Pamela Dean (28 page)

A much better list of effects than that of the pill, thought Janet. The instructions for taking it were complex, but seemed to say it should be made into a strong tea and drunk at noon every day during the time the patient was ovulating; if this could not be determined, the insert said gravely, the patient might drink the tea every day she was not undergoing her courses. Janet thought at first that this had something to do with sore heads in the studious; but a little application to the
Oxford English Dictionary
showed that it meant she should not take the medicine during her period.

The ingredients were listed by their Latin names. Janet made a note to ask Nick—or Robin, maybe, or Thomas; or better yet, Peg—to translate them for her.

November rains stripped all the trees except for the stubborn and covetous oaks. It was unseasonably warm, bare ground and bare trees luxuriating in the springlike air. The lovely shapes of the undressed elms stood up against all the red sunsets like the leading of a stained-glass window, and all the wide lawns of Blackstock were still green for Thanksgiving.

Halfway through November, some of the crocuses planted around Ericson put up questing shoots; Janet and Molly, along with a collection of seniors from First, Anne and Odile Beauvais, and Susan and Rebecca, helped Melinda Wolfe rake leaves over them and anchor the mulch with evergreen branches. Wolfe herded them all into Ericson's main lounge afterward, where she had had the Food Service set up urns of tea and coffee and a few trays of cookies. She left them pulling grass and pine needles out of one another's hair, and filling the thick Food Service cups; and returned balancing two huge silver platters covered with confections too beautiful to eat.

In the hubbub of exclamation, Janet and Molly looked at one another, and back at the trays. There were petits fours in their pale colors, with frosting flowers—no, preserved flowers, roses and violets and marigolds and nasturtiums; there were perfect miniature fruits, each with the color and bloom proper to its skin: apples, peaches, pears, plums, oranges, none bigger than a large marble—marzipan, those must be; there were rolled-up lacy cookies dipped half in chocolate and filled with cream; there were candied orange slices and ginger chunks and whole red strawberries all sparkling with sugar; there were slabs of shortbread pricked with a fork in patterns of flowers; there were small cakes like chrysanthemums; there were piles and drifts of the glistening red seeds of the pomegranate; there were, in fact, exactly as Keats had said in "The Eve of St. Agnes," candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd (by which he meant melon, and Melinda Wolfe provided cantaloupe); jellies soother than the creamy curd, and lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon, all right, Janet could smell it from where she stood; and dates, too—all of which Porphyro had brought to seduce Madeline.

"No?" said Melinda Wolfe, as if she had heard Janet thinking; but she was talking to Rebecca. "I'll eat the first one myself, then, and destroy the symmetry." She put her long fingers into the midst of the marzipan fruit, plucked out a peach that was golden on its smooth side and dusky red on the side with the seam in it, and put it into her mouth.

"Somebody ruin the other tray, then," said Rebecca, rather breathlessly, "and then we can all eat."

Anne Beauvais put out her honey-colored hand to the other tray and took one of the lace cookies. It crumbled, of course, as soon as she bit it; and she caught the crumbs of chocolate with her tongue and licked the cream off her fingers with a kind of delicate exaggeration that mesmerized Janet for several frozen moments and then made her want to laugh. Anne had not only been watching too many old movies, she was wasting her talents on the desert air by displaying her charms in a girls' dormitory.

Or was she?

Molly came to stand beside her, the freckles showing more than usual. Her eyes were enormous. "What was that a rehearsal of, do you suppose?" she said softly.

"I think it's Anne's natural style."

"She was looking at Wolfe the whole time."

Tina's rumor; Nora's remarks on the way back to the Hallowe'en party. "Well," said Janet, "it's none of our business."

"Yes, it is. Anne tries to make our business hers, quizzing Tina in the bathroom about Thomas. And she followed me into the Bio Library and told me Nick was a wild one. And she keeps acting coy and knowledgeable with Robin. She looks at him from under her eyelashes."

"What does Robin say?"

Molly sighed. "He asks me why I would be a breeder of sinners. Then he says that without women like Anne, Hell would be like a lord's great kitchen without fire in it. In't, I should say. And then, when I am about to murder him, he says Anne has been angling for him for years and I must protect him."

