Darconville's Cat (35 page)

  Born in Rouen, he entered the priesthood and,
distinguishing himself in canon law at a quite young age, was
raised to the cardinalate at thirty-three. An age of apostasy had
set in. It was decided, so legend went, that he be sent with speed
to England—so horribly crowtrodden there was the ancient
faith—where, even before his arrival, a clandestine one (as nuncios
from a hundred sees were being slain in their innocence on the very
shores), he had become simply from reputation the scourge of
several pernicious Tudors and more than one profligate, not to say
schismatic, court, the most significant, for our record, being that
of the mongrel queen, Elizabeth I, the essential tenet of whose
religion proved to be little more than prestidigitation.

  The facts are scant. It is known, however, that
Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville had at one period secretly worked
with the holy pamphleteer, Robert Southwell, and had personally
seen to the welfare of both the Jesuits, Campion and Parsons, upon
their arrival in England in 1581. It was a dangerous time for
Catholics. It was perfectly murderous for priests. Great bonfires,
fed with roods, pyxes, and sacred images, were burning in the
streets, and execrations were being heaped upon the names of those
guilty of no crime but that of showing fidelity to what had been
honored in England for a thousand years. The Grey Friars of
Greenwich, the Black Friars of Smithfield, the priests and nuns of
Syon and the Charterhouse, the abbot and monks of Westminster, all
were deposed, and, with their sees confiscated, countless holy
bishops—Watson of Lincoln, Thirlby of Ely, Bonner of London, Bourne
of Bath and Wells, Turberville of Exeter, Scott of Chester, Pate of
Worcester, Heath of York, and many loyal others—were thrown
headlong into prison (most of them never to be delivered) so that
Elizabeth, with her overriding ambition and underriding conscience,
and all the exoletes, dunces, procumbents, and unpalteringly ugly
bagmen she called her councillors could begin to carry out their
scheme of relieving the emptiness of the Exchequer.

  The cause of Catholicism in that lapsed country, of
course, had long been closely bound up with the claim of Mary Queen
of Scots to the English throne. If the illegitimacy of Elizabeth
were granted—and there was no doubt whatsoever of that—Mary, as the
granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, was the lawful sovereign.
Consequently, the cardinal soon became a vigorous, but secret,
friend of the Duke of Norfolk, whom he sought personally to wed to
Mary, hoping that with the support of Spain and such prominent
English Catholics as the Earl of Northumberland; the Throckmortons;
the Stourtons; the Berkeleys; the Arundells; the Scropes; the
Vauxes of Harrowden; and the deposed Suffragan Bishop of Hull,
Robert Purseglove (who sheltered the cardinal for several years),
he might restore the country to the Mother Church, but then, with
the uncovering of the Ridolfi plot by Burghley in 1571, Norfolk in
due course was brought to the block, and Cardinal
Théroux-d’Arconville was thereupon hunted throughout the country
like a dog.

  We hear of him wandering, starved and exhausted,
through Yorkshire, Herefordshire, and Chester, which probably had
the largest aggregation of ardent Catholics within the realm, and
then, shortly after the harsh enactments of Elizabeth’s sixth
Parliament of 1586-1587, finally being captured in Lancashire, “the
very sincke of Poperie,” and sent with other recusants to the
gloomy dungeon in the casde of Wisbeach on the Isle of Ely. The
charges were clear: civil disobedience, disobedience to the
statutes of Parliament regulating public worship, and deliberately
undermining the Protestant orientation of the realm, the penalty
for which was death.

  One need go no further than the nearest
non-sectarian history to read the facts of his brutal execution,
the direct order for which was given by that stork-faced malphoebe,
Betsy the Bawd, she of the thousand fright wigs, who—with a drop of
the cruel blood of the Visconti in her veins—found nevertheless her
hysterical proscriptions could do everything, apparently, but curb
truth. She could stint the victuals of her hard-fighting soldiers.
She could shop up in the Tower her caracoling courtiers. She could
bumfondle any lackey in sight, sink her black teeth into
thousand-year-old dogmas, and hound holy priests into ignominy,
exile, and death. But she would never kill the spirit of one noble
cardinal, who, although his pen was wrested from his hand and his
tongue silenced, nevertheless glorified God and edified the Church
by patient suffering and invincible constancy as the opponent of
heresy and schism. His name will ever be in benediction in the
Catholic Church in England as one of the last and not degenerate
successors of St. Hugh and St. George.

