Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  In any case, Nick would be around all summer; and Janet, half of whose college fees were waived because her father taught there, had secured a part-time job at Griegs's Greenhouse that would take care of her financial needs for the next year and give her plenty of time to catch up on her sleep and her extracurricular reading, as well as to see Nick.

  June was in fact quite pleasing. The weather continued to behave in an astonishing, Camelot-like fashion; working in a greenhouse afforded a lot of unexpected insight into a number of poets, especially the minor Elizabethans; and she and Nick, released from the constraints of college and the Minnesota winter, had time to do ordinary things like picnicking, learning to play tennis, attending movies, eating in restaurants, going up to the city to hear the Minnesota Orchestra, and bicycling to neighboring towns to rifle their used-book stores.

  Janet still felt that something was wrong. She put it down to a natural fear that nothing this good could possibly last; but what finally made her stop and examine the situation carefully was her reading, at long last, of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning.

  She picked it up one afternoon at the end of June. Nick was working all afternoon and evening; she was done with her work at the greenhouse until the day after tomorrow; and she had just today during her lunch break polished off the last of the new science-fiction novels that had been piling up while she was reading dead authors instead. She had a letter from Molly to answer, and thought it would be nice to be able to tell her that she had read

  The Lady's Not for Burning. She began on it after supper, and put it down very soberly at eleven-thirty.

  Everybody had gone to bed, though a tinny sound as of music played far too loudly through headphones could be discerned from Lily's room. It was a fine mellow night with a light breeze, and the cicadas were singing like crazy. Janet rubbed her fingers over the library markings on the spine of the book. This pleasant and convoluted work contained two sets of lovers. If you were eighteen and had never been in love before, you could be excused for not saying or thinking or feeling the sorts of things that Thomas Mendip and Jennet Jourdemayne said and thought and felt: Thomas and Jennet were entirely grown-up and had, so far as Janet could see, been through two separate versions of hell; no comfortable eighteen-year-old could expect to be as they were when they fell in love.

  But the young lovers, Richard and Alizon, so silly and inexperienced that even Janet could smile at them and feel mildly superior—they, too, seemed to inhabit a country she had never visited. "Whenever my thoughts are cold and I lay them against Richard's name, They seem to rest On the warm ground where summer sits, As golden as a bumblebee."

  When Janet's thoughts were cold, they stayed so. Nick was bright, but he wasn't warm.

  Good grief, she thought, falling back against her wadded pillows and gaping at the cracked, familiar ceiling. Neither of us has ever even said I love you. What are we doing?

  The lady is for burning, she thought, and swallowed a half-hysterical giggle. She turned off the lamp and watched the shadows of the leaves move in a mingling of moon- and street-light also familiar to her from childhood. I'm sleeping with a friend of mine, she decided. That's all right, no doubt; but you'd think, if it wasn't love, it wouldn't take such a lot of time and thought. Maybe it is love. How would I know? What does Christopher Fry know, anyway?

  No, that wasn't the way to go about it. Christopher Fry knew a great deal besides how to write poetry. Janet sat up suddenly, turned the light back on, opened the book, and looked at the date. Then she read the back flap. Christopher Fry wasn't dead. Christopher Fry was a modern poet. "Well, I will be go to hell," said Janet; thought that over, and decided it was not so pleasing an expression as she had thought when she heard Professor Wallace say it.

  She pulled her journal out from under the bed and wrote a long letter to Molly.

  She did not discuss the matter with Nick, though they did talk about the play quite a lot. It occurred to her that the whole atmosphere of their times together was unfriendly to personal conversation. She spent a few disconcerting afternoons and evenings with Nick trying to watch herself and him as through a plate-glass window, and succeeded only in losing two arguments about Keats and one about how exactly you were supposed to scan the verse of Fry's plays. It was like trying to think about the Fourth Ericson ghost while you were in Ericson, or about Melinda Wolfe when you were anywhere at Blackstock.

