Pamela Dean (29 page)

"Is hers just the same?"

"Certainly not. Hers has French lilies."

Janet picked up the delicate thing. It was almost weightless in her palm, but the thorns pricked faintly.

"Here," said Nick, and gathered the rebellious mass of her hair in his two fists and held it out of the way while she put the necklace on and fastened the clasp. It was briefly cold, and then seemed not to be there at all. The thorns did not prick her neck.

"I don't know how to thank you," said Janet; and bit her lip at the extremely unfortunate nature of this common remark.

"Your eyes will do it nicely," said Nick, and kissed her hand.

It was the curious custom of Blackstock College to hold classes on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, so that nobody could go home for a four-day weekend. Janet, having ascertained that her father had invited only two of his own students to Thanksgiving dinner, proposed to bring along Tina, Thomas, Molly, Robin, and Nick; and was given permission.

The two students he had invited were Diane Zimmerman, who was in his Rhetoric class, and Peg Powell, who was not in any of his classes, but to whom he had garnered an introduction through Professor Medeous so he could pick Peg's brain about the Fourth Ericson ghost.

Nick had already been to dinner three times, and had been an enormous hit with everybody except Janet's mother. He had not given up trying to charm her; but he sensibly refrained this time. Given the way her mother was eyeing the necklace of roses, Janet was grateful for his restraint.

Diane seemed to find Andrew delightful. Peg sat in a corner, smiling. Janet came to keep her company, and watched with amusement as Lily took immediately to Tina and her father to Robin and Molly and her mother and Vincentio to Thomas, while Andrew, having exhausted the charms of Diane's storytelling and the contents of her knapsack, gamboled among the rest of them but seemed most pleased with Nick, who had let him play the flute to accompany the guitar. He let him do it again, too, after dinner. He played some of his own songs, the ones to do with autumn and winter and Greek heroes and the profoundly silly one about elephants that he had written to Molly's daishiki, which she was wearing.

He did not play any of his own love songs, but he and Robin did sing a number of their Elizabethan rounds, making everybody else learn the words too.

At some point during this exercise, Janet's father brought his folding chair over to where Janet and Peg were sitting. "I understand," he said to Peg, offering her a plate of cranberry bread, "that you pick up after the Fourth Ericson ghost."

Peg looked at him warily from behind her glasses.

"Does she always throw the same books?"

"Well," said Peg, "yes—but that's not to say the same three or four. There are about a hundred and fifty of them."

"What do you do with them after you pick them up?"

Peg gave him the kind of look a timid and dutiful student gives to a teacher who is being an idiot. "I put them back in the library," she said.

"Why does—oh," said Professor Carter. "She throws the Thompson Collection."

"Well, that's who she
was,
" said Peg, irately.

"How do you know?"

"Because those are her books, and because she talked to me once."

"What did she say?"

"She said that her name was Victoria Thompson and she was homesick. She came from North Dakota. She thought Minnesota was too hilly, and everybody talked strange."

Janet's father then put a series of questions about which books the ghost threw how often, for all the world as if he were examining Peg for her comprehensives preparatory to graduating her. Janet sat watching the flames of the disregarded candles on the dinner table reflected in Peg's glasses, and feeling as Horatio must have when Marcellus and Barnardo told him the ghost of King Hamlet was stalking around the battlements.

In the house she had grown up in, surrounded by the smells of turkey and bayberry and chocolate sauce, with Vincentio ranging around the table hopefully, she dragged into the light of normality the night she and Molly had first gone out to find the piper, and been pelted with books from the windows of their own room. How strange that they had not thought it stranger. It had in fact been altogether peculiar, even if you recalled that they never locked their door, and that Tina was a heavy sleeper.

Janet got up and went into the kitchen, where her mother

was scraping the dishes,

helped predictably by Diane and Molly, and astonishingly by Thomas. "Can I spend the night?" she said.

"I thought you might like to," said her mother, "for post-Thanksgiving breakfast. I'm sorry I can't put up the whole lot of you, but you can all come back for buckwheat pancakes if you like."

