Darconville's Cat (29 page)

  Darconville just stood there. Colorless as an
etching, resigned, Dr. Dodypol looked up at him. He blinked. Then
he silently picked up several crackers from a plate and put them
into the pygmean side-pocket of his graveclothes and walked
aimlessly through the smoke of the noisy room, looking back only
once: to smile sadly at Darconville, hold up a cracker over his
head, and then, inexplicably, bite it in two in one ferocious
turtle-like snap—after which he turned through the crowd and,
solitary, followed himself out to the garden where the Chinese
lanterns were. Darconville looked on until he disappeared. And then
he looked at his watch.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday 4:03
P.M.: The Smethwick library,
though open, is virtually empty, not a rare thing, alas, on
weekends at Quinsy College. Isabel is there, however, sitting
noiselessly and alone in the tomb of the reference room, surrounded
by shelves of maroon encyclopedias, newspapers racked in
binding-shafts, globes. (That is Miss Pouce rearranging the art
oversizes in the next room by the window with the mixed bowl of
maypop and bunchberry. ) Isabel stares through a blank notebook to
the face of mournful Ate rising in a page, faintly frowning back at
her with expressionless lavender lips and profane eyes; her pencil
waits in her fist, her fist on her cheek, her cheek pale. Thesis:
apprehension is foreknowledge. Antithesis: what we see is what we
sometimes by mistake think we foresee. Synthesis: Isabel, knocking
on her head, subdues a wish to probe further and determinedly turns
to her index cards, fact-filled with notes for her art termpaper on
the subtle and artfully worked technique in Dutch potting of
concealing dull earthen pottery in pretty white glaze and
decoration: “Decoys in Delftware.”

  *  *  *  *  *

  Soon, the party was in full swing. The flint was
struck, a spark flew out, and the dry little birdnests that were
the hearts of the participants, once ignited, now crackled, then
spread. The crowd grew, as if the guests in some kind of ridiculous
fission seemed to double at every turn. It was a
Wimmelbilder
: a teempool, now in high report, of party
goons, noisome dowds and doodles, truffatores, pusspockets,
stoop-nagels, and a whole crazy retinue of
hoopoes-in-fine-fettle.

  Guests, being introduced, were rotated like tops.
These were the Ho’s, those were the Hum’s. Those were the Go’s,
these were the Come’s. The Snipps met the Snapps and the Snapps met
the Snurrs. It was endless. But Felice Culpa, who had no end of
energy, loved the combinations. Dr. Roget, Miss Carp; Miss Carp,
Dr. Roget. “Delighted,” said motograph-voiced Dr. Roget, one of the
pawns on the Board of Visitors, “overjoyed, highly-pleased,
gratified.” “Peachy,” replied ninety-year-old Miss Carp, her long
cigarette wagging up and down on the two syllables. A former
teacher at Quinsy, she was one of those outspoken choleric old
sticks down South who smoked three packs a day, said anything she
damned well pleased, and was given a wide berth—in this case, a
wider one than most, ostracized as she’d been in the Quinsyburg
community ever since casting that irreligious vote in 1928 for Al
Smith. The Culpas, her neighbors, liked her and thought to do
something about it, but not everyone approved, and Mrs. DeCrow,
looking like Vrouw Bodolphe come alive, thought the invitation
disgraceful, clacked her teeth, and turned her back to the
room.

  Others couldn’t be introduced. Dr. Glibbery was
searching for hot sauce in the kitchen. The Weerds, alone, were
talking to each other in the backyard. And Dean Barathrum was in
the bathroom. In two cane chairs on the porch, side by side, Misses
Shepe and Ghote were sitting like pharaohs, their hands on their
knees. They noticed Darconville. “Forget the black clothes,”
muttered Miss Ghote. “It’s the long hair gives me the dreads.”
“Well, long hair,” sniffed Miss Shepe, “
is
sanctioned in
the Bible, Miss Ghote.” She smiled. “Judges 13:5.” Miss Ghote
arranged her fingers into a reef knot. “I hate to disappoint you,
Miss Shepe,” said Miss Ghote, who hadn’t the slightest intention of
sitting passively by and allowing her neighbor the luxury of
placing the teapot of her Episcopalian proclivities on
her
Baptist trivet, “but long hair is
not
sanctioned in the
Bible.” She shifted indignantly on her sapless buttocks. “You want
to re-read I Corinthians 11:14, I’m afraid.” It was only another
one of those pull-devil, pull-baker affairs that would last long
into the night, good old ecclesiastical coun-teravouchings, each
felt, having both source and sanction in such great biblical
priestesses of yore as Euodias, Syntyche, Priscilla, Phoebe the
deacon, and all the other spoof-proof little charmers who traveled
across the sacred pages of Scripture in numbers too big to
ignore.