  She devoted a little time to discussing the ghost with Nick, who seemed taken aback that she should question for a moment the existence of spirits. She tried to discuss Melinda Wolfe with him, but he simply launched into a rambling story of how Wolfe had taught Herodotus when Nick's brother was at Blackstock. He was conveniently interrupted by a thunderstorm, and they had to pack up their belongings in a hurry and flee from the Arboretum to Taylor, where there were better things to do than talk about Blackstock's instructors in the Classics.

  When she got home that night, Janet thought of introducing Nick to Danny Chin and letting them argue matters out. So far as she could tell, the main difference in her intellect produced by one quarter of a liberal-arts education was the eruption of a mad ability to see several sides to every question. Nick and Danny were both quite sure of their opinions, and were on opposite sides of this one. She sat in her hot bedroom, waiting for the storm-cooled air to make its way through the open windows, and tried to imagine their meeting. She had in her time been able to imagine in vivid color and detail, complete with dialogue, a variety of far less likely events, including, to pick several of the more embarrassing, that she had managed to finish Keats's Hyperion to universal critical and popular acclaim, or that Robert Frost had praised her poetry and invited her to tea. But Nick and Danny, though an infinitely more probable combination than Janet Carter and Robert Frost, would not fit into the same scene in her mind. It was like writing a really bad poem, one whose central metaphor was flawed or whose basic emotion shallow. You could struggle all you liked; you could put down a lot of lines on paper; but you could not force these dried-up bulbs to blossom.

  She did call Danny the next day. He had managed, through one of his older brothers, to get a construction job with the state, and was spending twelve or more hours a day doing strenuous things with bridges and ditches in the blazing sun. The money was very good. He said he wished there were a locker he could check his brain into, since it wouldn't work for him anyway, and he was afraid the heat would ruin it forever. Janet told him that any brain capable of coming up with that metaphor might be delirious, but was not dull, and asked when they might meet. Danny said he had a week off at the end of August, and if he remembered to call her they would know his brain had suffered no permanent damage.

  Molly's letter answering hers was a long time coming. Tina, on the other hand, wrote every week, scented letters on pink stationery with pictures of teddy bears. She wrote straightforwardly of her job as a secretary for a small firm that sold large cardboard barrels, mournfully of the fact that she and her high-school friends seemed to be drifting apart, and rather frantically of her inability to respond to Thomas's long and poetic letters in the manner she felt they deserved. Janet answered in terms as reassuring as she could manage.

  She suggested that if Tina just wrote to Thomas about what really interested her, Thomas would be bound to catch the interest and be pleased with her letters.

  Molly wrote less regularly, but very long and entertaining letters. She was washing glassware and taking apart dogfish sharks for a laboratory on an island off the coast of Maine. Maine was a childhood love of hers, and she was wildly happy to be back there, except for missing Robin, who apparently wrote short, opaque letters and an occasional sonnet, but would not give her the kind of detail about his daily life that would have made her happy. Janet tried to find out if he wrote to Nick; he apparentl y sent a postcard now and again about something that amused him, but that was all.

  Molly's letter on being in love, when it finally arrived, comprised eight lined sheets o
f yellow legal paper, written small on both sides, and was not of a sort to reassure Janet at all.

  Molly was having precisely the same problem with her relations to Robin—exacerbated by Robin's secretive and undemonstrative nature. She had thought she was in love with him, having felt far more strongly about him than about any of the people she had gone out with in high school. But one of them was also working at the lab, and she was feeling about him quite as she had felt about Robin, if not more so, since he was willing to talk about himself and was not always falling into silly moods and having to be chaffed out of them.

  "So I don't know," she concluded, "if I should just become abandoned and have a good time, or reconsider that Spanish convent. Or I could set up some new experiments to discover what being in love really does feel like—except they're all irreproducible, of course. What do you suppose Robin would say if I went to bed with somebody else? I think he'd shrug and say it was time to go to lunch. But what if I'm wrong?"

