Darconville's Cat (61 page)

  Clearly, her mother was still in the room.

  The following days Darconville spent writing,
leaving his desk only sporadically either to eat or to check the
mailbox—which still remained empty—and the time dragged, for after
the telephone call he missed Isabel more than ever, wealth breeding
want, the more blessed, the more wretched having grown. The
woodpeckers rapping relentlessly on the lead roof of Adams House,
mocking his routine, demoralized him; it was ridiculous. Then the
weather cleared, and he began to take walks, sit whole afternoons
dreaming by the river, or perhaps take the train to Boston where he
spent hours going about the streets until he was satisfied that a
sufficient amount of tune had passed to justify the mail delivery
he ludicrously, illogically, came to expect as being somehow
causally aligned to his absence: he would return, find the box
empty, and then sit in his room in an agony of remorse at the
thought of the day wasted. Such accidents with Darconville became
weirdly consistent, and, more demoralized than ever, he’d read in
his guilt an obligation to redeem the time and then proceed with
murderous efficiency to write until long after the three o’clock
bells tolled pages he’d throw away, for they somehow always
curiously transessen-tiated into letters to Isabel—of love, of
grief, of passion, of worry— sometimes in words as beautiful and
enchanted as prayers but too often as remote and frenzied
dispensations, bungled by lovesickness, which gibbered
unmentionably outside the ordered universe where no dreams reach,
no hearts touch, no love takes place. And then with yet another
night almost gone, he would place another sheet before him and take
up his pen. He’d lean to the right and then to the left. He’d sit
forward. He’d sit backward. He’d sit
tête baissée
, bowing
his head to the page, blank as silence, and then mercifully nod off
to sleep in the holiness of his ignorance, fatigue becoming at last
the very narcotic needed to cure itself.

  The lively bustle in the streets outside eventually
became a temptation Darconville couldn’t bear to ignore.
Distinction, implying a difference, only meant isolation, and while
he still felt a general indifference to the suffrage of the public
he took again to roaming about, often observing in the streets a
face, or a fraction of a face, which seemed to reveal to a
hairsbreadth in mutable flesh what at that time he yearned to find
in durable shape. Strangely, he felt so bad about Isabel’s silence
and her absence that it became almost like having her there! And
yet he tried not always to think about her. There were, at first,
small conversatioas with the yardcops. Then he accepted the
invitations of several students to visit their final clubs, affairs
called “rum sociables,” during which he sat uncomfortably by
himself in discreet paneled rooms watching beautiful arrogant
children— golden-haired phaeacians with perfect heads and
supercilious preppies in striped ties—as they smoked bulldog pipes,
sang ribald songs, and played poker for exorbitant stakes.

  There were also faculty parties at Harvard, a
pinched hour or so once a week in some upper room or other where
vile little caphtorim for whom ideology, like science, put a ring
around the world and professors of both sexes, working their rubber
faces, stood around in the pavisade of closed circles, sipping
sherry and earnestly trying to solve the
vexata quaestio
of who shouldn’t be given tenure, while their voices, a blend of
the servile and the congratulatory, the deferential and the
condescending, rose at moments of histrionic laughter or dropped at
moments for serious inquiry—conversations, in fact, that proved to
be little more than the gossip of swivel-chair tacticians and the
less-than-witty exaugurations of academical women hardfaced as
execution, crafty little critics, and anxiety-ridden sculptresses
from Radcliffe with complexions like drakonite who taught art and
somehow all specialized in phallic and mammary bronzes. The men
stuttered; the women mimped; and the cumulative effect, often
rising to a pitch of sensibility hardly to be distinguished from
madness, only seemed to recapitulate in the babble what tragic
consequences lay in store for those who would build towers to the
heights of their Goddamned ambitions. Most of them had reputations,
not for any particular wisdom, but for having authored with
indefatigable manufacture books of eighth-rate criticism which they
approached like cutting serge, getting their thruppence ha’penny
change, and writing “settled” at the bottom of their manifests with
the pencil that had blacked their teeth.

