Darconville's Cat (26 page)

  It was time to go, with Isabel yawning into her hand
as Darconville got up to pay. The mesomorph turned from the grill
and, wiping his hands on his pants-seat, took Darconville’s
money—but not before suddenly and suspiciously tracing that
stranger’s eye back to the photograph of the Knights of the Great
Forrest, supplefaced in their framed repository. The proprietor
never took his eyes off Darconville, not in ringing the cash
register, not in returning the change.

  Darconville said, “Thank you, Mr. Ayak.”

  The man munched in a bronchiospasm—then crouched up
menacingly into Darconville’s immediate vision, squinting like a
mole through a musit. “Don’ mention it, boy,” he drawled cruelly,
one eye coldly galvanizing into a hard marble, and then repeated
slowly, “Don’
mention
it.”

  The night outside seemed fierce, inquisitive, with
heavy masses of shapeless vapor working through the woods. The
upper segment of the arch of the sky was all purple, blotched
purple, and descending on all sides were bleak clouds thrusting
their heads into the purple in mountain shapes. They drove away and
weren’t a mile up the road before Darconville turned to Isabel to
put her curiosity at rest: that road-house, he told her, was a
meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan. Isabel arched an eyebrow,
dubiously. But Darconville’s close friendship with a black minister
in Quinsyburg, who’d once nearly been hoisted by them during the
tense period when the public schools there had been closed (and a
few hours of disbelief thereafter reading in the library), had some
time ago put him in the picture. Not surprisingly, it was in just
such small sheriffwicks and timber- and box-producing outbacks as
Fawx’s Mt.—the land of the piney-wood folk—that they set up their
hate factories and bigotoriums. Darconville told her about the
Klan’s early playful pranks in Pulaski, Tennessee, and then
recounted how that small group of unreconstructed bushwhackers,
ill-concealed populists, and cut-rate anti-alienists who rode out
hooded and nightied in the witchlight through lonely dingles and
phantasmal swamps had grown into a nationwide klavern of
“brothers-beneath-the-robe.” Theirs was a perpetual hallowe’en.
They paid the initiation fee—the klectoken—and then, whenever they
spied anything whatever alien, Catholic, wet, black,
nullificationist, or remotely anti-American, they officially
klonvokated, paraded, and clashed. There were four stages of
klankraft, explained Darconville and, after due deliberation there
back at the roadhouse, he found he could name them: K uno, duo,
trio, and quad, or ordinary Klansmen, Knights Kamelia, Knights—
Darconville tapped Isabel on the knee—of the Great Forrest, and at
the top of the pyramid Knights of the Midnight Mystery.
Ooooo-eee-ooo! Darconville could picture them: the little hoodoos
creeping through low brush toward the midnight lodge, listening for
noises, and then, after a few gymnastic handshakes, sitting around
in their pinheaded cowls pantomancing each other by candlelight
with stories of Communist carpetbaggers, secret hatchet factories
run by niggers, and disgusting Romish excesses, for the actual
proof of which they thrillfully displayed to each other little
gingham bags-with-drawstrings especially manufactured for conveying
out of convents the fruits of priestly lust.

  They passed in silence the little collapsed
schoolhouse (The Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox School) where Isabel, on
a former visit, once mentioned she attended the early grades, a
pentecostal church painted red, and, finally, on the road to her
house, a wooden building set back in a foliage of evergreens in
front of which, in plaid shirts and neckerchiefs, a handful of Fawx
Mountaineers smoked pipes while fiddlers inside were playing a
medley of square-dance tunes: “Rats in the Meal Barrel,” “Frog
Mouth,” “Got a Chaw of ‘Baccy from a Nigger,” etc.

  “Who knows,” laughed Darconville, “that chap back
there might have been a Kleagle, a Wizard, a Kligrapp, or a Kludd
perhaps. Maybe even the Imperial Emperor himself!”

  Isabel said, “You still haven’t explained why he
seemed so angry. Maybe it was because you called him, what was
it?—that
name
.”

  “Ayak?”

  “Yes.”

