No Place for an Angel (34 page)

The boy smiled at him. The world was there.

On October 12, 1957, Irene and Charles sailed from Naples on the
Leonardo da Vinci
. They and the twins were photographed on the first-class deck, and their picture appeared in the Paris
Herald Tribune
, the Rome
Daily American
and one of the Italian papers, along with a brief summary of Charles' career abroad.

Catherine went through one of her happiest periods when she rescued Barry's sculptures. She wondered why Irene and Charles had done nothing along these lines, and was somewhat shocked when she called on them about the matter. She understood that people got severely tried and lost a good deal of their “niceness” in
Europe, but she was not prepared for them to dismiss her so firmly. Charles said frankly he thought it would be no great loss to the art world if Barry's things got thrown in the Tiber; maybe, he said, people would discover them ten centuries later and put them in the Vatican museum, but he doubted it. Irene said she considered this to be unnecessarily harsh but thought that Barry had enough connections in Rome to have the matter seen to. “I nursed him when he was really sick,” she pointed out. “Why did he leave like that? People say he was in some mess about a hot car. He should have had better sense.”

Catherine still thought that it would have been very easy, no matter what they thought of Barry's business sense, to have the sculptures shipped to their boat. She herself wished to fly back. There were, though she did not say so, certain doctors she had to see after so many months. “I'll pay for them,” she said. The Waddells exchanged glances. “I know we sound hard, to you,” Charles muttered. He got up to pour himself a Scotch. “Did anybody see my skis go out?” he inquired. “The boys' are still here.” “That's because they wanted all their gear together,” Irene said, “so as not to get mixed up with ours. Yours went yesterday.” She turned to Catherine with a sigh. “I know you think we're awful,” she said, “but sometimes you just can't do any more.”

“Why doesn't she do it herself?” Charles asked after Catherine left. Irene hung a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “It is difficult. I guess I wouldn't like to go through with it.” She laughed. “I guess, too, she thought we cared.”

This singular pair did not at that moment pause to mention even to each other that they had not only met Jerry Sasser in Rome,
but had had a meal with him. He had come out to look into the interests of an oil company he now worked for, which had branch offices in Rome. He had looked up the Waddells because they knew Catherine. He had learned this from some people in Washington.

The three of them dined at a small outdoor restaurant on Via Lombardia, and they told him everything they could. Charles decided he was not so bad, but Irene drew something of a blank on him. She had heard it blazed abroad at one time that he was marvelously attractive, but she couldn't see it. He looks like Phil Harris, she thought, only he's not got curly hair. He's even from Texas, too. One thing she did see, however, that Charles missed completely. Charles told Jerry that Catherine had developed a platonic attachment for a young sculptor, and he thought this was a good thing as the boy was a cheerful sort, though always half-starved. Jerry wanted to know if he was also a queer. Charles said that Barry looked exactly like a bantamweight prizefighter. “Except that
they're
all queer,” said Jerry, as Irene, who knew that was coming, chuckled. The Waddells seriously concurred that Barry was if anything too much drawn to pretty young girls. It then flashed through Irene's mind that Jerry Sasser did not quite believe them and that furthermore his interest in bringing the subject up at all had to do with his own vanity, rather than anything that might confront Catherine. She was touched by the smallest imaginable chill, the kind that results from hearing a fingernail scrape against slate. That too went away quickly because she knew too many people and had to say goodbye to all of them. She could not keep up, not possibly, with everything about everybody. The next day, Jerry Sasser flew to Paris.

After the Waddells' departure, Catherine spent days getting the sculptures packed by Bolliger and clearing the lot through customs. She changed her plans and took a boat back, and thus gradually, stage by stage, in her frail but patient way, like a pioneer woman plodding West, she restored Barry's work to him. He was by then in New York, had got a job as a garment packer to see him through and worked at night. When he saw what she had done, the whole earth seemed renewed. His joy, his gratitude flowed quickly into love. He heaped her with praise and tenderness; he all but left the earth altogether behind, rushing in on her before lunch one day at the Plaza to beg her to marry him. When he came to earth with a crash, like a homemade airplane in a cotton patch, he limped for a long time, licked sores, lost his job and drank too much. But through it all he was returning in spirit to his own personal defeat, which was always there waiting for him, like a plain but faithful wife whom through the years, since he couldn't get rid of her, he had to learn to love.

Catherine ultimately reappeared to him and they met for the first time as lovers. Her necessity, he ruefully realized, had been brought on by her having to see her husband again, and for the first time he saw the extent of her much-talked-about darkness, which he had been inclined to dismiss. She only needed “understanding,” he had boldly said, as if he didn't know better than that, as if any “understanding” in the world could have been brought to bear on Linell McIntosh, for better, for worse, for any purpose at all. He saw at last, at close range, Catherine's madness and could describe it only as a heavy eclipsing shadow which she was powerless to lift. Just the same, his tenderness for her,
expressed even for one single time, wrote his own anxiety off into fulfillment. He loved her but still she passed afloat in his world, as diaphanous as a treasured ghost. Beside her, Irene seemed to him coarse and at times almost evil, and the whole Waddell world a sort of underscoring of a lurking corruption that he could sense everywhere. As in Perry Mason, the gun was there and the man looked dead. You could figure it out any way you wanted to. The bomb threat came and went, but the other, nameless thing was worse, subtler, more profound and powerful, and it did not show any sign at all of going. He longed for the angel, but when he risked saying this to Irene, she treated his confidence summarily. Angels never crossed the ocean. Well, this was true; how could he answer it? Therein lay her extraordinary power.

