Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Did he,” asked Darconville, “touch you?”

“No, not exactly. But, um, he shone a”—she made a gesture—”a thing at me.”

“A thing?” asked Darconville, as the three girls who hadn’t yet spoken grabbed their mouths, snorting back laughter. It was the vaguest word in the language and so the most deceptive. “What do you mean, a thing ?”

“It was a flashlight!” cried Betsy Stride, barging forward with a hieratic hip-roll. “And he held it up to this real creepy face, like he was mental or something!” She looked desperately around. “It’s really great, huh, the protection we have? What are they waiting for, for cry-eye, a bunch,” she said, a trifle optimistically, “of undecent rapings? We want more lights on campus!”

Strange, thought Darconville. How many tragedies in this chiaroscuro world were related precisely to that: light when it was needed, darkness when it wasn’t; darkness when it was needed, light when it wasn’t. The same gardens that grow digitalis for heart patients also grow the devil’s oatmeal. Vinegar is the corpse of wine. Thus spake Zarathustra.

“Well,” confessed Mary Jane Kelly in a near-whisper, “he didn’t actually hold it up to his face .”

Betsy Stride covered her eyes. “O my God.”

“It’s just that passing that spooky glade by the old tennis courts I saw a foot behind a tree. It had a sneaker on it. Not the tree,” clarified Mary Jane, “the foot.” The three girls, giggling, were pinching their noses to stop. “And then, I swear, it moved. Not the foot—”

Bursting, the three girls quickly turned around and exploded in laughter.

“The tree?”

“Well, see, I saw two eyes peering out by a branch, sideways, like they was — I don’t know, burning or something! So I started to run and he started to run.”

“And to scream, right?” interjected Betsy. “Tell him, tell him!”

“He screamed? What did he scream?” asked Darconville. He prompted her, ready to hear the fiercest Asiatic curses, the vilest obscenities.

Mary Jane Kelly hesitated, surveying her feet, and then, resigned, put her hands to her mouth and tried as best she could to mimic in two hoots the tuba horribilis she’d heard with such alarm the previous night: “ Socialists! Socialists !”

The three girls, doubled over and quacking, had gone purple.

There may indeed have been a lunatic running amok on campus, or possibly a prankster, no one could say — although the reign of terror, it might be said, had in fact coincidentally taken place with the letting out of a Chekhov dress rehearsal for which a number of girls, to comply with the wishes of Miss Throwswitch, had been required to wear fake beards.

The fat, however, was in the fire. Betsy Stride, flashing her metal teeth, told Darconville that Marsha D’amboni almost got blackjacked a month ago, that Weesie Ralph found a man standing once in her gym closet bare as a baby , and that Shirley Newbegin once got whistled at by coloreds! And who cared? Xystine Chappelle, the wimp? Dean Barathrum? President Greatracks who kicked them out of his office and called them “pee-oons”?

With lampoon-lit eyes, Darconville promised he’d mention it all to Someone Important and, asking for their names, slipped them a piece of paper. One of the girls sorted through her handbag, clumping on the desk pretzels, lip-balm, five jawbreakers, a ring of keys, a penny-in-an-aluminum-horseshoe, and a snap-wallet thick as a fist, and shook out a molar-dented pen. They all signed their names:

Mary Ann Nichols

Annie Chapman

Elizabeth Stride

Catherine Eddowes

Mary Jane Kelly

Profuse in their thanks, one of the girls pushed back a twist of flocky hair and quickly kissed Darconville on the cheek.

At that very moment, Isabel Rawsthorne appeared at the office door. It had become her habit, often, to stop by with something, a bag of candy, a box of exotic tea, and if Darconville happened to be busy she usually left a whimsical little note in that delicate spidery penmanship of hers, always signed “The Little Thing.” But on this occasion when he looked up — she was wearing, typically, a half-length fur coat, pink hush-puppies, and jeans with three mushrooms (multi-colored) sewn over the left knee — he saw only two sad basset eyes. “Oh, excuse me,” she said with a face like sudden night — then disappeared.

O no, thought Darconville. He got up, stepped past the girls, and called down the stairwell. But she had gone, out of the light and into the darkness. By slow degrees it dawned on him what she must have felt, even if absurdly, for jealousy, lineament by lineament, feature by feature, needs no scene or sentence but actually creates itself from what it fears.

The male professor at Quinsy College, in fact, whether attached or not, symbolized a plenitude he hadn’t but by his very presence precipitated a thousand desperate necessities, a particular situation, needless to say, that often put in ludicrous but privileged ascendance those who would be gentlemen that late were grooms. He could act like a churl, use his hands for purposes of locomotion, or look like the Expansible Pig, the girls didn’t care— instans instanter , he became a combination of father confessor, confidant, marriage counselor, friend, adept, and phantom lover.

Anxious to see the girls out, Darconville asked if there was anything else. They didn’t think so and shuffled out, dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness behind them as they waved.

“Oh yes,” said Betsy Stride, turning back. The moon, setting, rose again. “My last exam, remember?” She popped a peppermint into her mouth. “It was a 78. I was close to a B, right?”

“Close,” replied Darconville, looking at his watch nervously, “only counts in horseshoe-pitching and necking.”

“Necking?” she asked salaciously — and, grinning, snapped off the light-switch with her elbow. Her teeth-braces gleamed in the darkness.

“As you say,” Darconville said quietly, “we want more lights on campus.”

Whereat Elizabeth Stride thrust out her underlip, turned, and slowly walked away, the undissolved peppermint still undissolved in her cheek.

The sound of Isabel’s light-running footsteps had made Darconville’s heart, echoing them, feel empty, ineffectual, and made equally futile the hurried explanation — of what? — he saw he had to give. He quickly dialed her number: 392-4682.

“Fitts!” came a voice on the other end like Stentor the Bellower’s.

“May I please speak to Isabel Rawsthorne?”

“Canyouholdonjessaminuteplease?”

The telephone receiver, summarily dropped, bonked against the dorm wall several times— clonk! clonk! clonk ! — but Darconville waited intently. Had he been lax, he wondered, or scrupulous, seeing those he shouldn’t have or seeing those he should? What had he done? He didn’t know. Who pre-plots with intelligence? Hazard, he thought, itself was creative.

Still waiting, Darconville looked down the corridor which ran straight from his office to a water bubbler at the far end. On the bulletin boards lining the walls of that corridor had been thumbtacked various grammatical projects which the education-majors there, being trained — as opposed to educated — to teach the lower grades, had prinked out; they were sort of visual rebuses, narrative cut-outs on oak-tag paper, with titles like: “Miss Question Mark has her Period”; “An Apostrophe takes Two Pees”; “Old Mr. Bracket falls on his Asterisk”; “Little Cedilla has a bout of Diaresis,” and so on and so forth. So much for the trivium, thought Darconville, so much for the quadrivium.

“Hello again, mister?”