Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  When he said, in the second quiet scene, after Hamlet had agreed to the duel with Laertes, whom the audience knew perfectly well to have intentions of not only using an unbated foil, but of poisoning it too, "If your mind mislike anything, obey it," Janet thought, he knows, somehow, that everything is about to go to hell, but his habitual relations with Hamlet won't let him say what he would need to say.

  The play ended as it always ended. "You didn't tell me I should bring Kleenex," said Molly thickly to Janet.

  "It's a tragedy," said Janet, blowing her nose on a very old wad of dusty tissue from the bottom of her knapsack. "Of course you need Kleenex."

  "Lend me some of yours, then," said Molly.

  "Allow me," said Robin, and handed her a huge and very clean handkerchief. Janet turned to Thomas for similar aid, and found him blowing his own nose. She was greatly taken aback, but warmed to him enormously.

  "It's a happy ending, really," she said to him.

  "It is not," said Thomas. "It's only the happiest one could hope for, given the world of the play." He blew his nose again. He looked more human with it reddened and his eyes swollen. "'As this fell sergeant Death is swift in his arrest,'" he said; and suddenly seemed to notice Janet making do with her sodden bit of Kleenex. "I do beg your pardon; here you

  go," he said, and presented her with a second handkerchief.

  "Good grief," said Janet, accepting it gratefully. "I've never in my life known a boy to have even one handkerchief."

  "It's hanging around with Robin and his ilk," said Thomas. "And I suspect they only have them because they come in so handy for theatrical stunts."

  "Are we in a hurry," said Molly, "or can we sit here peacefully until the crowds are gone?"

  Robin looked at his watch. "We may sit," he said. "We've missed the ten-thirty bus, and will have to take the eleven-thirteen city bus down to the Greyhound station and get home again that way."

  "Fine," said Molly. "Now, was that or wasn't it a splendid performance?"

  "On the whole, not in the least," said Robin. "But they disgraced their calling less than they might have."

  "What was wrong with it?" demanded Molly.

  "Thomas?" said Robin. "You were keeping the list."

  "I've kind of lost track of it," said Thomas slowly. "It did take fire after the first intermission, don't you think? That was an excellent Hamlet."

  "I still say he shouldn't have been Korean," said Molly. "It distracted me. I kept making up adoption scenarios in my head."

  "No, but that was one of the best parts," said Thomas, with great earnestness.

  "Because it's true, you know—he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court. All of them are against him, even the ones who love him, and none of them can help him out of his terrible dilemma, because their minds and spirits are not like his. He is a stranger in his own country and his own family. He hasn't got anybody."

  Thomas looked at Janet as Hamlet had looked at Ophelia—as if he had been loosed out of Hell to speak of horrors. But when she let her startled sympathy inform her face, he turned suddenly back to Robin and demanded, "Didn't you feel that, seeing that little dark figure down there all alone among them?"

  "He had Horatio," said Robin, fixing Thomas with a grave and anxious look.

  "Yes, he did," said Thomas slowly, looking back at him and sounding a little apologetic. "And this was a very good Horatio, I thought. But Horatio can't do anything for him, you know. All he can do is listen. Even when he knows, knows with all his heart, that Hamlet's doom is coming, he can't persuade him of anything. Their minds don't meet, either, really— though you think, if the parts are played right, that they did meet once, when both of them were students. I've thought I'd like to write a play about what they got up to at Wittenberg. I bet they drove everybody right up the wall. But not anymore. Once Hamlet gets home, and everything has gone rotten, there's an estrangement. Did you notice that they deleted the references, except for the antique Roman line, that implied Horatio was Danish, and kept all the ones that imply he's a foreigner? Horatio is a balm to sore feelings, maybe—but he doesn't understand, either. Hamlet's all alone," he finished, with an absolute flatness that was worse to hear than the most violent feeling could have been.

  Janet looked at him and worried while the rest of them argued.

  "I thought that might be partly Hamlet's fault," said Molly. "I've known people like that, whose intellect set them so far apart they couldn't bother to think how other people felt. And on top of that Hamlet's a prince. It must have been hard for Horatio, too."

