Darconville's Cat (18 page)

  The girls stopped in their tracks. And just before
they went to their respective rooms, sent down like insubordinate
nuns to their low crypts to meditate punitively on their sins among
the bones of their predecessors, they turned.

  “Who?”

  “
Come
on!” prodded Celeste Skyler, she of
the porpentine head.

  “Yeah, who?”

  Tenders, in a pause, for all? Tenders, in a pause,
accepted.

  “
Darconville
.”

  There was, for the first time that evening perhaps,
universal agreement, and, although laughing, they fluked Donna
Wynkoop mercilessly and told her not to hold her breath. She wasn’t
alone. Charlotte Bodwell, a junior psych major, for instance, sat
outside of his office all day every day! Sabrina Halliburton over
in Truesleeve, they all knew, claimed that he had asked her out
twice. And Brenda Workitt supposedly told her whole sorority right
out that she’d like to cover his whole body with honey and lick it
off!

  “I’d use hot fudge.”

  “I’d use syllabub,” said Robin Winglet, who majored
in home economics.

  “And what about that person-thing over in
Fitts—what’s-her-face with the long hair?”

  “The girl with the fat legs.”

  Nobody knew her name. But the better to hear, they
all moved closer, coming together not to praise but to bury. She
couldn’t
live in Fitts. That meant she was—

  “
A freshman
?”

  The cats perked their ears, ear-trumpeting in the
direction of whatever noise anyone wanted to make. Beautiful
Hypsipyle Poore, alone of all the others, didn’t say a word. She
simply sat there, silent, touching up her lips with a bullet of
cherry-frost lipstick. Hypsipyle, of course, made it an art. Before
putting on the lipstick, for instance, she blotted her lips with a
tissue, powdered lightly, then used a lip pencil along the natural
contours of her lips, and finally with a lipstick of a similar
color filled in the lip area—exactly! But she was listening all the
while, listening harder than usual, for Darconville and Isabel
Rawsthorne—especially to those who gave attention to such things—
had not gone unnoticed. They had been seen together more than once,
constituting a thousand times. Eyebrows, questions, had been
raised. And the gossip raced,
ab hoc et ab hac et ab illa
.
. . .

  “Well, y’all can go run around the hoo-hum-hah,”
moued lovely, spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis, “because I’m invitin’
that boy to my recital next week and—”

  “And, you watch, he won’t
come
,” challenged
Mona Lisa Drake, laughing and golfing Pengwynne on the knee. The
girls all agreed and, with their pillows under their arms, turned
to leave.

  “Wait,” ordered Hypsipyle Poore, suddenly breaking
her long silence and turning her flashing black eyes upon lovely,
spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis. “Shall I tell you why he won’t
come?”

  The silence was deafening. Everybody turned to
her.

  “Well,” questioned Pengwynne, closing her eyes
haughtily, “why?”

  Hypsipyle Poore put off her mask of burning
gold.

  “Because, honeychile,” said she, harder than usual,
“you look like
batshit
!”

  And, unsettled, Hypsipyle kicked everybody out of
the room, crawled into bed, and snapped off the light—harder than
usual.

  XXIII

  A Promise Fulfilled

  It can not be, nor ever yet hath beene

  That fire should burne, with perfect heate and
flame,

  Without some matter for to yeeld the same.

        —EDWARD DYER

  THERE WAS TIME during the suitable interval of
Finals Week for Darconville to write out the promised poem for
Isabel. It went as follows:

  Love, O what if in my dreaming wild

    I could for you another world
arrange

  Not known before, by waking undefiled,

    Daring out of common sleep adventure
strange

  And shape immortal joy of mortal pain?

    Art resembles that, you know—the kind of
dare

  Nestorians of old acknowledged vain:

    ”No, what human is, godhead cannot
share!”

  But what if in this other world you grieve,

    Undone by what in glory is too
bright,

  Remembering of humankind you leave

    That which pleased you of earthly
delight?

  Out then on art! I’ll sleep but to wake—

    Never to dream if never for your
sake.

  That night he ran over to the student union, slipped
it into her mailbox—number 120—and walked home delighted with
himself.