  “And these,” said host Felix Culpa, perspiring into
his ascot, for though he was big of heart, his almost thrice three
times thrice three feet in breadth sometimes got the better of it,
“these are the Thisbites.”

  “I’m sure,” smiled a few dears from the personnel
office, gentle souls with shell-pink complexions, precise hairnets,
and steel girdles, the type of women at parties who are always, for
no particular reason, just leaving—and never, somehow, without a
brown package tied with string under their arms and seventy-five
goodbyes at the door.

  Miss Thisbite, a Dixiebelle, was one of those girls
of the beauty-pageant variety, with that typical Southern smile
that is always just a bit too high. She had baby-blue eyes, a round
face—piefacedness has always been the Southern ideal of feminine
beauty—and had just come down from Richmond for the weekend, driven
by her brother, a young blond ephebe with a perfect head and skin
the color of moonlight who was also in attendance. She was being
interviewed for an opening in the English department. “A real
armful, huh? I know the type,” Felice said, playfully tapping
Darconville and nodding in the direction of the girl whose short
skirt revealed long lithe legs and stockings worked like the
marquisette of a butterfly net. “Shapelier than Isabel in the legs,
OK. But I’ll give you two to one she’d be harder to get into than
the Reading Room of the British Museum.” Then she tweaked his nose
and pranced away on an arc, very like the smile she sent him on the
way out.

  Southern women, it occurred to Darconville, were a
case-study in extremes. They were in fact like sausages: some—the
minority—were so soft and pink and moist they could be spread with
a pliable knife; the others were as hard and dry as corundum, a
kind of thin indurate
Landjaeger
, its groats tied off
tight and cold as marble in the bung of a fierce, almost
unbreakable coil. There seemed to be no other kind. In any case,
most of the men at the party, old dodders, young dudes, immediately
honed in on Miss Thisbite. They lit up trick bowties. They puffed
the college’s reputation. They subjected her to rustic stories,
pseudodoxies, tall tales.

  “They are saying”—it was Prof. Fewstone, of course,
sidling up to Miss Thisbite with his overfilled shirt and
yogibogeybox-shaped head, the strange hairdressing of which gave
him a big roach in front and a curled effect at the rear which he
tucked under a roll—”they are saying you want to join the team,
yes? First-rate! I tell you, we’re thick as three in a bed here at
Quinsy. Wonderful! But now tell me, have you been told about the
cutbacks over at the legislature, the budget, all ther—”

  Miss Thisbite, kindly refusing his offer of a
wheatcracker smeared with lobster pâté, .circled the button of his
jacket with her finger and softly asked if money was scarce.

  “Scarce? Why, non-existent, gal,
non-existent
! Listen, I was around this place when they
paid you through a bean-blower, shoot yes, and it ain’t no better
now. Thing is,” he said, moving closer, “I happen to have my foot
in the door with the governor, see, and—”

  He suddenly felt cold and looked up.

  Mrs. Fewstone, standing across the room in hard
brown shoes and wearing a dress that looked as if it had been cut
out of zinc, had him transfixed with her snake-like eyes in a cruel
fascinatio
.

  At this juncture, Darconville worked his way to the
front room to see if Isabel had come. Mrs. DeCrow, noticing him,
continued the shabby game of studied indifference she had played
for almost a year now and turning cock-a-hoop, her nose sharp in
the air, whisked past him with a face like the Uffizi Medusa.
Shaking his head, he lit a cigarette: the tinker, his dam. But as
the Great Snibber looked back—she had snibs in her, and snibs, and
more snibs!—she banged smack into a bureau, eliciting a snoot of
glee from the for-the-moment uncharacteristically joyous Mr.
Schrecklichkeit who, not that he could know it, immediately joined
both Darconville and Abraham Lincoln as a funeral urn in the
necropolis of her mind. Bristling, she shoved the bu-reau with one
swipe of her pipefitter-like arms. Schrecklichkeit was a simp,
everybody knew that. But Darconville? He tasked her, he heaped her.
She adjusted her breasts. She glowered around. She stepped to the
table. Correct her, would he? She stabbed into a bowl of smoked
oysters with a toothpick, spitted three, and, poor little beasts,
they were mollusks no longer but now part and parcel of Mrs.
DeCrow.

