Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  "I heard you," said Nick. "Anybody would think Tina was worth defending."

  That was a Robin remark, and Janet had no intention of responding to it. "Let's put our shoes on and make the bed," she said. "Molly gets so embarrassed if she sees any signs of what she knows perfectly well goes on in here."

  Janet and an unembarrassed Molly dragged Nick and Robin off across the frozen lake for an early dinner in Dunbar. Normally one did not eat in Dunbar in the winter; it was glass on three sides, pleasant in spring, summer, and fall, but chilly and depressing with frost crawling up the outside of the glass and condensation running down the inside. The lighting was bad, too; they relied on nature to supplement it, and during a Minnesota March nature was not cooperative.

  Robin and Nick took the news that Thomas had managed the switch to the English Department, apparently without being expelled, in the same irritating way they took so much other information. They looked at one another with eyebrows raised; then Nick shrugged and Robin rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

  "He's sticking with Tina, still?" said Robin.

  "If she'll let him," said Janet.

  "She'll let him," said Molly. "If he gives her a good dramatic scene first."

  "Oho," said Robin. "Disillusionment comes to the tolerant."

  "That sounds like the title of another goddamned Jacobean play," said Molly.

  "It sounds like a Greek comedy, really," said Nick. "But Robin, my lad, if disillusionment really ever does come to the tolerant, you are going to be in a great deal of trouble."

  "How is it," said Janet hastily, "that we know more about Thomas than you do?"

  "There's departmental gossip," said Nick, "which is how we know these things, but it hasn't caught up with events yet. You, I presume, have talked to Thomas directly—an unconscionable shortcut, which we will now put to its proper use by going about the Classics majors and telling them all about it, with distortions."

  "Rumor," said Robin, "all stuck about with tongues."

  "Painted full of tongues," Molly corrected him instantly. The few stage directions in Shakespeare had fascinated her, and she was particularly fond of this one.

  Nick burst out laughing in a manner more like Robin's than his own; Robin merely smiled. "I cry you mercy," he said.

  "That's okay," said Molly kindly. "You're only a Classics major, after all."

  Nick got up and left the room, hooting.

  "And he might as well be one also," said Robin, "the way he acts."

  "Everybody gets weird before exams," said Molly.

  Janet, watching the dining-hall doors swing in Nick's wake, thought resignedly that at least this was better than turning pale and wan at a recitation of Keats.

  After dinner Janet and Molly found themselves a corner of the library—you could not expect a whole padded room to yourself on the eve of exams—and studied diligently for several hours. At nine-thirty Janet looked over at Molly, who seemed wholly absorbed in her despised physics book, and decided to get her something to drink without bothering to ask. They could always take it back to the room and freeze it on the windowsill.

  The soda machine on their level was empty. Janet went down a flight of steps. The machine there was still stocked, but there were six people waiting to use it, and the one presently in possession had been reduced to hitting the side of the machine with her fist and threatening it in Spanish. She was a typical Minnesota Swede, but had obviously been studying Spanish for some time. Janet was stiff from sitting so long; she decided to take a turn through the third-floor stacks and see how matters stood when she got back.

  It was not really possible to take a turn around the third floor. The warm room, bright with fluorescent lighting and smelling of library bindings and stale coffee, was full of people. Every carrel was occupied, and if you walked by them half the people hunched their shoulders in unconscious irritation and a few actually glared at you. The long oak tables under the western windows were full, mostly of desperate researchers who should have done their term papers a month ago. Every aisle between stacks had at least two people in it, their heads tilted sideways like parakeets.

  Janet gave up and wandered out of the stacks and down a short corridor that contained offices and a few classrooms. There might be another Coke machine down here, or at least a drinking fountain. But there wasn't, just the bare concrete emergency staircase with its red EXIT sign glaring. Janet turned around and walked back up the hallway, and then down it again, reading the signs on the doors, LIBRARY 304; LIBRARY 306; LIBRARY 308—RARE

  BOOK ROOM, OPEN M-F 9:00-1:00, 2:00-8:00, SAT 12:00-4:00; LIBRARY 310—MRS.

