Darconville's Cat (42 page)

  I will not ridicule them, he determined, for he
himself, he knew, had accomplished nothing in the way of helping
Isabel and felt that nothing accomplished left everything therefore
to be. Further, was it not said that God often wished His glory to
appear in the dulling of the wise, in the fall of the mighty, in
the bewilderment of the alert? And so he kept to the shadows, an
outlaw, logiciannaire, the acute and distinct Arminius.

  Although a crescent moon could still be seen through
the window of Fitts, the pale traces of early morning just touched
the lower sky on the eastern outskirts of Quinsyburg, out toward
Richmond. Darconville went to the window, the mild breeze through
the rapfull curtains cooling his brow and in a semi-arrested,
inefficient state closed his eyes as he listened to Harriet
Bowdler—Loretta had momentarily disappeared—supplicating with
Isabel to accept Christ Jesus and be “bom again” lest, unconverted,
she die unredeemed and so caper about for eternity like the
maroonest devils in hell, the particular area, Darconville knew,
which the evangelical mind took to be God’s chiefest handiwork.

  As he listened, he wondered. Was it all so
simplistic and dim? It was and it wasn’t, thought the divided self.
Darconville the rationalist: reality was not thinkable but in
relation to an activity by means of which it becomes thinkable.
Darconville the nominalist: but wasn’t truth suprarational?
Incommunicable in the language of reason? Analyze, analyze,
analyze! Isabel was correct. Surely one must enter love with a
degree of folly which he can deceive and so, by deceiving, make
wise. That was wisdom. I must become a fool, thought Darconville, I
who have been so vain to know.

  Suddenly, Loretta Boyco came padding back into the
parlor and, smiling (a bit manically), short-armed each of them
with a pamphlet —copies of “Glints from My Mirror” by W. C. Cloogy,
Evangelist. Harriet then quickly dink-toed over to whisper
something to Loretta, whose eyes, as she listened, shut tightly in
holy mirth. And then she clapped! Would they both come to church
tomorrow, it being Sunday, asked Loretta, to
see
Rev.
Cloogy? To
know
him? asked Harriet. To
hear
him?
asked Loretta. An opportunity, Harriet breathlessly assured
them—rising and shaking a finger like Jael wagging a tentnail —that
may be given to them only once! The accusative/dative, thought
Darconville: the Accusation that is a Gift.

  But to the Baptist church? That was a kind of
Accusative of Place to Which, thought Darconville, with himself the
object, and he almost smiled, reflecting on how, formerly, it would
have taken a miracle of the first rank for him even to acknowledge
the existence of that steeple-hatted communion of nescients and
nincompoops called Baptists, a religion, broadly, only by reason of
numbers and the obfusc light of twentieth-century lamps. He looked
at Isabel. But she sat silent: in fact, somehow removed from it
all, she seemed, the
princesse lointaine
, to enjoy the
efforts of those two dumbledores attentively buzzing around her. In
any case, perhaps a miracle
was
necessary to bring them
together. For where had facts got them? And in how many a holy
synaxarion had he read as a youth of even greater wonders—of
dearths forestalled, serpents extirpated, rods embudded, courtesans
converted, fluxes cured, tyrants mortified, cadavers translated,
and, yes, minds completely changed! Darconville didn’t know what to
say. He looked at Loretta, who stood with her hip sprung out. Well?
He looked at Harriet, who folded her arms and asked again. Would
they come? Ordinarily not given to habits of sudden adaption,
Darconville nevertheless again heard sounded the depths of his own
spiritual bankruptcy and intellectual obstinacy, and so just when
one girl, again, was about to echo her coreligionist’s question, he
who had come within a finger-breadth of saying no turned thereupon
and said, “Yes.”

  Struck like a duck in thunder, Loretta Boyco
suddenly gooched Harriet Bowdler in the ribs and, shooting their
hands up, both hysterically shrieked, “
Praise the
Lord
!”

  The town of Quinsyburg still slumbered. It was quite
early yet, and, though on the horizon the edge of dawn promised to
widen, the greyish darkness held. It had been one of the longest
nights of his life, and that he’d survived it seemed to Darconville
a miracle in its own right. He crossed the Quinsy lawns and,
exhausted, came to his house. He entered and pulled the bolt; it
syllabified a dactyl—
mlr a. k’l
!

