Darconville's Cat (37 page)

  N. B. Hard part: which of the five is greatest?

  (4.) How is Henry Timrod’s brilliant poem
Ethnogenesis
in the same epic tradition as Milton’s
Paradise Lost
?

  (5.) I prefer a) Caroline Lee Hentz’s “Aunt Patty’s
Scrap-Bag”; b) Rosa Vertner Johnson’s
Hasheesh Visions
; c)
Sally Bull Sweetshrub’s
The Big Regret
; or d) Una Altera
Hint’s
The Black Duchess
. Dissertate amply.

  (6.) Write a cogent essay (using only one side of
the paper
please
) discounting the efforts of Mr. William
Faulkner as contrasted to Jane T. H. Cross’s
Wayside
Flowerets
; Anna Peyre Dinnies’
Wedded Love
; and the
prose-pieces of fascinating Octavia Walton LeVert, the “sweet rose
of Florida.”

  (7.) Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie’s “Armand’s Love”
is/is not in the cavalier tradition. Why? Why not?

  (8.) Compare and Contrast: Mary Windle and John
Banister Tabb; Eleanor Percy Lee and St. George Tucker; William
Byrd of Westover and Edward Coote Pinckney. How discouraged would
you be to hear that they were all, at one time or another, tempted
to rip up their manuscripts?

                          Name

                          Pledge

  I am both low and down South, a redundancy, thought
Darconville, if a poetic turn of phrase. South is down, isn’t it?
South
means
down. He shaped the exam sheet into a tiny
futuristic airship and launched it, somewhere, on the breath that
was the exhalation of his disgust—and walked dolefully up to his
office.

  “She’s not good enough for you, sir.”

  Darconville, surprised, turned to see a figure step
out of a shadow. It was Winnie Pegue, an overweight sophomore whom
he had known for an F in his novel course the previous semester.
She had hair both the shape and color of dulse and chubby legs, now
quakebuttocking under her as she moved forward.

  “I can imagine how it feels to be deserted,” said
Winnie Pegue, the words rushing out as if memorized. She stood
before him, a little
mont-de-piété
nervously hugging her
buldering armpits and perspiring frightfully. Then she asked him if
he thought she had any right, being as she was nothing, to ask him
if he had any right, seeing he was everything, to throw it all
away. Staring at her saddle shoes, she snuffled up a sob and said,
“If I were you, sir, I’d forget her. You’re— you’re too good for
her, for
anybody
!” She scooped her handbag further up her
arm and broke down completely. “All life,” she wept, “all life is
ahead of you! The sun, the stars—!” She couldn’t go on for the
tears, however, and, turning, flew pigeon-toed down the corridor,
around the corner, and out of sight.

  Philosophy major, thought Darconville.

  He shut the office door. He sat down at his desk. A
fact couldn’t be ignored: he had been for some time now looking for
signs—revelations, of a sort—to determine what direction he should
take in the coming year. Perhaps, now, a sign had come. Or symptoms
of a sign. He loved a girl much younger than he, for one thing, and
what could one really expect of it? Obscure gestes, lost love,
short commons in the midst of plenty. He had been jealous,
intemperate, weak of faith, and, suffering both in action and
consequence, unproductive—doing everything but what, in fact, he’d
come there for. That was the truth of the thing, for sure, suiting
the word to action, not action to the word. Goodnight, sweet
print.

  And then what of Isabel? Was it one and the other?
Or one in the other? Was it one for, through, or against the other?
Against
? Was it possible?

  Darconville looked up on the office wall to see his
favorite photograph of her. It was technically one of the poorest,
a large black-and-white blowup of her head and shoulders, the brown
seeksorrow eyes, the hair like clarified honey pulled back to a
beautiful knot, and the gentle mouth, almost happy, yet not quite
ripening into a smile. (No photograph ever quite caught her: each
of the many taken spoke of the one that got away—with El Dorado,
maddeningly, waiting just outside every frame. ) He loved this one
photograph, however. It had absorbed more vows than he thought
admissible to admit, and yet he felt absolved, for he had come to
believe, under that head, that he couldn’t live without her
morally
, that her faults, in fact, were both what he
himself must personally overcome for his
own
benefit and
yet not overcome at the risk of damnation. Almost literally, he was
she.

