Darconville's Cat (74 page)

        Nothing in
nature is equal quite:

        Jaws don’t match
in a single bite.

  My line. Doggerel, no doubt. Still, I suppose, it
shows imagination of some sort.

  “No, there’s no route back to the Garden of Eden,
Darconville, except by the imagination. That’s why I believe in
you
”—Darconville felt Dodypol’s hand steal into his to
give it a reassuring shake—”and why I set off for Charlottesville
the very minute you called. I may be speaking out of turn, but you
weren’t the only one she let down, my friend, not by half. It
wasn’t as long as two or three weeks ago that Thelma Trappe was
asking the very same question: ‘Why didn’t Isabel ever visit me?’
She doted on her, for some reason. You’d know. Parents, wasn’t
there something peculiar that way with both of them?” He shook his
head and sighed. “A goosegirl ermined is a goosegirl still.” He
touched his friend’s knee. “It’s too late now anyway, I should
say.” Dodypol glanced over at Darconville and picked up speed.
“Point taken?”

  This further recognition of Isabel Rawsthorne’s
disregard compounded his hurt, and yet, strangely, as one report
followed another in such detestable proportion, it only seemed a
cruel attempt by spiteful and fathomless rumor to effect a revision
of her which was sham and not her at all; one day trying to lynch
four years? It was not going to happen.

  “I don’t think you understand what I’m talking
about,” said Dr. Dodypol, staring straight on.

  Darconville looked up.

  “Last night Miss Trappe committed suicide.”

  It was late afternoon when they pulled into
Quinsyburg, with the last red streaks fading away in the western
sky. Darconville never bothered to ask himself why he had returned,
although he began to feel he found the recollection of her to be
more pleasing than her presence; something he remembered of her
seemed to be missing when he’d encountered her again, not only
yesterday, he reflected, but over the last months back to June. But
here he was in this bizarre world, again. Perhaps he hoped to
experience again the feelings associated with a happiness he’d
known there in time past? It was possible, but he began to realize,
passing the countryside which bore so clearly the mark of the
waning year, that the nature of time is loss, to be reviewed in
memory, perhaps, but never to be regained, and suddenly he couldn’t
put himself to review those memories that conspired for attention
on every street, at every corner, for the past, once taken to be so
immutable, had instantly been transmogrified by the present to the
point of disfigurement—and what memory could now be singled out
that didn’t lead in a single inflexible line straight toward the
dissolution of it? The exertions of trying to probe into the
purposeless series of tragedies so weighed on him that, to escape
them and to avoid the bald amiabilities and questions which were
sure to follow hard upon meeting anybody from the college, he asked
Dodypol to put him up in a room at Ms house, where, after writing a
swift retaliatory letter to Gilbert van der Slang—declaring with
what industry he would fight for Isabel—he fell exhausted from
thinking onto the bed and slept.

  Later that night, there wasn’t a sound when Dr.
Dodypol peeked into the bedroom. Darconville was so still he might
have been dead, but as his friend was concerned that he hadn’t
eaten for days he touched him awake. It was too late, whispered
Dodypol, as Darconville immediately rose to telephone Isabel—but
when he cried out in agony, Dodypol said no, no, he only meant it
was midnight.

  It was intolerable, this waking into facts, and
Dodypol suggested a walk. The night air was heavy with the odors of
fall, with rifts in the racing clouds that showed watery patches of
color in the dark sky. Darconville mailed his letter, and they set
off, Darconville walking swiftly, Dodypol trying to keep pace with
his companion who was speaking now with a euphoria which revealed
itself in unjustified optimism and grandiose plans, a compulsive
chatter switching from one subject to another so rapidly that his
listener couldn’t follow, and then slowing down in spells of
ominous reflection. He would halt, deliberating. Then he would
suffer a kind of hypomania, his thought processes, like film,
running along at incredible speed: did she love him, not want
marriage, or not love me? Or love me, fear marriage, so love him?
Perhaps hate me, love him, and so want marriage? Did she love one
more as she loved another less? If she loved me, he wondered, how
could she love him? Then did she ever love me if she always knew
him? If he didn’t love her, would she then have loved me still?

  Half-truth is a despot. By entering into the arena
of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and
tactics, by accepting the presumption of the legitimacy of debate,
Darconville felt he was only foundering more.

