No Place for an Angel (31 page)

“Things always move,” he told her. “Even love moves.”

“But where?” she said. “But where?” He felt sorry for her again. She was honest, anyway, and would have liked an answer.

He pressed the hard heel of his hand into wet clay, creating a shoulder. He esteemed Mario and whatever suffering he endured, far more than Irene. He did not tell her this. He could still see Mario's strained, disbelieving face the day Charles had arrived. Plopped down from the sky to sit with them by the spring of Arethusa and talk all about Egypt. There where the papyrus grew—an Egyptian plant in Siracusa, though no one but Barry would have noticed—and the little ducks paddled in among the stalks. He had seen Mario accept everything, like someone taking a crazy blow from a friend. What had happened had happened. What was, was. This Barry respected.

“You're fighting yourself,” he told Irene. “Not Charles or Mario. Probably they both love you, in their own ways. What do you want to happen?”

“Everything.” she said, and presently added. “Nothing.”

“Great,” said Barry. “Do you want a divorce, want to marry him?”

“But the Church—”

“Skip the Church. Mario isn't interested in the Church. Jump it like a mud puddle. Take him to the States. Civil marriage, job, house, children . . . set for life.”

“You think I can pull him around like a puppet. You honestly consider him to be that sort of man!”

“You see, you are fighting yourself. I told you.”

If he made her angry enough she would go. The trouble was, she wore him out. He had got it through the water, as Romans said when they meant the grapevine, that Mario's family had determined to say nothing whatever about the matter of the americana, but that his fiancee's family had gone crazy. Francesca herself, determined to be noble, had got ill, turned religious, decided on giving her life to Santa Chiara. Her family's anger, now that she had made a traditional step, partially abated. Barry decided from all he could hear that it was the family more than Mario who were making her suffer. He saw her once near the post office alone and decided that beneath that strained, pointed face there lived a center of calm which was not of Santa Chiara.

Mario moved into an apartment in a poor quarter across the Tiber. He gave up his embassy work and his lecturing, did translations to stay alive, and with a worn scarf muffled high around his throat like a disguise, ate in poor restaurants where the sauce and the wine were thin and the meat doubtless came from horses.

Charles genially one evening brought Irene what news he had learned of Mario, whose behavior he said that he found puzzling. “When I thought of the postwar European generation,” said Charles, who was apt to turn sweeping, “I always thought of him. You remember the first time we heard him lecture. You said he looked like Camus. Now where is he? Holed up in Trastevere and poor as a stray dog. I thought he might have turned Communist, but that's not it either.” He insisted that Irene call and ask him to dinner to see if they could help him. She got through the assignment somehow. Mario declined. “I think it must be some family problem,” she said to Charles. “Something about Francesca going in the Church.” “I'd even go to see his family, but he never introduced us. Very aristocratic Sienese. Probably we didn't rate.”

Floundering about in her grand passion, Irene was getting fat. Barry sat on the Spanish Steps with his chin in his hands, called out by a morning's thin sunlight in a season of February rain. If she just got fat enough, everything would be over. And that too, he saw, would come not from Mario, but from her.

Long years afterwards, alone with Barry at a pool side near Charleston on their way to Key West, Charles closed up with the air conditioning drinking gin, Irene suddenly said, “You know, Barry, the best thing in Italy was Mario.” “I thought that, too,” he at once agreed. “He didn't even know he was good,” she said. “He just was. More than anybody I ever knew. When he felt something it was all of him that felt it. He was complete. He suffered a lot,” she reflectively added. “Does he still?” asked Barry. “I don't know. Do you think he does?” “Which way do you want it?” Barry asked. He felt she had never let him go.

Do people ever, he wondered, let go? Creatures of memory and truth, how can they, without destroying their own souls? But this was the angel who thought this for him. For himself he didn't know. He had certainly let go of Linell McIntosh because his soul had demanded it. Yet he never forgot her. Pretty-faced, gentle-hearted, soft-spoken, loving and faithful and good, for indefinable disaster, she sure took the cake. Quick as anything, he slammed that book shut and flung it aside.