  KNUDSON; LIBRARY 312—THOMPSON COLLECTION. Janet stopped. No hours were listed.

  She pressed her nose against the frosted glass of the door, but the room was dark. She put her hand on the knob and turned, and the door opened without a sound.

  Janet felt for a light switch, found it to the left of the door, and pushed both switches up. One of them, it appeared, controlled the fluorescent light in the ceiling, which, after the manner of its kind, flickered and hesitated before blinding you. The other controlled incandescent lighting in three glass cases in the middle of the room. Well, all right. She had been meaning to visit this room since Thanksgiving, but not unnaturally had not gotten around to it. Molly would be fathoms deep in her physics for hours, and they had agreed to stay until the library closed.

  Janet walked forward. The books of the collection were on shelves around the edges of the room. In the usual cockeyed manner of Blackstock, you could check them out. She found, widely scattered, the Liddell and Scott, McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader, with its four sister volumes, and the Matthew Arnold essay. Newton's De Rerum Natura, in Latin; yellowing nineteenth-century texts in astronomy and mathematics; more Greek, Homer and Herodotus and Xenophon and Sophocles. The poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley; no Byron.

  A multivolume set of Shakespeare bound in green and gold. Pope and Dryden, Addison and Steele, Elizabeth Barrett Browning but not her husband, Dickens but not Hardy.

  Janet considered the glass cases. Victoria Thompson, who had died in 1897, had owned an ivory comb and an ivory-backed mirror carved with a dolphin, and a couple of scrimshaw hair combs. She had owned a ruby bracelet and several rings, opal and amethyst and garnet; and she had been fond of red dresses. There were a velvet one and a red-and-blue calico and a red silk. She had also had a great deal of embroidered underwear that anybody today might be happy to wear as a dress or a pantsuit. Janet moved on around the cases, reading the typed cards interspersed with the exhibits. One of them referred to Miss Thompson, as Peg or somebody had indeed done on Janet's first day here, as a member of the class of 1899.

  Janet felt as if she had been hit in the stomach. Yes, of course she must have died here, or why would her ghost run about tossing her college books out the window? But the thought of her dying as a sophomore at college made the entire display suddenly obscene.

  Good God, thought Janet, are they going to collect the underwear belonging to that girl who killed herself a couple of years ago and put it in a glass case with her favorite record albums and her high-school class ring and her goddamned Poli-Sci books?

  Maybe they would at that. Janet had been going at the display backward, and now came to the long typed scroll that introduced it. The books comprising the Thompson Collection had been given to the College at Victoria's death by her parents, and had been housed in the college library since about 1925. But the other articles were displayed as a result of the efforts of the Women's Caucus, because Victoria Thompson had not died by accident. She had thrown all her books out the window and taken laudanum—and where had she gotten it, for heaven's sake—because she was pregn ant. "In 1897?" said Janet

  hollowly.

  She turned off the lights, shut the door, and went back to Molly, passing the soda machine with only a momentary twinge. Their padded room had cleared out; now there was only a thin dark-brown boy writing feverishly on a yellow
legal pad, and Molly, who was making origami cranes out of the scratch paper from her calculations. She took one look at Janet and got up off her pillow in a hurry. "What's the matter?"

  "Let's go, I'll tell you on the way home."

  They climbed the stairs to the top of the library, took off their slippers and stuffed them into their knapsacks, struggled into their heavy boots and put on coats and hats and mittens, and went through the glass doors into the freezing night. There were seventeen inches of snow on the ground, the top two soft, fresh, and still clean. The sky was clear, the stars impossibly distant, and the air like thin ice. Because there was no wind, it was pleasant.

  "So what's wrong?" said Molly. They passed Masters Hall, its columns luminous like the snow, and turned right to pass Chester, which was only a dark block behind its larches.

  "The Women's Caucus has a special display in the Thompson Collection."

  "That's right, I read about it in the newsletter."

  A lump of snow fell out of a larch onto the swept sidewalk in front of them.

