Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "Six, then," said Robin. "I'll call for you." He turned, a little ponderously, and went on up the sidewalk past Dunbar. They stood on the bridge in the chilly air, listening to the water slide underneath. A few minutes later, when he was presumably somewhere in the neighborhood of the lilac maze, the pipes began again faintly.

  "Isn't he cute?" said Janet to Molly.

  "Huh," said Molly. "You want another dip in the lake, just let me know."

  Tina got up early, which probably wasn't her fault, and whistled, which certainly was.

  Even the suspicion that she was whistling Bach did not ameliorate the offense. Janet jammed her pillow over her head, which not only dulled the noise, but kept the blazing sun out of her eyes. It was supposed to rain on Sundays; couldn't the climate get anything right this year?

  Tina's whistling receded, and was cut off by the quiet closing of the door. Why didn't she just bang it, as long as she was whistling anyway? The birds were whistling too, never mind that they were supposed to be going south for the winter. Janet flung the pillow to the floor and sat up crossly. It was nine o'clock, an obscene hour at which to be up on Sunday.

  On the other hand, if she got up and had a large breakfast, she could read until five and then go off to her family dinner with a clear conscience.

  Janet put her feet into her moccasins. They were damp, and speckled with bits of grass and leaf mold. What in the world—oh, the piper. No wonder she was cranky. And no wonder Molly was still asleep.

  Tina opened the door quietly and came whistling in.

  "Shhhh!" said Janet as she came around the corner. "Molly's asleep."

  "She was sound asleep when we came in last night," said Tina, as if that were an excuse for waking somebody. She was wearing a pink cotton dress with a voluminous skirt and a lace collar. She looked dreadfully healthy.

  "We had some excitement in the night," said Janet, still quietly.

  "What?" demanded Christina, crossing to her already-made bed and bouncing herself down on it.

  "We heard somebody playing the bagpipes and went out to investigate."

  "Well, for heaven's sake, I heard it too," said Christina. "I put the pillow over my head and went back to sleep."

  "How practical of you," said Molly drowsily, from under her own pillow.

  "Sorry," said Janet.

  "Oh, well," said Molly, dumping the pillow on the floor and revealing a tangle of brown curls and a bleary face, "I can do my Physics now." She sat up. "The piper was Robin Armin, Tina. Just think what you missed."

  "Was Nick there?"

  "No," said Molly.

  "Well, then," said Christina. "Do you guys want to go to breakfast?"

  "Just let me wash my face," said Molly.

  "No, thanks," said Janet. When they had gone to Eliot, she took her anthropology book over to Taylor and ate watery scrambled eggs and flexible toast and read about the forest people of New Guinea. The people were very interesting, but the anthropologist would have gotten a D from any decent high-school English teacher. Janet wondered if you could write a paper about the bad style of anthropologists. It was a pleasure to finish with them and turn to Aristotle, whose translations at any rate were of a perfect clarity by comparison.

  At five o'clock, with only three pages of Aristotle left to read, she said good-bye to Molly, who was muttering, "Fuck Physics" under her breath about once every five minutes, got out of the basement the old green bicycle she had had since she was eight, and rode home for dinner.

  She took the sidewalk to the asphalt road between Forbes and Ericson, and the asphalt road to Mile Street, and Mile Street three blocks to Chester Avenue, and went out Chester with her hair blowing straight behind her in a most pleasing way. It was a wide street that had as yet lost none of its elms. It stretched away in a long tunnel of brilliant yellow leaves and black branches. The leaves were falling slowly. The houses on Chester were Victorian, larger and solider than the ones Janet and Molly and Peg and Tina had walked by on their way to Jacobsen's. That was Danny Chin's house, and that Professor Davison's, and that was where Lily-Milly's boyfriend lived, and over there in the red-and-yellow monstrosity lived the child who had gotten Andrew into such trouble with the wasps' nests last summer.

