Read Online Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux - Free Book Online Page A

papers to have signed and stamped.
      The room was warm, sticky, from the crowding bodies,
but the girls, somehow, all smelled of fresh soap and mint-flavored
gum. They were Southern girls, after all, and unlike their
counterparts in other sections of the country whose morning beauty,
from the normal wear-and-tear of a day, too easily faded only to be
carelessly ignored, they tried to keep powder-room perfect and as
presentable as possible. And, after all, this time there was a man
present in the room.
      “Some people can just whistle and wait,” snapped
Mrs. McAwaddle, going jimmy-jawed. A mite of a thing, resembling
the perky little owl commonly depicted resting on the hand of
Minerva, she was wearing a dress covered with hearts. She spindled
a card angrily and looked up at the man who’d been standing there
for some time. And now. His name? His business?
      “Darconville,” he said, smiling.
      The girl with the black hair, waiting behind him,
took a crystal vial out of her handbag (tooled in studs: “H.P.”)
and, closing her eyes, sprayed a musky lavender fragrance around
her perfect, prematurely formed silhouette, waxen as a delicate
shell.
      “Ah, of course,” beamed the owl of Minerva, “the new
professor.” They laughed together. “And I do believe I detect a
Yankee accent?”
      Darconville asked about his courses. He had met his
freshmen already but hadn’t yet been given the list.
      “Your freshman class list? O dear,” muttered Mrs.
McAwaddle. Apparently, it had been forced into more revisions than
a Dixiecrat caucus and so laid aside. She searched a tray, lifted
up a snow water-ball of glass, and then shot open an acidgreen
file-cabinet, finally rummaging up the sheets for English 100. He
read the first few names on the list:
     
            Muriel
Ambler
            Melody Blume
            Ava Caelano
            Wroberta
Carter
            Barbara
Celarent
            Analecta
Cisterciana
     
      “Would you let me,” smiled Mrs. McAwaddle, her
little head at a prayerful angle, “admire your coat?” Several girls
nearby exchanged glances and winked. Darconville’s coat people
loved. Cut to princely lines, it was an English chesterfield as
black as the black swan of Juvenal. “I do declare, if this isn’t
the most dashing—but here,” she added, hunching up to the desk,
“there’s an ever-so-small tear here, by that button.” She patted
his hand. “Now you have your wife mend that and—”
      Darconville leaned forward and, like Wotan
consulting a weaving norn, whispered with a close smile, “I am not
married.”
      Mrs. McAwaddle stared a moment—and then, with a
conspiratorial wink, motioned him into a side-room off the
registrar’s office where under a portrait of Jefferson Davis a
purple-stained mimeograph machine went
bwam-bwam-bwam
,
spitting out single sheets of copy. Conventicle gave way to
conclave. “Always remember,” she said, gripping his wrist, “to a
handsome boy like you—how old are you?”
      “Twenty-nine.”
      She made the sound of a pip. “—to a handsome boy
like you something wonderful will happen. You’ll find a girl to
love you as sure as wax candles have wicks.” She had lost her own
husband, she told him, eight years ago (tainted knockwurst, Jaycee
picnic), and now it was just hell dipped in misery. To live alone?
When the good Lord created someone for everybody? Ridiculous! “But
now,” she added, folding his hands in her own, “you be careful:
these girls at Quinsy College can work the insides out of a boy
without him having a clue and, simple yokums though they may seem,
can be the untellinest little commodities on earth. You saw that
child out front fussing at me? I could have spit nails. They have
nerve to burn.”
      For the advice of this little hole-in-corner sibyl
Darconville was grateful, though he couldn’t help but attribute her
suspicions to the exigencies of her job,