No Place for an Angel (37 page)

“Not there,” she said to the maid. “You can't put red chrysanthemums next to goldfish. Put them on the other side of the room.”

The doorbell rang. Its positive note broke up the surface of her mind, drew all her instincts together, quivering inward toward the moment. The challenge of movement, new people, the always possible future. Talk of the New Frontier was in the air. On and on. Did it never stop? she sometimes asked herself, now with wonder, now with weariness, occasionally with something like horror. But the next question always was right there, waiting for her: what if it did?

Rising, she touched her hair at the mirror, readjusted a single scarlet flower. If Barry did make a great success, it would be she, not Catherine, he would come round to. Who but she would know or even help to create its significance? She turned, settling her face, her smile, toward whatever face should appear.

When Catherine drove in late from New York, shadowy in the night, Latham rose from the doorstep where he had been sitting, like a quiet animal. He limped toward her across the lawn, giving every flagstone, every flower and tree he passed its total and infinite value.

Barry Day ran up a cheap stairway and opened a golden door.

Jerry Sasser played all afternoon with his little girl, throwing a big orange ball on a beach in Delaware. It was past dark before they turned to go inside.

Bunny Tutweiler had an accident at a Washington traffic circle when coming home from work. She was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, but did not recover.

The Grey World

D
ark and impassive as a savage, a carved, great-featured face lived constant in his mind among the ruins of his own lost glory. Jerry Sasser himself still went daily about something that at least resembled life. The carved face was no longer his own, but neither was it anyone else's. It was beneath these lofty ceilings, echoing passages, still arches, that he was lonely, because, no matter how many people he saw or dealt with, none of them came here. He would not bring his daughter here, and though he had twice in foolish illusion, which mainly came out of a bottle, kept Bunny Tutweiler up all night telling her about it, she had not at any point registered the awesome truth which even the existence of the ruin conveyed. Everything was alike to Bunny. She could deal with anything. Only Catherine had seen and had known; she had not been able to stand it, though perhaps to say why was beyond her. What it all meant, what had scared her, was power.

In the vast carved language of power, every particular thing—every reason, every decision, every individual—had no word to match it; nothing could in itself be felt as permanent and inviolate, nothing could quite merit life. The balance was all; the world
was a forest with a fire in it. He had long ago accepted this; on an admiral's staff during the war he had slipped by default of a public relations officer into doing a p.r. hitch himself; before he knew it he was supplying a conveyer belt with words. He found out what was being done, and more than that, he found out what could be done by him. The words went out through machines which relayed facts which could be proved, and which, all added up, came out to make a grand total which was always the same: Americans were superior to all others, acquitted themselves well, had right on their side, and some were braver than others. He discovered what everybody had been doing all the time, not just in war or over the machines, but all their lives, only they did not know it. They had been shifting words around to suit themselves. It was enough to make you laugh out loud. Once you got the key to life every door was apt to open. The sea was vast and blue, the ships beautiful, the combat a blur of blank tension and mindless trial, the islands green as paradise. He cared for no one and went up quickly.

The words which opened doors were by no means final, and once a door opened and you got inside there were other doors beyond that and more words necessary to open those and others beyond those, a labyrinth, with life getting better, every step of the way. You had to remember the facts: these could be juggled and arranged, but never altered. If people got hurt it was because they did not keep the facts in mind or had never learned them, or because they had used the wrong words. If he himself damaged anybody then he could always remember that everybody got hurt sometime and would get hurt again. Let them learn. Only the impulse of power could stop and start things. A vantage point had to be chosen, a point of observation, high as you could get, not apt to be noticed, with an unobstructed view of the main current, its swirls and eddies, rise and fall. A fascination began that kept him going long past the war, year after year, kept him alert, attractive, busy, offensively negligent to the point of contempt of individual moments in whose essence, where Catherine was concerned, life's beauty and passion lived, or could live.

Then one day somebody did to him what he had learned to do to others. He pitched into the current and was swept aside. He was buried at Sandy Gulch like the boy beneath the wagon. Nothing could unite him to his past, yet he felt oddly alive, an escapee from a life sentence. If he saw Catherine again, everything would wake up; chains would grow from his wrists and ankles, turmoil and passion would churn up, longing, ambition, the long proofs and trials of commitment to her, to the Lathams, to his son, to Merrill, to the sovereign state of Texas, to the United States of America. In her quiet person, she united everything. She would literally go mad rather than give up her unity. He wanted her to stay his wife forever just so long as he never had to go back. The only trouble was that he loved her. His glory had failed, that was all. There was no going back. He knew now he had never been good, even back in those days when he cottoned up to the Lathams and taught a Sunday school class, progressing by rhythmic, unconsciously calculated degrees to being a civic leader and favorite Kiwanis speaker. He now recognized he had been that worst of all human things, a pretender at goodness for where it could get him. It was far better to pretend at nothing in order to move toward glory.

Now, look what happened. His goodness was false face; his long trajectory of glory had fizzled out in the sand; if he went back to start again, back to Merrill where he would have at least to touch ground, the Lathams would inevitable gang up on him. They would do it as simply as thinking about it: by seeing that he confronted that remembered face out of which his soul had awakened, his father.