  After eight blocks, Janet turned right, swept past her old elementary school, turned left, and pedaled past a church and a greenhouse and two long, low, modern houses of no great distinction, to her own house, on a corner lot across from an area of prairie wetland that the College and the Town had been disputing over for seven years. The house, a large and irregular stucco monster with a red tile roof and red trim, had disappointed her dreadfully when they moved into it, because she had passionately wanted a Victorian one with clapboards and gingerbread. But she was used to it by now.

  Andrew's red bicycle lay halfway up the driveway; Janet swerved around it onto the grass and nearly ran over one of Lily's rag dolls. She parked her bike where it belonged, in the covered rack beside the garage, and walked back to pick up the doll.

  It was an old one of her own, a vaguely Oriental-looking creature that her mother had made on demand not long after Janet met Danny Chin and his family. It had not lain there long; it was freshly washed (she could tell because it was tan and not gray) and still smelled faintly of ironing. Janet straightened with it slowly, and thought of Liddell and Scott.

  Vincentio was barking madly and flinging himself against the back door. Janet ran up the porch steps, wedged herself through the smallest possible opening, slammed the door behind her, and suffered herself to be leapt upon and licked all over. Vincentio, a ragtag mixture of rottweiler, Labrador, German shepherd, and probably Missouri hound dog, had been named for his propensity, as a puppy, to hide in corners. He had outgrown this juvenile shyness as soon as he was large enough to make his friendliness inconvenient to its objects.

  Eventually he wore himself out and sat panting on the floor to recover. Janet's eye took in the new rag rug he was sitting on—Lily must finally have given up that old yellow bathrobe—and three fresh examples of finger painting on the potting table, their curling edges held down with rocks and empty pots and one brass paperweight in the shape of the Great Pyramid. She put her hand on the door to the kitchen, only to have it wrenched open.

  Andrew had come, now that the noise was over, to see what the dog was barking about. His grubby face lit up enormously. "Hey! Jan's back!" he shouted, and flung himself on her neck.

  It was like coming home from summer camp. Her parents appeared, her mother from the basement and her father from the downstairs bathroom, and they were still exclaiming at her when Lily condescended to come downstairs, trailing rock music from her open bedroom door, and smile benignly. The kitchen smelled of roast beef and stewed apples.

  Janet was very pleased, but she felt overwhelmed. She had been living with strangers, who gave you a lot of room until you should choose to be friendly.

  The dinnertime ritual was the same. Everybody was allowed to tell what news there might be, beginning with the youngest. Andrew had discovered a revolutionary method of fingerpainting with one's elbows, and had been taken to task by his best friend's mother for saying, "No shit!" when she told him it would use up the paint too quickly. Lily, despite having not played any of Janet's Beatles records for nine whole days, was still going to marry George Harrison when she grew up.

  "And leave your kids lying all over the lawn?" said Janet. "Your Connie doll is on the back porch, guarding Andrew's paintings."

  "No picking on each other until after dessert," said her father, automatically. "What else, Lily?"

  "You tell 'em," said Lily, and stuffed an entire roast potato into her mouth.

  "They did the music aptitude test at school and she's going to be very apt," said Andrew.

  "I'm going to play the flute, stupid," said Lily, with remarkable enunciation through the potato.

  Janet expressed approval of this plan. "I had a musical experience myself last night,"

  she said, and t
old them about the piper. After the flurry caused by Andrew's declaration that he would get a set of bagpipes and drown out Lily's flute playing had been dealt with, their father said, "Do they still choose the piper by committee, I wonder?"

  "What?" said Janet.

  "It's a tradition that goes back to the founding of the college," said her father. "I was on the committee for several years. It's not exactly a faculty matter—at least, I was approached by a student, myself—but it was started by Professor Dunbar, I believe. He was a Professor of Natural Science, before they started dividing everything up, and he was a fanatical Scotsman. Who is it this year, Jan, do you know?"

  Janet said, "Robin Armin. He's a Classics major—or maybe Theater."

  "What else has happened, Jan?" said her mother. "Are you sorry you didn't go to Grinnell?"

