Darconville's Cat (12 page)

  “You perhaps know my work?”

  She was looking at Darconville with her eyes shut,
her lavender gloves buttoned shut and crossed immaculately in her
lap.

  “Possibly. Could you name—?”

  “My novels? Let me see. My first was
Answer Came
There None
, then, respectively,
I, a Stranger
;
Also but Not Yet the Wombat Cries
;
The Big
Regret
;
The Interrupted Woman
;
The Same, Only
Different
; and
The Black Duchess
.” It was the genre
of course of Hoodoo, Hackwork, and Hyperesthesia, the popular
dustjacket for which always showed a crumbling old
mansion-by-moonlight and a frightened beauty in gossamer standing
before it, tresses down, never knowing which way to turn.

  Darconville, listening in spite of himself, was
trying to repress an image of the prattling angel, Glossopetra, who
reputedly had fallen from heaven to spend his eternal punishment
wagging like a human tongue.

  “There was a volume of my early verse,
Naps Upon
Parnassus
. I followed that,” continued Miss Sweetshrub, “with
a critical work on Robert Browning called
The Snail on the
Thorn
.” Miss Throwswitch, standing behind her, periscoped two
little fingers over her head and wiggled them, while Mr.
Schrecklichkeit and Qwert Yui Op smiled into their sleeves.

  “Mmmmm,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, breathing her hum back
in, a sound more of fatigue than recognition.

  “Thankfully nothing on Abraham Lincoln!” piped in
Mrs. DeCrow, making a loud transition to the powder room.

  Miss Sweetshrub chastely crossed her legs. “My most
widely reviewed book? Difficult to say. I guess I’d have to say it
was my
Tlot! Tlot! The Biography of Alfred Noyes
.”

  “My,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, hooing low but wisely,
like Minerva’s owl, “you’ve sure written a lot.”

  “Permit me? A lot is a parcel of land. I have
written”—she drew her little finger fastidiously across her
eyebrow—”much.” Then she smiled around sweetly at everyone,
especially Prof. Wratschewe whose approval was never in doubt if
the handful of tiny white valentine candies (inscribed “Skidoo,”
“Be Mine,” “Kiss Me,” etc.) he solicitously extended to her meant
anything. For eleven years there had run the possibly not unfounded
rumor they’d be married any weekend now—who knew, perhaps the
five-hundred-and-seventy-third would be it?

  “Good grief,” cried Prof. Wratschewe over his
pocket-watch. “It’s late—and I’ve a lecture to prepare this
weekend.”

  “Weekends few,” sighed Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub,
recrossing her hands and anticipating, perhaps, only the title of
another novel she’d one day write, one she saw somewhat wistfully
that there’d be plenty of time for as she sat there silently, as if
straining to hear the celesta of wedding bells she felt could now
peal only across the landscape of her fiction.

  And so it went.

  The last rays of the afternoon sun brought a feeble
light through the meeting-room, and Darconville, heading toward the
doorway, found a last group of teachers to meet. He was introduced
to Miss Ballhatchet, a muscular valkyrie from the physical ed
department; Dr. Excipuliform, a history professor with afflicted
eyes and a Transylvanian hop in his speech who despised the
left-wing American press (“Intellectschultz! Velfare! Gummonism!
Rewolt! Neekroes!”); cheery Miss Skait, from physics, who, immune
to paradox, bouncingly assured him that Quinsy College was actually
one big family; the Weerds—Aldo and Dodo—a young Pekinese-faced
couple in the English department who spoke only to each other, wore
rucksacks, and had occasional bouts of
purpura
haemorrhagica
which they insisted on calling poetry; a
six-foot maliarda named Miss Porchmouth, chemistry, who had a
handshake that felt like pebbledash-siding; a certain Mr.
Bischthumb, head of anthropology, who, tucking into an enormous
piece of cake, bit off half the doily which got stuck in his
weasand—and, wheezing tearfully, had to be raised by four men and
lifted out of the room kicking skyward cataleptically in one of the
most indecent postures Darconville had ever seen.