  It was only then, dragging himself wearily up the
flight of stairs that creaked with the pain that doubled them up in
the middle, that Darconville realized the implications of his
promise to go to the Wyanoid Baptist Church, a perturbation of
spirit weighing on him not so much for the denomination as for
another fact, suddenly remembered, that no miracle of Christ’s ever
took place in the Temple of Jerusalem.

  XLVI

  The Wyanoid Baptist Church

  One can know what God is not; one cannot know what
He is.

        —St.
AUGUSTINE

  THE WYANOID BAPTIST CHURCH—a box-shaped affair
surrounded by catbriars and scrubby, asymmetrical rows of chinabeny
trees—stood on the main street. There was a faint odor of mundungus
in the Sunday morning air, but the sun shone brightly. Southern
Baptists, who had separated from their Northern counterparts in
1845, were generally to be found a congregation of thin-lipped
believers in immersion, closed communion, and total teetotalism,
and, while it did not share his own ancient religion’s boast
eternal of
semper eadem
—neither was it, at once, holy,
catholic, and apostolic— Darconville, standing on the front steps
there, turned his back on the history of sacrilege in its shingles
and determined to try to be more altruistic.

  The parishioners, stepping out of their old
automobiles and dented pickup trucks, all had something flat about
them, and as they walked into church, moved, each, perhaps by the
thought of future glory which he or she fought in himself as too
worldly and so rechristened duty, the mood was made manifest in the
general soberness of appearance. It was all
flat
. They had
flat heads, flat shoes, flat chests, flat faces, flat clothes, and
flat, very flat voices.

  Darconville felt a bit guilty for such prejudgments
and vowed, with a smile, to discontinue “satirizing,” the penance
for which the great medieval Church of Rome prescribed twelve
genuflections at every canonical hour, three hundred blows with a
leather cat, and a cross-vigil. At that very moment two black
girls, wearing their Sunday best, hesitated in front of the church,
when suddenly a sanctimonious busybody with pegged teeth came
running down the front stairs, took them by the shoulders, and,
smacking through a hole of lipstick, told them they shouldn’t be
there,
should
they, that they had their own church,
hadn’t
they, and that they knew that very well,
didn’t
they, mmm? The girls, wounded, looked past the
woman to Darconville and hurried away. The woman’s face stank with
virtue, he thought, as his own inaction stank with vice, but what
could he do? There was nothing to be done, he reasoned, that would
actually
do
anything, for we are renegades all, he
thought, unfair each, every one a fool. What ever changed? The
blacks are the invisibles of the whites. The poor are the wealth of
the rich—but the thought, swiftly addressed by some words of St.
Paul, only reflected the madness of all men: “For that which I do,
I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that
do I.” Slowly, it came to him that the enemy of Christ was not the
atheist but rather the bankrupt Christian, and with great
disappointment he soon felt part of all he heard and what he saw,
for he himself was how it was, overwhelmed in the
the
of
being there and making not a jot of difference by the fact. And
then, as recognition caught hold of remorse, he suddenly realized
that it had been on this very spot not a year ago that, speaking to
Miss Trappe, he had smugly assured himself that the price for
privacy was anonymity. And O, how anonymous he had become! Buffoon
of my own ruins, thought Darconville, miscalled Quinsyburg! I have
become what I am!

  Then, there was Isabel. The flower-de-luce looked
pale from little sleep but no less beautiful than ever, her hair
pulled back
à la vierge
, her fingers playing high in a
little resigned wave. She managed a small smile. The sun seemed to
be shining out of her rather than onto her, a fact confirmed now in
the semi-darkness as they entered the church. Isabel remarked the
dry, punkwoody, almost
tense
smell reaching throughout the
place. “Schism,” said Darconville.

  There was no altar. It was a neo-funeral-home décor
with faked stained-glass and buckets of ferns and tubs of cycads
placed around the enormous stage up front in the middle of which
was a high rostrum which held a gigantic red-leather Bible, its
silk purple page-marker hanging out like a weary tongue. The two of
them sat down immediately to find staring at them from the reserved
seats at the side of the stage a group that looked less like the
officials of a church synod than the botched supernumeraries from
the Bosch
Bearing of the Cross
: a row of sour elders,
civic schmalkaldics, and scowling proto-puritans swollen with the
honor of wardenship. As the choir began its first hymn, “My Lord
Our Pinkies Nice Can Tweak,” Darconville hoped he didn’t know what
to expect but rather expected he did, only too well.