  “
Ayak
,” said Darconville. “ ‘Are you a
klansman?’ The response to which is
Akia
: ‘A klansman I
am.’ “ Then Darconville dramatically swung out his arm and bowed.
“
Kigy
! ‘Klansman, I greet you!’ “

  Those words weren’t out of his mouth a second when
straightway he was up and into the gravel driveway of the
Shiftletts (the ones who weren’t the others) and shut off the
motor. Suddenly a face—O brutafigura!—ballooned up at the car
window out of the pitch-darkness. It was a fish-white pretext of
eyes, nose, and mouth which, mis-aligned in God knows what tragic
hypocaust of fate, instantly turned the roots of one’s hair to
ice-needles. Horror dorsifixed Darconville. Immediately he
felt—why?—a stab of profound love for Isabel but in the grip of
sudden shock only heard her spool down the window to ask her uncle,
in a diffident whisper, if he would like to meet Darconville.

  “Thnairsz,” came a voice like a toy air-horn, with a
hole in it.

  It meant yes.

  XXXIII

  Gloss

  I am bound to you beyond expression

        —GEORGE LILLO,
The London Merchant

  DARCONVILLE would hear that man’s tiny, thumbtongued
voice— saying “thnaowr”—only one more time.

  And then it would mean no.

  XXXIV

  Hansel und Rätsel

  If you were April’s lady

  And I were lord in May . . .

        —ALGERNON
SWINBURNE, “A Match”

  
Fortunati ambo
: they fooled around most of
the spring, wandering, in joyous twinship, with Isabel laughing
always and Darconville feeling there wasn’t a happier person than
he, anywhere. They went on picnics, roamed through the woods, and
drove in and around the countryside with Spellvexit perched regally
in the back seat, whenever they could get away from the college.
They went to movies, walloped tennis balls, swapped useless gifts,
and in high spirits always chased down whatever curious
fatamorganas could be found in the Quinsyburg Darconville now, for
Isabel’s presence there, almost grew to love. How primal, thought
Darconville, the secondary can become!

  After classes, habitually, Darconville would wait on
his porch for her: and how often, sitting there, had he worn out
his eyes trying to grasp in the distance a certain, undeceitful
form coming toward him, which by failing to come only became an
uncertain figure going away! More often than not, they left each
other notes before lunch, hailed each other on the run in
midafternoon, and, leaving behind the little Pittenweem witches of
the dorm, hand in hand escaped that deinspir-ing world to follow
the endless caravan of fascinations their own delight, their love,
daily afforded. The mind defining reality creates it. The sun was
hot all spring. The world sang.

  “O, you’re going to leave me,
I
know,”
Isabel would cry, laughing, whenever he might be late, her arm
flung, Camille-like, melodramatically across her brow—then she
would burst into even wilder laughter, light silver peals flying up
like a flash of swallows. It was a favorite joke, a riddle posed as
a catharsis, documenting perhaps the early fears of their
delicately exigible love but becoming a humorous catchphrase from
then on, one never used without a lilt and a laugh.

  “Never!” Darconville would reply with comic
feverishness. “You’re going to leave
me
.”

  It has been said by some and several that Desire
wishes, Love enjoys, and that the end of one is the beginning of
the other. That which we love is present; that which we desire is
absent. But it was not so with smitten Darconville. He felt he
would never know enough of her, present or absent, so little, in
fact, he knew. His love only compounded his desire. And, as he
wished to enjoy, he enjoyed this wish: his
love
to desire.
And yet his wishes, even in her presence, were not misapplied, for
there was so little of Isabel known in so much of Isabel seen:
Queen Enigmatica of Quinsyburg. The Little Thing, indeed! She
herself was a riddle.

  There were matters, for instance, on which she was
close as an oyster: her poor grades, her occasional disappearances
on weekends, Govert (neither mentioned him: not him, not her), and
the inexplicable secrecy she seemed to assume whenever they went to
Fawx’s Mt. —but part of her beauty was her mystery, thought
Darconville, who went about his business in the face of such
conditions, immortalizing her, like Surrey’s Géraldine, in
dew-besprent complaints she never heard. She was that ineffable
factor whose precise definition—if one should avoid in definition
the word of words one’s trying to define— could maddeningly be put
in no other terms. She was equal only to herself. It was her first
glory. But there was no disclosure. She could not be found in the
line of a palm or explained in conclusion to a series of formal
donations. She was not in the tarot, untraceable through pounce
paper, incommensurable—a flash like a flame in an opal. Nothing was
really applicable. But if no name was put to their happiness, still
it was abundance. They were both frankly in love.

