Darconville's Cat (52 page)

  And, as time passed, they soon came to know how very
serious they had become.

  It became a matter of course, then, for them to
spend their weekends in Fawx’s Mt. Darconville didn’t really mind.
The farming community remained as misenunciated as ever, and one
rarely drove through those depressing doles and secluded ravines
without a sudden feeling of subjugation, an inexplicable sadness,
but as the years passed he’d found, surprisingly, he’d adapted not
only to the folks in those parts who looked like itinerant
blackthorn sellers, what with their low-vaulted brows and cluttoned
joints, but also to the land they worked and its parquetry of odd,
misallotted fields where stupid large-bodied cattle with shiny red
hides and massive horns ambled about. How often he’d heard the
sounds of reapers skitching near a hedge or fence by the road!
Slash, rustle, slash! Slash, rustle, slash. And, in fact, he
actually came to measure the frequency of his trips up there—along
with the parallel lapses of time—by alterations in the fields he
passed: the tedding after the swathe of the scythes, then rowing,
then the foot-cocks, then breaking, then the hubrows gathered into
hubs, sometimes another break, then turning again, to the rickles,
the biggest of all the cocks, which were eventually run together
into placks, shapeless heaps from which the harvesters carted their
hay away. Autumns it rained, the stubble soon took the snow, and
before long spring had come again. But what
distributions—irrotational, solenoidal, lunar—really mattered?
Where was that in a world of mutability that must apply to him? The
plug-uglies of Fawx’s Mt., the eupatrids of Charlottesville, the
quidnuncs of Quinsyburg? They were of no consequence anymore, for
behind what people on this earth, thought Darconville, were shadows
cast not black?

  The weekends rarely varied. They talked. They took
occasional drives. They often walked through the woods across the
way and once or twice to their initially slight embarrassment but
secret understanding found the tree where, the day before
Darconville left for London several years ago, they’d in a far less
assured mood carved the word “Remember.” Generally, however,
Darconville sat in the backyard reading—he didn’t write, he never
wrote when he was with her —while Isabel, either washing her hair
or listening to records, waited to fix dinner. Mr. Shiftlett, who
never said a word, seemed to have no end of work—Darconville never
figured this out—down in the cellar. And his imperseverant and
preposterous sister, her hah- pinched into rollers, was always
puttering about in the pseudo-carbuncular excrescence out front she
called a flowerbed—it was less expensive than a
psychiatrist—leaving off at successive intervals either for a stiff
drink or the by now familiar roundelay-like exchange with her
prospective son-in-law on the subject of noble intentions: for her
daughter, now at her accidence, the fond illiterate mother wished
only, if querimoniously, that she be thinking “aboot the footure.”
Darconville, of course, agreed. But as he felt that Isabel, for her
own
benefit, should finish her education and avoid, at the
same time, any inordinate pressure attendant on future speculation,
he preferred not to harry her in any way whatsoever. The flying
arrow, at a given moment in a given place, is also at rest. They
were content.

  There was, nevertheless, the habitual Saturday night
party when the Shiftletts and their neighbors (
minus
: the
van der Slangs) put their workaday worries into a blender and shook
out the concoctions of Lethe—a group of country skimpleplexes on
dress parade whose ardor from low squeals rose eventually to the
din of an Abyssinian thunderstorm. Darconville, by retiring early,
avoided it. But in the next room, Isabel, with all that thumping,
hooting, and laughter, lay face-up in the darkness most of the
night, burning with shame. Morning, then, never broke in Fawx’s Mt.
without Darconville being suddenly awakened by the explosion of the
6 A.M. farm report coming over the clock-radio next to his bed; it
was all agri-business: a rustic gaffoon with the diction of a
guinea-hen, full of voiceless consonants and twangs, grackling his
information out with such spitting, blowing, and hawking it sounded
like a five-minute repetition of something like
mustaherttuatarmustaherttuatar
—in fact, it was the
price-per-bushel rundown on red winter wheat, soybeans, and yellow
shell corn which was then always followed by a familiar essay on
the problems of pinkeye, parasite control, bull cross comparison,
and hog-spraying.

