Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

I’ll draw you to a particular, vowed Darconville, and have you look in a glass! He snatched up the photograph and angrily pressed it flat upon the mirror. There, he thought, now bathe your finger-ends and bat your eyes and load your bum with a farthingale! Could it move distraction in the heart of a Minotaur it should find me quartz! What, do you beg for clemency? Resisted, madam! Generosity? Forbearance? Come, I am in haste; be brief. Charity? Kindness? Favor? Pity? Pity ? He replaced the photograph on the mantel, upsidedown. Card your wool, Eve, thought Darconville — and fell again to writing.

He wrote to Isabel’s real father through the district attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, affecting, with a view to learning of his whereabouts and perhaps more of her, to be leaving them a huge sum of money. He wrote to Mrs. McAwaddle at the registrar’s office for a photocopy of Isabel’s dossier in which he hoped to descry — it didn’t matter what — some irregularity of birth, a reference to family lunacy, any kind of extralegal ganancial trickery in her parents’ divorce that might serve as a blocking agent to her marriage. He wrote a handful of vituperative postcards to everyone in Fawx’s Mt. whom he suspected of being involved in the conspiracy, composing in a sudden coup d’essai , then calling in, one special telegram to Zutphen Farm in which it was warned that, short of an interplanetary cataclysm, he’d appear at the forthcoming wedding in the company of Abaddon, the angel of ice, and sixty other apparitions from the abhorred deep. And then he wrote out an envelope to Gilbert van der Slang, stuffing it with duplicates of those of Isabel’s letters from the previous year in a nuptial mood — diploid, deceptive, devious — and went out at day’s end to mail the lot of them, making an effort as he walked back through the tin-colored dusk to ascertain the location, in back of one of the Wigglesworth houses, of what he marked in his mind. It was a young wild-nut tree.

* * * * *

Wednesday . It was time for further action. Darconville took from his pocket an object that had caught his eye some few days previous, a simple gem, green as jealousy, spotted with blood, that seemed in some kind of mnemonic resurrection both to contain and to conceal the mystery of the whole plot. But the luck? To traverse the world in thought where were swarming, by moderate computation, some five billion souls indifferent to his needs only because ignorant of them and then to remember, suddenly, the deepest accomplice of all who by some strange and inexplicable metonymy not laid down in books alone can turn captor into captive and make of the hunter game? How provident was nature in such matters! The chrysalis does not burst until there is a wing to help the gauze-fly upward. He immediately telephoned Hypsipyle Poore.

It has been observed that it’s a desperate thief that a thief lets in, but quickly Darconville in his brief conversation with her found a partner whose desires ran before her honor, whose wishes burned hotter than her faith, and when penalties were mentioned so also was a name. Darconville smiled darkly. The long explanation led to the only expectation: as the venality of Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, was legend, he asked, then why couldn’t she devise a plan to prove it? Hypsipyle said she didn’t understand. (The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.) Why, form schemes, plans, designs! Make him tell the tale anew, where, how, how often, how long ago, and when! Seduce him ! Then Hypsipyle clucked through the telephone like a wizard and jingled it with a laugh. She whispered an idea. O banquet of foul delight, prepared by thee, dark paraclete! “I love to say yes,” said Hypsipyle Poore, kissing him goodbye through the receiver.

Then Darconville put the bloodstone back into his pocket.

* * * * *

Thursday . But there was more to be done. It required vigilance, for the speed of her moves, elucidating duration, had to be measured in velocity — direction was involved — and yet as Darconville continued to trace out, track, and trip toward the unbroken trail to target, inquiries yielded full-fold. He learned, for instance, with the help of a co-operator at the Charlottesville telephone company — an acquaintance he remembered from the days when Isabel herself worked there — that there had been a spate of phone calls from New York to Isabel’s number, with charges transferred to the van der Slang household, between July 10 and August 21. He found out that she had registered in a Charlottesville shop for china (“Kensington” pattern by Noritake) and silver (“Chippendale” pattern by Towle) in early September ! And then he managed to contact, after an elaborate and roundabout series of calls, several ex-farmhands from Zutphen Farm — three disgruntled, but patriotic, illiterates — who without so much as a question proudly felt it a duty to help out the F.B.I.: yes, they said, Isabel and Gilbert van der Slang were together in Fawx’s Mt. during July, and, yes, they were shoot sure, officer, because it was a small town and—

Darconville put down the receiver. He was, by now, more surprised that he was astonished than astonished that he had cared so much. The darkness that had sat him down despondent in his solitary chair for days together, weaving bitter fancies, dreaming bitter dreams, now grew light and thin, almost as if chased by the sudden desperate longing to be free of this prostitute of figment and fable.

There was a glare of suitable vulgarity in the upsidedown photograph. It was not the beastly eye, weighing one’s appearance; it was not the assayer’s eye, weighing one’s worth, nor even the trading eye, weighing one’s purse. It was simply the worldly eye, weighing position . Isabeau of Fawx’s Mt.! Darconville found that her presence, even in memory, far exceeded his need of her and saw now only a worthless, self-perpetuating piece of fatback — vile, ambitendentious, thirty pounds overweight — who did nothing but in relation to herself and never gazed at a man if a looking-glass were handy, a functor with the heart of a dotbox, a face like an excuse, and a soul as insubstantial as a whiffle-ball. The remorse he felt! It was not only that he had pursued fancy. It was far worse. It was, he reflected, less to have loved someone with a cast of head as apt and artful as the dexterous cast of a trout-rod and legs blown to a size of almost advanced elephantiasis — a condition, making her body so disparate, it seemed to argue the possibility of a bisectional physique whose parts actually moved on separate axes — than actually to have forsaken reason itself! By what incredible fallacy of accident, he wondered, had he ever come to love her? But his interest in the question faded as soon as it was raised, and, putting on his coat, he went out to Harvard Sq. to try to find a wide brass dish.

* * * * *

Friday . There bore so little resemblance in his investigation to what Darconville once loved, however, that a wide and ready interest in the deeper mysteries of his subject sent him to the library where he spent the morning poring over volumes of mystic science and divination, trying, like a sorcerer, to cast precognitive facts out of her bulk and shadow and birthdate.

It was a little hell-hole of black magic and goety up there in that carrel in Widener, but students, peering in, drawn by all the mewing and muttering, so disturbed Darconville that he returned with an armful of selected books to study them in his room and to scrutinize as many as there were of her and all of her as many as there were. He stopped in a stationery store on his way back to buy two candles.