Darconville's Cat (60 page)

  Finally, the Supreme Court of Italy (
Corte di
Cassazione
), determining to resolve the controversy and
dispose of the case in judgment once and for all, suddenly
disregarded the form of the transaction in favor of its substance
and confirmed the decision rendered pro tern by the Court of Appeal
of Veneto, and the matter became
res adjuticata
, a
conclusion reached in respect of centuries of litigation. The
documents evidencing the decision were duly recorded, barring any
other claimants in the light of this last decision, exact copies
thereof bearing the proper seal were forwarded, and Darconville
became the owner of a Venetian palazzo.

  LXIII

  Figures in the Carpet

  But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in
my mind my reason for so shutting them.

        —EDGAR ALLAN
POE,
The Oval Portrait

  DARCONVILLE took out his black coat. A spell of bad
weather, cold hard rains, set in about the middle of September.
There was a torn and anxious quality to the sky. Days noticeably
foreshortened: the season when warmth lay low upon the land,
smothering it, was gone. The coolness in the air gave more than a
hint that the last rose of summer, tired of blowing alone, had put
on its hat and gone home. Cambridge now seemed small, dark, and
strepitous.

  It seemed a bleak, haunted Congregational world
these days, and Darconville came to descry in the black-hooded
clouds overhead the lofty pulpits of the Mathers, in the drizzle
their gloomy and irritable prophecies. Fall classes had now begun
at the university.

  The first week there had been interviews to give: a
long procession of ponderously uncertain students making
application for his courses. Darconville’s office was on the second
floor of a secluded, rickety house on Kirkland St., and there he
sat listening to their concerns, the usual olla-podrida of
undergraduate worries and boasts, hoping no one noticed how hard he
found it to concentrate. No, not hoping. Hoping allowed the
possibility of hindrance, resistance, opposition—prophecies he
refused to allow as the principal cause of events foretold, for we
hope, so pray, only to lose our comfort in the marshaled
expectation that creates a guilt, in which, feeling ashamed, we
fall afoul of hope and populate a hell. Darconville could no
longer, in fact, be numbered among those men whom obstacles
attract. All experience now seemed vanquished by one that had
already taken place—and he withdrew to
her
, now a refuge
in all things; he waited; he sat still in the sweet paralysis of
the past. The temptation to change or fully abide by new
adjustments, of whatever sort, seemed only a closely reasoned
paraphrase of rashness, and he didn’t dare do what, in the doing,
might be undone. He refused to acknowledge sorrow and at the same
time tried to blunt his eagerness, lest eagerness sharpen the
condition of that hope he now superstitiously held to be
antithetical to faith: don’t we hope for what we also fear we
mightn’t have? And
that
, of course, was unimaginable.

  No, Darconville was only rational—and grateful.
Without Isabel, however, his happiest moments became his saddest
because he could not share them with her, and yet, while he kept it
all to himself, he still saw fit—as he had for some time now—to
record his every feeling for her in a notebook, adding, as well
now, what he could remember of themselves, as far back as he could
remember. It seemed a way of keeping in touch. At the end of each
day at Kirkland St., he waited until the corridors were deserted
and then walked home alone, usually by way of the Yard, sometimes
so late that the wickets had been swung shut for the night, with
the lights in the old halls long extinguished and only the striking
of a lonely clock somewhere far away a reminder that beyond the
black and impenetrable shadows was someone very close to him. And
then he would whisper to her every single secret in his heart.

  Prof. McGentsroom, an old scholar at Harvard, proved
to be indispensable in those early weeks, becoming for Darconville
not so much the person who’d hired him but rather instead a good
friend who eased the transition, explained the rubrics of the
university, and suggested—always kindly and usually in language
that referred itself to the middle of the last century—how to go
about things. At their first meeting, he’d presented to his young
friend a volume of his own poetry, expressing only gracious
regrets, as he inscribed the book to both of them, to hear that
Isabel wouldn’t be coming up until December. They still, of course,
intended to marry? Darconville smiled. “The faith of man,” said the
kindly scholar, taking Darconville’s arm, “is itself the greatest
miracle of all the miracles that faith engenders.” It was true,
and, for strengthening him in his resolve, truer than ever. Only
endure, thought Darconville, endure, rich Penelope.

