Darconville's Cat (19 page)

  O no, thought Darconville. He got up, stepped past
the girls, and called down the stairwell. But she had gone, out of
the light and into the darkness. By slow degrees it dawned on him
what she must have felt, even if absurdly, for jealousy, lineament
by lineament, feature by feature, needs no scene or sentence but
actually creates itself from what it fears.

  The male professor at Quinsy College, in fact,
whether attached or not, symbolized a plenitude he hadn’t but by
his very presence precipitated a thousand desperate necessities, a
particular situation, needless to say, that often put in ludicrous
but privileged ascendance those who would be gentlemen that late
were grooms. He could act like a churl, use his hands for purposes
of locomotion, or look like the Expansible Pig, the girls didn’t
care—
instans instanter
, he became a combination of father
confessor, confidant, marriage counselor, friend, adept, and
phantom lover.

  Anxious to see the girls out, Darconville asked if
there was anything else. They didn’t think so and shuffled out,
dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness behind them
as they waved.

  “Oh yes,” said Betsy Stride, turning back. The moon,
setting, rose again. “My last exam, remember?” She popped a
peppermint into her mouth. “It was a 78. I was close to a B,
right?”

  “Close,” replied Darconville, looking at his watch
nervously, “only counts in horseshoe-pitching and necking.”

  “Necking?” she asked salaciously—and, grinning,
snapped off the light-switch with her elbow. Her teeth-braces
gleamed in the darkness.

  “As you say,” Darconville said quietly, “we want
more lights on campus.”

  Whereat Elizabeth Stride thrust out her underlip,
turned, and slowly walked away, the undissolved peppermint still
undissolved in her cheek.

  The sound of Isabel’s light-running footsteps had
made Darconville’s heart, echoing them, feel empty, ineffectual,
and made equally futile the hurried explanation—of what?—he saw he
had to give. He quickly dialed her number: 392-4682.

  “Fitts!” came a voice on the other end like Stentor
the Bellower’s.

  “May I please speak to Isabel Rawsthorne?”

  “Canyouholdonjessaminuteplease?”

  The telephone receiver, summarily dropped, bonked
against the dorm wall several times—
clonk! clonk!
clonk
!—but Darconville waited intently. Had he been lax, he
wondered, or scrupulous, seeing those he shouldn’t have or seeing
those he should? What had he done? He didn’t know. Who pre-plots
with intelligence? Hazard, he thought, itself was creative.

  Still waiting, Darconville looked down the corridor
which ran straight from his office to a water bubbler at the far
end. On the bulletin boards lining the walls of that corridor had
been thumbtacked various grammatical projects which the
education-majors there, being trained—as opposed to educated—to
teach the lower grades, had prinked out; they were sort of visual
rebuses, narrative cut-outs on oak-tag paper, with titles like:
“Miss Question Mark has her Period”; “An Apostrophe takes Two
Pees”; “Old Mr. Bracket falls on his Asterisk”; “Little Cedilla has
a bout of Diaresis,” and so on and so forth. So much for the
trivium, thought Darconville, so much for the quadrivium.

  “Hello again, mister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you say Isabel Rawsthorne was whom was
wanted?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  There was giggling on the other end, muffled by a
hand. “Excuse me,” asked the voice, “but is this Govert?”

  Govert? It was a shadow that seemed stronger than
the substance that threw it.

  “No. No, it isn’t.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Blunder. “Well, I can’t seem to find
her.”

  Darconville stammered. He felt ridiculous. Govert:
wasn’t
he
the no-see-um she once mentioned who lived near
her somewhere in Fawx’s Mt? At Zutphen Farm or some such thing? O
lax, thought Darconville, angel of thwarting demons, are you there?
Quickly, he asked the girl to check again.

  “She’s definitely not in. Can y’all try again
later?”

  “But are you certain?”

  The girl hung up.

  Darconville lowered the receiver, thought a moment,
then called her name down the corridor. The name echoed back. It
was imperative he find her, but where now should he look? He felt
an appalling lack of energy as he dragged on his black coat, shut
the office door, and, turning to avoid the nearest poster—”Mr.
Comma empties his Colon” or whatever—went out.

