Free No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer Page B

Washington and drove well. They passed the White House.
    â€œWhat do people say about politics?” Catherine asked.
    â€œWhat a question,” said Jerry. “Then there was that artist, Barry something.”
    Good old Jerry, good old Jerry, she thought. “I think he went South to work.”
    â€œYou’d think he’d live in Italy.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œPeople like that should live abroad.” He lost interest. “Catherine, why are you going home?”
    â€œTo keep them from tearing up the landscape, if I can. I can’t, of course. It all has to do with the new highway, the new suburb, the new Gateway to the West museum, the new . . . oh, the new everything. It exhausts me to try to stop it, if not stop it, at least to save the old farm the way it was; but I shall try. Then, in a month, I’m visiting with. . . .”
    She had friends everywhere. She let them take her up from time to time, never questioning their motives, which were perhaps genuine. Her money, her history, her influence, her contacts, her precarious health, her willingness to help and be helped—she did not care to go into it herself, let alone point it out to Jerry. It came to her when she got out of the car on the cold sidewalk and the wind instantly bit her, that she had exploited Barry to fortify herself for meeting Jerry. Jerry would certainly be living with some woman who had a career in Washington and two divorces behind her already, and something shady here and there to keep her brain sharpened razor-fine. (She had heard a part of this rumored and the rest flowed easily into place.) I guess I’m as big a bitch as the next one, Catherine thought, and huddled her frail shoulders against the cold, moving her delicate shoes from time to time on the pavement. As for landscapes, she thought, the only one I’m liable to end up with is Jerry’s face. Those two craters are his eyes, and there’s a dark crumple of hair, straight across the forehead, flat except for one cowlick that won’t lie down no matter what. And there were the high, Indian-straight cheekbones, reaching back like twin ridges, one of which, just beneath the eye, after a certain number of drinks, blotched with a mound of red.
    â€œGoodbye, then,” he said, and noticing that she was shivering, leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Keep well,” he said. She entered her hotel through turning glass doors, intractable with the dark opaque look of winter water.

    It was still cold and cloudy the morning after Catherine saw Jerry. The cab to the airport wound past the wealthy suburbs with their stone mansions which were possibly legation headquarters or senatorial residences, into the small-farm, fenced properties of one-story white houses, copses of leafless oak along the slopes and empty fields covered sparsely with sage and bone-white winter grass. A road project lay fallow along the highway, great dumb earth movers stood silent to the cold, machines very close to animals in their souls. The cab driver had a noisy heater, which roared.
    â€œWhere you going, lady?”
    â€œDallas.”
    The last time Catherine had made this trip was with Jerry, the time he said she tried to kill him. It was hot summer and she hadn’t wanted to be there. All the way to the airport she had sustained herself by imagining herself back along the green walks beside the Potomac, watching from cool shade while the plane took off. To the watcher below it would have to be a lovely sight: the plane, a long-nosed magnificent jet, rising silver in the cloudless summer blue, would seem to drift level as a boat above the Capitol, almost to dream, then tilting deliberately upward, to hang for a further second in the mesh of a dream. But before a doubt could gather around it, it would lift surely, beautifully, accomplish new heights of air, and seem to quiver itself with what it communicated—the delight and pride of power.
    Herself