Darconville's Cat (8 page)

        Butone
Slocum

        Millette
Snipes

        April
Springlove

        Lately
Thompson

        DeDonda
Umpton

  The memory had persisted. On an otherwise
unexceptional day, for the first time, he’d met that class of
freshmen, silent little elves bunched-up and sitting terrible-eyed
as they contemplated the four years of college to come. No one had
spoken or said so much as a syllable, but all took down the
assignment and then the name he’d chalked on the board by way of
introduction as if they were borrowing it for some felonious
purpose. And then, turning, he had seen the girl, a face out of
Domenichino declaiming itself with the supremacy of a mere look
that rose like an oriental sun not announced by dawn and setting
left no twilight—only the persistent memory of two brown eyes, soft
and fraught with soul, imparting a strange kind of consecration.
Darconville, looking through the mist of his reverie, then turned
from his own idle thoughts and read the last names on the list:

        Shelby
Uprightly

        Martha Van
Ramm

        Poteet
Wilson

        Rachel Windt

        Laurie Lee
Zenker

  “Yoo-hoo!” Halfway down the front stairs,
Darconville turned back to the voice. It was Mrs. McAwaddle,
scooting after him on her tiny slue feet. She was relieved she’d
caught up with him, she said, puffing, her hand pressed to her
heart. “I’m doing my level best to keep your classes down to a
minimum, especially from those”—she handed him a piece of
paper—”who have no business being there. The dean has decided to
leave the matter up to you.”

  The particular piece of paper, the formal request of
a senior to take his freshman course, was signed by the dean and
countersigned in an affected paraph of lavender ink with the name:
Hypsipyle Poore
.

  “You remember that child out front fussing at me?”
Mrs. McAwaddle shook her head. “They have nerve to burn.” And she
squeezed Darconville’s hand, turned, and trundled away toward her
office, one shoulder lower than the other. “Yoo-hoo!” Darconville
looked up again to see Mrs. McAwaddle standing on the landing. “Be
careful.”

  Dear Mrs. McAwaddle, wise Mrs. McAwaddle, widowed
Mrs. McAwaddle, owlish Mrs. McAwaddle, compassionate Mrs.
McAwaddle, Mrs. McAwaddle in her dress of hearts! But how could she
know, poor soul, that it was entirely someone else who was on his
mind and to whom that stricture better applied: be careful. But of
what? Of whom? For still, of the many names she could have, she had
none.

  Darconville, however, consigned her to the obscure
and folding the class list into his pocket walked out into the
lovely afternoon, the rarefactions in the air opposing, however
pleasantly, his general conviction that the state of art should be
in constant panic. The artistic nature, he knew, had an inborn
proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out
the aristocratic contours of what in human glory quickens the
impulses of life to mystic proportions. He found himself, again,
absent-mindedly thinking of the effect of that look in which
everything that was most obscure in the relation between two people
rose to the surface, and yet he could find no possible expression
of it in words. But curiosity, he thought—the weakest form of
solicitude, even if it was the beginning of it—was not love.

  And crossing the lawn he only hoped that he’d gain
somehow in veracity what he lost in mystery—a compromise, it also
occurred to him, he wasn’t always ready to make. But what
was
he ready for? He didn’t know. And so laughing he
headed home, walking without so much as a touch of regret up the
street to his house, his book, and the supra-mundane.

  IX

  A Day of Writing

  Exercise indeed we do, but that very
forebackwardly,

  for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as
having known.

        —Sir PHILIP
SIDNEY,
Defence of Poesy

  IT WAS TOO EARLY to rise. But Darconville, long
before dawn, couldn’t refrain from literally jumping out of bed,
the excitement in the sense of well-being he felt serving as the
best premonition possible for a full, uninterrupted day of writing,
and when the sun bowled up over Quinsyburg—which Spellvexit,
somersaulting, always greeted with a glossoepiglottic gurgle of
joy, something like: “Gleep!”—he welcomed its appearance with three
finished pages and an emphatic resolve to write a few more.

