Free No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer

dropped them on the broad coffee table; in short, to Barry, a canvas. Charles sat muffled to the ears in a yellow towel, a hot water bottle on his head, drinking a hot toddy.
    â€œI think it’s a dangerous journey,” said Barry. “I guess all journeys are dangerous,” he added, as Irene, who was busy getting out of her coat, gloves and hat, did not say anything.
    â€œThe park smells cold and absolutely dead,” she said.
    â€œI mean,” he said, “I think America is murderous in some respects. I think it is murderous to Catherine.”
    â€œYes,” said Irene, “but she—”
    â€œShe what?” he nagged. “She what?” When Irene only frowned without replying, Barry went on, flopping down in a huge comfortable chair. “We suffer more than any people on earth.” But the truth was he was happy to see Charles and Irene now they had got their good times back.
    â€œIt isn’t true,” said Charles. “We’re just brought up to play the happy-happy game, join the Optimist Club and the world smiles with you. Then we get unduly damaged when the facts of life emerge. We are unprepared. But that doesn’t mean I wish to’ve been born a Sicilian peasant.” He sneezed.
    â€œWhat do you think of Catherine?” Barry asked him.
    â€œCatherine? I’ve never gotten her attention,” said Charles. “We were once marooned in Rome after a party and couldn’t get a cab. She said she would walk home and was gone before I could offer to go with her. I must have had a few. After she left I was afraid something might have come out and eaten her.”
    â€œExactly what I mean,” said Barry.
    â€œBut then it doesn’t happen,” said Irene, sharply. “She’s always perfectly all right. Why doesn’t somebody worry that way about me?”
    â€œMy, my,” said Charles. “We are arching our backs, aren’t we?”
    She was silent and thought of Mario, an Italian she had loved for a time, down in Siracusa when she thought Barry would die. At the window, it began, astonishingly, to snow.
    Barry, with an awesome contraction in his heart, felt that Catherine was leaving them inexorably again, was by now no more than a speck disappearing at high speed into distant light.
    â€œShe will be gone for a long time,” he murmured.
    Charles looked up, but did not reply.

Dangerous Journeys

    ONE
    M ore than likely Catherine herself knew better than anyone else that she never had the slightest idea of going to Chile. This was the sort of blind, a delicately decorated screen, replete with incident, people, flora and fauna, which she knew well by now how to raise around herself.
    From Barry she went on to see her son, Latham, at his school in Massachusetts, and straight from there, as she had known for a month now she would do, she flew to Washington where she met her husband, Jerry Sasser.
    He used to be so handsome but in the two years since they had parted, some inner slackening off had come out clearly on his features. She wondered if this effect might not come from too much drinking and she wondered how well he was doing. He had a way of charging through doors and stopping suddenly to take note of the terrain before him; rather like a lion entering an unfamiliar stretch of jungle, he went to work at once looking for a victim or an enemy, striking an attitude which always had its effect on whatever room he entered. In this case it was the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, and Catherine, watching from the depths of a green armchair, while the familiar scene unfolded, saw at least a dozen heads lift as though from grazing and slowly turn. He spotted her at last, almost, you might guess, when he chose to, a battered lion, possibly in a bad humor, showing it now and again by a twitch of his tail. She braced herself; for when he got near, within a dozen feet or so, she was going to see again the shadow of the boy,