Darconville's Cat (36 page)

  “Dean Barathrum will shit feathers,” said Shrimpie
De Vein.

  “
Hush your mouth
!” shouted Harriet Bowdler,
prick-me-dainty and whilom Sunday-school teacher at the Wyanoid
Baptist Church. Harriet’s, alas, wasn’t a lucky life: she had
trout’s eyes, a bad case of pimples, and an unfortunate walk—she
toed in—which the girls constantly mimicked.

  “O turn blue, Bowdler,” muttered Divinity Jones,
slipping on her sunglasses. “You want a little damn confidence is
what you want.”

  “Exactly. Like this girl here,” said Quandra Tour,
who snapped back a page in the book she was reading and declaimed
for everyone:

  “‘—to receive his instructions in psalmody was
Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial
Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a
partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s
peaches; and universally famed, not merely for her beauty but her
vast expectations. She was, withal, a little of a coquette—’ “

  “ ‘Vast expectations’?” repeated Harriet Bowdler. “I
believe that’s dirty.”

  Everybody groaned.

  “It means she’s on the lookout for boys, for
cry-eye,” said Gerda Bean, “nothin’ else.”

  Harriet, near tears, explained. “ ‘She was with
all,’ it says. You heard it, same as me.”

  “O, put a sock in it!” snapped Cookie
Crumpacker.

  “Confidence, that’s all he means,” said Quandra
Tour, shrugging. She turned to the twins, Scarlett and Melanie
Longstreet. “It’s symbolism.”

  “Who means?”

  Quandra Tour jerked the book to the opening page and
showed Mehitabel Huntoon. The frontispiece pictured a man resting
his cheek, authorially, on two fingers. “Irving,” she replied. “One
of America’s greatest authors.”

  “Sounds like a little ol’ jewboy to me,” said
Divinity Jones, cracking her gum.

  Ravissa Deadlow, lying face down on a towel,
muttered into her armpit, “And she sounds like a fat little
bitch
to me.”

  “With a whole lot of boyfriends,” said Quandra Tour,
tapping the page with a little plic-plac of authority, “so don’t
knock it.”

  “I want to
get
knocked,” giggled Tracy
Upjohn, reaching out insatiably with both hands and salaciously
wadgeting the tips of her fingers in a charade of manic
intemperance.

  “An evening of sex!” screeched Betty Ann
Unglaub.

  “Kissy-poo! Huggy-poo! And—”

  Harriet Bowdler, wincing, had her ears plugged.

  “You name it,” cried Cookie Crumpacker, joyfully
shaking her moon-shaped earrings and proudly adjusting the
maroon-striped jersey she wore to punctuate the comment, twice,
with what natural increments were hers. “And if I die tonight,
hey,” she added with twinkling eyes, “they’ll have to bury me in a
Y-shaped coffin!”

  The day was glorious, with honeysuckle dangling
about in festoons, the syringas thickets of sweets, all perfuming
the sunshine that elevated moods all over campus and increased the
general excitement. The girls were all making careful preparations
to look spontaneously beautiful, sampling scents, swapping pearls
and purses, and chinning up to the shimmering rays as their skin
turned from the airiest, fairiest tones of straw to the awfulest,
tawniest fawns. The dance mattered deeply to the girls. No detail
was too small to hold their interest, no project too large for them
to entertain—and both, the detailed project and the interest they
entertained, were keenly seen to by no less an
arbiter
elegantiae
than Hypsipyle Poore who, though not now among the
group, with slow love from her room looked at the scattered colors
of the afternoon, pleased to lose herself in those intricate dreams
of hers where desire and possession somehow became one. Hypsipyle
exacted the very kind of personal adoration and attendance-dancing
from her following that Isabel missed. She lived raptly in a
play-world and could find romantic adventure every time she walked
down the street. She softly taught her coterie the art of making
drama from the most ordinary everyday events, and so with
indescribable delectation her girls generally kept mental trysts,
had revelations and premonitions, saw miracles flowering under
their very eyes, and, ready to find mystic excitement in the most
casual occurrence, always looked for magic in a mood. The motel
idea was Hypsipyle’s, and each of the four years she’d organized
it. And so plans were afoot.

  “What, you just register—for the
night
?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “It’s a no-tell motel.”