  XXIV

  Giacomo-lo-Squarciatore

  It is the nature of women to be fond of carrying
weights.

        —FRANCIS
GALTON

  THE TELEPHONE CALL seemed urgent: some student named
Betsy, the unromantic praenomen matching her disposition, asking if
Darconville minded very much giving her and her girlfriends some
advice, so would he? It was a voice of shrill little bleats warring
against, but intervenient with, the background noise of a dormitory
corridor that sounded like Mafeking. Sitting in his office,
Darconville could almost see her, squinched over, one ear plugged
with a finger, nervously rubbing her left instep against the
gastrocnemius of her right calf: she was in a dither. The girls at
Quinsy College had hearts like chocolate bars, scored to break
easily. Come ahead, said Darconville, come over.

  So Darconville waited for them long after his
classes had ended, his feet propped up on his desk. He was reading
an old novel from his grandmother’s
library—
Giacomo-lo-Squarciatore
(1888)—to pass the
time.

  “We’re ripping mad!” puffed Betsy Stride, breathless
from the stairs, appearing in the doorway like a rising moon. She
turned out to be one of his sophomores, a pompion-shaped grouchbag
in a brown dress A-lined and middle-kneed who, in happier moods,
was given to entertaining her girlfriends in the back row of
Darconville’s class by ingeniously shooting elastic bands from the
braces on her teeth. And then she motioned in four others—a group
Darconville had seen together more than once slouching around
campus like walking morts— who, obviously whelped together on a
mission, one, Darconville saw, that would soon be his, stood before
the desk. It looked as if they were going to group-step, kick, and
burst into a Victorian music-hall number.

  “Tell him, go ahead.”

  Betsy judiciously castled two of her friends and
moved a pawn forward with an impatient shove.

  “It’s all right,” exclaimed Betsy, “tell him what
happened. Well, aren’t you going to tell him?
Mary
Jane
?”

  They made a perfect quincunx, all standing in place,
with faces like apostle spoons, all deferring to each other as to
who should present their petition, for it was clearly one of those
irredentist ventures to restore a right or rectify a wrong,
something invariably to do with library privileges, curfew
extension, or some breach of the student moral code which at Quinsy
was stricter than the Rites of Vesta. Darconville, now six months
into the year, was becoming familiar with it all. The girls, most
of them, actually worried about these rules, an anxiety, in fact,
that over the year caused a good many of them to become overweight,
and not a few who had come in September as thinifers would leave
hopeless fattypuffs in June. The starchy comestibles in the Quinsy
refectory, however, better construed to account for the condition
of Betsy Stride, a girl so fat that were she wearing a white dress
one could have shown a home-movie on her. Briefly, she had a
beef—and, again, poked Mary Jane in the ribs.

  “Well, I was studyin’ real late over at Smethwick
last night,” began Mary Jane Kelly, shifting feet, “working on my
project on shade-pulls. You know? Anyway, I—”

  Darconville blinked.

  “Shade-pulls?”

  “My term paper. For Dr. Speetles’ education course.
‘The Effect of Insufficiently Pulled Shades in Classrooms on
4th-Grade Underachievers.’ “

  “Continue.”

  “I finished up for the night, see, and started
walking back to my room—”

  “Alone,” Betsy reminded her.

  “Alone,” agreed her friend.

  “
All
alone.”

  “Yes,” sighed Mary Jane, “
all
alone. I was
right tired, I guess, and” —she shrugged—”I don’t know, maybe I
just imagined the whole thing.”

  “You didn’t,” sniffed Betsy, shifting and looking
away hurt as if suddenly betrayed.

  Darconville looked at his watch. “And you saw a
man,” he said, “following you.”

  The girls all looked amazed, confirmed in their
fears but astounded at the sudden conjecture: how did
he
know? This was a constant: the fumblingly speculative association
in girls’ schools of any mysterious or unexplained mis-illumination
with some foul and forbidden chthonian, male of course, wreaking
havoc among them, and any apparition, whatever the circumstance,
desperately cried out for immediate rehearsal, redressai, and
report.

  “Did he,” asked Darconville, “touch you?”

  “No, not exactly. But, um, he shone a”—she made a
gesture—”a thing at me.”

