Darconville's Cat (87 page)
procuresses,
—from Queen Draga of Serbia,
the
belly-bumper,
—from Eriphilem, the callat of boundless
tongue,
—from Mother Waterhouse the Spaewife,
—from Blouzelinda, the princess
of
pillicocks,
—from Dame Hulda and her apparitions,
—from Jeannie Alexander, the wheezing
arrhenopiper,
—from Circe, the chaterestre, the chevese,
the
chydester,
—from Locusta, poisoner
of the Roman
court,
—from Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera,
the
fustilarians,
—from Gnathenion, who pillaged poets’
pockets,
—from Isabel Rawsthorne, than whom none
here is more
loathsome. . .”
The window had grown almost dark in the dusk, the
faintest twilight throwing lengthening shadows across the unlit
room. As he heard her name, profaned so familiarly in the mouth of
this huge creature built like an oversized marabout, Darconville
lost his heart in a downrush of total despair and he looked away,
tears now running down his cheeks.
“—from Clepsydra and her hourglass,
libera nos,
Domine
—from Mother Shipton of
Knaresborough,
—from Beatrice Ambient, the dewclaw,
—from Umm al Samim, mother of poison,
—from Mephitis, goddess of sulphur,
—from Juno whose clitoris was
a
thunderbolt,
—from Phaedra, the shameless sot,
—from Rhea and her midget dactyls,
—from Madame Box, the ranting meretrix,
—from Phyllis Grewsome, the
Washington
protopopsha
,
—from Bathsheba, druggard and drazel,
—from Queen Tomyris, the beheading
kite,
—from Catherine de Medici, the
monstriferous
matelot,
—from Eudoxia and her equipolances,
—from the Baroness Klara Ungnad,
weenie-trundler,
—from Maidhdeanbuain and her
superstitions,
—from Rapunzel the rampish-hearted,
—from Charlotte Corday, hysterical
virgin,
—from Baubo the Bawdstrot and her girls
whom none call
maidens,
—from Januatica and her horrible old
sempiternal
trots,
—from all the Little Pops of Hoggland,
—from Empress Theodora, harlot queen
of
Byzantium,
—from Mariamne, the dawkin for a dolt,
—from Belides, the dragonian doxy,
—from Actoria Paula, peripole
and
paranymph,
—from Hiberina, the bottomless well,
—from Grognon, the ill-willed
Stiefmutter
,
—from Catherine Bora, the lutheran duck,
—from Penthisilea, the Amazonian bunt,
—from Eryphile, the low betrayer,
—from the Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi
of Imperial
China, the Scourge of
God,
—from Thais, the trugmullion of
Alexander the
Great,
—from Lady Bertalda and her lavenders
and
leaping-housewives,
—from Typhaon the tallywoman,
—from Guinevere, the spiteful solicitrix,
—from the seductress Phrynne and all
pamels
everywhere who march by
two and
three,
—from Pheretrina, the crudest of
connivers,
—from Fulvia and Arsinoë, bumfondlers,
—from Sofya Andreyevna Bers, who
stole toys,
—from Pythionice the pallaptern,
—from Jennyanydots and her Gumbie cats,
—from Barbara Muehleck Kepler,
the left-handed
jilt,
—from Clorinda, the chattel of sullen
memory,
—from Ulin, the false enchantress,
—from the Grandmother of Ghosts and
her woolen
effigies,
—from the Princess Papulie with plenty
papaya,
—from Cytheris, the jade prophet,
—from Miss Emily Faithful, man-hating
amazon,
—from the Weird Sisters and their
wheyfaced
wirepulling,
—from Anteia the inallegiant,
—from Madame Arcadina, pinnace
and
pythoness,
—from Princess Sumru of Sirdhana,
the sunck, who
smoked her hookah
over the graves
of men buried alive,
—from Solange Dudevant, the deywife,
—from Olympias, the Greek hen,
—from Semiramis the Assyrian punk,
—from Hypatia, pagan philosophress,
—from Fiametta, bastard of the King
of Naples,
—from Dian L. Rotbun, hedonomaniac,
—from Ge Panmeter and all the whorage
of wifkin,
—from Marie Duplessis de Camellias,
la baiseuse,
la chouquette, la
gisquette,
la gonzesse, la punaise, la
travailleuse,
la racoleuse, la caliche,
la pétasse,
la poufiasse
.”
