Darconville's Cat (30 page)

  It was less for the observations he made, however,
than the emotions he felt that gave Darconville an indication how
extremely anxious he was that Isabel should come, so both of them
could leave. The party was ridiculous. It was one fantastical
opinion after another, mad fugitive theorizing-on-naught from bore
to batman to boobie, and behind everybody, everywhere, was
somebody, somewhere, making signs with his or her eyes which he or
she meaningfully manipulated for another, anywhere, to meet and
mock.

  Miss Malducoit—the kind of woman who always says
she’s going to make a long story short but doesn’t—stood in the
middle of the dining-room, meanwhile, and not surprisingly
de-edified her listeners as she plucked from the
damnum
fatale
of her new feminist consciousness this remarkable
theory, that, if women would become more like the men who thought
they were better than women, then those men would become more like
the women who thought they couldn’t become men than those women
who, thinking they could, already had— a remark that Miss
Ballhatchet, the college sapphonic, thought ironically aimed at
her, whereupon she withdrew, reached into her pocket, and furiously
began squeezing a handball, an action, misinterpreted, that took
the attention of Drs. Knipperdoling and Pindle, who nudged each
other knowingly, long having learned, both, from no less a hallowed
shrine than their mothers’ knees that the wages of refusing “to
make a decision for Christ” were clear, i.e., a faint mustache, an
abridged haircut, and the penchant for wearing gym shorts with a
zipper-fly.

  “I wanna tell ya,” said Pindle.

  “Breaks your heart,” agreed Knipperdoling, tossing
some hazelnuts into his mouth.

  “This mortal coil,” said Pindle.

  They exchanged glances.

  “
Life
,” they said in unison—and shook their
heads.

  Mr. Schrecklichkeit, blowing his huge white nose,
heard the word. “That’s my field, life,” he muttered, “which is
only another word for mortality.”

  “Maybe that’s why”—everybody turned to this
voice—”why everybody has an M on the palm of his hand?” faintly
offered Miss Swint, peeking over her glasses, but the gentlemen to
whom she was speaking all breezed past her and went to the
foodtable.

  Religion, of course, was the favorite staple of
conversation at Quinsy College. Indeed, it has always been a
subject that could touch off Southerners faster than’ anything
else, creating a fellowship, however, that had less to do with
binding them to a disposition to truth or Christian charity than
with allowing them to turn with grateful relief to the one totally
subjective, squibcrack-proof topic they could all pursue—every last
self-ordained half-wit who wanted to—without the attendant personal
humiliation of having to explain, clarify, or reconcile what the
strict tests of either an informed intelligence or thinking heart,
put into play, might serve to disprove and so disparage.

  Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub told everyone that art
was religion. The Weerds, now upstairs in the attic, were each
jointly confessing the other to be his and her religion. Crouching,
Mr. Thimm was in the pantry being threatened by an infuriated
Baptist minister with a raised fire-shovel for blasphemously having
claimed that the greatest book on religion ever written was the
privately printed (and, needless to say, dictated ) edition worked
out of his father’s deathbed confession, called
Crows as
Foreboders
. And by the rosy punchbowl, Prof. Wratschewe,
syntactitian and local authority on the shall/will rules, visibly
disturbed several in a circle of blue-haired ladies gathered around
him by posing to them the question that also happened to be the
subject of a monograph he was only that afternoon swotting up:
“Where Is the Christian Homer?”

  Include me out, thought Darconville, hearing the
question. Resigned that his own book would never be completed, he
kept silent. But that was all right, he felt, for next to him who
can finish is he who has hid that he cannot. Still, he wondered how
long it had been since he’d last sat down and finished a page, the
answer to which speculation, if there was one, immediately
destructed in an explosion of sudden dismay at his elbow.

  “O poo, I don’t believe it.”

  “I thought everybody knew.”

  “A fiction.”

  “A
fact
,” snapped Miss Gibletts, her
neutral articulations rendered none the more fetching for the plain
brown shift she wore that sagged from her like a punctured
windsock.

  “But, Lord,” asked Mrs. McAwaddle, snatching
nervously at her pearls, “how in the world could she have done
that?”

