Darconville's Cat (7 page)

  Virginia is famous for its many military academies.
All, in point of fact, are one. It is at best a technique mine of
Prussian fanaticism, an encampment of stibnite-colored barracks and
halls sticking up dolefully in the middle of acres of castrate
lawns, and, as advertised, usually in the rearward pages of
national magazines—always showing either a little chevalier midway
over a baffle or some lost, disappointed boy, too old for his age,
staring out in parade dress—it is invariably named something like
Stirrup-and-Halter Hall or St. Bugle’s Academy or Furlongville and
run by a man called Colonel Forksplit, a vole-eyed martinet with a
back straight as a Hepplewhite chair and a mouthful of sententious
stories, all lies, about Stonewall Jackson’s boyhood. His
charges—you can always see them standing alone, glum, in the
Washington, D.C. bus terminals after holidays—must adhere to the
regimental uniform which is nothing more than a bit of jerry jingle
stolen from the Yeomen of the Guard. But uniforms have plenty of
buttons, and Southern girls, whose adoration for uniforms must be
listed, after
amour-propre
, as the most pronounced
regional hobble against the First Commandment,
always
hold
you by the button when they speak to you.

  Were Quinsy girls, then, familiarized with all the
social graces, schooled to realize that by a failure of either
fashion or forthputfulness it might very well cost them an M.R.S.
degree?

  The handbook, encouraging power without aggression,
covered all contingencies. The caveats were long and
letter-perfect. They were never to dip sippets, lap stamps, or chew
gum, and upon the occasion of being invited to dine out to wear
dotted Swiss, eat little, and remember that one variety of meat and
one kind of vegetable was the maximum. At least one half of the
fare, a sop of grace to gluttony, must be left in the plate. They
were told that game bones must never be lifted to the mouth nor
strenuously attacked, scraped, or twirled. They were always to use
palliatives when giving opinions of consequence and yet, at the
same time, encouraged to shape the gentlemen callers who were
over-saucy with them, or who had small respect in their talk, such
an answer that they may well understand they were offended with
them, not so sharply, however, that the escort be irrevocably
turned away. They were asked not to crake or boast, not to use any
fond sauciness or presumption but, if dancing, say, to dance well
without over-nimble footings or too busy tricks—and it was advised
they neither reverse in waltzing nor dip.

  Curtseying was encouraged, as long as every girl
remembered that there have been many women who have owed their ruin
to an awkward attempt at such. She was counseled against shingling
the hair, sipping audibly, effecting a need in public for toilet
facilities, and always, in instance without number, to take heed
that she give none the occasion to make ill report of her,
whereupon, for example, if she went riding, she must never ride
astride, whoop untowardly, or button the third button of the
hacking jacket. The carriage of a young lady must, at all times, be
respectful without meanness, easy without familiarity, genteel
without affectation, and insinuating without design. Finally, they
were asked not to speak of themselves, for nothing could ever be
said to varnish one’s defects nor add luster to one’s virtues,
whereas, on the contrary, it would only make the former more
visible and the latter more obscure. She who lived upon talk would
die fasting. Good manners will minister to the shop, and the shop
will minister to thee. “Industry,” as Stonewall Jackson once
precociously lisped to his mother from his bassinet, “needs not
wish.”

  Quinsy College would not only endure, but prevail.
It had before in times of trial and would again. Its policies,
fashioned out of an impatience with this new age of permissiveness,
said it all, with this hope expressed, this continuity dearly
wished, that in such schools—with the laws of both discipline and
decorum meted out by the best teachers of
bienséance
—there
would surely be an eventual return to the good old American Way.
Had times changed? They had, yes, they had indeed, but if President
Greatracks himself, as he so often said, had to patrol the campus
by night in specially made sneakers snooping for socialists, so be
it! Had customs changed? They had, yes, but if one could no longer
catch a glimpse, as in days of yore, of Southern belles holding
parasols, wearing frilled bonnets, and tripping across lawns in
fragile blue-and-white prints with handkerchief-pointed tiers of
feminine chiffon and cascades of quivering ruffles, it didn’t
matter—they were still worshipfully kept alive in the rotogravure
section of every true Virginian’s heart. Had laxity set in? Yes,
yes, yes, laxity, slackness, looseness! It was the age. But if
ideals were honored more in the breach than in the observance
nowadays, it took nothing more than a quick look up at the college
rotunda to have one’s faith restored, for there the flag still
flew. The
American
flag, sir!

