No Place for an Angel (36 page)

There was no way for her to look for him; he was not really her husband. What right do you have to inquire, would be the first thing they would ask. His office called but she said she just didn't know. She looked for something in the papers for several days, considering writing a personal, or getting a private detective, then did nothing at all. She opened the mental file of all she had had to discover about men, and thought how all of them were different and each one had taken a lot of getting used to. A generation before she would have run a little house in a small Middle-Western town, been active in societies and had three or four children and a plot of sunflowers. If a sunflower with a monstrous face had come up, she would have gone out and cut it down. Two centuries before she might have gone out of a frontier fort to get some dry firewood and been captured by Indians and been very glad when they let her go. “If you're going to order anything from the delicatessen,” she told Jerry, early in their relationship, “get the largest size they have.” “Why is that?” he inquired. “Because they do a standard mark-up over the regular supermarket price on all the items, and so with the biggest size you're bound to get the best buy.”

When Jerry came back from his disappearance, he said he had gone away because there hadn't been much doing at the office. He took an apartment to himself. He came by every night for dinner, paid half her bills and everything for the child. They sat up at night and drank and played gin rummy. He's just got a wild streak, she thought. All men are different. Everything was just about the same.

On fine Sundays he took the little girl out alone with him for drives along the Potomac, over into Chevy Chase, out in Maryland farmland, once all the way down to Delaware. That was when Bunny started getting mad. Why didn't he want her to go too? If I leave him, I'll take her with me, she secretly thought. She's mine, after all.

“Daddy says I'm a natural child,” said Diane. “What's that mean?” “It means you're pretty and smart,” said Bunny Tutweiler, “but don't tell Miss Parsons; it's a secret.”

But with that she really determined to leave him, for something deep inside went fierce and strong-jawed enough to bite an iron nail in two. Then, for the first time, she got scared. She was riding the bus to work, holding on to a strap, on a brilliant Washington day still warm, though it was late October. Maybe he was just wild and crazy. The day blurred; her head felt as though she had forgotten her coffee. Did she love him maybe?

Sentiment to her was as bad as quicksand. She sank into a vacant seat, feeling stunned and trapped. It was like being caught by Indians. Oh, Lord!

Barry Day met a nice girl, fell in love, and married her.

He had to pay off what he owed in Arkansas, get a divorce, legally change his name from Bernard Desportes. It all took a lot of doing but he went through it happily and patiently, like a brave little boat which had got out too far and had turned back toward shore at last. He had met the girl when he had a job at Macy's; she had worked near him in the cataloging department and had got into a snarl that was clearly her own fault. He supposed it was the wrong time of the month or maybe she hadn't had enough breakfast. She shook when they descended on her to stand over her and ask a lot of questions. She cried and nearly fainted. Barry took all the blame and got fired, but he was ready to quit anyway. He had never seen anyone so grateful, and able to do something for a woman for the first time in his entire life, it went right to his head. He fell in love, she fell in love. It was absolute. She adored him.

Irene could never get her name right; was it Ellen or Helen or Eleanor, or Ellene? When Barry mentioned her he could never quite say it, a sure sign of love. None of them ever got to know her well, doubtless because there was really nothing to know. She was young but not girlish, good to look at, but not beautiful or even pretty, well-dressed but not elegant, and as far as anyone could tell she was as good as nature itself. She had no peculiarities except a deep anxiety to do well. It was this that had made her cry over her mistake at Macy's, not her period or lack of money or want of food. This one little weakness had landed her all of Barry Day.

Now her quiet look assured everybody, including him, that he was a great artist. They had a child before anyone could stop to think about it. Catherine never got to know her well either, though she had her and Barry, and the baby too when it arrived, up to her house in Massachusetts several times.

“The reason you feel that way,” said Irene, on one of the rare occasions when she and Catherine met in New York (Priscilla, who had been introduced to Irene on one of her trips East, now saw the Waddells more than Catherine did; she could enter with Irene on long meditative sessions about modern living, together they could gain a speechless nirvana of decision about clothes, people, food and decor, a special exalted area of transfiguration which comes to women who have dealt through a lifetime with products, styles, and who is who and what you can get where) . . . “the reason you feel that way is that there is nothing to know. She loves him; that's all there is to know.”

Catherine drew back from accepting anything as flat as this. “He's complex,” she argued. She remembered her feeling for him, the extent of it, entering into the smallest detail—his tuneless singing as he sponged the car at Sperlonga, his rock-bottom despair over the car, his eagerness to please, hold, stabilize, satisfy her that one time they had stayed together in New York—God, how she had needed to trust him—his forgiveness of her madness, of himself, of them both. I won't just summarize him, she thought, I won't do it. “Will she just never, never know him?”

“If it doesn't matter to him, why should we worry?” Irene said.

“I don't know, but I—”

“There are too many people now,” said Irene. “What good does it do to be complicated? Nobody has time to know all about us, follow us, remember us, feel for us. Love is something else now. It's just a kind of sinking into something, a sort of vanishing.”

She wore a linen suit, pink and dark blue, and was resisting sweets. Catherine had sunburnt forearms and had scratched her hands up doing yard work in the country. “If that's really true, we might as well not live,” she said.