  There were others. Darconville met Mr. Thimm,
government department, who told him, several times, about his
wife’s egg-in-the-armpit deformity; Drs. Knipperdoling and Pindle,
two sententious ballachers from economic geography, who in a little
vaudeville skit of theirs constantly pitched back and forth various
adages and truisms about life, invariably beginning, “Well, I’ve
learned one thing from the rough-and-tumble . . .” or “Now, I’ve
been shinnying up this old stick for forty some odd years, and . .
.”; and, finally, Dr. Speetles from the general education
department, an anti-intellectual gepid who claimed the study of
Skakespeare to be completely worthless, preferring instead the
applied sciences and confessing wittily, “I teach all my classes,
see, using only a toy fire-engine. It’s a multi-concept factor, you
know? With this as a point of departure,” he said, sucking a
candy-spangle from his thumb, “I can teach sociology, government,
civics, visual and environmental studies—hell, you
name
it.” He tapped the side of his nose and nudged Darconville, who at
that point was seriously on the brink of calling upon the angel,
Hodniel, who supposedly had the power of curing stupidity in men.
Instead, he put on his coat.

  Walking out, one of the unaligneds of the faculty
who may have stood, perhaps, for the several Darconville hadn’t yet
managed to meet, confided to him, “You know, when ol’ Greatracks
bangs down the gavel in these meetings and says, ‘Begin!’ well, I
always think, shoot, that’s about the longest word in the damn
books—and ain’t
that
the truth.”

  The thought hadn’t been uttered a second when Prof.
Wratschewe, grammarian, suddenly jumping-jacked out of nowhere and
said, “Actually, I think you’ll find that the longest word found in
literature, Aristophanic in origin, is:
Lopadotemachoselacogaleokranioleipsano-drimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossypho-phattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoisiraiobaphetrago-nopterygn
.”

  Somehow, it summed up the day.

  XIII

  A Lethiferous Letter

  And, behold, there came a great wind from the
wilderness.

        —Job 1:19

  Dear President Greatracks,

  I feel I have made a mistake in coming to teach at
Quinsy College. My intention here is not to sit in judgment, but
your failure in my opinion to recognize the true ends of academic
life—a circumstance I can’t yet believe you are disinclined to
preserve—raises questions less to the extent than to the source of
the trouble, and since I shall be foolish in saying more to this
purpose, while trusting you to understand, may I trust with more
reason to ask pardon for these remarks? We seem to have lost our
way, becoming righteous rather than virtuous, rigid in form but lax
in substance, and, not secondary but rather accessory to the
urgency of my decision, reconciled to the old idea that vision is
perilous where vision is profound, a fact leading not only to a
singular want of refinement but to the kind of fatal ignorance,
excusable only where it cannot be overcome, that has put us at
variance with ourselves and advanced the cause of various
griffon-like promoters and apparitors on the faculty whose names I
would in all places esteem it an honor openly to abhor.

  I have been forced by deliberation, therefore, to
weigh advantage against loss in a matter touching not only my
students and myself but also a book I am presently under obligation
to complete, whence I here mean by conscience to advise you that,
upon the firm setting of this persuasion, I believe it my duty to
resign—

  Thinking of Isabel, however, Darconville
reconsidered and, running his great black pen over the words,
registered a rainbow over the Universal Deluge.

  XIV

  The Witchery of Archery

  All myths are attempts to explain contradictions in
nature.

        —CLAUDE
LEVI-STRAUSS

  “FIRE!” cried Miss Ballhatchet, the
forty-nine-year-old physical education teacher—her body, in the
vintner’s phrase, orotund—and she waved her arms, megaphoning her
way in a ballooning duck gym-suit through the front line of
cherry-cheeked freshmen, their bows at the ready. Suddenly, she
blew her whistle in a flutter of angry pips. “
Wait
!”

  “Must I repeat? The cock feather,” she fumed, her
muscles tense, “must be at
right
angles to the nock and
away from the bow! Miss Moss here must have thought I said left
angles.” She glowered at Trinley Moss and pointed. “Is this what
you mean by a left angle, or what?” The girl’s bow was canted
ridiculously.

  “Your bow is canted ridiculously.”

  Miss Moss murmured.

  Miss Ballhatchet again blew her whistle and closed
her eyes. It had been broiling on the archery field earlier but the
day had darkened by afternoon, a pewter-like sky settling in with
full clouds. “Now, remember, a bow fully drawn is seven-eighths
broken, hear?” She pointed, nose to nose, down the line. “This is a
sport, I shouldn’t have to remind you, in which women have
excelled—far better,” she snorted, “than men—for thousands of
years, so shall we let up now, tell me? Well, we won’t, pure and
simple.” She blew her whistle. “OK, go for your golds. Position!
Aim! Draw!”—and, pausing dramatically, she pointed like a
bellwether to the ten old targets (the broom-corn stuffing in each
bulging out of the rips) which rose at one end of the long sward
expanse like striped comic moons and boomed, “Fire!”