  Miss Gibletts, closing her eyes, simply shrugged.
She knocked back a small tumbler of Southern Comfort, then one
more, and another— respectively her eighth, ninth, and tenth that
evening—rather annoyed that Mrs. McAwaddle didn’t believe her. She
set down the glass, audibly. “It is said, you know, that the poet
Ovid—Publius Ovidius Naso —had the longest one in the world. It
cast a shadow. It could accommodate pigeons.”

  “I simply can’t believe it.”

  “Read your Roman history.”

  “No, I mean I can’t believe”—Mrs. McAwaddle
swallowed— “
that
.”

  Darconville believed it when he’d heard it,
however—and since he heard it everywhere he went, he walked to the
far windows, leaving the subject of this conversation, along with
the two ladies, behind. The topic was disturbing: fortuneless and
dripstick-nosed Miss Gupse, the previous March having been asked to
resign—the verdict was “overtired”—had been found apparently by the
odor, stiff, on the business-end of a halter in the backroom of a
Nashville doss house with a note safety-pinned to one of her
anklesocks reading only “Because.” The police later gave out the
information that, tied round her head on a string, had been found
an item crocheted by her own hand—a pointed nose bag.

  Peering out expectantly, Darconville could not see
Isabel through the darkness of the window. He saw only Miss Gupse,
somewhere, now beyond anyone’s poor power to add or detract, and
bent over there, his hands on the panes like blinders, he thought:
you can never love too early, you can only love too late.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday 8:58
P.M.: Tableau: Girl, With Door
Ajar. Artist unknown. Round-eyed in fright, Isabel steps into
Darconville’s dark office and seems to feel the room
waiting
and aeroferic with suspicion, that strange
disturbing noise which sits at the heart of utter silence: white
noise. Closing her eyes, she hears wounds in the doleful sounds of
the bell tolling out nine leaden bongs from the old Smethwick clock
and pauses in her cold shoes: no candle gutters, no shutters bang,
no suit of armor creaks. Swallowing, she steps quietly out of her
footprints— and waits again. O interminable! She decides to leave.
The wireworm that has crept into her ear now moves: “
Why then
was this forbid? Why but to awe, why but to keep ye low and
ignorant, His worshippers
.” There is some shame and remorse,
less for finding the letter removed from the desk than in pinching
out the fragments from the bottom of the wastebasket; thereafter,
not so—the moves of the operation are then all swift and precise:
excogitating, a vein like an S raised on her forehead, Isabel oops
piece to piece, piece to piece. She inhumes a hot sigh. A letter
comes up in lavender. A low moan rises up through Isabel to echo in
a shrill piercing cry of agony matched only by the proclamation of
the angel Hadraniel, dropping from somewhere, his voice penetrating
through a million firmaments to plead, “Come back, come back!” But
the door of the English building is already slamming, slams.

  *  *  *  *  *

  “I’ve ate rook pie.”

  “Rook? Pie?”

  “The ruddy duck, yessir!” deblaterated Dr. Glibbery
with a smattering of mustard on his nose, his cheeks huge
walletfuls of pork. “The most scabrous and torn-downest little of
birds what am, let me tell you.” He aimed the barrel of his fat
finger into a wall-mirror. “I potted messes of ‘em smack out of the
air back in college just to keep alive. With prices skyhootin’ like
they was? In my day—matriculatin’ and all?—christ, it was pronto
dogs and blinky srimp from one day to the next, take it or leave
it. We didn’t have rubber assholes in my day, jack. And nobody,
excusin’ God, can know to the number of them rooks I ate to this
day, nobody—and I mean, nodamnbody!” Porkfaced Glibbery then began
sucking the pig grease from his fingers as vigorously as the pig
itself had ever sucked its parent. The whole mode of piggery
itself, in fact, applied to him—the very kind of face, arguably,
that had turned Islam against pork. “What, these sophomore dufuses
backin’ and forthin’ around here going to tell me? Sowballs!” he
cried, ripping away half of another sandwich in one thyestean bite
and speaking through a smacking medley of loud champs and chews.
“Rooks, for chrissakes? They’d be havin’ the living doits scared
out of them, these people, they so much as
looked
at one!”
He mowsed the rest of the sandwich. “Sowballs!”

  Everybody laughed.

  “And sowballs again!” Dr. Glibbery repeated, through
a mouthful of food.

  “Excellent,” chuckled Mr. Roget, pulling his
perspicacious nose. “Perfect. First-rate. Flawless.”

