Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  It was Robin. Janet's first thought was that he was coming down with the flu. He was as pale as paste and his eyes looked feverish. He came straight up to her where she sat gaping, twisted sideways in her desk chair. "Tina's jilted Thomas," he announced in the tone of a man delivering the news that the besiegers have breached the walls and there is nothing to do out die bravely.

  "Yes, I know," said Janet, "he was just here. Don't you have a class?"

  "I met Thomas just before; he told me, but he would not stop. You must talk to Tina."

  "What's the matter with you people? What have I got to do with it? I can understand Thomas coming to talk to me—but if you think Tina should reconsider, you tell her so."

  "What makes you think she'd listen for a minute? It's you she listens to. You need but mention there is such a thing as a folk dance," he said the phrase scornfully, as Janet's father was accustomed to say bits of critical jargon he despised, " and she's consumed with it on the moment."

  "Don't be ridiculous," said Janet. "Besides," she added, putting aside her indignation and getting to the really puzzling matter, "what's so bad about Tina's breaking up with Thomas? He's done nothing but agonize about how to break up with her since they met.

  Why should everybody mind so much that she did his dirty work for him?"

  Robin stared down at her for an instant, his lips parted, then, as was his irritating habit, he burst out laughing, slapped his forehead, and reeled over to Janet's bed, where he crouched, making wheezing and choking noises and snorting repulsively. Janet tossed him her box of Kleenex. She thought of going on with her reading, but it would hardly be fair to Pope, for whom she was conceiving a tardy sympathy.

  Robin eventually blew his nose, smoothed down his disordered brown hair, and gave Janet a winning look. She hoped he didn't know just how winning it was. "I cry you mercy," he said, predictably. Janet wished Shakespeare had never invented the phrase.

  "Thomas mopes when he is without a lover. After a week or a month of it, you'll be pleading with Tina, I warrant you."

  "After a month of it," said Janet, coldly, "I'll be taking my examination in Eighteenth-Century Literature and considering switching to Classics. I shall be far too busy to—"

  "Don't do that!" exclaimed Robin, sitting straight up and giving her a nakedly earnest look that made it seem likely he did know how winning the other one was.

  "Why the hell not? You've all been after me to for a year."

  "It's too late for that."

  "Will you talk sense for once!" said Janet, losing all patience.

  "Sir," said Robin, in uncanny imitation of the Korean actor who had played Hamlet a year ago, "I cannot. Cannot what, my lord?" he apostrophized himself sharply, as Rosencrantz had spoken to Hamlet. "Make you a wholesome answer," he said mournfully, as Hamlet. "My wit's diseased." He reverted to his own expression, and looked hopefully at Janet.

  "Oh, go away!" said Janet. "You're enough to try the patience of a saint. Leave me alone. I'll see you at supper. Don't say it! " she added furiously, as Robin seemed about to add some of Hamlet's observations about Polonius and the worms, which would, to a grasshopper mind like his, have been amply suggested by the word "supper."

  "I shan't say it," said Robin, getting up off the bed and bowing to her. "Nobody is dead yet." He turned with considerable aplomb and shut the door with a dignified click that spoke volumes more than Thomas's slam.

  "We're all mad here," said Janet after a moment, and turned resolutely back to Pope.

  He was a great relief after Robin. He was organized; he was methodical; no matter how angry he got—and he was very angry in this poem—he turned his phrases as precisely as a woodworker with a good lathe; and instead of bursting the bounds of his own chosen form of poetry—which even Shakespeare did and which Professor Tyler was always lauding those few modern poets who had a form in the first place for doing—instead of letting the poetry go all to hell the moment he felt any strong emotion coming on, Pope simply made that miraculous container of his, the closed couplet, that much tighter. Janet was entranced. Besides, Pope had been unfairly persecuted—always supposing you could believe him, but that was a problem for later; and even if the actual author hadn't, the person he was playing in this poem had, so what did the history matter—and after this afternoon Janet could feel for him.

  At a quarter to six, a disembodied whistling of "How Should I Your True Love Know"

  ascended the stairs, followed shortly by Nick. He seemed perfectly cheerful; but after he had kissed her and they had inquired after each other's day, he sat down at the end of her bed and looked sober. "Have you heard about Thomas?"

