Darconville's Cat (3 page)

  The train whistle there every evening seemed to
beckon, dusk, precreating a mood of sudden melancholy in a wail
that left its echo behind like the passing tribute of a sigh. And
Darconville, while yet amply occupied, was by no means so derogate
from the common run of human emotions as not to share, upon hearing
it—Spellvexit always looked up—a derivative feeling of loneliness,
a disposition compounded, further, not only by the portentous
evidences of the season but also by the bleakness of the place upon
which it settled. The town was the quotidian co-efficient of limbo:
there was no suddenness, no irresistibility, no velocity of
extraordinary acts. He found hours and hours of complete solitude
there, however, and that became the source, as he wrote, not of
oppressive exclusiveness but of organizing anticipations he could
accommodate in his work: the mystic’s rapture at feeling his
phantom self. He had assumed this exile not with the destitution of
spirit the prodigal is too often unfairly assigned, nor from any
aristocratic weariness a previous life in foreign parts might have
induced, but rather to pull the plug of
consequence
from
the sump of the world—to avoid the lust of result and the vice of
emulation.

  There are advantages to being in a backwater, and at
the margins, in the less symphonic underground, recriminations were
few, ambition didn’t mock useful toil, and the bald indices of
failure and success became irrelevant. The man beyond the context
of hope is equally beyond the context of despair, and the serious
vow Darconville had once made to himself, medievally sworn in the
old ipsedixitist tradition of silent knights, holy knights, aimed
to that still point; so it was with love as with loneliness: to
fall in love would make him a pneumatomachian—an opponent of the
spirit which, however, to him disposed to it, nightly blew its
unfathomable afflatus down the cold reaches of the otherwise
impenetrable heavens to quicken man to magic.

  It didn’t matter where he was. No, the best attitude
to the world, he felt, unless the Patristics belied us, was to look
beyond it. Darconville was below envy and above want. And what
pleasures a place denied to the sight, he hoped, were given
necessarily to the imagination. He sought the broom of Eucrates,
the sword of Fragarach, the horse of Pacolet. Prosperity,
furthermore, had perhaps killed more than adversity, an observance
fortified in him by what was not only the d’Arconville motto but
also his grandmother’s most often repeated if somewhat overly
enthusiastic febrifuge: “
Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più
forte
!” And so he had come to this plutonial grey area, a
neglected spot, where passersby didn’t look for art to happen as it
might and when it would—to lose himself for good, in both senses,
and realize the apocalypse that is incomprehensible without Patmos.
The passion for truth is unsociable. We are in this world
not
to conform to it.

  It had grown dark.

  Darconville had finished a day’s writing, took some
cigarettes from his suitcase, still as yet unpacked, and walked
through the disheveled light down the flight of stairs to the
porch—the night was positively beautiful—when past the hedges,
through the rustling leaves by the large tree, he thought he saw a
girl, looking apprehensively side to side, walk quickly across the
street like a tapered dream-bird in fragile but pronounced strides
and then disappear. But he noticed something else. He reached down
to pick up from the doorstep a small round object, studded with a
hundred cloves, its pure odor a sweet orange like September. It was
a pomander ball. Darconville, by matchlight, slipped the
accompanying card out of its tiny envelope. It read simply: “For
the fairest.”

  They were the three words that had started the
Trojan War.

  III

  Quinsyburg, Va.

  Death hath not only particular stars in Heaven, but
malevolent Places on Earth, which single out our Infirmities and
strike at our weaker Parts.

        —Sir THOMAS
BROWNE,
A Letter to a Friend

  RULE A LINE from Charlottesville, directly through
Scottsville and its lazy river, and draw it down—a straight
180°—into the southside, fixing it to a terminal in the heart of
Prince Edward County, Va. Follow scale to measure the low point.
Now, drive that sixty miles of narrow godforsaken road past old
huts and shacks, scrub pines and blasted forests into a desolation
the crossed boundaries of which, though not silent to your eyes,
one feels more in the depth of imagination, the kind of anxiety, a
foreboding, of a guilt within not traceable to a fact without; turn
then and trail slowly on a wind across a tableland of sallow weeds
and sunken dingles into flat tobacco country where the absence of
perspective seems as if offered in awful proof of what suddenly,
crouching in a perfect and primitive isolation, becomes a town.
Stop your car. Your hesitations are real. You can hear yourself
breathing. You can hear your hands move. You are in Quinsyburg.