"May I lend you my horse and armor?"

"I wish you could," said Molly.

"Shall we go and eat some of the artwork?"

"So you think it's safe?"

Molly hadn't even read "The Eve of St. Agnes."

Janet said, "With Anne around, what would she want with us?"

"It's the pomegranate seeds that worry me," said Molly. "Blackstock isn't really my idea of Hell, but its physics program is a pretty good imitation."

Janet patted her on the shoulder. "We'll confine ourselves to the marzipan, then; there can't be anything sinister about marzipan."

They stepped up to the table and almost ran into Melinda Wolfe, who smiled at them.

"I forgot Susan's a diabetic and Odile is on a diet," she said. "I see you're hesitating as well.

Is there something I can fetch for either of you?"

"Oh, no," said Molly, "what's here is fine. We were merely reminding one another to be moderate at dinner."

"Given dinner," said Janet, "that shouldn't be much of a pr oblem. But you shouldn't

have gone to all this trouble."

Melinda Wolfe laughed, and moved back toward the table of delicacies. She passed through a broad beam of sunlight and her hair took on sparks as if it were full of glitter dust, the kind they let you put on valentines in the second grade. Her blue jeans glowed like velvet; inside the thin white shirt, the sun made her skin glow gold. Molly and Janet moved after her, slowly.

"It's a small repayment for all your work," said Melinda Wolfe, turning on them suddenly. "On behalf of the crocuses, I thank you. Go on, eat; I have to get some real fruit for the handicapped."

She slid through the crowd of girls and out.

"If I were Susan or Odile," said Molly, "I don't think I'd like that."

In Professor Soukup's class, they examined from each of its many sides the gap between philosophy and modern science. In Professor King's, they were still plodding through the minute details of Malinowsky, who had further delighted Janet by disproving the universality of the Oedipus complex, thus lending a certain tardy credence to Robin's comments on
Hamlet.
In Professor Swifte's class, they were learning the difference between rapier and saber techniques; and in Professor Evans's, having been wafted through Milton's grand epic like thistledown, disputing bitterly whether Milton had been of the Devil's party without knowing it, they were now traveling the heavenly circles of John Donne's poetry, which by sheer audacity of metaphor seemed to be trying to mend the rift between philosophy and science.

The week before Thanksgiving, Janet carried her winter-term schedule card to Melinda Wolfe for approval.

She had allowed ample time to find again that buried office. The spaces between the temporary buildings were silted full of brown leaves. The ivy was red as blood. Melinda Wolfe had hung a different wreath of dried plants on her door: huge orange and yellow marigolds, round purple chive flowers, the blue sprigs of rosemary with their stiff gray-green needles, two flat-topped bunches of white elder flowers, and a scattering of yellow yarrow, the ferny leaves of which formed the base of the wreath. It smelled sharp and medicinal in the mellow air. Janet knocked on the door, and was told to come in.

Melinda Wolfe's office looked as if she, like everybody else, was falling behind in her work. Papers and folders were piled four feet tall on her desk and on the floor around it. She herself was sitting in the desk chair, which she had wheeled around to the front of the desk.

She wore a blue sweater, probably cashmere, and a plaid skirt in blue and yellow and green.

She was not falling behind in personal grooming.

She smiled at Janet and gestured her to the other chair. "I found your file," she said.

"Almost a miracle. It was still in the drawer. What have you thought of for winter?"

No ceremonies, thought Janet. All right. She proffered the card. She had put down Swimming, Shakespeare, Astronomy, and Greek Literature in Translation. "You do know that the Astronomy Department consists of one professor who still holds to the fifty-five-minute class period?" said Melinda Wolfe, groping along the edge of her desk.

"But he can show me how to use the telescope?"

"Oh, yes, he can do that," said Melinda Wolfe, and, having found a pen in the pile she was investigating, removed it. "All right. It's good to get the Phys Ed out of the way; and Anne Beauvais is helping to teach swimming next term."

"Is she a student of yours?"

"Yes; specializing in Neander's account of the travels of Alexander." Melinda Wolfe signed the card and handed it back. "She tells me you threatened her sister."

