No Place for an Angel (39 page)

His father had never gotten in that final plea, the plea to Latham. You have to leave something undone. It had been in his mind, certainly: Latham, the blood descendant, though crippled. The final chance. Catherine had known it, sensed it, too. It was one reason she had never had Latham in Texas much. Professor Sasser had seen him, but only at the Latham house. She would not permit this terrible exposure—the books brought out, talk of “the truth, the one truth.” She was too polite to mention it, but not too gentle utterly to defeat any move to get Latham up at that end of the street. Jerry had rejected Latham. He went to see him now, truncated impatient visits. The boy's goodness irritated him. He felt himself observed and even loved, but loved in observation only, like an animal, his habits recorded with open-minded curiosity, no criticism. Latham learned everything, an astonishing heap of knowledge, by quietly and accurately observing the great big world. Diane! She did not say much. He folded her up into a small dark object and set her next to his heart, a temporary warmth. He had to go see Latham from time to time to see if Catherine—

He walked in the fresh crisp city. Trees spring-touched and warm along the handsome street, a florist's shop on the corner near the traffic circle, sprays trickling like a gush of spring rain down the glass, clever idea. A blur of irises behind the glass, tall and sentinel. Kennedy-looking flowers. New administration. New glory for new heads.

He walked with sharply slashing heels, long accurate Texas walking, shoulders inclined to hunch and slope now. He straightened,
long profile leveling, young woman in the corner of his eye. Rounded shoulders, short skirt, blazer, rounded calves, short stiletto heels, pretending she hadn't noticed him and maybe she hadn't. Maybe they didn't notice any more. He doubted it. They were angling toward each other, about to cross paths before the florist's window. He slackened sail to let her pass, but turned it on her, catching her attention, saw himself taken quickly in, the long line of his cheek and jaw still good, eyes grown dark as tar the more they drew her into true focus, straight brows, harsh, motionless forehead. For a minute he had her and she knew it. The moment broke off in the sort of jazz they were both able to give it by simply spinning past each other and not looking back, both forgetting instantly, letting the day, which had become slightly different, take up what had happened, whatever it was.

With Diane one day he had seen the President go by, wife beside him and someone else. In the old days he would have known who it was. “It's the President,” he had said. “Remember that.” The motorcycle escort slowed at a stop light, sputtered, turned; the car moved soundlessly, uncurtained, the occupants clearly visible. A few people turned and waved. He did not. “Look,” he said to Diane. “Remember.” Those beautiful people. “Daddy held me up once to see them. He said, ‘Look, baby, it's the President.'” Already he spoke out of shadows.

But the shadows were at least great big ones and moved leaping on distant walls, where people still did not know what to think of him, namely in Texas.

“What's he doing?” Priscilla begged Millard to tell her. For Millard saw him, from time to time. Millard had some weird kind
of sympathy for him. For Millard had a theory of action, the necessity of its not even being disguised as anything either good or bad, of the command to motion being as primal with humanity as gravity was to objects; he believed that very few people could recognize this but he thought that Jerry Sasser could. He saw Jerry lost to the family without trying to prevent it because he knew the family would never face the truth Jerry was a walking illustration of, namely that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral action. Only reflection, meditation, ascribes motives, divides sheep from goats, approves or condemns, refuses to note from what foul or idiot source even the pure love flower has sprung. He never discussed all this directly with Jerry. The family by default had landed in Millard's hands, just as Edward's defection and flight had placed it in Jerry's once. It was only that Millard had the good grace to keep in touch with the dethroned and exiled. He even visited him.

Donning togas of contemplation, they strolled through ruined gardens. Millard pondered aloud on Texas becoming bone-dry, stripped of oil. Without new discoveries, in twenty years, at the present rate, it might be possible. What about natural gas? How much could you get out and why could you be allowed to get out more than somebody else, like the Hickmans? He thus got Jerry action-directed, like giving an all but insoluble puzzle to a bed-ridden person with a fetish for order. It was pure carrot and stick. Suppose Jerry found a way to ruin them all? Suppose he found a way to make millions? He would do either one, Millard mused, maybe depending on what he'd had for breakfast. He did not think of Catherine because it seemed to him that about Catherine there was no longer anything to think.

