Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  least was blooming when and where it ought.

  Somebody had left a couple of folding chairs on the western side of the veranda. Janet carried one along to the north side, and sat down to watch the storm come in. She had a fine view of both lakes, and the new concrete bridge between them, and on their left the steep hill with the larches. The wind was picking up. The dark clouds boiled up over the Upper Arboretum, over the willows on Mai Fete Island, over the larches and the lake and Eliot.

  There was no lightning yet, but there was a steady roll of thunder. No, that wasn't thunder.

  Janet jumped out of the chair and leaned on the balustrade. It was horses. They were coming over the hill beyond Dunbar, down the asphalt road and, one by one at what had to be a completely reckless speed, down the narrow sidewalk between Dunbar and the lake.

  Six black horses pelted down the hill, pounded over the wooden bridge with a noise like an avalanche, and flung themselves up the hill between Eliot and Forbes, tails streaming. It was very dark all of a sudden, but the riders carried a light with them. Janet saw Medeous's flying crazy hair.

  It started to rain. Behind the black horses raced six or seven brown ones, and behind those five or six white ones. They were going much too fast for the riders to be discernible; they were going much too fast altogether.

  There was a tremendous clap of real thunder, and the last white horse rounded the corner of Forbes and disappeared in the driving rain.

  Janet was already wet. She skidded along the veranda, leapt down the steps, and ran for all she was worth. The riders had cut back between Forbes and Ericson and were apparently breathing their horses; at any rate, the horses were milling around in some confusion. Having gone too fast altogether, they had now stopped far too quickly. Janet slipped in the wet grass and herself slowed to a walk, gasping. And as the last few white horses went past Ericson and pulled up with the others, a rain of books shot out of Ericson's fourth-floor windows. Janet couldn't see what, if anything, they hit, but they upset the horses, which took off galloping wildly up the next asphalt road, and disappeared behind the Fine Arts building.

  Janet walked through the rain to the first book. It was a thin volume bound in dark red, a little larger than a trade paperback. She opened it up, trying to shield it from the rain with her head and shoulders. "Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. THE FIRST

  QUARTO, 1600: A FACSIMILE IN PHOTO-LITHOGRAPHY." It had been published in London, by William Griggs, in 1880. Janet tucked it under her shirt and went to the next one. Liddell and Scott. The Scarlet Letter, in a very handsome edition. Janet thought of her battered Signet paperback, and grinned. A little green book. Yes— Legendary Ballads. All according to spec. She hunted a little more in the grass; it had looked as if dozens of books were falling, but that might have been just excitement and the scattering effect of the rain, or the light from the riders. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But there had been no Hardy in the Thompson Collection. She picked it up anyway. The front of her shirt was beginning to fill up.

  She ranged back and forth a few more times, but found only sticks and pine cones and somebody's math paper. Math 11, B+. She kept that too; but a huge streak of lightning cut the sky to pieces just then, followed by an ungodly crack of thunder, and she decided to seek shelter. The side door of Ericson was locked, but its main door, which she tried more or less in passing on her way to trying Olin, opened placidly under her hand. It was gloomy in the entrance hall. Janet dumped the books on the disused monitor's desk, wrung her shirt out, and investigated. The door to the stairway and the swinging glass doors that let onto the first floor were shut and locked, which unfortunately meant she had no access to a bathroom, or to the pay phone in the basement. But she could sit out the storm in the lounge. She certainly had reading matter.

  She found the hallway's light switch, and in its dim glow was sorting the books to find the driest, when behind her a door opened and Melinda Wolfe's voice said, "May I help you?"

  Janet dropped Liddell and Scott with a dreadful bang on the stone floor and turned guiltily. "Hi," she said.

  "Oh, it's you," said her advisor, and smiled. She was wearing a long and voluminous robe with running horses appliquéd on its hem and the opening at the throat. It ought to have clashed with her hair; but it was a very dark red. Janet's throat was dry. Melinda Wolfe said, "Are you having second thoughts about your schedule?"

  Janet thought that was irony, since she had registered for Boswell and Johnson, Herodotus, and Sociology 11 with no discussion at all. But she answered, "No, I just got caught in the rain. I thought I'd sit it out in the lounge; I didn't mean to disturb you."