  "It says Victoria Thompson killed herself because she was pregnant."

  "In 1897?"

  Another lump fell behind them. Janet walked faster. Chester Hall's blind dark windows were like openings into a whole lot of very unpleasant alternate dimensions. The architect must have gotten the proportions wrong or something. She said, "That's exactly what I thought."

  "I didn't know you could get pregnant in a girls' college in 1897."

  The larches rustled, and something crackled. Another lump of snow landed behind them, and a dusting of it went down Janet's neck where she had tied the wool scarf too loosely.

  "Hey!" shouted Molly. "Quit throwing snow, goddamn it! Stupid jerks." She walked faster too. Janet was relieved; Molly was more likely to throw snow back, and with people in the kind of mood they got into during exam week, a snow fight could get nasty.

  "It wasn't a girls' college," said Janet. "It's been coeducational since the day it opened.

  They were very strict about everything, though. But I guess there have always been ways to manage these things."

  "I didn't know good girls did manage them in those days."

  "All the worse when they did, then. If she felt she had to kill herself—"

  "Right."

  "Do you think there really is a ghost?"

  "I don't know," said Molly. "I have to admit," she said, as they turned left between the Music and Drama Center and the ghostly skeleton of Olin, "I thought Tina might be doing it for the attention. But she's not getting any attention out of it—and after this last exhibition over Thomas, I'm certain it's not Tina's style to mystify everybody and chuckle quietly over it."

  "The display says that before she killed herself she threw all her books out the window."

  "And how do they know?"

  They climbed the snowy steps to Ericson. The College was good about keeping snow shoveled, but the wind was better at spreading it out again.

  "Good question," said Janet, yanking open the heavy door. The foyer smelled overwhelmingly of coffee. Janet saw in a moment that this was because there was an urn of it on a table in the lounge, surrounded by the ruins of sandwiches and cookies. Nine or ten girls were seated and sprawled in the room. The television set was off and they were all reading or scribbling. Two of them scowled automatically at Janet and Molly, who ducked quickly up the stairs. "That's a very good question," said Janet. "Any good scholar asks about sources. We can go back tomorrow and check."

  "I have a physics test tomorrow," said Molly. "Maybe in the afternoon."

  Tina was not in the room, but her bed was rumpled and on her desk was a green glass vase full of tiny red roses, huge white carnations streaked with red, and a few drooping clumps of greeny-yellow flowers. The sweet scent of the roses and carnations was underlaid by an odd bitter smell.

  "My God!" said Molly. "I guess Thomas was repentant all right. What are those ugly little green flowers?"

  Janet, whose mother grew herbs, sniffed at the maligned blooms and laughed. "I think it's rue," she said. "Do you suppose Tina will get it?"

  "Where did Thomas get it this time of year?" said Molly. "You can't tell me florists sell something that looks and smells like that."

  "Health-food store, maybe," said Janet. "I think you can use it to make tea. It must be good medicine if it tastes like it smells. It's better in the summer in the garden."

  "I don't suppose we could get rid of it? Just the rue?"

  "Tina would kill us. We can open the window if you want."

  At four o'clock that morning, four hours from the time of Molly's physics test, while Janet was awake listening for the sound of bagpipes, Tina came along the hallway whistling Mozart, put her key into the lock so quietly that Janet did not hear it, and managed to squeeze past Molly's toy theater without making anything rattle or swearing under her breath. She closed the window over her bed, undressed, and went to bed as quietly as a ghost, and Janet did not hear Molly stir or turn over. But she was annoyed just the same.

  They ascertained the next afternoon that the room housing the Thompson Collection contained no sources for its allegations. Molly dragged Janet, protesting, to the little cubicle given by the College to the Women's Caucus, and they talked to the student in charge, a tall, thin young woman with long black hair and a great deal of eye makeup. She was rather abrupt in her manner, but readily fished out for them photocopies of Victoria Thompson's diary and two letters written by her mother to her aunt afterwards. The mother's letters employed a lot of circumlocution—which was just as well, thought Janet, because if one could not be amused and indignant about that, there would be no barrier between oneself and the awfulness of Victoria's story. In conjunction with the diary it was clear that the exhibit's summary of events had been accurate. The diary made Victoria's lover sound rather like Kit Lane; but of course Kit's was a type much in vogue at the time.

