Darconville's Cat (39 page)

  Returning to her place, she sought a collaborative
response in the face of the other chaperon, who merely blinked.

  “Elbow room,” repeated Prof. Wratschewe, interlacing
his fingers. “Do you realize, Miz McAwaddle, that Shakespeare was
the first person ever to use that expression?”

  Mrs. McAwaddle was utterly adsorbed.

  The clock bonged its lonesome numbers from the
library. Darconville, a multitude of one, had positioned himself at
some distance on a hill rising up toward Truesleeve dormitory and
wished, as he watched the lights of the college and outlying
Quinsyburg below, that they were the lights of Venice, a city that
now seemed further away in time than in space. The palazzo,
remaining under a writ of
quo warranto
, was still stuck in
the courts and yet he didn’t care—there was London, Paris, Rome—as
he thought for the first time of going away, anywhere. The student
union, noisy and aglow, stood below him on the phenomenal level,
but what, he wondered, but where, my interdimen-sional love, shall
I search for you on the noumenal level, down or up? What, he asked
himself, could he want with such a
will
to want it? What,
he thought, that I need it with such intensity?

  Darconville ached, he believed, to know the
ineffable thing-in-itself! I am in love, he thought, with the
Ding-an-Sich
! To postulate, yet not perceive: it was a
doom that now began to ask too much of him. O artif actual game! O
artificial pastime! He longed for her, for Isabel, for the
prepredicative heart without which he felt, truthfully, he couldn’t
live, but his knowledge was conscious of its own insufficiency, a
“learned ignorance” to which, even with the bribe of desperation,
truth saw fit to supply little or nothing, suffering forth only a
spate of murderous questions: what was the part of the subject, the
object, in knowledge? Did man’s limited ability to know necessarily
deform objects according to his own subjective nature? Was truth
the concordance of knowledge with itself or with that which is? Did
we have in all domains of knowledge the same certitude? Darconville
was not even convinced that the question, whether they were
important questions, was
itself
an important question.
They were questions, clearly, not to be solved without immortality,
in which state all philosophy was once only one philosophy, and
mortals had only a handful of fragments like puzzle-pieces to prove
it true. Who knows what will happen? Do we know Who knows but not
know what? Perhaps, thought Darconville, the doubter
was
the true savant—to prescind from judgment and know, by default,
that which you wouldn’t judge. There is no Doubt but Doubt, and
Aenesidemus is his prophet!

  The trees soughed in several rushes of night wind,
blowing as if off an invisible sea upon which sailed only that
which sailed, was meant to sail, and meaning nothing more, and
Darconville, imagining himself, the while, at some point in the
future recalling this particular moment, found it restful to think
that somewhere some things existed without significance, without
dreams, without memory. But that was memory, wasn’t it? And what
had memory wrought of joy? Memory wounded. We must free what we are
in time, he thought,
from
memory and live toward the
future which, second upon second, made memory irrelevant even if it
increased its size!

  It was well past midnight now, and the band, at a
primordial pitch, challenged the Quinsy girls, the drumlike beating
in their blood leading with incredible rapidity to various
misadventures. Ariadne Naxos swirled toilet paper around her and,
vamping from one boy to another, danced her smoldering “Veil of the
Béguines.” Trudy Look-ingglass, having punted away her silk pumps,
sat perched over the balcony dangling one of her garters and
rotating her shoulder
à faire provoquer
while a dozen or
so boys went scrambling—bookety-bookety!—through the doorway and up
the stairs, howling with encouragement. Dancing a sexy shuffle on
one of the tables to a clap-chant below, Sabrina Halliburton slowly
hoisted her gown almost to her hips, revealing a pair of legs
smooth and delicious as a pawpaw. And all the while, her beautiful
eyes narrowed in black disapproval, Hypsipyle Poore watched from a
distance, being made no happier, certainly, by finding her escort,
a blond cavalier-in-uniform from V.M.I., staring at those legs. She
puffed exasperatedly through her nose and shifted position. The
young man, turning to her, asked if anything was wrong. Hypsipyle
merely sighed, loath to establish another’s credibility by a
criticism that could only be misapplied, for Southern girls,
actually, alarm each other quite easily: such is their homogeneity,
in fact, that one’s particular actions are always another’s in
potency, and so, with each a simulacrum of the next, they must all
sustain in constant reflection what approving of themselves within
they must hate in others without—while the concomitant virtue,
paradoxically, of
admiring
in another for self-esteem what
the burden should logically reverse is curiously absent. It is
often common for them, in fact, to make friends in order to avoid
enemies, a contradiction, in this instance, that could no more be
eliminated by explanation than it could be diverted by disapproval
or reversed by ruse.