  There were other country matters, as well. Sundays,
for instance, usually found Darconville and Isabel alone. No one
there went to church. The Shiftletts, a somber two in low-crowned
black hats, always set that day aside as a ticket-of-leave for a
spin in the family truck to replenish themselves with the aimless
but prolonged mouse-hunt that is the Sunday drive. Little varied
thereafter in the wave goodbye, the locked door, the silence.
Transcendental prolepses, or anticipations of thought: under the
color of sudden opportunity then, interwished, they would turn like
aimcriers to behold their chance, not with spoken words, but simply
eyes that meet to seek what seeking always find. Mumbudget is the
slogan. Isabel steps quietly to her room; a shirt’s unbuttoned, off
comes an umbeclip, and down flows her hair; and then a girl with
tresses shining like that of a faxed star and a figure
bioluminescent beneath a black diaphanous gown sprinkled with
flowers turns with a gentle smile to the doorway and leads her
lover, under a slowly twirling mobile, toward the familiar
red-and-cream bed. There are kisses short as one, one long as
twenty, and they make love, recapitulating with considerable skill
what they’d done a thousand times in a passion now as restless and
urgent as that need which into words no vertue could ever digest.
Fire makes gold shine. In the swelter, Isabel is proof of it,
always in the same way—she pushes herself forward in blind
suspension, her arms lowered behind her, her hands locked tightly
under the bed panel, her breath catching in soft aromatic yoops as
if astonished, inexpressibly, at the wonder now of other
impossibilities ever being found as true as that. And Darconville?
Now in the floods, now panting in the meads, Darconville could not
be found to ask, so lost for joy was he in those always indelible,
compellable, but untellable hours of drury which nevertheless the
stupid quack of a clock, set against invasion, always served to
end.

  “O, you’re going to leave me one day, I know it,”
Isabel, raised on an elbow, habitually teased.

  For they talked, often—yes, and hoped, and dreamed,
and planned. Indeed, it had been one such chance remark on one such
occasion, sometime during that first year after he’d returned from
London, that one particular quodvultdiabolus was fully, and
finally, put to rest; the topic of infidelity having been raised in
the whimsical way that had become typical of her, Darconville would
thereafter never forget how Isabel, cajoled, suddenly laughed out
that Govert van der Slang, not only someone now to whom she never
gave a passing thought, had also been all along none other than
Darconville’s unprepossessing and inoffensive conversant at the
nefarious Gherardini party the previous year! It was, if a belated
confession, a disclosure at once explaining why, fearful at the
prospect of suddenly finding two rivals side by side, she had kept
to the other side of the room and how, in fact, she’d suffered so,
a matter thereby encouraging her shocked, then relieved listener to
try to effect greater efforts at a truce with him whenever they
met, which they did, and a mutual understanding developed as the
years passed to the degree that they might even have broached old
subjects, which they didn’t. Govert van der Slang was harmless. The
name, Ignaro, did his nature right ahead even if once he’d loved
her. “I never loved him, I don’t love him now,” said Isabel
Rawsthorne, “and I will never love him.”

  Fawx’s Mt. however, unlike that problem, never quite
lost its inscrutability, nor had Isabel her mystic fancies. (What
was it about that place, for instance, that made her so nervous and
always looking about from port to stern?) Smitten, nevertheless,
Darconville found her a child of the sun, to be faulted less in
what she lacked than for all he could never know of her or ever
have enough of: the incautious afternoons of love, her secret
kisses pressed upon his hand, the closeness she felt sleeping in
his shirts, and of course her many childlike exaggerations—”I know
you’re going to leave me.” “Are we being ‘lascivious’?” “I must go
back to my kingdom one day, you know, because I’m really a
princess.” “If we ever parted I’d come back one day and you’d
recognize me by—”

  O, could one write her paralipomena!