  After his coffee, he smoked awhile, and then set to
work again, his desk cluttered with notebooks, pens, and piles of
paper. The skull,
norma frontalis
, was even smiling its
approval this morning, for before long Darconville was fully
re-engaged in that silent and solemn duel in which the mind sits
concentrated in the most fearless of disciplines, the tidiness of
which, he felt, life could never hope to emulate and the wonderful
and deep delight of which nothing whatsoever else could hope to
match. It was worth the loneliness. It was worth the time. And if
the blazing rockets of his imagination came whistling down mere
sticks, as occasionally they did, it was worth it still, for truth
indeed was fabulous and man, he’d always thought, best knew himself
by fable.

  Was truth, however, discovered or constructed?
Darconville, actually, was never really sure, and, of so-called
“experience,” well, when he thought of it he tended to believe that
it had to be
avoided
in order to write—a matter, in fact,
that couldn’t have been given clearer focus than during these last
few weeks in Quinsyburg when up in those rooms, conjugating the
games of speech and light, writing pages racily colloquial,
classically satirical, stinging and tender in robust and ardent
sequence, be had been interrupted with a frequency that almost
bordered on devotion: students-in-crisis; evangelists—two
ruby-nosed Baptanodons, especially, whose particular theory of
disputation was that one should aim, not to convince, but rather to
silence one’s opponent; and even several locals who knocked to
inquire, alas in vain, about the possibility of buying his car, the
black 1948 Mark VI Bentley in front of the house whose tires they
invariably kicked, crying, “What a mochine!” So he had his
telephone pulled out. He kept his shades pulled. He locked his
door. And the Lords of Pleroma stood by.

  When not teaching, Darconville worked very hard on
his manuscript and, in doing so, was entirely free from any feeling
of having committed sacrilege against the vow he had made with
himself before coming there. His was a kind of asceticism. The
writer was not a person, Darconville felt, rather an amanuensis of
verity, who would only corrupt what he wrote to the extent, that he
yielded to passion or shirked the discipline of objectivity.

  The noon bell sounded from the library clock, work
continued, and before too long it was midafternoon, reminding him
quite poignantly of how slow the imaginative struggle was—for were
not artists those few of us flung down from the heavens into mortal
garments?—and how difficult it was to return. To do, however, was
not necessarily to make, nor to shape, to shape correctly. A
maniacal stylist, Darconville worked to
shape
what he
wrote—contour of form with respect to beauty, coherence of matter
with respect to blend—and to dig in matter the furrows of the mind,
for in all creation matter sought form, form matter, and that was
as profound an exhortation to the artist as any: form matter! The
Greeks, he reminded himself, designated the world by a word that
means ornament,
koruos
[greek], and the Romans gave it the
name of
mundus
for its finish, its grace, its elegance.
And
caelum
? The word itself meant a tool to engrave!

  The horizontal sun, shooting its rays through great
dark banks of western clouds, sent a last coppery glow under the
shade, the fiery reflection of what was left of a good day.
Dareonville closed his eyes, strained from concentration, and
leaned back. With a furtive movement of his shoulders, he turned,
feeling suddenly a girl’s phantom presence in the room. But he
ignored it and continued working on into the night, his face a
shadow above the gooseneck lamp—the cat snoring—rewriting the pages
he’d spent the day on. It was abundance, to be alone, in the
solitude of night, watching what you fashioned and fashioning by
the miracle of art what was nothing less than giving birth by
parthenogenesis. At last, in the middle of the close and quiet
night, he saw he was done. He looked up at the old watch hanging on
the nail: late, late—the tortoise of the hour hand, the hare of the
minute hand epiphanizing the ambivalence of time that both weighed
on him and bore him up. But then there on the desk, completed, lay
the finished pages, washed with silver, wiped with gold. And the
phantom?

  The light was out, and he was fast asleep, happier
than anyone deserved to be, and the only phantoms he could see were
the benevolent ones he found in the fleeting fancies of his dreams.
And that was fine with him. Accident he would leave to life which
specialized in it.

  X

  Bright Star

  The unthrift sun shot vital gold, a thousand
pieces.

