No Place for an Angel (14 page)

“Whether he did so well or not is another matter. But Catherine always said he didn't keep it up because—”

“Oh, Catherine, Catherine! She's a good wife. She said what Jerry told her to say. No sir, Jerry Sasser had rather stay in Washington and mingle with big names than have to come back to Tremont, Smith and Gunnison counties every two years and win an election. He hates the grass roots. Among the grass roots, anything named Sasser is a small, particularly revolting, dedicated, serious, peripatetic bug. Puny educational institutions on the bony hillsides, odd earnest religious sects, no fixed dwelling, door-to-door canvassing for fanatic causes. In Washington, with his $250 suits and his $50 shoes, button-down shirts—”

“Oh, now,” said Priscilla, “if you keep on I'm going to be on his side. I can't stand Jerry Sasser, but I don't see anything wrong with spending money on clothes.”

“Provided you don't think they do such an awful lot for you,” said Millard, and wiped his greasy mustache. “We really need finger bowls with this, Priscilla.”

“But still you say you
like
him?”

“Of course I like him, as much as I like anybody. He interests me, if you want to call that the same as liking. He does not inspire me with brotherly love. I believe, you understand, that we are all imprisoned. But his particular type of prison is unique in my experience, and his reactions to his imprisonment are interesting.”

“I think that's awful,” said Priscilla. “You got that out of all those old books you read.”

“You're always wanting me to talk to you more and once I get started you think I'm just awful. Don't go so righteous and Latham and First Baptist Church on me. You love everything bad I can think of about Jerry Sasser. What's your gentle mother's kind and Christian expression toward people she disapproves of? ‘I'd like to wring his neck.'”

“But they love Jerry. They don't know a thing—I'm wild for them to find out—well, not everything; nobody knows what that is—but some little piece of gossip to let them in on it that the idol may have one clay foot.”

Millard sighed. “They like his masculinity. Gossip wouldn't discourage them much. They think in the long run his heart belongs to their own gentle Catherine. Can't you see how Victorian they are? He makes them shudder with delight.”

Here Priscilla could really grow furious. “I think it's the most ridiculous thing to think for one instant that Jerry Sasser is so damn masculine and attractive. Why, I just know you're twice as good in bed as he is. All this build-up is the most suspect thing in the world! These swaggering types who have to lead every woman they see straight to the couch—”

“Oh, stop it,” said Millard, who could not stand frenzies. He poured himself some more Frascati and reached for a teakwood salad bowl as big as a tub.

Priscilla had to clamp her jaws shut to stop herself and even then she sat with a frown between her brows so deep it seemed to have been cut there with a hatchet. After her engagement to the 4-F musician had broken off, Jerry Sasser had made a trip on business, quite by coincidence, to that very little insignificant town, about a million miles away, in the middle of nowhere, west of the Pecos. What did he do it for? By inquiry she found the business was genuine, all right, and this made her angrier still. Could he be there and not poke around into what should remain her affair alone?

“I'll make you angrier yet if I tell you that I often envy our brother-in-law,” Millard said. “What feelings do you think I get when I see those little high school girls prancing by with their short pleated skirts, twirling their little batons at the football game and flicking their little tails? You think I don't wonder if there isn't some way to implement the glorious sensations they arouse? Don't you realize, Priscilla, that I, like most men, simply can't think of any way to go about it? At a certain period girls showed up for me, they were there, I was willing, things happened. Now—well, damn it all, how
does
Sasser get with 'em? I'm going to swallow my pride and get him to brief me when next we meet. So much for your faithful husband, my love.”

All of a sudden, Priscilla dropped the whole discussion, and giggled. She sank down into her own complaisant, deeper nature. The things Millard had discovered about her—they were always there for her, and she sank sighing into the mass of them, memories of childbirth and nursing babies as well, all told, the biggest, most Texas-size feather bed in the world.

Only one last thought lingered, and with it a slight frown. “But what about Catherine?” she asked, half to herself. She wiped what conservatively must have been an entire tube of lipstick mingled with half a bottle of barbecue sauce off her face and rising, with a clank of wooden sandals and a chink of gold bracelets, went in to get the finger bowls. The maid was always off on Sundays.

Catherine herself often wondered: But what about me?

She had a couple of admirers. One was an ensign who also had been attached to the same admiral's staff that Jerry had lucked his way into during the war. He never liked Jerry; even then, he thought, Jerry was watching for the main chance. The idea during many long hours of close contact at sea had had a chance to take root firmly. But it was only after he had seen Catherine's picture that he had begun really to despise Jerry Sasser.

After the war he returned to his hometown in Virginia where he took over an Office Supply Company from his uncle; but he came to Washington from time to time and eventually he looked up Jerry Sasser who asked him home to dinner. So he finally saw that photograph in the bright flesh, and the damage was really done. Now, occasionally, every month or so, he would happen to be in Washington on business. Occasionally, Catherine would consent to meet him for dinner or a drink. He was five or six years younger than she.

“You better get married,” she counseled him. “Relieve the mind of all those Lynchburg girls.”

“I may someday,” he said, “just not right away. Are you going to stay married to that guy, Catherine?”

“Well, you see, Jerry and I—” Catherine began.

