Darconville's Cat (10 page)

  There was silence.

  “We’re clearer then,” asked Darconville, “on the
meaning of the poem?”

  “It hath to do with the thufferingth and thorrowth
of life.”

  Everybody groaned.

  “I believe that young boy,” came a sudden voluptuous
drawl from near the back of the room, a low magical level of
loveliness which absorbed with a kind of absoluteness any rival
utterance that might have been offered against it, “was just sayin’
the most obvious thing in the whole wide world.”

  It was the kind of female voice that Juvenal
somewhere naughtily describes as having fingers.

  “He was talkin’“—she touched her tongue to her upper
lip— “about love.”

  Most of the girls, in icy silence, stared straight
ahead.

  “I’m sorry,” said Darconville who, although not
taken in—he’d seen her back there at the beginning of class and
almost with amusement had been waiting for her to
speak—nevertheless feigned surprise, “but I can’t seem to find you
here in my roll-book. You are a senior, aren’t you, Miss
Poore?”

  It was too much. Every head in the entire
class—excepting one student’s, whose head was lowered—abruptly
shifted from the teacher to her, the
only
student’s name
he had known! And there she sat, confident and cool, wearing a
nubby placket-front shirt trimmed in beige to match a black velvet
dirndl.

  Then, very slowly, Hypsipyle Poore lifted off her
sunglasses and, with one lingering provocative glance, revealed
eyes as limpid as the pools in Heshbon by the gate of
Bathrabbim—and everyone there could have sworn she winked as with a
cryptic smile she breathed softly, “Well, should I see you after
class?”

  “Love has been mentioned,” said Darconville, who saw
he had a minute or two. “And suffering, as well. The history of
romantic disappointment, I don’t doubt, often does nothing more
than document the schism between Beauty and Truth or, better,
proves that Beauty, when it becomes an end in itself, often yields
no Truth. The simple line, in such cases, had no complexity within
it—there can, of course, never be too much. A knowledge of many
things is possible, it’s been said, but one can never know
everything about one thing, though, sadly, one perhaps tries. The
relationship with a boy or girl you spontaneously took for
perfection-in-beauty but didn’t sequentially know by
examination-in-truth can result in disaster. The implications of
the Ideal? Who can really know? It is the chance one takes when one
falls in love—the discussion of which,” smiled Darconville, “is
perhaps beyond the province of the classroom here, agreed?”

  The girls laughed—and prepared to leave. But
Darconville, alert to the chance, quickly took up his class roll
and began to call attendance.

  “Muriel Ambler”

  “
Here
”

  “Melody Blume”

  “
Here
”

  The students, by turn, acknowledged their names. But
for the suspense it might have been interminable, the list seemed
so long. Here. Here. Here. But which was hers? Was it there?

  “Sheila Mangelwurzel”

  “
Here
”

  “Christie McCarkle”

  A carrot-top put up her hand.

  “Glycera Pentlock”

  “
Over here
”

  “Isabel Rawsthorne”

  A thunderclap!—then a flashing light across his
book. Dazed, almost unconsciously, Darconville called out the
remaining non-names, reflecting on this alone: only love makes the
pain of lifting a shy head a grace. It equally unlocks a silent
throat with the knowledge in the plaintive soul of what must be
done, and so was, in the tender-taken breath he suddenly heard,
soft as a swoon, say: “Present.”

  And sculptured Aphrodite, in loose-flowing alb,
stepping slow and fragile under the loops of dripping ring willows,
puts a finger to her lips, shakes out tearshaped petals from her
flasket, and then holds high her holy lights which silver and
bewitch the common wood where two, long asleep, sweetly wake under
the baldric of a new heaven to blush at the silence, pause, and
faintly hear a goddess whisper in a voice lower than leaf-fall:
“
Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover
tomorrow shall be love
.”

  In short, Isabel Rawsthorne looked up and
smiled.

  XI

  Ghantepleure

  Repetition is the essence of conjuration.

        —St. NEOT OF
AXHOLME

  “ISABEL, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel,
Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.”
Darconville repeated the name into the unintelligibility we call
sleep—and dreamt of desperadoes.

  XII

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  There foamed rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,

  There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the
ground.