  But why had she agreed to marry him? When exactly
did she meet this other person and with what disposition informed
by what cause? How was it he had never once seen her wedding dress?
And what was behind those ridiculous errors in the wedding
invitations? The paucity of her visits, when she had the only car,
last summer? The months of unbearable silence when she could have
simply told him the truth? But what was the truth? Why, for
instance, had she bothered to be baptized? Engaged? And why that
recent telegram expressing her love?
Elle m’aime, un peu,
beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout
? It was
impossible. The torch casts no light upon its base.

  They circled around the outer side of Quinsy
College, walking down the empty streets in silence. The copses
moaned and swung in the rising wind, and it wasn’t long before, up
on that small hill overlooking the train tracks, Darconville
stopped in front of the dead dark bulk of a house outlined against
the sky and looking ghostly and barren under the leafless trees
that stretched out their black fingers over its roof. It was Miss
Trappe’s place. They paused by her garden patch where in the
crooked drills lay the brown and lifelessly twisted stalks of her
plants. Without a word, despite Dodypol’s pleas, Darconville was up
on the porch and inside. He wanted to say goodbye.

  The rooms were plain, with a stillness in them that
bespoke the probity and simplicity of its lost tenant: an old
bureau, faded rag rugs, and bargain-net curtains. There was always
a painful temperance about the place, but now, in a way, it seemed
overfurnished and musty with the absence of human life. Darconville
clicked the switch: the electricity had been shut off. He lighted a
candle. There in the back room was a tiny bed next to which stood a
table holding a vaporizer, a sinus mask, and a snore-ball. A print
of
Latoney’s Funeral
hung on the wall, and by either side
of a window were shelves of books, most of which held leaves
between the pages, or little round rings of dried larkspur blossoms
pressed within. In the cramped kitchen quarters were rows of empty
bottles, pincushions, tidies, and a pair of grape-scissors hooked
to a little chart detailing frost dates and shrinkage ranges. The
doorknobs were woolen with dust. He opened a closet: a bag of
inactive shoes and piles of huge hats. And there on a bureau was a
photograph of Isabel he had given her several years ago; by it lay
the cameo—uncollected, unseen—she had promised the girl who had
never come by, who had not kept faith, who perhaps in concentrating
on trying to remember instead of remembering forgot. His sadness,
as was often the case with Darconville, made him feel suddenly
cold.

  The last days of Miss Trappe, according to Dr.
Dodypol, had been as lonely as ever. He said she simply went
wandering about town in larger and larger hats meeting no one and
stopping in the street only to look up at the sun and repeat, “Let
me suffer, just keep shining! Let me suffer, just keep shining!”
And then it happened. As no one had seen her for weeks, eventually
they checked. They apparently found her, her old-fashioned
nightgown with its high neck covering her slight frame with decent
circumspection, buttoned to the full and sitting on a chair in a
flexion of resignation, her skin in rigor and her grey lips
buttered with light flecks; one of her thrawn hands was clutching a
straight razor while the other, nearly severed, rested on the open
Bible in her lap where a twiglike finger was
still
pointing to the text of Ephesians 6:12—

  For our contention is not with the flesh and blood,
but with dominion and authority, with the world-ruling powers of
this dark age, with the spirit of evil in things heavenly.

  The shadows, as he blew out the candle, closed in
upon Darconville like a caress that killed. That night he crawled
into a bed that seemed hot-forged in the furnaces of the lost
angels. Eternity went by in an instant, and a second lasted
forever. He looked for faces and saw masks. He sought nepenthe and
found nitriol. The universe expanded and his heart contracted.
Light utterly disappeared. And then all the heavens crashed
headlong into hell, displacing sheets of flame that burnt him down
into the unconsciousness of sleep for three whole days. It was time
completely lost.

