No Place for an Angel (18 page)

“Mr. Angelino is the headwaiter at the Rook Club,” Jerry explained, “where I had lunch yesterday,” he added.

“You husband sit, talka to me a long time,” said Mr. Angelino. “Senator Ogden go, the customer all go, so we sit and we take the little brandy and we decide how to vote. Maybe you think he is gone with the pretty girl, eh?”

Laughing genially, he departed.

“You see, Catherine,” said Jerry dolefully, “I told you I was there.”

The next time they sat in a drugstore and got to converse any, they fell to wondering who it could have been in Senator Ogden's hotel suite. “Maybe it was Marianne,” said Jerry. “Maybe she did fly in from school, found the bellboy—a likely youth—emptying ashtrays. Or the laundryman. Or the plumber. Or maybe the maid was there and the bellboy came in.”

“Or the laundryman,” said Catherine.

“Or the plumber.”

“Come to think of it,” Catherine said, “where did Senator Ogden go after lunch at the Rook Club?”

“Why, he said he went to see this guy—”

“About a horse?”

“Well, what do you know? So old Ogden met the maid—” He laughed. “Or the bellboy, or the laundryman—”

“It would have to be a very soprano bellboy,” said Catherine.

“There are such things,” said Jerry. “I kid you not.”

“Where,” Catherine inquired, “was Mrs. O.?”

Jerry was thunderstruck. “His wife! Well, the old devil!”

“They're bound to get together sometimes, I guess,” said Catherine. They both fell to laughing.

“Catherine,” said Jerry, “just out of curiosity, what record did you say was playing?”

“I said she liked Dixieland jazz . . . oh, I can't remember what.”

“Dixieland jazz!” Jerry thought that was downright rare. He laughed till he hurt. While he was laughing it came over Catherine that Jerry Sasser would be capable of not only carrying on the conversation if he actually had been back of the wall but of savoring it even more than if he had not. And how could she, out of all the world, mistake any intimate echo of him for anyone else, out of all the world? Crazy? she thought. I would certainly have to be. Oh, God, she thought, suddenly breaking off with a long exhausted sigh.

“What's the matter?” Jerry asked, cutting off too.

“I can't take back anything,” said Catherine, “no matter how we sit here and laugh. If it wasn't you this time, it could have been. Else what would there be to argue about at all? After the election, I'm still going, Jerry.”

Jerry Sasser became very still. “We'll see about that,” he said.

When she was in Denver in the hospital, another person showed up to see her who wasn't Jerry either. It was Guy Owen, he of the broad Caesar's brow and old-fashioned tastes. He had had business, he explained, in Denver, and having heard she was there—

Catherine went out to dinner with him. “The rules are certainly very relaxed,” he observed.

“That's because there's really nothing the matter with me,” Catherine said. “I'm just tired. It's all this campaigning.”

“Catherine,” said Guy Owen, “I think your husband is—well, a smart guy—but for you—”

“For me, all wrong,” she supplied.

“Well, a lot of my business, of course. You can always tell me to go to hell.”

“Oh, I don't feel that way!” She looked at him across the small table, across the candlelight.

“Just then,” he said, “the way you looked at me, you seemed to be appealing to me. Were you, Catherine?”

She knew how she had looked, saw how she had made him feel. Had it been genuine, her look? Did she want to make him feel this way? “I've been alone a lot,” she evaded him, “since coming here.”

He smiled his sad gentleman's smile. “And I've had too much wine.”

“It's good of you—” she began, but he waved his hand.

“We won't have that,” he advised.

She was still turning Guy Owen over in her mind after he had flown back to Washington, when the door opened and there stood Jerry, all full of fire and glory. “I came to spring you, baby,” he said.

Oh, it was grand! They went dancing and drank champagne. They talked about days before the war, all their many army camp rendezvous, laughed about Priscilla and Millard, and back at the hotel, the night two-thirds gone, crawled up out of a sea of love to sleep like two young people on warm sand. Next morning the doctors insisted on interviews and pronounced grave warnings, all the while Jerry was writing out the check, and he and Catherine returned to Washington in the afternoon.

“There's somebody we have to give a dinner party for tomorrow night,” he told her while opening the blinds and turning up the thermostat in the apartment. “I've arranged most of it on the telephone. Even typed out all the vital statistics for you. Didn't want to tire you. Look, you'll see. I got a caterer to write out the menu, spell it out—even a country boy like me can understand.”

So in that instant, while getting her toothbrush out of the night case, while looking for her toothpaste, it all came back over her, grew out of his words and dragged her down, the claw of weariness and dread, the mind's awful immersion. Except now, she thought, reclining on the chaise longue and feeling physically unable to lift her arm for the necessary exertion of brushing her teeth, except now, I can always call up Guy Owen.

And she did.

“You know,” said Jerry pleasantly, a few weeks later, “if this were England, old girl, and anybody mentioned divorce, the one of us with practically conclusive evidence would be me. Shall we race to see who gets there first?”

“You mean Guy,” she said, “and there's nothing in it so far but conversation.”