  "You didn't really; I just realized I'd forgotten to lock the front door. We never do it in term time, and it's hard to get back into the habit. Why don't you come in and have a cup of tea? What have you got there?"

  "Just some books," said Janet, picking up Liddell and Scott, which mercifully had landed without damage. "They can dry out here."

  "Bring them in; you'll want to blot them dry at least, I think."

  Janet gathered them up, resignedly, and carried them into Melinda Wolfe's living room. Behind her she heard Melinda Wolfe shooting the bolt on the main door of Ericson.

  "Carry the books on through to the kitchen," said her advisor, returning and shutting the door of the apartment. "There's a vinyl cloth on the table; put them on that. I'll get you a towel."

  Janet did as she was told. You could not tell a great deal about Melinda Wolfe's personality from the apartment, which was furnished by the College with objects only a little more elegant than those they gave to the students. But the wreaths of herbs and the little Persian-looking carpets, as bright as jewels, were probably hers. Janet laid the books one by one on the table. The color was running a little from the cover of the Shakespeare.

  Janet had just found a paper towel and was carefully lifting the pink stain from the first page when Melinda Wolfe came back, carrying a large green towel for Janet and a rather ragged yellow one for the books.

  Janet dried her hair and face and arms and tried to rub some of the water out of her shirt. Melinda Wolfe said, "Let me get you a dry one," did so, and sent her into the bathroom to put it on.

  The bathroom smelled of apricots. The borrowed shirt, a gauzy white muslin affair with long puffy sleeves and a thick embroidery of flowers, also white, on the yoke and cuffs, smelled of lavender. If Melinda Wolfe had planted the lavender outside, Janet should ask her how she managed to keep it going. She shook out her dam p hair, hung her own limp green cotton tank top over the shower rod, and went back to the kitchen.

  Melinda Wolfe had stood all the books upright, covers open and pages spread to dry.

  A collection of stains on the yellow towel showed that she had probably prevented the worst of the damage. Janet opened her mouth, and Melinda Wolfe looked up and saw her.

  Her glance was as cold as a Gorgon's. Janet stood perfectly still.

  "Did you check these out of the Thompson Collection?" said Melinda Wolfe, as if she were asking how many children Janet had murdered today.

  "I found them on the grass between Forbes and Ericson."

  Melinda Wolfe's gaze grew colder still.

  "Somebody threw them out the window," said Janet. She walked forward; if she was dead, then she was dead, but there was no point in being a coward about it. "I wanted to check—see, look, they don't have the library markings on them."

  "Of course they do," said Melinda Wolfe, picking up the copy of Tess and holding it out.

  It did have the white library letters on its spine.

  "Maybe I need glasses," said Janet.

  "It's the rain in your eyes," said Melinda Wolfe, kindly. "Sit down. Herb tea, or caffeinated?"

  "Caffeinated," said Janet. "Please." She sat down and stole a surreptitious look at the Shakespeare and the Liddell and Scott, whose bindings had been so fair and empty when she looked at them thirty seconds ago. Library markings, as clear as you pleased.

  "
May I use your phone?" said Janet. "I should call my parents."

  "Help yourself," said Melinda Wolfe, rummaging in a cupboard.

  The telephone was on a wall in the kitchen, which was unfortunate, though Janet was not at all sure what she would have said in privacy if she had had it. She dialed her home number, got Andrew, talked him into calling Lily to the phone, and cajoled Lily into telling her parents, who were shut up in her father's study with the June bills, that she was sitting out the storm with Melinda Wolfe and would be home when it stopped raining.

  She took a hopeful look out the window as she was hanging up the phone, but the rain was beating the huddled larches like fury, and another smash of thunder made her shrug and go sit down again. Melinda Wolfe brought the tea in big glass mugs: Earl Gray with lemon for Janet, and a repellent greenish-yellow brew for herself.