  Darconville, upon awakening, found a revelation in
the very act: time didn’t stop; it continued; and so what he lost,
mightn’t then another? Stupor, which benignant fate sends by the
side of extreme pain, conditioned him—and possibly deceived—but it
cut through the hesitation of reason: it let him act. Defensively,
his conception of self became consciously enormous. How? Why? To
borrow some time from a part of the eternity to which it tends? To
convince desperation, perhaps, that love is its reward? It was hard
to say. But he became inspired with the absolute necessity for
instant action. Miss Trappe was only Isabel who hadn’t been loved!
He was no longer restrained by any sense whatever of modesty or
decorum. He knew it; in one way, he needed it; and he was suddenly
wakened to deal with the distress he could once but now no longer
not
deal with, for a blast blown to the hounds is no less
a blast blown to the fox. He prepared for violent activity, to
snatch out of the formal malfeasance that had taken place behind
him what in refusing to see as treachery committed he could only
see as innocence withheld.

  It seemed a monomania, the fact becoming almost more
important than its significance. He loved her! And all the gods,
aerial and aquatic, would never prevent him from loving her! He
rose quickly and once again asked Dr. Dodypol to drive him—this
time,
back
to Fawx’s Mt.—and so away they went, racing
once more up the road to Charlottesville and over those ragged
hills where no phenomena, however uncanny, however evil, could now
prevent him from reaching out to the one he loved. The morning dew,
before settling, left rainbows shimmering in the tender light
within various glades they passed. Dr. Dodypol, who’d have none of
it, explained them away as nothing but concentric arcs with the
common center on the line connecting the eye of the observer and
the light source. Dr. Dodypol said, “A person cannot really stand
at the rainbow’s end. Not at all.” It was a strange remark,
perhaps, but no stranger a remark than the fact that no one else in
the car would yet believe it.

  They banked the wooden bridge and turned onto the
road leading into the Blue Ridge mountains, but when they got to
the Shiftlett house they found it empty—then Darconville remembered
Isabel’s new lodgings down the road. There they proceeded, with one
voice hushed and one spirit subdued, until Dr. Dodypol at some
distance from the Watsons’ house stopped the car.

  There was Isabel. She was wearing sneakers, jeans,
and a green-and-white striped jersey and was carrying some articles
into the small back house there when she happened to look up: she
gave a violent start. Darconville crossed the lawn. He looked
ghastly. From his gaunt wasted face his eyes showed the brightness
of fever, and when he spoke to her his voice was crackling and
spasmodic. He stepped to her; she bridled—the only time he had ever
seen that verb. It was a deplorable spectacle, for she clearly
wished he were a thousand miles away and conveyed it in her cold
attendance to the few duties she refused to set aside (throwing
unusables into a wastebasket: old letters, school notebooks, a
carved Russian fife, etc. ) while studiedly moving around him and,
with a civility more deadly than violence, answering his questions
with a poisonous gentleness of speech. There was an intensity of
hatred in her white, set face. She took a handful of books—on
nautical subjects, he saw—into the small house; he went to follow;
she abruptly stepped out. She flung back her hair. What did he
want? No, she would tell him
nothing
about Gilbert van der
Slang! Darconville mentioned he’d written to him. Isabel pushed her
face at him like a dark, blue thumbtack and said if he ever dared
hurt him she’d—! The muscles of her mouth contracted, making her
ugly. She lost her breath for a moment, but then self-contained and
inflexible once again she showed the ethereal other-worldly face of
the fanatic whose distant thoughts become the more remote as they
become the more intransigent and replied nothing, did he hear,
nothing
was going to change! Let him do his worst, it was
too late.

  Her face lost its attractiveness in a smile of
triumph that he saw no love, no pleading, no words, no
peine
forte et dure
would ever change, and, although he loved her, a
condition that might formerly have absolved in her personality
whatever lessened it, he suddenly saw himself in the light of her
aversion and actually began to share it. His lungs began to ache in
the apprehension. An explanation, asked Darconville, would she give
him that? For an instant, a convincing animation came into her
countenance that prevented him from realizing how far away her
thoughts had flown. He tried to take her arm, but, groaning, she
waved his hand away—not touching him. She continued to regard him,
beginning to feel that the moment was not only tense now but
possibly dangerous. Yes, she answered,
if
he left she
would send him an explanation. But, she added in a voice like wind
from an iceberg, he must go! How extremes call to each other! It
was flame and ice face to face. She went to step into the house.
Darconville intercepted her. He took her waist, asking for one more
minute, when Isabel tore away from him with cold cutting contempt,
her eyes like a glass snake’s.