Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Isabel became his constant preoccupation. Strangely, he feared her loneliness, and, whenever he thought such a thing probable for her, he lived it himself, as lovers will, with twice the anguish. There were troubles — crises often coming simultaneous with letters from her, answers to the ones required of him to have hers (was this pride or humility?) which revealed, in attempts to hide her unhappiness, her unhappiness: family discord, the need for her own apartment, a roommate to share expenses, etc. How often we express what we can’t, thought Darconville. A game is not won until it’s also lost. The exclamation mark is always a digression. And so to assuage his own fears as much as her own, though moved more out of love than duty, Darconville would often put away his work and drive up to Charlottesville to visit.

The potholed road winding out of the seventh circle of Quinsyburg and its scrubpine forests takes a turn for the better just at that point where the James River debouches on a silly curve through low swampland and passes by the hog-soaping community of Scottsville. A swift change in tone is noticed: dirt-farms give way to orchards; farting pigs transform into sleek horses; and goose-faced peasants — lo! — are now sporting colonels in plus-fours banging away at birds. The grass of a sudden rolls away to smooth expanses of green, no longer anymore tall and shapeless twists of brome and creekthatch. Now in the air is the perfume of blooms, not tobacco, and one hears the content weedio-weedio of whistling quails instead of scraping whiffletrees and hens screeching through backyards draped over in hand-wrung laundry. There the northern part of Virginia begins to detach itself from the southern. Exit Calvin-, enter Pelagius. Enthusiasm is out, neo-Stoicism in. The rod is put away, to be replaced by sweetmeats. You bank a wooden bridge some miles along and weave up and out of a last dingle to discover finally below you at the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge — always with surprise — the city of Mr. Jefferson.

Charlottesville was a city that loved prerogative. It was, in fact, one of those quaint places on earth where most of the inhabitants, emphasizing the value of ancestral origins, spent a lifetime zealously devoted to the cause of trying to correct the several mistakes, owing to their absence, committed during the events described in the first chapter of Genesis. This was the land of Wishes, Wirtses, and Weems, where every last ferblet in the county had the distinct impression he was a born gentleman and she a well-bred lady, and that was that. Theirs was that great legacy of the Southern elite, dames and colonels still, so it went, all in solid support of a proud slaveholding but benevolent republic — purified of Free-Soilers, locofocos, parlor pinks, realists, supporters of the Wilmot Proviso, and advocates of the League of Nations — which stretched majestically from Pontchartrain to the Potomac: not the United States, but the States United!

The Virginians in this particular area, briefly, had a marvelous idea of themselves. What was past was perfect! They doggedly held to a caste mentality. They kept a strict and incurable devotion to postures they felt couldn’t be misinterpreted at Windsor or Schônbrunn. They still tried to register wills by regnal years, used seltzer bottles, and habitually went on ancestor hunts (flatly refusing to accept the lie that everybody had as many ancestors as anyone else) and while obsessed by lineage many philoprogenitive parents in the South, to fix on a bygone era by intra-family “arrangements,” preferred to marry kin rather than those unrelated by blood. It was of course inevitable some would eventually have to take the bit between the teeth in relation to the occasional, slightly plumulaceous child who came along — a congenital drooler, a nimfadoro in white boots, a little shovelmouthed surd whose blood was so bad it was all he could do to keep from falling down. But this too was sort of charming, see? — only one more touch of regional, aristocratic cachet in that world of moonlight-and-magnolia which, in a similar context, made every tree a dueling-oak, every house a plantation, and every asshole in a string tie a colonel.