Millard himself was a sort of white hunter in darkest Africa, going to Washington, getting on the phone, lunching the brother-in-law, setting baits and traps, smearing the blood of rabbits and kids all around on the foliage. Jerry mentioned something in passing, only a phrase, as Millard, after a short argument, took the lunch check: “the grey world.” This stuck with Millard as he got a taxi to the airport. So Jerry knew it; the phrase made a deep sigh rise within Millard, restoring his own humanity. Jerry knew what he lived in, had chosen it. At one time which Millard remembered clearly, Jerry Sasser had been clear as glass, and the girls he had chosen, picked like flowers from border to border and coast to coast, had all been clear-eyed and white-toothed; you could spin them around like sculpture on a pedestal and there it all was, every jot, toenail, eyelash, flat wafer of temple, blunt bone of sacroiliac, etc., etc., etc., all fulfilled. Now Jerry lived with some woman with a messy name and somebody had got drunk and careless, not only conceived a child but in another misguided mood decided why not keep it. Jerry didn't know that Millard knew this. Perhaps Jerry loved the child, Millard thought. He found that thought, as regards Jerry, almost disgusting. It spoiled the clarity of Millard's vision of him. Like a termite eating patiently into an oaken timber, one microscopic love insect would finally get to the heart, and there would be Catherine, immovable. He didn't like it.

The plane took off. It was misty. The grey city, touched out in white monuments, mainly to the dead, dropped away below.

It was somewhere along during that winter of Millard Warner's first visit to him, early 'sixties, that Jerry became aware that Charles and Irene Waddell were around Washington. Every time he saw them he experienced rage that almost amounted to fury. Once Irene was in a Japanese restaurant in make-up that looked strongly Oriental, though he knew she was the sort of woman who if you asked her about this it would turn out she not only had not done it on purpose but had not really thought about it, the whole way through the lunch. Once at a crush at the British embassy where Jerry had been asked along to escort the divorced wife of a Congressman he used to know, she came up to him with immense aplomb, to reveal that she had been aware of his being in Washington all these years—he took it that all this had its genesis in Catherine and that artist he had never liked the sound of. She went on to say that she and Charles were giving something next week and could he come. He accepted and then did not appear. What did she want? To talk about what she knew and he knew and then maybe they would both know something new. Common knowledge of knowing Catherine, unspoken, but giving an added
je ne sais quoi
. Charles was on a publications committee for the White House, something cooked up between the culture-conscious administration and the New York publishing houses. Of course, he would be there, once his party got back in power. He had acquired a quiet, heavily polished air, like something in the furniture department of the best department store. His wife had picked the new manner out for him, no doubt, and got him to wear it without his knowing he had it on. It was necessary, Jerry saw, grudgingly admiring her
good sense, for the simple reason that the Waddells were older now than the New Frontier image allowed one to be. He had once himself had this sort of feeling about things. One day somebody from one of the big welfare bureaus approached him with a feeler; a job was in the air. He made a connection—as tenuous, gossamer as a spider web that could only float invisible in air and appear as something unprovable across his eye—to Irene. He turned the job down. He would not welsh on what he was. Nobody need show up to tell him that neither Charles Waddell nor any other man was giving that woman all she wanted.