  The dining-room looked magnificent. A long table,
set off in the center by a huge beef roast stabbed
entrecôte
with a miniature of the Quinsy College flag, was
spread out with bowls of conch gumbo, cheese wheels, platters of
Virginia ham, potato salad, buns. The guests swarmed around,
wolfing sandwiches, gobbling meats, drinking.

  “As paprika is to a Hungarian so am I to esoterica,”
lisped Floyce R. Fulwider. He plucked a twist of candied
Metzelsuppe, ate it, and, closing his eyes, delicately wiggled his
fingers over the heavenly taste. Miss Dessicquint, standing behind
him, mimicklingly pursed her lips, went limp in the wrists, and
stuck her bum out like a poodle. Miss Shepe and Miss Ghote, having
their ginger-ales in lovely stemmed glasses, both agreed that the
highlight of the party had been the appearance of the little Culpa
boy who’d been brought down to sing that adorable song;
unfortunately, twisting his pajama string in an initial moment of
nervousness, he’d managed to pull it out.

  “It didn’t seem to faze Mrs. Culpa, did you notice,
that everybody could see—” Miss Ghote paused and looked away.

  “His bow-wow.” Miss Shepe had a brother.

  They sat silent momentarily.

  “It was—”

  “Yes.”

  “Flying expressly in the face of Galatians 5:2?”
asked Miss Ghote, archly. “O my.”

  “Circumcision, Miss Ghote,” said Miss Shepe,
whispering, “was condoned in Genesis 17:10. Ask your Rev.
Cloogy.”

  “
Lapser
!” cried Miss Ghote, with a muttlike
snap.

  Dr. Speetles, munching some rolled-sprat, cavalierly
presented a plate of leafalia—winter-rocket, cress, endive—to his
ample wife who, adding five slabs of roast beef, roundly told
everybody she wouldn’t be having dessert. Lately arrived, Miss
Pouce took a jam roly-poly and tea. And Mrs. Fewstone, her
unforgiving shoulders tense, was facing the wall nipping a cayenned
egg, but when her husband offered to make her a drink she wheeled
around, her mouth hardening into pliers, and bent him like cheap
wire, hissing, “You—
pimp
!”

  Miss Swint, sitting on the piano stool and eating
spooms-in-a-cup, said she didn’t think she heard anything.

  “Actually, I think you’ll find,” pipped in Prof.
Wratschewe, turning from the discussion he’d been having with a now
thankful, now disappearing Darconville, “that the etymon of our
word ‘pimp’ is taken from the Greek verb
pempeiu
: to
send.” He beamed and bowed.

  “I theash clatherx,” said Miss Gibletts,
listing.

  “Yes, Miss Gibletts, I know. I know you teach
classics,” said Prof. Wratschewe, looking behind him. “I say,
Darconville?”

  But Darconville was in an upstairs bedroom, trying
to telephone, with some apprehension, the third floor of Fitts. It
rang and rang and rang. What could be wrong? Then he began to fear
that she might have felt unwanted at the party, for it had been
reported several times during the past year by a scandalized
handful of faculty vestals—with Miss Sweetshrub i/c and a few other
shades of Orcus in the rear— that the two of them had been spotted
“marketing together” (
ipsis-simus verbis
) at the local
Piggly Wiggly with only
one
pushcart. Dean Dessicquint
once nearly bit her head off for signing out on an “all-night,”
learning only afterwards of the anthropology class field-trip to
Assateague—a coal-run to Newcastle—to study these people’s dialect.
And once at the movies with Trinley Moss Isabel overheard Miss
Tavistock, sitting behind her, tell someone that a psychic had
recently told her that she would soon be marrying “a dark handsome
stranger” and then—mistakenly?—bumped Isabel with her umbrella.
Guileless as she was, Isabel, a mere freshman, had managed to
exercise just about every bitch and barge-wife in the Quinsyburg
locality. It is the Cyclops’ thumb, thought Darconville, by which
the pigmy measures its own littleness. Perhaps she was right in not
coming to the party. He hung up the phone.

  Spotting Miss Pouce at the foot of the stairs,
Darconville asked her if, earlier, she’d seen Isabel Rawsthorne in
the library. Miss Pouce only sighed and said that, oh, no one had
time for libraries anymore. He pressed her no further, but his head
was as filled with worry as his heart was filled with love. How he
missed her! He sat down momentarily on the stairs. Grand old Miss
Carp was watching him.