A few weeks later, Guy Owen's law firm was involved in a price-fixing scandal which got into all the Washington papers and failed by a thread to make the national press. Catherine for the first time in her life went to a detective agency. The agent, who was rather cautious with her—Catherine was now alert for people perhaps thinking she might be mad—reported that he could find no evidence whatever to point to Jerry Sasser. It seemed that Guy Owen also was equally guiltless. There had just been a slip-up somewhere, somebody had goofed. Now Guy, though as honorable and old-fashioned as ever, was bankrupt, and furthermore he looked old. Catherine, to her sorrow, noticed this immediately. His manners now seemed merely bitter. “I even have to thank your husband,” he told her. “He managed singlehanded to keep it from blowing up into a front-page scandal. He knows how to derail these things, no doubt about it.” Catherine put her hand to her brow, an attitude which she found helpful for reading the handwriting on the wall. “Owen's taking it too seriously,” Jerry said. “He's got a lot of old leftover precepts to muddy up the waters. They could easily reorganize the firm and go right on.” “I think,” said Catherine, “that all the money's gone.” “You've got a lot of old leftover precepts, too,” said Jerry. “And one of them is that money means something. I've told you and told you—it doesn't mean anything.” “We seem to spend an awful lot of it,” said Catherine, “just the same.”

“Well, what I want to know is,” Priscilla said, “what exactly does Jerry do?” Among her own leftover precepts was the idea that there was an answer to a question like that.

“Do?” said Catherine. “I don't really know what he doesn't do.”

“Well,” said Priscilla, who was already getting exasperated, “can you name one or two things?”

“He's a lawyer,” said Catherine. “All of Senator Ogden's legal affairs in Washington are in his hands. When Jerry was in the House, so was Ogden. They served on one or two committees together. They used to sit around after hours discussing the machinery of all the various decisions. Ogden told me once they made a good team: when anything came up, he wondered what it was and Jerry wondered how it worked. Then he shook hands with me. He always shakes your hand. He must shake his wife's hand every morning after breakfast. You see, Priscilla, the government—”

“Yes?” said Priscilla encouragingly.

“Well, it's all like a great big machine. You don't think at any one time whether any one small thing is all important or right or wrong, it's just whether all the smaller things are working together or not. If you try to get some direction toward broad goals, then a lot of people may get hurt or pushed aside, but others are necessary to come along with you and straighten up the details. If they can see the goals and agree with them, so much the better. Sometimes they're along for the glory, or just for the ride, or for some advantage to themselves. What Jerry is the world's wonder at, is sorting the people out. He has a magnificent memory for names and connections, ties between people, motives for why they might do this whereas they would never do that. To some people everybody looks just the same, like so many rats in a cage—to Jerry they never do. He can look at them and understand—he knows their weakness right away with very few clues. That's probably why he's so good with women,” she went on, and Priscilla knew, settling back, that she had tripped the switch. The trouble with Catherine now was that whereas before she had kept things dutifully to herself, now she couldn't stop talking, and any odd suggestion might burst the dikes, and all roads led to Jerry. “He was in a wreck with a baby-sitter,” Catherine said. “At the outside, she might have been a nurse; she'd come to see about Ogden's secretary's children one weekend. Eighteen years old anyway, and blonde. Slipping, I said. Of course, he denied it. He said he was running her home as a favor. I didn't inquire.”

“Why not?”

“If I inquire it's always true,” said Catherine. “Why do you think he's so valuable? Better people than I have tried to catch him. Ogden's got him stitched into a hundred fake payrolls.”

“So that makes Ogden dishonest, too, doesn't it?” Priscilla asked.

Catherine smiled. “They don't call it that,” she said.

“If you don't get a divorce, Catherine,” said Priscilla, “why don't you get a hobby? Go back to your music.”

“Hobby,” said Catherine. “That's one of those words that makes me want to throw up on the floor.”

Lottie Ogden, the Senator's wife, talked to Catherine. “You need to get inter-rested in business, honey,” she said. “Look at So-and-so, look at So-and-so. The good times come and go in marriage. Oggie and I are just lucky we've always been so compatible. Oggie just worries about you. He really does.”

There were always two ways to look at anything, Catherine thought. If Oggie worried about her, it was partly because of what he was afraid she might say right out in public during some fine luncheon. She almost said, right then, “Lottie, was it you and Oggie I heard through the hotel room wall in Kansas City? I've wondered for years, it was such a mystery.” Some day, I know, she thought, I'm going to come right out with that. Then they'll pack me off to Denver again and all the doctors will say, This syndrome was foreseen two years ago. Why was the patient withdrawn? But let me get in the part about Dixieland jazz before somebody shuts me up.

“How did it all turn out this way?” Priscilla burst out.

“I don't know,” said Catherine. “I just woke up and found it there.”

“The times, the times!” cried Jerry Sasser. He had his black intervals of sincere despair.

“It isn't the times, it's you,” Catherine told him, good-humoredly. “You've got to be in on everything. You work yourself silly.”

“It's better to work than worry,” he said. “Even so I feel that it's all getting too much for me. It's going outside of anything I can imagine or control. I don't have the education, the degrees, the big-shot backing. I haven't written any books; I'm an expert on nothing.”

His picture had just come out on a national magazine cover. Every newsstand they passed, there he was by the dozen. In hotel lobbies, airports, along the streets, the bright dark intense face—an artist's job on a candid photograph—unreeled freshly imprinted before their eyes.