  Apologists, generally, believe Cardinal
Théroux-d’Arconville to have written a good deal more than the two
works of his extant, the less famous one—for which in his
fifty-seventh year the then Holy Father, Sixtus V, presented him
the cross of the Order of the Holy Spur with a diploma and patent
bearing the great pontifical seal and declaring him in his quality
of doctor of laws
pronotarius apostolicus extra urbem
—the
exact but brief animadversion in flawless Latin, dated 1584, in
defense of the assassination of that goofball in the orange helmet,
mouthy William the Silent of Dutchland. The by-far-greater work,
one rare copy of which Darconville now perused, was the
uncompromisingly frank propaedeutics he had written, in English,
for the students of the school he had secretly re-established at
the plundered monastery at Wednesbury.

  This book was called
The Shakeing of the Sheets:
A Yare Treatise on ye Englissh Tongue and Sage Counsel on Clinches,
Flashes, Whimzies, and Prick-Songs with Regards to Stile; or, Put
Not More Inke on thy Paper Than Thou Hast Brains in thy Head
.
It was now witty, now rather heavily doctrinal, showing the
rhetorical power of Gorgias but, often, the herpetical glower of
the Gorgon. And how so? Its advice as to how to achieve an
understanding of, and a respect for, language was indeed
formidable—yes, and this was commendable—for the old cardinal saw,
wisely, that correctness in language was the foundation of clear
thinking, that clear thinking would lead to right reason, and that
right reason would not only shed light on the quidditive
perfections of Catholic dogma, proving the inexorability of the
Roman persuasion, but also that, for once and all, it would put
paid to all the lies and willful deceptions of the faithless
clerical secun-digravidicals thereabouts with long faces and square
hats who, though living in England, were breathing the air of
Geneva and Wittenberg.

  Sitting there, turning the pages, Darconville
nevertheless found one particular aspect of the treatise
disagreeable—its misogyny. That bias rose like a poison fume from
almost every paragraph, and Darconville, who, even in his early
teens, had been somewhat scandalized the first time he read it, was
no less so now—and, possibly for being in love, more. How, he
wondered, could
anyone
hate women? What, he thought, had
the contrivances of that nail-spitting abishag called the Virgin
Queen wrought in this poor priest? And yet in spite of that what
validity value could ever be given to such an unfair, out-of-hand
denunciation of the most beautiful half of the human race? The
fault was not larger than the fault was fine—but nevertheless a
fault. It was foolish and sad, long having been the cause of
Darconville’s keeping silence, sensitively, on both the subject and
the saint.

  Darconville knew from his heart what to reject in
the book, shut his thumb on a page, and then put it away, glad at
bottom not only that no one ever bothered to read it nowadays but
that no one had ever even heard of it anymore.

  XL

  Oudemian Street

  We do not feel terror because we are threatened by
the Gorgon;

  we dream of the Gorgon in order to explain the
terror we feel.

        —JORGE LUIS
BORGES

  DARCONVILLE, meanwhile, was living solitary as a
waldgrave. His days seemed as empty as the window frame he often
paused before, staring out, intermittently, for almost two weeks
now. Isabel seemed to have vanished. Hopeful, he had waited for her
to come, initially to have it explained to him why she’d dropped
out of his life, but then simply to have her with him again, a
secret, if not divulged, that at least should have been understood.
He either slept too much or stayed awake too long, listening for
the slightest noise and smoking, so much, in fact, that when
smoking one cigarette it became a strange source of misery to him
that he wasn’t smoking another.

  It seemed almost diabolical, her never appearing.
Oh, I know
, he thought,
you’re going to leave
me
—but he dared not laugh at the irony. God might
misunderstand it.

