Darconville's Cat (55 page)

  The comfort, he knew, was that every effort in
Quinsyburg that summer would be an effort finally put to rest and
the occasion, finally, of putting that place behind him. Who’d have
believed he would have stayed so long? Constancy was a word too
hollowpampered to express so extraordinary a behavior; it wasn’t
patience; it wasn’t longanimity. It was love—a wooing, leading only
to one end, that had followed the same time-honored steps, the
shared laughter, the wantsum misunderstandings, fearful and
explorative, and all the other fits of uncommon passion for so many
centuries displayed in the tempests between Father Weather and
Mother Earth.

  Struggle, of course—what else?—informs success, and
there were those of Darconville’s friends who, hearing now of his
marriage plans, left him that summer somewhat in the dark less as
to the wisdom of his new venture than as to the interpretation they
placed on it. Quinsyburg was a lonely place, and loneliness often
becomes the sole source of protection against the comparatively
worse desolation
passing
friendship causes. Lonely they
lived—why, wondered Darconville, do people have to have no money to
spend less?—and lonely they would die; but pitifully he could find
no words of consolation for such as those who, meeting him in the
streets or at school during those final months, stopped forlorn as
if to ask, not so much from him as of themselves, why bother to
marry and beget when the search for union is doomed by implication
in the very act? Why part a whole heart into halves if it is
required to break it? Why not acknowledge, finally, that union is
one and disappointment the alternative?

  No, it wasn’t that the remarks were put in such
direct terms; Quinsyburgisms seldom were. There were hesitant
glances, often, silly nods, comments odd and elliptical. For
instance, one day Mrs. McAwaddle stopped him on the front steps of
the library, sighed lugubriously, and —what byzantine warning was
this
in aid of?—tapped the side of her nose. Another
incident as inexplicable occurred one afternoon in the college
post-office. “Hello, Darconville,” came a voice, “fair grow the
lilies on the riverbanks?” It was of course Dr. Dodypol who,
banging a stamp on a letter, then pointed at him with a quote:

        ”If Nature’s a
vision, Art’s a re-

        How can you
write what you cannot see?”

  Then he popped his letter in the slot and said
good-day.

  But Miss Trappe’s, perhaps, was the queerest.
Walking up the street one day under one of her boisterous hats, she
suddenly reversed direction and on a detour came up to knock on
Darconville’s door. Disheartened to hear that Isabel hadn’t stopped
by to say goodbye to her—the old cameo lay still unclaimed—he was
only confounded by what followed. “I was reading your book,” she
said cryptically, “and on page sixty-five I suddenly remembered,
though I couldn’t recall where, something I wanted to re-read.” A
worried smile quickened up to her temples as with a run of light.
“Now, tell me, what page did I turn to?” Darconville didn’t know
what to say. “Why, page fifty-six,” exclaimed Miss Trappe, her
pitted nose pushing forward. “Page fifty-six!” And quickly kissing
his cheek, she turned, and walked away. There wasn’t in any of
these encounters, either by word or gesture, that which raised so
much as a hint of disapproval about his marriage and yet each
referred, he was convinced, to nothing else.

  It was that kind of summer.

  Darconville soon found, with Isabel still
unbaptized, he needed a dispensation from “disparity of worship”
which had to be obtained from the Bishop of Richmond and then
forwarded to the Chancellor at the Archbishop’s House in London to
have it cleared for execution in that diocese. Harvard University,
meanwhile, notified him he was to be in Cambridge by September 10.
So he busily set to coordinating matters. But in late June he was
informed that he was required to obtain a special license for the
dispensation of the residency requirements in England, and to that
end he immediately wrote, as directed, to the Registrar of the
Court of Faculties. He was busy as a piper: teaching, boxing books
and clothes, writing letters, and preparing in the interim —he’d
have no time later-—his courses for the fall. The prospects were
exciting. Would that he’d the time to dwell on them!

