Darconville's Cat (14 page)

  “Sawmilling: Why It’s Important to Us” by Melody
Blume
C

  “A Look at Tarot Packs” by Wroberta Carter
D

  “My Summer in Chincoteague” by Ava Caelano
B-

  “Freshman Worries!” by Barbara Celarent
C

  “
Three Wogs
: My Favorite Novel” by Analecta
Cisterciana
A

  “How to Candy Shoups” by Ailsa Cragg
C

  “Fidelity in Penguins” by Childrey Fawcett
B+

  “The Legend of Kali Pátnï” by Galveston Foster
B

  “The Life and Works of Kate Douglas Wiggin” by
Scarlet Foxwell
B

  “Jesus Christ: My Personal Savior” by Opal Garten
B

  “The Day We Lost Our Dog, Pee Wee—and Found Him

        Again!” by
Marsha Goforth
C

  “My Pet Peeve: Pet Peeves” by LeHigh Hialeah
C-

  “My Life Eats Shit” by Elsie Magoun [nervous
breakdown]
Inc.

  “Quinsy College: That First (Gulp!) Glimpse” by
Sheila Mangelwurzel
D

  “Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?” by Christie McCarkle
C

  “My First Batch of Potato Cookies” by Trinley Moss
B-

  “Dating vs. Non-Dating” by Glycera Pentlock
D

  “Love at First Sight” by Hypsipyle Poore
B

  “
Areopagitica
” by Hallowe’ena Rampling
[plagiarism!]
F

  “An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm” by
Isabel

        Rawsthorne

  “My Prize Hen” by Cecilia Sketchley
B

  “A Poetic Analysis of ‘The Pig Lady’ “ by Butone
Slocum
B

  “Coiffures Through the Ages, 1936-1970” by Millette
Snipes
B-

  “Pellagra: Blight of the South” by April Springlove
C

  [missing] by Lately Thompson
F

  “4-Hing Can Be Fun” by DeDonda Umpton
D

  “A Short Study on ‘
The Essay of
Megalanthropogenesis
, or,

        the Art of
Producing Intelligent Children Who Will Bear

        Great Men’ “ by
Shelby Uprightly
A

  “Quain’s Fatty Heart: A New Disease?” by Martha
Van

        Ramm
B+

  “Dinky, My Favorite Rabbit” by Poteet Wilson
D

  “Menopause: It’s Closer Than You Think” by Rachel
Windt
D

  “‘Traveler’: General Lee’s Loyal Steed” by Laurie
Lee Zenker
D-

  Darconville dropped in his drawer the thirty or so
little maimed and undermedicated projects, roughly eight to fifteen
pages in length each, stapled, bradded, corner-crimped, and of
course those several gathered together feminologistically with a
punched hole and a loop of yarn.

  The one paper he’d set aside—after shooing
Spellvexit away—he now had a chance to review in peace. The
calligraphy was spidery, a thin arachnoid scrawl, but unique in its
own way and, he thought, rather beautiful, with somewhat of a
forward slant, long t-bars, and the overuse of hyphens, along with
perpendicular ascending final sweeps and, well, the rather choleric
preference for red ink. It wasn’t, frankly, either a hand or a
prose style comfortable with language, nor was it, upon the
reflection of several re-readings, a person perhaps very
comfortable with herself. The pity of it! He found himself—queerly,
he was not certain why—loath to give it a grade. It was strange: a
judgment of any kind seemed presumptuous. Nettled only in that,
while logic told him the paper was flawed, truth told him it
wasn’t, Darconville delayed.

  Although exhausted, he lit up another cigarette and
went to the window. He wouldn’t grade it: no one is equal to only
one thing she does. He went to bed. But he
had
to grade
it—so he got up, turned on the light, and read it again.