Dr. Crucifer in one move shut off the phonograph
and, caracoling belly-forward, countermarched to the bed with the
mouth of a bell and the heart of hell and the head of a gallows
tree, but the day of toil for Darconville, his ashen eyes no longer
staring into space, had fortunately ended several minutes before
when with an inexplicable stabbing in the lungs from a last indrawn
breath he passed the threshold of pain now into a deep coma.
LXXXIII
Gone for a Burton
When I loved you and you loved me,
You were the sky, the sea, the tree;
Now skies are skies, and seas are seas,
And trees are brown and they are trees.
—CHARLES A.
WAGNER
STILLMAN INFIRMARY was white and antiseptic, the
room on the seventh floor nothing more than a table, a chair, and a
high wheel-footed bed. There was no flourish of architecture, no
ornament, only chrome, silence, and a monotony of windows. Doors,
opening, shut. Lights, coming on, went out. There was no sky beyond
the window. The view, looking westward, was too high for one to see
the trees.
The doctors had been worried. They might have lost
him, they said, charging Darconville where he lay, forfoughten,
with contributory negligence not only for excessive smoking but for
an acute tension due to some kind of overexertion or apprehension
he’d ignored. Where had he been this past week? And how long had he
gone without food? The quick hard pulse and convulsive motions had
frightened them, along with the obvious weight loss, dyspnea even
at rest, and the labored use of accessory muscles for respiration;
his chest was hyper-resonant to percussion. He had to lean forward,
while sitting, to brace himself. An inept intern, searching for a
cardiac murmur (known only to himself), had initially forced him
through a valsalva maneuver: the sudden stabbing pain was so severe
that Darconville became hypoxic and, past his limitation, fell into
hypotensive shock. The intern quickly called an emergency code.
Several resident doctors ran in and gave him a saline
infusion—wide-open—of 1500 cc’s over three hours. They found a
bounding right ventricular pulse in the chest beneath the sternum
and the sound of wet rattling rhonci on the right but, more
ominously, on the left side of the lung only a seashell hollowness.
There followed prolonged expiration through pursed lips, profuse
sweating, and flailing movements in the chest. An emergency X ray
revealed scattered lucencies throughout the lung fields, and now
they knew what they had—a congenital condition of bullous
emphysema, with an episode of spontaneous pneumothorax.
It called for immediate intervention: one or several
bullae had ruptured, causing air, leaking from one lung, to rush
into the chest and being trapped there to increase the pressure
from
outside
the lung to collapse it. The harder he tried
to breathe, the more the lung collapsed. Quickly, the doctors
punched a hole in the chest wall and through the ribs inserted a
tube attached to a Gomco machine to suck out air in order to
reinflate the collapsing lung, prevent it from closing down, and
allow scarring to seal the rupture.
Darconville spent several days on a respirator while
being fed intravenously, and his pulmonary competence was restored
to a fragile but stable state. No visitors were allowed—not black
lameth; not Hasmed, angel of annihilation; not Af, ruler over the
death of mortals. He slept fitfully. When he awoke, the sweat had
stenciled his hair to his forehead and his head rocked with
conflicting swing and spin, a relentless hammering between the eyes
as if, with importunate questions, someone to solve justice yet not
knowing how desperately sought release to find and punish the
criminal who belonged there instead. He had almost gone for a
burton—he didn’t care, for it was better to die than live some
death too bitter to fear—but he was still alive. He remembered
nothing of how he got there, but for all he knew the university had
already issued a writ
de lunatico inquirendo
, scheduled as
he was, before a week was out, to undergo a required bit of zoopery
with a psychiatrist.