  “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

  Hypsipyle sighed again, looked searchingly into her
escort’s eyes, and leaned over to whisper softly—with a breath
oversweet from pastilles—into the shell of his ear, “
My silk
panties are too tight
.”

  The night grew more perilous as the night grew late,
with passions being fueled by liquor and liquor being passed around
now, openly, like love-philtres at a sabbat. Alicia Lutesinger,
nimptopsical, was skipping in a circle and swinging by a loop half
a six-pack of beer still attached to its polypropylene zeros.
Rebecca Lemp, at her wit’s end, was losing the grip she had on the
shins of her boyfriend, a big-bellied snewf from Hampden-Sydney
who, goaded on by the rebel yells of his fraternity brothers, was
hanging upsidedown from a balcony in the Trendelenburg position and
trying unsuccessfully to chug-a-lug the full bottle of grain
alcohol that was splashing below like a fifty-foot waterfall in a
loud clapotage. And of course there were casualties. Olivia Oona
Osborne, going stone cold, suddenly dropped her jaw and her tenth
cup of cheap bourbon and reeled over backwards at the top of the
staircase, the egglike alliteration of her name matching the
echoing wail as she bounced, bum over beezer, all the way
downstairs with a loud dopplerian “
Ooooooooooooo
!” And
then in perfect sequence came another crash. Nora Buncle’s date,
mousing her thigh, never knew what hit him—for, unprepared for it,
she squealed and kicked up with a whoop of surprise catching him a
desperate shot full in the
corpus spongiosum
and,
instantly, he snapped shut into a fierce genupectoral vise,
unflexioned, and then wheeled about and hit the floor where he lay
stiff as a stoolball in the rising fumes of whiskey and friable
bits of glass from the shattered hip-bottle underneath him.

  “O my weak heart!” cried Mrs. McAwaddle, shrieking
in owl-blasted anguish. “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  “House,” said Prof. Wratschewe, reflectively. “You
hear yourself, Mrs. McAwaddle? The most curious pronunciation in
the idiolect of the Virginian. I believe its phonemic
transcription”—he drew signs in a dribble of spilled whiskey—”is
best rendered /h3ous/. Hoose: the voice hoots.” He looked up. “Mrs.
McAwaddle?”

  But she was in the powder room, gulping a handful of
strain-abaters.

  Meanwhile, Darconville had decided he could wait no
longer. And although he could not shake off the feeling that his
soul had become a drifting multiplicity without any nucleus—indeed,
he began furtively trying to annihilate with his imagination his
very life there—he walked down the hill from Truesleeve and around
to the front of the student union. Three pale
roreres
from
the University of Virginia, all wearing varsity shirts and nothing
else, stood on the landing outside chanting “Wahoo-Wa! Wahoo-Wa!
Wahoo-Wa!” and then wended their spiflicated way, arm in arm, down
the front steps beside which some poor child, pinching her nose
clothespin-fashion and urging her sick self forward, doubled up
like a foot-rule and passed out. The campus police were called in,
and after searching the grounds, strewn everywhere with gartering,
inkles, nonesopretties, and gloves, they marched the drunks they
collared and the vandals they nabbed right over to the
chaperons.

  Mrs. McAwaddle, all in a dither, hadn’t appeared on
the steps ten seconds before Darconville stopped her short. Please,
had she seen Isabel Rawsthorne? Anywhere? No, he knew she hadn’t
attended the —But Mrs. McAwaddle, her dead turquoises clicking,
squeezed his hand, told him to be calm, and reassured him: Isabel
wasn’t ill, no, and in fact that very afternoon had been over to
the registrar’s office. Although Darconville had more questions,
she stopped his lips with a finger and turned momentarily
elsewhere.