  What Chrysostom could explain, what Cassiodorus
write, the story of this love? It began, simply, with diffidence,
followed by sudden devotion, and then the thought that he might
ruin her life if he left her, a pressure she transmitted by
implying that his life might be ruined if she stayed, for in the
intensity of their deepening love the sweet confessions left
unspoken were too often interpreted as hesitation and doubt. She
seemed to believe that passion overstated the love she didn’t, for
some reason, deserve, while he believed her loving soul needed what
he could only give insufficiently. What, wondered Darconville, what
if he
had
held back? What if in dreaming we have actually
entered another world, daring to commit all but our consciousness?
Why, journeys and dreams went together like two people very much in
love.

  Overcome with weariness, Darconville laid his head
on his folded arms and shut his eyes. I love her, he thought, and
yet I want to leave: a plural I and a single gloom. Or was the
gloom merely a plural I? Whatever, two antagonistic Darconvilles,
smitten to death, had fallen desperately in love with her. Duples
imply choice. He was double-damned. Park your
ka
,
Egyptian. Yes, he thought: the possible that did not become reality
was impossible. No, he thought: it was possible.
Cumaea Sibylla
horrendas canit
: nothing which will not be in reality is
possible. Let the ambiguity stand, concluded Darconville in a last
sleepy reflection, for in the dungeon of our dreams images embody
the sensations they can also cause.

  He was soon fast asleep, when beating forward
through the darkness to the front of his mind came the poisonous
archlucifer, Satan himself, who, ready to kill what he wouldn’t yet
devour, squatted down by his ear like a foul gryllus and
whispered:

  “
I am Gog’s ghost, come alive, to pipe to you!
Here, would you see it? My porphyritic hoof? I rode up in a dogboat
now to boot your god. I pun to amuse you, poet. Pay attention to
me! I talk unlike you want to hear, upsidedown and backwards, with
a nice repetition of G’s
—
the hump in them is the hump in
your gunzel: tumorous, a gold cancer, the load you bear on your
back. Isabel! There she is! Mistress Gummigutt! I know you are
ashamed to feel this way about someone you love, but, look, the
girl’s legs are a proximate occasion of sin to a cannibal! And
that’s your ideal? Laugh with me at her, can’t you? Yaw, yaw. No,
with more conviction! O, how I hate her, her mammoth legs, her
vanity about her hair which she has either just washed or is about
to. I hate the back of her head as she rides in your car with her
collar turned up. She eats a lot: snacks. She doesn’t know whether
her arsehole is punched or bored. She weeps in the most
unconvincing way I’ve ever seen. She repeats what you say and
rarely offers anything to a conversation. Your ideal? I hear you
call an ideal what I take to be a personified inconceivability. A
galeopsis is nothing but a thing with a cat’s face! But, soft, she
troops by with her mother! Par-nels march by two and three saying,
Sweetheart, come with me! Pay attention to me, or you shall not see
all I see! I love you, Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Too partial a piece
of piety? I love you but I pity you, for is it not written: ‘Before
the child shall have knowledge to cry “My father and my mother,”
the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken
away’? I will remind you of poetry if you let me, I promise. Not so
she. She takes too much humoring and requires more attention than a
rosebush with greenfly! Are you laughing? O yes, laugh! That is
wonderful! Reverence to this! Stand beside me and watch. I knooow
you have a conscience. Look! She is holding your book! She is
reading! She is going to pronounce about it! ‘Blap,’ she
says
—
can you hear her
?—’
that’s a great verb!’ O
she is wise. Isn’t she wise? Yaw, yaw. The father’s chuckling! Give
it two balls! But trust her, whorepouncer? Touch pitch and be
defiled, for isn’t a vision grim when a vision is great? She wants
to be safe. I want you to hurt her. Please, I love you! Accept her
rejection, for he who won’t when he may, when he will he shall have
nay! I talk unlike you hear, but does one go to Greece by Rome,
riddler? Pay attention to me! Leave her! Hurt her! Dispatch her to
the land of Ganabim! I used a G for you just now, now you do
something for me. A ruse. A sprat to catch a mackerel. I won’t put
up a wall between us, I promise. Ask her something I know about now
but your face won’t see! Ask her about me! I will whisper it again
for you. Ask her
—”

  A crash! Darconville shot up out of his chair, in a
cold sweat, his mouth open in terror. Wavering, he steadied himself
on the desk to watch the nightmare dissolve like water in water,
having dreamt, he felt, what he feared but feeling he caused what
he dreamt. His hand was trembling. How long had he slept?