  "Tragedy of character," said Robin, staring at Thomas.

  "Situation," said Thomas instantly. "He's doomed, that's all." "Nobody's doomed,"

  said Robin, with great scorn. "Fate awaits our doing."

  "We await Fate's."

  "If you do that, Fate will doom you; but it's you who will have made that doom."

  "All I'm saying," said Thomas, lifting his chin, "is that some situations are hopeless.

  And Hamlet's was one of them. And—"

  "This is an old argument," said Robin to the two girls.

  "Oh, have at it," said Janet lightly; this was not the sort of argument one could stop, but one might be able to lower its emotional temperature a little.

  "Yes," said Molly. "I've got the canvas bag, in case of dire need."

  "You'd better put it on my head right now," said Thomas, summoning up a smile that made Janet's throat hurt. "I didn't mean to get so exercised."

  Robin said gaily, "'Our indiscretion sometime serves us well when our deep plots do pall.'"

  Thomas's face went from strained to wretched. "Don't," he said to Robin, "say the next line."

  "Is it character or situation should prevent me?" said Robin, still gaily.

  Thomas managed a better smile and answered him with spirit. Janet didn't listen to them. The next line was, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Unless Thomas were as militant an atheist as her father, it seemed an odd sentiment to object to.

  CHAPTER 8

  Janet had forgotten to put a note in Campus Mail for Nick when she got off the bus, but on Sunday morning the early-rising Tina found a folded paper stuck under their door, and dropped it on Janet's pillow. Janet rubbed her eyes until they stayed open, appreciated sourly the fact that Tina, who must be curious, had nevertheless gone off to take her bath, and unfolded the paper. It was written in the same peacock-blue ink, with the same fountain pen, that Nick used for his class notes. He had a peculiar hand, like that of a calligrapher suffering from some nervous disease. It looked rather tidy from a distance, and the letters were uniform; but they sprawled, especially at the bottom, and some of them were hard to make out.

  "Lady," said this epistle, "if you will meet me for lunch in Dunbar at twelve-thirty, I will most humbly receive your instructions for tonight's entertainment." He had closed with something that might have been "Love," "Yours," or "Fuck you," followed by a completely indecipherable scrawl in which a very wild imagination might have found an N

  and a T. Janet grinned at it, and put it away in her top drawer.

  It was eleven o'clock. She and Molly and Robin and Thomas had stayed up until almost three, talking about Hamlet; and then she had dreamed of the fencing bout (which she understood a great deal better after listening to Robin and Thomas arguing over it), in the middle of which the participants had flung off their masks and revealed themselves as Nick and Thomas rather than Hamlet and Laertes. She thought Nick might fancy himself as Hamlet, but the notion of any rivalry between them was not welcome. Thomas had been lovely company, but he had not acted like a man smitten or about to be. She wondered if one's time at college might be better served with friends like Thomas than with lovers like Nick; but it was rather late to back out, and besides she was curious.

  "Tomorrow morning," said Molly's drowsy voice from under her pillow with its yellow-and-white-striped case, "I am going to
get up at the crack of dawn, pile millions of scraps of paper on Tina's pillow, and go out, shutting the door without a sound."

  "Where are you going to get millions of scraps of paper?"

  Molly pushed the pillow to the floor. "Have you looked in the wastebasket? Between my math homework and your paper for Evans, we're halfway there already. Tina can contribute the rest with that letter she keeps writing and tearing up."

  "Who's she writing to?"

  "I suspect it's her high-school boyfriend," said Molly, "but she won't really say. Be nice to her, anyway; she's suffering from something." She sat up and fixed Janet with a fierce, if sleepy, blue eye, and Janet did not list for her exactly the faults Tina was suffering from.

  When Tina came back, Molly had returned to bed with Fourth Ericson's copy of the Sunday paper, and Janet was sitting propped up with pillows like an invalid, reading Plato.

  The translation was lumpy and difficult. Perhaps she should learn Greek.

