Darconville's Cat (72 page)

  Isabel turned to him the three-quarter profile the
Dutch invented. Her lips curved into a sharp, foxlike smile as if
under the pressure of some inner merriment or delight remorselessly
beyond her power to suppress, for its triumph, for the force in the
authenticity of its abusive truth, for the opportunity at last of
its unexpected release, and then calmly spoke the words of his
execution.

  “Gilbert van der Slang,” she said.

  [[BLACK PAGE]]

  LXXIII

  The Supreme Ordeal

  And if I loved you Wednesday,

      Well, what is that to
you?

  I do not love you Thursday—

      So much is true.

  And why you come complaining

      Is more than I can see.

  I loved you Wednesday, yes,

      But what is that to me?

        —EDNA ST.
VINCENT MILLAY

  “IT ALL BEGAN a long time ago,” said Isabel, smiling
wistfully at Darconville, “before I met you. I guess it was just
fate.” She seemed to turn his body into the frame of a doorway
through which, though speaking of the past, she gazed out into the
future. “I was first attracted to his brother, Govert, you know all
that, in my classes in high school, but with him inviting me over
to Zutphen Farm and all, well, it wasn’t long before I eventually
met”—she looked at Darconville who was obmuted into a shocked and
fearful silence, his eyes frozen onto her—”Gil.”

  She paused. “Don’t just
look
at me, please?
It doesn’t help.” She waited, then shrugged exasperatedly and
continued speaking with an increasing urge of mounting indiscretion
and the kind of monotony in her voice which assumed that he, like
herself, had rehearsed it all before. The tongue and the taste had
memorized it for her.

  “We dated a few times, not much. Then he went away
to school,” she smiled. “The Naval Academy? You know? I didn’t
break off with Govert, and, although I always liked his brother
more, I tried to put him out of my mind. See? I had to, to
survive.” She was not speaking to him, she was speaking to people
who were not there, approving people, people who understood her and
liked her and would believe her. “Summers, he returned to visit
with his family at Fawx’s Mt., I knew that, but even though it
turned out that he secretly cared, he intentionally stayed away
from me,” she said with an admiring rale in her voice, “because
of—well, us. He didn’t want to interfere, you could say,” she
beamed, “he’s like that. And neither did his mother who didn’t know
how I felt anyway, though I’m sure
you
think she did,
don’t you?” Knowing herself to be a traitor, she read the
accusation in Darconville’s eyes. “Well, you wanted to hear this.
You wanted to
know
.”

  A horrible noise, like that of something breaking,
issued from Darconville’s mouth. It flashed suddenly into his head:
My God, theologians know something they can’t tell us—
Adam and
Eve chose knowledge over life
! And instantly he knew where, in
those nervous halts in Fawx’s Mt., she’d been staring all those
years!

  “Last summer, he told me later, he’d built a wall
between us. Me,” she clarified, “and him. I’d always sensed that, I
think. Somehow”— Isabel’s eyes flowered into a smile—”you just
know. Anyway, I saw him around Labor Day, he was in uniform, when I
was helping out at the farm—” She stopped short. “I see what you’re
thinking, that all this had been planned way back during the summer
and that like my real father I have no conscience! Well, it wasn’t
in July! Or June!” A tragic contralto note came into her voice.
“How
could
it have been those months,” she asked
illogically, “I spent them trying to make my wedding dress! Oh, it
doesn’t matter now, anyway. The point is, he could understand my
doubts like no one else ever could, including—”

  Darconville closed his eyes.

  It all seemed like some resistless, inexorable evil,
with the contrast in Isabel of what she once was as pronounced as
the front of a portrait is from the back. Darconville’s skin was
stone cold as she continued her explanation in a tone of
concentrated resolution.

  “He told me about a friend of his who’d just
recently gotten married but was miserable. Miserable! Don’t you
see, inevitably I had doubts about us? We talked. We talked a lot,
about simple things: in plain language, no big visions, no big
words—just walking around the farm, I don’t know, under the trees,
with a few little animals around.” She lowered her head to contain
a smile. “I’m just a country girl, I guess.” An expression of
foolish diffidence and utter relief struggled for mastery in her
face as she looked up. “I felt a kind of security I’ve wanted all
my life. I felt safe,” she said with a supple-mouthed smile. “I
guess I should have told you all this before, shouldn’t I?”

