Darconville's Cat (20 page)

  
N.B
. Wrong. The photograph compendiates a
rapprochement
of note. She leans toward him with such
contentment fond, as well the sweetheart sits, would well a wife.
The only photograph of hers thumbed.

  (8.)
Isabel as a non-acquaintance
: a
wallet-size rendering, from the shoulders up, of vacant
preoccupation. A study of Van Der Weyden’s lady. The lips are too
full. The turtleneck sweater misuses her delicacy of clavicle. The
mouth is winterset. That is not benevolence in the eyes. They look
beyond you, more toward vanity than vision. The photographer
missed. He will be taken out at dawn, blindfolded, and shot.

  A long, long insearch—then Darconville shuffled up
all the photographs together, and, inevitably, the jack-of-knaves
came up on top. It was, supervening all, the thumbed and creased
one: number seven ( this, no doubt, in some kind of social
apposition to the intentions implied in number five). Darconville
wished, as did Momus of Vulcan’s created man, that every person had
a window placed in his or her breast. Murmur, fallen angel and
father of ill report, whispered, “
Govert is covert! Govert is
covert
!”

  Quickly, Darconville slapped his hand over it. It
was as if it had become another photograph, creating a fear in him,
by way of diseased imagination, as inconstant as the shadows he
surveyed. Who
was
this fellow? A name too little mentioned
to suspect yet mentioned just enough to heed or learn to disregard.
He looked at the photograph again. Weren’t these simply the facts
of certain events? And weren’t events always the same as their
significance?

  It was incredible for Darconville to see how swiftly
he could fall to torturing, tormenting thoughts, to scribble a
biting and incoherent tragedy out of the restive suppositions he
poorly fought. It was only to conceive one of those sticky,
ring-swapping high-school junkets for the clang of mistrust: he
threw a faithless cipher of moon into the sky, put beneath it a
fatherless girl craving affection, and then helpless before the
doom of his own contrivances watched in his mind, possibly on that
very prom night or in a car parked on an overlook up in the Blue
Ridge mountains, the hideous pyroballogy of some vile teenager with
a hanging lip, his suspenders disengaged, prying off her gown with
his grice-fingered hands and then bucking away like a country
stink-cat, whereupon she—

  But cruel! Cruel! Darconville, clapping the
photographs back into the envelope, instantly grew disgusted with
himself. He was scandalized by thoughts transported into the very
deeds he disbelieved. If I create loveliness, he determined, there
is
loveliness. If I create monstrosity, there
is
monstrosity. Away with it! To play the part of accuser, one had to
be word-perfect in that of hypocrite as well!

  XXVII

  Master Snickup’s Cloak

  The routes of ideas in history were also the routes
of contagion.

        —G, M.
TREVELVAN

  THERE WERE MANY DISAPPOINTMENTS during these months
for Darconville but many, indeed, for Isabel herself, and not one,
somehow, that didn’t compound another. She was only eighteen —”the
age of the duck,” in his grandmother’s phrase—a period of
diffidence and confusion, generally, but in her case somewhat
exacerbated by her keeping to herself and refusing to share her
problems with anyone at Quinsy she wasn’t scrupulously sure of, a
situational irony that only sent effects back to causes.

  It was not much help, beyond that, to be suffering
the vicissitudes of freshman year. One of the deans, for instance,
had several tunes summoned Isabel to her office, inquiring after
the propriety of her seeing too much of a certain professor,
especially in view of the fact that she had flunked almost all her
courses for the first semester, with one glaring exception: a grade
of A in English. And then certain enterprising girls in the dorms,
unspeakable in malice, had been making her life miserable, a
self-appointed group of spitesowers manufacturing stories, shaping
hexes and false rumors, and blowing their green cornets across her
every hope. It was whispered that she was above her station as
Darconville was below his, and, as time passed the apocryphal,
simply by repetition, became the apodictic.

