Darconville's Cat (25 page)

  Well, Darconville didn’t know, you see. He wanted
only that she come to believe in the sublimity he felt, feel enough
to believe the sublimity possible. Hope, after all, was as cheap as
despair, and vision? Vision! It was perhaps nothing more than
believing it could be arranged. Isabel was silent, yes, and
mysterious beyond that. But those who saw in their loved one only
what was obvious or actually present, concluded Darconville, were
incapable of understanding the select activity of love and—fools
curial! fools primipile!—addressed it with a solecism. The romance
of imprecision is not the elision of the tired romance of the
precise. Mint, in a glass of water, exhausts pounds of it. Whoso
feels the meaning of eternity is in it. Q.E.D.

  
J’adoube
, thought Darconville.

  The sun fell behind the mountains, an income of cold
breezes and blue dew now being felt along the high countryside of
Fawx’s Mt. The woodlands of pin-oaks, sour gums, and box elders
darkened. Clutching his arm, Isabel moved closer to Darconville,
sleep drawing her head toward his chest. He drove on a bit further
through gloomy dimbles and boggy slades and little unnamed places
with boondock courthouses, then circled around near the funny
little airport, a red wind-sock over a barren tract, on the
outskirts of Charlottesville, and passing back through
Stanardsville under a sky filled with clouds like weasel tracks
bounced over narrow, lonely roads along which bordered tumbled-down
stone walls and desolate dray-horse farms sticking up out of moss
and moor, holt and hill, and then came again to the edge of Fawx’s
Mt. where Darconville saw a roadhouse in a stand of pines —and
pulled over.

  It was a shabby place.

  The hairy wabblefat at the grill—you couldn’t see at
the neck where the head adhered—had an acromegalic jaw and a five
o’clock shadow; he took a toothpick from his mouth and half turned.
One of his eyes was milky with trachoma. The close air, as
Darconville and Isabel sat down, smelled of sawmill gravy and fried
meat. A jukebox was playing a country song about adultery. The
waitress, a slatternly blonde with orange lipstick and a severe
case of underbite, came over to the booth and unhooked an order pad
from her hip. Darconville, ordering a coffee for himself and a hot
chocolate for Isabel, asked the time. The waitress scratched a tiny
spot in the nest of her hair with the sharp fingernail of her
medical finger and, with a pencil, stabbed behind her in the
direction of the clock. It was with unexpressed disbelief but a
suddenly profound sense of mis-wish that, finding the time, he also
read in faded letters pericycloid with the clockface the name of
the establishment:
Shiftlett’s
—incontrovertible proof,
thought Darconville, that demons were rife on earth. It was a Land
of Sub-multiples!

  The roadhouse was like all others in the South. The
pattern never varies. A crusty exhaust-fan, wafting out the bacon
smoke, whines in a high pigeon-flecked window. In a cubby-like
pantry off at one end slouches the
plongeur
—a bindlestiff,
working his way down to Chattanooga or Mobile, in a paper hat,
ripped T-shirt, and apron tied gracelessly low—who has his mouth
pursed to a perpetual whistle (nothing ever comes out) and is
dunking in and out of the cold, soap-less water thick white cups
and bowls washed over the years almost to fossils. The owner, of
course, works the grill, clarifying his drippings and juicing alive
the comestibles—fat snaps, grease cracks, oil spats— but he’s a
windmill of efficiency, jackflipping burgers, whiffling batter, and
sieving oil out of the fries, his ear professionally cocked to the
laconic input of orders barked by the waitress, his perspiring eye
on the dusty moon of the clock on the flame-scorched ceiling above
him, next to that pair of antlers you love, and the calendar
printed up by the local dairymen’s association showing in front of
a red barn a freckled girl-child in pigtails and overalls hugging a
cow, its caption reading, “Let’s Bring the Curtain Down on
Mastitis.”

  That tone held here. There was one addition,
however—an unpredictable variant—on a side-wall by the door. It was
a framed photograph, frilled around in the crushed bunting of the
Stars ‘n’ Bars, of a group of thirty or so country jakes in string
ties, identified collectively on a plaque underneath as “Knights of
the Great Forrest.” Darconville, always curious, wondered who they
were. The Prophets of Zwickau? Contra-Remonstrants of the Old
Dominion? The Second Synod of Dort? “Bunkum,” he demoted.