Where Paths Divide

C
atherine's house was a quiet one; it was in a small Massachusetts town strong enough and old enough to envelop her. The house was in no way artistic or impressive, and things of Latham's lay about it in the pleasant disorder it was her nature to like. She had finally come back to herself by means of Latham, who had been there all the time because he studied animals who had been there all the time. At least Catherine put his nature down to animals; she did not see how two Texans could ever have produced him, and she rather thought too that his close brush with death as a young boy had been like the permanent touch of a sacrament. The flamboyant sweep of the times, that had torn his parents apart and driven their lives in opposite directions, he completely eschewed. One leg permanently smaller and shorter than the other, he read with his sneakers or loafers propped disparately on footstool, fire fender or porch railing. He collected colored slides of wild life, most of which he had lain in the woods for long hours to photograph; he mounted shells and butterflies and wild flowers in glass frames, each labeled with its particular Latin name a yard long. Specimen pheasant, quail, duck, goose, eagle, hawk and gull looked down from shelves pegged with iron supports like the dark-varnished pine walls of the wing he lived in.

Latham had not shot or trapped any of these creatures, nor would he; the only thing like this he could do without qualms was to fish. He had even felt a bit bad about buying stuffed creatures, for somebody had had to kill them someway. Catherine said absent-mindedly that that would go on anyway; she was not about to shed tears over two or three birds more or less in the world. Latham, however, succeeded in getting her worked up over the extinction of certain species and she found herself writing checks to various game preserves which still depended on private finance. Though the family in Texas believed that Latham would never amount to much because he was a cripple, he had a stiff enough job with the Massachusetts Game and Fisheries Commission as well as certain research rights gained through a foundation grant in cooperation with the state university. The research had to do with fish propagation as related to the relative purity of streams and lakes and to this end Latham had a whole basement area of the biology building to operate in; it was filled with tanks of water, some clear and some not, in which the fish either swam or did not swim. To Catherine, each time she went in to find Latham and looked at the fish, they seemed to be thinking about something, the same thing, over and over. She wondered what it was.

Catherine saw her son with a sense of reserve. She saw him as a boy who would never have to go and fight in a war, who would always live in a quiet house with some quiet girl, whose children would look a little like something startled in a wood. Already
he showed a tendency to take up with girls he felt a bit sorry for, and almost, his senior year at the small college he had chosen to attend, married a girl who was part Negro. Catherine said it was okay if he really loved her. After this he and the girl decided to become just good friends. He took the friendship seriously still and wrote long letters to her, spinning out all his thoughts. About his father he did not speak very much, and Catherine wondered why this had come about. It seemed that in Latham's terms there was nothing much to say.

It was as if he didn't have a father, only a sire who had no more stuck around after he was safely on his feet than a male moose would have done. If he had ever suffered over this, spent twisted nights of summer anguish, had dreams of the return of a man who would regard him with love and interest and blessing, all this in turn now must have come to seem like a dream. He once said to Catherine apropos of nothing but his own train of thought (they had been driving back from the Cape where they sometimes used to meet when Catherine went to New York in the summer to shop or visit), “It seems in a way he was always a myth. You can't blame a myth for anything, so I don't blame him.” “You don't ever see him?” she inquired. To which to her amazement, he replied, “Oh, yes, sometimes.” At that moment, on the highway at twilight, as they curved around the side of a low hill along a climbing road, a rust-red doe came up out of a cut in the woods along the slope to their right. She loped slowly with a fluid motion, her small back hooves hardly seeming to touch the pavement, crossing the road a good fifty yards ahead of them, and having made the opposite side in her long somewhat awkward stride, though awkward with the fresh quality of that which had not been before observed by human eyes, she in one upward bound, which seemed almost perpendicular but which flowed quickly toward the easy moment of descent, cleared the wire fence they had not even noticed was there, and vanished among the trees. Catherine had slowed the car until she passed, but whether she ever knew they were present or not neither of them could tell.

“You see him,” she repeated.

“He stops by the college sometime.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You aren't supposed to see him. He drove you crazy or something.”

“But now,” she said. “Now all that part is over—in the past.”

Latham did not reply.

Jerry, she knew because Priscilla had found out and told her, was living in Washington with a woman called Bunny Tutweiler, who had had two husbands and one divorce. “I guess she's his common-law wife,” Priscilla had said with distaste. “He's the only person I know still common enough to have such a thing.” She never spared Catherine anything about Jerry. “They have a daughter,” she said. “Dear Lord,” said Catherine, “the poor little thing. Have you got a picture of it, Priscilla?” Anything was possible. “Of course not,” said Priscilla. “Maybe he calls her his mistress,” said Catherine; “that would make it better, wouldn't it?” “Why do you always take up for him?” Priscilla asked. She was not angry now; she would never be angry with Jerry Sasser again, having seen him crumble. “Well, he was my whole life for nearly forever,” said Catherine; “why shouldn't I?” “Why don't you marry Barry?” Priscilla asked. “Marry Barry?” She laughed. “Maybe because it rhymes.”