  There was for instance the head of the English
department, a showboat-fat idler in American Lit.—a salesman
disguised as a catalogue— who, with his hands in his pockets,
rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet and upon being
introduced to Darconville said, “Ah, the scrivener.” Another one,
expert on Wordsworth, simply snorfled sherry and talked about His
Book. A group of men, introduced collectively as the Personnel
Committee, tidily kept themselves to the rule of proportion and
excluded anyone else from their charmed circle. It was all in all a
gathering of self-important and inaccessible fame-suckers who ate
too much, rarely taught classes, and had more sabbaticals in their
lives than Saturdays—copyright pirates, purveyors of secondhand
sunshine, and empiriocritical yahoos all ferreting and rummaging in
the quis-quiliae of time, making books out of a judicious mixture
of other books, and carrying owls to Athens. They were all at once
silly, unimportant, and ambitious, minds which were logical and
positive without breadth, without suppleness, and without
imagination and their scholarship was nothing but a school of
peculation which suffered less in the lack than in the excess of
attention. The laurels about which one dreamt wouldn’t let the
other sleep; another dreamt that his laurels wouldn’t let yet
another sleep; and
that
one couldn’t sleep because only
another dreamt of the very laurels he himself was disallowed.

  Darconville would remember one particular afternoon
at such a party: a colleague in his department happened,
dared
, to introduce herself as Isabel, and he was suddenly
astonished to see how immeasurably sad he grew—excusing himself, in
haste, to run immediately over to Adams House for a look into his
mailbox, with no luck.

  There was, of course, an outer edge of vanity and
pretension to these occasions, these people, but the distractions
were welcome. Anything that came to his mind became a
preoccupation. A rough sea, he thought, leaves a smooth beach. And
one morning that idea seemed confirmed in a wonderful way. A letter
arrived: the wedding date was set in London at Westminster
Cathedral for December 23! He called that night to tell Isabel.
There was no answer. Quickly, he wrote her a letter asking her if
he could come down to see her.

  The master of Adams House, meanwhile, had noticed
that Darconville not only kept aloof at the faculty parties but
also took his meals alone in the dining-hall and so encouraged him
to come to the Wednesday open-houses up in the Senior Common Room—a
weekly get-together for associates, tutors, and affiliated
professors where one had the opportunity to meet other members,
chat, and have a drink. It was enjoyable, a versatile group of
scholars, musicians, and lovely intelligent girls who, brimming
with laughter and smelling of hot puffs of hairwash, effortlessly
stood in to discuss their studies, vivisect the worth of a movie,
or explain what they wanted to achieve in their careers.
Several—the master among them—had read Darconville’s book, which
even became the subject of some discussion there. He began to look
forward to these occasions, the congeniality and quiet civility in
that room, with its noble bust of John Adams, keeping his spirits
up. By happenstance, one afternoon, Darconville noticed a person
who looked like a pale slug crossing furtively along the wall to
the exit of that room, walking with a kind of hop in his gait and
frowning at the floor. It was none other than the blond shabrag of
a lad who had so nervously accosted him in the dark that night on
the top floor of Adams House.

  “Excuse me,” asked Darconville, interrupting
someone, “who is that?”

  A few people turned: then they all knowingly
exchanged glances. There were raised eyebrows, excipient whistles
of sarcasm, and one or two exaggerated reviews of the ceiling. One
girl, sucking her tongue in disgust, looked away. The senior tutor
smiled and shook his head.

  “That,” he replied, “is part of the caricaturama of
Harvard. His name is Lampblack.”

  And he ran errands. But no one knew much of anything
else about him, whether he was a graduate student or how long he’d
lived in Adams House or in fact where he’d come from. Nobody could
guess his age. The only incontrovertible fact, it seemed, common
knowledge apparently, was that he was a lackey, a little
aide-de-camp of sorts whose services at some time or other had been
secretly (and, it was suggested, diabolically) given over—if one
could believe the report— to one of the strangest human beings on
the face of the earth: some mad apple, a creature few had ever
really seen, they said, in fact, a professor emeritus at Harvard
who lived his life out alone on the interdicted reaches of the top
floor of Adams House. As those in the common room spoke of him, it
was as if of ruin or disgrace, as if some diseased and
unpentecostal wind had suddenly blown up in that room to scandalize
their young tongues and yet somehow force them to pronounce, not
without an uneasy, almost disbelieving hitch in the throat, the
discreditable confession that was his name: Dr. Crucifer.