  "What, has he drowned himself?"

  Nick tilted his head and considered her for a moment, it was a maneuver that usually preceded some devastating remark in an argument, and it was with relief that she heard him say merely, "Robin's been here, hasn't he?"

  "I thought he was sick," said Janet. "Why in the world should Thomas's love life exercise him like that?"

  "Classics majors have to look out for one another," said Nick, rather sententiously.

  "Why they, more than another?" said Janet, echoing Hamlet's words to the Gravedigger and silently cursing Robin and Shakespeare too.

  "Can you ask, after that play?"

  "That play" meant The Revenger's Tragedy; as if they had invented some latter-day superstition, none of them called it by name anymore. "Just what," said Janet, "do you think that play conveyed, for pity's sake?"

  Nick looked at her, still soberly, with the dim light of Janet's desk lamp sharpening his blunt nose and chin and making his eyes look an almost luminous blue.

  "Oh, come on. Is the department really like that Duke's court? Adultery, incest, rape, nepotism, misogyny, sleazy intrigue?"

  "The misogyny was ours," said Nick, "and I should have to deny the rape, I think.

  Seduction, now. You might very well say seduction. And for all the rest, certainly."

  "Would you say the same thing if a man were running that department, or is it just—"

  "I did say the same thing when a man was running the department," said Nick.

  "You mean, in the play?"

  Nick nodded.

  "She doesn't look like a seductress. Whom has she seduced?"

  "Pick a name."

  "You?"

  "Not recently," said Nick.

  Janet abruptly lost all relish for the conversation. "Well, look, can't you report her?"

  "I don't think so. The department is divided, you see, and she is a brilliant scholar and a most excellent teacher—you've seen that yourself, already. And she knows everybody. I don't think it would come to much. And what is her job anyway—to make us all happy and virtuous, or to turn out good scholars?"

  "She doesn't have to go out of her way to make you unhappy and wicked, does she?"

  "She doesn't," said Nick, gloomily. "It's just her nature."

  "I really can't believe we're talking about the same woman

  — the one who's so patient

  with Charlie Caspar, when I'd have murdered him in the first week of classes. And she never flirts with any of the boys—"

  "Or the girls?"

  Janet raised her eyebrows and looked at him. He nodded. "Well, she doesn't flirt with the girls, either. She's perfectly impersonal, except that every now and then she makes a very dry sort of joke."

  "You don't belong to her, that's why. People in Greek 1 and 2 haven't declared their majors yet."

  "So you don't belong to her either, yet."

  "There are ways and ways of belonging."

  "Are you in love with her?" demanded Janet. She was sorry the moment she had said it.

  Nick, however, simply said, "No."

  "Is Robin?"

  "Very like, very like."

  Janet almost said, "Poor Molly," but was prevented by the arrival of Molly herself, looking brisk and red-cheeked and cheerful. "Hello, children," she said, "why so glum?"

  "Have yo
u talked to Tina?"

  "Not on Tuesday—she's got eight-thirty Chemistry and then I've got two classes in a row and she's got lab and I've got Bio. Why?"

  "She broke up with Thomas."

  Molly dropped her red hat and stood staring. "I don't know what to say," she remarked. She picked up the hat. "I never would have expected it. Oh, God, is she going to wallow again?"

  "I haven't seen her," said Janet. "Thomas and Robin and Nick have all been to tell me about it, but I haven't seen Tina."

  "No, you wouldn't—she's sewing with Susan and then they're going to meet Sharon and Kevin and go see Woodstock at the Palace."

  "Kevin asked if we'd like to go," said Nick to Janet, "but I didn't feel I could take it just now, not with Kevin playing Those Who Gather No Moss over and over and over again."

  "It's okay; I think you had to be there. I might go as an anthropologist, but not as a music lover."

  "Anyway," said Molly, "if she's going to wallow, I quit."

  "Have you had a bad day?"

  "She isn't going to wallow," said Nick. "Thomas says she's terribly pleased with herself."

  "So long as she doesn't have a reaction," said Molly, dolefully. "Well, I think it's a shame. I always did like Thomas. What do you think she'll bring home now?"

  "There's nothing wrong with her taste," said Nick, in rather stifled tones.

