No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer Page B

of sorts between Catherine’s parents and Edward, who, after ten years, had finally revealed his address, along with photos of a wife, a shoe business, and two babies, grinning in sunbonnets. Visits were exchanged and babies hugged and checks signed. “I just never did like oil,” said Edward, the only excuse he ever offered anybody for all the anguish he had caused. “I’d like to kill him with my bare hands,” said Priscilla, who, if she didn’t watch out, was going to be an old maid. She was terribly glamorous, kept an apartment in Dallas, had dozens of men on her mind, and went to New York every winter to see all the plays.
    Just before Jerry was drafted, Catherine made sure she got pregnant. For six months, until the doctor made her stop it, she chased around the army camp circuit to be near Jerry, squeezed up in day coaches with people whom she found awful, interesting and funny by turns, went for days without a bath, slept in dingy rooming houses where roaches and spiders ran through at night. Catherine’s mother got wind of what things were really like on these wild trips and bitterly complained. “I know we used to be poor,” she said a dozen times a day, “but we were always clean. Suppose you had a miscarriage in one of those places, what could you do, who could you call on?” “It’s as bad as the Hickmans,” Catherine agreed. “It certainly is,” said her mother. For years now, the girls had had their little jokes about the Hickmans.
    When Jerry went overseas, the grey density of the war years came down over them in earnest. Catherine cried at night; she cried the baby into birth a month too soon, she thought; at least, it always seemed that way. Did it really rain so much during the war? In Catherine’s memory she was always at the house in Merrill and it was always a winter afternoon, the big living room chill and empty (they lived on a side porch and only went to the front to get the Dallas paper from the door around dusk), the baby to be fed, and after that the war news on the radio. So one day during the war was as like another as the footprints of one man walking on smooth sand.
    Catherine’s father was in a plane crash. He wasn’t killed, but shattered one leg which refused to knit. He had to use a brace and crutch and acquired the nickname “President Roosevelt.” He would hobble up and down the one long business street in Merrill and say, “I got inter-rested in a knot of black Angus cattle down near a fence corner, and I forgot I was in the plane. I really forgot it. I thought I was in the Cadillac. Any fool knows you can’t run a plane like you run a Cadillac. You pilot one and you drive the other. I just got my words mixed up and now I’ve got to pay for it for the rest of my life by answering when people say President Roosevelt. A fellow could preach a sermon on it, if he had half a mind to.” A Mexican who was riding with him got killed in the crash along with a black Angus bull who wouldn’t get out of the way. Mr. Latham went to some trouble and expense locating the Mexican’s family and paying for the funeral, but beyond this thought scarcely more about him than he had about the bull, though both of them remained in the story, which he went on telling and telling—his something to match the war.
    You got to know the war like a person, Catherine and Priscilla agreed. And found out more bad things about it all the time, they would add. Edward, a PFC who did not aspire to be a sergeant, got shipped off to Bahia, of all places. Here he cooled his heels for three years and complained about the officers and the food. Edward, Catherine thought, should always have kept a Gunnison County sunburnt face and a sun-squint to go with his scornful mouth; he should have stayed tall. Instead, ever since he had revealed himself in the shoe business in St. Louis, he had a shopman’s pallor and he