No Place for an Angel (5 page)

Her husband mentioned his war years in Italy and disclosed that he had been at Salerno, whereas Charles had been at Naples during the same period. That was going back a long way—Irene a young mother in the States, V-letters, rationed shoes, gas and sugar, a sense of the world waiting in the wings. Then the war finished and it started, made its entrance, that real thing she had waited for all her life, the moment she left to join Charles in Germany after the war. All the late '40's had been Paris, just as the early '50's was Italy, and the late '50's ought to be New York, if only Charles would—

“I was nursing babies all through the war,” she said.

“It's an experience I missed,” said Charles, “mixing midnight formulas. I was trying to keep the Neapolitans from trading us out of all our supplies.”

“I thought the trading was mutual,” said the Indiana man.

“It was. Lots of Italian G.I.'s, of course, but it went on in all quarters. A case of mutual rapport. The Italians never wanted, really, to fight a war. And Americans were never very angry at Italians. They sold everything they knew to us for a bar of Palmolive. For a tin of Nescafé or a package of Gillette blades they would describe the whereabouts of a whole gun emplacement. For cigarettes you could raise a regiment of spies.”

“Sell their sisters,” the Indiana man grinned.

“Oh, the sisters went early on. Hardly worth a Hershey bar.”

Charles was at his best.

“I'll give you a problem none of you has,” he said. “How to keep the top of one's head from sunburn, provided one's head is like my head.”

“Get a sun hat,” their hosts suggested.

“You mean I'm to look like somebody's old cullud yard man? The sun goes straight through that flimsy cap I bought.”

“I can find you something here maybe,” their host offered.

“Mine were war babies, too,” the Indiana woman said. “Harold was already born but Davey was the result of home leave.”

“Too much champagne,” said the Indiana man. “Just before leaving for ETO. Jesus God, what a time that was, those few days! I was green: I'd made up my mind to die. Can you imagine? Now it seems crazy to get worked up to that degree. I was Hemingway, I was Robert Jordan, I was Gary Cooper and G.I. Joe.”

“A lot of people did die,” said Irene.

“Yes, but how safe we all are now. Really. Here we are a dozen years later, everybody making money. Everybody I know of is making money. No real problems.” He laughed. “Not at least until they drop the big one.”

“You think they'll do it?” the hostess said, in such a way that one felt on a foreign island, remote among warm winds, evening, sea and alcohol.

“Sure they will,” said Charles. “Sure they will someday,” he added.

“Well, I hope I'm right under it,” said the Indiana man.

“That's crazy,” said his wife. “You're always saying that.”

“No messing around for me. No shelters, no Hiroshima scar tissue. No prolonged radiation death sentence. Just one big bang is all I ask, dear Lord.”

“It's noiseless,” said the motel owner's wife, unexpectedly.

“That's right,” Charles nodded.

“And they say the colors are stupendous,” Irene said with a tiny laugh.

“A super-colossal Cinerama show that only the Japanese have so far been treated to,” said Charles. “What makes them so special? I call it discrimination!”

“You're sounding sick,” said Irene.

Barry ate a lot of hors d'oeuvres. He had long ago got in the habit of eating large quantities at other people's houses. He never had enough money to feed himself and had often gone hungry.

Charles had said, the first time after they had invited him to dinner in Rome, “What's eating him?” To which Irene in a collapse of laughter had replied, “You mean what's he eating? He's hungry, poor boy. I never saw any American come to a dinner party really wanting food.”

So she was already interested in him. In so many ways, he seemed like something new.

They went out on a hired boat the next day, the twins, Irene, Barry and Charles. A local “character” took them out, one who had cultivated his grizzly white beard, no doubt, though his knowledge of the area and its waters and fish seemed genuine. Charles wore the sun hat, as advised. Irene, slathered in oils she trusted, wound her head in the bright scarf. The twins got darker by the minute, and stood around not missing anything, but refused to fish. They leaned against the rail, looking into the water, conversing seriously.

“I think they're abnormal,” Charles complained. “All boys love to fish.”

“If they start getting fat I can't stand it,” said Irene, doting on their straight backs and trim legs.

“I should love to catch a turtle weighing two hundred pounds,” said Charles. “They have wise faces.”

“I think they're horrible,” said Irene. “Except for shells. And soup, of course. Those awful feet.”

“Enchanting feet,” said Charles. “Life's first blundering attempt at a foot. The most honest foot of all. What's pretty about the human foot? Why, turtles have beautiful feet.”

“You can have them,” said Irene.

It was Barry who caught a turtle, though a small one. The boat owner smashed its head in and said that he had killed it, though Irene believed that it died by degrees on deck beneath the sun, contorting beneath its plated shell, upside down and waving its feet in the air. She did not speak for several hours and refused lunch.

“Blood sports are cruel,” she finally said. “I loved turtles more than I thought.”

“This isn't a blood sport,” Charles argued. “Fishing a blood sport?” He stamped about the deck with his big feet flattened out in canvas shoes. There was a thin wash of fish blood on the planking. He gulped cold beer from a can.

