Darconville's Cat (48 page)

  I am here now and then will be gone, thought
Darconville, dispelling the grey dominion, and if I am robbed of a
deep love I am spared at least a moderate one. A sign had been
given. There was nothing more to say, he was determined on it.

  Darconville was already telephoning the dean’s
office at Quinsy College when Isabel appeared in the doorway with
contorted hands and begging-bowl eyes which seemed somehow to have
surmised everything. She took a step forward in her shift, alarmed,
no longer conscious of her heavy legs. She hadn’t been listening a
minute when, aware suddenly of the letter, the extremity of the
moment, her metallic screams tore holes in his chest. But of course
it was too late—Darconville immediately resigned from his teaching
post. The following day he was packed. And before the week was out
he departed for England, resolved now to believe he had been spared
the duty but denied the pleasure of hearing her lie and yet
wondering as the thousands of miles were being fast put behind him
if in some century long past he and Spellvexit hadn’t stopped one
final time in a place called Fawx’s Mt. and whether he and the girl
he loved so much had actually gone into the woods across the street
where, upon a tree, they carved the word “Remember” and how the
loveliest pair that ever stood between heaven and earth begetting
wonder—a figure all gold, a figure all black—could possibly have
said goodbye in what had been a last Zoroastrian kiss.

  L

  Dialogue on a Dank October

  Ah,
mon Dieu
! how is it I didn’t think of
it before?

  It’s the gipsy girl with the goat.

        —VICTOR HUGO,
Notre Dame de Paris

  “I TELL YOU,” exclaimed Mrs. van der Slang, rowing a
spoon through her tea, “this could happen only in a
book
!
I knew of course you were thick as thieves for a while in
high-school, and of course that was then. But now, tell me, are you
certain? Him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not—”

  “No,” said Isabel, “not really. Not anymore, I’m
afraid.” She looked away. “But I don’t know if he will be.”

  “Will be?”

  “Certain.”

  Mrs. van der Slang arched a brow and blew on her
tea. “You mean
interested
.”

  Isabel nodded.

  “Well, I’m sorry to say, I don’t know myself. We
don’t see him much, there’s that. Then, he’s young and frankly
hasn’t fulfilled our ambitions for him nor his own for us. Sugar?”
It was one of Isabel’s privileges to take sugar. Mrs. van der Slang
moved closer and continued; it was a voice like dishwater gurgling
through a sink. “Now I’m a practical woman. I’m a businesswoman. So
I’ll be frank. I must say, you seemed to drop the whole business
last year, didn’t you, when you went off to college—and, gracious
me,” added Mrs. van der Slang, crossing her bowed legs and making a
slight bleat of nasal peevishness for the benefit of the
responsible party, “we didn’t do entirely well there, did we?”

  Isabel fixed her eyes on the woman’s feet.

  “There you are, you see. And I do think,” said Mrs.
van der Slang, her forehead filling with centripetal furrows, “a
young woman should maintain. Oh, schooling, general efficiency,
what-not—I don’t mean,” she smiled coldly, “the telephone company,
hm?” She smiled a great deal, smiled
angrily
, but her
mouth was large and when she smiled she tried to hide her teeth,
which were large and yellow. It wasn’t scolding but innuendo: the
scolding of innuendo. “I don’t know, it could become a condition in
this whole matter, not, Lord knows, because I want it that way,
but, heavens, I’ve asked it of my own boys.” Isabel nervously began
twicking her thumbs. “I mean, wouldn’t you? Want us to know you
could, well, maintain? Of course you would.
He
would. I
promise, he is not insensitive to things. He’s realistic. His feet
are on the ground. For instance, I remember—”

  Squinting suddenly, Mrs. van der Slang rose to nudge
out of an italic position the marinescape hung askew over the
fireplace.

  “It is lovely, isn’t it.
Storm on the Zuider
Zee
, it’s called. Pricey though.” She popped her eyes. “In the
hundreds.” Mrs. van der Slang, a woman with that loud persistent
eloquence of an auctioneer in the slave-market, was the typical
polder peasant; wealthy, humorless, clever in business, indifferent
to the impatience or irony of those annoyed by her crafty reticence
and facial games, she had perhaps sturdy visions of one day
returning to live on the Heerengracht, pulling close the shutters,
and locking herself in to count her gold. She was one of those
women who in moving from room to room carried one hand floating in
mid-air, limp off the wrist, in a charade of what for some wildly
inexplicable reason is assumed by such people to indicate
grace.