  "How was the play?" said Tina, appearing suddenly in her pink bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, all scrubbed and healthy-looking with her wet hair pinned neatly on top of her head.

  "Depends who you ask," said Molly. "I thought it was wonderful. Thomas thought the second half was wonderful. Robin thought it was much flawed." She looked at Janet.

  "I loved it," said Janet. "They didn't cut any of my favorite speeches, but I guess they got a lot of Thomas's. And it was awfully Freudian."

  "Well, why is he so interested in his mother's sex life?" demanded Molly.

  "Because it reflects on Denmark—and it reflects on him. That's why he thinks his flesh is sullied; because his own mother could do such an awful thing."

  "What awful thing?" said Tina, picking clothing out of her drawers. Janet and Molly always rummaged, but whatever Tina wanted seemed always to be meekly on top, and folded, too.

  "Married her dead husband's brother."

  "What's awful about that?"

  "They thought it was incest, just like marrying your own brother would be."

  "That's silly," said Tina. "Any geneticist could tell you that."

  "Well, that's what they thought."

  "I doubt they cared much about genetics, as such," said Molly. "You're right, though.

  All that talk about harlots and blood and bastardy. As if they thought you inherited moral, not physical, traits."

  "Well, schizophrenia's inherited, isn't it, and a lot of mental problems that make people do things the Elizabethans would think were immoral?"

  They wrangled amiably until Nick arrived, explaining that he had been seized with a fear that his note would not be delivered in time. Molly and Janet had to grab their clothes, run to the bathroom, wash and dress hurriedly, and run back again. Nick had sat down on Janet's unmade bed with her copy of The Daughter of Time, which he was reading in bits whenever he came over. He refused to borrow it because he had no time for extracurricular reading. Tina was sitting on the end of Janet's bed, smiling and talking in her pleasant voice about the antics of her Bio 10 teacher. Nick looked a little harried; he had closed the book over his finger but seemed to wish he could get back to it. Serve you right for not just meeting me the way you suggested, thought Janet.

  It was a sunny day with a brisk wind, and while there was very little green left on the trees, the grass, as Nick remarked, was the color of Ireland.

  "Have you ever been there?" said Tina, as they crossed the wooden bridge to Dunbar.

  The lake was bright and ruffled. The ducks were nowhere to be seen.

  "Once," said Nick. "When I was just a baby. My family used to tell stories about it—how I, a mere babe in arms, grabbed for my father's glass of ale just as if I knew what it was, and the like. I don't remember any of that—but ever since then I've had the same dream, and in it the greenest land you've ever seen. I thought of it when I read Frodo's dream," he said to Janet. "I wonder if Tolkien was thinking of Ireland."

  "What's the rest of your dream?" said Tina, clearly impatient with Frodo.

  "It varies," said Nick. "Depending on what I've been reading, you know. But the land is always the same."

  "I've got a dream like that," said Molly. "About a house. In the dream, I think it's the house I grew up in. But it's a lot larger, and the wrong color, and hasn't got any neighboring houses. The only thing about it that's really like our house is the mulberry tree in the back

  yard. But I know it's ours."

  "Give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name," said Nick. "Are you a lunatic, a lover, or a poet?"

  "Lunatic," said Molly. "Coming soon to a dormitory near you. Just as soon as we do this next chapter in math, I'm done for."

  "I'll be the lover," said Tina, holding the door of Dunbar open for them.

  "That leaves you as the poet," said Nick to Janet.

  "And what about you?"

  "The dreamer," said Nick. "Just the dreamer."

  They filed into Dunbar dining hall, made their choices among grilled-cheese sandwiches, eggplant parmesan that looked like a collection of stepping stones in some alien red swamp, or chicken pot pie. The latter was a thing Janet had never seen in a Blackstock dining hall, and she asked the student server about it.

  "It was supposed to be fried," said the boy, "but the apples for the pies were bad and we got too many carrots. I think they're Taylor's carrots, but Dunbar hates Taylor, so Taylor's out of luck. Anyway, put it all together and you get pot pie."