  Darconville uttered a long sentence but no words
were produced. As she spoke, she seemed by leaps to ruin the words
that plodded in bewilderment out of his heart.

  There was an exaggerated eloquence in her
confession, as if it were necessary to focus in her mind, with
indisputable fixity, on those satisfactions, adulterated by her own
proofs, she spoke to savor—a story made the more incontrovertible,
at least so she felt, by the very fact of its being recounted and
yet one somehow bootless in the telling, so closely knit was it all
with instincts of which, in having been accepted as so irrevocably
true, her brain had in fact long ceased to take account. It was as
if the facts became such only in collusion with their being told,
reaching, nevertheless, to a greater degree of importance as they
were, with an exactness forced upon each and every detail by
nothing more than the formal decision that not only informed them
but indeed had given them birth. She prepared what could have been
to serve what should have been, so was.

  “O my G-God,” whispered Darconville, from whose face
every vestige of color had been drained. He was hunched in place,
motionless, his fingers held so tightly they were but splints of
pain. Struggling for words, trying to formulate a proposition, he
began to stammer. She asked him what he was saying.

  She sighed. “I don’t understand what you’re trying
to say.”

  Darconville felt ashamed, almost invisible. “I’m
a-afraid.” He sank his face into his thin hands.

  “That would be silly,” she said, frostily.

  “But you’re my life,” he said in a strangled voice.
“You’re all I have in the world.”

  Isabel pulled her thumb—and without closing her
mouth, which with the droop of her underlip took on an almost
vacant look, she frowned a little as she fixed her steady gaze full
open on him.

  “Not you! Not you!” He looked up. “I can’t believe
it. It’s not
true
, I know it isn’t.”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “Don’t,” pleaded Darconville, searching her eyes
desperately. “Please d-don’t?”

  She looked deedily into his face.

  “I heard you were seeing another girl in Quinsyburg
this summer.”

  “No,” he said with low parentilism, “no, d-don’t say
that.”

  With full composure, Isabel got up and placed a
glass of water and a blue pill in front of him. “You won’t say that
again?” he pleaded.

  “Drink that.”

  Darconville took the pill with hands trembling. He
wanted to, but couldn’t, ask exactly who Gilbert was, how in all
these years she never
once
mentioned him; he was trying to
shake free, literally extricate himself, from the horror of what
was happening to him. With half-shut, malignant eyes, full of
strange inward unction, she weighed him. As she removed the glass,
he saw with utter disbelief that her face had been fully
dispossessed of its natural sweetness by that mask of intransigence
which, with the arrest of desire, horrifyingly implies a secret
point de repère
to a world forbidden to him and so
reserved for another. It hadn’t been a choice between, but of. She
turned sideways in her chair, waiting.

  “Will you 1-look at me, Isabel? Please?”

  “This just isn’t the end of the world,” she said,
the contours of her countenance as imperturbable to his emotions as
dark, slippery rocks to the wash of the sea. “Why can’t you
see
that?”

  “I’ll leave Harvard.” She held her head very high at
this, and her eyes grew defiant. “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll
move down here, if you’d like, to live.” Coldly, she said that she
was no longer living at home, that, in fact, he was lucky to have
found her there when he did. The Watsons, down the street, had
offered her a small house behind theirs to live in. He asked if he
could live there with her. Isabel closed her eyes and exasperatedly
whistled air.
When will he go
, she wondered,
when will
he go
?

  It all seemed to Darconville like some weird,
stupefying story that had been told to him long, long ago—a tale,
ignored as fiction, so fashioned to be lived: the revenge of real
dreams upon fake sleep. We can actually cause to exist, in the very
act, what irrationally we fear, as perhaps we write less to get a
second chance in life than to exorcise the demons peopling our
minds. There was no real person named Dr. Crucifer, thought
Darconville, I have created him!

