Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

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“I’ve ate rook pie.”

“Rook? Pie?”

“The ruddy duck, yessir!” deblaterated Dr. Glibbery with a smattering of mustard on his nose, his cheeks huge walletfuls of pork. “The most scabrous and torn-downest little of birds what am, let me tell you.” He aimed the barrel of his fat finger into a wall-mirror. “I potted messes of ‘em smack out of the air back in college just to keep alive. With prices skyhootin’ like they was? In my day — matriculatin’ and all? — christ, it was pronto dogs and blinky srimp from one day to the next, take it or leave it. We didn’t have rubber assholes in my day, jack. And nobody, excusin’ God, can know to the number of them rooks I ate to this day, nobody — and I mean, nodamnbody!” Porkfaced Glibbery then began sucking the pig grease from his fingers as vigorously as the pig itself had ever sucked its parent. The whole mode of piggery itself, in fact, applied to him — the very kind of face, arguably, that had turned Islam against pork. “What, these sophomore dufuses backin’ and forthin’ around here going to tell me? Sowballs!” he cried, ripping away half of another sandwich in one thyestean bite and speaking through a smacking medley of loud champs and chews. “Rooks, for chrissakes? They’d be havin’ the living doits scared out of them, these people, they so much as looked at one!” He mowsed the rest of the sandwich. “Sowballs!”

Everybody laughed.

“And sowballs again!” Dr. Glibbery repeated, through a mouthful of food.

“Excellent,” chuckled Mr. Roget, pulling his perspicacious nose. “Perfect. First-rate. Flawless.”

The dining-room looked magnificent. A long table, set off in the center by a huge beef roast stabbed entrecôte with a miniature of the Quinsy College flag, was spread out with bowls of conch gumbo, cheese wheels, platters of Virginia ham, potato salad, buns. The guests swarmed around, wolfing sandwiches, gobbling meats, drinking.

“As paprika is to a Hungarian so am I to esoterica,” lisped Floyce R. Fulwider. He plucked a twist of candied Metzelsuppe, ate it, and, closing his eyes, delicately wiggled his fingers over the heavenly taste. Miss Dessicquint, standing behind him, mimicklingly pursed her lips, went limp in the wrists, and stuck her bum out like a poodle. Miss Shepe and Miss Ghote, having their ginger-ales in lovely stemmed glasses, both agreed that the highlight of the party had been the appearance of the little Culpa boy who’d been brought down to sing that adorable song; unfortunately, twisting his pajama string in an initial moment of nervousness, he’d managed to pull it out.

“It didn’t seem to faze Mrs. Culpa, did you notice, that everybody could see—” Miss Ghote paused and looked away.

“His bow-wow.” Miss Shepe had a brother.

They sat silent momentarily.

“It was—”

“Yes.”

“Flying expressly in the face of Galatians 5:2?” asked Miss Ghote, archly. “O my.”

“Circumcision, Miss Ghote,” said Miss Shepe, whispering, “was condoned in Genesis 17:10. Ask your Rev. Cloogy.”

“ Lapser !” cried Miss Ghote, with a muttlike snap.

Dr. Speetles, munching some rolled-sprat, cavalierly presented a plate of leafalia — winter-rocket, cress, endive — to his ample wife who, adding five slabs of roast beef, roundly told everybody she wouldn’t be having dessert. Lately arrived, Miss Pouce took a jam roly-poly and tea. And Mrs. Fewstone, her unforgiving shoulders tense, was facing the wall nipping a cayenned egg, but when her husband offered to make her a drink she wheeled around, her mouth hardening into pliers, and bent him like cheap wire, hissing, “You— pimp !”

Miss Swint, sitting on the piano stool and eating spooms-in-a-cup, said she didn’t think she heard anything.

“Actually, I think you’ll find,” pipped in Prof. Wratschewe, turning from the discussion he’d been having with a now thankful, now disappearing Darconville, “that the etymon of our word ‘pimp’ is taken from the Greek verb pempeiu : to send.” He beamed and bowed.

“I theash clatherx,” said Miss Gibletts, listing.

“Yes, Miss Gibletts, I know. I know you teach classics,” said Prof. Wratschewe, looking behind him. “I say, Darconville?”

But Darconville was in an upstairs bedroom, trying to telephone, with some apprehension, the third floor of Fitts. It rang and rang and rang. What could be wrong? Then he began to fear that she might have felt unwanted at the party, for it had been reported several times during the past year by a scandalized handful of faculty vestals — with Miss Sweetshrub i/c and a few other shades of Orcus in the rear— that the two of them had been spotted “marketing together” ( ipsis-simus verbis ) at the local Piggly Wiggly with only one pushcart. Dean Dessicquint once nearly bit her head off for signing out on an “all-night,” learning only afterwards of the anthropology class field-trip to Assateague — a coal-run to Newcastle — to study these people’s dialect. And once at the movies with Trinley Moss Isabel overheard Miss Tavistock, sitting behind her, tell someone that a psychic had recently told her that she would soon be marrying “a dark handsome stranger” and then — mistakenly? — bumped Isabel with her umbrella. Guileless as she was, Isabel, a mere freshman, had managed to exercise just about every bitch and barge-wife in the Quinsyburg locality. It is the Cyclops’ thumb, thought Darconville, by which the pigmy measures its own littleness. Perhaps she was right in not coming to the party. He hung up the phone.

Spotting Miss Pouce at the foot of the stairs, Darconville asked her if, earlier, she’d seen Isabel Rawsthorne in the library. Miss Pouce only sighed and said that, oh, no one had time for libraries anymore. He pressed her no further, but his head was as filled with worry as his heart was filled with love. How he missed her! He sat down momentarily on the stairs. Grand old Miss Carp was watching him.

“The apple of your eye, is it, dear?”

Darconville nodded, and then explained not only what was bothering him but what might have been the occasion of it, a matter she herself understood only too well.

“So the pair of you are currently dating? Good,” said Miss Carp, puffing her cigarette. “You have your reasons. I’m plumb fed up with these old kumquats around here who want to throw lime in your eyes for it. The policy on faculty/student dating — rules that should have been pruned long ago — was a lemon even when I taught here. You just give ‘em the old raspberry, y’hear? Me?” She blew out a cannonade of smoke. “I couldn’t give a fig for them.” She tapped his nose three times. “Not. One. Fig.”

The dining-room table was in chaos. It looked as if the Harpies had descended and flown, leaving a disorder of nutshells, slubbered glasses, cherry stems, and half-bitten macaroons. Gastronomes blouted. Hip-pophages belched. Fruitarians burped. And all the low candles, flickering, seemed to wink a final notice to all those guests who doggedly remained and in whose eyes, now, sensitivity and sobriety were so comfortably abed.

“They used to call me ‘Temptation Eyes’ in high-school,” muttered bedraggled Mrs. Dodypol who, in the obvious grip of Korsakoff’s Psychosis, rocked shakily past Darconville and walked straightway into a linen closet. She might have spent the rest of her life there had not two hundred pounds plus of lubberly self-assurance — with a stink-pot cigar and a suit splurched with the orts of a cream bun — tiptoed by. It was President Greatracks who, wheezing with laughter, hammered on the door. There was no answer. He squatted, giggling behind his hand, and began bouncing up and down and crooning in the manner of a jump-rope song, “Your baby wants his ha ppy! Your baby wants his hap py! Your baby wants his hap py!”