Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

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.

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.