“You're both from Texas. You grew up together. You're from the same town. You married young. That doesn't answer my question.”

Catherine became cross with him. He was looking at her in a reflective, worried way, through plumes of cigarette smoke, one knee propped up at the corner booth in a smart, dark little restaurant where your heels sank an inch into the carpets, small red lights glowed on the tables and abstract paintings lined the walls. What does he take me for, she wondered, a child? He was just like Priscilla—people who fell in love late, they always felt they knew it all. They were invariably authoritative, boring, and wrong. “You may as well know,” she said, “that I don't love you, Frank. You may as well know that I never will.”

“I was cross with him,” she told Jerry. “I'm afraid I've hurt him.”

Jerry had just had a bath and was nearly dressed. He was stamping into his shoes, late, as usual; gleaming, warm and hurried, he looked up from tying his shoe. “He took you to a smart, dark restaurant with squshy carpets, little table lamps and modern art on the walls. Corner table. Lots of cigarettes. Long sad face.”

She burst out laughing. He had once confided in her long after the affair with the little Washington secretary that she had always wanted to converse like people did in Hemingway or worse still in a Humphrey Bogart movie. “It isn't all tea and roses,” he had said, “this having pretty little girls fling themselves at you.”

Catherine's other admirer was a widower, a lawyer like Jerry. He was what is always known as a “fine man,” and in his case the term was a true one. He was grey, getting bald, with a strong-featured face, like a Caesar, a man of some delicacy, and much finesse. He and Catherine dined once or twice when Jerry was away on business. Though he never said anything in so many words, Catherine felt the shift of the wind. She mentioned casually to Jerry that she had seen him. “Umm,” said Jerry, “dinner in a Victorian residence in Georgetown—you'd never think from the outside that it was a restaurant. Up a lovely old-fashioned staircase, discreet small high-ceiled dining room, moldings, crystal chandelier, no menu. But where the hell is the ladies' room?” This time she became angry with him. “You wouldn't understand anybody like him.” “I know when I'm bored,” he said, “and so do you.” Then he was running out with a briefcase. She supposed that Guy Owen was a little bit boring.

My mistake is telling Jerry, she told herself. I ought to wait until I get really attached to somebody, then he wouldn't be able to do anything. Wait till it gets to the point when I can talk about Jerry with
them
. But oh, she thought, taking her coffee into the living room and drawing the curtains open on the clear morning light, that's just the trouble. I can never stand to hear anything against Jerry, much less say anything. She put down her coffee cup and sank down at a table, thinking, her head turned toward the street below. It was morning and her long hair had not yet been properly put up. Anyone coming in might at first glance, seeing her hair's slight disorder, her long robe and averted thoughtful face, have judged her the perfect recipient for a man's lifetime pledge of aid and courtesy, if that was what she wanted. Anyone seeing her, knowing Jerry Sasser halfway well, might have asked, as Priscilla did, “What about Catherine?”

But the feelings she aroused in others could not win her true attention. At this moment she was experiencing everywhere the recent pressure her husband had incised upon the rooms she stood in. The sound of his departing footsteps in the corridor and on the stair lingered in her hearing; his scent collected for a moment in one pocket of air, gravid as mercury. I'm married to a myth already; he is known everywhere and so he's turned into an image. Anything he does or says is the same as anything else he does or says. There isn't any good or bad he can do, even to tearing up his own son's picture. The name is Jerry Sasser: that's all there is to know.

The commercial airlines flight bearing Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Sasser with airline hostess Miss Jan Radley landed at the Dallas airport about nine on Saturday night. By then it was all arranged. Miss Radley would go to the hotel, shower and change, and come up to Senator Ogden's suite on the twenty-fourth floor. Jerry and Catherine would be there by then, or if not she only had to mention that she was a friend of theirs. Catherine was cordiality itself. At the exit from the plane, along with the other passengers, she and Jerry received from the little stewardess their professional goodbyes. The girl was looking extremely pretty, her cheeks slightly flushed already with an evening's excitement at a really important big-name gathering in prospect—could hardly wait to tell Edie all about it probably, when next their paths crossed—but she stood her ground expertly at the door (one of a whole nation of
amazing little girls, thought Catherine), and did not give any inkling of the game away. Maybe they'll all outsmart Jerry some day, Catherine thought. She put nothing beyond these small professional creatures. She envied their constant command. She had even once had breakfast with one, who, she was positive, had crawled out of Jerry's bed not thirty minutes before. That was in New York; she had flown up from Washington in the early morning, bringing his dinner jacket, as they had to appear at a U.N. function. The girl had passed herself off as a typist and stenographer, and her typewriter was there all right, along with her neat overnight case. They had all had breakfast together at the Beekman Towers, at a table overlooking the East River.

In the Dallas airport Jerry went straight to the newsstand to buy a copy of the magazine which had disturbed him on the plane. The regular concessionaire was off duty; a substitute suggested that perhaps the issue had already sold out. At any rate, there weren't any. Jerry started to go back to the plane for the one he had read there. “There'll be plenty at the hotel,” Catherine said. Besides, looking back through the glass walls out to the runway, one could see that the plane had already been closed and was now being taxied away for servicing. The stewardess was nowhere in sight. “At the hotel,” Catherine repeated. Jerry agreed.