  "Is it very glutinous?" said Molly.

  "Shouldn't be. Somebody else got our cornstarch."

  They moved on, and eventually stood in an inconvenient crowd by the milk dispensers, looking for enough empty tables in proximity. Janet became aware, over the sea of heads, of a sturdy dark arm waving vigorously.

  "There's Sharon," she said.

  Sharon and Nora had one table for two with a vacant one next to it; and by dint of some shoving and squeezing and stealing two chairs from a stack just inside the door of the steamy kitchen, they fitted everybody around these two.

  "Cheer her up," said Sharon generally. "I can't do a thing with her."

  "What's the matter?" said Tina.

  "Your goddamn classmates," said Nora, as if it were their fault. Her round face was flushed, and she looked as if she had not washed her hair in a week. Her white blouse was clean but unironed, and her jeans had a sort of gray sheen on them. "I have never seen such idiot freshmen. I am going to have to report them to the Dean of Residential Life, and he is probably going to have them arrested. Stupid. They think because they've got coed dormitories and independent studies in the social effects of television and an administration that turns a blind eye to people living with their lovers in dorm rooms, they can suck up any fucking illegal substance they want to, carouse around all day and all night, throw books out the windows, keep their whole end of the floor awake all night, make three National Merit Scholars fail their physics exams—I'd like to kill them."

  "Jen and Barbara down on Third smoke dope all the time," said Sharon mildly.

  "And you smoke it with them. So what? Who cares? You're quiet about it—and you don't fail quizzes, either, right?"

  "I did freshman year."

  "But you didn't make other people fail theirs."

  "Not that I recollect."

  "They can do any damn thing they can think up if they don't bother anybody else and their work doesn't suffer," said Nora. " I don't care. College doesn't care either. But we can't put up with this. Jesus Christ, apart from anything else, one of them's going to go out a window some fine night."

  "Good riddance," said Tina.

  "You can say that, you're not responsible for them. I am."

  Nick said reflectively, '"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest: for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.'"

  "Huh!" said Nora. "I wish that was all. I wish we had any ancientry."

 
; "Can't you talk to Melinda Wolfe?" said Janet.

  There was a silence: Nora looked at Sharon and then away, Sharon looked at her plate, and Nick stared over Janet's head as if she had not spoken.

  "That is what she's for, isn't it?" said Tina.

  "She can't threaten them with anything I haven't threatened them with already," said Nora.

  "But maybe she can think of some other approach," said Molly.

  "Maybe," said Nora. "Anyway, never mind the young idiots. Are you guys okay? I haven't given half a thought to anybody who was behaving. Is the course load too much?

  Are you getting enough sleep? Any petty squabbles you want settled?"

  Make my roommate stop making eyes at my boyfriend, thought Janet. Molly said,

  "The course load is too much, but not too much too much. Everybody seems to be suffering about the same, so you assume it's normal. And it's really amazing what people will put up with if they do think it's normal. Maybe I'll switch to Psychology."

  "Not around here," said Nora. "It's a bad department since Jensen left."

  "Thomas was saying that about Poli Sci," said Janet.

  "What, that it was a bad department since Jensen left?" said Nick.

  Janet thumped him on the head with her soup spoon. "Goldstein, I think he said," she continued. "Are we losing a lot of good professors lately?"

  "Just got two more good ones in Geo," said Sharon.

  "I think a couple of departments are just in a slump right now," said Nora. "It happens." She rose, picked up a tray that still contained most of the food she had put on it, and said, "I have to study. See you later."

  They watched her go out the door. Sharon said to Janet, "Kevin tells me you do a mean fifty-yard dash."

  "Fat lot of good he was to me at the time," said Janet, over Molly's, "What?"

  "We'll tell you later," said Janet. "If we may," she added to Nick.

  "Do, do," said Nick irritably. "Only not in the public hall, for God's sake."

  "Bound to get out eventually," said Sharon. "Part of the game. Homecoming's coming up, you know."