Darconville's Cat (54 page)

  “It’s a miracle—a wonderful secret just between you
and I,” said Isabel, giggling and sipping more champagne. She
looked up. “Or should it be me?”

  “Should what be me?”

  “Should I be me?” Isabel twirled a finger in her
drink and laughed. “
You
know.”

  Darconville smiled. “Could you possibly be anyone
else?”

  The secret had been divulged, and they were both in
high spirits, an exuberance fully as bright and as antic as the
candleflames that lighted up the table and sparkled out of the
silver and twinkled in the wine. Darconville refilled the glasses,
and again they toasted the future that had just been offered them.
But there was Doubt in the Mind of Royalty. “Harvard!
Harvard
University
! But it’s you,” she added, playfully pushing his
arm, her diamond ring spurtling with tiny lights, “it’s you they
want. Me, whatever would I do there? You know me, I don’t seem to
be able to communicate with anybody.” She paused, reflectively. “I
seem to ruin everything”—always, that quaint pronunciation—”but to
ruin your career? To disappoint you? To not measure up?”

  It was absurd, such talk. Loyalty? The virtue, going
to such lengths, only turned upon itself, making faith as fickle as
a lee tide trying to run against the wind. Oh, could she only have
seen herself, for she sat as for a portrait, her honeycolored hair
falling around a face as exquisite as noonshine and her long black
dress leaving her shoulders bare and whiter than purity. Praise
praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Couldn’t she
see
that?

  “What,” asked Darconville, “could you possibly
ruin?”

  The smile died. For a minute Isabel seemed not to
know, struck as if she’d somehow forgotten on opening night the
dialogue that had gone too long assumed or unquestioned in her
monologous lines of rehearsal. She grew silent, thinking she didn’t
want to remember what she, in fact, had forgotten. Darconville,
watching her for a response, remembered all of a sudden a queer
dream he’d once had: a couple, standing on each side of a dead
beast, were bid to live together ‘til death did them part and so,
shaking hands, the wedding was ended. Who was that couple? What was
that beast? Isabel, meanwhile, seemed for no apparent reason
utterly shent and powerless, staring at, then into, and now through
Darconville to the reaches of blackest orphny. It frightened him,
that mood-change, and he touched a shiver in her arm. She looked up
and around as if looking for something to do.

  “How much they must have loved your book! Look!” She
nervously pulled from her handbag a copy of
Rumpopulorum
,
the formal cause of his being asked to teach at Harvard and so
brought along as a guest, flipped it open, and read: “‘
With the
sun a reminding touch upon their frozen hair the winged
, um,
phagones of evil flashed out of heaven
—’“ She looked up.
“‘Flashed,’“ she said, “that’s a great verb.” The voice was happy
but it wasn’t her voice. It seemed a terrible echo of something
even worse than false cheer: terror.

  Darconville wasn’t fooled.

  “Please,” he asked softly, “what’s the matter?”

  Isabel’s face collapsed as if she’d just been
stabbed—then, clutching his two hands, she pulled herself to his
face and sobbed desperately, “
My God, do you really love
me
?”

  The dining-room itself seemed to fall away, the
shadows thrown across it becoming now more ominous, its huge
radiators like headstones and the faded perse drapes like shrouds
over the windows effectively providing a last funereal touch. It
seemed to transform back to the sepulchre it always was, not that
the owner, were he ever brought that complaint, would have given a
damn—and he’d damned well tell you so, too; but he spoke to no one,
least of all strangers: he only stood around, tut-mouthed in his
baseball cap, listening to his swine-toned radio, reading the
paper, or maybe slouching out to that dad-docky veranda, knotted
with grey wisteria, to play checkers with a few other old smouchers
and layabouts who seemed to have spent a lifetime devoted to
smoking bags of filthy shag and patching grief with proverbs out
front. That was the way it was. You didn’t like it, you could
goddamn well go down the road, OK?