  The knowledge for Darconville that it was too late
to offer apologies to Isabel suddenly became a haunting penance for
him that exceeded the sin itself. But what sin?
What had he
done
? Surely something! Or was this happening to someone else?
Again, he thought of Crucifer: was this guilt by innocence?
Oversight? Presumption? It has long been observed that men do not
suspect faults which they themselves would not commit; so it was
with Darconville, who nevertheless, too wracked with guilt to
disallow the possibility of his personal hand in this, too deeply
in love to want to discern it elsewhere, assailed himself in a fit
of remorse and self-accusation that he mightn’t absolve in himself
what he wouldn’t accuse in another. He spoke in a daze of baseless,
unanswerable self-reproach, admitting his faults, proclaiming his
regrets, but all to no avail—for she looked away—and even the joys
in their lives he rehearsed suddenly seemed never to have happened
as he recalled them. There was nothing to say he could manage, with
but one exception.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She deigned not to answer.

  “Yet you wanted me. Didn’t you? Why, you
must
have wanted me to be with me so long. She assumed a
lethargic sulkiness. “I know you love me.” He spoke into the hands
that covered his face, a stammerer, literally afraid of what he
might say. “I b-beg you to love me. Please?”

  “Don’t lose your pride. Lord.”

  Darconville looked up ashen and startled, for he
suddenly saw that two personalities coming together can create a
third, with each becoming different yet together making up one they
are both surprised at separately.

  “What have I got left?”

  “Your genius.” She shrugged. “Everything.”

  “I don’t want everything that’s nothing. I want
anything that’s something.” His head was splitting. “I love
you.”

  “None of that matters now.”

  “By the truth of your right hand,” asked
Darconville, searching her mind through her eyes, “do you mean
that?” She nodded. Her eyes were clear and well-opened.

  Was there no history? No memory? No continuity or
meaning to love? They were questions the weight of which
Darconville, weakened to the heart, hadn’t now the strength to bear
asking. He had grown yellow and pasty with fatigue, his face
perspiring so much it looked as though it had just been raised from
a basin, and his swollen eyes seemed to have taken their moisture
directly from his lips which were now dry to smacking.

  “After four years? You mean”—his throat stuck
shut—”everything’s g-gone?”

  Isabel was unmoved. She turned away, exhaling in
irritation and thinking to herself: is this to go on forever? Her
hands were ice-cold. She touched the back of her left hand with the
fingers of her right: gelid.
Confecta res est
: it was
hopeless, for as she could no longer see in him what by the new
dispensation she could not understand, she could consequently feel
no sympathy for what she could not imagine. Where there is no
imagination, there can be no horror. There was nothing to be done.
The girl was gone.

  “May I,” asked Darconville, like a statue whose
fixed stare corresponds to a once genuine reality but reflects in
its cold and empty sockets no understanding at all, “may I sleep
here tonight?”

  “I don’t think that would be right.”

  Reasoning, Isabel scrutinized him. She looked
disgustedly at his trembling hands, then sighed, and relented—with
the stipulation, however, that he understood it would only be this
one
night. It seemed a kindness to Darconville whose
complete exhaustion, coupled with the sedative she’d given him,
almost prevented him from walking. She proceeded with him to an
empty bedroom where, overcome with shock, bewilderment, and grief,
he fell onto the bed and let the darkness roll over him. Something
rose out of him and actually looked down at himself from the
ceiling, from the sky, and then from beyond the universe, making
him feel smaller than anything that ever was in the world.

  The exigencies of life quickly resumed control of
Isabel. Excusing herself, she assured him she’d be right back; she
shut the bedroom door, listened a moment, and quickly disappeared
into the kitchen. And then with an efficiency that seemed a
distorted echo, an ironic recurrence, of a previous but now long
forgotten dénouement—one characterized as much by opportunity as
desire—she acted with dispatch. She looked apprehensively back to
the bedroom and then picked up the telephone to share with the only
person that mattered now the sudden good-fortune she could only
express in breathless, disconnected whispers which, while the
consequence of her elation, nevertheless seemed to recapitulate in
composition what only the most skillfully malignant and exitial of
changelings could have transformed into a rhetoric of joy from the
fragments of another’s broken heart. She had not forgotten her
stamp this time. The die was cast. It was over.