        —HENRY VAUGHAN,
Silex Scintillons

  THE CLASSROOM was old. It seemed in dark and
incongruous contrast to the delicate femininity it both isolated
and yet protected with a fastness like that of some battlemented
watchtower. On the wall hung a portrait of the Droeshout
Shakespeare and a canvas map of Britain, pocked with red pins. This
was English 100, a freshman section of girls who were almost all
dressed
à la négligence
in the present-day fribble-frabble
of fashion, mostly jeans and wee pannikins.

  Darconville strode in and sat down. He placed his
books on the desk, and, as he smiled, the girls straightened around
to squeaks, the click of shoes, the scent of earth-flowers. The
moment was immediately memorable, for instantly aware at the corner
of his eye of a sparkle, the fluorescence, of a jewel, he looked up
with sudden confusion, as if bewildered to discover art in nature’s
province. It was she: a faery’s child, the nameless lady of the
meads, full beautiful, sitting in the front-row seat at the far
right with her eyes lowered to the desk in a kind of fragrant
prayer, her chin resting gently on the snowy jabot of her blouse
and her hair, tenting her face, golden as the Laconian’s. Prepared
for her, he saw he really wasn’t. The heart in painful riot omitted
roll-call.

  “Shall we look at the Keats?” asked Darconville,
quietly. It had been their first assignment: to analyze one poem.
There was a marked self-consciousness in the straightening of
shoulders, in the coughs, as the students settled down resolutely
to consider the poem.

  “As one must pronounce a Chinese ideograph in order
to understand it,” said Darconville, “so also must a poem be read
aloud. Would anybody care to do so?” He waited.

  Silence.

  “Anyone?”

  The girls remained earnestly hunched over their
books, submissive to the idea that obscurity can be found in the
solemnity of well-aimed concentration.

  “Anyone at all?”

  The linoleum snapped.

  Darconville was amused. It seemed like vesper hour
at the Shaker Rest Home for Invalid Ladies. The discomfort was
palpable, with not an eye on him. Then a hand shot up.

  “Miss—” Darconville looked at his roll-book.

  “Windt,” the student provided.

  It was a girl in the third row who resembled
Copernicus, the shape of her pageboy, its two
guiches
coming forward like tongs and swinging at the jawline, making her
look small as a creepystool. She turned to one of her girlfriends
for confidence, then stood up, and began.

        ”Bright star!
would I were steadfast as thou art—

        Not in lone
splendor hung aloft the night,

        And watching,
with eternal lids apart,

        Like Nature’s
patient, sleepless,
um
—”

  “Eremite,” said Darconville. “Hermit.”

  Rachel Windt, wrinkling her nose, squinted at the
word. Darconville, repeating the word, prodded her.

  “E-eree-ereem—”

  “Just pronounce the consonants,” Darconville said,
laughing, trying to relax her, “and the vowels will fall into
place.” Two girls in the back row exchanged cold glances; they
didn’t find that particularly funny. Rachel Windt bewilderedly
twisted up a noil of her hair, shrugged, and continued.

        ”The moving
waters at their priestlike task

        Of pure,
um
, ablution round earth’s human shores,

        Or gazing on the
new soft fallen mask

        Of snow upon the
mountains and the moors—”

  “Perfect. Let’s stop there,” said Darconville,
“where the octave and sestet hinge. This is a sonnet—composed, if
you’ll notice, in one sentence—in which the poet expresses a wish.
And what, let’s ask ourselves, is that wish?” He paused.
“Anybody?”

  “He’s wishin’ he was a star?”

  
Wishin’
. Your thlipsis is showing, thought
Darconville, looking in the direction of the voice.

  It was a long-nosed piece of presumption in the last
row, wearing an armory of Scandinavian nail-jewelry, who was less
concerned with a Romantic poet’s tragic wishes than after-shampoo
flyaways if the comb she simultaneously shuttled through her hair
to the repetitious snaps of chewing gum meant anything. Darconville
smiled and kindly suggested that she was, even if a trifle so,
somewhat wide of the mark. Snap. Another hand? Anyone?