  The windowpanes were dark. Darconville went
downstairs, his mind stammering down to reality, and left the
building. It felt good to be outside. The sky, made exotic by a
sickle of moon, was so clear and black it seemed to fetch one
toward it, and, looking up, he could almost feel the nutation of
the earth, the swing of the universe. On the other side of town a
train rocketed through the night, leaving behind a few spotballs of
smoke and a disembodied wail. Essences were in the spring wind. He
could feel the warm breezes chuffing the leaves of the magnolia
tree which stood sentinel-like, an
Urpflanze
, over the
lonely bench that sat more than one memory in it. But it all
saddened him.

  The tall live-oaks and elms like black-cloaked
prophets muttering urgent warnings of the vanity of all flesh
seemed to represent some kind of extinct symbolism—with any
interpretation made owed more, perhaps, to the homiletic power of
the mind observing it than anything else. But every focus of
concentration, regardless, seemed only to serve that mind for
purposes of dejection, of apprehension: he looked out dolefully
across the grounds and, turning one way, then turning another, set
out again like a Rufa’iyah dervish in his black coat, searching for
a trace of his promised but lost and unadaptive child.

  XLI

  The Turner

  As falcons to the lure, away she flies,

  The grass stoops not, she treads on it so light.

        —WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE,
Venus and Adonis

  THE CURTAINS BILLOWED SOFTLY in and out with the
night breezes that also carried the music of the dance across
campus into the front parlor of Fitts. Isabel Rawsthorne, waiting
by herself, had her chair set up halfway between, and faced around
from, the two open windows and the door which she had locked. She
sat unobserved, wearing a smock-with-flowers, jeans, and pink
canvas shoes and staring without reaction into the flame on the far
wall she had studied for more than an hour now: a reproduction of
one of those Turners where the ocean seems on fire. The proctors
had disappeared, the girls had gone, and the room was perfectly
dark, silvered to ghostliness, however, by the streetlights
outside.

  It was a complete solitudinarium. The
empressement
of the parlor’s interior, old and distinctly
Southern, was also the source of its gloom: the moquette carpets,
sofas the color of asparagus rust, a grandmother clock severely
ticking. There was a defeated grace to the room, somehow worse than
the oppressive silence made by the sudden evacuation of the
gentlemen callers who’d come, picked up their dates, and
disappeared. Fixed to the flame growing out of the sea, Isabel was
only waiting and listening to the slight flutter of the velivolent
curtains behind her, thinking neither of gentlemen callers nor
addressing with despair the feeling that time is too short. There’s
no end to nothing, she thought; there’s always an end to something,
but there’s never an end to nothing. So if I can just be nothing,
she thought, I can even be bigger than something. She twicked her
thumbs. I
am
nothing.

  Now she knew that without the shadow of a doubt:
that afternoon she had been summoned to the registrar’s office only
to be told by Dean Barathrum, as Mrs. McAwaddle handed her her
grades—with each one lower than those of the first semester—that,
as probation no longer applied, she couldn’t return to Quinsy
College unless she took the fall semester off, reapplied, and hoped
for the best, understanding, of course, that there would be no
guarantee, without a full review by the admissions board, she could
even be readmitted. Her reaction, strangely, was almost
ceremonious, subdued, as she was, less by shame than by the simple
ineluctability of fate. She remembered walking to her room, packing
her clothes, and now—it was so sad and simple— she was waiting only
to go home. What medium is the darkness, she wondered, that one can
lean on it?

  “Isabel?”

  The voice, a familiar one, called through the
window. Isabel’s scar whitened: she froze in her chair and,
motionless, shut her eyes only to feel tears roll down her cheeks.
There’s always an end to something, she thought.