Pamela Dean (32 page)

"Why do you say they, and not we?"

"For fear of my immortal soul," said Robin, smiling again. "I'm not a Scotsman." He glanced to his left, and said, "Nick and Anne and I will be some little time; there was something amiss with 'All Along the Watchtower.' Do you go and cheer up Thomas, who's trying to get drunk on this goose-piss, the pitiful soul."

He went away. Janet found Thomas in a dark corner, with five large, empty, clear plastic cups in front of him. "What on earth's the matter?" she said.

"Hello, Jenny," said Thomas with great gravity. "It's this beer. It runs out as fast as you put it in, and leaves nothing of itself in the passing."

"It does too," said Janet, sitting down resignedly. "You're talking like Robin. And my name's not Jenny."

"It was the piping put me in mind of it," said Thomas. "That's the Scottish nickname.

Is there Scots blood in you?"

"Scots-Irish, I think," said Janet. "The most disreputable kind. Why are you drinking this stuff; what's the matter?"

"I don't know what to do about Tina," said Thomas. "How do you and Molly manage?"

"Molly manages," said Janet. "I behave myself so she won't murder me. But look, nobody made you take up with Tina. What's the matter with her?"

"I'm not sure," said Thomas. "She isn't stupid, and she isn't insensitive, and she's very obliging. She's
lovely
in bed," he added with the utmost gloom.

Just like Tina, thought Janet, not to tell them that things had gotten better. She supposed one could have deduced it from Tina's willingness to take her three hours of privacy a week.

Thomas sighed heavily. "But she doesn't—she hasn't—she doesn't read. Well, she will, if I ask her to; but it doesn't take, somehow. She hasn't any imaginative life."

"Sure she does," Janet said. "It's just not literary."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"Either musical or scientific, I guess. I'd bet on musical."

"I wouldn't," said Thomas. "She likes music; she knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do. But she doesn't love it. She's just dutiful. She gets a mild pleasure out of it, that's all."

"Well, science, then. Psychology, maybe; that's the only thing I've found her reading for the fun of it."

"Oh, God," said Thomas. "While it would reassure me for Tina's sake, it wouldn't help my case much." He dropped his face into his hands, knocking two of the empty cups to the floor. When Janet emerged from under the table with them, he was staring at her with an expression of consternation. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "It was unconscionable to talk to you like that about a friend of yours—especially somebody you've got to live with. I'm not going to break up with her, don't worry about it. I just have a difficulty, that's all."

"Well," said Janet, abandoning caution, "I have exactly the same difficulty. Only I'm not sleeping with her. Why don't you talk to Molly? She truly appreciates Tina; she really likes her without having to work at it. You ask her what to do."

"She's so damned romantic," said Thomas.

"Molly?"

"No, idiot—Tina. Romantic in the most prosaic way imaginable. I don't know what to make of it."

"Talk to Molly," said Janet firmly. "Here. They're coming to throw us out. Put your coat on. Haven't you got a hat, for pity's sake? It's ten below out there."

"What a nice motherly type you are," said Thomas, vaguely.

"A lot you know," said Janet, but she said it under her breath. She turned him over to Anne and Robin with considerable relief, and let Nick walk her back to Ericson. They discoursed amiably of winter-inspired poetry, and said nothing of Thomas or Tina, or of romance at all. The whole business was far, far easier when Nick was present: the person who lived in that body was of far more account than the body was, and required a more

concentrated and diligent attention, leaving much less room for mere mortal longings.

Janet wrote her first poem at Blackstock in the sixth week of the term, which fell in the middle of February. She had assumed that if she ever got around to writing it at all, this poem would be for Nick. But it was not, probably because his own poems were so much better.

It was the February thaw that inspired her, if indeed you could call such a mood inspiration. This was a time of year that she usually looked forward to, mostly because it was an almost annual occurrence and so allowed recollection of other Februaries, including those few when no thaw came; and partly because it was reassuring to see that the ground was still there, pleasant to run from one class to another sans hat and gloves but without risk of frostbite, and comforting to consider that the hounds of spring were as usual on winter's traces.

But this year it depressed her unutterably. The sky grew warm but stayed cloudy. The snow did not melt altogether, but shrank back in filthy ridges of gray and black, from which protruded lost mittens, paper cups, cigarette butts, and leaves neither raked up by human agency nor decently decayed by nature. The trees, which in November had seemed merely free of mortal trappings, were now indubitably dead. In the warm spots where the snow did melt all the way, it revealed merely a waste of black mud and brown grass.

Most maddening of all, this bleak landscape conspired with some mental difficulties of her own and produced a crisis. The mental difficulties arose from the fact that no good teacher would let you read all the way through Milton and Chaucer without making certain you had a clear idea of how they viewed the world; and in Evans's case, without making very certain that you understood their stories in their own terms before you were allowed to apply your own. Janet's father was an atheist and her mother a lapsed Catholic turned Unitarian, which meant that she knew a lot of Christmas carols in Latin and refused to let her husband make fun of religion no matter how silly it sounded.