  XVII

  “An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm”

  We had but one interview, and that was formal,

  modest, and uninteresting

        —OLIVER
GOLDSMITH,
She Stoops to Conquer

  
Précis:
The Disquisition recounts
how Isabel Rawsthorne, upon the Occasion of being invited to dine
at the large farm of her Wealthy Neighbors—surstyled van der
Slang—was overtaken with nerves, and, giving Further Particulars
concerning that, is then wholly devoted to a Full and Faithful
Report of what befell the subject in mid-meal when, twiddling her
plate in a vigorous attempt to separate for consumption an obdurate
chop, she embarrassingly jerked her portion of peas across the
table, a Lapse in Elegance she begs leave to offer, while
confessing no other motive which her heart had informed her of, as
caused by finding herself in Unnatural Surroundings, after which
the Narrative reverts to the High-Dutch pedigree of her Neighbors
(q.v.), containing under Different Heads everything Illustrative
and Explanatory of a social class disquiparant to her own,
superadded to which is not only a Digression on the current value
of the Angus cattle they owned but also an Episode, provided for
comic relief, that treats of Diverse Little Matters anent the
reactions of the Boys in that family, how they laughed, &c
&c, appending then a Touching Moment when the adjudged
delectus personne
, though pulsing by secret oath to refuse
it, is given an Open Invitation to return, this comprising a Final
Exit concluded to the satisfaction of Practically Everybody,
intended all, as so put, less as a rehearsal of the Scanty and
Defective social graces of the author than an example of the
Voluminous Essay, indeed Book, which she implied could but never
would be written on same because of her insignificance. It was
signed: Isabel Her Mark—and graded A.

  Awkwardness is the prerogative of kaleidogyns.

  XVIII

  Isabel

  Art thou that she than whom no fairer is?

        —Christ Church
ms.

  THE NIGHT finally came. A porchlight was lit.
Upstairs, Darconville sat at his desk, a single finger in
cogitative support of his head, flinging arbitrarily between one
thought and another and staring into space. It was Thursday.

  He wasn’t worried. He felt apprehensive, but he
noticed: it wasn’t his kind of apprehension. She was coming to
visit him this night, and, although he tried to work, driven by the
fact that for several nights he hadn’t, he couldn’t and,
furthermore, perversely deemed it of no consequence. He had of
course often written scribble before, but that wasn’t it—now,
nothing came.

  There was, he supposed, a secret logic to it all, as
there was to so much in his particular life thus far, but he
suspected that the man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded
by reality, and so his brow was drawn with this worry: that he
wasn’t worried—an apprehension neither diminished nor temporized
during those long hours of silence that eventually passed and,
after the faintest knock, brought Isabel Rawsthorne into his rooms
with all her bravery on, and tackle trim, sails filled, and
streamers waving. Instinctively, Darconville kissed her cheek
(surprising even himself!), the only displacement activity he could
manage for the hitch in his throat that kept him from speaking. He
set out some candles. Silently, he went to pour some wine and,
after standing in the kitchen with eyes closed for a moment,
returned. Taking her glass, Isabel thanked him.

  They both stood silent in obscure embarrassment,
facing each other. No mood was ever more subdued in relation to
what was felt, yet etched with those graceful and tiny observances
that somehow connote aspiration and make every ferial act
festal.

  Darconville who couldn’t speak tried.

  “I’ve often wondered—whether you can see my light
from Fitts.”

  “And I’ve often wondered,” she whispered, “which of
the lights I’ve seen from my window in Fitts were yours.”

  There was silence.

  “We neither of us know.”

  “Neither of us,” she echoed, looking up. Any look
with so much in it never met his eyes before.

  It was a face—
ecce, quam bonum! quam
pulchritudinem
!— sweeter than Nature’s itself, her soft eyes
full of light. She was wearing a slight summery buff-pink dress,
low cut in front, with a design of cherrysprigs and long sleeves
flounced out at the shoulders, a fashion that did not adorn so much
as it was adorned. A pink lutestring ribbon matched one wrapped in
a bandeau around a weft at the back of her flowing hair. She was
like a beautiful apparition of heather, white, pink, and rose.

  There was a radiance in the unspoiled face which
glowed, as Darconville looked at her through the clouds of golden
hair, above the swip of the flickering candle. It was a flesh,
sculpturally considered, whiter than new-sawn ivory. Her eyes,
fawn’s—clear and agatescent at the edges—were the gentle brown of
woodsmoke (if a trifle too close) showing a light as if the heart
within were sun to them, with the trace of a smile there, a
sparkle, her lips in a second renewed, a sweet aristocratic curve
which drew a faint line by the cheek at a perfect angle of
incidence, creating on one side an ever-so-slight dimple. She had a
positively perfect mouth, with yet a curious
concordia
discors
to that face.

