No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer

Didn’t get the word?”
    â€œMaybe there’re just a few advance copies. Maybe it won’t get around.”
    â€œMaybe, maybe. Maybe he’s knifed me. Maybe the cards were stacked that way.”
    â€œYou sound like a gangster,” Catherine laughed.
    But she could not put him off; in fact, she knew better than to try. His lean hand, dark-haired and tense, curled, then knotted around the magazine. He stabbed the end of the roll against the lounge table, snapping its center ridge. Ruined for other people, was the commonplace thing she didn’t say. There would be no earthly use trying to communicate anything to him now, for until the plane landed it would be his cage and when it landed he would proceed as directly, as deviously, as cunningly as he felt impelled, to reach the point of release, of wising up, of knowing exactly how much damage it had done him to have openly and completely failed in a commission he had been specifically instructed by Senator Ogden himself to accomplish in Washington that morning. And then, my love, Catherine thought—as at that moment, the little stewardess returned, walking expertly as the plane pitched into a warmer level of air, moving solicitously from passenger to passenger but with, of course, the Sassers sky-written in large letters upon her—and then, my dear, if you’re still around, your chance will come all right.
    Politics, tension, women—if they soared to the moon or plowed away to the South Pole in an atomic-powered submarine, all three would come anyway, inevitably materialize, winging like pigeons out of the air, homing to nestle on Jerry Sasser’s shoulders.
    Jan Radley was sitting down on the chair arm again, her soft voice purring just adequately above the undertone of the plane. Yes, she did by chance have a lay-over in Dallas, and yes she would just love to come to the Longhorn Hotel for a party tonight, and if the Vice-President-to-be—oh, she had been for him from the first; why, she was one of the few who had said, Well, why don’t they get him for Vice-President, and Edie had said, Now, Jan, that’s the silliest thing, but she said, Well, I can’t see why it’s so silly, and sure enough it began to happen right on the TV set— “Well, now,” said Jerry, “we’re making a mistake raiding Harvard for a brain trust. What about some of these girls’ schools, eh, Catherine?”
    â€œWhy, yes, I think so,” said Catherine, and smiled her warm approval.
    â€œYou’re going to have to brief me someday on just how you figured that. Is it a promise?” And he leaned over to light the cigarette of the trim blue-suited girl, who bent her cropped head forward over the flame.
    Does it have to be this way? Catherine wondered. To think it did not have to be that way was like getting up on impulse out of a bed of high fever from snakebite maybe, and saying that nothing was the matter at all.

    Catherine Latham and Jerry Sasser had been brought up together in a little Texas town called Merrill, about a hundred miles north of Dallas. It was one of the last of those Deep South-looking, deeply shaded little towns before the big West begins with its dry immensities of mesquite, cactus, arroyos, foothills, tumbleweeds, jackrabbits, alkali, desert and dust. Therefore the shade seems sweeter in little towns like Merrill and the water seems clearer and cooler and tastes better than in towns to the east of there.
    All her life Catherine was conscious of living on the edge of something; always, they had assumed it was the West, but when she was a child and they struck oil on her father’s land it seemed too that they had lived for a long while without knowing it on the edge of wealth. The Lathams were rich then, in a home-made, prodigious way. Before that they had just been farmers; not poor-white, not even quite dirt farmers, but just farmers who like most other farmers in those days