  “Anyway, as I was saying, I remember he told me he
put a wall up between you and him: didn’t want to interfere, see?
‘I put a wall up, Mother,’ he said.” She sniffed. “I’ll say he did,
don’t believe he ever came home much afterwards—well, but that was
mostly summers. All this, in any case, not without reason, my poor
angel. Mind you, it’s all the same to me, the mother in all this,
but I mean, after all, you had been seeing—” Mrs. van der Slang
made foolish eyes.

  “Him,” Isabel freely acknowledged.

  “
Him
, yes. But not—”

  “No.”

  “And he’s the one you want now.” Her malerect ears
twitched. “You’re convinced?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “But I don’t know if he might
be.”

  “Might be?”

  “Convinced.”

  Mrs. van der Slang blew on her tea and arched a
brow. “You mean
available
.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now I understand. We women always do it; no one
ever notices it, but we must always create a small flaw in every
image—it’s for safety, right?” And then came the ringing
antistrophe. “Look, I told you I am a businesswoman, didn’t I?
Good. Then let’s put the foot to the fire. You don’t know if you
can take the chance of assuming he cares for you enough to wait for
him, do you?” She took a sip of tea, swallowed, and looked up. “Do
you?”

  The rain outside continued. Gusting around the
chimney at Zutphen Farm, it seemed almost wild enough to blow down
the pipe and launch from the mantelpiece the little model ship with
red sails and black hull sitting there. A fire crackled in the
fireplace and played glowingly in crimson reflection on the cute
blue-and-white Dutch tiles surrounding it. It had been an awful
day, and, feeling low and lonely, Isabel had dropped by—she found
she’d done so more and more of late—to talk to Mrs. van der Slang
who on this particular day, in spite of the weather, had just
finished dropping her bulbs. (“I always try to get them in by
Columbus Day,” said the mud-spattered mevrouw, waving a graip in
greeting. “It worked out, as you can see, to the very day.” )
Having come inside, shrugging off the rain, they’d removed as usual
to the living room, not so much for the fire as for the endless
opportunities afforded Mrs. van der Slang to fish out in
succession, while announcing their significance and price, the
variety of objects she kept there for that specific reason. The
visits, initially, had been short. They’d sit and converse on
charming nullities, with Mrs. van der Slang most of the time,
though polite enough, essentially uninterested: in a masquerade of
attention she’d either put her nose out like a projecting horn, the
beak of a shoebill, pointing upward and simply wait it out or,
slumped down, raise single strands of grey hair, vacantly draw them
along her fingertips to their limp extremity, and every once in a
while mutter, “hmm, hmm.” This continued for a time. It wasn’t long
however, as things go, before Isabel eventually raised a subject
which not only cut its complex way across her own life but reached
into the lives of several others, specifically the
boys
of
the family van der Slang. Then—and thereafter—Mrs. van der Slang’s
sharp ears, like a goat’s, displayed their pointed conches high up
among the indiscreet tufts of grizzled hair. After all, there was
the good of the family. There were her sons. There was the farm.
And so tea was poured and patience employed against the comfortless
and reverie-inducing rain that the inquisitive might attend to the
declarative and, by acquainting itself with the question at hand,
come to solve it—correctly.

  “I said, you don’t know if you can take the chance
of assuming he—”

  “No.”

  Isabel’s voice, low and embarrassed, actually seemed
to consummate itself. But Mrs. van der Slang felt much better. She
maneuvered Isabel’s eyes back to her face.

  “There, was that so difficult, hmmm? Ideal visions,
you’ll find in this life of ours, are unreal visions. Fact, huh?
What is. What happens. What is the case. So let’s be practical,
but, at all costs, let us not be too hasty, advice,” said Mrs. van
der Slang, affecting one of her large assortment of miniature faces
and pouring more tea, “your own mother, you’ll forgive me, might
have passed along to you with more authority at several critical
junctures of late. Sugar?”

  Isabel shook her head.

  The older woman, balancing her teacup, looked up
with portentous concentration. Her gothic eyes locked on Isabel.
Her ears seemed to arch backwards. Her ruminant jaw shifted.

  “You see, we can’t yet say there aren’t others
involved.”

