No Place for an Angel (40 page)

By maneuvering certain interstate contracts on the grounds that the Latham estate now included Oklahoma holdings, just as the Warner estate included Texas holdings, and hence both were not strictly speaking exclusively a Texas concern, he more than doubled for the family the amount of natural gas they were allowed to export. Families like the Hickmans could get themselves somebody in Washington, he guessed, or arrange for a daughter to marry into a Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, or Oklahoma oil family. About the only clever business trick Priscilla ever pulled. In the long run he was going to pay back his $100,000 debt six times over, as long as nobody decided to challenge the legal set-up. There were still enough leftover political
connections to make sure nobody did. It was up to Millard Warner now to ring up certain names in Washington, but what names? They had been supplied to him by Jerry Sasser. Jerry Sasser reflected, filling in the loops of letters on the telephone directory, letting his mind idle in his office, that he had never had anything at all against the Hickmans and neither did anybody else any more. So if things were still working against them through the Lathams, it was totally without animosity. Local history did not keep on repeating itself. Those two families would hardly bother to stop making money long enough to remember anything unpleasant about each other. Someday there would be intermarriage, no doubt.

“I'm making a lot of money for you,” Jerry told Millard, having come down all the way to Merrill to explain it to him.

“You could also ruin us,” Millard said, “by using the same system in reverse. You could get it all thrown out of court right now.”

“I could if I wanted to.”

That was if you could call not making another million ruin—they would always be wallowing in wealth to their eyebrows and could, if they wanted to, buy His and Her airplanes from Neiman-Marcus to give each other for Christmas, one on either side of the swimming pool at midnight when Santa wriggled in through the air conditioning. But even though ruin was a myth and the necessity of further increase from natural gas was a myth in the myth land that money is to the rich, Millard still liked to meditate on it all.

He put on his rough English tweed jacket, worn-out elbows with leather patches, and went up to get the mail, and Jerry was left with Priscilla coming in from the grocery with a brown paper sack.

“I guess you'll stay and eat,” she said.

“No, I guess not,” he said. Then he said, “I just came back to say what I'd done for you, that's all.” Then he said, “You know I always wanted to fuck you, Priscilla. You wanted it too, back then.”

She looked up with sea-green eyes. Millard must have got hold of the reins somehow. She used to be a nut. Her hair, loose and expensively waved, had gone gray. She looked good, not like Catherine at all any more, but good, he guessed. She looked spoiled rotten with wealth, faintly like Elizabeth Taylor. “I got crazy about Millard as a result of you going bust right in front of us. I wouldn't do anything for you now.”

“I never asked you.” He wondered if she still was a bit of a nut. “Don't tell Millard,” he said. “I like him.”

“He wouldn't do anything, even if we went through with it.”

“I didn't know you knew that.”

She had gone in the kitchen with the groceries and he was raising his voice to her and she to him. It seemed they had been conversing for centuries whether present to each other or not. “Isn't that like saying he's not a man?”

“Well, no, he's just not a violent man. He thinks it all out. Maybe he's got a notion you're already dead.” When this happy thought occurred to her, she came out of the kitchen beaming with satisfaction.

The elder Lathams being away on one of their interminable forays to Dallas to see doctors who had to remove and run biopsies on every mole and wart old age had scattered upon their flesh, Jerry went up the street to the house with the turret and by searching through it for three hours, basement to attic, finally found the books his father had given to Catherine.

