No Place for an Angel (9 page)

“Exactly what I mean,” said Barry.

“But then it doesn't happen,” said Irene, sharply. “She's always perfectly all right. Why doesn't somebody worry that way about me?”

“My, my,” said Charles. “We are arching our backs, aren't we?”

She was silent and thought of Mario, an Italian she had loved for a time, down in Siracusa when she thought Barry would die. At the window, it began, astonishingly, to snow.

Barry, with an awesome contraction in his heart, felt that Catherine was leaving them inexorably again, was by now no more than a speck disappearing at high speed into distant light.

“She will be gone for a long time,” he murmured.

Charles looked up, but did not reply.

Dangerous Journeys

ONE

M
ore than likely Catherine herself knew better than anyone else that she never had the slightest idea of going to Chile. This was the sort of blind, a delicately decorated screen, replete with incident, people, flora and fauna, which she knew well by now how to raise around herself.

From Barry she went on to see her son, Latham, at his school in Massachusetts, and straight from there, as she had known for a month now she would do, she flew to Washington where she met her husband, Jerry Sasser.

He used to be so handsome but in the two years since they had parted, some inner slackening off had come out clearly on his features. She wondered if this effect might not come from too much drinking and she wondered how well he was doing. He had a way of charging through doors and stopping suddenly to take note of the terrain before him; rather like a lion entering an unfamiliar stretch of jungle, he went to work at once looking for a victim or an enemy, striking an attitude which always had its effect on whatever room he entered. In this case it was the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, and Catherine, watching from the depths of a green armchair, while the familiar scene unfolded, saw at least a dozen heads lift as though from grazing and slowly turn. He spotted her at last, almost, you might guess, when he chose to, a battered lion, possibly in a bad humor, showing it now and again by a twitch of his tail. She braced herself; for when he got near, within a dozen feet or so, she was going to see again the shadow of the boy, young man, husband, father, she had always loved. Would it never go away, that shadow? Why didn't it, like a light, simply burn out?

“Hello, Jerry.”

“Hello, Catherine.”

Back of every mad person there is a person who never would answer. Well, if he never would answer then at least he could and would sign, for the papers she brought were about money—a bond investment, held jointly, had matured—and though she could have let it drift into the estate until such time as he got an accounting done and found it, she knew he always needed money and so chose to bring it to him herself. Her family, if they knew of it, would have thought she was either in another crisis, or had gone back to him, or both. But even in the world's worst marriage there are moments of comfort, like the settling of an old quilt over tired limbs, when two people meet again. So they sat in green armchairs in the hotel lobby, a low table between them, discussing Latham, relatives, health and money.

Catherine had known Jerry Sasser all her life. If a table now sat between them every time they met, it was a table with an imaginary chess game laid out upon it. The chess game, she had come to see thus late on, had been going on for nearly forty years. At each meeting one or the other of them might reach down and make a move. Then again, they might not. The possibility was always present, but not always acted on. The game itself, she now saw clearly, would never end. They had grown together like two trees; they had sapped life from each other. There had always been a sense of mystery about him, first there to draw her, win her, possess her, and later to poison her. There was, later on, a specific point, never cleared up, but always present; something he wouldn't say.

“Who did try to kill you that time, Jerry?” She had asked him that at least a hundred times.

He always laughed. But this time, unexpectedly, he answered her. “You did.” The move was made.

She started. “Don't be an idiot. If I ask you a serious question—”

“Sure it was you.” He grinned, worrying out a match, and dropped it on the growing litter in the too-small ash tray before him. “Who else would?”

“You think I would?”

“You wanted to plenty of times.”

“Jerry, I never—”

“The gate was locked.”

“Those men—!”

“You think they would? Just when I was making over a fortune. You blanked out, that's all. Strain and crisis . . . same old trouble. I never blamed you.”

She sat quietly, hands folded, allowing the recent memory of a young man's hoarse whisper in her ear to sustain her. Jerry would still wreck me if he could, she thought coldly.

He drove her back to her hotel.

“I suppose you see the Waddells,” he said.

“I saw Irene in New York,” she said. “Charles seems to travel a lot. It's some promotion or other, I gather. A company extension . . . that's it.”

“She told you that, did she? Well, that's good, if true. The last I heard he was beachcombing in Florida, pretty definitely ‘between jobs.'”

“I'm sure that isn't true. Irene seemed perfectly confident about things.”

“She's that type.”

“Jerry, they are my friends, not yours. Just because you happened into Charles on a business matter, you can't simply move in. . . .”

“There was a time when he could have put money in that company, but he preferred to think it was his brain power, background, or something vague like imagination they wanted, that that was the valuable part. Well, there's more than one with all that to spare, and of course it isn't even supremely valuable, not to excess.”

“You mean they've let him out.”

“I guess we must have heard different things. Maybe not.”

He knew his way around Washington and drove well. They passed the White House.

“What do people say about politics?” Catherine asked.

“What a question,” said Jerry. “Then there was that artist, Barry something.”

Good old Jerry, good old Jerry, she thought. “I think he went South to work.”

“You'd think he'd live in Italy.”

“Why?”

“People like that should live abroad.” He lost interest. “Catherine, why are you going home?”

“To keep them from tearing up the landscape, if I can. I can't, of course. It all has to do with the new highway, the new suburb, the new Gateway to the West museum, the new . . . oh, the new everything. It exhausts me to try to stop it, if not stop it, at least to save the old farm the way it was; but I shall try. Then, in a month, I'm visiting with. . . .”