  It was whispered that this remote figure held an
absolute and malevolent jurisdiction at Harvard and, to
Darconville’s skeptical amusement, that he not only controlled
everything there but that a good many members of the faculty, about
whom he supposedly knew everything, had been brought to the
university on the strength of nothing less mysterious than the
power of his own secret command. “I take it he’s a wizard?” asked
Darconville, smiling. But no one laughed—in fact, as he spoke, he
happened to notice the senior tutor, closely watching him, suddenly
look away.

  There were legends. It seemed that this Crucifer was
the organizer of every last deviltry. Stories, passed along down
the years, were many-handed, many-wintered, many-stemmed. He was
evidently a genius, for which, of course, at Harvard nothing wasn’t
forgiven. Actually, there was small firsthand information:
students, who conspicuously avoided that stairway on their own
initiative, had in fact been strictly prohibited by house rules
from all suites beyond the fourth floor of F-entry. That didn’t,
however, stem rumors. Dr. Crucifer’s courses, no longer being
given, had apparently been quite famous—it was said, among other
things, that in the heat of a
rabidus furor
the ingenious
method he once took for conveying to a lax and ill-prepared student
the importance of discipline was to administer stripes to the
fellow while having him repeat the “Miserere” on his knees in front
of the whole class—but that upon Radcliffe’s co-educational merger
with Harvard he had immediately resigned. It wasn’t explained why.
Afterwards, however, he supposedly never appeared in the community
again, although the word was that sometimes he’d been seen walking
the downstairs corridors of Adams House late at night. Alone.
Slowly. That sort of thing. Some said he shot at targets in his
living-room with an air pistol, others that he worked in the lofts
upstairs on demonic experiments, and several that he was writing a
history of Harvard.

  It was offered one to select any of a thousand
dubious reports: he dressed only in red; he owned a library of
cutisbound books; he was never visible to mortal sight for
twenty-four hours running; he was an ex-priest; he’d once caned
Kittredge; he smoked only Sherman’s cork-tipped 100’s and drank
only imported Pharaon liquor; he was Lampblack’s real father; and
so on and so forth. His reputation reached everywhere. It was sworn
that, once, he had been heard screaming from his upper window for a
full ten minutes, that he purposely humiliated Jewish students in
his classes, and that, with the remark “My bread, I think?” once
dug his fork into the white hand of a lady who sat beside him at a
faculty dinner. On another occasion he supposedly called to his
table the patron of a local restaurant and ordered him to remove a
consumptive from the doorway so that he could enjoy his meal
without disgust. And a last flight of someone’s fancy actually had
it that this creature, in order to elevate himself above the
weakness of humankind, once traveled—this was unbelievable—to a
remote place called Zawyel-Dyr where in the dead of night he
willingly knelt on a mat, lit by stars and a lantern, while some
byzantine with a shanked and serrated clamp, fitted to an oval
ring, illegally performed a surgical peotomy on him and—

  Excusing himself with a smile, Darconville left the
room. It was preposterous.

  The oaks in New England had now turned. Winds piled
every gutter and dark doorway full of scraps of red, amber, and
yellow leaves. The passing days were as empty to him as his
mailbox, and now even his writing couldn’t take his whole
attention. He developed headaches but managed to get hold of some
amphetamines which temporarily cleared them up. It was not magical:
the cure itself was a symptom, only confirmed what his headaches
hinted at—his mind had become rigid in its preoccupations, and soon
it seemed he was concentrating on concentration alone. Thought
became a drama as an end in itself, with his mind both stage and
audience. The packs of cigarettes he smoked left his lungs
absolutely raw.