  Subrationally, they needed each other, with each
making the other proud and worthwhile in the way lovers do when
attention is freely given, when one is loved less because he or she
deserves to be than because he or she creates, is created by, the
other’s grace and both become transfigured not as opposites but as
reverse images of the same character. It was a pact, to save each
other from trouble, to protect every consideration come to them in
the inaudible glory of each other’s trust, to find, miraculously,
in the sudden emptiness of one heart the beautiful contents of
another’s filling the void.

  They packed lunches and took trips, the sunroof of
the Bentley thrown back, its radio playing, driving to Richmond, to
Appomattox, to Charlottesville, telling stories, taking pictures,
and always laughing, laughing from horizon to horizon, as if space
were endless and they’d triumphed over time. They locked themselves
in the music rooms of the college and danced, acted out scenes with
the skeletons in the labs, and delivered funny speeches to each
other in empty lecture halls. One night they were returning from
the movies. Walking by a hydrant, Isabel found sitting on top of it
a filthy old discarded seaman’s cap, but feeling silly she picked
it up (typically, with exaggerated thumb and forefinger), stuck it
on her head and, with her face rubberized into a foolish grin,
said, “I think I’ll join the navy!” “O my God,” exclaimed
Darconville, “take it off—you may get cancer!” And Isabel was
overcome with uncontrollable laughter, a rat-a-tat-tat of lovable,
bubbable squeaks. It was Spellvexit’s noise
exactly
. My
wonderful cats, thought Darconville, my—

  At that very moment, he happened to glance up: about
ten feet ahead of him—near his house and in the
exact
pose
of the cat from the curious drawing he’d done as a child—stood
Spellvexit, looking sorrowfully at him. It was strange. It looked
so much like a look of pity.

  And then, together, they often crept at night into
the Episcopal church in Quinsyburg where Darconville, under a
pinlight—with Isabel, lusorious in a pew, giggling and clicking her
tongue (always a colophon of her joy)—worked melodies on the organ
out of its dusty wheezes. Still, Isabel was always apprehensive
there. The pastor of that church had once invited both of them to a
dinner party, their first social affair in Quinsyburg together, but
Isabel, sitting on a central divan and wearing a dress
insufficiently volumetric to cover her poundage of leg,
self-consciously went the entire evening without saying a word and
still thereafter sought to avoid him: she never wore a short skirt
again.

  They even made several films with Isabel’s old 1940
plug of a camera, often spending days together walking around town
and per-iscoping everywhere for subjects: smews in flight,
misspelled signs, rosydactylate sunrises-and-sets. One of their
films, a plotted four-or-five-minute comic drama shot on location
among the bent stones in the wisteria-strewn Quinsyburg cemetery,
was a masterpiece of creative irreverence. It was Isabel’s
capolavoro
, shot in perfect sequence: Darconville,
funebrist, motors slowly in his Bentley through the main gates;
cuts to Darconville, memorialist, stepping from the car holding a
myrtle wreath; cuts to Darconville, sobrietist, who halts before an
odd gravestone hewn to the shape of a ship; cuts to Darconville,
dadaist, suddenly clutching his heart and dropping down dead; cuts
to Darconville, karcist, rising up creepily, slowly, from behind
the stone with a gleam in his impish eyes. Blackout. They almost
died from laughter every time it was shown.

  But their most memorable film?

  It was most certainly the Day of the Kite, one
golden afternoon out on the Quinsyburg golf course over which,
limitless, a perfect blue sky from mid-heaven down opened for the
sun, heating its own shining light, to transfigure a rolling field
to the Garden of Shiraz, the air holding the promise of dreams in
it and blowing around the scent of flowers in washed wind.

  “I’ll let out slack, you tug the mainline,”
Darconville called out to her. The wind ghosted. She clicked her
tongue and ran, tipping and toeing down the staircarpet of
grass.