  It is immediately a terrible letdown, a dislocation,
solitary in the framework of its rigid and iconoclastic
literalness, which yet sits in the exact center of the Commonwealth
of Virginia, a state commemoratively named—if we may charitably
disregard for a moment her biological interMdes with everyone from
the royal dancing master to the beetle-faced Duke of Anjou[1]—after
the twenty-third British sovereign, Elizabeth I, she of the judas
wig: bastard, usurper, excommunicate, baldpate, heretic, murderess,
schismatic, and willing copulatrix. The sharp and instinctive
disappointment you feel, that this must be the capital city of all
failure, wrongheadedness, and provinciality, does not subside—it
increases, intensifies, heightens. The approach that announces with
sadder and sadder emphasis its sterility leads only to a
confirmation of its deeper afflictions: for it amounts to,
infringes on, nothing, shares npthing with the prospect of the sky
but, deathshot with monotony, lies like a shroud wrapped around
itself as if, so determined, it refuses to be inhabited by even so
much as the relative humanity of a corpse. It is infinitely liker
hell than earth, the proper place to feel the first hint of the
decay of the fall. It appears to have extracted from beauty the
piety given to it and, keeping that, dismissed the rest as
ignominious accident to build a town. A sign tells you where.

  [[1] Greetings here might also be extended to
Alençon; Charles Blount; Hatton; De Vere; Heneage; Sir Walter
Raleigh; Admiral Thomas Seymour; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester;
Eric, King of Sweden; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; Archduke
Charles of Austria; and any number of others.]

  The place—nothing surrounded by nowhere—is
rigorously confined within its own settled limits, huddled, as if
on its knees searching the corners of its rural conscience for some
sin of omission or commission whereby, to ratify the truth of
natural depravity, every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle
scratched out of the dust might then be magnified into a great
offense, and less for its severe white churches than a general mood
of dissent do you feel that the deepest solicitudes of its
inhabitants must have nothing to feed on except by what either
outraged godliness or gave the devil his due. Crete had no owls,
Thebes no swallows, Ithaca no hares, Pontus no asses, Scythia no
swine. Quinsyburg had no hope. It is overpowering to realize and
worse suddenly to accept, you fight it, and only the muteness of
apprehension stifles an immediate impulse to cry out in despair,
“Of all the loveless, lifeless things that quail beneath the wrath
of God, commend Quinsyburg to it!”

  IV

  He Enters the House of Rimmon

  My child, how didst thou come beneath the murky
darkness, being still alive?

        —
Odyssey
,
XI, 155-156

  MISS THELMA TRAPPE, spinster, had a pitted nose. An
ex-schoolmistress from Quinsy College, having been forced because
of age to retire, she could often be seen walking eccentrically up
and down the streets of the neighborhood in her wide straw hats,
peering over her spectacles and repeating like a mantra to the sun,
“Let me suffer, just keep shining. Let me suffer, just keep
shining.”

  One Saturday morning, she simply walked over to
Darconville, who was sitting on a porchswing, and with her little
pyewacket of a head turned sweetly to the side asked him, as he was
new there, would he care to see the town? A little walking tour,
perhaps?

  It was the first friend Darconville had made in
Quinsyburg. An exile herself, she had come down from New Hampshire
many years ago, stayed on to teach, and now lived by herself in
rented rooms at the top of the hill where the loneliness, she said,
always seemed worse. She wore a dress like a teepee, loved
frequently to quote from her favorite literary piece, “Mrs.
Battle’s Opinions on Whist,” and although she once had red hair and
fair skin, with the passage of time and more than periodic though
secret infusions of parsnip wine they had reversed, creating a face
rather like a crabapple. It was a glorious day, and so they went
off together on the jaunt, exchanging confidences freely from the
very start.