The funny thing was that the nurse he had got for Diane, that fastidious and aristocratic mulatto image of all that was correct and right-smelling, had recently got converted to something that sounded suspiciously like what he had heard all the time as a child. He was going to her, he thought, straightening up with sweat pouring off him—it was Millard who had given him the key, unbeknownst to Priscilla—and give her the books: “Is this what you mean? It all came from my own father, what a coincidence. But how did you get hold of it? No matter, now we can have it proved that color doesn't matter, blood being always the same, or so it says here. Chapter and verse.” Of course, he would get right out of his own carefully built-up character, it would kick hell right out of his home situation to say that, be a traumatic experience for his daughter to see him flying his true colors, watching him blast apart the carefully built-up, smoothly running menage, her own security shot out of a tree like an old deserted bird's nest. He was capable of doing it, that's what scared him. He sat down on an old locked-up trunk and smiled at himself; the spectacle he could create was extraordinary. He was capable of doing it because he knew that however awful he might get, life itself could always go him one better. It was always something you couldn't believe. From the first call out of the night, which was his father, to the last one, which was death, it was not anything that made an occasion for reverence. The Lathams, if they came in right now,
would temper their feelings about what he was doing there with tender consideration for all the money he knew how to bring in, and it might turn out they were glad to see him after all. (It was Catherine they thought a little peculiar: she preferred Massachusetts to Texas.) No, in spite of all the shaking and worrying he had taken care to give it, life was not even a story. It all pranced away like a mad chorus line, with pairs and trios coming on from time to time to sing their little heavily costumed parts. Catherine with weeping willow in hand, Irene Waddell the lady of fashion, Priscilla and Millard doing some sort of jive, other parts for comic tangos off and on, and himself a restless has-been warrior, occasionally dropping his helmet which whammed like a tin washpan. His laugh echoed in the empty rooms wherein had lived and hoped and shuddered and cried and laughed and thrilled and been bored and grown up, sulked, lay sick, vomited, dreamed and giggled, Catherine, and Edward and Priscilla. Edward was a ghost in the turret—was he actually there? Had Millard said something about it? If so, the laughter would bring him out. But he wasn't. Had he perhaps died? Had someone told or written him, or had he seen it in the paper, Edward Latham is dead. Shoe manufacturer in St. Louis. Living in old-fashioned suburb, taking drugstore-purchased medicines for ailments of veins: Iron Aid, Hadacol, Nature's Spelled Backwards, verging on witch doctors. All that stuff had done was dissolve him, if he was dead. This house had once seemed so large, so imposing, so comfortable. Good smell, clean sheets, freshly washed and shining hair of the rich little Latham girls who turned their snooty little noses up in air and trudged home without a backward glance, all the way
down the long street, their heels going snipsnipsnip. But she watched him sometimes from the corner of the classroom, from the other side of the playground when the north wind hit, too fierce to play in, dull, depressing. Streams of cold dust. He was already smart. Now the house seemed small, Victorian-stuffy with overpriced things in old-fashioned taste, poor tacked-on passes at renovation, the TV room, the glassed-in porch with sentimental ugly articles held onto with death grip. Also a smell of age. Now it was the last place he wanted to be, instead of the first. There had been all the world-wide comedy in between. The sculptor who might as well have been making coathangers all his life. Had had three names, none memorable. The Warners who had discovered it was fun, all this and a million dollars too. Charles Waddell who had peddled Americanism all over the globe, once having been assaulted by a monkey on the streets of Cairo, while his wife spread for some Italian all over Sicily. But now Diane's heels went ahead of him from time to time and that was not funny. And there had been the glory, the ranked fleet in the Pacific, far as the eye could see, and that was not funny. And loneliness and bleared out interest and lagging powers, and that was not funny. In the Dallas airport he rented a locker for twenty-five cents and put the two books inside and much later on he dropped the key in the first river he passed. Perhaps a fish got it, like Jonah and the whale. His father had thought this story symbolic and it was so explained to be, he had noticed, when he tried to read the books, but the fact was perhaps it was in a way literal, too, and now his father himself reposed in the belly of a catfish, who might one day spew him up to whoever cut the fish open, saying Locker No. 241, Dallas Airport. Could anyone with a shred of imagination resist not going there? The dead would rise, resurrection was certain.

The laugh had resounded far past the turreted house of the leading family of Merrill, had troubled, as the silver scream had done, his own lofty ruin which stood about that actual house, like an enveloping shadow of something five times grander. Now it died. The dog had stirred, but his daughter was still asleep. Maybe when Catherine was mad she was only laughing in the turret. She used to laugh for no reason, from time to time.

He went back to Catherine and confronted her for the first time in a thousand years. She was lying in a glider in late summer on the side porch of her New England house, sun on her face, hair catching the sun, freckles, no make-up, broken nails from gardening, reading in a grey wool skirt and white blouse. She did not get up. “Hello, Jerry.”

A canyon roared out silence between them. They held to their ears a conch shell as big as Pennsylvania Station.

“Catherine,” he said. “What have I done?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I guess I just don't know anything you haven't done.”

“Does it matter?” he said.

“I don't know.”

“Can't you just let it go?” he asked.

“Oh, but I did! A long time ago. The question is, can you?'”

“You mean disown, deny, throw away . . . not say I'm sorry, not repent or anything . . . but just shed it . . .?”

“Well, if you aren't sorry, I just thought I'd mention it.”

“I'm not either one. I'm not sorry, and I won't disown. It was me, Catherine. It was me.”

He had a sense that the phone was going to ring, that Latham was going to limp up the walk unexpectedly home because of a half-holiday, that the mailman would come or a committee on something. He had a feeling that a thousand threads of interest and mutual sympathy, generosity, even emotion, united her to this unlikely town, to this whole snow-cursed, summer benevolent area. He would have liked to sweep it out of her head, her life, her heart, at one blow, coldly, like spaying a cat. He would drive her crazy again, and tear open every old wound. She would let him; it had never mattered personally to her as long as some character in himself could resist, define, hold itself detached from the world of lie, main-chance and smear, the well-acted tableau. The grey world. The nothing that was always threatening everybody. He accepted corruption. It was the only way to meet the terror within. If there wasn't enough of it, he invented more.

She saw her one chance and took it. “Latham told me you had a daughter. Don't you have a picture of her? I'd love to see.”

He had one in his pocket. A little dark girl in a field full of flowers, blue and yellow and red. The picture was in color. The flowers were all those girls he used to know. If he gave Catherine this, it would be all over. He would be melted down forever, his ruins gone in a flash fire like cardboard gothic, not even asbestos, let alone stone. She had known right where to stand and strike the match.

“I have a right not to let you see it,” he said. “You know I have.”

She smiled. “I know.” She started to read again, then glanced up. “I might love her.”

He saw her through a red boiling passionate haze of all his times and doings. A car was pulling up at the front steps and people were getting out; Latham was limping in from the drive; the mailman was just leaving; and the telephone had started to ring.

“You would,” he said. “Oh, Catherine, you would!”

She leaped up to embrace him before everyone arrived. He just got out in time. The moment, melting, clung to him present as a dream, for a long time after he left.

“Go back to Catherine?” he said to Irene Waddell, to whom he inevitably drifted at a dinner in Washington where a lot of Texans were being entertained, though how she had got there he didn't know. “Go back? It's a killing thought. Like oil and water. Something is wrong with it.”

“Still,” said Irene, wisely, “you both must have suffered a great deal.”

ALSO BY ELIZABETH SPENCER

NOVELS