Pamela Dean

by Tam Lin (pdf)

  walking about in the middle of the night, abandoned his post at the foot of Tina's bed and came and sat on her chest and purred, which eventually did send her to sleep.

  She slept through her math course the next morning, which made her feel very guilty, even though she had been skipping it with abandon since it began. Thomas had proposed behaving frivolously until the end of October, but Janet wondered if three weeks of this might not be enough. She ought at least to go to her classes, even if she still cavorted outside the classroom rather than doing her background reading and starting to prepare for her comprehensives.

  At the thought of the comprehensives she shuddered, and decided to read some James Joyce before lunch. Into this unproductive exercise walked Thomas, announcing his presence by shooing the cat, who had learned to open the door, back into the room, and then shutting the door loudly.

  "Good morning," he said.

  He looked ill at ease. He was probably wondering what to do, just as she was herself.

  Leaping up and kissing him seemed indecorous. Janet felt that she had made the first move, and he should make the second. He, of course, was probably wondering if she was regretting the entire business, and talking himself into letting her decide how to proceed.

  "Lord," said Janet, "what fools these mortals be. Did I forget to tell you I'd respect you in the morning?"

  "Not exactly," said Thomas, sitting down on the end of her bed and winding his long fingers up into knots. "It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol."

  "If it is, I haven't been sober for years. I am of the same mind as I was last night. If you are having any second thoughts, you'd better say so. Don't prolong the agony, for God's sake."

  "There isn't any agony to prolong," said Thomas, rather sharply. "What do you say to fifty days?"

  "What is this, a limited-contract marriage?"

  "If you like. We could see what we thought at the end of it."

  "Well," said Janet, "it makes a change from Nick, who implied and assumed a whole lot of things but hardly ever stated anything."

  "Is that why you went after me in that downright way just now? It's hard on the nerves, you know."

  "That's my natural approach, I'm afraid. But Nick was very good at stifling it—I don't think he meant to, but he had a different set of assumptions and—I don't know—there was something awfully powerful about them. He made you feel like an idiot if you tried to go contrary to them."

  "Robin's much the same."

  "Yes, only it's impossible to figure out what Robin's assumptions are, so you just go on as usual."

  "You can afford that, you don't live with him." This might have been an automatic remark, but it sounded heartfelt.

  "Is he giving you problems?" said Janet.

  "Nothing serious," said Thomas.

  Having been just chided for being downright, Janet didn't press him for details; she gave him a kiss instead.

  Ten days later she was rummaging on the top of her dresser in search of Amoeba's flea collar, which he knew how to take off and enjoyed hiding, when the sign above her bed caught the corner of her eye. "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth could sleep out the rest." She felt extremely cold. It was not that she had missed a pill—it was that she was five days into the seven days on which one was not supposed to take any, and her period had not begun.

  Janet sat down on Amoeba's tail, got up again so he could hide under the bed and complain, and stood in the middle of the room staring at Tina's picture of a bust of Beethoven. Don't panic, she told herself, this could mean many things, and the one you're afraid of is the least likely of the lot. She got out her Penguin Shakespeare, since rereading

  Much Ado About Nothing had been what she planned to do after finding the collar. She found herself looking up All's Well That Ends Well in the table of contents instead.

  She went out into the hall and called Dr. Irving's office in the city. They put her on hold for ten minutes. Dr. Irving did not sound at all concerned, but her instructions were less than reassuring. "You shouldn't go back on the pill if there's any chance you might be pregnant. Use some other form of contraception—I can fit you with a diaphragm next Tuesday, if you want to make an appointment—until you can get a pregnancy test. Yes, I do them. No, not till you've missed your next period. Yes, I know that's another three weeks—it won't hurt you to use some other contraception for that long—even abstention wouldn't hurt you for that long. Yes, make an appointment with the nurse down there if you want to see me Tuesday."

  Janet hung up carefully, and found herself muttering as she shut the door of her room.