  The police, inquisitively shining flashlights at
thirty or so college identity cards all at once, were trying to
prevail on Mrs. McAwaddle to help them match owners to face. It
must have been a frightful day for her, thought Darconville, as she
seemed to have nothing left. It was only partially true, however,
for in spite of the furor there, Mrs. McAwaddle, having excused
herself to Darconville more to deliberate her response to him than
anything else, had bad news—how could she tell him that the girl he
loved had cashed in her three Fs, one D, and an Incomplete for a
job in support of which she, Mrs. McAwaddle, had only that
afternoon, begged for it, written a letter of recommendation?
Isabel, going home, was to take a job as a telephone operator. She
had flunked out. The ball was over.

  And, somehow, Darconville knew it.

  “The grades, why I couldn’t half
understand
them. But they weren’t good, I’m afraid. They weren’t”—Mrs.
McAwaddle, closing her eyes, shock-absorbed his
unbelief—”sufficient?”

  The moonlight whitened the grounds. He crossed the
dark street, the dead sound of his footsteps making his heart feel
desolate and empty. Crickets stopped chirping as he passed. There
was no one in sight as he left the area of the student union, where
the dance had broken up. The long year, soon finished, was on his
mind. At once he pitied Isabel, and then never had he felt less
inquisitive, less concerned, for the hopelessness of it all and the
questions asked that never seemed to have answers, adequate or
enough. He was tempted to walk forward, past his house and past the
town, and let the whole thing go, disposed to let the night fall
about him in that place of memory and seal the dwelling shut.

  The beech trees and maples whispered overhead. An
owl hooted. And he began to feel that he himself shared those
nocturnal movements and sounds, that he was no stranger among them
but rather a secretive and lonely earth-life removed from
self-respect, an incompetent at fostering hope in another, and a
would-be lover open to the whimseys of what he’d never understand.
He passed by the low brick wall in front of Fitts—how many times
that day had he done so?— where over the doorway, set some thirty
feet back, the front lamp was lit. Darconville stopped, and his leg
jumped as he looked. He looked again. He dropped low and cocked his
head to spy into a serendipity he wouldn’t yet believe. A figure
was standing in the morning-glory vines.

  The night itself seemed to hold its breath.
Darconville moved closer, not daring to turn salutation into
irruption, drawn only toward the luminous darkness that revealed
her golden hair and flesh as white as elder pith, and extending his
hand he heard only a slight exhalation. Was it a sigh for a yes, a
sigh for a no, or a sigh for an I-can’t-bear-it? The figure stepped
forward once, the moisture in her throat moving to her eyes, clear
as the tears of a penitent. They did not demand, or plead, but
simply said
understand me, please understand me
?

  And they turned into the parlor, Darconville and the
girl who, as she turned, left behind in the shadows her suitcase
the color of the dented blue car (a guitar in the back seat) that
suddenly roared up there and waited in front, waited for five
minutes in front, then waited in front no longer but, blowing a
sneer on its horn, disappeared on a furious curvet into the
night.

  “Forgive me?” asked Darconville to Isabel. “I know
not what I did.”

  Adversity always made him epigrammatic.

  XLIII

  The Unfortunate Jilts

  Little pitchers have wide ears.

        —GEORGE
HERBERT

  LORETTA BOYCO pressed in another piece. Clapping her
hands, Harriet Bowdler squealed in excitement and reached for
another bottle of grape soda. The puzzle was hah0 done. Left on the
shelf, so to speak, while the others did the sprint, the two
seniors, wearing quilted housecoats and scuffie-wuffies, had spent
the evening of the graduation dance in a sitting room off the front
parlor of Fitts. What fun!

  The girls, earlier, had bathed, creamed their faces,
twirled up their hair, and together gone to the front desk to sign
out the puzzle—it had a hermeneutic theme, one of the many donated
to the college by the Southern Baptist Outreach Association, and
was entitled:
The Rivalry of the Brothers Absalom and
Ammon
. They had worked on it all evening. And now they sat,
cross-legged, first trying this, then trying that from the mess of
little pieces left on the floor and nibbling from the bag of
sweetchews they brought along for reinforcement. They’d done the
edges, of course, the easiest part, and were just starting on the
sky, always the hardest.