  It would be incorrectly given out, however, to call
Isabel perfect. Loyal? That she was, and that for Darconville
mitigated matters otherwise not always positive. She often took a
great deal of humoring. She never sent thank-you notes, never read
enough, and never visited Miss Trappe. She
lagged
a lot.
She had a monstrous vanity about her hair, the combing of which
became a particular hobble of hers exercised to death. Young, she
was disinclined to keep promises, take chances, or, except in the
woes of antipaternal lament, ever really be frank—and, even when
driven to it, her responses were often too understated to match
Darconville’s enthusiasms which tended less to stifle them, often
to her consternation, than to fan. She often said things out loud
that most people generally preferred to think ( “I know what I’m
going to do—” or “I’m decided now—”) but was just as often a talker
to no purpose. The talker, by definition, is not a listener, but
wasn’t listening, deliberating, the key to the thought
understanding requires? Then, she always said her worst fault was
that she was always trying to please people, and yet she somehow
failed to understand that, in doing so, she inevitably came to
resent them, a fault that had its worst ramifications in the matter
of jealousy.

  Isabel loved Darconville, he was certain of it, but
through her behavior often proved to need him even more—and
suspicion is often an ugly, if habitual, facet of need. There were
at times hysterical telephone calls. Several times, she read his
mail—”I just looked, I didn’t
see
anything!”—which upset
him terribly only because it threatened him with implications of a
disloyalty he never felt, quite the reverse, in fact, and so he
would end up paradoxically insisting on his loyalty with wrath and
on his love with anger. At such times, she wept in the most
unconvincing way—she never hid herself to weep—but when
Darconville, appalled at the vulgarity of such groundless suspicion
yet terrified at the same moment that his presence far exceeded her
need of him or underrepresented what need of hers he could meet,
then made the suggestion he always swore within himself he’d honor
(“Would you like to date anyone else?”), she always refused, always
firmly and always finally. Stubbornness, one of the worst
manifestations of weakness, here made him grateful. Yes, she was
loyal.

  But our virtues, indeed, are our vices. She never
entertained a single thought about the mysteries of God, man, or
the universe yet for that seemed innocent. If she had few
convictions, kept her opinions at half-mast, and simply repeated
what Darconville said, easy acceptance replenished serenity.
Threatened by mediocrities much closer to her than to others—or at
least she so feared—she effortfully aspired to graces others of her
age ignored, and yet when she acquired them she too often failed,
in terms of sympathy, those who
hadn’t
acquired them—and
far too often, in the light of those requirements where the social
demands of Quinsy College, such as they were, refracted off the
relatively advanced status her association with Darconville gave
her, Isabel more and more began to feel her participation in them
less a favor received than one conferred. That people with
atrocious manners should now have to be polite and considerate in
their dealings with her, that people whose habit was to stand aloof
should now have to be at her service, that the priggish and
self-assured should have to defer to her, all of this pleased her
just a little too much—and yet, while sometimes it cankered him,
Darconville could no more by unconscionable criticism be disloyal
to her than St. Paul who, ready to anathematize even an angel if it
preached another gospel, proved a model of steadfastness.

  There was not a lot to forgive, really, for while
what she was exacerbated what she wasn’t—the fairer the paper, the
fouler the blot— her faults were few. Isabel could be amusing, as
well. Hers was a sweet wiseacreishness. She made claims: that she
never had a headache, never drank a cup of coffee, and never—a
howler of Southern etiquette—went to the bathroom. She boasted she
could tell by smell if it were going to snow and that she knew
jiujitsu. She suffered an acute haptodysphoria in relation to
peaches. She carried French sweets loose in her pocket, stuck
together with lint more often than not. She wore a cheap perfume
called “Figment” which was much less attractive than her particular
way of lowering her eyes in a smile when he flatteringly
acknowledged it. The girl was difficult in the extreme to know, a
fact brought home to Darconville many times in the process, lately
begun, of recording for fun what she said, and did, and felt,
memos, then notes and random observations, and finally long
reflective essays that eventually grew into a box of papers on a
subject whose wonderful inconsistencies he hoped never to resolve
only if they led her to the larger, deeper self he knew she had it
in her power to become.