  "Abstention is not the problem," she told Amoeba. She sank down on her bed and picked up the Shakespeare again, leafing through its preliminary pages with shaking fingers.

  These were facsimiles of the opening pages of the 1623 Folio; she had pored over them from time to time, but the erratic spelling and the old-style s that looked like a misconceived f made them difficult. She thumbed through "To the Reader," the picture of Shakespeare, which had always looked a little startled to her, past the elaborate dedication to William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earle of Montgomery; past the closely printed, wandering essay addressed "To the great Variety of Readers," from which one learned that Shakespeare's friends had scarcely received from him a blot in his papers; past the laudatory poems by Jonson and Holland; past the table of contents (they called it a Catalog) with its decoration of cupids and peacocks and hunting dogs; past more laudatory poems; past the page containing the Names of the Principall Actors, to the opening lines of The Tempest.

  Janet thought she saw Robin's name go by, and turned ba ck to the list of players, wondering what might look like "Robert Armin" out of the corner of a distracted eye.

  There were two Richards in the first column, but no Roberts. Samuel Gilburne, Robert Armin. No, it really did say that. William Ostler, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley—surely not. No, that was what it said, in nice clear italics, and the s at the end of the first name, where it looked normal to modern eyes. William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield. "For pity's sake," said Janet. Richard Robinson, John Shancke, John Rice.

  She looked at the first column again. No Thomas Lane; no Jack Nikopoulous; no Melinda Wolfe, of course, women didn't act in Elizabethan times. Just those three names.

  They were fairly common, except maybe for Armin. But for there to be three of them—and the way Robin and Nick talked. Not aliens but—what? Time travelers? "You are pregnant"

  said Janet, "and you're having fancies." Saying it aloud made her perversely certain that she was not pregnant; but that meant, of course, that she was not having fancies.

  She got Tina's copy of Webster's Biographical Dictionary down and looked up Robert Armin. Nothing. Nicholas Tooley. Robert Benfield. Nothing. She looked up Hemmings and Condell, who had put together the Folio, just to make sure she had not wandered suddenly into some alternate universe. Yes, Webster's did admit their existence. She checked the index of Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture. Nothing. She had read the General Introduction to this edition of Shakespeare several times; she read it again. And then on page twenty-four it was, a list of the actors who had comprised "a vital core" of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company. Robert Armin was the last name listed.

  She pulled a box from under her bed, and found the little stack of books Professor Davison had recommended as additional reading. She had read most of them, and Robert Armin and Nicholas Tooley and Robert Benfield weren't in them. But there were several she had never gotten around to. "Robert Armin, actor," was in the index of Harrison and Granville-Barker's A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, and from the three references there she learned that he was an author of plays himself, that he had replaced Will Kempe as the company's comedian, playing parts such as Feste and the Fool in Lear and perhaps somebody called Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. He could sing, sa
id the essay, because the parts he played called for music; Shakespeare had not written any singing clowns until he had Armin to play them.

  He could sing all right. He had definite and peculiar opinions about Hamlet; he talked familiarly of Shakespeare; he was certainly an actor. Janet shut the book and looked around the room, at the familiar scarred oak furniture; the red carpet; the four-year-old curtains, looking a little faded across their middles; Tina's sewing machine in the corner; the gray cat asleep in a patch of sunlight on top of Molly's biology notes. This was much harder to believe in than the Fourth Ericson ghost. And Nick, whose name appeared in no reference she had—though he was probably in the library somewhere, if she wanted to look him up—was a greater enigma than ever.

  Janet began to laugh. Why in the world was she rummaging through all these books?

  Why was she thinking of looking people up in the library, when they were walking around to be talked to?

  "What's The Meebe done now?" said Molly, coming in the door and tossing her armload of heavy books onto her unmade bed.

  "He's asleep; I was laughing at myself."

  "Want to share the joke?"

