No Place for an Angel (13 page)

Catherine's sister Priscilla took warmly, even urgently, and with a certain fury to the idea that Catherine herself had once advanced, namely that somebody else had decided during the war to impersonate Jerry Sasser, and that the true Jerry Sasser had been killed in a kamikazi attack during the war. Though she had had two martinis and though the years of pretending that nothing was wrong between her and Jerry now stood as separate as an island in the gigantic ocean of the obvious, Catherine still could make a pronouncement like this lightly, as though to wring humor out of anything could always clear the air.

“You knew he fell in love?” Catherine asked.

“No!”

“It was after he and Latham went up to Maine on that fishing trip. Latham had a glorious time; I've never seen him so enthused. They played; they made up games, fell in the water, discovered a deserted town in a cove. Latham went off to school simply walking on air. Two weeks later Jerry became strangely absorbed, schedule gone crazy, odd appointments at weird hours—breakfast dates—you'd think he was in college. It ended suddenly. You could almost clock it with a stop watch. I don't mean predict it, but see it end, like writing off the edge of a sheet of paper.”

“What was she like? Did you see her?”

“I did, as a matter of fact. Accidentally. She was meeting Jerry on a streetcorner, heading for the Marine Room where they probably had a date—they saw each other at a little distance and walked toward each other. Two people you've never seen before can meet and you know right away if they're in love. As I watched them, I felt they were both strangers to me and that they carried this magic of their own meeting with them; it made the air between them melt away. It was like that. One could even almost think that moment was part of their destiny, that my happening to be there saved them from having to tell me. She was such a perfect-looking little girl—new grey fall suit and black suede pumps, very, very efficient Washington white-collar girl, but pretty too. And you've got to admit, anybody has got to admit, even if they despise him, that Jerry is as attractive as hell. So put the two of them together that day, the beautiful fall afternoon, just so glorious and alive, why, the two of them meeting, being in love—it seemed to sweep everything before it, to be the simplest most profound natural force in the universe. My heart went straight down, I confess. I had to duck in a drugstore for an excuse to sit down. But almost immediately I began to think: Well, it's really over now. I began to see my life ahead alone. I'd build a house in Merrill to spend part of every year near Mamma and Daddy. I'd go to Europe every year, pick a favorite country, learn the language. I'd see Latham in the summers, mainly to talk things over, no major move without consulting him, taking care not to depend on him, or make him sorry for me. Oh, I saw it all. And I remember I sat there thinking that the drugstore was so much like the one near the clinic where Jerry and I used to try to get milkshakes down when Latham had polio, and I was having just about as hard a time with the coffee. I thought, nobody but me will ever know how much I really had been in love with Jerry Sasser before the war and how I thought it was really him that came back and I went on living with the impostor for ages, not knowing the difference, and then I saw the real answer: that Jerry Sasser got killed in the war.”

“Oh!” cried Priscilla. “It might even be true.”

“Don't be a goose,” said Catherine. “Of course it isn't true. But sometimes there's a false explanation that answers everything and if you can only persuade yourself to believe in it, then everything falls into place—”

“But you know we really could investigate,” said Priscilla. She had learned by experience that if appropriate sums were released toward a certain end, the end was generally accomplished. Anything on earth, anything, to get rid of Jerry Sasser, whom she despised. Something else suspicious came to her that she had always wondered about. How did anybody who started out as an army draftee wind up as a naval officer? But she had had this explained to her several times, something about transferring from one service to another. She guessed that it had made sense, she just could not remember it.

“So what happened?” Priscilla asked, and as Catherine wouldn't have another drink, poured one for herself.

“About what?”

“This girl Jerry was chasing around after?”

“You mean the one he was in love with? Oh, just as I told you. Three weeks later he could not—honestly could not—remember her name. I asked him: Wasn't she awfully hurt? She's so young. He said that they'd had a long talk together and that she said she understood. He has a talent, you know, for getting people to feel the way he wants them to feel. Not just say they feel that way, but really feel that way.”

“He's never made me feel any way he wanted,” Priscilla bridled.

“He's never wanted to,” Catherine said carelessly, and went off to see her mother, up the street in Merrill from Priscilla's house, fanning the air before her mouth to get the gin smell out.

“I do wish you girls wouldn't
drink!
” her mother was going to say.

Four years after this conversation, Catherine's sister Priscilla stood in the entrance to the patio brushing her hair. She had sprinkled on it a new product, a dry shampoo. So clever was this powder, which she had bought at Neiman-Marcus, that it perfumed, imparted sheen, and dry-cleaned the hair of oil, and whatever part of it fell on the carpet would not do any damage whatsoever. As if anyone would brush their hair over the living-room carpet, Priscilla thought, but here she was brushing hers in the patio because she had something to tell her husband.