  Janet wrote back urging caution. It was with the greatest of difficulty that she refrained from asking Nick what he thought Robin would do if Molly went to bed with somebody else. She did pass on Molly's complaints about the paucity of communication from Robin, who was doing community theater in Omaha, Nebraska, and ought to have enough time to write. She was still intermittently tempted to burst out with the real question.

  Mercifully, Molly wrote back in a few weeks to say she had thought better of it, having finally received a ten-page letter from Robin in which he explained in considerable detail what a difficult person he was, and thanked Molly for putting up with him. At around the same time Janet got a despondent letter from Tina saying that when she was interested in something, she just did it, what was the use of talking about it, and all the letters she had tried to write Thomas about her interests had sounded so stupid she had torn them up. Janet tried to find out if Nick knew anything of Thomas's state of mind, but it seemed that the two of them did not correspond. Janet finally, near the end of a clear, dry, warm July utterly at odds with the normal habits of Minnesota summers, wrote to Thomas herself, in fairly general terms. If he answered civilly, she might bring up the matter of Tina.

  He did not, however, answer at all; and as August sulked in in a halo of thunderstorms and danced out in a blaze of sunshine, and September came on as hot as summer, Janet relegated all these problems to the time when school should start again, and gave herself up meantime to enjoying the last of her vacation.

  It turned out that she would have to enjoy the final week of it without Nick. Professor Medeous was taking a little group of her students to a cabin in Wisconsin for a week before classes began. Janet was unable to determine, from the various things Nick said, if this was a tutoring session for people who were behind in their work, an advanced class for those who were ahead, or just a sort of prolonged party for favorites of either persuasion.

  Nick came over for dinner the night before he was to leave, and departed rather early, since he had to pack. He did not invite Janet back to Taylor to help him, which didn't disturb her particularly but did seem to affront her mother.

  "You just don't like him," said Janet. "Why?"

  "He's very charming," said her mother, reflectively. "I just wonder if he's reliable."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I wonder what he'd do if you got pregnant." She shot Janet a sort of look that Janet had been more accustomed to receiving when she was ten, and said, "You are on the pill, aren't you?"

  "No," said Janet, staggered into the truth; and seeing how very alarmed her mother looked, she added hastily, "I'm using a more old-fashioned method, but it's quite reliable."

  "None of them are a hundred percent reliable," said her mother, darkly.

  Janet had often wondered if Andrew was an accident, but she would not have asked it for the world. "Nick is a gentleman," she said, a little hotly. "I'm sure he'd be honorable."

  "Even if he would," said her mother, "you might not like it very much, if you want to go on to graduate school."

  "I'm being as careful as I can."

  "Well, I suppose one can't ask for more," said her mother. "I hope you're right about your swain, that's all."

  "I wouldn't sleep with somebody I didn't trust," said Janet; and though she had spoken with perfect sincerity, she immediately wondered if it was true.

  They went on rocking—they were sitting in the porch swing—and presently Janet's mother asked her what her hours were at the greenhouse next day, and they passed on to harmless topics.

  Danny called her the next evening and, after he had been congratulated for retaining the use of his brain, asked if he could have three days to sleep and then bicycle with her to the Dundas Book Fair. He said he hadn't read a book all summer and was worried that he had forgotten how.

  It was all very well for him: he had been sweating in the sun for three months, while Janet had been doing light work in a greenhouse, going for twilight walks, and lurking inside the rest of the time. It was a cloudless and ferociously hot day and the secondary roads they bicycled along were a welter of dust, which combined with the sweat to make a salty mud. Janet got mad at Danny for getting so far ahead of her and madder when he stopped to wait.

  The book fair was held in and around a disused barn. The sun and the dust were about the same as on the road. The books were, as always, varied, fascinating, and very cheap.

