No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer Page A

for two years,” he said. “What are you eating?”
    â€œBiscuit and butter and strawberry jam,” she said.
    â€œDon’t you ever get enough? God A’mighty. Fifteen different things for Christmas dinner. Is that a different dress?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œGod A’mighty. Fifteen hundred different dresses.”
    That was the last conversation she ever had with him. He left early in the New Year, had been, apparently, planning the move for some time, for when they broke into his turret rooms they found everything smoothly packed away, with accurate labels written on the outside tabling the contents. On each, in capitals, he printed: NO NEED TO LOOK INSIDE AS THIS LIST IS CORRECT .
    His mother, weeping, as usual in time of trial, locked the door so that he would find everything just as he left it when he got back. A post card arrived the next month from St. Louis which said: “Am fine. Have job here. Do not try to find me.” Others came from time to time.
    Catherine and Priscilla, whispering, drew closer after this. Quivering with those ideals that mushroom in the hearts of little girls taught to mind their manners day by day in Victorian households, they solemnly decided to make up to their parents for the loss of Edward. “Poor Mamma and Daddy,” they said. “But we won’t hate Edward either.” So they vowed.
    It was about this time, in the summer, that Jerry Sasser started asking Catherine for dates.
    Why had she married Jerry? There had been lots of other boys. And Jerry Sasser in those days was not even particularly good-looking; nobody mentioned him as being much of anything, and girls did not giggle pleasurably among themselves when they talked about him. He did not really belong in Merrill, his father having come there to teach economics at a small agricultural junior college somewhat contemptuously known as the “Aggie.” Catherine married him because he understood how Edward had grieved her father and mother; she knew he understood because he said so. One by one, and altogether, he heard them out on this matter with serious sympathetic nods, and when they finished, he said, “I understand.” But once she was alone with him on that same evening, when the family had confided in him, almost like a son, for the first time, Catherine went on to say, “I don’t want you just to listen to them all the time. My feelings aren’t just about family things. I want to live my own life, even if I do think I’ll never get over what Edward did.” And Jerry Sasser looked at her over the wheel of the car—they had driven out to look at Sandy Gulch in the moonlight, which after the picture show and the drugstore was the standard thing to do—and said, “I understand.”
    When they were not busy understanding all these grave issues about the Latham family, they were doing everything together in high school, joining the band, getting out the paper, and being in plays together. Jerry made the highest grades, Catherine the next highest—they leapfrogged each other, it was like a game. Poor Priscilla wasn’t in it, she trailed way behind, but got to be a cheerleader for the basketball team and screamed her lungs out. Then it was over, speeches all made and dances done and Catherine off at finishing school where she kept right on, serious way down where it mattered, considering motives, her own and everybody else’s, thinking that she would like to do the right thing; but among the deep drives of life she might as well have spent her time counting eggs or smoothing out quilt scraps. The result was the same whether she had spent even five minutes thinking or not. She quit school and she and Jerry got married in Merrill at the First Baptist Church, and went to live in Dallas for two years while Jerry studied law, a blissful bit of canoe-drifting toward the war.
    The war changed everything.
    There had been a reconciliation