  The flag, indeed, still flew. And yet a paradox
presented itself, for the democracy which that flag represented was
somehow the same democracy that the admission board, the
administration, and the alumni were under jurisdiction, sometimes,
in fact, by federal writ, to oblige—resulting in a perceptible
latitudinarianism which included, among other things, extended
curfews, widening of student privileges, faculty raises, the
lowering of entrance requirements (two new highrise dorms had to be
filled) and now a consideration for the actual admission of
black
students!

  The South was trying to rise again. But where was
the yeast? “Freedom,” as President Greatracks had said on many
occasions, “is all very well and good, but—”

  VIII

  Hypsipyle Poore

  Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,

  Dark Angel! triumph over me:

  Lonely, unto the Lone I go;

  Divine, to the Divinity.

        —LIONEL JOHNSON,
“The Dark Angel”

  “I
NEED
IT’!”

  “That’s a lot of pudding, miss.”

  “I’m signing up, anyway.”

  “The course, I told you yesterday, is
not
open to seniors,” exclaimed Mrs. McAwaddle, the registrar, her
mouth cemented shut against the possibility of further
discourse.

  “My daddy,” the girl drawled, charging through in
interruption and waving a slip of paper, “had the dean on the
telephone last night. Now, y’all want to read this?”

  The student, obviously used to exacting compliance,
was an arresting young beauty in sunglasses with a soft pink
sweater, raven-black hair cut to perfection, and a pout of wet
lipstick that made her mouth look like a piece of candy. She
stepped back, unvanquished, and seemed satisfied to wait, speaking
to no one but admiring from a corner the indisposition of the other
girls there who were trying to arrange their schedules during the
first discouraging days of registration. They shuffled about in
determined little squads with drop/add cards, course syllabi, and
countless papers to have signed and stamped.

  The room was warm, sticky, from the crowding bodies,
but the girls, somehow, all smelled of fresh soap and mint-flavored
gum. They were Southern girls, after all, and unlike their
counterparts in other sections of the country whose morning beauty,
from the normal wear-and-tear of a day, too easily faded only to be
carelessly ignored, they tried to keep powder-room perfect and as
presentable as possible. And, after all, this time there was a man
present in the room.

  “Some people can just whistle and wait,” snapped
Mrs. McAwaddle, going jimmy-jawed. A mite of a thing, resembling
the perky little owl commonly depicted resting on the hand of
Minerva, she was wearing a dress covered with hearts. She spindled
a card angrily and looked up at the man who’d been standing there
for some time. And now. His name? His business?

  “Darconville,” he said, smiling.

  The girl with the black hair, waiting behind him,
took a crystal vial out of her handbag (tooled in studs: “H.P.”)
and, closing her eyes, sprayed a musky lavender fragrance around
her perfect, prematurely formed silhouette, waxen as a delicate
shell.

  “Ah, of course,” beamed the owl of Minerva, “the new
professor.” They laughed together. “And I do believe I detect a
Yankee accent?”

  Darconville asked about his courses. He had met his
freshmen already but hadn’t yet been given the list.

  “Your freshman class list? O dear,” muttered Mrs.
McAwaddle. Apparently, it had been forced into more revisions than
a Dixiecrat caucus and so laid aside. She searched a tray, lifted
up a snow water-ball of glass, and then shot open an acidgreen
file-cabinet, finally rummaging up the sheets for English 100. He
read the first few names on the list:

        Muriel
Ambler

        Melody Blume

        Ava Caelano

        Wroberta
Carter

        Barbara
Celarent

        Analecta
Cisterciana

  “Would you let me,” smiled Mrs. McAwaddle, her
little head at a prayerful angle, “admire your coat?” Several girls
nearby exchanged glances and winked. Darconville’s coat people
loved. Cut to princely lines, it was an English chesterfield as
black as the black swan of Juvenal. “I do declare, if this isn’t
the most dashing—but here,” she added, hunching up to the desk,
“there’s an ever-so-small tear here, by that button.” She patted
his hand. “Now you have your wife mend that and—”

  Darconville leaned forward and, like Wotan
consulting a weaving norn, whispered with a close smile, “I am not
married.”

