Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Isabel Rawsthorne, it turned out, had been born on the very day of treachery — Judasmass! The astonishment that Darconville felt could hardly be imagined. It was black nativity (December 30), falling in the decan of those who betray with a kiss and who, according to prophecy, will not be saved at Armageddon. The winter sign, Capricorn, was a zodiacal horror, its ecliptic gloomy, its portents caprice and lust, its symbol in ligature ( V3 ) combining the first two letters of the Greek word for tragedy; and these goats, ridden by Saturn, were, while always associated with climbing proclivities, all of a type: calm and deliberate in method and action, addicted to practical things, and limited in outlook, with a morbid fear of ridicule which often curtailed the expression of their views, making them secretive, procrastinating, and treacherous. The creature was confirmed in her signs.

Then, Darconville cast her numerological chart. First, he found the number of personality — the quickest to disclose its traits — to be 3 , indicating unalterability, fixed position, the need for security. The number of development, riddled out of her name, totaled 60 ; he made his reductions, while reckoning up the numbers of both the added (5) and underlying (2) influences, and came up with 9. It represented the need for achievement in a chosen object, regardless of the moral issues involved. My God, thought Darconville, the thorn comes into the world point foremost. Here was a bride for Machiavelli!

There’s not enough if there’s never too much. Darconville meddled and mumbled, probed and pried. He sought to confirm various omens and oddities by applying his wit to the practices of alomancy, rhap-sodomancy, capnomancy, spodomancy, sortilege, and especially — for her flesh to him was a map well-known — physiognomy. There was about her, it turned out, a stricter consecution from body to behavior than from lameness to limping: this defect fit that disposition, this flaw that foolery. The phrenological characteristic of a low, comic facial formation meant quarrelsomeness, with slanting eyes and a weak head line indicating an untrustful, petulant nature. Moleosophy assigned a shrewd and petty acquisitiveness to that predominant, dark-colored spot on her clavicle. And metoposcopy proved her trivial in the forehead, the wavy cross lines there forecasting a voyage by sea — a pleasure trip, according to the line of Venus. The chirognomic profile suited her to perfection: the thumbs, indexing the essential character of the hand, were “waisted,” disclosing selfishness; the fluted nails, irritability; the knotted knuckles, deviousness; and the hands themselves, large and spatulate, were the hands of mingy pursuers, unusually obdurate ones adapted to the suddenness of the grasp and the snatch.

Night was falling, but Darconville was not quite finished. He went to the kitchen, brewed some china tea, and after drinking it from a white cup he swirled the grouts around three times with a left to right motion — the leaves, he saw, formed a windmill . He checked the symbol against the tasseographical values given in the book and read the portent: “a scheme of gigantic magnitude, turning industrious plans into money.” Well-pushed, nun, he thought, well-pushed.

Darconville’s smile was ghostly as he put on his coat. It was the smile one has in feeling he knows the future by looking at the past. Cracking down all the riddles and fanciful demonstrations was secondary, nevertheless, to other essentials he’d separately but simultaneously pursued all week, undertaken, each one, with an intensity that seemed not only to make claims upon or compel but almost create whatever it was he sought. Was he himself aware of it? The answer Darconville left to the mystery of the night through which he now walked, taking the two candles across the dark and empty street to St. Paul’s to have them blessed, as he told the priest, for a funeral.

* * * * *

Saturday . The celesta of sweet bells from the Lowell House tower, pealing when Darconville awoke, did nothing to soften his heart. He took more benperidol and went down to his mailbox, pushing through a group of milling students without care. A canting letter from the English department chairman inquiring about his lack of attendance in the classroom he ripped up. The first of the few reports on Isabel— his only concern now — arrived in much the same way she told the truth, not all at once, but gradually, and sometimes not at all. He filed the facts he had; but little changed. The treason had been done, and the clues he found, serving more to sicken than to solve, accordingly were understood as neither here nor there, for what is manifest in a proposition cannot also be stated exactly. A problem is always less complex by nature than the solution it requires.

The story was simple: there once lived a girl who was poor. She was burdened with deep insecurity, hippopotamine legs, and the memory of a putative father who spending but a minute on her mother to get her would spend no more time with either. She grew to hate what she missed: not feeding the anger, however — starving made it fat. The dreams of the riches her family hadn’t in the wealth of a family nearby, proving more substantial, alas, than did the attentions of its two eligible sons, led her to temporize with someone else in a romantic Schmockerei got of starved vanity and self-aggrandizement-by-association, an amusement by proxy that cost her less trouble than being alone. It was a subterfuge of convenience, with passion its pretext and the mock adoption of values its mask, for she chose what she couldn’t imagine to test what she couldn’t be, setting out, as it were, not to survey the boundary of ocean but rather to measure the coast. He fell in love; simply, she wouldn’t — it reminded her precisely of what she couldn’t give to get. But when that particular opportunity arose, she lived to betray what she feared to love and opted to have what she hoped to own. She was safe at last. The wedding would not take place in Fawx’s Mt., for tripwires had been set. It would be held in secret, very soon, and somewhere else. The announcement would only be made afterwards.

Isabel Rawsthorne! It was a name to conjure with, a creature who fell into the heart of space like a stone in a vacuum, with no attraction and no purpose. The speed of such a fall, multiplied only by the ideal weight, is impossible to measure — hi fact, is no longer anywhere. It is noiseless, mindless, nullibiquitous. She would never pine under any regrets, because she had no appreciation of any loss. She would chafe at no indifference, because it was her art. She would not be worried with jealousies, because she was ignorant of love. She who measured her wit by the triumphs of fashion and face-play and smiled away falsity even to herself was silent precisely when she thought and faithfully spoke when she didn’t.

She alternated between surrender to foreign influences and a vengeful longing for originality, finding there to be as much weakness in the former, however, as there was futility in the latter. She had no pity in success and self-pity, always, in the case of failure. In victory, her eye was dry and glittering, for repentance of what cunningly she won was rendered moot in relation to an opponent who thereby had no rights. A facile follower, she assumed servility toward the approved and arrogance toward the rejected. She knew, of course, that there was truth and untruth, that right and wrong existed, but did not feel the asperity of such notions because her indifferent and cowardly heart led to a total ineptitude for grasping differences between ideas and values, and if her trouble was due less to positive vice than to the feverish absence of altruism, both nevertheless enabled her to concentrate on any commodity whatsoever — one was like another — and then to appropriate by lies what in the possession, that she might save face, she had to call love, taking it away from one she could not trust and handing it to a trustee whose loyalty she’d see remained assured. Her lack of discrimination — a lack, not a lapse — was accompanied, all the while, by a tenacity that might have been a quality had she any character. But she was characterless. The humane and the advantageous she calmly identified, the teacher becoming the lesson it refused to obey in the face of acquisition. She was hypocritical because empty, clothing destruction in a kiss, feeling hate for love, and was a serpent most when most she seemed a dove. The void was always there. Had it been filled by judgment, she would long since have sat in judgment on herself. She broke her word because it was always meaningless when she gave it, and she broke it so easily that she could never fathom the anger of her dupe. She could veer like a weathervane in a minute. She overlooked significant wholes and yet had that passion for detail that is so often the mark of the small mind and the cankered soul, choosing always what measured to her empty conceit and disposing of what was left like the dramatist who finds a useless character left over at the end and simply kills him off.