When Irene broke off with Mario he went into automobile racing, the mille miglia. He had always been a good driver and had a passion for cars. The idea of driving to Siracusa in a new rented mille centro had been a factor of some weight. He needed money now; the Francesca situation could not be touched even if he wanted to; his heart was sore and could not be thought of; his intellectual curiosity on the shelf along with his weary spirit. He could not work for the Americans any more and keep any pride at all; too much had depended on Charles. In addition, he had seen about all anyone could of America.

When she heard about the mille miglia, Irene concluded he was determined to kill himself and of course came flying to Barry, who hooted her out. “He needs money,” he said, “and he's probably sick of emotions. It's time you got sick of them too.” “I love him so,” she said.

The twins had come out for Easter and she had gone on a strict diet. Charles was taking them to the Dolomites for spring skiing. There had been a recent shake-up in the ranks of bureaucracy abroad which she was very late getting straight and even then was not too certain about. Charles had a new title, a new office, and had decided the problem of keeping physically fit in Rome was a serious one which deserved his attention. “He won't go into the ins and outs of how this job came about,” Irene complained. “You haven't been paying enough attention,” said Barry. “I actually think he wanted to steer me off onto Mario to give himself a clear field. Do you know, this has crossed my mind more than once. He used to sit out with those damn roses or hole up with three electric stoves and write reports. We haven't had a conversation all winter. Until recently. Now he's got it made. Line forms to the right. Off we go.” “You're mad because you can't run them—either one of them.” “I'm mad because some way, somehow, Charles Waddell has used me—he even used my feeling for Mario.”

She was lingering in his studio, frowning and preoccupied, somewhat restless, and then he knew why. It was probably the last of the many conversations they were to have about Mario. Or if they talked of him again, the conversation would be of a different sort, a different quality. There would be a certain distance.

She said one more thing. “I offered to have a child for Mario.”

Barry almost dropped a piece of yellow Sienese marble which weighed five kilos and had cost him 20,000 lire. The statement with its peculiar force of truth cast a strong backward light on them all from the moment he had stood in this particular spot and held the telegram from Linell McIntosh in his hand in place of marble, and thought, I've got to get away, I've got to get out of here.

So it was finally Irene and his thought of her which would never be quite the same. For she would have done it, gone through with it—he knew that.

All spring and summer Mario Marcadante roared through Italian towns and villages from the Swiss border to Naples in his white racing Alfa-Romeo. His name got in the papers, he killed nothing
but a stupid sheep on a hillside near Perugia, he did not even kill himself. He made a lot of money and grew empty of thought and ambition. In time he wrote Francesca in the convent where she was a novitiate and she came out and married him. In time she grew sophisticated in her own quiet, reserved, dark way, with an air of past suffering which faded, ripening into life. She had astonishing taste in clothes. Mario ran a rather select tourist agency on the Via Bissolati. It was said that Charles Waddell had something to do with getting him started. He became a great favorite in Rome and went up quickly in social circles, his old family name having come of itself to the fore, precisely when needed. In time Irene was to see pictures of this man and his lovely wife in an international fashion magazine. It was a full spread, showing their villa at Fregene, their three children, their graceful little boat, and the signora herself in several of the latest Roman fashions created for women like herself. She pored over this for some time, trying to find between the lines or upside down some thread, some phrase to link her with what she saw. But she could not. “Forever, forever,” he had said to her. “You will be with me forever. Affinché la memoria non viene piú.” He was never a light person; that she knew. Now, limpid to the transparency of absolute identity with his own life, his own people, he stood before her in a photograph, and did not think of her at all. If her mark was there it was totally invisible. Was it all nothing? she wondered. For if it wasn't, what was it? Barry was not with her and she had no one to ask. She imagined his saying that he didn't know. Suddenly, surprising herself, she yawned.

Soon after she had known she would give up Mario, she had looked up in a Roman garden and there was Catherine.