  Janet opened her mouth; and after a moment, she closed it again. She thought in terms of looking things up in the library not just because of her upbringing and her training, but because if those people walking around to be talked to had wanted her to know what she would be looking up, they could have told her. Nick's curious reticence was suddenly explained, though it didn't necessarily make much sense. None of it made sense, really.

  Why should four-hundred-year-old actors, if they were that old, come to a midwestern liberal-arts college? If they weren't old, but just time travelers, which made more sense, because they didn't look old—no, she was dreaming; she was crazy.

  "Molly, have you ever missed a period, while you were on the pill?"

  "No, worse luck."

  "But some people do?"

  "Usually while they're getting adjusted to them, in the first few months. Why don't you call Dr. Irving?"

  "She said go off the pill till it's time to do a pregnancy test."

  "Oh, wonderful. You're probably not, you know—unless—have you missed any pills lately?"

  "Nope."

  "Well, you're probably not, then."

  "Right."

  "I know it's no use telling you not to worry about it, because you're going to. So just thank God it's not last year. Utter a grateful prayer to the Supreme Court. And you could call the Women's Caucus and see how much they've got in the abortion fund."

  Janet felt sick.

  "Yes, I know that's cold-blooded. But think about the worst, if you have to worry, and get it over with."

  "Is that the worst?"

  "Abortion? You aren't thinking of having the baby?"

  "Now you're talking as if there were one."

  "That's what we're doing, looking at the worst. Have you talked to—" Molly closed her mouth.

  "Thomas, yes, you're right. No. Why should we both go quietly crazy?"

  "Misery loves company."

  "Would you tell Robin?"

  "No," said Molly, "but that's a different kettle of fish. Why don't you go call the Women's Caucus?"

  "I don't think they should have to pay for my sins, when my parents are perfectly capable of it."

  "Well, they don't think you should have to apply to your parents if you don't want to.

  Do you think you've sinned?"

  "I didn't—but it feels as if Nemesis has come to live under the bed. You remember the last Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the one about her marriage? I knew she'd had a daughter, and I wondered, when I bought the book, how Laura would ever talk about sex. You know what she thought, when she found out she was pregnant? She tho ught, Ma always said that those who dance must pay the fiddler. Well, I've danced, and now I'm paying."

  "At least she seems to have enjoyed it."

  "At least she was married."

  "If you're going to go on like that, I think you should talk to Thomas."

  "No. If I'm not pregnant, I don't want to force all those issues. It's only been three weeks."

  "If you mean you and Thomas, it's been three years."

  Janet stared at her. "That's a very interesting theory, Miss Dubois," she said, in her best imitation of Evans's manner. "Would you care to support it from the text?"

  "I leave that," said Molly, imitating Professor Davison back at her, "as an exercise for the student. Come and have lunch with Robin and me."

  "Robin won't like that."

  "Nonsense. He can't talk about anything but New Testament Greek, which he hates for being different from Classical Greek; he'll love having a knowledgeable audience. I keep trying to compare all the verb changes he's raving about with mutations in the typhus bacillus, and it drives him crazy."

  "The Elizabethans are supposed to like weird metaphors."

  "Well, Robin doesn't imitate them in every one of their strange ways. Come on, he's got a class at one."

  Janet moved through the next two weeks feeling as if she were carrying a large, ill-balanced tray of priceless china. It was easier than she had expected not to tell Thomas that she might be pregnant. She had thought of no good way to explain why she was no longer on the pill, and it would have been the height of idiocy to get pregnant because she thought she was already. But Thomas was not importunate, and did not seem surprised that she was not, either. He called or dropped by or suggested walks and movies as often as before. When she called him, he was agreeable to her own suggestions. His attitude, while it made matters easier in the short run, filled her with a certain dread when she thought about the future.