Perhaps the one good thing he had ever done, he now considered, was to try to love his father. In trying to love, he did love—to try is to succeed—and then there was the horror which he couldn't even call horror because of his love. There was the hot fall night of his seventh birthday when his father lit not the electric light in the little dusty sunken one-story house under a mulberry tree, but a lamp with a glass chimney, globed at the base, and heating the small blade of a pocket knife over this to sterilize it, pierced his own flesh and drew blood from his wrist and let drops fall into a glass of water. The glass had once contained cheese spread. “This is your power,” his father had said. “And it is mine.” He had been startled up out of bed and led into the kitchen half-asleep, his father carrying the lamp down the hall before them. He stood barefoot on the linoleum and drank a couple of swallows, very small ones. The water was not even discolored; it didn't taste like anything much except water. Then his father drank. “You're old enough to begin because you can remember now. To remember is everything. Time adds to time. Each time you will remember the others. You are never to speak of it. There are only the two of us here. Later you will find others. It is a bondage and cannot be broken. We are spreading. Everywhere.”

Still dazed, he blundered back to bed in the dark, his heart beating strangely. The next day it seemed like a dream. His father did not mention it. He had already been wakened once before like that and told that his mother had died. He remembered her well, from way over in the city, in Dallas, and how they had all lived as one family in a little house on a street with a lot of little houses, regularly spaced out, and every much alike. He remembered laughter from those days, and late conversation from other rooms. Then one early morning he was standing in the hall dressed in a new suit, which they had bought for him without telling him about it and told him to put on. It made a wool smell in the chill winter house, that peculiar stretched-out, dry, uniform chill of a Texas winter. His mother's tears were smeared on his face, and now his sisters bent close to him, those two sharp girl-faces, grey ever after in his memory. They hugged and pulled at him. He was smothered in woman smell, the dim pervasive odor of their clothes hung in closets, damp things left lying in the bathroom. He walked away with his father. It had all been explained by then. His father would be a teacher in a town. He would live with his father. His mother would come soon. “Soon, soon,” his mother said. She came, but seemed a visitor. His father scarcely spoke to her except with the removed tones of a careful householder, a pastor perhaps receiving a parishioner. She did not stay long, but went away. “Hush,” his father said when he asked why. One day his father explained. He said she had never acknowledged the truth. He said he had pondered it: was the truth for women or not? The Bible seemed to be in doubt also on this point. If she had listened to him, she might have been with them still. But she could not listen; something prevented her. It was a mystery. He decided to try her by taking a job away, at some distance. He could leave the girls but not his son. A son was the true line, the thread of life, the truth-bearer.

All these things came in the form of strange quaking night-confidences, when, his brain confused with sleep, he would be called out to the sitting room, not to the strange ritual but to the stranger divulgences, things he had to know, fed to him out of his father's mind like secret spiritual food. Why couldn't he be told something at an ordinary hour? He didn't know. Perhaps his father had no control in this way, but the information in all its precise quality emerged at odd hours and quickly sank back, as if a fish had surfaced for a moment, out of the stream of sleep. All of it ran the risk of seeming a dream. But what is closer than a dream, or in the long run more real? It was his daylight father he learned to love, a meditative, friendly, conversant man, lonely and observant, like all self-styled thinkers in odd little towns, content to be thought learned and peculiar, reposing himself in charity, modesty, regularity, never going into debt.

Years passed without any strange summons, the whole blood-smeared legend put away in a locked closet, like a Halloween costume or an old lion's skin, motheaten and torn in places, wanting the dignity of flesh. One day he learned that his father had himself written the books he was always reading, especially on Sunday afternoons.

There were several copies of each, and in one, yellowed clippings contained words of praise for them, one written by a U.S. Senator, another by a multi-millionaire.

In time he was given the books. He could never read them. He promised to and he said that he had, but he could not. Sometimes, after dark on Saturdays, strange cars pulled up and parked at their trailed-out end of the street, and men got out who would talk to his father until a late hour. The next day they were all to be found, the owners of those voices, at a small brown-painted house on a side street down behind the business section, where, tightly closed in with cloth-covered windows, they would hold a service, light the lamp, pass the cup about.

He preferred never to think about it between times. He was always the youngest one present. They would all shake his hand solemnly, acknowledging his privileged place. One day they asked him to pray. He had been sitting thinking of something else, and when it got through to him what they wanted, he knew they had asked him not once but several times. He got up slowly and slowly too the odd revelation once more suffused his spirit, a thing that came out of closets, out of midnights; he felt he was falling helplessly. He woke up on the main street of Merrill, to which he had fled. For a long time that day he wandered around and did not dare go home. When he did return his father did not underestimate what he had done. He did not speak to his son. “I didn't mean it,” Jerry said, clinging to the door, leaning in the threshold. “Next time I'll try. I'll really try.” “You never will,” said his father, continuing to read. “I have failed.”

Professor Sasser made one last try in behalf of the faith, when he gave his books to Catherine. He talked rapidly that day, imposing on the girl's young manners, her pliancy, her awakening love. He told her too much at once, talking desperately, stumbling over his words. For this was his last chance on earth, and his son, watching him in something like agony, knew it. What had he done? He had startled and sickened her, that was all.
Blood Bondage of Messiah's Brotherhood
. The sacred cup. The Holy Grail was an old cheese glass. Oh, Father, Father! How can you be like that?