Darconville's Cat (45 page)

  The school year ended, forcing neither Darconville
nor Isabel to any decision of consequence concerning the future.
With his help she vacated her room at Quinsy and without any
fanfare—save for the last-minute appearance of doting Miss
Ballhatchet who, puffing across the lawn for a farewell, presented
her with a gift (
The Poems of Sappho
)—they drove away,
Isabel silent, her collar up, and Darconville feeling quite sad and
empty.

  Isabel took a job as a telephone operator in
Charlottesville. And Darconville stayed on in Quinsyburg. He lived
alone as usual, making occasional visits to Miss Trappe’s house,
and after some consideration took up writing his book again, not
with the vigor he’d once known, rather with the comportment of the
crane of legend who, to keep awake, gripped a stone in its
footclaw. He felt vigor: it was not that he didn’t: but his vigor
was divided, a bilocation of spirit he felt necessary to support
the half he loved more, and she was now sixty miles away.

  Although the writer is a man who, paradoxically,
must have nothing to do to do what nothing intimates he must do,
Darconville felt he stole for art—”
You always never stop
writing
!”—what life owned, hesitating too often before the
thought of now trying to repay some fraction of his debt to her by
offering her a book that was meant to be and then feeling she had
nothing whatsoever to do with it at all. It was not so much a
question of where commitment should lie in facing the divided self
as to who should be the judge. It was with sadness, when he wrote,
that he saw each page come up violent, with every loop a
gallownoose, every period a bullethole, every break between
sentences a crawlspace into which guilt crept home to hide; the
words themselves sank down into the inkcrimped paper and perversely
seemed to have an existence only on the other side of the page: a
bebeloglyphics of revolt and refusal, backwards in dead black.

  Isabel became his constant preoccupation. Strangely,
he feared her loneliness, and, whenever he thought such a thing
probable for her, he lived it himself, as lovers will, with twice
the anguish. There were troubles—crises often coming simultaneous
with letters from her, answers to the ones required of him to have
hers (was this pride or humility?) which revealed, in attempts to
hide her unhappiness, her unhappiness: family discord, the need for
her own apartment, a roommate to share expenses, etc. How often we
express what we can’t, thought Darconville. A game is not won until
it’s also lost. The exclamation mark is always a digression. And so
to assuage his own fears as much as her own, though moved more out
of love than duty, Darconville would often put away his work and
drive up to Charlottesville to visit.

  The potholed road winding out of the seventh circle
of Quinsyburg and its scrubpine forests takes a turn for the better
just at that point where the James River debouches on a silly curve
through low swampland and passes by the hog-soaping community of
Scottsville. A swift change in tone is noticed: dirt-farms give way
to orchards; farting pigs transform into sleek horses; and
goose-faced peasants—lo!— are now sporting colonels in plus-fours
banging away at birds. The grass of a sudden rolls away to smooth
expanses of green, no longer anymore tall and shapeless twists of
brome and creekthatch. Now in the air is the perfume of blooms, not
tobacco, and one hears the content
weedio-weedio
of
whistling quails instead of scraping whiffletrees and hens
screeching through backyards draped over in hand-wrung laundry.
There the northern part of Virginia begins to detach itself from
the southern. Exit Calvin-, enter Pelagius. Enthusiasm is out,
neo-Stoicism in. The rod is put away, to be replaced by sweetmeats.
You bank a wooden bridge some miles along and weave up and out of a
last dingle to discover finally below you at the eastern foot of
the Blue Ridge—always with surprise—the city of Mr. Jefferson.

  Charlottesville was a city that loved prerogative.
It was, in fact, one of those quaint places on earth where most of
the inhabitants, emphasizing the value of ancestral origins, spent
a lifetime zealously devoted to the cause of trying to correct the
several mistakes, owing to their absence, committed during the
events described in the first chapter of Genesis. This was the land
of Wishes, Wirtses, and Weems, where every last ferblet in the
county had the distinct impression he was a born gentleman and she
a well-bred lady, and that was that. Theirs was that great legacy
of the Southern elite, dames and colonels still, so it went, all in
solid support of a proud slaveholding but benevolent
republic—purified of Free-Soilers, locofocos, parlor pinks,
realists, supporters of the Wilmot Proviso, and advocates of the
League of Nations —which stretched majestically from Pontchartrain
to the Potomac: not the United States, but the States United!