  There were still to be obtained sérologie tests,
birth certificates, and letters of permission as well, and another
matter involved the telephone calls to Fawx’s Mt. where Isabel,
presumably, was working away in as much of a dither, measuring
patterns, cutting, and sewing away like the Three Fates all at
once. By midsummer her letters fell off in frequency, but
Darconville gamefully placed upon those that did come an even
greater value, reserving in his heart only the spirited longing
that such accidents might happen again and again. Contact with her
kept him vital. And when the Adams House secretary at Harvard
notified him of a vacancy there (a suite at $250 per month) his
acceptance brought home just how crucial contact in whatever form
would now become, for, as money now was critical, he was forced to
sell his car. The trips up to Fawx’s Mt. were over.

  Ah, dear Bentley, thought Darconville, such a deed
as from the body of contraction plucks the very soul!

  It wasn’t a week before another car appeared—a sleek
foreign racer, chrome and plumcolored, screeching up to
Darconville’s house with a triple blast of its hom. The door
opened, and then, wearing a lavender tube-top and demoniacally
tight jeans, out stepped Hypsipyle Poore! “It’s a Hulksaek Kongjak
Puin! A present from daddy!” she called up to his window, snapping
off her driving gloves and pointing to her initials printed on the
fender. She blew him a kiss, stepped under the big tree, and said
in a low breathy voice, “Only one thing faster ‘n’ better than this
au-to, baby boy. Hint, hint.” Laughing, Darconville came downstairs
and explained for her, again, the situation she’d long known, only
too well. “Good
lord
,” exclaimed undaunted Hypsipyle
Poore, scribbling her telephone number on a napkin and tucking it
firmly into his pocket, “but don’t mean, surely, you can’t promise
to call me sometime by and by, now, does it?” Darconville said
nothing. She smiled into his eyes. “You promise. I can tell.”

  Darconville that same day (almost as if to
counteract that assumption) went down to Main St. and bought Isabel
a pretty ring.

  The whole plan, then, was struck a terrible blow
sometime around the middle of July. Darconville uttered a round,
mouth-filling oath at the post-office and left trailing in the air
behind him a language which burnt it coppery all the way to the
bench under the magnolia tree where he sat down to re-read, again
in disbelief, the special delivery letter from London he’d just
received.

  The residency requirement couldn’t be waived. The
qualification for an English marriage registration meant either (a)
a seven-day residence in Westminster before notification of
marriage, plus a further clear twenty-one days before a marriage
certificate could be issued—a total of thirty days including the
day of arrival and the day of collecting the certificate, or (b) a
fifteen-day residence plus one full day before a marriage license
could be issued—a total of eighteen days, including, again, days of
arrival and collecting the license. For the certificate, both
parlies had to put in the residency, for the license only one—but
the other party had to be in England on the day notification was to
be given to the Registrar.

  As if that weren’t enough, when later Darconville
called Isabel to explain she wasn’t home. He tried again, several
times, and finally reached Mrs. Shiftlett who, outpacing herself in
mutters and non-sentences, explained to Darconville how, that
morning negotiating a curve on the road to Charlottesville, Isabel
had skipped out of control —she always drove too fast—and rolled
her car into a verge. She had been taken to the hospital. Yes, she
thought the car was wrecked; no, she thought Isabel wasn’t hurt.
Thought
? Darconville made five telephone calls to the
University of Virginia hospital, only to find she had been
released.
Thought
? That night he telephoned Fawx’s Mt.
Isabel answered and lightheartedly assured him she had been
unharmed; he sagged, but fearful, worried, overwrought—in the
knitting of himself so fast, himself he had undone—he cried out
fitfully against all the tergiversations of love he could think of,
which of course were only the tergiversations that stood in the
way
of love. But the telephone went dead. Isabel had hung
up. He called back: no answer. An hour later there was no answer.
There was no answer the following morning.

  There was no public transportation north from
Quinsyburg. The buslines in the Piedmont area, through either
subterfuge or evasion, skirted completely around the poor but
direct road that ran up to Charlottesville. For a simple trip
north, then, this meant—in twice the time—the double, double toil
and trouble of an hour busride east to Richmond and then back again
west, another hour to Charlottesville. But Darconville was
desperate. He jumped the Richmond bus which, stopping for
passengers at every snab and dole-house along the way, gave him his
connection in that city, the return run shuddering along at about
ten miles per hour into Charlottesville where, luckily, he
hitchhiked a ride and followed the late afternoon sun into the
fluecolored hills of Fawx’s Mt. He appeared, dusty, at the front
door. Isabel hurried him inside, not shutting the door, however,
before taking several of those by now familiar half-turns,
apprehensively looking toward places where the object she seemed to
seek had turned into a ghost, disappeared in a puff of smeech, or
flew into a tree. Darconville never knew which.