  Melinda Wolfe, in the most prosaic possible manner, asked Janet how her summer was being. Janet said she had been catching up on her light reading, and they discussed mystery novels peacefully for a while. Melinda Wolfe admitted to reading Mary Stewart and an occasional Ruth Rendell, which made Janet think more kindly of her. "But you can only read so many," said Janet, "even of the best ones."

  "Hence the trip to the Thompson Collection," said Melinda Wolfe.

  Janet looked at her, taking a large gulp of tea as an excuse for not answering immediately. Somebody had thrown those books out the window, and nobody was going to talk her out of believing that. She was quite certain also that those books had not had the library markings on them when she picked them out of the grass; but that was something it would have been easy to make a mistake about. What did Melinda Wolfe want? "I've got my own Liddell and Scott at home," said Janet. "There wouldn't be any point in checking it out of the library."

  Melinda Wolfe sipped her tea and said absolutely nothing. Her face was serene enough. "Is that Hardy from the Thompson Collection?" said Janet.

  Melinda Wolfe tipped the book toward her and shook her head. "No. An underslept student helper on a work contract might have put it back in the wrong place, though. The numbers are similar."

  She sat there blandly drinking her tea and waiting for Janet—to do what? Finish the tea and fall over? Finish the tea and become suggestible? She didn't feel suggestible; she felt extremely stubborn. And what she really wanted to do was to ask Melinda Wolfe if she was really sleeping with Professor Medeous. That was the single most fascinating piece of gossip Janet had ever had out of Blackstock—which was saying a great deal. But there was no way of asking it; and no way of forgetting it. A mental bow for Hesiod. Janet found herself inclined to giggle, and took another swallow of tea.

  "It would be entirely natural to check out books from the Thompson Collection," said Melinda Wolfe. "These handsome old editions are much more satisfying to read. I never thought the feel of a book was important, myself, until I was given the special edition of Medeous's translation of The Odyssey. It's enormous; the Greek letters are about as big as your thumbnail, and the footnotes are the size of normal type. The pages are thick as cloth.

  It smells scholarly. Here, let me show you."

  She got up and went into the living room, leaving Janet with a wild impulse to laugh.

  When she got back, lugging a black-bound, gold-lettered volume with the dimensions of

  Life magazine, only much thicker, Janet said, "Is this our Professor Medeous, or the other one?"

  "This is ours," said Melinda Wolfe, clearing the tea things away, drying the table with the yellow towel, and laying the book down. "The nineteenth-century one didn't translate anything in her field; her translations were all done for pleasure." She opened the book.

  "There. Isn't that something? Go ahead, you can touch it."

  Janet wiped her hands on her napkin and turned one of the huge creamy pages. The black letters were as sharp as if they had been engraved. Janet rubbed her thumb over the first two lines. They had been engraved. It must have cost a fortune. The book had English on the right and Greek on the left. Professor Medeous had used a fairly free blank verse for the English—rather like the Fitzgerald translation, except that it didn't sound at all like that.

  Fitzgerald was modern in idiom and rather cinematic in his images; he put in a lot that wasn't there, though the additions were rarely jarring. Medeous's sounded uncannily like the Greek.

  "Why doesn't Professor Ferris use this in his classes? It's gorgeous."

  "Professor Medeous won't let him; and he has been known to admit that it would probably discourage the students. Fitzgerald isn't literal, Lattimore's a terrible plodder if you don't know the Greek; any diligent student can improve on their work here and there.

  But what can you do with that, except admire it? Now, he might use it in Thirty-three, except he's always hoping most of the kids in that class will go on to take Greek."

  "And Professor Medeous won't let him?"

  "That, too."

  "What a shame."

  "He did put it on the list of additional reading one year, but she almost took his head off. Here, why don't you borrow it?"

  " This? No way. Isn't there a paperback or something?"

  "Yes, but it deserves this housing. I can run you home in the car, and maybe your father could return it later in the summer."

  Her father usually rode his bicycle to campus in the summer, but he would certainly get out the car for this object—always supposing they were not all tempted to flee to some foreign strand to live in poverty and gloat over it for the rest of their lives.

  "I really can't."

  "Of course you can. There are few enough people who appreciate things like this. Go see if your shirt is dry, and I'll run you home."