  The Virginians in this particular area, briefly, had
a marvelous idea of themselves. What was past was perfect! They
doggedly held to a caste mentality. They kept a strict and
incurable devotion to postures they felt couldn’t be misinterpreted
at Windsor or Schônbrunn. They still tried to register wills by
regnal years, used seltzer bottles, and habitually went on ancestor
hunts ( flatly refusing to accept the
lie
that everybody
had as many ancestors as anyone else ) and while obsessed by
lineage many philoprogenitive parents in the South, to fix on a
bygone era by intra-family “arrangements,” preferred to marry kin
rather than those unrelated by blood. It was of course inevitable
some would eventually have to take the bit between the teeth in
relation to the occasional, slightly plumulaceous child who came
along—a congenital drooler, a nimfadoro in white boots, a little
shovelmouthed surd whose blood was so bad it was all he could do to
keep from falling down. But this too was sort of charming,
see?—only one more touch of regional, aristocratic cachet in that
world of moonlight-and-magnolia which, in a similar context, made
every tree a dueling-oak, every house a plantation, and every
asshole in a string tie a colonel.

  Myth, of course, flouted history. The tradition that
all white men in Virginia were “cavaliers”—a boast in
Charlottesville put about by even the lowest of dungcrunchers—was
true only in that there had been a general 17th-century disposition
in that flyblown colony against English parliamentarianism; at that
time the humblest plowjogger in the territory could be so
identified, and was. Whenever a Southerner dreamt of improving his
lot, he kept “niggers”—stationed either on his property or in a
class, below him. Every owner of two Negroes, therefore, however
dubious his own origin or squalid his existence, came to be
considered a cavalier. So was it then, such was it now. Facts,
needless to say, didn’t get in their way, and it was with enormous
pride and an almost martial zeal that the revisionist citizens of
Charlottesville cooperated to perpetuate the image of their
forefathers as dashing, emplumed gallants-with-mustaches out of
Lord Rupert’s dragoons protecting women, daring battle, and running
to hounds—when the truth of it was they had been almost to a man
nothing but a bunch of lackeys, cacochymical scroyles, and
middle-brow merchants who spoke near-Gutnish and worked the
head-right system, accumulated “seats,” and lived out their
whiggish lives pocketing quitrent, hustling slaves, and selling
snuff. But who cared? No one. Did it matter? Not a bit. It was not
in the image, never mind the interest, of the Old Dominion. Thus
the queer little mystery perpetually continued, for, blow high,
blow low, everytime a Southerner got
à vau-l’eau
he needed
only spread his sails to the winds of his own foolish fibs and
flatulencies and another start was made down-sun.

  The fabulous traditions held firm in
Charlottesville. The days of ye old carriage houses, stirrup cups,
and bag-wigged royal governors shirted in frills and Mechlin lace
were still commemoratively preserved in the hearts of the
throwbacks there who, hunting foxes all day and tracing genealogies
all night, were locked on the crotchets of Tory caricature:
pinch-mouthed Federalists; titless Junior Leaguers from 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea; frigid bluestockings with matching hair;
snudges with hip-gout; lords of rice-tierce and cotton bale, of
sugar box and human cattle; civic bona-robas and bores; fatuous
hip-pomants from country clubs; and incontrovertible bitches from
the English-Speaking Union with saurian skin and faces that looked
like they’d been cut on a catstick who—
suspendens omnia
naso
—spoke to no one who wasn’t someone and then only in the
pluperfect. The men all had recurrent dreams of shooting each other
for disrespectful remarks or having an affair with Sally Fairfax;
the women, of being observed in the waxlight through frosty bowed
windows dancing quadrilles or minuets in lovely eighteenth-century
poses and saying things like, “It was simplytooshattering FOR
words!” or “Why, Lord Cornwallis, you say such things!” or “O
Macheath! Was it for this we parted? Taken! Imprisoned! Try’d!
Hang’d—cruel Reflection! I’ll stay with thee ‘till Death!”

