Darconville's Cat (11 page)

  It occurred to Darconville that the expression,
“ignorance is bliss,” was a perception curiously unavailable to the
ignorant as he considered, with great misgivings, the sad and
inarticulate desperviews there whose identities had gone soft on
them and whose grasp of reality was so slight and so arbitrary and
so grotesque that each could have easily stepped from there into
the hot pornofornocacophagomaniacal set of Bosch’s unmusical hell
and fit, snugly.

  The meeting, finally, adjourned. A partition was
rolled back, revealing at another section of the long room several
tables with bottles of soft drinks (no liquor) and plates of
cookies, candy, and cake. Papers rattled, people coughed, and
chairs shifted as everyone withdrew.

  “Y’all ever see so dang much shuck for so little
nubbin?” complained President Greatracks who—a fake giant among
real pygmies —stomped toward the food in the company of several
pipe-smoking lackeys, all dodging about in his circumference. No,
no, they agreed, no, they hadn’t. His arms upon the boobies’
shoulders, you quickly saw the gudgeon bite. No, no, they repeated,
not at all. “Sombitches,” he said, picking up five thumbprinted
marshmallows and stuffing them into his mouth. “I can hear their
brains rolling about like B-B’s in a boxcar.”

  The Quinsy faculty, during the refreshments, took
the occasion to gossip, but faction didn’t really constitute
disunity. It was as if, somehow, they had all been destined by some
temporal and spatial anti-miracle of history to come together at
the same place and time and to know each other on the instant by
some mystic subtlety for mates, perhaps in the paradox of peculiar
faces which, while each was different, all looked as though God had
smeared them when still wet. They didn’t have to talk. They weren’t
speakers, really. But they were
experts
at
malversation.

  “I know about budgets,” said Miss Throwswitch, the
drama teacher, with a scrawl of mockery under the rims of her eyes
as she poured a soda. “This year, you watch, we’ll be doing Chekhov
in clothesbags and clunkies.”

  “They are saying”—Prof. Fewstone’s standard opening
line, never without its veiled threat—”they are saying that over in
Richmond the legislature is cutting us off without a dime unless we
put some Mau-Maus on the faculty.” A history professor, Fewstone
always kept to that one note, like a finch; his sour doctrines,
masquerading as brands of economics and politics, fit his
reputation as a miser far better than the hackberry-colored jacket
he never took off, perhaps for that elegant pin (compass, square)
awarded him by some Brotherhood of Skinks or other who worshipped
trowels and pyramids. “Now in my book,
The Rehoboths: Reform or
Reglementation
? I put forth the theory—”

  “Attitudinizing,” murmured Miss Gibletts, the Latin
teacher whose thin, dry, hectic, unperspirable habit of body made
her somewhat saturnine. She looked like St. Colitis of the Sprung
Chair. Turning away to find another conversation, she carefully
managed to avoid the dark stranger with the French name who’d just
been introduced and who was standing all alone.

  Miss Dessicquint, the assistant dean, looked like
Nosferatu—a huge mustachioed godforgone, inflexible as a Dutch
shoe, who was given to lying about her age before anybody asked
her. She closed her eyes and begun to hum. “Look,” she sneered,
nudging her secretary and sometime bowling partner, Miss Gupse, an
unhealthy-looking little poltfoot with one of the longest noses on
earth. “There, by the table, in harlequin shorts.”

  “Oh no. Floyce.”

  “The flower of fairybelle land.”

  “He irks me, that one.”

  “He?”

  Miss Gupse, smiling, caught the irony and licked her
nose. “She.”

  “
It
!” said Miss Dessicquint, wagging a
tongue long as a biscuit-seller’s shovel. Her secretary had to turn
around to stop the smile glimmering down the flanks of her steep
nose. “He looks like a Mexican banana-split.”

  “I wonder,” swallowed little Miss Gupse, “how those
people”—she looked up over a cookie—”well,
do
it.”

  “Have you ever had the occasion,” asked Miss
Dessicquint, pausing for dramatic effect, “to look at the east end
of a westbound cow?”

  Floyce R. Fulwider, reputedly a ferocious
alcibiadean, was a balding, fastidious art teacher—he pronounced
Titian, his favorite painter, for instance, to rhyme with
Keatsian—who could often be seen skipping across the Quinsy campus
holding by his fingertips the newly wet gouaches and undernourished
para-menstrual creations of his students or, as he called them, his
“popsies.” The college teemed with stories about the felonious
gender-switching parties he threw, when he’d paint his windows
black, put on his Mabel Mercer records, and encourage everyone to
don feather boas and run around naked. He couldn’t have liked it
more. But Miss Dessicquint didn’t like it and told Miss Gupse,
confidentially, that he was getting a terminal contract this year.
“Rome,” she whispered into her companion’s ear, “wasn’t burnt in a
day.”