  Quinsyburg was the county seat. The old courthouse
stood behind a short lawn in the square. The place hadn’t changed
much since the long-gone days of the Civil War, and its
townsfolk—ardent lifelong drys—lived out their small agonies or
quietly went to the dogs in the proper behind-the-curtains manner
of shabby genteel respectability. There was an odor of decay there,
of custom, of brittle endurance, a sort of banality, with yet
something sinister, waiting below the bleak checkerwork of vacant
yards, used-car lots, gas stations, and the panmoronium of faded
motels (the “Bide-A-Wee,” the “Sleepy Hollow,” etc.), to the rooms
of which, studiously obliterative of every trace of pretense, came
the intrepid Polos and pan-animated wanderers of America who, in
point of fact, had usually taken the wrong road, missed the right
bus, blinked the incidentals of a highway sign, or somehow got
delayed or waylaid at the eleventh hour. It was a little world
unpardonably misled by fundamentalist drivel, a stronghold of
biblicism, and one drowned in the swamp of its execrable
simplicities. Nowhere could be found anything in the way of
adornment. It was a place that liked its coffee black, its
flapjacks dry, its adjectives few, its cheeses hard, its visits
short, its melodies whistleable, and its dreams in black and
white—preferably the latter.

  Darconville was amused to find Miss Trappe setting a
good pace, her hat so large, wagging, that she looked like a tip
under a plate. “ ‘I like a thorough-paced partner,’ “ quoted Miss
Trappe, “as Mrs. Battle would say.” They crossed through the nicer
part of town, an area of well-treed properties and rows of
colonnaded houses, handsomely appointed in old brick that served
also the formal front walks, chimneys, and no-longer-used slave
quarters out back. The patrician section of Quinsyburg was
small.

  This was not the doo-dah South of the Camptown
Races, good bourbon, and the smell of honeysuckle in old shambling
yards where at dusk one heard the sound of risible Negroes pocking
out “Dixie” on hand-hewn banjos. It was far more dreadful and far
less eloquent: a kind of cimmeria, a serviceable huggermugger of
old wooden tobacco sheds; auction barns; too many hardware stores;
a dismal shoe factory; and a run-down dairy bar into whose neon
“foot-long hotdog” sign, at night, sizzled bugs blown in by the
stale breezes of the dung-drab Appomattqx River which sludged along
its fosses of spatterdock and alligator weed and milfoil. The
freight train Darconville had heard but hadn’t yet seen chugged
through town once in a while on its way to Cincinnati, but as it
had long ago stopped taking on passengers, the station had fallen
into disrepair. The town came to an abrupt halt at both ends, a
foolish watertank marking the limits on one side and the other
giving way to a region of fat-farms and open fields which, several
times a year, suddenly sprouted up tents soon to be all faffed up
with the trivialities of the camp-meeting and the chatauqua
harangue, the county fair and the vote-rousing picnic. But these
were
special
events.

  During most of the year, the brass-jewelry tastes of
its citizens—you knew them by string ties, brutal haircuts, and
snap-brim hats, with fishhooks and lures, .advertising things like
“Funk’s Hybrid” or “Wirthmore Feeds”—ran to little more than a
general enthusiasm for church bake-offs, barbershop gossip, and all
that hand-me-down bumpkinry touching on Bryanism, vice-crusading,
and prohibition. It was a town nonascriptive, nonchalant, and
nonentitative, one of those places that lent itself to uneasy jokes
or gave rise to dismissive quips, like “I spent a whole week there
one Sunday” or “It’d be a great place to live if you were dead” or
“I visited there once, but it was closed.”

  “Look,” pointed Miss Trappe, coming to a halt. “I
never see him without thinking, for some reason, of my father.” The
statue of a sinople-green Confederate soldier, so common in
Southern communities, stood above them on a granite pediment,
surrounded by cannonballs, with a dapper Van Dyke beard, a
bandolier, a rifle-at-the-ready, and a chivalric squint into the
heart of the legitimacy of states’ rights, honoring those who
died—so read the inscription—”in a just and holy cause.” He was the
Defender of State Sovereignty. He stood there in all weather,
unphased by birdlime or pigeons. He never flinched. “My father left
us, you know. I was only a child, but almost died of shame. Oh yes,
but that was long ago, and, besides,” she sighed, “that, as they
say, was in another country.”