  Meanwhile, Darconville looked around the dim front
room, and looked, and looked.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday 5:40
P.M.: The shaft of light from
the overhead lamp bleaches out a spot on the front steps of the
library, where a figure is standing. Are you going to dinner? No.
Have you finished your term-paper? No, no. Isabel Rawsthorne is
staring through a nightfall thick as a fault to the outline of the
tree in front of Darconville’s house, only a largeness of
indifférence—not good, not evil—the pendulous boughs of which the
wind jostles with the feverish excitement of a sacrilegious thief.
All are not abed that have ill rest, and one of them, lacking most
because longing most, begins to pace out notions. Of these notions
one lodges itself finally in her mind with cautious exactitude as
the very thing indicated by the occasion. It’s a cat’s walk, a
little way up and back. Then it’s not a cat’s walk. The figure is
gone.

  *  *  *  *  *

  Darconville soon began to get restless. At sixes and
sevens, he wandered through the hall and went into the library; he
half-pulled a book out of a shelf—
The Gnomes of Zeeland
by
Rex Hout—and uninspiredly pushed it back. He stepped out on the
veranda and looked at the sky. Strangely, an intuitional hindsight
occurred to him, but it passed as he strained to count the distant
peal of bells coming from the library. Nine o’clock. Thank God,
Isabel would be coming soon.

  “Titbits?”

  “Kickshaws?”

  “Kitcats?”

  It was three horae from the home economics
department at the veranda doors offering the hors d’oeuvres they’d
brought. Impossible to avoid, these fructatory genii and inveterate
tray-passers with fat dimpled elbows, polished faces, and smelling
of soap and starched linen had been shoggling through the party
since they’d got there, the ball-like contours of their heads
revolving as they bowed and dipped from guest to guest with plates
of airfoods. One of them who’d flunked Isabel first semester for
absenteeism thought the grade confirmed in not seeing her there.
She went on about it with some concern, embarrassing Darconville,
having become her father-by-proxy, his proxy-by-placement. An hour
passed. He checked his watch. It was 9:04.

  The guests, meanwhile, circulated, mooning from room
to room, discovering each other again in a different place but
under the same circumstances to resume their similar chat. Taken
altogether, it was not unlike any other faculty party, archetypal,
to be sure—if more pronounced at Quinsy—with its predictable cast
of poltroons, gum-beating fibsters, and others whose brains were
kept in jars above the moon; to wit: the Funster with the
double-jointed thumb which also serves—to everybody’s dismay—as a
finger-puppet; the Trendy Wife (always from California) wearing
hoop earrings and a bandanna who’s found the most
fantastic
recipe for sharksfin soup; the Good Ol’ Boy, a
fox-snouted churl in a perpetual sulk who sits alone in the den
misanthropically crunching pretzels and flipping through a
five-year-old issue of
Knife Digest
; the Female Poet,
smoking a cheroot, who has a cat named “Cat” and calls her poems
“friends”; the Foreigner, coddled by all, who is perfectly willing
to talk about agrarian reform in his country; the
Chubby-in-Residence who, after twenty-seven visits to the dog-whelk
dip, publicly—and virtuously—refuses her dessert at dinner; the
Etymologist, thoroughly bottomed in his Skeat, who is silent in any
given conversation until that crucial point when he interrupts
with, “Actually, I think you’ll find that—”; the Televisioniste,
somebody’s boyfriend, who with more confidence than brains
deathlessly mis-recapitulates for everyone the interminable plot of
last night’s late movie; the Convenientologist who at some moment
or other always comes striding out of the bathroom saying, “Why,
Felice, you never told
us
you installed a bidet!” and then
always, of course, the Favorite Child, the little towser with the
cowlick dragged down from upstairs in his pajamas-with-feet,
blinking and clutching a truck, who is called upon to sing in a
voice like a puppetoon—and reluctantly—”Jesus Wants Me for a
Sunbeam.”

  Darconville, who didn’t want to, noticed everything.
He
fought
not to notice. If the people there, however,
could have known with what punctilious accuracy their every
movement and mannerism was recorded by him, not through
viciousness, not smugness, nor any premeditation, they’d have sued
him on the spot. He couldn’t
help
it. Behavior is comment,
the articulation of action, and these nopsters? With their
fipple-fluting tongues? Their pretentious piety? Any satirist worth
his salt would have banished them forthwith in a jingle, not as
victims but as
executioners
: an authorized punishment,
seeking to cure disease by remedies which produce effects similar
to the symptoms of the complaint, for what to correct as hangmen
they’d have to know as the hanged. There is not a bauble thrown by
the silly hand of a dunce, thought Darconville, that may not be
caught with advantage by the hand of art. Pausias, in painting a
sacrifice, foreshortened the victim and threw his shade on part of
the surrounding crowd to show its height and length, an offense
that exaggerates a mood where defense, sickened, lies and,
stricken, dies, for are we not all implicated in what we hate by
what we otherwise might love? But I am no writer anymore, reasoned
Darconville, so how would I know?