  It was a scar—a slight pale dartle, once stitched,
like an elongated teardrop coming down the left cheekbone, a small
disfigurement as if a tiny, tiny dagger sat there, as if, perhaps,
the Devil, his breath black as hellebore, had shadowed her
birth-bed, stepped through the valance and, astonished for envy,
leaned down and paid her the exaction of a poisoned kiss. But what
awful conjectures it gave rise to! Had she been knived? Had someone
thrown something at her? Had she been imped by a wicked family? And
yet, Darconville recalled, hadn’t Helen herself had a scar which
her lover, Paris, called
Cos Amoris
, the whetstone of
love?

  “Are you—a writer?”

  “Yes,” said Darconville, turning from his
thoughts.

  She only smiled, her girlishly soft hands lying
motionless in her lap. She seemed so different from other girls
he’d known, her unmeretricious eyes, her face full of messages one
had to read in a single flash. Intrigued, he felt he would never
know her fully but that, somehow, she would always enjoy the
compromise of exception—an exception that proved the rule of what
beauty was and is and yet but once seemed a dream for us only for
want of being seen. Standing up, she looked around Darconville’s
room with curiosity, pausing at certain objects she touched with
fleeting taps—the skull, the fat pen, the watch on the
nail—exclaiming over them with a kind of knowing sympathy for his
strange, perhaps cracked romantic life. She bent over his
manuscript.

  “I was going to say,” said Darconville quickly, a
feeling of sudden embarrassment and undeniable discomfort emanating
from what she in nature embodied compared to what he in art
attempted, “that since I first saw you in class I’ve found
myself—”

  
Ecstatic? Miserable
? It would have sounded
ridiculous, whatever he said. He poured some more wine with
innocent confusion.

  “—I don’t know,” he stammered, “I guess I found
myself wondering if you were anymore at h-home here than I.”

  He wanted to tell her that he couldn’t sleep or
write, that there was, in spite of that, a lovely inevitableness to
the suddenly unmeasurable and reasonless order of his life now, a
supernatural sort of coexistence with angels who left him with no
choice, somehow, only alternatives and often confusing him to such
a degree that he couldn’t tell the evil from the good, demons from
daevas, satans from seraphim as they crisscrossed through an
imagination given over before now only to fiction. And so he
wondered who are you, Shekinah? Who are you, Emanation? Who are
you, Anima, who framed such another ideal?

  “Here? You mean, in Quinsyburg?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s lonesome at school. But,” she said, pulling
her thumb, “not— here.” She looked up, her color high. “In this
room.”

  As Isabel paused at the mantelpiece, Darconville
noticed more clearly what before he’d but briefly noticed: a
peasant-like thickness in her legs, a flesh of babyfat (touched
here and there by pink arborescent veins) which overloaded the
lower body somewhat and forced her into a kind of affrighted
retention of movement, a defensive posture in which, so poised, she
seemed always ready to back away, all to contect what, by
accepting, might have made her even more beautiful because less
self-conscious. Argive Helen with fat thighs? It didn’t matter: he
prayed she could see for herself he
knew
it didn’t matter
at all. Trees grew more out of the air than out of the ground,
didn’t they?

  There were long silences, the kind where everything
seems to be being said but nothing at all is uttered. She was
faithful in her attention, but there wasn’t a sound. Such a strange
tenderness reached him, but no one said a word.

  “I haven’t thanked you, Isabel,” said Darconville
suddenly, “for your gift.”

  “My gift?”

  “That.”

  “Ooooh, yes,” Isabel laughed softly and gently
picked up from the mantel the pomander ball. He could see it
pleased her to have done an action by stealth only to have it found
out by accident. Darconville also noticed that she always picked up
things delicately with the exclusive precision of only thumb and
index-finger, a seraphically nimble sleight-of-hand with all the
other fingers (ringless, he saw) spread out fan-wise and tapering
to the flattest of fingertips.