Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

THE SUMMER began with much to do. It was June already, and Isabel had passed her courses, was graduated, and had been driven back to spend an unemphatic summer — her last — in Fawx’s Mt, not Arcady, no, but home. There had been a happy coincidence in her graduation gifts: her parents gave her a sewing machine, Darconville several hundred dollars for the nuptial silks-and-satins they together chose in Charlottesville for her gown and a blanket chest in which, with sprigs of rosemary, to fold it when finished. She also bought a small, blue used car. Now, as they’d determined to be married in London come September, time was pressing. When the particular discrimination called hesitation long exists, the reverse discrimination of haste must offset it, and so with that in mind Darconville returned to teach two five-week sessions of summer school at Quinsy and to organize as best he could what promised to be a frantic few months.

It was imperative, right off, to secure living quarters at Harvard and to find out when in the fall they were required to be there. There were other letters of inquiry, as well, one immediately to Westminster Cathedral to set a wedding day and another, also to London, to ascertain from the General Registry Office at Somerset House what procedures were required on the civil side. They would need reservations, licenses, certificates of a hundred kinds — and above all luck. (A less pactitious consideration — one no less, however, involving Isabel — was squaring away the matter of faith: he began to think about her baptism.) The hope, of course, was that all would go smoothly. His was to do, then report, and it became his habit to dodge down to the Timberlake at night to telephone any news of consequence. Sometimes Isabel wasn’t at home.

The comfort, he knew, was that every effort in Quinsyburg that summer would be an effort finally put to rest and the occasion, finally, of putting that place behind him. Who’d have believed he would have stayed so long? Constancy was a word too hollowpampered to express so extraordinary a behavior; it wasn’t patience; it wasn’t longanimity. It was love — a wooing, leading only to one end, that had followed the same time-honored steps, the shared laughter, the wantsum misunderstandings, fearful and explorative, and all the other fits of uncommon passion for so many centuries displayed in the tempests between Father Weather and Mother Earth.

Struggle, of course — what else? — informs success, and there were those of Darconville’s friends who, hearing now of his marriage plans, left him that summer somewhat in the dark less as to the wisdom of his new venture than as to the interpretation they placed on it. Quinsyburg was a lonely place, and loneliness often becomes the sole source of protection against the comparatively worse desolation passing friendship causes. Lonely they lived — why, wondered Darconville, do people have to have no money to spend less? — and lonely they would die; but pitifully he could find no words of consolation for such as those who, meeting him in the streets or at school during those final months, stopped forlorn as if to ask, not so much from him as of themselves, why bother to marry and beget when the search for union is doomed by implication in the very act? Why part a whole heart into halves if it is required to break it? Why not acknowledge, finally, that union is one and disappointment the alternative?

No, it wasn’t that the remarks were put in such direct terms; Quinsyburgisms seldom were. There were hesitant glances, often, silly nods, comments odd and elliptical. For instance, one day Mrs. McAwaddle stopped him on the front steps of the library, sighed lugubriously, and — what byzantine warning was this in aid of? — tapped the side of her nose. Another incident as inexplicable occurred one afternoon in the college post-office. “Hello, Darconville,” came a voice, “fair grow the lilies on the riverbanks?” It was of course Dr. Dodypol who, banging a stamp on a letter, then pointed at him with a quote:

”If Nature’s a vision, Art’s a re-

How can you write what you cannot see?”

Then he popped his letter in the slot and said good-day.

But Miss Trappe’s, perhaps, was the queerest. Walking up the street one day under one of her boisterous hats, she suddenly reversed direction and on a detour came up to knock on Darconville’s door. Disheartened to hear that Isabel hadn’t stopped by to say goodbye to her — the old cameo lay still unclaimed — he was only confounded by what followed. “I was reading your book,” she said cryptically, “and on page sixty-five I suddenly remembered, though I couldn’t recall where, something I wanted to re-read.” A worried smile quickened up to her temples as with a run of light. “Now, tell me, what page did I turn to?” Darconville didn’t know what to say. “Why, page fifty-six,” exclaimed Miss Trappe, her pitted nose pushing forward. “Page fifty-six!” And quickly kissing his cheek, she turned, and walked away. There wasn’t in any of these encounters, either by word or gesture, that which raised so much as a hint of disapproval about his marriage and yet each referred, he was convinced, to nothing else.

It was that kind of summer.

Darconville soon found, with Isabel still unbaptized, he needed a dispensation from “disparity of worship” which had to be obtained from the Bishop of Richmond and then forwarded to the Chancellor at the Archbishop’s House in London to have it cleared for execution in that diocese. Harvard University, meanwhile, notified him he was to be in Cambridge by September 10. So he busily set to coordinating matters. But in late June he was informed that he was required to obtain a special license for the dispensation of the residency requirements in England, and to that end he immediately wrote, as directed, to the Registrar of the Court of Faculties. He was busy as a piper: teaching, boxing books and clothes, writing letters, and preparing in the interim — he’d have no time later-his courses for the fall. The prospects were exciting. Would that he’d the time to dwell on them!

There were still to be obtained sérologie tests, birth certificates, and letters of permission as well, and another matter involved the telephone calls to Fawx’s Mt. where Isabel, presumably, was working away in as much of a dither, measuring patterns, cutting, and sewing away like the Three Fates all at once. By midsummer her letters fell off in frequency, but Darconville gamefully placed upon those that did come an even greater value, reserving in his heart only the spirited longing that such accidents might happen again and again. Contact with her kept him vital. And when the Adams House secretary at Harvard notified him of a vacancy there (a suite at $250 per month) his acceptance brought home just how crucial contact in whatever form would now become, for, as money now was critical, he was forced to sell his car. The trips up to Fawx’s Mt. were over.

Ah, dear Bentley, thought Darconville, such a deed as from the body of contraction plucks the very soul!

It wasn’t a week before another car appeared — a sleek foreign racer, chrome and plumcolored, screeching up to Darconville’s house with a triple blast of its hom. The door opened, and then, wearing a lavender tube-top and demoniacally tight jeans, out stepped Hypsipyle Poore! “It’s a Hulksaek Kongjak Puin! A present from daddy!” she called up to his window, snapping off her driving gloves and pointing to her initials printed on the fender. She blew him a kiss, stepped under the big tree, and said in a low breathy voice, “Only one thing faster ‘n’ better than this au-to, baby boy. Hint, hint.” Laughing, Darconville came downstairs and explained for her, again, the situation she’d long known, only too well. “Good lord ,” exclaimed undaunted Hypsipyle Poore, scribbling her telephone number on a napkin and tucking it firmly into his pocket, “but don’t mean, surely, you can’t promise to call me sometime by and by, now, does it?” Darconville said nothing. She smiled into his eyes. “You promise. I can tell.”