"I've got a nine-thirty class," said Janet tardily.

"So has your father. I don't know what's the matter with Blackstock," said her mother, as she had said every Thanksgiving for fifteen years. "Why can't they do away with their precious midterm break and give you a couple of days off for Thanksgiving?"

"The latest theory," said Diane, who had somehow received the job of stripping the turkey carcass and was up to her elbows in grease and bits of stuffing, "is that it would be too hard on the kids who can't afford to go home. Midterm break isn't over a holiday, so they don't mind so much. Theoretically."

"The kids who can afford to go home usually do it anyway," said Janet.

"Yeah, but they're not supposed to," said Diane. "It permits a glow of righteousness to emanate from the rest of us."

"Blackstock students have one of those anyway," said Janet's mother.

Janet walked her friends to the end of the block, kissed Nick, and trudged back slowly under the high frosty stars. All the puddles in the road were rimmed with white ice. She could see her breath, and tried, as always, and failed, as always, to blow rings of it. Smoke, of course, was denser; but that was not enough reason to take up smoking.

She read Andrew a chapter of
The Wind in the Willows,
which he was hating violently but insisted on finishing just the same. Then she went to bed. Her bed felt too soft, and the quiet in the room was amazing. She lay staring into the dark and assembling the forces of her intellect. There was something at Blackstock that deadened thought. No, not all thought—she had not had the slightest difficulty in absorbing Milton, Aristotle, Malinowsky, or anybody else who could write English or be translated felicitously into it.

She had written critical papers that had not been utterly scorned; she had learned the rules of fencing, past and present; she had passed quizzes on philosophy and anthropology and, when Evans became impatient with the quality of class discussion, on the progression of metaphor in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."

There was something at Blackstock that made it difficult to think about particular topics. The Fourth Ericson ghost and anything connected with her—including, for some odd reason, Peg's remark about having bunk beds in her room when she hadn't. Assuming there was a ghost, why would she exert this influence when, apparently, she had told Peg all about herself anyway? If she were hiding, why throw books out the window? She seemed rather flexible for a ghost; most of the ones Janet had read about had been confined to appearing at a particular time in a particular place to perform particular actions, whether washing blood out of a garment, weeping hysterically, or putting down milk for a cat whose ghost did not, after the manner of cats, oblige by appearing also. This seemed like a cross between a ghost and a poltergeist. Well, there were certainly enough upset adolescents, the generally assigned cause for poltergeists, whether supernatural or natural, around Ericson.

What else? She revolved the incidents of her first weeks at Blackstock through her mind. It suddenly struck her as odd that everybody should be so averse to using Melinda Wolfe as Melinda Wolfe's position required, as an advisor and mediator, the last resort before making an official report that the College would have to take notice of, with unpleasant effects. Unless, of course, Melinda Wolfe had explained to all the RA's that she did keep her finger on the pulse of Ericson and the RA's were to stay quiet and let her work in her own way.

What an aversion to asking Melinda Wolfe for help might have in common with the ghost of Victoria Thompson, aside from the fact that Janet had found them difficult to think about at Blackstock, was another question entirely. Janet turned on the bedside lamp, dragged notebook and pen out from under the bed, and wrote down everything she had thought of. She sat up a while longer, considering Tina's weird mixture of denseness and perspicacity; Robin's peculiar way of conducting a romance; Molly's rare detachment from herself and her preoccupations; Nick's inability to say he would not be somewhere; Thomas's transformation from a raging maniac to a soft-spoken charmer; Peg's sleepwalking; Nora's conscience; Sharon's speech patterns. They were too familiar to her now; she could not reconstruct how she had seen them when they first met, except for Thomas, and he had never behaved like that again. It was as if she had met another person entirely in the library.

Nothing at Blackstock—except the pressures of work—was keeping her from thinking about any of those things. It was the ghost and Melinda Wolfe off whose oddities thought seemed to slide like rain down a window. Janet was getting sleepy. I wonder, she thought, turning off the lamp and sliding back under the patchwork quilt her grandmother had made, if I should sleep at home once a month, just to clear my mind.