She had friends everywhere. She let them take her up from time to time, never questioning their motives, which were perhaps genuine. Her money, her history, her influence, her contacts, her precarious health, her willingness to help and be helped—she did not care to go into it herself, let alone point it out to Jerry. It came to her when she got out of the car on the cold sidewalk and the wind instantly bit her, that she had exploited Barry to fortify herself for meeting Jerry. Jerry would certainly be living with some woman who had a career in Washington and two divorces behind her already, and something shady here and there to keep her brain sharpened razor-fine. (She had heard a part of this rumored and the rest flowed easily into place.) I guess I'm as big a bitch as the next one, Catherine thought, and huddled her frail shoulders against the cold, moving her delicate shoes from time to time on the pavement. As for landscapes, she thought, the only one I'm liable to end up with is Jerry's face. Those two craters are his eyes, and there's a dark crumple of hair, straight across the forehead, flat except for one cowlick that won't lie down no matter what. And there were the high, Indian-straight cheekbones, reaching back like twin ridges, one of which, just beneath the eye, after a certain number of drinks, blotched with a mound of red.

“Goodbye, then,” he said, and noticing that she was shivering, leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Keep well,” he said. She entered her hotel through turning glass doors, intractable with the dark opaque look of winter water.

It was still cold and cloudy the morning after Catherine saw Jerry. The cab to the airport wound past the wealthy suburbs with their stone mansions which were possibly legation headquarters or senatorial residences, into the small-farm, fenced properties of one-story white houses, copses of leafless oak along the slopes and empty fields covered sparsely with sage and bone-white winter grass. A road project lay fallow along the highway, great dumb earth movers stood silent to the cold, machines very close to animals in their souls. The cab driver had a noisy heater, which roared.

“Where you going, lady?”

“Dallas.”

The last time Catherine had made this trip was with Jerry, the time he said she tried to kill him. It was hot summer and she hadn't wanted to be there. All the way to the airport she had sustained herself by imagining herself back along the green walks beside the Potomac, watching from cool shade while the plane took off. To the watcher below it would have to be a lovely sight: the plane, a long-nosed magnificent jet, rising silver in the cloudless summer blue, would seem to drift level as a boat above the Capitol, almost to dream, then tilting deliberately upward, to hang for a further second in the mesh of a dream. But before a doubt could gather around it, it would lift surely, beautifully, accomplish new heights of air, and seem to quiver itself with what it communicated—the delight and pride of power.

Herself borne aloft by it that summer day, Catherine felt the take-off in these terms, and her sense of glory, tired as she was, roused golden in her senses, then sank to apathy. Such moments vanished quickly and defied meaning; her mind had leveled off for the flight. The roar died to a drone, a soft insulated drumming from without. The tension slid behind into the jet stream. She had groped toward seat adjustments and magazines.

“Coffee, tea, or milk?”

“Shhh!” Catherine put her finger to her lips and indicated her husband, who had fallen asleep before the take-off. The stewardess nodded, and bending down with a smile, picked up a shoe which was sitting half out in the corridor and placed it neatly, along with its mate, under the edge of the seat; then she picked up an arm which had fallen limp and weary out into the line of passage and laid it across his lap. She nodded to Catherine—a young, trim girl with a dark cropped head, smooth olive cheeks and admirable lipstick. “Coffee, tea, or milk?” she whispered. “Coffee,” said Catherine.

Despite his wife's reminder as they walked up the incline that this was a commercial flight, Jerry Sasser, from the moment he had flopped into his seat, had insisted on acting just as he did on the Western Star, Senator Ogden's private DC-6 Constellation, shucking his coat, loosening his belt, tie and top shirt buttons, dropping his shoes, banging the seat back to the hilt—there was nobody behind, thank God. “You can lose a vote that way,” Catherine remarked, but he had crashed already, into the sudden oblivion of sleep. Aloft, the air conditioning gained total saturation. Now he'll catch cold, Catherine thought, with all that Washington perspiration drying off. She was fumbling to close the ventilating system when the coffee came.

When Jerry Sasser wakened they were somewhere over Tennessee and it was nearly dinnertime—the early dinnertime of planes and trains and hospitals—perhaps of all waiting people. He had been sprawled there, silently, a long while, then the seat snapped up and the coat which she had spread over his chest fell down into his lap. “What's that?” he demanded, catching it by the sleeve. “Oh”—he shifted his grasp to the collar and lifted it up, at which point the article became not only recognizable but his own—“my coat.”

“I was afraid you might catch cold.”

“Cold,” he echoed, absently. He drew down his turned-back cuffs and buttoned them, slid his tie into place and fastened his belt. Then he quitted her in a men's-room sort of way. When he got back he leaned over her to look down at the U.S.A.

“You want to swap?”

“No, just trying to see where we are. What's that down there? The Mississippi?”

“The Tennessee, I think.”

“Oh, sure. It wiggles. Lots of lakes.”

“Wouldn't that be the TVA? I've been wondering.”

“Sure, sure. The TVA.”

He had damped and combed his hair and his hands smelled clean.

“You look better,” she said.

He gave her a rare, direct glance. “You too.”

“I feel better.” She paused. “After all, we are going home. Aren't we? After Dallas?”

“I promised, didn't I?”

Later, after dinner, they sat in the observation lounge; they had a corner to themselves. The stewardess joined them. She knew Jerry, as it turned out; had met Catherine as well some months before on one of Senator Ogden's pre-campaign flights to the Midwest. Through the window, Catherine could watch the northwest flange of the sunset, streaming pink, mauve, crimson, violet, sinking a cool liquid play of satin light into one back-flung silver wing. Lights were already picking out the forest-green, darkening texture of the land below. There a city flashed up: “Little Rock,” said the stewardess without even looking. She was bringing Jerry out about politics. Oh, yes, even way up here, Catherine thought wryly. This entire summer, she thought, is nothing whatever that isn't politics.