No Place for an Angel (7 page)

“Has Charles been here?” Barry inquired. It was not his business and Irene seemed not to hear him.

“After a while the Keys begin to smell like fish. All day long.” She tucked her blouse in meditatively, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “The thing is, he has to be first or nothing, and the humiliation of getting kicked out of that firm by a collusion of little guys in Brooks Brothers suits—that was what hit him.”

“But he could have fought it,” Barry prompted, recalling that she herself had said so too.

“But that would have been acknowledging they existed,” she pointed out. “Now he's staring every day at the sun and the sky and the water and the girls in bikinis. At twilight three martinis explode in his head. And one day he'll know what makes it all run.”

“You think he's nuts, I guess,” said Barry.

“I don't think anything.”

Is there somebody else? Barry wondered. For one or the other or both? There didn't seem to be anybody for Irene. She was dressed rather more strictly than not, and had let her hair go; it was dark and oily, streaked with grey. Her look was still direct and clear. It burned for a second across him, then strayed away.

“You're not going to get a divorce or anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

As he went out, Irene told him at the door, still chain-smoking, “People here think he's in the Keys for his health. I think they've made it up that he has arthritis or TB or something. Well, I don't care. Let them make up anything they want to.”

Barry went away, walking home. Buses seamed by in the late afternoon traffic, edging along the park. The air was sodden and gloomy, but the trees in the park had trapped some violet light among the cold branches.

He was more at peace than he could ever remember having been, and all things looked to him exactly as they were. The heavy war threat had shifted off for a time and even the skyscrapers looked the freer for it—when threatened they seemed to know it. There was a way of thinking that he had caught to himself the life that had flagged for Irene and Charles. But he did not want to admit even this as something he believed. He felt any idea was best left as another object one could look at.

When Barry left, Irene locked herself in alone. She leaned out of the bedroom window, looking down an austere drop of opposite façade to a street lined by skimpy trees. She saw herself as a girl, standing in a doorway, saying, “But Mother, if you'd only tell me what it is . . . if you'd only say . . . please say. . . .” “No one has understood my life,” said the voice out of the dark. “Not a single soul.” “Would you be happy if I was pretty and had a lot of dates and friends and things, and a lot of people came to see me?” The voice inside was instantly defensive. “Well, that's not my fault. You needn't make me sound to blame.” “But Mother, I didn't mean . . . I did not mean. . . . Listen, please, listen, if only I could go to another school . . . somewhere near, but not that one.” “You know the problem . . . you know the financial problem very well. You want to hurt my pride by making it an issue. I try not to blame anyone, God knows how hard I try.”

There was the old-fashioned street outside, the porch of the old white house with its red brick front yard, and the school across the way—that awful girls' school. Between entering the room where her mother lay in the dark and talked that way and crossing the street to go inside that school, there was no choice at all in Irene's mind. She was trapped like the pendulum in a clock.

Then there was Charles.

As she stood remembering, the phone rang from the empty foyer, and it was Catherine. She was in New York and wanted to see Irene.

This late! Irene thought. And with Barry just gone. But I can't, she thought. She felt afraid and her heart began to go fast. “I'm alone, you know, Catherine,” she said. “Charles is—is away on business.”

“But it's you I wanted to see,” the voice continued.

It was the kind of voice used to speaking to doctors, to saying, “but can you please just tell me what . . .” If there was anything Irene kept herself away from, it was authority. Nobody knew. She had learned it long ago. But how to stay clear of someone who could not retreat from authority because of some inner weakness, exploited infinitely? Wasn't that what Catherine permitted? Or was it? The highway to Key West began to unreel in Irene's head by way of a nonsense answer. The road to Siracusa had led south also. But Catherine, innocent as a lamb, had been in neither of these places.

“Yes, certainly, Catherine. Why, yes, do come round.”

What else could I say? she heard herself asking Charles. What else could I do? Can you tell me?

There was no one like Catherine Sasser. A lot of men had said that, and Irene had always to agree: there was no one else like Catherine. She entered gently, not looking quite well, not entirely in good health, but in total command of such wonderful manners, asking if the boys were there, and saying how disappointing it was to miss them.

Irene took her coat. “You look wonderful,” she lied, though in a way it was always true. To steady herself, she had bolted a vodka in the kitchen before the doorbell rang, and now got herself another and a whiskey for Catherine, who let it sit on the coffee table while the ice melted. What she was doing in New York was vague; Irene suspected doctors and did not press for an answer.

“So I wonder how Barry is?” she asked.

Something in Irene's head grew stubborn as flint. This is not my business, she thought. Why should I let them make it my business? “I think Barry may need his privacy these days,” she said. “I assume this as I don't see much of him. Perhaps that's all he needs to turn out some really great work. This is what Charles thinks, what several critics we know were frank in saying
they
think.”

She went on in this vein, knowing only too well how to package a thing in a New York way, to give it the sound of the latest, the different, the explosive, the final, soon-to-be-revealed, superlative word. She had been a little taken in herself by this quality in New York when she had first come there to live, but then her energy, stirred, had risen to meet and challenge it; she saw that it was only a game, and started, forthwith, to play it. “So I think the best we can do for him—”

Catherine, reading a match folder in her lap, did not seem to hear the end of the sentence. “I see. Well, I'm so glad, really so glad.”