  "Oh, no, it's wonderful," said Janet. "King's not good for m uch, but everybody else is

  splendid. Especially Evans. Oh, Daddy—what do you know about The Romance of the Rose? "

  "That's out of my period," said her father, automatically, "but it seems to me that it was begun by a genius, continued by an idiot, and translated into Middle English by Chaucer. It's the prime example of the medieval allegory of love."

  "Where can I read about it?"

  "C. S. Lewis is your best bet," said her father.

  "Narnia?"

  "No, child. What do they teach you in these schools? It's about time you realized that Lewis was a brilliant medieval and Renaissance scholar. The Allegory of Love is still the standard work on the subject, and he wrote it in 1936."

  "Before you were born," said Andrew to Janet.

  "What else, Janet?" said her mother.

  Janet thought about Nick, but since all her public expeditions with him had not been describable as dates, and she was still angry with him anyhow, she decided against mentioning him. She told them a little about Tina and Molly; she told them about the battle for Schiller, which her father had also heard of, in somewhat distorted form, from Anne Beauvais, who was in his Romantics seminar; she told them about the peculiar influx of theatrical types.

  "It's Medeous," said her father. "She has delusions of performing Greek drama in the original language."

  "Oh," said Janet. "I almost forgot. We saw a manifestation of the Fourth Ericson ghost."

  "Who'd she look like?" said Lily.

  "We didn't see her, " said Janet. "It was when Molly and I went to find the piper.

  Somebody was throwing books out of the fourth-floor windows."

  "Which ones?" said her mother.

  "Liddell and Scott, Matthew Arnold's On Translating Homer, and McGuffey's Fifth Reader. "

  "That's not what the canon says, is it?" said her mother, amused. "They should be more consistent, if they want to fool people."

  "So you don't think it was the ghost really?" said Andrew.

  "I don't know," said Janet. "The books were dated in the 1800's, but most of them looked awfully clean and new."

  "But it was dark," said her father.

  "Well, did you keep the books?" said Andrew. "You could take them to a book analyzer and he could tell you—"

  "No, Peg Powell—she lives on my floor—came along and took them," said Janet.

  "But I could ask her to let me see them."

  "She probably threw them out in the first place," said Lily. "Why else should she come along?"

  "Same reason we did—she heard the piper. Anyway, I'm not sure she had time," said Janet, considering. No, Peg hadn't been breathing hard or looking disheveled; and even running for all she was worth, she couldn't have gotten down four flights of steps, out the main door, and around the far side of Ericson, past the bulge made by the Little Theater, between the time the books went out and the time she appeared.

  "What about your news?" she said to her mother.

  Her mother had taken Lily's Girl Scout troop canoeing on the river, and they had all been very grumpy about being made to work, believing, like all children of their generation, that all transportation was equipped with engines. She had made a new rag rug, painted the upstairs bathroom, washed the dog, and weeded the garden, though goodness knew you oughtn't to have to do that in September. She had read one of the books Janet had pressed on her before going off to college, and thought it very interesting but rather rough, which was probably Janet's father's fault, because living with an English teacher meant you couldn't pass over a single stylistic flaw, ever.

  Janet's father put up a mild protest, which Janet overrode with, "Which book?"

  "Babel-17," said her mother. "Your father really ought to read it, if only to tell me what's wrong with the linguistics; but I think he'd only throw it across the room."

  "Like the ghost," said Andrew, and giggled.

  "Yes, the ghost," said their father. "Jan, if you can get those books away from the mysterious and suspicious Peg, I really would like to take a look at them."

  "Okay," said Janet. "I assume I could get her to lend me the Arnold or the McGuffey.

  I don't have any excuse to borrow the Liddell. So where is Babel-17 rough?" she asked her mother.

  "I'll show you after dessert," said her mother. "Your father hasn't told his news yet."

  "One good, one bad," said her father. "The level of idiocy of our entering freshmen is

  considerably down this year—I'm much encouraged. Even the premeds seem to have some glimmerings of grammar in their fuzzy little heads."

  "Thanks, Dad," said Janet.