  The Timberlake did no business to speak of. The
students never went there, the faculty rarely, and Negroes weren’t
welcome. It was a place for Quinsyburg’s old people—veiled like
outdated fabrics and wrapped in woolen stuffs—who stopped in,
wordlessly hung up their coats, and then took their plates of
boiled fish and glasses of water alone. On this particular evening,
the dining-room was empty as usual but for one black waiter,
several old ladies crunching breadsticks, and the unmistakable
figure, hunched in a bib, of President Greatracks alone in a corner
gulching a mound of meat. He had seen Darconville come in but only
winked, wiped his oily chin, and fell again upon his meats and
puddings as if to defeat them. Ordinarily, he would have come over
and talked the runners off a pung. He obviously had other plans.
But congeniality, even at the best of times, was not a big number
at the Timberlake Hotel. Nor had Darconville chosen the place by
chance. You see, it was absolutely impossible to have a celebration
there, so it was the perfect place to have a celebration if you
were never coming back. For Darconville, incidentally, there was no
question whatsoever about that. But unfortunately he was now facing
another.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You must be tired,” said Darconville. Was it a
joke? If so, it was a joke that hurt him badly. But he smiled.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve been overexcited by it all.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Please,” asked Darconville, leaning forward, “what
is the matter with you?”

  “You.”

  “What’s the matter with me?”

  “Me,” she whispered.

  Darconville touched her hand and frowned, feeling
clownish and homely and old. He was embarrassed. He didn’t know
what to say.
Do you really love me
? When love isn’t proof
of itself, it is suddenly impossible to prove—and words, which fit
to fill the mouths of myst and mummer alike, cheapen on the tongue.
And how many of them, to mock about meaning with mendaciloquence!
No, if weeds were orchids, thought Darconville, people would come
to hate orchids rather than cultivate weeds. But words were weeds,
weren’t they? They can mean their opposite! If I should cleave,
must I then embrace this girl or be let to cut her into twigs? Let?
Choose, it can mean both hinder and allow. Avaunt beckons and
banishes, both, and
hostis
, why, it indicates a guest and
indicates an enemy! Foundlings are lostlings!
Do you really
love me
? I do, and so must loathe her, he thought, fashioning
thus the truth that grows expedient, becoming Cato’s lie. Question:
Are you faithful to your husband? Answer: I wouldn’t be with
you—
there
, for manifold ambiguity to say that one deserved
condign punishment is tautological; to say that one does not
deserve it is a contradiction in terms. What of language, then,
when opposites pip each other into life as faith will doubt and
love will hate? If Moses was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, then he
must have been the daughter of Pharaoh’s son. Why, pluck out words
that mean what they are, and language shan’t have a tooth left to
mump on beans!
Do you really love me
? It was a question,
thought Darconville, that fully deserved the wrong answer—but,
what, making it then, if language interpreted as it did, the right
one? O wonderful world, when we can’t mean what we say! But wait,
perhaps she asks what she too well knows and therefore doesn’t know
at all, as a person goes blind to the riddle of familiar landscapes
or sits deaf as a post listening in the depths of that infirmity to
try to hear more of the promiscuous roar she can’t see has caused
and now prevents it. Good! I will outparadox paradox, thought
Dar-conville, juggle intentions like balls, and make foundlings of
lostlings all over again! Opportunity is being ready for it!
Checkmate!

  “I want to marry you,” said Darconville.

  The statement was simple. It didn’t subdichotomize.
It didn’t subdivide. It seemed to Isabel as far from danger as she
was from reason and as near to love as she was now from folly. She
felt strangely calm, almost in the swoon of satisfaction that is at
the last stage of penance fully made. It was a moment to cherish,
there in that ghastly hotel, when perhaps for the first time in her
entire life that vision which she feared waited for her forked and
misanointed in the middle distance now came to the fore an angel of
deliverance, its open hand gentle to the possibility of it. It was
so easy. There was suddenly confusion in neither concern nor
context: here was a person who loved her, a friend to console her,
a protector to keep her safe from the close world of mouse-fretting
worries and major disappointments she’d lived with so long but
could no more. If one
did
something, she saw, one didn’t
have to wait anymore. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—wait anymore. There
was nothing to remember. The statement was simple. There was
nothing to forget.