“Oh, we can live, all right,” said Irene. “Not once but a dozen times. Three dozen lives.” She laughed. “Assorted pastries.”

Was this happiness Irene was carelessly describing? I'd rather be unhappy, Catherine thought. “I've only one,” she asserted. With Irene, to give her credit, Catherine could always state things, and perceiving at once the truth, more or less surprised out of her, of this one statement about herself, she came to rest in it, as though it had been chiseled out on a stone. She wasn't sure she was unhappy, though. She had taken unhappiness for granted for ages, but had not really thought about it in a long time. How long a time? She didn't know. Life had taken on an aspect of timelessness. She had to think to make out what year it was, or her own age.

On these matters, Irene was right up to date. She knew that she and Catherine had both slipped the forty mark and that she had never expected this to happen to her. To everybody else maybe but not to her. They had really got together over Barry, Irene recognized. They both had a strong sensual tie to him, had
held him tight in the throes of what might have been death or might have been love, had been held by him. Nothing but spiritual poison can dissolve a tie of the flesh, and spiritual poison had been left out of it when Barry was fabricated.

“But maybe she does,” said Catherine, with one of her sudden inspirations.

“Does what?” asked Irene.

“Maybe his wife does appreciate him, feel for him, see everything we did, know him better than we did.”

Irene closed her eyes. This was one of Catherine's innocent cruelties. Maybe it was true. “Catherine,” said Irene, “doesn't it occur to you that we would do better not to think so? Can we find another Barry now?”

“I couldn't, but maybe you could,” said Catherine, waking up and finishing a chocolate eclair. “You just said we had a dozen lives.”

“I loved Barry,” said Irene.

“I still love him,” said Catherine. “I think his work will succeed now,” she added.

Irene burst out laughing. It was a final twist of the knife.

“What about Priscilla's girls?” Irene asked. “She says she's bringing them to New York this fall for the theatre.”

“They're selfish and mean,” said Catherine. “They have a lot of boy friends. They're racing toward the altar like a pair of fillies. Millard will be glad. He'll get his house back, all his books and records. Maybe some day Merrill will blow away in a tornado. If it did I might see Jerry again, the way he really is. If that town had never existed, we could have existed.”

“That's one of those things you can't prove,” said Irene, to shake her out of it. She had to go and shop for a dinner party; Charles had business visitors from Denver.

“I was in Denver once,” said Catherine.

“I guess we've all been just about everywhere,” said Irene. “Except Mexico. Charles and I are going in January. They say it's mystical.”

Irene got ready for her party sooner and more easily than usual. She had help now, for Charles was in the swim again, had landed a high executive position in a firm that published the best nonfiction, in paperback: political science, science, sociology, business research, public documents, both historic and current. It was the newest field. Even the goldfish knew it.

She knelt on the sofa in her long crepe hostess skirts and stared out at East River. It was dark already. The traffic was forever. Catherine, she thought. She must be home now. A Southern woman in that little town in Massachusetts. Cold blue evenings. Knowing the druggist, knowing the postman, knowing the neighbors, raking leaves. And not unhappy. Not crazy any more. Just out of it.

Practically everybody in the world is out of it, thought Irene. I guess they do all right. I will always be in it, she thought. I created it. It is me. If it hadn't been for me Mario would still be grubbing around in libraries, lecturing on Hegel. Now he's a retired national hero and has his picture in magazines.

Charles was coming in, a load of fresh red chrysanthemums under one arm.

“I saw Catherine today,” said Irene.

“Catherine Sasser? How is she?” On his way to shave, he did not stop for an answer. “Letter from the boys,” he shouted from the bathroom. “Came to the office. Oh, Irene! When Parker's wife gets too much she goes on the prowl. Apt to be scenes. Got to watch it.” He came into the living room, buttoning a clean shirt. “Is something the matter?”

“Why?”

“I never saw you look that way in my life. Are you sick? Worried?”

“No, just thinking.”

But what about? She couldn't say exactly, that was the trouble. The great anonymous thing that Catherine had let in on her at long last had been trying to get at her, she now realized, all her life. The wild daisy, pure in sunlight, that we see by the roadside from the car window is gone only slightly less quickly than we can pass it, only slightly more quickly than we, in our little lifetime. Where was the cat she had had as a pet for a little while as a child? Her own mother, aging, unable for fifteen years even to go uptown, sat all afternoon daily on a narrow porch in Maryland. She had sat there this afternoon. What did she think about, every day that way? Did it matter what she thought about? Catherine has stopped by the grocery for a loaf of bread, she thought. Latham may call; Latham may not call. There are still lakes in the woods which no one sees. Somewhere within five minutes of her maybe the police were knocking at a door to catch an old man
who had forged a check. And all over the city, swarming, the unknown, the voiceless, the quiet, the good, the evil, the loud, the corrupt, the sick, the dying, millions on millions, reached out to one another, caught and held or failed to catch and hold. To be good, not to be mad, to accept, live, perceive, with steadfastness and grace . . . was that all? To love, to love, to love, constantly, the very rhythm of it like a beating heart? What about it chilled her, touched her with dread? She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out.