  Darconville took Isabel’s hands on the table and
smiled, for he saw she was justifiably uneasy about the place. He
wanted to avoid saying something from the
it’s-important-that-you-understand-that-you-must-trust-me-if-you-want-me-to-help-you
school but, as she seemed distraught, he gave her full attention.
This
, she said, peeping her eyes sideways and lowering her
head, was exactly what she wanted to avoid in her life. Please,
said Darconville. No, she said, her eyes filming over, she meant
it, really, she
meant
it. And then out of the blue, for
the first time, she explained—her heart now a hotpond of
regrets—how she’d grown up in the midst of such, such—she fought
for words—

  “Lower-class—
things
!” she whispered
hoarsely. Isabel thrust out her underlip, blew up at her hair, and
then told Darconville in language a shade too vehement how, how,
how weak, really
weak
, her mother was, although she loved
her, naturally, who wouldn’t love their own mother? O, said Isabel,
couldn’t he
see
? She bemoaned the fact that her mother
rattled dishes in the sink early in the morning, that she drank too
much, that she mispronounced words, and on and on. Why, her uncle
never even flushed the toilet after using it! They were poor,
uneducated, didn’t even
talk
right!

  Darconville listened to her, who seemed now so out
of charity with almost everything, as if all joy had suddenly
passed out of the world, as if God, and simultaneously with Him all
creation, had suddenly bowled up on the horizon, angry, revengeful,
and cruel. Isabel had a woman’s worries, but the child lingered on
in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Apparently,
for Isabel, her mother’s failed marriage was a crushing blow—her
thunderbolt, her Stotternheim— which dropped her into such darkness
of soul that she saw herself doomed. No, she
didn’t
hate
her uncle; see, it was what he
represented
. And what was
that? How, Isabel fell to an even lower whisper, how could she know
where to begin?

  Poor simple voice, thought Darconville, she fails,
and failing grieves, and grieving dies; she dies—and leaves her
life the victor’s prize, falling upon his lute. O fit to have, that
lived so sweetly, dead, so sweet a grave.

  The confession was diffident, scrambled, and
unclear. Darconville, however, pieced together what he could:
Isabel’s mother worked in Charlottesville, the source, she granted,
along with her uncle’s job in a local parts factory, of her college
tuition, but on weekends, apparently, both of them were foolishly
given to inviting pig-ignorant loons and locals over to their house
for potlatches of excessive drinking, loud music, card playing,
and—with Isabel sitting quietly in her bedroom absolutely
mortified—frivolous and nearly insane displays of laughter and
vulgarity that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. O yes,
said Isabel ruefully, she owed a great deal to them, it was true,
but nevertheless she still resented them and the desperateness in
her they wouldn’t,
couldn’t
, even recognize! Why, her
mother, added Isabel, the scar on her cheek whitening, her mother
even considered her to be a snob for placing herself above the
neighbors. Neighbors? asked Isabel with fire, metonym of war, in
her eyes.
Neighbors
?

  Silently, Darconville listened to her descriptions
of them—I shall never have any trouble from her neighbors, he
felt—and, looking around him, ironically discovered there in that
very roadhouse the perfect illustrations of her running text.

  On the long row of stools by the counter and in the
booths sat old whiskerandos blowing their whit-flawed fingers;
baleful giants with narrow eyes and unijugate ears; a cowboy out of
nowhere; interstate truckers with pussle-bellied paunches and split
shoes; tiny women wearing baseball caps; and in general an entire
assortment of culex-ridden farmers, bust-hogs, and chawbacons, most
banging in and out for coffee, some doped from stupidity into
motionlessness, and others synoptically eyeing the waitress and
making gawky, insinuative reverences whenever she bent over to flap
away the pack of cats snooping the local accumulations on the floor
and anybody’s inflamed feet.