And now he was in Nassau on a yacht, consulting with some British and Canadian oil men about rights in the North Sea and East Anglia. One lazy night in February, moored off the pier before the Harbor Club, water burning under moonlight deep black as oil, he happened to bring up Jasmin, which was the company that owned Millard Warner's Oklahoma distribution and development rights, and someone had heard of Warner. Jerry stirred in the depths of a Barcelona chair, resting its steel frame legs on the wall-to-wall deep blue carpet of the yacht's little salon, and said yes, that Warner was his brother-in-law, and that he had once suggested to him as a joke that with a government contract to process crude oil he could use byproducts for marginal income. Warner had actually investigated to see if Jasmin could do this. The way Jerry laughed you couldn't tell but what the affair had actually succeeded and from the way the Britisher looked he knew the reference would not escape cataloguing. Millard Warner a crook. Millard was one of the few good men Jerry knew, and having read somewhere that nothing could hurt a good man,
he did not feel too bad about having, in the course of making up a good story, tried. One of the Canadian wives, pink-gowned with pink sandals, platinumed hair, was looking him over. She was not subtle. He encountered her later in the ship's corridor and bowed past her. Her daughter, tanned black and wearing silver, was a bell-ringer. She shimmered when she went up the steep narrow stairs. Later he stood at the rail and heard somebody scream, a girl-scream. Fallen overboard, was what he instantly thought. Had she committed suicide, that lovely thing, had a nightmare, or been awakened by a drunken guest who had blundered into the wrong cabin by mistake, been awakened by a drunken guest who had blundered into the wrong cabin on purpose, had agreed to go ahead and try it, might as well, and so been broken into in terrifying advent for the first time. First time? Incredible. But that could be a falling overboard too. He guessed they screamed sometime. The girl had not seemed unhappy or happy either, at cocktails—just closed, confined. So many people are that way now, he thought; she had not responded very much to his conversation. She was so black she must have spent untold hours in the sun, blackened eyebrows winging straight up, eyelids brushed with silver. Now her scream was silver, too. He watched the moon shimmering on the water and did not stir. If she had hurtled past his nose, going from upper deck straight down to her doom, would he have jumped in to save her? Nice of you, so nice of you, Mr. Sasser, I'll always be in your debt, you saved my life, Daddy will make you a vice-president for life. He would never do anything to be nice. Had he ever? Now that he thought of it, he didn't think so. He always had a motive: a two-birds-with-one-stone killer.
“Did you hear her scream?” “I thought I heard something but it barely woke me. I was drunk.” So it might come to saying that; so what? If it was only that original falling overboard, the hot assault on the virgin gates where blood out of season would spill to scare her, blood of midnight, she would be glad if no alarm were sounded at all. And then it would be nice of him not to have said anything. He guessed if she were drowning it was all over by now. The moon beat plunging against the wise old water. He could have had the hostess, unwrapped her pink article at a time; he hated pink. Catherine had never worn it. Could he have had the silver girl? Felt the scream coming on, eased her past it, clever as the skillful maneuver of a racing driver, the sharpest corner taken without a screech. Diane might give a small squirrel cry one day. Drowned at midnight. Oil-black water. He had been powerful to say nothing, not even to turn his head. A visiting Roman, walking the early-to-bed streets of the provincial town, having praised the local wine, genuinely admired the governor's daughter, rejected the not-quite offer of the governor's wife, thrashed his business out, thrown them quite gratuitously, just for the hell of it (but necessary, as necessary for him as for them), the raw, dripping meat of somebody's corruption and greed, either wished for or actually carried out. It was a joke, making conversation, never meant it. Everything fair in the family. Families all crucify one another all the time. Shimmer of foreign moonlight. Death of foreign girl would make the New York papers no more prominently than loss of her virginity. She could send out cards perhaps. He had got a sympathy card from Catherine when Bunny Tutweiler died. It was the one time he almost went and looked her up. She had done it in her own personal humor, being funny as hell, and he almost went and said What the hell do you mean? The trouble was he could never stop being a crook.

The scream resonated through the empty ruin of his glory, bounded from arch to dome to cornice, ricocheted in abruptly turning passages, disturbed the spider webs over the low portcullises of waste courtyards, knifed between the upright stalks of unpruned self-seeding plants, crashed like a tiny flimsy but expensive foreign-made car against the walls where weeds grew up in crevices. The dog lifted his head and growled. Diane got out of bed and came running to him and sat in his lap. “You oughtn't to be up barefoot. You'll catch cold, sugar.” Southern talk of his off-and-on accent. He had turned it on in Nassau, slurring soft and easy into the warm air, uplift and bite in the middle, drop and drag at the ends of phrases. You called them “sugar.”