No Place for an Angel by Elizabeth Spencer

borne aloft by it that summer day, Catherine felt the take-off in these terms, and her sense of glory, tired as she was, roused golden in her senses, then sank to apathy. Such moments vanished quickly and defied meaning; her mind had leveled off for the flight. The roar died to a drone, a soft insulated drumming from without. The tension slid behind into the jet stream. She had groped toward seat adjustments and magazines.
    â€œCoffee, tea, or milk?”
    â€œShhh!” Catherine put her finger to her lips and indicated her husband, who had fallen asleep before the take-off. The stewardess nodded, and bending down with a smile, picked up a shoe which was sitting half out in the corridor and placed it neatly, along with its mate, under the edge of the seat; then she picked up an arm which had fallen limp and weary out into the line of passage and laid it across his lap. She nodded to Catherine—a young, trim girl with a dark cropped head, smooth olive cheeks and admirable lipstick. “Coffee, tea, or milk?” she whispered. “Coffee,” said Catherine.
    Despite his wife’s reminder as they walked up the incline that this was a commercial flight, Jerry Sasser, from the moment he had flopped into his seat, had insisted on acting just as he did on the Western Star, Senator Ogden’s private DC-6 Constellation, shucking his coat, loosening his belt, tie and top shirt buttons, dropping his shoes, banging the seat back to the hilt—there was nobody behind, thank God. “You can lose a vote that way,” Catherine remarked, but he had crashed already, into the sudden oblivion of sleep. Aloft, the air conditioning gained total saturation. Now he’ll catch cold, Catherine thought, with all that Washington perspiration drying off. She was fumbling to close the ventilating system when the coffee came.
    When Jerry Sasser wakened they were somewhere over Tennessee and it was nearly dinnertime—the early dinnertime of planes and trains and hospitals—perhaps of all waiting people. He had been sprawled there, silently, a long while, then the seat snapped up and the coat which she had spread over his chest fell down into his lap. “What’s that?” he demanded, catching it by the sleeve. “Oh”—he shifted his grasp to the collar and lifted it up, at which point the article became not only recognizable but his own—“my coat.”
    â€œI was afraid you might catch cold.”
    â€œCold,” he echoed, absently. He drew down his turned-back cuffs and buttoned them, slid his tie into place and fastened his belt. Then he quitted her in a men’s-room sort of way. When he got back he leaned over her to look down at the U.S.A.
    â€œYou want to swap?”
    â€œNo, just trying to see where we are. What’s that down there? The Mississippi?”
    â€œThe Tennessee, I think.”
    â€œOh, sure. It wiggles. Lots of lakes.”
    â€œWouldn’t that be the TVA? I’ve been wondering.”
    â€œSure, sure. The TVA.”
    He had damped and combed his hair and his hands smelled clean.
    â€œYou look better,” she said.
    He gave her a rare, direct glance. “You too.”
    â€œI feel better.” She paused. “After all, we are going home. Aren’t we? After Dallas?”
    â€œI promised, didn’t I?”
    Later, after dinner, they sat in the observation lounge; they had a corner to themselves. The stewardess joined them. She knew Jerry, as it turned out; had met Catherine as well some months before on one of Senator Ogden’s pre-campaign flights to the Midwest. Through the window, Catherine could watch the northwest flange of the sunset, streaming pink, mauve, crimson, violet, sinking a cool liquid play of satin light into one back-flung silver wing. Lights were already picking out the forest-green, darkening texture of the land below. There a city flashed up: “Little Rock,” said the stewardess without