  What was far more difficult than she had expected was refraining from telling him about the list of the Principall Actors in All the Plays. He was the best person to tell: the best person to talk the issue into its component parts if it were true, and the best person with whom to discuss its beauties and flaws if it were a fantasy. But she felt that by telling anybody she would somehow disturb the balance of the universe; and she did not want to do that, not now, when she might, still, not be pregnant. Thomas did ask her once if she was all right; she said she was still depressed about leaving Blackstock next spring, and as a result they took even more walks.

  She did start attending all her classes, a move Thomas approved of and also undertook himself, being, as he told her, unhappy at having missed Professor Evans's initial remarks on Swift, which seemed to be the key to all later lectures. Janet lent him her notes from her own sojourn in Eighteenth-Century Literature; but Thomas said Evans had been using a different set of metaphors then.

  American Literature was not as annoying as she had feared it would be. Mrs.

  Simpson, a tall, thin woman with a great deal of gray hair braided and wound around her head so that she looked rather like a statue of Athena that Professor Ferris had shown a slide of in Greek 33, was a delight. Like Evans, she was as sharp as a razor and had apparently memorized every work with which the class had to deal; like Fleisher, she was gentle and patient with all but the most obdurate stupidity. Janet would have preferred to take Chaucer from her, but she made American literature interesting if not entrancing.

  Janet did look forward to what she might have to say about Mark Twain, the only American author (of those commonly taught in college English classes) Janet had any use for.

  The homework for Math 10 was tedious in the extreme, but Mr. Brunner had not only announced his intention of explaining calculus in metaphors, with no mathematics higher than high-school algebra, he seemed in a fair way to achieving it. His class was peculiarly complementary to Medeous's approach to Aristophanes as a series of linguistic puzzles that included prizes for those discovering the greatest number of (linguistically and culturally verifiable) dirty jokes.

  Janet was still puzzled by Medeous. Only in her enjoyment of the more salacious aspects of Aristophanes did she demonstrate any characteristics in conformance with Nick's assessment of
her. She was so dignified that it was three weeks before anybody laughed in class, a class on one of the greatest comic dramatists of all time; nobody would have dreamed of taking any liberties of any sort with her; she did not abuse the powers vested in her as professor or treat any student with other than impersonal courtesy. It made no sense. Nick made no sense. Too much cogitation in this area always led Janet back to the list of Principall Actors, from which even The Rise of Silas Lapham provided a welcome relief.

  CHAPTER 20

  Janet did in fact dream one night in the middle of October of Silas Lapham's daughters, who had turned up as Celia and Rosalind in a production of As You Like It that was set in Elsinore Castle and also included Pekuah from Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, solemnly reciting the first paragraph of Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, and adding, after Celia had spoken a few words in New Testament Greek, "Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but imputed to man, they may both be true." This all seemed natural at the time; but Janet woke from it, slowly, to a sensation of vast interior discomfort.

  "Oh, hell," said Janet, sitting up and wishing she had not.

  Amoeba made a querulous noise from Tina's bed. Janet's roommates slept on. Janet groped her way to the door, blundered down the hall to the bathroom, and stayed there the rest of the night because she was too depressed to move.

  No, depressed was not the word. It was a cold panic that paralyzed every nerve but left the mind free to concoct the most horrible scenarios it was capable of. Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee. Oh, get hold of yourself. You're not Tess; you're not Hester; you're not Mary Hamilton in the ballad, who slept with the King and had his baby and put the baby in a little boat and sent him out to sea, and was hanged for murder and the only satisfaction she got out of the whole thing was being able to tell the King to hold his tongue and let his folly be.

  You're not Victoria Thompson. I suppose she thought her parents would throw her out in the storm. You're lucky, Janet Carter, that's what it is, lucky. You are the beloved daughter of tolerant parents with plenty of money, living in a society that has just declared it's none of the government's business if a woman has an abortion in the first trimester. I wonder if it's their business if you have the baby? Well, they can't put you in jail for it. Is it illegal to have a child out of wedlock, the way it still is in lots of states for unmarried people to have sex? But oh, God, why me? There are people around here who sleep with somebody different every night of the week, and they don't get pregnant.