  “And what about Miss Dessicquint, huh? Huh?” asked
sitting-up-correctly Harriet Bowdler, chastely buttoned up in spite
of the sun in her school blazer of sober watchet which displayed on
one pocket the disc of the college insignia. “What about her?”

  “She can go suck a blanket!” said Gerda Bean.

  “And stop squinchin’ your eyes all up,” said Ravissa
Deadlow. “You do manage to get all bitey, Bowdler, don’t you?”

  “
I
manage to get all bitey?” Harriet
Bowdler wailed. “You do,
you
manage to get all bitey!” She
looked about her for support. Calmly, Ravissa Deadlow openhandedly
appealed to the same group, asking everybody who in fact was the
one who got all bitey? “
You get bitey
!” everyone screamed
at Harriet, who burst into tears.

  Berthalene Rhodie, meanwhile, was wondering if the
authorities would
let
them all take rooms, offering for
consideration the trouble they’d had in previous years when the
townies and the boys from Hampden-Sydney College, all shoe-mouth
deep in liquor, spent the night banging doors and running around
the premises like whistlehogs.

  The twins, Scarlett and Melanie Longstreet,
agreed.

  “Remember last year? Bambi Bargewell’s boyfriend got
himself all yopped up with bourbon,” said Melanie, putting by her
sun reflector, “and then flingin’ free as you please into one of
them cabins went and daddied her baby right there on the pile
carpet.”

  Shrimpie De Vein gasped happily.

  “I saw her all pooched up in Thalhimer’s last fall,”
added Scarlett, rubbing an antbite on her calf with her left
instep, “buyin’ kimbies.”

  “While he ups and goes into the navy.”

  “I don’t care,” said Tracy Upjohn, “I’m for the
Bidey-Bi!”

  “Ditto,” said Mehitabel Huntoon, with fluoroscopic
eyes.

  “Off the wall!” hooted Betty Ann Unglaub.

  Shirley Newbegin, converted, carefully tied a
fascinator over springing curls. Everybody looked at Harriet
Bowdler. Was all settled? No, not yet, not quite.

  “And if Quinsy revokes your degree,
then
?”
asked the outraged girl whose hippocrepiform legs—to assure the
position of sagacious fakir— she crossed with difficulty.
“
Then
?”

  “Why, then, I’ll tell them to twist my diploma into
a cone, Harriet dear,” pronounced “Pookie” Pumpgarten, her arm
falling languidly over her eyes against the glare of the sun, “and
shove it where the moon don’t shine.”

  “My
life
!” said Harriet Bowdler.

  In the meantime, Darconville was having no success.
From the cemetery he went over to the Piggly Wiggly, bought some
cigarettes— he was smoking himself into a state of near
etiolation—and returned to campus by way of a gate that led to the
indoor swimming pool. The empty pool smelled like an empty
terrarium. He cut through a corridor with the gnome Umbriel astride
his back repairing to search the gloomy cave of spleen that was the
gym. It was also empty. He called out, “Isabel?” The echo called
out again. Nothing.

  The laboratories were next. Classes in that
building, however, had been dismissed for the day, and the late
afternoon rooms were tomblike, the silence broken only by the
hysterical coughing in the main corridor of some blue-in-the-face
squidgereen—all doubled-up and being thumped on the back by
clappermaclawed Miss Porch-mouth—who had half-wittedly suctioned up
through a retort, and swallowed, a half-litre of phenolphthalein
solution. The anthropology department—where Mr. Bischthumb’s
classroom (they had not re-hired) was commemoratively kept
empty—showed the same end-of-the-year inactivity, except for one
particular classroom where some swivel-chair tactician or other,
back to view, was winding down a lecture on virvestitism in the
Benelux countries to five girls: three fast asleep, one, gongoozled
by boredom, refrogging a silver chain, and the last, in the front
row, was the student body president, Xystine Chap-pelle,
upholstering her 4.0 grade point average—and she was auditing.