  A color like a rosy infusion in medicine flooded
Isabel’s cheeks.

  “He mentions—other people?”

  “He mentions, my girl, nothing of the sort. He’s not
home enough to mention anything of the sort. And I wouldn’t tell
you anything of the sort,” she pronounced with throaty complacency,
“if I thought it would wound you so. I’m only obliged, I believe,
to tell you frankly that this wait of yours may not”—Mrs. van der
Slang’s nose-tips flared —”pay off.”

  “I see.”

  “I so hate to be blunt. But girls aren’t reluctant,
you must know, to telephone him at all hours when he’s home. Why,
only this summer—”

  Isabel turned to her with swan-necked alarm.

  “—but why bother going into it.”

  “Does he ever mention—me?”

  Mrs. van der Slang stood up, conspicuously turned
for the machinery of effect to the grey weeping window, and sighed.
“ ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I’ve put up a wall.’ You can almost hear him
say it.” Wistfully, she sipped her tea. She scrutinized Isabel,
however, through half-closed eyes as though measuring the
perspective in a painting with which she was not completely
satisfied. “Can’t you?”

  Isabel closed her eyes.

  “Well, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, why hedge? He’s realistic. Let us be. We
both of us, you and I, each want to see what we can get out of
this. Forget me—now I’ll come frank—the captain would love
grandchildren, by all our sons, oh positively, no matter who or
which or when. Then of course you’ve always been a help around the
farm here, I can’t deny that. On the other hand, you know, I’m
sure, you could do worse than, well, join the team here at Zutphen.
Indeed, you seem to want that. You’ve as much as said it. Certainly
you know we’re—comfortable, taxes notwithstanding. This Libyan
rug?” Mrs. van der Slang closed her eyes in artificial grief and
held up five fingers. “Ah, but that’s all for later, isn’t it, now
it seems we must settle on a plan whereby everyone concerned will
be as content as possible. Some, we know, won’t be. But some will.
You of course and especially—”

  “Him.”

  “Though not—”

  “No.”

  Isabel’s face strained. “But I don’t know if he
could be.”

  “Could be?”

  “Content.”

  Mrs. van der Slang neither arched her brow nor blew
on her tea this time but sat back autocratically, taking Isabel in
with a sharp avizeful eye, and said, “You mean
married
.”

  Always frustration, thought Isabel, pulling her
thumb, fffruuustrationnnn! Always struggle, always life.

  “So where then does all this put us?”

  “I don’t know,” Isabel whispered.

  “Well, wouldn’t you agree with me that time,” said
Mrs. van der Slang, speaking from the lofty pedestal of Age, “will
solve it?”

  Preoccupied, however, Isabel had dislocated her
attention and had turned to listen dolefully to the percussion of
the driving rain outside. The Graeae and Gorgons seemed to be
hailing in from the sea to distress her alone of all others,
threatening the very last vestige of security in her being—and she
who had so little!

  “I say, wouldn’t you agree that—”

  “Yes,” replied Isabel, her eyes rimming with bitter
tears, “
oh yes
.”

  Mrs. van der Slang felt good.

  “I find I must be candid, child. I think we should
return to college —why, say as a kind of proof of intentions—just
to see what transpires.” There was a long silence. “We must above
all show we can maintain. Is that unfair?”

  “And should I wait—and should I wait that long?”

  Mrs. van der Slang’s face went surprised in a pout.
“Perhaps you wish to suggest that I am not being kind? Well, you
must see at a time like this one can’t stop to think of
convenience. Especially other people’s. I asked only a simple thing
of you. And am I being unfair? I don’t think I’m like that, really.
And I mean, who knows, it may turn out perfect and this romance of
yours may all work out fine, just like, I don’t know”—Mrs. van der
Slang groped for an apt simile and then, finding one, looked up
with one eyebrow drawn high in a whimsical vertex and smiled—-”just
like in a book?”

  Isabel was now desolate. She knew she was alone but
knew as well she couldn’t be, she hadn’t the strength. Walking home
aimlessly on that terrible October day, she only felt the cirrus
clouds, harbinger of even more rain, mist down into her isolation
from the Blue Ridge mountains and then enter the confines of her
heart, filled once with a hope of some kind but, alas, a hope no
longer, for hope itself to tell the truth had now quite petered
out.