  Victoria's family had wanted very much to know who the young man in the case was—so they could horsewhip him, or what? said Molly—but possessed no clue at all.

  "It's not Tina's style to fake a ghost," said Janet to Molly as they went down the steps of the Student Union afterwards, "but is it Peg's?"

  "I don't think so."

  Despite all the upheaval, nobody failed any courses. Tina got straight A's. So did Molly, but that was forgivable. Janet got a B in astronomy, her theory being sound but her mathematics rather uncertain.

  So they began Spring Term. Janet was back with Professor Evans for English 11, at the civilized hour of eleven-fifteen in the morning; she was taking History 12, required for graduation, to get it out of the way; and after very little conscious thought but a great deal of consideration in the back of her head, she was taking Greek 1 from Professor Medeous.

  She had meant to take it the following fall from the exacting but kindly Ferris, whose fault it was anyway that she was interested. But next fall contained two vital and daunting English courses and next spring a rare offering of Greek Lyric Poetry, which, if she took Greek 1 and 2 and Homer, she would be allowed to register for. So she gritted her teeth and wrote down Medeous's name on her form.

  Melinda Wolfe had not said a word about it; she had smiled pleasantly and signed the sheet and asked if Janet wanted a Phys Ed course this spring. Janet had not: she figured, though she didn't say so to her advisor, that walks with Nick would probably fill the bill very well, even if they could not be credited toward graduation.

  Spring Term began on March 27, and was distinguished by five inches of snow.

  People who had gone home to balmier places for spring vacation, including Molly and Tina, grumbled a great deal; Janet thought they were crazy. Nick and Robin, who had both stayed at Blackstock helping Medeous with a computerized concordance to Euripides, grumbled also. Thomas thought they were crazy. As a result of the final conversation on this subject, Janet found herself engaged to go traying with him down the hill to Bell Field one more time before the thaw came.
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  It was already rather warm, and the snow was soft; but a previous party had packed a couple of paths down already. Janet had invited Nick to come along, but he was going to a small party that Professor Ferris had arranged for the members of his forthcoming Aeschylus class. So she and Thomas met at the top of the hill with their trays under their arms. Janet had abstracted a red one at lunch, red being the easiest color to find should the tray escape and go shooting across the frozen field. Thomas had a blue one, and also one of the triple-sized, scarred brown trays on which the bowls of toppings were set out every Sunday for people to concoct their own desserts with. He was wearing one of those huge thick sweaters in incomprehensible Irish stitches, and no hat. He had had the wit to put some gloves on.

  "I'm amazed you have any ears left," Janet greeted him.

  "There's a hood on my winter jacket," said Thomas, dropping his trays in the trampled snow. "But I'm not wearing my winter jacket in March. It just encourages them."

  "Encourages whom?"

  "The sprites of the weather. How do you want to do this? Some solo trips first to get the feel of it, and then try the big tray? I've never used one of these before. I hope we don't break it. You go first so I can push you; you've got less mass than I have."

  Janet sat down on her tray, tucked up her feet, and said, "Ready."

  Thomas gave her a huge shove. The tray slithered down a few yards, hesitated at a spot where they hadn't gotten the path smoothed down to start with, fell six inches with an ungodly bump, and flung itself down the hill fast enough to bring tears to her eyes.

  They had made the bottom of the slide properly: instead of stopping abruptly in the hollow made by everybody's stamping feet, the tray skimmed halfway across the huge expanse of Bell Field, slowed, and slowed, and stopped somewhere past the middle. The setting sun lined the bare branches of the trees across the stream with gold, but down here there was a blue and gray twilight. The sky had already lost the profound and chilly color it got in winter.

  Janet got up and picked up her tray just as Thomas came hurtling past her, whooping.