THREE

All that summer long in Rome, Catherine and Barry went to the beach together. They discovered Sperlonga, of later date so popular, a white village on a mountain above the sea, no streets, no motors, only precipitous steps and winding passages. Below, the beach was firm and good. Barry dug up shells and dived for shells; he stripped them of whatever life was in them and piled them in sculptural shapes. This was what he wanted now. Catherine made him able to work again. She sat in the sun in white shorts and a white shirt and dark glasses, sometimes reading, sometimes doing nothing at all. She watched him, brown and wiry in his longish, old-fashioned American-style trunks, diving and hauling, boating and beaching his boat. Sometimes she cooked for him in a white beach hut they had rented, sometimes when it was still and too hot for the beach, they went up to the village and ate in a trattoria. Once, driving back to Rome in the late afternoon, a white Alfa-Romeo passed them going like a bomb. The driver wore huge yellow goggles. His silk scarf blew in the wind. Barry believed it to have been Mario.

They did not see much of Irene, who was busy all that summer with Charles and the boys and what she called the barbarian invasion, which was apt to take almost any form. Even the nurse who had delivered her twins in Maryland, fourteen years before,
while the doctor was trying to get there in time, showed up from nowhere, rang her, and had to be asked to dinner. As for Barry, Irene at once jumped to the conclusion that he would live on Catherine's money. He would not feel any compunction about doing so. A money morality had never got into his head. He took things the same way he took shells out of the sea. He could have picked any number of women with an unhappy past to feel sorry for; instead he chose a wealthy one. But had he just done it by instinct, without scheming, hence forever evading any guilt? This could make her impatient to think about. Irene expected something of Barry, of artists generally, which she thought of as “honest success.” “You had better watch out,” she told Barry. “She is very precarious. She may suddenly jump off a rock; she may just walk out into the night; you may wind up in a divorce suit. Texas people are all crazy to start with, and Catherine—” “You are not going to ruin a happy period,” he said, and shook the dust of her elegant apartment off his feet.

Catherine let herself be led into a simple, peasantlike life, reminding her of her days way back at Sandy Gulch, and more recently, of her visits with Latham, in the New England schools and camps he had taken for home, though his surroundings were always slightly institutional. In some ways Latham was like Barry. They could absorb themselves in nature. They could open its door better while she was watching, and in this way she could see inside a little herself, as she could never have done alone.

Up and down the cliffs they came and went, in whites and sandals, straw hats from the local market, cheese, wine, meat and bread in shopping nets. And all to find seashells! The villagers
thought they were both crazy. How they talked and how they didn't talk. Nobody thought they were in love, and this was true. It was only later Barry believed himself to have been in love with Catherine. He missed her after she was gone. He thought it might all have been different. He believed that one day they had both seen a dolphin.

But then events did move in on them and take them over in the most nonsensical way. One could only suppose the two of them had been, for all their supposed seclusion, like sitting ducks to be picked off whenever the wilfulness of things chanced to spot them.

It started in the slightest possible way, Barry thought later, as though the snap of one twig in a wilderness presaged the materializing of ten thousand Indians from behind every rock and tree. Soon after they began to go to Sperlonga, he had bought a car for $200 from a man at the Australian consulate. The car had British license plates and consequently had to be run up to the French border every six months to have the documents renewed. Barry felt rather devilish about this transaction. For one thing, he never owned anything but one good suit to go to Irene's parties. Corduroys, an old jacket, and fleece-lined suede boots got him through the winter. He was still, in summer, wearing the kind of seersucker suit that went out in the 'forties. He knew in his bones that Irene thought he was living on Catherine's money and in a manner of speaking this could even from time to time be regarded as true. It was she who suggested they rent the beach house for the summer instead of paying for it by the day and thus running the risk of finding it already taken. It was she who gave him money to pay for a month of meals at a time at the trattoria, on the grounds that she often ate there alone while he worked on his stack of sketches. It was she who rented a car to take them there and back, and that was what did it.