  A television set was blaring in the small dark
living-room, where the Shiftletts, submersed into the sofa, sat
snoring upright and holding cans of beer in their respective laps.
Darconville quickly looked at Isabel: she hadn’t been hurt—and her
car out front, dented somewhat, was still operable. In her bedroom,
they sat on her red-and-cream bed where he tried to apologize for
his thoughtlessness the day before by reading her what he felt was
the cause of it—the bad news from London.

  Isabel, curiously undistracted, listened calmly
enough, but Darconville turned to the arithmetic of it all: the
Quinsy summer courses ended on August 22 and yet the faculty were
required to be at Harvard on September 10. The residency
requirement—the shortest one—was eighteen days in London. The
return flight back to the States canceled the ninth, which meant,
if he could find someone to administer his final exams, they could
leave on August 21. It was the only alternative. The tunnel of
possibilities had narrowed to that. Darconville kissed her. It
would be wonderful! It would be madness! What did she think?
Isabel, twicking her thumbs, froze. She
couldn’t
, she
said: she hadn’t finished making her dress! He laughed. And what,
she asked, about all the other matters? Why, packing, invitations,
and, and—she raised her eyes suddenly—she had decided she wanted to
be baptized. Into the Catholic Church? Yes, that was what she
wanted! Deliberating, Darconville wiped his forehead. He took her
arm. He paused.

  Then he asked her if they really shouldn’t be
married in Fawx’s Mt. after all.

  “No,” said Isabel, disconcertedly wringing her
hands. She looked out searchingly through her window, across the
turnip patch, and past the old fences which the falling of dusk
made nearly indistinguishable, creating an illusion of unbroken
access even to that farthest house hunched under the aeviternal
mountains whose ridges, Darconville saw for the first time, were
inaptly called blue. They were in fact quite grey.

  “It would be easier.”

  “It seems so.”

  “It is so,” said Darconville.

  “Yes,” said Isabel, “it does seem so, doesn’t
it.”

  The following week in Quinsyburg Isabel stood
holding a candle in the chancel of St. Teresa’s Church, and, with
Darconville as witness, was washed, oiled, and salted at the
baptismal font. He felt very proud of her. He hadn’t either
encouraged or discouraged her but was happy, nevertheless, she
stuck to her plans with deliberate speed and firm resolution; the
process, to hasten it, took a bit of doing—Darconville had
instructed her—and, while the emphases of time weighed no less
heavy on them, he still managed to counterconvert the obstructions,
delays, and postponements on other fronts to final satisfaction. It
was only after the ceremony that he gave her the surprise that
became her baptismal present. Kissing her, he mentioned the
invitations could now be engraved. She looked at him, eyes
questioning. (What blushing notes did he in the margin see? What
sighs stolen out?) Then he told her: the wedding day was set for
two o’clock on September 8—almost the exact date on which, four
years before, they had first laid eyes on each other.

  It wasn’t easy for either of them. The strain told.
In late July, in fact, Isabel wrote that she was too rushed with it
all—the reasons, not given, she said were various—and thought they
should call it off. Not to worry, thought Darconville.

  August obliterated. The first few weeks sped by with
temperatures soaring and Darconville rushing around in a feverish
va-et-vient
struggle with last-minute things: he had to
register officially at Caxton Hall, reserve rooms at the Eaton
Court Hotel in Belgravia, and, having changed plans, reserve his
airline ticket from Boston a day earlier, the flight he’d now be
taking alone. It was hairline procedure to observe, chaos to watch.
It would pass, thought Darconville. Bread was made from panic,
wasn’t it? Sometimes the speed of it all almost exhilarated him.
The gallop is a pace in which the sequence of steps, supposing the
off fore to lead, is near hind, off hind, near fore, off fore, with
a period of suspension—and
there
Darconville rested,
content, pondering the joys that were to come in a race at the
finish. And then one day that happened. And it was all over. It was
done.