  Fog, with the smell of February. The dampness,
settling in with dusk over the patches of snow, could be sharply
felt by an easterly wind. The sky was a slate slab. Darconville
walked slowly across the grounds, catching his muffler to his neck,
and—but who was that?

  “Hello.”

  It almost seemed a question.

  Isabel, huddled up, was sitting on the wooden bench
under the magnolia tree in front of the English building, her brown
eyes moist like beautiful Israfel’s and other angels who carry
misfortune in their wings. Darconville kissed and hugged her, and
she handed him a packet of photographs of herself—long requested,
longer postponed— which, she said, smiling wistfully, was why she’d
come. Then they simply sat together, preferring to keep silent,
their two hands clasped like lost children in a world only suddenly
found.

  He couldn’t define it all at once, but the feeling
of her there next to him, a grateful one, gave way to a strange,
almost sensual spasm of sympathy for all she was. Isabel
Rawsthorne’s loyalty—he should have known she’d be there waiting
for him—kept faith with her humanity. It was precisely what he had
ignored all his life, the humanizing redemption of someone else for
whom
he
dearly cared. Her silence spoke volumes. He
thought how little he’d written since meeting her. Very well, he
thought, I haven’t written. But darkness had become light. Love, he
saw, manifested itself not so much in the desire as in the need,
and, who knew, perhaps less in the learning than in the loyalty.
For the sudden recollection of his banter with the five girls, he
felt chastised, for his lack of sympathy, ashamed.

  To keep away from humankind, he suddenly saw, was to
be its murderer. Dehumanized man was capable of enormities
indescribable, and he bethought himself of what, in the absence of
this child whose radiance outshone a Delia Robbia angel, he could
become—what, some psychopath, caped in black, scuttling with a hook
before his face like a soiled shadow through the fog of his
imagination only to wound victims hatched from the disaffiliations
of his cruel and selfish solitude? Horrifying! And although hatred
was not so much beyond Darconville’s capabilities as beyond his
comprehension, he trembled at the thought, as happens in
nightmares, of what is left a heartless and inhuman force pursuing
pure illusion.

  O Isabel, O love, thought Darconville, turning to
her, his heart swollen with what, because too overpowering, he
couldn’t express. Instead, they both held hands, fearing to say
what each thought the other knew but hoping that each would feel
what both of them knew the other might be afraid to say.

  XXV

  Miss Trappe’s Gift

  And how reliable can any truth be that is got

  By observing myself and then just inserting a
Not?

        —W. H. AUDEN,
“The Way”

  THAT PARTICULAR DAY, Darconville found a surprise
waiting for him upon returning from classes, for just as he opened
the porch-door—with Spellvexit, as usual, in attendance on the
upper landing and crying out—the cat skittered over something that
came bouncing down the stairs. It was a cylinder, the contents of
which he carefully fingertwisted out to find a rare Masanobu
pillar-print of the eighteenth century, entitled
Kuroi Koshaku
Fujin
—a black half-woman/half-bird, all beak and talons,
plummeting downward. There was a note attached.

  Dear Darconville,

        I’d like to be a
could-be

        If I could not
be an are,

        For a could-be
is a may-be

        With a chance of
reaching par;

        I’d rather be a
has-been

        Than a
might-have-been by far,

        For a
might-have-been has never been

        But a has-been
was an are.

              THELMA
TRAPPE

  P.S. I wanted you to have this, being an artist (an
“are”), not like me (a “might-have-been”). I have a cameo for
Isabel. Maybe she can come visit me? But, oh, she must be busy.

  Glad for the chance, Darconville underlined the
postscript, put the note in an envelope, and posted it all to
Isabel for her good attention. He stopped by Miss Trappe’s at the
top of the hill to thank her and then hurried home to the
mysterious packet.

  XXVI

  The Nine Photographs

  Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze.

        —EDGAR ALLAN
POE

  ISABEL
was
always mysterious. The prospect,
then, that Darconville had of looking at the photographs she’d
given him filled him with high expectation. The idea of formulating
them, however, to the fancies he had of who she was only
accentuated the premonition he had that he already knew, at least
abstractly, for, although only a newly baptized considérant in her
religion, he loved her. And yet it was with some misgivings that he
prepared to pit the prosperous freedom of his partisan imagination
against revelations already cross-examined by the facts and
fingerprints of the past, a still world, while too small for her
secret and his curiosity, belonging to quite another day.