  “A thing?” asked Darconville, as the three girls who
hadn’t yet spoken grabbed their mouths, snorting back laughter. It
was the vaguest word in the language and so the most deceptive.
“What do you mean, a
thing
?”

  “It was a flashlight!” cried Betsy Stride, barging
forward with a hieratic hip-roll. “And he held it up to this real
creepy face, like he was mental or something!” She looked
desperately around. “It’s really great, huh, the protection we
have? What are they waiting for, for cry-eye, a bunch,” she said, a
trifle optimistically, “of undecent rapings? We want more lights on
campus!”

  Strange, thought Darconville. How many tragedies in
this chiaroscuro world were related precisely to that: light when
it was needed, darkness when it wasn’t; darkness when it was
needed, light when it wasn’t. The same gardens that grow digitalis
for heart patients also grow the devil’s oatmeal. Vinegar is the
corpse of wine. Thus spake Zarathustra.

  “Well,” confessed Mary Jane Kelly in a near-whisper,
“he didn’t actually hold it up to his
face
.”

  Betsy Stride covered her eyes. “O my God.”

  “It’s just that passing that spooky glade by the old
tennis courts I saw a foot behind a tree. It had a sneaker on it.
Not the tree,” clarified Mary Jane, “the foot.” The three girls,
giggling, were pinching their noses to stop. “And then, I swear, it
moved. Not the foot—”

  Bursting, the three girls quickly turned around and
exploded in laughter.

  “The tree?”

  “Well, see, I saw two eyes peering out by a branch,
sideways, like they was—I don’t know,
burning
or
something! So I started to run and
he
started to run.”

  “And to scream, right?” interjected Betsy. “Tell
him,
tell
him!”

  “He screamed? What did he scream?” asked
Darconville. He prompted her, ready to hear the fiercest Asiatic
curses, the vilest obscenities.

  Mary Jane Kelly hesitated, surveying her feet, and
then, resigned, put her hands to her mouth and tried as best she
could to mimic in two hoots the
tuba horribilis
she’d
heard with such alarm the previous night: “
Socialists!
Socialists
!”

  The three girls, doubled over and quacking, had gone
purple.

  There may indeed have been a lunatic running amok on
campus, or possibly a prankster, no one could say—although the
reign of terror, it might be said, had in fact coincidentally taken
place with the letting out of a Chekhov dress rehearsal for which a
number of girls, to comply with the wishes of Miss Throwswitch, had
been required to wear fake beards.

  The fat, however, was in the fire. Betsy Stride,
flashing her metal teeth, told Darconville that Marsha D’amboni
almost got blackjacked a month ago, that Weesie Ralph found a man
standing once in her gym closet
bare as a baby
, and that
Shirley Newbegin once got whistled at by coloreds! And who cared?
Xystine Chappelle, the wimp? Dean Barathrum? President Greatracks
who kicked them out of his office and called them “pee-oons”?

  With lampoon-lit eyes, Darconville promised he’d
mention it all to Someone Important and, asking for their names,
slipped them a piece of paper. One of the girls sorted through her
handbag, clumping on the desk pretzels, lip-balm, five jawbreakers,
a ring of keys, a penny-in-an-aluminum-horseshoe, and a snap-wallet
thick as a fist, and shook out a molar-dented pen. They all signed
their names:

        Mary Ann
Nichols

        Annie
Chapman

        Elizabeth
Stride

        Catherine
Eddowes

        Mary Jane
Kelly

  Profuse in their thanks, one of the girls pushed
back a twist of flocky hair and quickly kissed Darconville on the
cheek.

  At that very moment, Isabel Rawsthorne appeared at
the office door. It had become her habit, often, to stop by with
something, a bag of candy, a box of exotic tea, and if Darconville
happened to be busy she usually left a whimsical little note in
that delicate spidery penmanship of hers, always signed “The Little
Thing.” But on this occasion when he looked up—she was wearing,
typically, a half-length fur coat, pink hush-puppies, and jeans
with three mushrooms (multi-colored) sewn over the left knee—he saw
only two sad basset eyes. “Oh, excuse me,” she said with a face
like sudden night—then disappeared.