  "You're privileged; of course your level of idiocy is less than the average. Now, the bad news. Tyler's got pneumonia and is going to miss most of the term recovering from it; I have the joyful choice of taking his Modern Poetry course or taking over for Davison as chairman so she can take his Modern Poetry course. She says the misery of the one is about equal to the misery of the other, so I can choose."

  "I think he should take the poetry course," said Janet's mother. "He's been chairman; let's have some different misery, at least."

  "Sure, take the poetry course," said Janet. "You can have a wonderful time telling them how awful all the moderns are, and comparing them to real poets."

  "That, my child, would require first that I read the moderns, second that I have a grasp of what they are attempting, and third that I be able, ideally, to demonstrate both that it is not worth doing and that they are doing it very badly."

  Janet's mother began to laugh; Janet stared at her father with a sinking and peculiar feeling. "But you've got a Ph.D.," she said.

  "Take it from me," said her father, "it is possible to get a Ph.D. in English while ignoring no less than three literary periods. You must have read something in all of them, so as to fling their names about; but you can be quite ignorant of at least three and still do very nicely."

  "Which three are you ignorant of?" said Janet.

  "The moderns, the whole of the twelfth century, and the Jacobeans," said her father.

  "You should have waited until she went to graduate school to tell her," said Janet's mother. "Here, have some pie to soothe your disillusionment."

  "I'm not disillusioned," said Janet, accepting the pie just the same, because the lemon meringue pie in the dining halls tasted like lemon Jell-O with chalk in it. "I'm just mad. I thought you knew what you were talking about."

  "With regard to what?" said her father.

  "Free verse."

  "I took three undergraduate courses in it and gave up," said her father. "I've given it a fair try, if you like; but I'm not really qualified to teach it."

  "You could tell the students that," said Janet. "Ask them to help out. Ask them to formulate a theory on the spot—well, by the end of the class, anyway."

  "Dear Lord, please don't do anything of the sort," said her mother. "It's bad enough when you're suffering from students' theories about poetry you understand. Duncan," she added, very sharply. "You'll hate it."

  Janet's father had a glazed look in his eye, and had not yet tasted his pie. Ja
net felt simultaneously guilty and triumphant. Her father was going to be difficult no matter what he was doing; he might as well spend his time redeeming his faults. She looked at him intently, and after a few moments, during which Andrew bolted his pie, clamored for more, was called a disgusting pig by Lily, stole the crust she had left behind, and, when she accused him, said the dog had taken it, their father stopped staring out the window and looked at Janet again.

  "I'll make a deal with you," he said.

  Janet eyed him warily.

  "I'll teach Tyler's course this term if you'll take it before you graduate."

  "Uh," said Janet.

  "Maybe he'll die," said Lily cheerfully.

  "Lilian," said their mother.

  "It's a thought I've had myself," said their father, "but it's unworthy. He's a very nice man, Lily-Milly; his taste is warped, that's all."

  "Should he take some zinc?" said Andrew.

  "Not that sort of taste," said his father. "The literary equivalent of zinc supplements is a very interesting notion, though. Well, Jan, what about it?"

  "Okay," said Janet, heavily, "but you have to listen to me complain every single Sunday evening."

  "I thought you only wanted to come home every other Sunday," said her mother.

  "For that term," said Janet, "I'll make an exception."

  She and Lily cleared the table; her mother washed the dishes and Andrew and her father dried them; then she played a game of Snakes and Ladders with Andrew and read him a chapter of Kim. When she came out of his room, she looked across the hall to the door of her own room, which still bore in wobbly Elvish letters the adjuration, "Say 'Friend'

  and Enter." Janet looked at it for some time. All the rest of her books were in there, and a few garments she was inordinately fond of that she had not thought suitable for college.

  "Mellon," she said softly, obeying its command in Elvish, to the closed door. She had painted it pale blue three years ago, and done a good job. It looked blandly back at her, like a summer sky in the early morning. Janet shook her head at it, and marched into the bathroom instead. Lily, who suffered from nightmares and was an early riser, had gone to bed by the time she came downstairs again. It was nine-thirty.