  A Harvard classic, McGentsroom—almost old enough to
carbon-date—looked like a real pottle-fiend (at times, in fact, he
did rather moisten his clay, as the phrase goes, somewhat
copiously): he was thready, wore salt-and-pepper suits, and was
always stuffing filthy old shag—the genuine Bull Durham—into his
pipe. His ties were stained. There was awn sticking out of his ears
and nose. He looked as though he couldn’t find the holes in a
bowling ball, but in point of fact he was a great polyglot and was
currently being considered for another Pulitzer Prize, not so much
for his masterful biography, rendering others obsolete, of Weef VI,
as for his brilliant translation of a recently discovered
tenth-century Russian manuscript called
Chornaya
Gert-zoginia
. He couldn’t remember the carfare to Boston from
Cambridge but could quote chapter and verse from the works of
Defensorius, Synodite of Ligugé, and Baudonivia, the Nun of
Poitiers. Darconville often took Prof. McGentsroom to lunch. He
always got sauce on his nose.

  Despite the fact that he was getting on—the previous
year he had yawned and dislocated his hip—Prof. McGentsroom was
widely held to be a wonder in the classroom. In he bumped, replete
with umbrella and beret, looking as if he’d shaved with a
scarificator, and without so much as a note began to lecture. He
taught courses in comparative literature, but Homer was his love,
and several generations were often given to regale each other with
stories of how he always chuffed on fumicable feet across the front
of the classroom, the standard opening since 1915 to his famous
classics course in which he demonstrated that Homer sang in the
rhythm of a choo-choo train! Classics: a course which teaches you
how to live without the job it prevents you from getting. But to
such complaints McGentsroom was oblivious. Lecturing, he was liable
to nod off or perhaps reach into his pocket and take out something
like a telephone-pole insulator, stare at it, then put it back. As
he talked, he pulled on his pipe, slurped it, chewed the stem in
deliberation. Of course he was a bit bunty, but the students loved
him, especially those who, answering a question correctly, earned
his ritualistic praise: he would step out from behind the lectern,
extend his hands cardinalationally, and clap them down upon the
fellow’s shoulders, saying, “Oh, it
is
grand to be young.”
It was reported that he got angry only once—this was years and
years ago—when he simply walked out of the classroom, shouted
“Suffering Columbus,
no
!” and then returned, smiling and
composed. Female students worshipped him and on the last day of
each semester always brought him a balloon. McGentsroom was one of
those people rare today who adored his wife, whom he invariably
called “Little Mother.” You always saw him leave Widener Library at
9:10, when he walked home —often the wrong way—for a small glass of
scrumpy, the late news on his overheating old Philco cathedral, and
then to bed.

  At the beginning of the second week, Prof.
McGentsroom invited Darconville over on Saturday night for drinks.
It was something to look forward to, for the young teacher had been
spending his nights alone working on a piece of satiric fiction
which showed the ironic contradictions between the characters’
confidence in themselves and what the reader knew about them, a
kind of writing at which recently he’d became extremely adept.
Writing he could manage; nothing else much interested him. There
was in F-21 only the whisper of his pen, a familiar silence broken
only occasionally down in the street by roaring students addicted
to asserting in chorus that they wouldn’t go home ‘til morning, a
needless vaunt in that, more often than not, it had usually
arrived. As time passed, the pointless spaciousness of his rooms
came to oppress Darconville, and he proceeded to move his bed, his
desk, and his lamp into one room. He began to talk to himself,
avoid the dining-hall, feel a fatigue he could only ascribe
to—what? His apprehension to know suddenly explained it:
apprehension. He wished Isabel would write. He tried to ignore that
she hadn’t.