  One more day passed, then two again, and another.
Darconville claimed to himself in the mirror that he was being
haunted by a suc-cubus who crept into his bed every night and that,
though he flogged her, it was his own body every morning found full
of welts, but the unshaven face in the mirror, showing havoc and
rueful lines, spoke back to him: “A true lover doesn’t mind being
disappointed. But he cannot bear the thought of his loved one being
disappointed, and it frustrates him beyond all else, for
disappointment, worse than mere complaint, is blackmail.”
Spellvexit, who despised philosophy, showed an utter disregard for
Darconville’s neautontimoroumenotic pain and preferred to stay
outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over.

  It was time to do something: graduation week,
Darconville realized, meant time was running out. But the telephone
calls were all the same: seven numbers dialed, a slight quietus in
the swallowing phone, several expectant rings, and then the apology
of each correspondent— pal, protectress, prothonotary of the
Queen’s bench—whereupon, opening the door of that close booth at
the Timberlake, Darconville held out the receiver at arm’s length,
deliberating what to do and letting whatever little impotent voice
it was squeak on and on. Forfex, commander of thirty legions of
devils, had become a ventriloquist. The conspiracy seemed
school-wide. It was a concert of deceit.

  The alternative was search-and-seizure. Classes at
Quinsy College, excluding those for seniors, were still in session,
and Darconville hoped that, rather than be found waiting for her at
some door, he might meet her in a casual encounter. He roamed out
by the hockey and archery fields, looked into the old tennis
courts, and then walked out along, and then back by, “The
Reproaches.” He stepped into the art building and went upstairs
where in one classroom six narcoleptics, fast asleep on their
notebooks, were missing the pointer-to-board lecture of Floyce R.
Fulwider:

  “This [tap] is a pot-walloper of the Flemish
rubricator who called himself Pieter De Hooch, the grandfather of
American gin. For his dates you’ll want 1629 and 1677. You may or
may not be disheartened to know that he wanted nothing heroic [tap]
in his art. His dry, domestic, explicit-as-arithmetic masterpukes
[tap] tend nevertheless to narrative. Now let us look at this bit
of scrumpy [tap]:
Courtyard of a Dutch House
. Notice the
light archway with a woman in shadows staring off? Where is she
facing? And why? The shading here is . . .”

  Darconville left the building and crossed over to
the music building. He checked all the piano rooms: nothing. The
auditorium was locked. He wandered over to Smethwick, going floor
to floor, aisle to aisle, and found no one but two girls, upstairs,
flipping through old
Bride’s
magazines and Miss Pouce,
down in her office, pasting a concealing strip of paper over two
blasphemous lines in the fourth stanza of
Atalanta in
Corydon
. Where could she be? He cut across the street to the
English building—opening doors, closing doors—and went through the
history department to the Rotunda and then down to the dining hall.
She was nowhere in sight. He was outside again, on the run now back
around the ring-road by Gund and Truesleeve, heading toward the
high-rise dorms which led, past the woods, toward the cemetery
where in certain moods that had become all too characteristic of
what in her frightened him Isabel was wont to go, to read, to
think. But he saw only the memory of himself rising up creepily,
slowly, from behind a gravestone with a gleam in his impish
eyes—but this time of ridicule.

  The seniors, during these days of grace, were
sunbathing on dormitory steps, by the student union, across almost
every lawn that Darconville crossed. They sprawled about in the
sunshine like delicious confections in a sweetshop: tarts in wicked
shorts; cupcakes in halters and cut-away jeans; and turnovers in
swirl skirts up to the hips and brief shirts without so much as the
hint of a bra. The main topic of conversation, of course, was the
graduation dance to be held that night. It was
the
social
event of the year.

  “I’m about to blow up from excitement,” exclaimed
Tracy Upjohn.

  “Me too,” squeaked Berthalene Rhodie, catching her
hands.

  “Forget the dance,” said “Pookie” Pumpgarten, rising
an inch to unpinch her shorts grown moist from the dewy grass. She
winked at Mehitabel Huntoon and Betty Ann Unglaub. “It’s what’s for
later
!”

  “Well, it just dreads me to death,” confessed
Shirley Newbegin, unchambering a mouthful of bobby-pins and
twirling out a set of pink, snailshaped rollers—”spoolies”—from her
hair. Her fears, not to the dance, were rather being addressed to
arrangements then being made for a midnight party at the Bide-A-Wee
Motel.