        —ALEXANDER POPE,
The Dunciad

  FACULTY MEETINGS are held whenever the need to show
off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing. It
was the case at Quinsy College. There were five every year—a rump
parliament of “educators,” all bunged up with complaints and full
of prefabricated particulars, who sat around on their buns for
several hours trying to correct various problems, whether of school
business or personal bagwash, and to confront problematical
variables, every one of which was always greeted with a salvo of
idle questions, nice distinctions, sophisms, obs and sols, and
last-ditch stratagems. The presiding genius? Brizo, goddess of
sleep. The style? Extemporaneous. The participants? Teachers, who,
like whetstones, would make others cut that could not cut
themselves.

  There were some preliminary matters, first.
President Greatracks, sitting up front like Buddha in a bad mood
with his hands clasped in front of his belly as indifferently as
tweezers, was being presented a gift (an unidentifiable rhomboid of
pewter)—for his “unswerving leadership”—in the name of the senior
class whose metonym, Miss Xystine Chappelle, student body president
and sweetheart-of-the-school, after tweaking the tips of an organdy
the color of an orange fruit-jumble, curtseying, and delivering her
message with cute little eye-rolls, breathlessly concluded:

  “. . . as a class we really couldn’t think of a more
deserving leader. The real meaning of college, hopefully, will
remain with us even when we have to face the reality of the world
after graduation, the realization of which, I realize, is not very
realistic now. Anyway, I’m really proud to bestow this gift in
behalf of all of us who can never thank you enough for helping us
reach our realizable goals.” [
Applause
]

  The agenda was full: it was the first such meeting
of the year, and there was a great deal to do. Swinging his nose,
President Greatracks motioned to her feet his secretary, a blinking
anablept with mis-mated eyes and slingback shoes who read the
minutes from the previous spring and then handed out the updated
“Faculty Profile” booklets, after which Greatracks, his cheeks
puffed out like a Switzer’s breeches, stepped forward on his huge
drawbridge feet and said he wasn’t going to be wordy because where
was the damfool percentage in it? No, his only grouse, he said, was
about the budget. Money, he pointed out, didn’t grow on trees, was
the root of all evil, lost one friends, and
talked
!—too
damned much, he said. This year, he continued—it was prolegomenon
to every faculty meeting—money was going to keep its little mouth
shut, and they could all paste that in their hats, OK? Mr.
Schrecklichkeit, an assistant biology professor with a white squill
of a nose, leaned over to Darconville and snapped, “There goes my
course in Vegetable Staticks, that
son
of a bitch!”

  The meeting, then, was called to order—with several
raps of the gavel by President Greatracks, appearing rather like
the Turk of legend who, ready to drink a bottle of wine, first made
loud noises and screwed out filthy faces to warn his soul of the
foul anti-Koranic act he was about to commit. First, Dean
Barathrum, a born remittance man and author of several out-of-date
arithmetics, introduced the newest members of the faculty. They
were received, Darconville and several others, with eye-watering
yawns. One man was continuously tracing the sweephand of his watch
with his fingers. Another, staring out a window, was actually
sucking his thumb.

  Darconville’s attention, however, had been drawn to
the shiny-paged faculty booklet, alphabetically listing everyone
with photo and credentials. It looked like a medieval bestiary:
skipjacks, groutnolls, hysterical-looking circumferentors, frumps
and filiopietistic longheads, micelings, whipsnades, and many
another whose eyes showed a very short limit of accommodation.
Several had actually taken no college degrees. Others were
part-time evangelists, ex-army colonels, and car salesmen. And the
various titles of their scholarly publications—books, articles,
monographs, etc.—were scarcely believable: “English Nose
Literature”;
Stephen Duck: More Rhyme Than Reason
; “The
American Disgrace: Overabuse of the Verb ‘To Get’“; “Fundavit
Stones in Crozet, Va.”;
Much Ado About Mothing
; “The
Psychopathological Connection Between Liquid Natural Gas and
Agraphia”;
The Story of Windmill Technology
; “The
Significance of Head Motions in Peking Ducks”; “Infusions as
Drinks”; “Abraham Lincoln, Quadroon?” and several other inventions,
thought Darconville, of which necessity was hardly the mother.

  Finally, the Great Consult began. They discussed
tenure procedure. They revised policy on sabbaticals. They
rehearsed, to palsied lengths, curriculum changes,
cross-registration, crises in enrollment. It suddenly became a
great din of objections, fierce denials, and loud peevishness all
expressed in noises like the farting of laurel in flames with
everybody going at it head to head as if they were all trying right
then and there to solve the problem of circular shot, perpetual
motion, and abiogenesis!