  But as night followed night it turned out the same:
when darkness fell he always found himself facing auspiciously
south, gazing through the windows of his room, yet observing
nothing, only reaching with one hand to clasp the opposite
shoulder, drawing it inward and sitting, as it were, cupped within
himself. And it was quaint, for when the windowpane misted over
with his breathing, he would wipe it with a handkerchief as if
prepared, for some reason, to find in a breathless moment something
terrifying looking in, very like the child who displaces fright and
apprehension onto monsters and other imaginary creatures in order
to preserve the indispensable belief, deep in his heart, that
someone loving will then intercede.

  His classes provided some diversion. The lecture
room assigned to Darconville was located over in Sever, an old
smutted brickbat-with-turrets in the quad—its main entrance a black
gaping mouth—whose twists and coils of ivy, running down from its
slateshell roof to the whispering Norman arch out front, were now
turning the colors of autumn. The building enclosed within it ages
of stifled air, musty, overoiled, dead, and when one opened the
windows, wobbling on corbels, it was only to smell the rot in the
stone outside.

  The students, most of them, were confident,
wellborn, and poised, and their determined eyes, straight Yankee
mouths, and Back Bay inflections told the story of what it was
within their power to become —indeed, several of them made no
pretense at hiding either the fact that they bore the very same
names that once made George III tremble or could trace their
gametal descent from the lines of Dolgoruky, Edward the Pacemaker,
or Pepin the Short. They were quick, forthright, and generally
studious—and bore a refreshing dissimilarity to their
preterimposterous counterfoils down South who for reasons known
only to them took great pride in having enrolled in such schools as
Sewanee, Vanderbilt, Baylor, and other sectarian watering-holes
where the teachers were all history-whipped alcoholics who
calculated the date of the End of the World to have been April 9,
1865, and whose intellectual concerns had less to do with the study
of Shakespeare than as to why Longstreet delayed at Gettysburg or
how in the subsequent surrender the infamous result for the Union
had much less to do with a new birth of freedom than with several
generations of piebald babies.

  Darconville’s seminars usually went well—they’d only
met a couple of times—and all the students, crowded together in
heaps of bookbags and bunched-up coats, seemed attentive. He would
walk in, wheel out a perambulant blackboard, and deliver his
lecture with dispatch, pausing only to answer questions or perhaps
look out at the leaves fluttering from the trees across the Yard.
Unlike most of the Quinsy girls, the students here worked with
determination and results, studiously rack-and-snailing over their
assignments with the precision of a clock, their ambitions, high,
extending simply to honors or, in some cases, to the even higher
aspiration of making the punching lists for A.D. or Porcellian,
felicity supreme for many of those stouthearted leptorrhins with
triple names and disposable incomes who leaned that way.

  During those first classes, Darconville managed to
establish a decent sort of rapport with most of them—owlish
overachievers, bearded scholars, manic-depressive divinity
students, sun-streaked blondes in parkas—and many a discussion,
full of quibbles and amphibologies, vigorously continued outside on
the steps, along through the Yard, and right on up to the brick
sidewalks of Plympton St. where, late though it might be, he
patiently stood talking to whatever concerned group was there until
such time as he had to excuse himself for dinner. But invariably he
wouldn’t go to dinner. Nor, for interruptions, would he go to his
room. He would wait until he was alone and then, for privacy, hurry
over to a walkway in the Lowell House courtyard where there was a
telephone box.

  On the evening of September 20, he connected. It was
a brief conversation, for all that depended on it, at least so he
felt, after three silent weeks. It seemed that it took Isabel
forever to answer the telephone, the explanation for which, when
given, being that she’d been outside sitting under a tree,
thinking. About? Nothing, everything. Darconville thought:
say
all, and all well said, still say the same
. She asked him if
he missed her or had he, well, met someone else in Cambridge
smarter and prettier than she? She gave credibility to the question
that, with a hollow laugh, she repeated, but he refused to accept
the callowness it seemed he was being forced, that he might
understand, to assume, and though more hurt than indignant he
pretended to be neither—and went on, as he swallowed his emotion,
asking her if she’d received his gifts, which she had, and if she’d
write to him, which she promised she would, that very night. There
followed an awkward silence. “I love you,” said Darconville. He
listened, hard, and heard a low, indistinguishable something, but
whether of ardor or alarm or aphilophrenia he couldn’t say.