No Place for an Angel (35 page)

Nevertheless, she had a devotion to Barry and wrote notes to him from time to time. Thus she found out that Irene had put goldfish in one wall of her apartment in New York; they seemed to be immersed in green water because the glass was green. Priscilla had picked up the notion from Irene also and was thinking of doing the same but could not get Millard interested. He said people in Merrill thought they were crazy enough as it was. Catherine made a mental notation that wherever she went fish were apt to be observed at eye or elbow level. Thinking their one thought she did not know.

Charles Waddell, though Irene was too coarse fully to comprehend it, kept on being gnawed by jealousy. It was the one feeling he could never quite escape even when asleep. It did not rise to passion; he did not hate Mario, loathe his wife, want to slaughter anyone. How could he confront her and thus perhaps rid himself of it? Did he want to confront her? Was it, in any terms she would recognize, even possible to do so? He knew there were many harbors she could set sail to on her own; for him there was only her.

His jealousy, once it took its firm and secret hold, made him even more unpleasant than was his habit, made him a failure after his return from Rome, almost drove him into alcoholism. Who understood?

Well, as it turned out, the twins had more than a little comprehension of it all. They did not believe their mother's version of the Florida trip, that Daddy was worried because he did not have any money and so had stayed in the Keys. Money, they could already see, was not hard to come by. With the unexcited gravity so many war and postwar children have, probably because they have spent so much time with their grandparents, Will and Tom held long discussions, the identical dark blond duck tails on the napes of their necks moving slightly from side to side as the long muscular tendons rose and shifted in time to their thought and talk.

They had got longer-legged since Florida and sat about the lounges at the Virginia academy they attended (they were not, by their parents' request, allowed to room together), talking over things they had noticed, with the gravity of a United Nations committee meeting. Occasionally they laughed.

When their father descended on them from Florida, he found one of them right away—Will: he was in the library. Tom was in the pool. The twins got to go into the town for dinner and that was when Charles began to discover them in their great, complex totality for the first time. He became a listener, an observer at the chance and casual unfolding of their habits, lives and thoughts. A phrase here and a joke there struck him with the freshness of light, night-long rain falling on land as dessicated as a two-year-old corn shuck in the corner of a barn loft. He had spent so much time worrying.

Realizations came across to him now with the rapidity of summer lightning. How to make his face remote, how to withdraw his elation from them, lest in their infinite discrimination they became embarrassed at him. Oh, this took great skill, sharp moment-to-moment control of tension within, smooth relaxation without. Summit conferences were a snap, playing Hamlet at the Old Vic was nothing, compared to what was now crucial for Charles Waddell to get through without goofing. All the while, his spirit, a child itself, it now seemed, splashed about with overgrown baby gurgles, the awakening to his children like the primal contact with water in a tub. Careful! He had to make it seem that he was the recipient, that it was to him they were coming with their interest in space capsules, atom-splitting cyclotrons, ballistic missiles, something called the new math. An infinitude of wonders. The earth alive with it, space, too.

To himself when alone, Charles gave full rein, not wanting alcohol for the first time since the war started—before that he had been abstemious. His spirit burbled. He remembered whole blocks of conversation word for word. “We've decided Mother is our little sister,” Will had said. “Oh, no, we decided she was younger than me but older than Will,” said Tom, who in some way or other did seem the older of the pair. A whole log jam in Charles' spirit had broken up. If he had only asked them before! She was a venturesome child, seductible, overweight, easily impressed, comical. He almost howled with laughter. Far into the night, he lay on the tousled bed of his motel room and beat his fists into the pillow with sheer delight. When you conquered Irene, the world was yours. He began from this point to put the twins' wisdom far beyond what was even human—they had seen his dilemma, he believed, the secret gnawing at his heart, and had liberated him on purpose, like a pair of small Oriental sages disguised in chino trousers and brown leather loafers. It occurred to him later that they were able to do this because sex was less of a real terrain to them than deepest space a trillion light-years away; but some residue of his belief in their wisdom remained and would always remain. They had known instinctively, the way straight young savages might track game without ever being told exactly how, the trouble in his breast.

That night he slept the sleep of peace, completion and a new beginning—all, all. Life had opened before him a great and joyous future. To be a father. But he had been a father for years. He hadn't really noticed. What then had he noticed? His duty, service, information, programs, current history, personnel, Irene. The twins had been, after all, so very much her ornament.

Before the school principal the next day, his hat off in the office lit by spring sunlight, with redbud springing into bright tenuous life against the greening haze in the big campus oaks, he tried to hide his pride behind a sober frown. “So are they doing well?” The principal frowned. His heart sank. “I don't think you realize, Mr. Waddell, how exceptional your sons are.” He nearly exploded with joy. The rest of the conversation was a blur. Leaving the school was the hardest moment of his life. But then he could hardly wait either to get home to Irene. He had forgotten all her foolishness. Perhaps he had driven her to it by never noticing how wonderful those kids really were. (This was sheer fantasy; even he knew that.) Perhaps, he darkly thought, she herself had never truly seen them. The turnpikes fled away beneath his homing speed. The city hampered him; it was molasses to a fly.

Now he burst into the apartment and was enfolding her with strong delight. A letter promising a job did not amaze him, though everything could touch him now. He took her thoroughly to bed, slept the great sleep, awoke to one of her excellent dinners, and over coffee broke the news to her. “Do you know? Do you realize?” “Realize what?” “Those boys!”