This was not how one's advisor was supposed to go on—especially after feeding one with the delights of Paradise and telling dirty jokes like a teenager. "Did she say what I threatened her sister with?" said Janet.

"Yes. I do," said Melinda Wolfe, "keep my fingers on the pulse of Ericson, no matter how unruly it may seem to you."

"They were putting an unconscionable burden on Nora," said Janet, too angry to be afraid, "and I don't think I should have to wear a gas mask to walk down the hall." Faced with Melinda Wolfe's unblinking scrutiny, she found herself quoting, with considerable vigor, one of Dorothy Sayers's characters.
"
Some
consideration for others is necessary in community life."

Her advisor, mercifully, began to laugh. "Never mind," she said. "But do think, how much of the burden did they bind on Nora, and how much of it did she take herself?" She handed the pink card back to Janet. "See you next term," she said. "Good luck on your finals."

Janet thanked her with restraint, and emerged with profound relief into the narrow alley. She shut the door with more force than necessary, and one of the brittle flowers of yarrow bounced off the wreath and landed on the sleeve of her jacket. Janet thought of tucking it back into the wreath, but the entire structure looked far too dry and fragile to be messed with. She slid the flower into her pocket and left in a hurry.

Back in her room, she found Molly and Robin in the throes of an argument. She had left them peacefully intending to sing "Box of Rain" in two-part harmony. Robin was asserting that the reason this was impossible was that the original perpetrators were so very bad at singing. Since he had already, in previous sessions, asserted that Stephen Stills could not sing without whining and Bob Dylan brayed like an ass (which last, Janet thought, was more or less true), Molly was less tolerant than she had been. She had, it appeared, just given up arguing in the abstract, and was about to start insulting him personally.

Janet snatched her English textbook and retired to the lounge with John Donne, Thomas Campion, and Thomas Wyatt. Their subject matter did not help her forget Molly and Robin. That relationship seemed to her utterly mad—but it endured, and Molly even seemed happy. What they had said to one another the night they walked in the woods till dawn, Molly had never told her in detail, despite a great deal of nagging.

Promptly at dinnertime, Nick's violent whistle ascended the staircase ahead of him. It was his own setting for Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream," which Janet was firmly persuaded nobody else in the universe would think of putting to music. She put down her book and crept down the hall to meet him. The quarreling voices in her room had not abated a whit.

"Shhhh," she said as Nick came through the swinging doors. "They're fighting again."

"That's not fighting," said Nick. "That is just getting ac quainted. Come into the

lounge, then; I have something to show you."

He shut the door behind them, and sat next to Janet on the orange couch. The room was scattered with last Sunday's newspaper, which was always left until its successor came, to give harried students more time to read it. The battered college-issue sofas and chairs and tables were littered with soda cans, pens, somebody's tennis racket, several people's geology books, a number of Styrofoam cups half full of cold coffee, a large stuffed tiger belonging to Nora that she had donated for the desperate who wanted to hug something at four in the morning, one hundred and sixty-four crayons, all out of their box, the box itself, and a great many sheets of drawing paper, most of which contained either abortive maps or drawings of geological strata. Janet had turned on one table lamp to read by; the rest of the room was dim except where a single band of red sunlight edged through the window and striped the far wall.

Nick took a wad of white tissue out of his jacket pocket and unwrapped it. In the dim light of that untidy institutional room its contents struck the eyes like a sheet of lightning.

Janet opened her mouth, and said nothing. It was a necklace made of thin linked rose leaves and stems and thorns, with a rose and a bud as the pendant. It looked like ruddy gold, which might have been an effect of the light.

"I didn't make it myself," said Nick, a little anxiously. "I drew up the design, and got Robin to make it. And then I couldn't wait until Christmas to give it to you."

She couldn't take it. For more reasons than her muddled mind could marshal, she knew she could not. But it was very hard to say so, especially without hurting his feelings, especially since this was a relationship whose emotional boundaries she, not he, had tried to enlarge.

"It's all right, really," said Nick. "Robin is making another one for Molly. He'll have it by her birthday. But your birthday is no use; it's in August."