  He recalled, for instance, one particular night the
previous winter when, called upon for it, he had gone over to Dr.
Dodypol’s house to cheer him up but, when he arrived, found that
little fellow reeling around drunk as a lord, his lower lip hanging
so low it looked as if he were wearing a turtleneck sweater. The
Piggly Wiggly had been closed six hours or so and his wife hadn’t
yet come home. It had grown later and later when Dr. Dodypol,
fidimplicitary no more, burst into a crazy fit of laughter and with
one low wheeple from the throat asked, “What does one need more
than anything else in the world?” But when his visitor quite
properly answered love, the poor poet, murderously squeezing his
glass into a fist of bits, squawked, “For Mrs. Dodypol, I could
make it
air
!”—and then passed out. Darconville had covered
him with a blanket, he remembered, and, watching guard, turned on
the television set. Network programming had just ended. At that
instant, however, morning devotions—”Nitey Nite Necessities” or
something like that—slotted in, a quiet organ
Schlummerlied
in the background supplying inspiration,
when suddenly an aggrieved clerical demivir dropped, ripe as a
medlar, into the nasty little orchard that was everyone’s life.
Looking up from his busy ministerial desk, the evangelist swung off
his glasses—candor—and immediately began gasconading about this
here being the free-est country on earth and, friend, the most
decent, an assertion he underscored with the unusually colorful
heresies, explicitly implied, that Christ had signed the
Declaration of Independence, personally translated Robert E. Lee’s
horse, “Traveler,” to the reaches of heaven, and was temporarily
living in Crozet, Virginia (not uncoincidentally the preacher’s
hometown), where, carpentering a new church, He might be very, very
pleased if one morning, you pick it, neighbor, He sauntered down
the hill to find five dollars tucked into his R.F.D. mailbox just
so’s He could see to that new weatherproof siding! And tenpenny
nails! And heating ducts! And ten dollars would buy twice as much!
And twenty, why, four times that! An address for mailing was
flashed on the screen, not before, however, those out there in
televisionland were sent scurrying for a pencil. The preacher then
flipped open his Bible, raced through a text, kissed the page, and
then with his head lowered— caught looking up, his eyes
custodiously emended—he slowly metamorphosed into a flapping Old
Glory upon which was superimposed a montage, in sequence, of
cumulus clouds, a squadron of jets, grannies-at-prayer, the
murmuring pines and the hemlocks, a towheaded tiny licking a
raindrop from her nose, the fruited plains, and, finally, the
Raising of the Flag at Iwo Jima, this accompanied all the while by
the crescendo of an out-of-tune choir humming “I Love to Steal
Awhile Away,” after which a thunderclap and then the basso profundo
voice of God the Father demoting from on high, “
I Am with You
Always, Even Unto the End of the World
!” At which point,
miraculously, Dr. Dodypol rose on a drunken elbow, claimed
that
was only the voice of a fat man bellowing into an
empty keg, and then fell back again unconscious.

  “May the Lord love you
reeeeal
good!”

  It was the heartfelt, if ungrammatical, wish of
welcome boomed over a microphone—and suddenly waking Darconville to
where he was—by a jug-eared rapscallion wearing a string-tie, a
raspberry shirt, and a woefully carpentered hairstyle. Clamor flew
with huge flapping wingclaps from wall to wall. The service was
ready to begin.

  “I come up here”—he wiped his nose on his sleeve
and, snuffling, grinned—”I come up here in front of all you good
folks and feller Christians to welcome you to our sixth-in-a-row
doorbuster revival Sunday, is what it is, with the world-famous
man, evangelist, and pastor of the Wyanoid Baptist Church, Dr. W.
C. Cloogy, who you gonna see in jess a minute, but first—”

  Doctor?
Doctor
? Darconville was surprised,
but then understood: for what preacher, teacher, or sinister
minister could ever course among his flock peddling his scriptural
exta
and exegetical guesswork without the security of some
kind of honorific, unfurled over him like an umbrella? Doctor was
the favorite. Reverend would do. Saint was too pretentious,
Kalokagathiate not true. Arch-Rabbi was impossible. Misters just
abound. And, finally, Metropolitan had a European sound.