Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Several times, in fact, Darconville during that day slipped out to a telephone booth, dialing and listening expectantly, but the current, each time, hummed wastefully through Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Washington, and Virginia bearing only its own dullness. The other end rang on. No harm done; he could wait.

Later, he sat down and wrote Isabel a funny and multifarious letter about his long trip, heading off an awkward temptation to beg her to come up immediately — she needed the time for herself, of course — by losing himself in long and colorful description of their splendid rooms at Harvard. Then downstairs over in C-entry, the superintendent directed him to the telephone service, where minutes later the installation for his room was arranged, and, after writing down his telephone number on a postcard and posting both pieces off to Fawx’s Mt., he took his dinner alone, contentedly watching the sun go down over the river. It was a fairly humid night, and for cross-ventilation he opened a front window and his apartment door. And to waste no time that very evening in a battery of letters addressed to various English authorities, civil and clerical, he reconfirmed their marriage intentions, asking that they be revised according to the newer plan he outlined and that a date be held open for late December for a nuptial Mass. These letters had to be done well, and in sequence, an orderly arrangement he knew he should have used before. But, in spite of himself, he fell asleep over the typewriter. At some point, however, in the middle of the night he was awakened by the city noise, hoits, yells, traffic below. He shut the window and went for the door — strange, he thought, he had been told he was the only one in the building. He strained to listen.

Could that have been a key chuckling in a lock upstairs?

The following days were spent by Darconville acquainting himself with the layout of Harvard. He got a map. He cut through the traffic on Massachusetts Ave., crossed down Quinsy St., and went to the English department office in Warren House to make himself known to the man who had hired him, but the secretary (handing him his faculty card, class schedule, and a catalogue) told him that Prof. McGentsroom hadn’t yet returned from his summer vacation. She told him there was some mail for him. Darconville almost misgave from expectation as she rooted around in a series of letterboxes, all tabbed with professors’ names: McGoldrick, Schreiner, Waxman, Stuart, Millar, Treadgold, etc., and then handed him a postcard: a lavendulate “Miss ya!”—the dot an extravagant circle — signed by Hypsipyle Poore. Well, well, thought Darconville, tearing it in two and dropping it into a goody’s pail on the way out. He spent an hour or so in the Fogg Museum, walked around the commons in front of the law school, and circled back by Memorial Hall, a huge Victorian Gothic vault with large windows of colored glass stiffened dark with metalwork and stone tracery and memorializing the Union dead in what, in another part of the country — already thankfully forgotten — was generally considered to be the last of romantic wars.

Across the way, he entered the vine-webbed gates of the Harvard Yard, an old commons of skinnybranched elms and walkways surrounded by venerable red-brick college halls, quadrangular in form, cloistral in intent, an enclosure as neat and strict as a bowling green and isolating in time and space traditions of an intellectual and spiritual probity, uncluttered as a puritan psalmody.

The figure of John Harvard sat, dignified and aloof, staring across the Yard in a mood of piety and godliness. Darconville walked back through several centuries under the pleasant trees and had the strange feeling that, in peering up a dim stairway or through an old window or into some dark chamber-and-study, one just might happen to catch an anachronistic glimpse of some students reading The Tatler by candlelight instead of working their sophemes or construing their Demosthenes or perhaps a group of lads, with wigs a-flap, skipping up out of the buttery — the steam of hasty-pudding in the air — and balancing tankards and sizings of bread and beer or maybe several young blades drinking rumbullion and gowling against the excessive measures of Lord North, Grenville, and Townsend until one of them might leap up to shout, “Step outside and repeat that asseveration, Villiers, you damned Tory!” He stepped over to look at Widener Library, the beautiful white steeple of Memorial Church, and came out again, under an old archway adorned above with crowned lanterns, into the square.

The congestion in Harvard Square, a maze of stoplights and ringing commerce — almost island-contained — became a singular source of delight, especially to someone pointedly tired of the High and Main streets of Quinsyburg as the avenues of sophistication. Darconville crossed the street, the kiosk of the central subway entrance exhaling brakedust and stale air, and went shopping: he mailed Isabel some jewelry and a Harvard T-shirt. In the plaza of the Holyoke Center, he observed, were gathered all manner of people: bearded fellows selling flutes and sandals; drownbottles with split shoes sharing slugs of whiskey with each other; wagoneers selling books and records; three or four pale mystical girls offering bunches of dried-flowers from their trugs; a dinger holding on a leash a capuchin monkey in a red bellboy’s hat, snatching dimes; and everywhere, in the crowds, professors and law-cats and transcorporating philosophers and other remnants of academe who for the way they talked, gestured, and dressed might have flown out of Baffin Land. It seemed one of the few places on the earth where one could stand on a street corner for five minutes and see and hear the world go by in a thousand fashions and in fifty languages.

When Darconville had time on his hands — there was a great deal to share but no one to share it with — he’d several afternoons left the square for Boston, aimlessly, meditatively, circuitously riding the underground transit in and then back out, with the seats crammed and the aisles crowded, and when the train pulled into Harvard Station, always, the conductors, thumbpunching buttons, called out, “End of the line, all change!”—the doors leaped hissing open, dust rose, and tired sober-eyed commuters with rolled newspapers hurried out in a rush, pushed up the ramps, and left the subway to lose themselves in the larger crowds on the street above. Darconville noticed the girls of greater Boston were lovely, lithe, and elegant — one, however, always gleamed in their ranks, her unassuming innocent self-withdrawal being brighter than the lights that danced over the cities he explored. And she wasn’t even there.

The dewy sweet smell from the gardens of Brattle St. drifted through the fencepickets. Darconville put his map into his pocket and cut down Hawthorn St. where, walking along, he listened to the sad, quiet rustle up in the red and golden beeches and noticed the first decaying leaves, tawny and rusted, sprinkling like the bridal colors of autumn from the chestnut trees, always among the first to shed. He came out to the banks of the peaceful river and slowly headed east along a pathway.

The sun was beginning to go down, and a faint ring of blue autumnal smokehaze could be seen over the playing fields and boathouses across the Charles. He crossed the Larz Anderson Bridge and then cut down a grassy slope to sit by the water and consider the beauty of the college from another angle, a view sweeping and magnificent. Again, he looked at his map and named to identify the elegant brick houses he traced from left to right: Eliot, Winthrop, Leverett, Dunster, all stately and knitted over with withers and strands of ivy. Theirs was a spectacular fenestration, the jigsaw cornices and windowed frontdoors facing across the courtyards and crowned above in a little parade, beyond the gates, of chimneys, turrets, and domed towers of green, gold, and crimson.