From then on that was all there was. For the whole weekend they talked of nothing else. They forgot about liquor and did not answer the phone. Irene dragged down old snapshot books, resurrected letters. He stared at her in wonder. “You kept all these? All this time!” He called up his parents, back in Ohio. They would all come for a family visit soon, he assured them. If they aren't dead of heart failure before midnight, Irene thought. Charles went for months—sometimes, she suspected, for years—without writing them a line. He heaped affection on her. “Do you remember the day I met you, how you had on that big cream-colored hat? Why don't women wear wide-brimmed hats any more? Can you tell me that?” “I had borrowed it,” she said, “just for graduation. It was a costume. I had to give out programs.” “Get another one,” he pleaded and stroked her in a rapture of content. “The boys will go into science. It's absolutely certain.” “They'll be space twins,” said Irene, drowsily, in her uncanny accuracy about the world, predicting what had not yet occurred to anybody. “Masters of the air,” he said, and that halted him. “I'm turning into a fatuous old fool,” he said. “Poor darling,” said Irene. “They were there all the time.” “All this time! I know it. I say it to myself.”

He did not reckon on it, but the twins were far from perfect. They had already, together, drowned animals, mutilated insects, read salacious books and pamphlets and scrutinized filthy pictures, though they did not keep any. They were sometimes cruel to stupid boys, in a way that could be caught on to only later,
if at all, and had both had separately rudimentary homosexual experiments. Irene rather imagined without being told that all this was true; Charles could have got it down with difficulty and come up somewhat sobered, a good while later, with the obvious truth: that these things were all phases and would soon be forgotten by everyone, including Will and Tom. But at the moment no one broke in upon him with any fact. The boys stood in his mind's eye, their very phrases, laughter, eyes, ears and lashes he found printed on his brain to read and reread. Will had a slight cast in one eye; for years he had known this but for long periods could not have remembered, if asked, which one it was true of. Now in Greek perfection, their boyish shapes, mature manhood just around the corner, grew into his own identity and gave him youth to sport in once again. “Hey, I see why Barry has to sculpt people,” he said. He padded about half-naked and barefoot, going from window to window. “Hey, let's go to a movie. You know, something old-timey . . . isn't there an old one on? Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert?”

He was drunker than he had ever been.

“Why don't you tell her?” said Jerry Sasser to Bunny Tutweiler.

“Tell her she's illegitimate? You must be crazy,” she said.

“Somebody's going to tell her, sooner or later. It might as well be you. In the long run she'll respect you for it. What is it when a girl is a bastard? What's the feminine of bastard? Didn't you used to teach school?”

“I never taught school in my life,” she said. “Where'd you get that? You're making me sick anyway.” She had a strong way of coming out with things. She had rust-red hair, freckles, crow's feet, an ill-defined nose, good practical figure, not very good taste.

He was sprawled out on the couch in the less than elegant apartment they had in Washington. His job—still with a legal firm retained by a Texas oil complex in which the Latham interests also figured—was in a slow period. He sat up too late and drank too much. For a time after the Texas debacle he had got to travel; where people never heard of him he was naturally more effective. But he never liked anywhere but America, really, and by now most people had forgotten his troubles anyway. Bunny would sit up half the night with him, or as late as he lasted, drinking with him, even though she had to keep strict office hours and get up early. She had a good sound tough nature and if anybody hurt her, she came right up and at them, hitting back. She thought he was a little bit strange at times, but knew he had had problems in the past.

She had probed around in these, rather more from curiosity than any other motive, and was satisfied that her already half-formed notion, namely that all Texans were apt to be crazy, was correct. She thought that Catherine must have been a weak, oversensitive woman who was not with it. On the other hand, maybe Jerry had played around a lot. She felt a twinge of jealousy to have missed this glamorous, handsomely got-up, fast-paced period of his life. She would have known how to have made it all work, would have got some fun out of it. It never occurred to her that without Catherine's money and backing, it would never have been possible in the first place.

Bunny Tutweiler would have married Jerry Sasser, but he never asked her to. He was not divorced, nor was she. Having been through one divorce which had got mixed up legally and dragged on for a year and a half, she did not want to go through another unless Jerry would do it first. For some reason not clear to her, he did not want a divorce. She thought it had to do with money, what he stood to gain if still married to his wife. There had been things about psychiatrists, too, unpleasant to consider, let alone stir up again. Bunny decided with her feminine intuition that more than anything else all this embarrassed Jerry. When she got pregnant she left it up to him whether she would have it or get rid of it. To her surprise, he wanted it. A girl. Was he disappointed? His one son had been a cripple. No, he was pleased and named her himself: Diane. Where did he get it? Didn't know. Always liked the name. He wondered nervously if she would be pretty or not. “At that age you can't tell a thing,” Bunny told him. Bunny was always correct. After six months exactly, she had a sitter come in and went back to work. She couldn't stand staying at home all day. She was always up early, hair freshly done, nails perfect. All the things she had were ordinary—Revlon make-up, pink hair curlers, nylons drying on plastic coathangers fitted with clothespin hooks in various colors. To the crisp clacking of her Middle-Western accent, which always reminded him of a typewriter run by a very good but not extraordinary typist, his drawl found ways and means of returning to his speech: it was easy to be a mean Southern
boy again. He tried to teach her chess once at one a.m., but by three she had learned nothing whatsoever. “Nice to find your limitations,” he said and put the set up for good. After that they played gin rummy; she usually beat him except when he took a spell of caring. “Tell her,” he prodded her, opening out his hand after the deal, glancing at it, furling it and setting it face down on the board to pick up his drink. “Go on in there and say, ‘Diane, honey, you're a natural child.'” She gave him a funny look. “You must be drunk,” she said, and played the nine of spades. “If you won't tell her, I will. Sure. I'll tell her some day.” He took the trick. The rest of the evening they did not say anything. The apartment was still in every unremarkable inch of it. One day he disappeared.