Free No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer Page A

young man, husband, father, she had always loved. Would it never go away, that shadow? Why didn’t it, like a light, simply burn out?
    â€œHello, Jerry.”
    â€œHello, Catherine.”
    Back of every mad person there is a person who never would answer. Well, if he never would answer then at least he could and would sign, for the papers she brought were about money—a bond investment, held jointly, had matured—and though she could have let it drift into the estate until such time as he got an accounting done and found it, she knew he always needed money and so chose to bring it to him herself. Her family, if they knew of it, would have thought she was either in another crisis, or had gone back to him, or both. But even in the world’s worst marriage there are moments of comfort, like the settling of an old quilt over tired limbs, when two people meet again. So they sat in green armchairs in the hotel lobby, a low table between them, discussing Latham, relatives, health and money.
    Catherine had known Jerry Sasser all her life. If a table now sat between them every time they met, it was a table with an imaginary chess game laid out upon it. The chess game, she had come to see thus late on, had been going on for nearly forty years. At each meeting one or the other of them might reach down and make a move. Then again, they might not. The possibility was always present, but not always acted on. The game itself, she now saw clearly, would never end. They had grown together like two trees; they had sapped life from each other. There had always been a sense of mystery about him, first there to draw her, win her, possess her, and later to poison her. There was, later on, a specific point, never cleared up, but always present; something he wouldn’t say.
    â€œWho did try to kill you that time, Jerry?” She had asked him that at least a hundred times.
    He always laughed. But this time, unexpectedly, he answered her. “You did.” The move was made.
    She started. “Don’t be an idiot. If I ask you a serious question—”
    â€œSure it was you.” He grinned, worrying out a match, and dropped it on the growing litter in the too-small ash tray before him. “Who else would?”
    â€œYou think I would?”
    â€œYou wanted to plenty of times.”
    â€œJerry, I never—”
    â€œThe gate was locked.”
    â€œThose men—!”
    â€œYou think they would? Just when I was making over a fortune. You blanked out, that’s all. Strain and crisis . . . same old trouble. I never blamed you.”
    She sat quietly, hands folded, allowing the recent memory of a young man’s hoarse whisper in her ear to sustain her. Jerry would still wreck me if he could, she thought coldly.
    He drove her back to her hotel.
    â€œI suppose you see the Waddells,” he said.
    â€œI saw Irene in New York,” she said. “Charles seems to travel a lot. It’s some promotion or other, I gather. A company extension . . . that’s it.”
    â€œShe told you that, did she? Well, that’s good, if true. The last I heard he was beachcombing in Florida, pretty definitely ‘between jobs.’”
    â€œI’m sure that isn’t true. Irene seemed perfectly confident about things.”
    â€œShe’s that type.”
    â€œJerry, they are my friends, not yours. Just because you happened into Charles on a business matter, you can’t simply move in. . . .”
    â€œThere was a time when he could have put money in that company, but he preferred to think it was his brain power, background, or something vague like imagination they wanted, that that was the valuable part. Well, there’s more than one with all that to spare, and of course it isn’t even supremely valuable, not to excess.”
    â€œYou mean they’ve let him out.”
    â€œI guess we must have heard different things. Maybe not.”
    He knew his way around