  Janet woke up at four in the morning, to a renewed assault of thunder and rain, and remembered that all the books she had picked up out of the wet grass were still sitting on Melinda Wolfe's kitchen table. Well, no doubt Melinda Wolfe would return the books to the library, whence it would be easy enough to take them out again.

  But she had Medeous's Odyssey to read first. She read it a book at a time, every night before bed. It was not quite so fine an experience as reading The Iliad in the original, but she could read this in the original her senior year, under the kind but ruthless eye of Professor Ferris. This was a very different story from that of the wrath of Achilles. Quite apart from anything else, it had some sympathetic and clever women in it. Janet remembered Professor Ferris's saying, in Greek 33, that The Iliad was a tragedy and The Odyssey a comedy. She thought of the women in Shakespeare's comedies, and of those in the few tragedies she had read; and wondered if she had hold of something; if the women in comedies were always more real than those in tragedies.

  About halfway through July and The Odyssey, she remembered that in junior high school Danny Chin had always been nagging her to read it. She wrote him a letter about it, and entered upon the most satisfying correspondence of the summer. Danny was, in some unpejorative way, a nice ordinary person, who moreover had acquired, from what he said, a nice ordinary girlfriend, who was passionately interested in Depression glassware and espionage thrillers. He said what he meant; he was not difficult; as long as you didn't mention ghosts to him he was as patient and whimsical as anybody could wish for. He was an enormous relief. When he got home they made one visit to Sheila's, one to the used-book stores in the city, and one to see a movie; and Janet felt September as something of a shock when it landed her back at Blackstock.

  CHAPTER 18

  Robin and Thomas were rooming together. They had a double on the ground floor of Eliot, because Nick had let his Room Draw number go to his head, and had secured a single—a rather narrow and utterly unprepossessing single, but his own—in Holmes.

  He and Janet had a very satisfactory reunion in it, among the unpacked boxes shipped from England—a reunion that he spoiled almost immediately by telling her he was adding Music Theory to his schedule to make another twenty-four-credit term. This would be like his senior year in many reg
ards, because as a student with two majors he had to take his comprehensives in one of them. He had decided it had better be Music, in which he felt he had a head start. The Listening Test was administered in the winter, so as not to interfere with the Senior Recital in the spring, so he expected to spend those moments not used up in class or in studying sitting inside a pair of headphones in the Music Library. He already looked tired and harried: England must be less restful than Wisconsin with Medeous.

  "Shall we make a date for once a month?" said Janet acidly.

  "Yes," said Nick, with the utmost seriousness. "That's a fine idea." He reached over the edge of the bed for his jacket, which had ended up on the floor, and extracted his pocket calendar from it. "I'm glad you are taking this so calmly."

  "I'm not, actually," said Janet.

  "Certainly you are. Nine girls out of ten would have set up a terrible wailing. Are Friday evenings good for you, or have you got Saturday classes?"

  Walking back to Eliot under a mild autumn sky, Janet tried to fume, but found herself laughing instead. She was not sure what she was angry about—not the neglect of her for education's sake, which she sympathized with; more, she thought, the form of Nick's announcement and the failure of that usually ironic young man to understand irony when he heard it. He had not appeared in the least distressed at the prospect of giving her up for the pleasures of sitting in a stuffy room and analyzing classical pieces of music for hours on end—that was what stung, and that was what was funny, too. She remembered Thomas's advice about time. She and Nick hadn't had any time, except for that first summer, which she had squandered mooning over Christopher Fry and feeling put-upon. I wasted time, and now time doth waste me. And what was she in such a hurry for, anyway?

  She climbed the stairs to the second floor of A column, went into their room (much like last year's, but with a very shabby blue carpet, and one wall painted bright red by departing students who had been supposed to repaint it white and preferred to pay a fine instead), and poured out her troubles to Molly and Tina, whom she found swearing and agonizing over their fall-term schedules. Since Tina was still enjoying her loverless state and Molly had been putting up with Robin's sulks and absences and general unaccountability for going on three years, neither of them was very helpful, though Molly seemed willing to be indignant; she said she would have thought better of Nick.