For she had a husband now; had him safe and sound. His
name was Millard Warner, and he was lying in a deck chair near the swimming pool, reading. He was not an inspiring sight to many people. He was flat-chested and thin with surprisingly strong, wiry arms and legs. His hair was thinning, he wore glasses and a heavy mustache, which was seldom trimmed. In motion he was full of nervous energy and staccato phrases, uttered more or less to himself, beginning, “Now where the hell is . . . ?” and “Wouldn't it really be best to . . . ?” Most of the time he was not in motion at all, but lay immobile with a book braced between his hands and his diaphragm. He read heavy intellectual things—Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus—and daily, with a baggy seersucker coat pulled over his knit, open-throated jersey, walked with long strides to the post office, whence he would return, sooner than you would have thought possible, usually carrying a package of books. One wing of his and Priscilla's house was his study, and additional bookshelves were now being contemplated on designs in the office of a Dallas architect. He looked like a science professor in a Midwestern university, was Jerry Sasser's judgment of him. Priscilla was wild about him. Up to the time she had met him she had been terribly unhappy and restless. She had got herself engaged during the war to a 4-F who taught music and wanted to be a concert pianist. There had been deep and soulful love between him and Priscilla, but something had gone wrong. Jerry, when he heard about it, was not prone to sympathize. When Millard Warner came along Jerry thought him suspect. He would not, for one thing, take much interest in Jerry's carefully culled and skillfully updated collection of dirty stories. “Ummm,” he would say and smile, rather more politely than otherwise, as though he had been told that somebody in Merrill had to go to the hospital. “I see,” he would say. There is nothing worse than being left with an off-color story, well told, hanging in the air unreceived. It is like meeting in a bar to talk business with someone who doesn't drink. Jerry good-humoredly got rid of his bad feelings behind Millard's back. “He and Priscilla are going to make love right in the living room in front of the guests some night. One can only hope they go about it in the standard, grade-A, nationally authorized way.” “I'm so glad she's happy now,” Catherine said. “He never talks to her,” Jerry pointed out. “I wonder if they've ever had a conversation. A flat-chested intellectual with his head in a book.” “He looks nice when he's dressed,” said Catherine. “In a dinner jacket he can even look distinguished. And he's good to Mamma and Daddy,” she added. “That Indian,” Jerry pursued.

There had been, in truth, some story, circulated before Priscilla married Millard, about his being an Indian. He had come from Oklahoma, after all, people who believed the story always concluded, as if this in itself were enough to clinch it. At a woman's church group meeting in Dallas, a week before Priscilla's wedding, Catherine and Priscilla's mother had encountered an old friend from Fort Worth who knew everything. “He's got Indian blood,” the friend pronounced, “and don't you let her do it, now.” Mrs. Latham worried and worried. “Well, Mamma,” Catherine said, “what if he has? Some of
us
probably have Indian blood.” “I never heard of it,” said Mrs. Latham. “Well, what's wrong with it?” Catherine asked. “Wrong with it! We just don't want it, that's all.”

But no one, considering Priscilla's sensitivities and her infatuation and confronting Millard's air of detachment, had the courage to broach the subject.

So they got married, and (too late now) had two little girls with their veins just full of whatever blood there was—they were constantly over at their grandparents' house where Mrs. Latham was always, in the back of her mind, watching fearfully for some manifestation of a blood strain different from the pure Anglo-Saxon stream of the Lathams. “Well, he could have been a Jew,” Ben Latham consoled her. “Or a pauper. Any number of things.”

Neither Jew nor pauper, nor (so far as had been actually proved) an Indian, Millard Warner attended to his interests in Oklahoma by flying up there once or twice a month. He chose, of course, as any civilized man would choose, to live near Dallas.

Priscilla, to get his head out of his book, and force his total attention to turn to Jerry Sasser, came and sat on his chair arm, and kept on talking. He did not look up, but took her hand, fingered the plump flesh of her arm, grunted at appropriate pauses in her talk, and went on reading.

“Catherine says Jerry is a changeling, an impostor. Catherine says Jerry really got killed in the war. Do you think so, Millard? Do you think it might be true?”

Millard looked up, blinking in the sun. He had really heard her, for the voice was there and the words, and presently, in a minute, he would have total recall—there! His answer:

“No!”

He laid aside the book, stretched, and as she had already made a place beside him on the edge of the beach chair, pulled her down toward him. She sank gratefully, nesting her warm full breasts into the hollow concave of his chest.

“But what do you think of Jerry Sasser? What do you really think?”

This was still Priscilla and she was still after Millard. They had had each other, a Mozart symphony on the hi-fi, and a couple of bourbons, in that order, and were now having barbecued chicken on the patio. They wore napkins tucked under their chins and their faces were smeared with barbecue sauce and grease. Millard, his attention somewhat easier to engage at present, bit a succulent globule of dark flesh from a thigh joint and said:

“He doesn't have enough backing. Nothing solid behind him.”

Priscilla laughed. “Are you trying to say the Lathams aren't
solid?
”

“The Lathams are but the Sassers aren't. Jerry doesn't have anything of his own but a junior partnership in a Washington law office and the best set of political connections in the entire country. Connections.” He dropped the last gnawed bone on the big ceramic platter. His greasy finger indicated the tangle. “This chicken, also, was once well connected. In truth, it was an act of God. And look at it now. Why didn't Jerry go into politics? He had an excellent start. Right out of the war with a sunburst of fruit salad on his gleaming white navy uniform, he got appointed to fill a representative's unexpired term. Jerry Sasser represented Tremont, Smith and Gunnison counties in the halls of Congress. He did very well, too. Why didn't he keep it up?”