  Out a side door, across the mall, and Darconville
was in the social sciences building. He took the stairs
three-at-a-go to the first, the second, the third floor and paused,
searching faces, at a classroom where a group of girls sat in the
semi-darkness watching one of Dr. Knipper-doling’s gripping
geographical filmstrips; the pictures flashed to a recorded
voice:

  “—Faletua Uliuli is still, of course, a poor Samoan
village by our own standards. The daub-and-wattle hut here has
served them for centuries, [beep] Irrigation methods, as used by
their fathers and forefathers, were far too primitive to keep up
with modern production. Not so, now, with the recently introduced
flutter-wheel, [beep] American advisers, experimenting, have saved
them an untold number of good harvests this way which is why, when
revisiting, these men are invariably greeted by smiling peasants
bearing armfuls of taro root, [beep] Miracles abound here now. The
great crane you see here scooping up earth can do the work of fifty
men. Pride and self-reliance have been restored, [beep] You can
witness the results on the face of young Emilio here who is just
learning to work with leather—to grow up a useful and happy citizen
in his own country, a proud people, in a strange land, far
away.”

  The lights came up to long stretches and gulping
yawns, and Dar-conville, peering skygodlin through the door window,
searched intently from face to face as if he were candling eggs. He
saw nothing— and no one—of consequence, left, and returned to the
main building. It was getting late.

  In the long lecture hall there some forty or so
students, Darconville noticed, were slaving away on their final
exam in American history under the eviscerating stare of
peripatetic Mrs. DeCrow who, in expert fashion, managed not only to
survey them all but monitor each at intervals of sudden command:
“Eyes front, people!” “Sit around, Miss Nosy!” “Who in the second
row in the white blouse wants her testpaper torn up?” Craning his
neck under the half-pulled shade, Darconville saw no Isabel—only
the shade snapped up and Mrs. DeCrow disgustedly glaring out. A
turn by the registrar’s office was equally futile: no Isabel
Rawsthorne—only ubiquitous Hypsipyle Poore, there to badger Mrs.
McAwaddle for an extended curfew that night, suddenly turning to
him with pursed lips and an acknowledgement, effected from the
knee, by a dipsy-doodling of her index finger. Dark Angel, ever on
the wing, who never reaches me too late, thought Darconville. He
dragged himself downstairs.

  At the English department office, he asked the
secretary if any messages had been left for him. There were none.
He slipped into an empty classroom next door to gather his
thoughts, his eye randomly falling on a map of Europe on the wall:
he fixed Venice. Will I ever go back there, he wondered, and will I
return with more vices than I went forth with pence? How remote
those days were! The dreams he had had! The attempts in mind to
travel
aux anges
! Was that perhaps a fault, the famous
fall that infamous pride goes before? Original Sin, perhaps, was
related not so much to the feeling that we must die but rather that
we feel we can live too majestically. And what of the
via
negativa
he had once chosen? Poustinia? The Empty Quarter? The
subtle distinguo between loneliness and solitude? The remorse he
began to feel came to suggest he hold himself back, purposely aloof
from everything of implication, at bay in a lifelong quarantine of
imagination —coopted by some unimposing anti-fate neither to write
nor live but, chastened of all impulse, simply to stop.
Nevertheless, he felt resources which buoyed him up in
bewilderment. I could give her up, he felt, if necessary. But I
love her, he thought, I love her so much.

  Across the way, Darconville suddenly heard a
recitation in progress. He leaned forward, looking, to find Miss
Sally Bull Sweetshrub’s four o’clock class—
Great Southern
Writers
—now under way. With her eyeglasses low on her nose,
she was giving a passionate rendition of Maria J. Mclntosh’s poem,
“Frown Not,” as a consolatory prelude to the final exam the girls
were about to take. He went to check the class —Isabel, who should
have been among that number, wasn’t—but, before he left,
sidestepping glum Howlet, who sat doggo by the door, took up a
mimeographed copy of the exam from a stack of them on a chair
outside. He read the following:

        
Great
Southern Writers

  (1.) Confute the charge that Almira Lincoln Phelps’s
“Southern Housekeepers” is narrowly regionalistic. (Be careful. Be
honest.)

  (2.) Develop my view that Emma D. E. N. Southworth’s
Sybil Brotherton, or The Temptation
is “the most perfect
plot in the American novel.” (Illustrate by example.)

  (3.) Identify: a. Samuel Minturn Peck

                 b.
Henry Lynden Flash

                 c.
Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar

                 d.
Sallie Ada Reedy

                 e.
Stringfellow Barr