Myth, of course, flouted history. The tradition that all white men in Virginia were “cavaliers”—a boast in Charlottesville put about by even the lowest of dungcrunchers — was true only in that there had been a general 17th-century disposition in that flyblown colony against English parliamentarianism; at that time the humblest plowjogger in the territory could be so identified, and was. Whenever a Southerner dreamt of improving his lot, he kept “niggers”—stationed either on his property or in a class, below him. Every owner of two Negroes, therefore, however dubious his own origin or squalid his existence, came to be considered a cavalier. So was it then, such was it now. Facts, needless to say, didn’t get in their way, and it was with enormous pride and an almost martial zeal that the revisionist citizens of Charlottesville cooperated to perpetuate the image of their forefathers as dashing, emplumed gallants-with-mustaches out of Lord Rupert’s dragoons protecting women, daring battle, and running to hounds — when the truth of it was they had been almost to a man nothing but a bunch of lackeys, cacochymical scroyles, and middle-brow merchants who spoke near-Gutnish and worked the head-right system, accumulated “seats,” and lived out their whiggish lives pocketing quitrent, hustling slaves, and selling snuff. But who cared? No one. Did it matter? Not a bit. It was not in the image, never mind the interest, of the Old Dominion. Thus the queer little mystery perpetually continued, for, blow high, blow low, everytime a Southerner got à vau-l’eau he needed only spread his sails to the winds of his own foolish fibs and flatulencies and another start was made down-sun.

The fabulous traditions held firm in Charlottesville. The days of ye old carriage houses, stirrup cups, and bag-wigged royal governors shirted in frills and Mechlin lace were still commemoratively preserved in the hearts of the throwbacks there who, hunting foxes all day and tracing genealogies all night, were locked on the crotchets of Tory caricature: pinch-mouthed Federalists; titless Junior Leaguers from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; frigid bluestockings with matching hair; snudges with hip-gout; lords of rice-tierce and cotton bale, of sugar box and human cattle; civic bona-robas and bores; fatuous hip-pomants from country clubs; and incontrovertible bitches from the English-Speaking Union with saurian skin and faces that looked like they’d been cut on a catstick who— suspendens omnia naso —spoke to no one who wasn’t someone and then only in the pluperfect. The men all had recurrent dreams of shooting each other for disrespectful remarks or having an affair with Sally Fairfax; the women, of being observed in the waxlight through frosty bowed windows dancing quadrilles or minuets in lovely eighteenth-century poses and saying things like, “It was simplytooshattering FOR words!” or “Why, Lord Cornwallis, you say such things!” or “O Macheath! Was it for this we parted? Taken! Imprisoned! Try’d! Hang’d — cruel Reflection! I’ll stay with thee ‘till Death!”

This was a species unto itself. They were the kind of people who sat around trying to imagine Patrick Henry, a close and familiar friend, stopping by for a visit and explaining between sips of Blind Pineaux what a frightful day he’d had with the burgesses! They hired amahs and black grooms. They gave cute toponyms to their houses like “Wit’s End,” “Ranelagh,” or “Quivering Aspens.” They didn’t commit sins, of course, but only made faux pas and believed that creativity lay in things like arranging flowers and furniture or in knowing how much powdered sugar went into a mint julep. They talked constantly of hunting boxes and stables and gunrooms and went riding a lot-it was so inarguably aristocratic. They often made references to the game of cricket, without the remotest idea of how it was played. They imported English nannies to take care of their pinguid children who were always named something like Pruitt or Denison or Brawley. They loved to read— nobiliaires , especially; the most important books shelved in Charlottesville were, of course, Burke, Debrett, the Almanach de Gotha, Ruvigny, Fairbairn, and the Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels for such of those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t pass muster in that Anglo-Saxon stronghold. The men were actually too gracious to women and the women too ingracious not to call it off, and so the summum bonum of their lives was to sit collectively in planters’ chairs in front of columned porticos covered with creepers, drinking bourbon, watching a distant game of polo, and muttering down their chins, their general conversation being of the sort that’s almost always wholly narrative (and, alas, autobiographical), coming at you in those over-pronounced declarative sentences which are usually reserved for out-and-out simpletons, nonagenarians, or myna birds and are filled with prejudices that are almost all ineradicable, being based on that kind of ignorance which is fully impenetrable to information coming from the real world. Every Charlottesvillian wanted to die in his own arms and conceived himself, upon the act, as entering Paradise by walking in genteel fashion down the Duke of Gloucester St. in Williamsburg. Each lived in a vacuum his nature positively adored. Each windowed well his head.