A week later, on the eve of final exams, Janet and Tina had a birthday party for Molly.

They had found a local bakery, tolerant of college students, that would make a three-layer chocolate cake and write on the top, in red icing, "If it doesn't work, it's Physics." Molly was, in fact, scowling over her physics book when they marched in, singing, with the cake.

Thomas and Nick came behind them with the toy theater, which they were to quietly insinuate into Janet's closet until it was wanted. She had had to clean up the closet floor for this purpose, greatly astonishing Molly. "I can see rereading
The Lord of the Rings
instead of studying for finals," she had said, "but why clean your closet?"

Now she lifted her head with great deliberation from her book and surveyed them all, Tina and Janet and Robin and Thomas and Nick, with as forbidding an expression as freckles and large blue eyes would allow. Janet had a sudden awful feeling that Molly did not like surprises. Then Molly grinned. "Lucky for you idiots I didn't decide to study in the library," she said; and flinging the despised physics book in the general direction of the sink, she bounced off the bed and blew out the candles on her cake.

Robin had already given her the necklace that morning; she was wearing it now, with a Grateful Dead T-shirt, having remarked in passing that it was a pity the Dead had not chosen lilies as their flower, since Janet's necklace would have been more becoming to the shirt as it was. She clearly had no expectation of any presents aside from the cake. Tina and Janet had left it to Thomas to decide when to bring the thing out of the closet, and he seemed in no hurry about it.

Tina handed Molly a long knife abstracted from the Food Service by Thomas, who was on financial aid and worked in Taylor, poor creature, five mornings a week. Molly used the point of the knife to pry off all the sugar roses, which she then distributed at mathematically exact locations around the cake. Everybody got one and a half of them.

They all ate their cake, and sat around drinking Tina's Russian tea. Thomas had scrunched up Tina's bed pillows to lean against, as he always did; Tina would complain bitterly about it later, but now she lay with her head in his lap and her pink-stockinged feet on her desk and looked blissful. Nick sat at Janet's feet and let her rub his head. Robin and Molly sat at the extreme ends of Molly's bed and conducted a vehement argument about the costuming of
The Revenger's Tragedy,
diverging into the finances of the College, the intention of the playwright, how hot it was likely to be in Ericson Little Theater in the middle of January, and whether it was difficult to sew velvet.

Janet found in her mind the words of some of Tolkien's people, discussing the story they were in and how they might end it. Bilbo had thought of, "And they all lived happily ever after until they died. It is a good ending," he had said, "and none the worse for having been used before." "Ah!" said Sam, "but where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

Janet wondered, too. For four years they would live here. After that, unless somebody made a prodigious and possibly miraculous effort, they would scatter to the four corners of the world, their fellowship broken, and do what all of them had done to be here in this room now: find new friends. It seemed wasteful. Perhaps they could buy an island somewhere.

Janet looked around the room again, trying to imprint it in her memory, sight and sound and sense: the steamy warmth of the radiator, the worn path in the carpet before the chipped sink, the smell of tea and chocolate, and sage from Nick, and Tina's wearisome white lilac perfume, and a background of dust because nobody had had time to clean the room since the Hallowe'en party. Molly in her Blackstock sweatshirt, with chocolate on her nose; Robin in a red velvet shirt with huge puffed sleeves and tight cuffs, tugging it out of the waistband of his jeans and turning its hem up to show Molly its construction. Tina's long, beautiful legs in those silly pink stockings, her smiling face upturned to Thomas and her yellow hair spread over his lap. Thomas, who caught Janet's eyes and said, "In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs That did renew old Aeson."

"What?" said Tina, dreamily, not at all in the sharp tone with which she usually speared you if you said something she did not understand.

"In such a night," said Janet, backing up, "Stood Dido with a willow in her hand Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love To come again to Carthage."

"In such a night as this," said Nick, in his theater voice, "When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls, And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night."