  "What's the matter?" said Janet to Molly.

  Molly took off her jacket, hurled it onto Tina's desk, looked at it for a moment, and hung it up in the closet. "I had a fight with my advisor, that's all," she said from the depths.

  She emerged. "I wanted to take English 52—Shakespeare I, Histories and Comedies—because we had such a good time last winter. And he was giving me a lot of nonsense about how many distribution requirements I was missing, and trying to foist off a lot of goddamned psychology and sociology and religion courses on me."

  "Who's your advisor?" said Nick.

  "Ferris," said Molly. "He's been an utter doll up till now. I don’t know what's got into him. He thought the last Shakespeare course was a wonderful idea. Dimwit."

  "Who won?" said Nick.

  "I did. But he looked so disappointed. It wasn't really a fight, you know—Ferris would never fight. He just looked all reproachful. People shouldn't be allowed to have eyes like that. He's worse than Robin."

  "I'll take it with you," said Nick. "I'd thought of the Victorians, but I'm really not sure I could bear Charles Dickens in the wintertime."

  "How about you?" said Molly to Janet. "Shall we make it three and wreak dreadful havoc?"

  "Well," said Janet, "I'd thought of Victorians, too—but if I wait till next year I can take it from Evans, which is probably better than Tyler. I don't see how a man who likes Robert Bly could do justice to Dickens."

  Melinda Wolfe, whose office Janet could find very reliably by now, had another wreath of dried flowers up on her door. It was mostly of rosemary, both leaves and purple flowers; but it had a few sprigs of thyme and five or six enormous lavender passionflowers.

  Janet looked at these with interest; her mother had tried to grow them, but they did not thrive so far north.

  She knocked on the door, and Melinda Wolfe's mellow voice called, "Come in!"

  She had added another file cabinet to her furniture, which reduced the piles of paper but also diminished the floor space. Janet squeezed through to the chair provided for her, said hello, and pushed her schedule sheet across the desk.

  "Let's see," said Melinda Wolfe. "Chaucer; Homer: The Iliad; Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies." She frowned. "How are you doing on your distribution?"

  "Um," said Janet. "Done with Group Four." That was History, Philosophy, and Religion, and required two courses, which she had already taken. "And Group One isn't any problem because of all the English courses—not to mention the Greek. I guess I need two more in soft sciences and three in hard science and math."

  "Wouldn't you do better to take a science or math course instead of one of these English courses?"

  "English is my major, " said Janet, irritated. "Why not tell me to drop the Homer course?"

  Melinda Wolfe looked at her across the cluttered desk, her green eyes intent, and it was all Janet could do not to drop her own gaze. "Because," said Melinda Wolfe, "Ben Ferris inspired you to take that course and nothing I can say is going to prevent you.

  Besides, you could still change your mind and major in Classics; I wouldn't want to get in the way of that."

  "I don't think I can stand any math or science in the winter," said Janet. "Maybe in the spring."

  Melinda Wolfe got out the 1972-73 catalog and leafed t

  hrough it. "All right, that

  should do," she said. "There are two Math 10 sections in the spring, and Biology for the Humanist, if you don't care to cut up frogs." She looked at the sheet again. "No gym? Anne Beauvais was telling me how very well you did in Swimming; she thought you might like to take the advanced course."

  Janet had been considering it, but immediately dropped the notion. "I thought I'd take Outdoor Fitness in the spring," she said. "There's some very heavy reading in this schedule; I think what I've got is enough."

  Melinda Wolfe signed the schedule sheet but did not push it back across the desk. "I'm not sure what you need an advisor for," she said consideringly.

  Janet collected herself and offered, "To remind me to take math or science in the spring."

  "You're determined to major in English?"

  "I don't know; probably. Could I do a double major, do you suppose?"

  "I'd endorse the request, but you should consider it carefully. It's a lot of work; you'd have to do some twenty-four-credit terms. And you'd better start Latin in the spring if you think you might want a double."

  Janet grimaced. "I'll think about it," she said, and Melinda Wolfe gave her the schedule back.