  Then, turning, they saw Darconville.

  “I hope
he
isn’t a bumbie.”

  “He looks normal to me,” said Miss Gupse.

  “Well, you know what they say. And it’s true,” said
Miss Dessicquint, with eyes like frozen frass, “there’s a thin line
between madness and insanity.”

  Miss Gupse, never strong, secretly thought herself
the object of this cut and that very evening would proceed to call
her sister in Nashville to inquire tearfully about a job there.
True, that particular afternoon she had been in the midst of her
mois
. But the memory of having a big nose from childhood
is perhaps at the bottom of more havoc than one can ever know.

  In one corner of the room, occupying much of it,
stood Dr. Glibbery, a walrus-arsed microbiology professor with a
face, spanned by a dirty ramiform mustache, that had the nasty
whiteness of boiled veal. His body resembled the shape in microcosm
and odor in fact of one of those nineteenth-century lamps, the kind
with a reservoir that gurgled periodically, emitted a stench of
oil, and often exploded. A fanatical right-wing at-once-ist, he
bullied his students—calling them all “Dufus”—with incredible lies
about the difficulty of taking a doctorate and how, in pursuit of
his own, he’d lived on ketchup sandwiches, got hookworm from going
barefoot, and had to study upsidedown to keep awake. In point of
fact, he had taken his degree from one of those
just-about-accredited polytechnical millhouses in Virginia,
identified usually by its initials, where the only requirements for
graduation were to belong to the DeMolay and have two thumbs and a
reasonably erect posture.

  “None of these here dufuses
work
anymore.
Well,” pontificated Dr. Glibbery, “I’m going to knock their tits
right into their watch-pockets for them, OK? You won’t spy no grade
of A in my roll-book,” he said, “for love nor money.”

  He mumped a fistful of horehound drops and
winked.

  “
Or
money,” corrected Prof. Wratschewe,
doyen of the English department and proud author of several
monographs, still, alas, awaiting the recognition of an indifferent
world: “Bed-Wetting Imagery in Chatterton”; “Packed Earth as
Anti-Resurrection Symbol in Wordsworth”; “The Caesura: Rest Home of
Rhetoric”; and one slim book,
Menus from Homer
(o.p.).

  But Dr. Glibbery only farted and grinned.

  Miss Pouce, standing there, almost died of
embarrassment—and, turning quickly, banged into a wall. Great
snorts of laughter accompanied this, then grew—the lackeys, going
beetred, doubled over with hilarity—as Greatracks, mimicking her,
waddled yoketoed into the same wall, went crosseyed, and grabbed
his nose. Qwert Yui Op, a midget Tibetan-Chinese, and Miss
Malducoit, of the dirigible hips, both in math, applauded—and she
spilled her drink. Darconville went to pick up her cup. “Thank you
very much,” said Miss Malducoit coldly, stepping in front of him,
“I can do it myself.”

  Darconville, unwittingly, backed into a group of old
ladies. It was the delegation, each old enough to carbon-date, from
home economics. In the midst of them, studiously arranged that way,
loomed a huge unproliferative boffa with tied oviducts and
blimp-like breasts which sagged according to the law of S=½vt2
named Mrs. DeCrow, associate professor in American history and
local U.D.C. chairwoman, who was blowing a loud
ranz des
vaches
across the room, subject: her summer in Biloxi. She had
a voice like a faulty drain. There was a cruel pin in her hat, and
she wore an eighteenth-century brooch with a painting of a litter
of pigs on it. Famously disagreeable, at least so Dr. Dodypol, a
colleague, told Darconville, she harbored a monomaniacal
loathing—something not a few Southerners shared—for Abraham
Lincoln.

  “I know you but you don’t know me,” Mrs. DeCrow
announced to Darconville, hoping she was wrong.

  An arrangement, thought Darconville, that suits me
fine.

  “Wait,” she suddenly exclaimed, holding a finger to
her nose and turning to the other ladies, “but now who does this
boy remind me of?”

  Everyone dutifully waited.

  “Not that awful Edwin Albert Poe who wrote horror
poetry?” asked a sagcheeked lady cretinously mis-shoving a wedge of
cake into her face.

  “No,” said bossy Mrs. DeCrow, cocking a quick snook
at the lady. “I know,” she said, interrupting herself, “Sir Thomas
More.”

  “Saint Thomas More,” corrected Darconville, for whom
such distinctions meant something. But he was smiling.