  Mrs. McAwaddle stared a moment—and then, with a
conspiratorial wink, motioned him into a side-room off the
registrar’s office where under a portrait of Jefferson Davis a
purple-stained mimeograph machine went
bwam-bwam-bwam
,
spitting out single sheets of copy. Conventicle gave way to
conclave. “Always remember,” she said, gripping his wrist, “to a
handsome boy like you—how old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  She made the sound of a pip. “—to a handsome boy
like you something wonderful will happen. You’ll find a girl to
love you as sure as wax candles have wicks.” She had lost her own
husband, she told him, eight years ago (tainted knockwurst, Jaycee
picnic), and now it was just hell dipped in misery. To live alone?
When the good Lord created someone for everybody? Ridiculous! “But
now,” she added, folding his hands in her own, “you be careful:
these girls at Quinsy College can work the insides out of a boy
without him having a clue and, simple yokums though they may seem,
can be the untellinest little commodities on earth. You saw that
child out front fussing at me? I could have spit nails. They have
nerve to burn.”

  For the advice of this little hole-in-corner sibyl
Darconville was grateful, though he couldn’t help but attribute her
suspicions to the exigencies of her job, and, excusing himself, he
worked his way out of the office, looking up only once: but then to
catch, above a blur of fluffy pink, a perfect face unblindfolding
slowly from a pair of sunglasses the fire-flash of two beautiful
but dangerous eyes in which, he thought, he detected a sly,
premeditated smile. He paused in the outer corridor and once again
looked at the names entered alphabetically on the list; it read
like a spice chart:

        Ailsa Cragg

        Childrey
Fawcett

        Galveston
Foster

        Scarlet
Foxwell

        Opal Garten

        Marsha
Goforth

        LeHigh
Hialeah

        Elsie Magoun

        Sheila
Mangelwurzel

  A single name there meant something more than it
was: a
symbolum
—both a “sign” and a “confession.” But
which one was it? Which one was hers? It was curious, his
preoccupation, for he’d seen her only once. Inexplicably, however,
it mattered, if only for the hardly momentous irony that by knowing
it he could then immediately dismiss it and put an end to it all.
Her look had injured a silence in his life. The known name might
somehow injure the look, and with the look gone the silence could
continue, allowing him in consequence and inducing, for diversion,
the equanimity to create out of the dormitive world the something
out of nothing we call art. There was actually scant attention
being paid to this unnamed girl in the upper part of his mind, but
in the lower reaches she several times appeared, a thing, rather
like the libration of the moon, alternately visible and
invisible.

  He flipped a sheet and read more names.

        Christie
McCarkle

        Trinley Moss

        Glycera
Pentlock

        Hallowe’ena
Rampling

        Isabel
Rawsthorne

        Cecilia
Sketchley

  Darconville couldn’t help but smile. The names
seemed absurd, but one didn’t really have to spend very much time
down South to realize the regional compulsion for this particular
extravagance, daily coming upon such weird examples as: Cylvia,
Olgalene, Marcelette, Scharlott, Coquetilla, Mavis, Latrina, Weeda
and Needa, Mariedythe, Romiette, Coita, Vannelda, Moonean, Rhey,
Flouzelle, Balpha, Erdix, Colice, Icel, and Juella, all desperate
parental attempts to try to work some kind of sympathetic magic
upon their daughters from the very start. And yet how was it that
upon hearing them one saw only majorettes, waitresses, and
roller-derby queens?

  Darconville passed by the refectory (and the odor of
mercilessly boiled brussels sprouts) and sat down in a circular
room where in the center stood a sculpture of Chapu’s Joan of Arc,
the college patron. This was known as the Rotunda. The main
building at Quinsy College, its egg-shaped interior was a
respectable cream-and-green color, open, as it took one’s attention
higher and higher past two circular balustrades, to a voluminous
inner dome covered with fake but sumptuous, over-elaborate,
neo-biblical murals in rose and gold. On several walls at ground
level, a series of past college presidents, bald and severe,
glowered out of their frames. He was still reviewing the list,
empty pier-glasses, and pronouncing names, all but hers hostile to
him because not hers, but yet none hostile because to him any might
be.