Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Darconville climbed in his rented van and left Quinsyburg as inconspicuously as he’d come. It was goodbye! Goodbye to Quinsyburg and its sapsuckers with feedhats and teardrop heads! Goodbye to its dacryopyostic onion patches and citizens with faces like leeks! Goodbye to its buckish slang and pickpocket eloquence! Goodbye to its vat-icides, its dunces, its trelapsers of gossip! Goodbye to the farms on that Bebrycian coast and its water-tower! Goodbye, Your Foxship! Goodbye, Your Wormship! Goodbye, Your Gibship!

The winds were brisk off the mountains. A strange calenture came over Darconville, banking the wooden bridge into Fawx’s Mt., and as he looked the cilicious weedgrasses and cowquake seemed to turn to waving water, a wisping in the meadows of sea-sounds as if blowing from some beautiful but lonely marinaresca. It made him long for the haven, that harbor he wanted, but knew still wasn’t his; no, not yet; not even now.

Isabel and her mother, sitting at the back of the house, both waved. Parking the van, Darconville crossed the short lawn and came over to them. Without a word, Isabel handed him a card; it was one of the wedding invitations. She pointed to it twin-fingeredly — there were two flagrant errors: a misspelling and a botched date. Darconville looked at Isabel who looked at her mother who said, “And the whole job-lot’s the same way. Fotched.”

“We can do without them,” said Darconville, looking from one to the other. “It’s a formality, for friends. We can do without them.”

Isabel, turning away, looked back at him with one eye, as if peering round a corner.

“Can’t we?”

“I don’t know what to say.” She sheered away with what seemed utter indecision, tears rippling down her cheeks. “I do love you, do you know that?”

“Invitations?” laughed Darconville.

“It ain’t only that. Sit down,” said Mrs. Shiftlett.

Suddenly Darconville was given a turn. “Something is wrong.”

“Oh,” cried Isabel, sobbing and bearhugging Darconville as if she’d squeeze out his very life. “My wedding dress, I’ve gone and ruined it, I’ve ruined my car, I’ve ruined the invitations — and all your hard work, gone! Gone up in smoke, just like it never was!”

Darconville, bewildered, could make no immediate sense of what now prevented their going ahead with plans any more than he could explain what mother and daughter had already accepted as accomplished fact. He cradled her head to his neck, breathing her libanoph-orous hair and looking off miserably and inarticulately beyond her only to see Mrs. Shiftlett wink with risible eyes and mouth something — apologetic, if those converting bowlips meant to indicate a pout of shared disappointment. Trembling in fright, Isabel almost killed Darconville on the spot with the innocence of the question that followed: would the wedding now be off for good? Off? For good ? The sky went dull, lowering like a metal dishcover. Darconville was beneaped.

The two figures just waited there, unmoving, as confused as if each stood at the opposite ends of eternity itself. Mrs. Shiftlett had disappeared. Darconville’s throat constricted: it was hopeless and he knew it. Bowled! The whole summer! The wedding had comperendinated. The end was now in the middle.

Speechless with disappointment, he couldn’t rehearse what he wanted to say, for questions kept intruding: what had happened to the dress? Was she frightened at the prospect of marriage? Why had she let him know at the last minute? And then Mrs. Shiftlett reappeared and, beaming, bumped them both with a large cardboard box — it was filled with a crazy array of five-and-dime forks, knives, and spatulas — which she proceeded ostentatiously to place in the van, as Spellvexit dodged out; she winked on her way back, “Householdry.” He interproximated a word of thanks. Hand in hand, then, he and Isabel walked across the backyard and looked away over the cowfield to the woods.

There is an unhappiness so awful that the very fear of it becomes an alloy to happiness. Darconville whispered that he loved her; Isabel whispered the same. Isabel whispered that she wanted to marry him but needed more time. More time, Darconville whispered, to think about it? More time, Isabel whispered, to prepare for it. He whispered one more question. She looked up at him and kissed him, and he felt her tongue on his lips, swift and cold, an infrigidation that perhaps reminded her, as she answered, of what to say. Isabel then — with conviction — whispered, “December.”

It was with simple gratitude that Darconville accepted the facts as they were — it didn’t matter, truth seemed thievish for a prize so dear — and that night he was only strengthened in his resolve to hold on, finding constant vigilance perhaps the part of vision that most was love, for just before sleep overtook him he caught in the bedroom a faint glimpse of Isabel silently sitting by him in the darkness, stroking his cat, and watching sentinel lest anything creep in from the dark am-bisinistrous night to discover him there in that room.

IT WAS THE DAY of departure. The van, loaded to the doors, was ready to go, and after breakfast there seemed nothing else to do for Darconville and Isabel but make their farewells. Before the morning sun peeped over the mountains, the Shiftletts had gone off to work: that made the goodbyes less troublesome but somehow more awkward, for nothing could dissemble, nothing displace, nothing divert what by accepting they had to seem to condone. Isabel, in actions quick and acute, moved about with dispatch as if, in trying to bury in the camouflage of time the fact of pain, to say goodbye was not necessarily to see him go, and she preferred to leave it there like the maiden Marpessa who, choosing Idas over Apollo for her fear of immortality, was willing to renounce the sun as long as she didn’t have to think about the consequences.

Darconville felt her uneasiness. And yet the intervening months, he saw, if keeping her yet in durance vile would at least modify the bad luck impetuosity had caused them and simultaneously increase the delight of sweet premeditation. It pained him to see her troubled, busy with the efficiency of preoccupation, but he sat her down — wasn’t Genius the clerk of Venus? — and told her a hundred tales of the wonderful life they’d have, no matter where! But sometimes, she confessed, that very thing made her afraid, she didn’t know why: where would they go? Trying to dispel her worry, he became playful. He asked where she’d like to go, Mt. Woodwose, Catland, the Island of Poke Pudding? — wherever, whereverever, she’d be loved !

Isabel tried to smile. Lifting her chin, he asked if he could see her wedding dress; that would be a bad omen, she said, and blushed nervously. Would she like to take a walk? No, she shook her head, no. It was a difficult hour. Omissions relating to his departure became more oppressive than any reference to it, and yet, apprehensively, she kept glancing at the clock. They took time to make love in her bedroom: it was cold and compensatory, faisonless, a sequence of tenses; usually, he loved the way she loved the way he loved her, but now, it seemed, she was worried the way she loved he didn’t — and he could tell. It was clear, not quilts filled high with gossamer and roses, neither poppies nor mandragora, could have put Isabel at rest. The time had come to go.

At the door, Darconville turned, took from his pocket the gold ring he’d bought in Quinsyburg — two birds interclasped on a moonstone— and slipped it on her right hand. She handed him a box she’d pulled from under a chair: a gift of a blue shirt. He wished he hadn’t had, that she hadn’t bought, a going-away gift — it seemed too formal in the preparation. No one, he felt, should ever be ready for such things. They hugged each other for a full minute, silently.