Irene laughed. “The last time I saw him, he said, It's happier not being in love; it's really great . . .”

“Oh, but I didn't mean . . . !”

“Oh, good heavens, he didn't mean you,” Irene hastened to explain. “I think he had a fling with an odd-ball girl down in the Village. Charles called it his existentialist period—ten years too late. I never saw her but once and she looked slightly dirty. Those girls like that—I always want to say, Look, honey, what you need, first of all, is a good long bath.”

“I see.”

Once Catherine did think she saw, she would not embarrass anyone by continuing to pursue the matter. She would put herself in Irene's place; Irene was obviously doing her best to be kind. She brightly asked all about Charles. Charles was traveling a lot, Irene said; the company was expanding, it was having tiny replicas of its New York offices all over, one after another, like kittens. At present, he was in Miami.

Catherine accepted this. She never looked deeply into business matters of other people. The instant one said “company” she stopped listening.

“I'm going away in a few days,” she told Irene.

There were distances in her voice which made a chill down Irene's spine. It was always in the realm of the possible that Catherine was being seen for the last time. And here was Irene keeping her from seeing Barry.

“Where are you going?”

Catherine stood up. “To South America. Chile, I think. They say it's rather beautiful. I've never been there.”

“Look,” said Irene, “I want you to take Barry's number. I'll give you the address. It's not for me to say whether or not—”

“Please, no,” said Catherine. “To think of hurting any more people. It was through not having much of anything but his work that he got attached to me, and pretty soon, before I knew it, I was everything to him. But I didn't know it. You must understand that. I never guessed. I know it sounds ridiculous.”

“Catherine,” said Irene, “did you ever get a divorce from Jerry Sasser?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps I should do it yet. Some people said one thing, some another. To me it seemed an added strain. Once you start it, you have to go on with it—” she laughed—“like being drawn up in a vacuum cleaner.” She could flash so lightly through saying such a thing, and it was in moments like this that Irene felt the tug of Catherine's whole history, and she felt, too, almost like a puzzle laid out to be put together, the strong lure of a challenge; namely, to solve the riddle of Catherine. And forty years later I would wind up, thought Irene (with her own kind of ironic humor closed beneath a smooth countenance), worn to emotional fragments, and Catherine, mad as ever, would be completely the same.

She walked to the desk and pulled out a note pad. “Here,” she said, writing.

“What is it?”

“It's Barry's address and number. I think he may even have got in the phone book but he's moved since.”

Catherine took the small leaf, torn out neatly along its perforation, and tucked it in her small leather bag. “I don't think I shall use it,” she reassured Irene. “Not after what you told me.” She pulled on her gloves and was gone soon after, had melted from view like an apparition.

When Irene got Charles' long soul-searching letter from Florida announcing his decision to return, she skimmed it in one minute to get to the heart of the matter: back on Saturday.

She did not call the twins to tell them the news, though she had promised to. On the drive back from Florida, they had sweetly consoled her. “This happens to a lot of boys' parents,” they had said, citing all the examples they knew. One boy's father had chased his mother around the house at 3
A.M
. with a gun. Some things like this were made up and told for melodramatic effect, but the twins believed this to be true. “And then they come back, sometimes,” said Will. “
Most
of the time,” said Tom. “Do we know enough to make up a statistical sampling?” he asked. “I think it would not be representative,” said Will. “As if a statistical average ever comforted anybody,” said Irene, passing a Pepsi-Cola truck. “Why, of course, they comfort people,” said Will. “Certainly,” said Tom. “They run graphs in the newspaper about the Gross National Product every time there's a serious drop in the market.” “I wish you weren't so damn bright,” said Irene. They both laughed. “It will bring you nothing but trouble,” she threatened darkly. “I need some new loafers,” said Will. “These are just about gone.”

All the way, Charles' head had loomed high and lonely in her mind, dominating Key West as it had Siracusa. The clouds passed high over it, drifting; the head was domed, bald, high, beak-nosed, blue-eyed, and thin-lipped. Who knew what Charles was better than the clouds did? If clouds knew him, he was, of course, imperial, and could desert her if he chose without explaining anything. Nature is acquainted with emperors. A car honked her aside. She gasped and set herself straight with the white line. There was no good having a wreck and killing the boys. The job in hand always kept Irene going; to get the boys in school as quickly as she could now led her on. They ate hamburgers and peanuts all the way, but were not sick. God knows, she thought, they couldn't be a more docile pair, they even have fool-proof digestive systems. “Darlings,” she murmured, having left the president's office at a moderately well-known Virginia academy where she had fixed up the problem of expenses and tuition with no great loss of face “Angels.” She put her arms around them, on the broad flight of entrance steps. This parting too she grouped in with all the rest of their latest phase: the waspish young men who had got Charles out, the turtle, the child's suicide, Barry's flight, her own desertion. The autumn sun was elegiac and warm. There was a distant view of gallant Virginia hills, a sense of the yellow leaf stoutly clinging till its full ripe moment was attained.