“It would of course be taken as healthier—more
normal—for you to hate her,” the psychiatrist muttered, sitting
back and meditatively circling his foot. It was absurd: hate
Isabel? Darconville loved her. He wouldn’t say it again. But he
wouldn’t pray for it anymore, either, for God now seemed to him the
refuge to whom men only turned to avoid any homage to their
neighbor. And then how did Christ expect us to love as we were
bidden to do in this life when the very chance for it was taken
away? The heavens? No, to seek solutions there—whether of a crime,
or a code, or a criss-cross puzzle—was to have your questions not
solved but dissolved. To solve it all, on the other hand, he was
nevertheless determined (he simply didn’t know how!) for love was
somehow
inside
him, giving him no rest; it was not a
pursuit to which he could turn his attention or not as he chose. In
any case, she had promised she’d send him an explanation, hadn’t
she?—he would wait for it, then. It would help. It must help.
There must be more to love than death, thought
Darconville during those long empty days, feeling he wanted only to
find something he needed or needed to find something he wanted-—to
step on the moon and say, to the cagastric night, “Be day!” No,
something would come that would save him from hate, and if it
wasn’t death it had to be love, didn’t it?
Darconville told the psychiatrist he missed his cat.
Yes, that’s right, his cat—because he believed, as he said, that we
partially died, all of us, through sympathy at the death or
disappearance of each of our friends; memories, even if one wished
it,
couldn’t
be forgotten. It became a thought that
literally upon the thinking brought an ache to his wounded lung,
compressing his chest. (Secretly, he began to take the benperidol.)
He asked the psychiatrist, describing him, if by any chance he had
ever seen Spellvexit. He badgered him to make inquiries. And
repeatedly he begged him if he would telephone Isabel on his
behalf. Would he? Why wouldn’t he? But there was no reply, the foot
merely continuing meditatively to circle, now this way, now the
other. It must have been a Saturday, at one such session, when
Darconville strained across the bed to peer down at the street: the
distant marching music, attracting him, was that of the Harvard
band escorting a football crowd through the streets below. They all
looked so happy, the boys in topcoats and flannels hugging blankets
in one hand and beautiful slender girls in crimson tarns and
scarves waving fishtail-pennants in the other, all of them limber,
alive, in the bright sword-cold October air and kicking through
autumn leaves toward the grey arcade of the stadium across the
river. It made Darconville feel more isolated than ever. Would he
telephone, please? Would he call? No, decided the psychiatrist, he
must simply learn to forget her; he was worried: the largest number
of inmates in bedlam, he pointed out, were people, unresigned to
it, who’d been rejected in love. The psychiatrist, however, asked
what
he
was going to do, lest he end up among them.
(Instantly, Darconville felt an overwhelming compulsion to write a
book in defense of them all. I wonder why? he thought.
I
?
Perhaps, he thought, there isn’t an I at all and we’re simply the
means of expression of something else.
Wonder
? What is
wonder but the imagination seeking what it hasn’t.
Why
? Y:
the past tense of antique verbs resurrected to predicate present
behavior.) His reply was that he was waiting—Isabel was going to
send an explanation. But the psychiatrist frowned and continued to
express concern, remarking again on the curious absence of a normal
heteropathic symptom of improvement: relief by rage. Why did he not
hate her? Then Darconville turned to him, not with rebuke, not with
ridicule, neither with irony nor sarcasm, but rather with the kind
of childlike and simple-hearted ingenuousness that suddenly lit up
his eyes with innocence as he softly asked, “Do you think she’d
believe I loved her then?”
The days passed. Morning brought emptiness, ink
flooded the sky beyond the window, and night crept in again,
earlier and earlier now, the cold winds outside crying and sobbing
like a child in a chimney and blowing out the faraway lights of
Boston one by one. Visitors were still prohibited him. Late one
night, however, Darconville was awakened when the door of his room,
gradually opening, sent a diagonal fan of light across the bed. He
sat up quickly and clicked on the lamp. There stood Lampblack of
all people—alone—gesturing nervously with a handful of mail he
dropped on the bed just before he rushed out. The largest piece,
postmarked New York, was an official-looking manila envelope.
Darconville slit it open, and an angry blush suddenly filled his
head as with a sinking heart he saw what he held in his hands—a
photograph of a blond fellow in a naval uniform, the subject’s rank
and identification below. It was Gilbert van der Slang,
himself.
