Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Page B

scrawl of mockery under the rims of her eyes
as she poured a soda. “This year, you watch, we’ll be doing Chekhov
in clothesbags and clunkies.”
      “They are saying”—Prof. Fewstone’s standard opening
line, never without its veiled threat—”they are saying that over in
Richmond the legislature is cutting us off without a dime unless we
put some Mau-Maus on the faculty.” A history professor, Fewstone
always kept to that one note, like a finch; his sour doctrines,
masquerading as brands of economics and politics, fit his
reputation as a miser far better than the hackberry-colored jacket
he never took off, perhaps for that elegant pin (compass, square)
awarded him by some Brotherhood of Skinks or other who worshipped
trowels and pyramids. “Now in my book,
The Rehoboths: Reform or
Reglementation
? I put forth the theory—”
      “Attitudinizing,” murmured Miss Gibletts, the Latin
teacher whose thin, dry, hectic, unperspirable habit of body made
her somewhat saturnine. She looked like St. Colitis of the Sprung
Chair. Turning away to find another conversation, she carefully
managed to avoid the dark stranger with the French name who’d just
been introduced and who was standing all alone.
      Miss Dessicquint, the assistant dean, looked like
Nosferatu—a huge mustachioed godforgone, inflexible as a Dutch
shoe, who was given to lying about her age before anybody asked
her. She closed her eyes and begun to hum. “Look,” she sneered,
nudging her secretary and sometime bowling partner, Miss Gupse, an
unhealthy-looking little poltfoot with one of the longest noses on
earth. “There, by the table, in harlequin shorts.”
      “Oh no. Floyce.”
      “The flower of fairybelle land.”
      “He irks me, that one.”
      “He?”
      Miss Gupse, smiling, caught the irony and licked her
nose. “She.”
      “
It
!” said Miss Dessicquint, wagging a
tongue long as a biscuit-seller’s shovel. Her secretary had to turn
around to stop the smile glimmering down the flanks of her steep
nose. “He looks like a Mexican banana-split.”
      “I wonder,” swallowed little Miss Gupse, “how those
people”—she looked up over a cookie—”well,
do
it.”
      “Have you ever had the occasion,” asked Miss
Dessicquint, pausing for dramatic effect, “to look at the east end
of a westbound cow?”
      Floyce R. Fulwider, reputedly a ferocious
alcibiadean, was a balding, fastidious art teacher—he pronounced
Titian, his favorite painter, for instance, to rhyme with
Keatsian—who could often be seen skipping across the Quinsy campus
holding by his fingertips the newly wet gouaches and undernourished
para-menstrual creations of his students or, as he called them, his
“popsies.” The college teemed with stories about the felonious
gender-switching parties he threw, when he’d paint his windows
black, put on his Mabel Mercer records, and encourage everyone to
don feather boas and run around naked. He couldn’t have liked it
more. But Miss Dessicquint didn’t like it and told Miss Gupse,
confidentially, that he was getting a terminal contract this year.
“Rome,” she whispered into her companion’s ear, “wasn’t burnt in a
day.”
      Then, turning, they saw Darconville.
      “I hope
he
isn’t a bumbie.”
      “He looks normal to me,” said Miss Gupse.
      “Well, you know what they say. And it’s true,” said
Miss Dessicquint, with eyes like frozen frass, “there’s a thin line
between madness and insanity.”
      Miss Gupse, never strong, secretly thought herself
the object of this cut and that very evening would proceed to call
her sister in Nashville to inquire tearfully about a job there.
True, that particular afternoon she had been in the midst of her
mois
. But the memory of having a big nose from childhood
is perhaps at the bottom of more havoc than one can ever know.
      In one corner of the room, occupying much of it,
stood Dr. Glibbery, a walrus-arsed microbiology