They came back in the early afternoon. “My darlings, my darlings,” said Irene, drawing her two boys to her. “Don't have identical sunstrokes, please?” They laughed at her; their teeth flashed whiter than milk.

There had been a silken overcast during a good part of the afternoon, thin and sheer across the sun's fierce eye. Irene's nose was blistered. When she laughed with her two sons, the three of them had all looked fleetingly alike. So Barry observed.

The haze deepened; there was a sense of quiet, with no threat of wind or any sort of weather; the boat steadily cut the sheer blue surface, as true as a drawn line.

All such returns are like homecomings, and as though the motel were indeed a home, Barry sensed the instant they stepped onto the pier that something was wrong. There was a silence, a stillness more than silence, an especial meditative beauty beneath the palm shade, and the way the shadow of the thatched sun huts lay upon the tumbled sand stirred Barry's hand to itch for a brush to paint it in just that way.

“A terrible thing happened while you were gone,” the motel owner's wife said.

She had come down to Barry's room about an hour after their return. He had showered and dressed and was wondering what to put on his blazing nose. But most of all he continued to sense the unnatural quiet which had had its moment of beauty and now had grown eerie, alive with its secret as though the surface flesh of the place were creeping. Then there had been the small knock at the door.

“Come in,” he said, opening the door wider.

“I can't. I've too much to do.” She smiled wanly. “Well, no matter what happens, I think you should know. My husband and I discussed it and thought we'd go ahead and tell you.”

Briefly, she told him.

The elder son of the Indiana people had electrocuted himself on a generator owned by the motel neighbors, a Miami family who kept a
little pure white Spanish-style villa just across the inlet. The event had been clearly visible from the motel couple's balcony and had been witnessed by the boy's mother and father. They had come upstairs to ask about renting a boat with scuba diving equipment the next day, and were standing at the balcony watching the boys swim. They saw when they crawled out on the opposite shore, where the steps of the little villa went down into the water. Though a huge sign in red letters spelled out the voltage in the generator and advised one to keep away, the boys went toward it anyway. Their mother called to them from the balcony, and was joined by their father, who called also. They were both within easy hearing distance, separated from the adults only by the height of the second story and the narrow inlet of water they had been swimming in. They stood with their hands on their narrow hips, squinting back across the distance and arguing with their mother. Their father stepped in and cupping his hands to his mouth demanded that they return to the motel. “I know what I'm doing,” said the older boy, and walking to the generator, deliberately put his hand to the outlet. He was wet from swimming and fell at once. In the motel they were for an incredulous instant stricken silent, except for the boy's mother who cried aloud: “He knew I didn't love him!” Later, neither she nor anyone could imagine why she had said this. It wasn't true, she said. The words had simply sprung out of her. Whether some suppressed truth had come to light, or whether she was trying to remove her husband's possible sense of being to blame, or whether it was merely hysterical and meant nothing, the motel owner's wife couldn't say. She sat on Barry's bed with her hands linked tightly together, her
face white, bleached out, and her eyes swollen. There had been a general rush, she said, from then on for two or three hours—they had done all the right things, including a dash to the hospital in Miami with the ambulance. And now it was all over. Doctors and undertakers and nurses with sedatives and people who arranged these things had been prompt to take charge. It all seemed like something swallowed up into past history before the white paving near the Spanish villa could dry in the sun from the boys' splashes where they had come up out of the water. “So it's hard to believe now,” she said. “But we thought you'd see it in the paper. There was a reporter here—heaven knows where he came from; he seemed to spring out of a tree. So many people come and go and nothing out of the way happens, and then a thing like this—there was no doubt they were the very best sort of people, genuine and kind and honest . . . they were just what they seemed to be. And there was no doubt either that the boy did kill himself. It was straight suicide, there was no mistaking that.” Her husband, she said, had taken their little daughter for a drive. The child was terribly upset in her own deep way; they knew that. “When he gets back, I hope he will take me for a drive. I need to be talked to as much as anyone.”

“But to be told what?” asked Barry. He really wanted to know.

“If I knew, I'd tell you.” And she gave it to him again: her wan, sweet smile.

They went on the next day, on to Key West. Irene decided that it had all happened the moment the turtle was killed; she was apt to think things were true just because she had thought of them. Afterwards, the little cove with the white Spanish villa just across the inlet, blazing pure in the sun, seemed more of a dream than ever; they left and drove on, down a length of bare highway over vistas sometimes swampy, sometimes craggy with shells, past commercial fishing harbors, and towns sandwiched narrowly out between the concrete and the water on either hand. Then the highway at last became an abstraction, a single line unreeling infinitely on above water, under sky.

At Key West they viewed the large white-painted house where the President used to come to get away from Washington. They stood on the point which was farthest South in the whole U.S.A. and saw that it said only ninety miles to Cuba. They considered the huge white clouds.

Charles deliberately turned his back to the sign about Cuba, which might have come to seem at that moment like the next stopping place. He turned his back on the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

“What I'm going to have lies due north of here,” he announced. “They needn't think they can push me off the edge.”

“Who?” Barry asked. “Who's trying to?”

“Oh, get with it,” said Charles. He was laughing.