  Isabel, initially undecided, eventually chose to
major in art. A singular disappointment with this as its source
took place one particular night when tapping on Darconville’s
door—her eyes swollen from weeping and want of sleep—she appeared
holding up between thumb and forefinger two prints she had worked
weeks on and on which, for both, she’d been graded F. One showed a
square of ribbed wheels interlocking on foil. The other, also
abstract, was a thinly proven and just-about-detectable sunburst
squashed into a background the color of the jellied broth of a
canned ham. No, they were not good—and were, in fact, quite bad.
But what did it matter? He looked from the morbid prints to
Isabel’s own soulful beauty and to indicate without ado the
condition of true art asked her only to accept herself, a good at
once appropriated, a glory-in-itself by virtue of but a moment’s
reflection. It is to judgment, he told her, that perception
belongs: true eloquence makes light of eloquence, to make light of
philosophy was to be a true philosopher! Why, to fail to accept her
own originality, not by force or exactness but by comprehension,
she could never accept his own, could she? Ordinary persons, he
said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found
them all.

  Not to undercut his own argument, he continued.

  But he thought: what was art next to
her
?
It was a lie, he explained (aware of this implication, however,
that the book he was writing would become, increasingly, a more
difficult task), a contrivance to find the mind’s construction only
where it looks and how it will. Darconville looked into her eyes,
and beyond. In the selfish state of the human heart, he thought, to
consign to the exercise of the wayward imagination those facts,
correspondent at hand but held as contrary, was possibly to lose
everything. The imagination was, after all, only that poor faculty
that strived to make the ideal real, wasn’t it? There was once a
medieval tournament, Darconville told her, where favors to the
victors were bestowed by the Queen of Beauty: the third prize was a
silver rose, the second gold, but the highest award—given to the
best knight of all—was a genuine rose.

  Thinking of his own response to the photographs, he
began, uncharacteristically, to dwell on the possible havoc that
resulted from facts fully falling prey to the imagination.

  Darconville suddenly had an idea. He wiped her tears
and, shutting off the lights, took Despondency’s daughter,
Much-Afraid, by the hand toward the bed where he cradled her head
on a large pillow, loopholed her arm to his, and tried, for
catharsis, to work the only witchcraft he knew: he would tell her a
story. Isabel, closing her eyes and snuggling up to him, felt
better already. “It’s a sad, sad story.”

  
Master Snickup’s Cloak

  
One morning, it was the Middle Ages.

  
The sun shone down on the foundling home at the
end of Duck’s-foot Lane in the quiet little dorp of Sleutel in the
Netherlands. The year was 1307 ( by Pope Hilarius’s corrected
calendar, of course
).

  
Master Snickup, a tiny ward
there
—
wearing the black and red uniform of the
home
—
gleefully played punchball against the cobbled wall
beneath a yew tree near the town weigh-house
.

  
It was a feast day: the Pardon of St. They.
Cattle were blessed. Children processed. You heard
litanies.

  
”Wat is Uw naam?” asked a new little orphan girl
who suddenly appeared at his side, smiling, plumcheeked, and
wearing a chaste wimple. Her beauty put to shame the roses of
Paestum.

  
Superfecta
—
for this was the name of the
flax-haired
frokin—
immediately stole Master Snickup’s
heart quite away
.

  
The two children, thereafter, spent day after
day playing games of noughts-and-crosses, ducking mummy, backy-o,
all the winkles, stickjaw, egg-in-cup, stitch-away-tailor

  
And skiprope, when they frisked and jumped to
the jingle

        
”Do you love
me,

        
Or do you
not?

        
You told me
once,

        
But I
forgot.”

  
Happily, Master Snickup even did her chores for
her, scowring cups, dipping tallow, and decoaling the squinches; he
even did the washpots. She played the dulcimer.

  
A decade passed, just like that.

  
Superfecta, who’d bloomed into indescribable
loveliness, now drew smiles from each and all. There is no
potential for permanence, Master Snickup told his heart, without a
fear of threat.

  
And so they were betrothed one day at the shrine
of St. Puttock of Erpingham
—
and swapped gifts: he gave her
two white pigeons and received from her a wonderful blue
cloak
.