  This was a species unto itself. They were the kind
of people who sat around trying to imagine Patrick Henry, a close
and familiar friend, stopping by for a visit and explaining between
sips of Blind Pineaux what a
frightful
day he’d had with
the burgesses! They hired amahs and black grooms. They gave cute
toponyms to their houses like “Wit’s End,” “Ranelagh,” or
“Quivering Aspens.” They didn’t commit sins, of course, but only
made faux pas and believed that creativity lay in things like
arranging flowers and furniture or in knowing how much powdered
sugar went into a mint julep. They talked constantly of hunting
boxes and stables and gunrooms and went riding a lot-it was so
inarguably aristocratic. They often made references to the game of
cricket, without the remotest idea of how it was played. They
imported English nannies to take care of their pinguid children who
were always named something like Pruitt or Denison or Brawley. They
loved to read—
nobiliaires
, especially; the most important
books shelved in Charlottesville were, of course, Burke, Debrett,
the Almanach de Gotha, Ruvigny, Fairbairn, and the Genealogisches
Handbuch des Adels for such of those who, for whatever reason,
couldn’t pass muster in that Anglo-Saxon stronghold. The men were
actually
too
gracious to women and the women too
ingracious not to call it off, and so the summum bonum of their
lives was to sit collectively in planters’ chairs in front of
columned porticos covered with creepers, drinking bourbon, watching
a distant game of polo, and muttering down their chins, their
general conversation being of the sort that’s almost always wholly
narrative (and, alas, autobiographical), coming at you in those
over-pronounced declarative sentences which are usually reserved
for out-and-out simpletons, nonagenarians, or myna birds and are
filled with prejudices that are almost all ineradicable, being
based on that kind of ignorance which is fully impenetrable to
information coming from the real world. Every Charlottesvillian
wanted to die in his own arms and conceived himself, upon the act,
as entering Paradise by walking in genteel fashion down the Duke of
Gloucester St. in Williamsburg. Each lived in a vacuum his nature
positively adored. Each windowed well his head.

  Good manners in Charlottesville had long ago
degenerated into etiquette, which of course thrived on those social
occasions when one had to have the right enthusiasms, the right
prejudices, the right indignations. But that bogus
aristocracy—feudal reactionaries, seigneurial land-owners-in-rubber
bowties, Dukes of Omnium, horse fanciers, Epis-copocrats,
paid-up-in-full members of the Colonial Order of the Acorn,
University of Virginia trustees, the Dames of 1890, etc.—was in
fact only a kind of club, a stuffy composite of thrusting
atti-tudinarians who managed in a general and well-disguised
parvenuism to throw for the
charming
people who dressed
just too
divine
the
marvelous
parties they simply
adored
! They were nice without being nicer. Downward they
climbed, backward they advanced. Venal, they were obsequious;
obsequious, insecure; and insecure, they overstated themselves,
out-anglicizing the English in that feeble mimicry which, born of
inferiority, ironically made them even less secure. Dignity in the
South became once again only a peculiar manifestation of gall.

  Scenario: the Blacks invite you to their house,
“Duchessa”; you accept and, appearing the following evening, are
met under the porte-cochere by the small, sharplipped hostess
herself—an overdressed grympen in peak shoes—who theatrically leads
you by hand into the drawing room. There are paintings of
celebrated race-horses on the wall, a Brown Bess over the hearth,
its mantel a moonscape of old plate, and all of it surveyed from
above by the glassy stare of a mounted buck’s head, the huge
beam-and-times sticking out in a stiff blessing. Two black
maids—”reliable help”—offer you hors d’oeuvres. The host hands you
a drink.

  It’s a fête worse than death. The room is full of
people with faces like borzois, most of them drinking 8-to-1 ratio
martinis and asserting one opinion after another with
high-declarative candor, that subtlest form of deception. A group
of over-perfumed fussocks, gossiping, and bilious old soldiers,
chiming the gold in their crammed pockets, are standing around
sipping—not just drinks—but the real Virginia possets: Col. Byrd’s
Capital Night Cap, King William’s Toddy, and Daniel Parke Custis’s
Original Floster.

  The introductions are made. It’s the usual group of
uniques and antiques. You meet the cheerful latitudinarian
divine-cum-poacher and his young male friend. You meet the master
of hounds who whispers a small salacity into your ear and wheezes
good-naturedly into his cup. You meet the unsalvageable narcissist,
a twenty-year-old blonde—her name is usually something like Grey
Fauquier or Summer Bellerophon —who rides sidesaddle, infixes in
every Southern male a compulsive desire to be flayed by her riding
crop, and despises her mother for stealing her daddy with whom she
is passionately in love. You meet the
agitateuse
-with-political-interests, wearing logic and
fake jewels. You meet the Dear Ol’ Thing, a fusty dowager who,
decaying beneath piles of old-fashioned clothes, is chairwoman of
projects like “Save the Peakferns” and dares say anything she damn
well pleases between puffs of her tiny green cigar. They’re all
there, the blue-rinse set, city toparchs, university snobs,
thorn-eyed starkadders with offensive orchids, gynecocrats from the
hintermath of time, and all those over-advantaged
rhetoricalists-in-ascots from Albemarle County who, gathered under
one roof, would rather talk than breathe.