  Darconville locked the door. It had to be quiet. He
had no idea what he was about to see but felt a sensuous pleasure
as exciting as the intense rushing in his heart experienced
whenever he met her. It may have seemed a packet of trifles, worth
nothing, but it was a trifling part of the world where she lived,
and that made the difference. He opened the envelope and out fell
eight photographs—all different shapes and sizes—of Isabel at
various ages. He bent forward under the light, extending his hands
so that both stood against the coping of each picture, and studied
them.

  (1.)
Isabel as a little tweeny
: of the
“adorable” genre, it shows her in a white hair-bow and frothy white
pinafore, plump, clutching an ingot of chocolate and hopscotching
over a manhole cover, twice the width of her size in height. Part
sylphid, part crammed poultry, her legs even then are more Saxon
than Norman.

  (2.)
Isabel as a premenstrual
: her face,
pigtails, and big milk-teeth show a comic sunniness and a kind of
rubbernecking innocence, though there can be detected a sad fleer
playing at the edge of her mouth. There is a noticeable birthmark
beneath her eye (the answer to the question of her scar! ). She
doesn’t know she misses the father she knows is missing. The sleep
in her eyes might seem to reflect, unfairly, on her I.Q. At this
age, she’d have had a favorite ring with a pyrite stone, an
imaginary friend named something like “Mr. Koodle,” and a tiny
patent leather purse in which could be found five pennies, gum, and
a skate-key.

  (3.)
Isabel as a high-school cheerleader
:
here she’s waving from an open car, after an Albemarle High School
football game, and showing herself, if artificial, abloom. The
chenille “A” on her sweater is just detectable under her heavy fur
coat. In Adam’s fall we sinned all. The smile is forced, the drive
for popularity uncharacteristic, the birthmark gone. (“I, without
artifice, taught artifice.” St. Augustine)

  (4.)
Isabel as a blur
: an operator’s giggle
shook the camera. Was that blob in the lower right-hand corner a
figure standing in a boat? This is the only photograph with writing
on the reverse side, the connotative hieroglyphic: “G v d S.”

  (5.)
Isabel as a prom queen
: spruce Miss
Darklips, an eyebrow slightly raised, her hair styled and sprayed,
her face overpowdered white like a
femme entretenue
, is
wearing a white short-sleeved evening gown of Holland silk with a
single green stripe at the Plimsoll line of her breasts, long
gloves, and lyre-like shoes. She poses before a stone fireplace
(hers?) on the mantel of which stands a model of a red-sailed,
black-hulled ship and the demotic pénates of the owner,
not
a Medici: a duck-spout pitcher, gimcrack bottles, a
pewter cup. The hearth is surrounded in blue and white mock-Delft
tiles and the tacky, mass-produced print of a rainy
marinescape-with-ship-in-distress hung in glass behind her is,
thanks to the witless photographer, ludicrously given a sun by the
reflection of his lightbulb. (
His
light-bulb?)

  (6.)
Isabel as stout Cortez
: a white
farmhouse with a hip-and-valley roof and hippie-related fence lies
within view of the beautiful subject standing hind-side-foremost.
The photo has a
Sinnbald
character, with the back, awful
and mysterious thing, impossible to speak about—that part of us we
know nothing about, like an outlying waste forgotten by God. The
photographer’s elongated and fractured shadow—he would be just
abaft her port beam—covers her in part. The ear of the sphinx is 4½
feet long.

  (7.)
Isabel as a party guest
: a candid shot
of the subject sitting on the floor, a Nike amidst a group of
yegg-faced teenagers, playfully mussing a blond boy’s hair, which
action effectively disprizes one from a consideration of his
face—but not, by any means, his ears! Her eyes are animated. It is
strange to see her beauty so incongruously annexed, even if
momentarily, to some kind of affection for this dolt-headed pube, a
cobbler, clearly, who got beyond his last.