  But in the first fifteen minutes Danny beat her to a complete set of the D'Artagnan romances, a huge volume of sixteenth-century maps, Lord Hornblower in hardcover, and six of the Rick Brant books. She did find two minor works of Dorothy Sayers in hardcover, and four Nancy Drews, the old ones where Nancy drove a roadster and there were words longer than two syllables. But it seemed a poor compensation.

  They settled with their booty and paper cups of fruit punch in the shade of a huge maple. Danny's sun-dark, sweaty face was blissful. He looked like a statue of an especially smug Buddha that its caretakers had neglected to clean recently. All he needed was some bird droppings. No birds obliged. Janet finished her punch and began to be ashamed of her temper. It was Danny's youngest sister's birthday and he had to be home for dinner, so if she wanted to talk to him this was the only time to do it.

  Danny was gloating over his book of maps. Janet paused t

  o gather her thoughts. But

  like Danny and Nick, they would not come together in the same place. What she had was not a series of events connected by necessity and probability, as both Aristotle and Danny would require; not tangible proof of strange goings-on; not reasonable suspicions backed by evidence. She felt what confounded her as she had felt the weight of Christianity on English literature. Something pervasive and all-embracing manifested itself from time to time, in books thrown out of windows, in Nick and Robin's conspiratorial glances, in Thomas's costuming of the Classics Department, in Melinda Wolfe's gorgeous refreshments and Professor Medeous's grave demeanor.

  "So," said Danny, closing the book carefully, "seen any ghosts lately?"

  Tina was returning a day before Molly, which made Janet a little uneasy. She dutifully met Tina at the bus station, however, and helped her carry her suitcases up the hill, past the Morgue, past Taylor and the chapel and the tilting M&D Center and the narrow ends of Ericson and Forbes, and up all the stairs to their new room at the top of Eliot. Then they carried all their own boxes and as many of Molly's as they could find up from the basement of Eliot, where they had been deposited last June.

  Molly's toy theater they made a special effort to find; setting it up for Molly had been a brainwave of Janet's, mostly so they would have some common goal to talk about. They found a stray lounge table from the previous (and rather sturdier) issue of college furniture, and lugged it cursing up the steps. Janet expended a few longing thoughts on the boring new dormitories, which had elevators in them. But after all, one had to carry only twice a year; one had to live with the walls and woodwork and the proportions of the windows and the height of the ceiling
s day in and day out.

  Their room was furnished with three single beds, which was a blessing. The furniture in Eliot was like that in Ericson, though, like the rest of the building, a little shabbier. They had a green carpet instead of a red one. They put the old striped curtains up anyway, to see if they would get along with the carpet or not. They spent several hours moving furniture, so as to make a place for the toy theater where nobody would bump into it.

  Tina was very easy to work with; she was strong and coordinated and didn't complain about being tired or about pounding her thumb with the hammer when they put the hardware for the curtains up. It occurred to Janet that she would probably make a very good sister; she would be easy to live with if there were no expectation of strenuous friendship.

  Maybe they could manage this. They went down to dinner at six in a very amiable spirit, and found Diane Zimmerman and Sharon Washington at the table Sharon and Nora used to occupy.

  Diane had been working for a children's puppet theater, and Sharon had been doing all the dirty work for a couple of geologists in Arizona. They were both very pleased with themselves and their summers. Janet had a sudden shamed feeling that, despite a fair amount of work in the greenhouse, surely a worthy institution, she had squandered her own vacation on self-indulgence.

  Tina too looked depressed, and confessed to Janet later, when they were completing the unpacking and trying to decide where to hang some botanical prints Tina had brought back with her, that she was mostly downcast because her own job and summer had been so ordinary. Janet, standing on a desk chair and adjusting a lovely curlicued drawing of wild hyacinth, looked at her uneasily. If Tina really was ordinary, then making her unhappy about it would serve no purpose whatsoever. She could not think how to ask if Thomas had been putting ideas into Tina's head.