  “Wait,” said Darconville, swiftly interrupting
himself to comply with apprehension before it rose to overwhelm
him, “if you want to. You may want to spend some time alone, you
may want more schooling, your parents—”

  Isabel’s head was lowered, shadowed in a slant of
candleshade. It has been said that the happiest conversation is
that of which nothing is remembered, and, if so, whether a longer
reply led up to what he heard, Darconville couldn’t say, but he
would never forget that moment when she looked up suddenly with
moist brown eyes, paused, and whispered softly, “I want—what you
want.”

  “When?”

  “September.”

  “Where?”

  Isabel fixed her eyes on him tenderly, her bosom
upwelling with the tears she tried in vain, by swallowing, to
absorb. “Where we were engaged.”

  A stone suddenly rolled away from his heart.

  “I have to confess something,” she said, smiling
through the tears that fell and pressing the back of her fingers
against his cheek. “I’ve always wanted since I was little to make
my own wedding dress.”

  The driving rain outside—a sudden gowkstorm had
blown up during the evening—turned the lobby of the Timberlake even
darker than usual, the heavy curtains over the windows flapping
about now in the room like the huge wings of angry birds. They had
stayed on rather late, and Darconville, concerned about Isabel’s
curfew, was wondering how they’d get to the car. Hugging two empty
champagne bottles, Isabel laughed that she didn’t care and that she
didn’t mind getting wet and that, having claimed earlier at Fitts
that she planned to go to Fawx’s Mt., she’d signed out for an
“overnight” anyway.

  They waited on in some merriment, with Isabel
gladdened to the heart and Darconville feeling a certain continual
power, a sense of being attentive enough to a minute survey of the
worth of real life that he might have been perpetually a poet. At
that moment he looked through the window and saw a woman outside in
the midst of the downpour. She was running up the front steps
holding up a pink umbrella and an overnight bag. It was Mrs.
Dodypol! Whether Isabel recognized her he couldn’t say, but as the
poor woman stumbled through the front door of the hotel with an
alcoholic lurch and a fright of hairloops stuck messily to a face
the color of margarine he saw how very much she evoked Isabel’s
sympathy—Isabel pressed close to Darconville.

  “I love you for that. You care,” he said, thinking
of his own general indifference to that faculty wife, “sometimes
far more, I’m sorry to say, than I.”

  Mrs. Dodypol, signing the register, quickly
disappeared upstairs when Isabel turned to Darconville and,
winking, whispered playfully, “Or is it me?”

  LVI

  The Wedding Is Banned

  And all is done that ye looked for before.

        —JOHN SKELTON,
“Though Ye Suppose

              All
Jeopardies Are Passed”

  THE SUMMER began with much to do. It was June
already, and Isabel had passed her courses, was graduated, and had
been driven back to spend an unemphatic summer—her last—in Fawx’s
Mt, not Arcady, no, but home. There had been a happy coincidence in
her graduation gifts: her parents gave her a sewing machine,
Darconville several hundred dollars for the nuptial
silks-and-satins they together chose in Charlottesville for her
gown and a blanket chest in which, with sprigs of rosemary, to fold
it when finished. She also bought a small, blue used car. Now, as
they’d determined to be married in London come September, time was
pressing. When the particular discrimination called hesitation long
exists, the reverse discrimination of haste must offset it, and so
with that in mind Darconville returned to teach two five-week
sessions of summer school at Quinsy and to organize as best he
could what promised to be a frantic few months.

  It was imperative, right off, to secure living
quarters at Harvard and to find out when in the fall they were
required to be there. There were other letters of inquiry, as well,
one immediately to Westminster Cathedral to set a wedding day and
another, also to London, to ascertain from the General Registry
Office at Somerset House what procedures were required on the civil
side. They would need reservations, licenses, certificates of a
hundred kinds—and above all luck. (A less pactitious
consideration—one no less, however, involving Isabel—was squaring
away the matter of faith: he began to think about her baptism. )
The hope, of course, was that all would go smoothly. His was to do,
then report, and it became his habit to dodge down to the
Timberlake at night to telephone any news of consequence. Sometimes
Isabel wasn’t at home.