  Staring in disbelief, Darconville looked on in a
kind of autoscopic hallucination as each of the faculty members
rose in turn to make a point that never seemed to have an acute
end. It was all queer, makeshift, and unpindownable, for all the
cube-duplicators, angle-trisectors, and circle-squarers seemed to
keep busy avoiding any question that hadn’t sufficient strength to
throw doubt on whatever answer couldn’t have been offered anyway
lest an inefficacious solution only prove to muddle a problem that
couldn’t be raised in the first place. The discussion, rarely
deviating into sense, grew round with resolutions and amendments as
they sacrificed the necessary to acquire the superfluous and did
everything twice by halves, for, like Noah, they had two of
everything—two, it might be said, they didn’t need so much as one
of: two policies, two excuses, two faces and, always, forty-eleven
reasons to prop up both.

  There was, for instance, Miss Shepe the witty, Miss
Ghote the wise —educatresses both, departments sociology and art
education respectively—who fell swiftly to reviewing the college
motto: should it be “We Preach to Teach” or “We Teach to Preach”?—a
rabid grace/ free-will discussion growing out of their sudden but
sustained failure to settle on the primacy of one over the other.
They squared off, adjusting their plackets and glaring into each
other’s pinched and penny-saving faces. “I’m for less grapes and
more fox,” exclaimed Miss Shepe, confusing everybody. Furious, Miss
Ghote—
brekekekekek
!— snapped her pencil in two.

  “So much for your deduction,” said Miss Ghote.

  “I deduce nothing,” sniffed Miss Shepe. “You’ve
simply induced that yourself.”

  “Induced, yes, what you’d implied.”

  “You dare,” snapped Miss Shepe, twisting her
cramp-ring, “you dare infer I’ve implied what you yourself have
induced, Miss Ghote?”

  “Put it this way,” replied Miss Ghote with an
icy-sweet smile, “you’ve only surmised I infer what you’ve implied
I induced—and I do believe your bra strap’s showing.”

  Miss Shepe banged down her heel. “Then you conclude
wrongly, Miss Nothing-in-the-World-Could-Make-Me-Care-Less, that I
surmised you infer what you think I’ve implied you’ve induced!”

  “But you only assume that I conclude wrongly that
you’ve surmised what—”

  “
Elephant balls
!” howled President
Greatracks, the fat in his eyeballs quivering. A group of old
fishfags from the home economics department, dosed to sleep by
their own heavy perfume, immediately woke to clap their mouths in
horror.

  “I’m not certain I heard what he said,” whispered
Miss Swint to someone behind her. It was a faint voice, some
staring ghost suddenly exclaiming upon Rhadamanth. The world to
Miss Swint, piano teacher, her face two subtle shades of oatmeal,
backlit both by a monocle, consisted merely of music, her
collection of wheat-sheaf pennies, and the responsibility of
playing the organ every Sunday at the Presbyterian church, the very
place in which, years ago, she’d long since become convinced that
maidenhead and godhead were indivisible.

  There were soon other matters on the docket:
dining-hall duty, election to committees, chaperon assignments. And
some few raised questions about general reform, and yet while only
a mere fraction of the lot were actually concerned with change—it
was a subject met by children, with reform as the wicked uncle—they
all jumped up like minorités, jurisprudentes, and tub-thumping
Sorbonnists to debate it, all reinforcing the “yo-he-ho”
protoglottological theory that words initially began as shouts. No
aspect was overlooked, no fine point ignored, no issue diminished.
It was complete havoc once again as they stood in coalition or
squatted in caucus, breaking down every proposition like
reformational hairsplitters into partitions, sections, members,
subsections, submembral sections, submembral subsections and
denouncing each other with mouthfuls of rhetoric warped by
quiddling, diddling, and undistributed middling. One third believed
what another third invented what the other third laughed at. Quid
the Cynic argued with Suction the Epicurean, Suction the Epicurean
argued with Sipsop the Pythagorean, Sipsop the Pythagorean argued
with Quid the Cynic, and the whole afternoon dwindled away with one
saving at the spigot and another letting out at the bunghole.