  
Now, there lived on the verge of the village at
that time one of the richest burghers in all
Gelderland
—
the ill-living Mijnheer van Cats, an unctuous
cheesegobbling fat pants who smoked a clay pipe and wanted
sons
.

  
But who’d be his wife? A purse of 2000 gulden
was put up.

  
In vain, however, did the merchants of the guild
offer up their daughters, a group of off-sorts who had pointed
noses and pointed caps.

  
”Knapweed! Hake! Twisses!” screeched van Cats
and hurled other unprintable names at them. Modest pious folk
covered their eyes.

  
One winter dusk, it so turned out, the orphans
were given a special dispensation to go to the Haymarket to watch
the “illuminations.” Mijnheer van Cats, in attendance, sat up high
on the balustrade of the guildhall, whereupon his gaze
fell
—
fatefully
—
upon Superfecta. That little
boompjes, thought he, will soon be mine
.

  
An ouch of heavy gold was hers the day
following; his, a sealed envelope, which he slit open with his
pipestem. What could be the decision?

  
”Yaw, yaw,” guffawed the fat Dutchman.

  
A record of the wedding can be found to this day
as a small entry in the old chronicle of Nuewenburgensis. You will
do, as the diverb has it, what you are.

  
Master Snickup, disedged with grief, took up
scrip and staff and, wearing only his blue cloak, set out to pick
his way across Europe. He sought the antipodes.

  
Hither was yon, yon hither.

  
Mountains were climbed, mazes thrid. He crossed
a sea that had no motion on the ship, “
What is
Pseudonymry?
” and came to a desert where he said penances and
fed on caper buds, dormice, and lentils. Still he
pilgrimaged,

  
Reading the footprints of geese in the
air,

  
To reach eventually the Black Sea where, living
alone on an uncharted shale island, he chastized himself with
thongs and subsisted only on air and dew. Rain fell on his blue
cloak, which he sucked supplying himself with vitamin Bu.

  
Swallows sang upon his wrists.

  “Sero te amavi
,” whispered Master Snickup to
God
—
and prayed constantly with perfectly folded hands, a
shape best fitted for that motion. Small furious devils hated
that

  
And visited him in a variety of shapes and
torments: six-fingered Anaks, freexes, nasicornous beetles,
chain-shaking kobolds, Saûba ants, red-eyed swads, sorcerers who
could disconnect their legs and flap about like bats, and
pin-headed Hippopods, with reversed feet, who leapt instead of
walked.

  
Master Snickup soon fell ill. But who could
help? For ships in sight there were none.

  
The town of Sleutel, meanwhile, rang with news.
Superfecta van Cats was delivered of a son. “A witty child! Can it
swear? The father’s dearling! Give it two plums!” boasted its sire,
butterballing it with his gouty feet.

  
But hear of more. Mijnheer van Cats, now
fattened on perfidy itself, had turned syphilitic and even more
hateful than before. He sang curses against his wife in the taproom
and, roiling and hissing, streeled home drunk. He locked her nights
in the black windmill. He chased her through town slashing her with
timothies.

  
Sadism and farce are always inexplicably
linked.

  
The orphanage, in the meantime, closed
down
—
without so much as two coppers snapped together to
prevent it, despite the bulging wallets of all the snap-boilers,
razor-makers, brewers, and guilder-grubbing rentiers who lived
thereabouts. O events! God could not believe man could be so
cruel
.

  
Winter settled hard over the Black Sea. The soul
of Master Snickup now grew pure
—
a hagiographical
commonplace
—
as his body grew diseased. He never washed his
bed save with tears. The tattered blue cloak had become infested
with worms and rotifers,

  
Which also battened on his holy flesh
.

  
It snew. And on that desolate shale island,
since fabled, Master Snickup one day actually looked into the heart
of silence, rose and
—
with a tweak-and-shake of finger and
thumb toward the sky
—
died. Rats performed the
exequies
.