  Mrs. DeCrow, arching an eyebrow, didn’t care. That
remark, though she smiled a hard smile, immediately cost him—and
irrevocably—any invitation whatsoever to one of her Fridays, even
if he lived to be a hundred.
She
knew where to stick the
knife in.

  Darconville submitted to his uneasiness and in the
contending noise, the rambling incoherent flow of talk, found that
the most delectable social delight there seemed to be the quarrel
that stopped just short of violence, discussions ending in repeated
barks and loud flat interrobangs. It was a tragedy of language.
There was no dialogue, only monologue, wherein each of the
thimbleriggers and pathologically self-defensive opsimaths gathered
there, most of them educated on the fly at one of those narrow and
sectarian chop-and-chance-it swot factories in that region which
was named after some square-capped fifteenth-century Protestant
joykiller, only kept to a mad and self-referent fixity of subject
and blathered on to no consequence.

  Suddenly, there was a buzz of intrigue by the
doorway: someone reporting a car accident. Xystine Chappelle,
calling from the Quinsyburg Hospital, had reported that, while
driving them home, Miss Shepe and Miss Ghote, sitting in the back
seat, had willfully resumed their
“I-think-that-you-think-that-I-think” argument, whereupon Miss
Ghote leaped in frustration from the moving car and broke her
femur.

  “Them ol’ beangooses,” muttered Dr. Glibbery,
fingering through the candies, “I do believe they gone get married
one day.”

  “Are you?” Darconville, surprised, looked behind
him. “Are you married?” It was the German instructor, Miss
Tavistock (a.k.a. “The Clawhammer”), a flat-chested girl with a
cataleptic smile who had the curious habit of suggesting to perfect
strangers that, frankly, she thought they were in love with
her.

  “No, I’m not,” answered Darconville who, suddenly
noticing Mrs. DeCrow empty-handed, offered her some cookies, but
she would have none of it and walked past him in a snit—the snit
that would last a lifetime.

  “The writer,” sighed Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub, the
tournure of her phrases as precise as cut glass, “has
no
time whatsoever for such things as marriage. No, I’m afraid she has
not. The devotion which asks her to feel the deliberation of art
asks also that she choose the single life.” A senior member of the
creative writing department, Miss Sweetshrub carefully lifted off
her half-glasses and, patronizingly turning her head from person to
person, lectured the few people nearby on the difficulty in
question. She was—how to put it?—an “unclaimed blessing.” “I am a
novelist, you see,” she said, “which is spelled
d-e-v-o-t-i-o-n.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. McAwaddle, the registrar, who
passing by with a tidy of licorice-whips on a napkin and a paper
cup of purple soda unintentionally got hooped into the
conversation.

  “But do you? Do you really?” asked Miss
Sweetshrub.

  Mrs. McAwaddle, to be kind, gave the mandatory sign
of ignorance by pretending to reconsider and said, “Mmmmmmm.” Long
having been a fretful auditor to Miss Sweetshrub’s explicit
polysemantic chats, she knew the hopelessness of trying to
extricate herself. “Well,” she reflected, charitably, “I have no
doubt but that I might not.”

  Prof. Wratschewe, ducking his head in, interjected.
“Excuse me, Mrs. McAwaddle? The word ‘but,’ I believe, is used
unnecessarily after the verbs ‘to doubt’ and ‘to help.’ Strunk
& White, Book Four, I think you’ll find.”

  “I wouldn’t have made that mistake,” riposted Miss
Sally Bull Sweetshrub, bowing her head and fluttering her eyelids
with the advantage Prof. Wratschewe’s old, but as yet
inconsequential, crush on her allowed.

  Miss Sally Bull Sweetshrub,
aet
. 50 or so,
was classically affected and wore out-of-date dresses that looked
like Morris wallpaper. She had a perched Jacobean nose, like a
dogvane, a waltzing oversized bottom, and wore her
pissburnt-colored hair in an outlandish bun at the back anchored by
several severe combs that matched in horn her conversational
brooches. A bottomless fund of clarifications and cruelly sharpened
pencils, she was known for giving strawberry teas and answering all
her mail on Featherweight Antique Wove, Double Royal 90 when she
couldn’t attend a function, which, of course, she always could—and,
when so doing, always did in the company of her pet beagle,
“Howlet,” and a monstrous alligator friend who some years ago left
its native land in the form of a handbag. She was
the
pillar of Quinsy College, a woman both impregnable and unbearable
(what she might have borne were she pregnable would, indeed, be
unimaginable!)—one of those starboard-leaning High Anglicans,
famous and innumerable in the Old Dominion, whose factitious sense
of vanity in a private conversation makes it frankly public: the
raised and punishingly assertive voice of the insane queen which
includes, willingly or not, everybody within earshot.