  Snap! Twing! Whirr! And to squeaks and squawks a
sluice of twenty or so arrows—apterous some, most snapping off in
slices and hooks—were released, heftily, in a fluttering of
novice-like bowshots. No more than two or three hit the targets.
Some flew sideways. Several twirled right around the bowstrings.
And one deposited in a lateral whistle not four inches from Miss
Ballhatchet’s manfully emplanted feet, whereupon, almost swallowing
her whistle, she hopfrogged up with a piglike squeal.

  “Beautiful!” she barked. “Oh, just beautiful!”

  Each girl, her six shot, trooped out after her spent
arrows, all of them waddling like dabchicks, stooping, wading
around, hopping. The successful few dawdled at the targets,
delaying the sweet necessity, for the benefit of all the others,
and notably Miss Ballhatchet, of unplugging their shafts from the
blue treble bed or the near-perfect red.

  The archery class was almost finished, the grey
light creeping slowly toward the west. A few more clouds bulled up
in the northern sky, darkening, making it cooler.

  From a distant knoll at the verge of the field,
having strolled over after his classes, Darconville sat and watched
the girls at play, trying at the same time to finish writing a
letter, a deposition to the Venetian court, at least his tenth, in
reply to various interrogatories touching on the litigation of his
grandmother’s palazzo. It felt good to be outside. He hummed
quietly, content in his solitude. The ritual across the archery
field, a kind of dumb-show being acted out wordlessly, he
sporadically studied: especially hirsute Miss Ballhatchet marching
amphitheatrically to and fro, like Lady Paramount, waving her
special self-nocked lemonwood bow and bellowing outraged but
indistinguishable commands that reverberated off the dormitory wall
of Clitheroe and shook out croaks of crows. A thought, with one of
them, flew across Darconville’s head:
onto a shaft the bird’s
own feathers are grafted as fletches, and what must that bird think
whose own quills, shafted and sped, strike it a fatal wound in
mid-sky
?

  The lesson down on the field continued. Miss
Ballhatchet explained the technicalities of the Sioux Draw, the
Mongolian Draw, the Pinch Draw. She fiddled out a timberhitch,
dissertated on fletching glues, distinguished between various bow
woods, and finally showed how to wax a string correctly, at which
point—her breasts walloping up and down to the vigorous action—she
told the girls they had damned well better stop laughing, stop
immediately, she didn’t mean maybe, or someone was going to find
herself with a fat lip, did they understand? —good!

  “Now together,” clapped fit Miss Ballhatchet, “which
eye do we sight with?” She placed her hand to her ear.

  They shouted in unison: “
The right
!”

  “And on which side of the bow is the arrow
placed?”

  “
The left
!”

  So. Miss Ballhatchet marched down the landskip,
turned, and blew her whistle; came the bellowed orders: “Position!
Aim! Draw! Loose!—
Loose, for godsakes
!” But it was of a
sudden a mis-exploded fireworks of tackle, shaft, feathers, and
bows. Elsie Magoun overdrew. Martha Van Ramm didn’t anchor and
wobbled her arrow. Twosie Kelter closed her right eye instead of
her left and then looked up, at the cost of a bulbous thumb, too
soon. Sheila Mangelwurzel’s shooting tab flew off. Grace Lerp’s
nose wasn’t touching the string, her arrow spinning off like a
pinwheel. One girl’s string—it was Bertha Tinkle— unlooped from the
nock, and she sprang forward onto her head, tripping in a ricochet
over her ground-quiver to a burst of laughter and, clattering her
arrows, just missing a fatal impalement on one of the several
parallel-pile target points sticking up. Sarah Lou Huckpath, never
very bright, moronically jerked out her bow with a bending-load of
such vengeance that it immediately went
crackkk
!—and she
just stood there, bewildered, holding it up like a poorly yerked
wishbone. And fat little Millette Snipes, her abundant forearm
unable to accommodate the conventional leather arm-guard, missed by
seconds Miss Ballhatchet’s initially sage, but belated, howl—”You,
your arm is kinked too far into the arrow!”—screamed, bent over
double (no mean feat in itself), and then zigzagged off the field
with her mouth open and a flaming welt on her inner arm the shape
of a nasty smile.