  She finally saw Tina that evening. Molly had reported that Tina was having her dinners with Susan and Rebecca, who lived in Taylor; presumably Tina was doing this so that Thomas could still dine with the other four if he wanted to. Sharon, however, reported that Kevin said Thomas wasn't bothering with meals much, unless you counted one processed hamburger and five cups of Cave beer as a meal. Janet kept meaning to do something about this alarming news, but Pope had become exciting; Tyler had just added Wallace Stevens, whose work was impenetrable, to his syllabus; and Greek 2 was now being presented with large chunks of Xenophon, which were straightforward but tiring, and small pieces of Plato, which seemed, grammatically, straightforward, but were contextually exhausting.

  Janet was wrestling with one of these, and had just discovered with disgust that her translation from Philosophy 12 was not at all literal, when Tina came home. She looked pleased but nervous, rather as Janet had felt in junior high school when she had found another of the forbidden James Bond ("the sex is silly and the violence will give you nightmares") books at the library sale.

  Molly stopped mumbling over her Morphology book and said sensibly, "Are you all right?"

  Tina, fluffing her hair back up from its confinement under a stocking cap, looked shocked. "Somebody told you."

  "Everybody has told us," said Janet. "Sometimes twice."

  "Pigs," said Tina, reflectively.

  "Well, it was Thomas's news too, you know," said Janet.

  "I know," said Tina, "but he doesn't care."

  "I think he might," said Janet.

  "It's only vanity, then," said Tina. She sat on her bed and kicked her boots off. She always put on winter clothes a month before they were appropriate. "He's mad because I beat him to it."

  "So he beat you to telling your roommates," said Molly. "He wasn't very forthcoming with the details, was he, Jan? So go ahead." She closed the heavy book and sat up.

  Tina's account seemed to please and amuse Molly, but it left Janet depressed. Tina's reasons for breaking with Thomas were exactly the same doubts Janet had been having about Nick since June, and Tina hadn't even r
ead Fry. The only difference was that Tina was persuaded Thomas condescended to her all the time, thought she was stupid, and wished he had never started the affair. There was a part of Nick he would not let Janet see—maybe connected with Medeous—but he did not condescend, he never (unlike Thomas, come to think of it) called her stupid, and he seemed perfectly satisfied with the situation.

  The discussion degenerated into a rambling argument over where Tina ought to go on having dinner. Janet brooded. Tina went off to brush her teeth.

  "Molly!" said Janet. "We forgot Hallowe'en!"

  "It didn't fall inside Fall Term Recess this year," said Molly into the Morphology book. "We could have a party the night before Dead Day, if you wanted."

  Janet grinned. Dead Day was the College's term for the free day that fell between the end of classes and the beginning of exams; having a belated Hallowe'en party on it would be appropriate, though probably not productive. She said, "I meant to watch and see if they all went riding with Medeous again—and I meant to check out the Fourth Ericson ghost."

  "She wasn't throwing books around last Hallowe'en."

  "How would we know? We were off following bagpipes. Did Robin play them this year?"

  "Probably. He had that look."

  "I really think my mind's going sometimes," said Janet.

  "Well," said Molly, looking up and grinning, "if you insist on filling it up with Plato and Pope and Fry—"

  "Oh my."

  "Then you have to expect little things like chasing ghosts to fall out the bottom."

  "You make me sound like a leaky sieve."

  "Isn't that an oxymoron?"

  "Oh, and now you're calling me stupid."

  Molly threw a pillow at her.

  CHAPTER 16

  Over Christmas vacation, Janet consulted her father about the reported habits of the Fourth Ericson ghost. She had meant to consult Peg first, but Peg was involved in a common form of senior-year panic that caused its victims to exhibit permanent distraction and to take up residence in the library. Janet thought she might be able to corner Peg in the flurry of returning from vacation, before classes started. In the meantime, she interrogated her father over dinner, obstructed by Andrew, who wanted to tell his own ghost stories, and interrupted by Lily, who had become a raving skeptic. ("It could have been astrology," said their mother when Janet complained about it; "be thankful.") They finally fled downstairs to her father's basement study, and he got out his notebooks on the subject. He had in fact written five or six chapters of his book, which in the usual way of scholarly works set out all the available information, neatly parceled up into categories. He seemed to have gotten bogged down in what to make of the parcels once he had them. He shook dust from the three-ring binder in which he kept the carbon of his chapters.