  The patrons ranged over their plates like nimble
spaniels, each using his primary utensil—an aggressive fork,
pointed down—to cut, saw, shear, shape, and worry around his food.
They buttered their bread in the air, folded it, and held it out,
bitten in gouges. They shook salt onto the counter by their plates,
dropped sops into their gravy, slurped soup from the front of their
spoons. They masticated, smacking, with open mouths. They ate
asparagus and celery by the fist, spat out the hulls of peanuts,
and twitched bones onto the table or cracked them for marrow at the
back of their teeth. They tongued icecubes, while talking and
grunting, from glasses stippled white with lip-prints and drank
with their spoons in their cups, elevating the vessels as if,
rather than drinking, they were trying to stand them inverted on
their noses. Finishing their meals, they tipped up their plates for
any spilled chankings, fingered up any, and then, burping, banged
down a few coins, shoved backwards from the counter—pausing maybe
to catch on the jukebox the last clanging, twanging offerings about
store-brought happiness, careless love, and women either living on
the cheat-in’ side of life and/or takin’ their love to town—and
went out. You were looking for the overture to
Xerxes
?
This was the Vale of Tempe?

  O Fawx’s Mt., Fawx’s Mt.! thought Darconville.
Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate.

  “You see? What it’s like? I don’t know what I’d
do”
cried Isabel, her hands beseech-side up, “if I hadn’t
found you—be thrown to the wolves, I suspect, I really do. I don’t
think I can live here another day. I have nothing.” Darconville
heard in her words the locutions of her mother. He didn’t know what
to say in response, but he who at one clap would have summoned from
above all the Angels of the Triplicities to help her knew it fell
to him alone. The prospect frankly delighted him, for he loved her,
although in that, he feared, perhaps he wasn’t alone. “I have only
the woods and fields,” she said with a forlorn look. She pulled her
thumb. “And animals.”

  Darconville saw his chance.

  “At Zutphen Farm?”

  Isabel looked away. There was nothing there for her,
she promised. Yes, it was true she would walk over to visit when
she had nothing else to do; the little farm-related chores there
gave her pleasure, she said, but she didn’t do it for money, even
though they were wealthy. She never really liked that family, she
added, nor respected them very much.

  And as she talked, Darconville put together what
fragments he could: Captain van der Slang, rarely at home, was a
semi-diplomatic species of merchant profiteer-with-schemes who,
thunderballing the watery world in his
blaue Schuyte
from
Libya to Newport News and shifting barrels of oil, natural gas, and
pig-iron hither and yon, nourished pretensions of great
significance. They were of the rentier class, the van der Slangs,
supposititious zee-drainers who’d recently moved from somewhere in
Delaware to Fawx’s Mt. and this particular farm the captain bought
to keep his wife and family of idle boys busy. The mother, it was
clear, was a hex-faced busybody who, while studiously avoiding the
Shiftletts of low degree down the road, nevertheless patronized
Isabel not only to help her with the farmwork but also because she
harbored secret hopes of moral advancement for her foolish sons,
both roughly of Isabel’s age, whose ambitions thus far, apparently,
proved less than complete. (But Isabel gave no details on either of
them.) The farm, in any case, was a going concern, and more, with
great profits realized in selling livestock and breeding Black
Angus cattle. The family, the richest in Fawx’s Mt., was
nevertheless somewhat unpopular with the common serfs and chapped
hands who hired out to that farm; rumor had it, said Isabel, rather
circumspectly, that they cheated on their taxes, arbitrarily
manumitted the help, and were remorseless in the matter of buying
up more and more land. Their niggardliness was legendary. “You did
mention once,” said Dar-conville quietly, wondering if, when a
bullet traces a line, every point in that line sustains it, “that
one of the sons—”

  Isabel, watching his eyes, kissed him quickly and
said, “I want you. I need
you
.”

  Need, thought Darconville: the
quaestor
that sells indulgences love buys. It was true, however, that they
hadn’t yet confessed their love, which, under the circumstances,
nevertheless, seemed only a formality. There was more need for time
to know than pressure to convince, in any case, wasn’t there? No,
it was good that he’d come to Fawx’s Mt. For no reason, Darconville
thought of Hypsipyle Poore, whose beauty somehow always outran her
grace, and he thought of Aeneas’s passion for Dido, sudden and not
sanctioned by the gods or favorable auspices, whereas the ultimate
union with Lavinia, for whom he formed no such violent or hasty
attachment, would have recommended itself to every noble Roman.