical age, he felt at times to be her father. A father suffered at his daughter's defection, but in his suffering, if civilized at all, he hoped for the best, was moved with pity, took nothing too personally. Here Charles failed and floundered. He could see the jump and make himself run toward it, but he could not go over it. At the point of refusal, chaotic questions swarmed in his mind. Was Mario the only one? If she was discreet about Charles' affairs, had she learned, all this time, also to be discreet about her own? He thought of all the long periods he had had to be away from her, and shuddered. Nevertheless, he believed that Mario was the only one because he believed in her taste. Some would have said Irene had an eye for brass as well as gold, but if so, she did not know it. She would have saved herself, instinctively, not purposefully, for something like this, maybe even (here he reached a great romantic conclusion, so unlike him that it made his head spin) just precisely for Mario and none other. He shook his head to clear it: he would never risk thinking anything like that again. It was dangerous. Later on, his doubts returning, having fed on God knew what and grown accordingly, he came to wonder if Mario was the last. He grew suspicious of Barry, something which in the past he would have hooted at. Why did he hang around if he didn't care for Irene? When were people moved exclusively, blindly, by sexual drives and when weren't they? Before these questions he stood dull and helpless, and there was none to take his hand.

Deeply concerned with duty as a young man, with education, with a grasp of foreign affairs and public policy, he had refused or scanted what opportunities there had been for the big emotions to grow in, and now this green time was gone forever; it was too late. He had grown, through the years, terse with people, short, for he had painfully learned that warmth and affection were generally misunderstood, all too often taken advantage of, and were the American mannerism Europeans were quickest to view with contempt. Germany had taught him his longest lessons here, and France had given him a postgraduate course. By now his sharp manner was proverbial; he no longer wished to be liked, nor was he.

So where was the heart at all? he wondered (as he guided the packers on, mainly by opening the doors from one room to the next), that it should now wake up with this tiny splinter in it? He would not think of it. Let it fester as it would. He went out on the terrace.

Will and Tom were sitting in a couple of canvas lawn chairs, reading Gibbon. One had volume two and the other volume three. He wondered how they had got even this much out of step. He had often wanted to say, “My son, my son.” It seemed a joke on this desire that he had to say instead, “My sons, my sons,” this not being at all the same thing.

“Have you finished packing?” he inquired.

“All done,” said Tom.

“Can we help?” Will asked.

“No, but thank you.” His eyes became clouded. “Thank you, son.”