But Milton and Chaucer were Christians, there was no denying it. And while the early Greeks mercifully were not, they were most certainly not atheists either; even Euripides, deny them how he might, could not keep the gods out of his plays. The whole of theater was religious in its origin—rotten at its core, her father said gloomily, which was why he preferred the Romantic period, when nothing of the slightest interest was done in English drama. But Janet had been reading the medieval and Renaissance poets, and then Milton. It was not their arguments that oppressed her, on the rare occasions when they troubled to make any. It was the sense of that whole intricate, solid philosophy, stretching for centuries in both directions, infusing life like a strong light, taken for granted and used in a hundred ways for symbolism and imagery and situation, as clear and real as Tolkien or Eddison's worlds, that weighed her down with a sense of indefinable doom. Evans had made it clear to anybody who would pay attention that Milton had not been of the Devil's party.

On a particularly dreary Wednesday afternoon, Janet flung her astronomy text to the floor, dug her journal out of the bottom drawer of her desk, and sloshed over to the library, where she found a deserted padded room at the bottom and resigned herself to her fate.

This winter shrills its dirge self-satisfied,

And all is black, or gray, or ragged brown,

And all the world in rags its bread has cried,

And begged the gates of that unheeding town

Men once called heaven.

That made no literal sense whatsoever, but it had caught in a net of words at least half her feeling about this weather, interior and exterior. She bit vigorously on the cap of her pen, and went on.

Such a time as this

Must make our reasoned doubt a certainty:

We see the universe just as it is,

Unveiled by miracle of bud or tree.

She wanted to put "miracle" in quotation marks, or scar it somehow with sarcasm; but if the poem itself didn't do that, she had failed anyway. She read the lines over several times, biting her lip instead of the pen. Oh, the loveliness of the sonnet. Just where she wanted it, the turn came in the very form of the poem. The next word was But.

But even while I watch the senseless sky

Cracked hideous in the water at my feet

Janet sighed heavily. This was where she always ran into trouble. The puddles of the February thaw, reflecting black branches and the usual patched blue and gray of the late winter sky, were among the first things she ever remembered noticing, before the cherry blossoms or the blooming crocus or the startling red of an autumn maple. They had held for her, all her life, the fascination of things seen in a mirror, the intimacy of things seen through a telescope, the curious charm of a dollhouse or of Molly's toy theater. And this year they made her think the sky had fallen and broken on the pavement. That might make another poem, but it certainly could not at this point be crammed into this one. And the poem did not care, anyway, how she felt now or had felt then, unless that served the movement that the poem had gathered before this "But."

She left the lines alone, and went on.

Dread rumors crowd me, dark forebodings: I

Remember, as improbable as spring

The last line of the poem was breathing down her neck. Janet left a blank line and wrote it alone by itself at the bottom.

The star, the cup, the cross: that tale's ending.

Was that what you wanted, she asked the poem. Thanks a lot. How am I supposed to get there? What a rotten rhyme. I wanted a couplet at the end, anyway; what is this? The poem looked at her blandly and kept its own counsel. It was done; she had to patch up the rest as best she might. What a stupid tangle she had got herself into with the rhyme scheme.

She needed a rhyme for "feet," to end a line that made some sense of the foolish phrase, "as improbable as spring." She scribbled and crossed out and erased and threw her pen around a bit, but in the end there was nothing for it. She had been reading too much Greek literature.

But even as I watch the senseless sky

Cracked hideous in the water at my feet,

Dread rumors crowd me, dark forebodings: I

Remember, as improbable as spring

To this abyss where Night and Chaos meet,

The star, the cup, the cross: that tale's ending.

There was something there; it was maddeningly far from perfect, but there was something. Janet briefly damned Keats for inventing alternate forms of the sonnet to plague her; scrawled "The Atheist in Doubt" across the top of the page, thought despairingly of what Danny would say about the entire endeavor, and went back to Ericson.

Molly was lying on her bed completely surrounded by sheets and wads of yellow paper, much scribbled upon. She was writing up her lab report. She glanced up as Janet came in, and then sat bolt upright. "What in the world have you been up to?"

"I wrote a poem," said Janet, startled. "That's all."

"Far out. Can I read it?"

"It's awfully rough, but sure. Here. It's pretty legible; this line finishes up around here and this one actually comes before that one."

Molly took the notebook and read. "I like the title. You read about Christians in doubt until you want to throttle them all, but you never hear about atheists in doubt."

"Are you an atheist?"

"Nope," said Molly, not looking up. "I believe in an order for good in the universe.

You can't look at a tidepool and not believe that." She grinned suddenly, and raised her head. "Of course," she observed, "people do it every day. I can't, though. But I won't put up with this nonsense of organized religion. I'm a scientist and I will rely on my experience, thank you."

Janet decided not to argue with her; not when the basis of her own problem was not one whit less woolly. Molly looked back at the paper. "It
is
like that out there, isn't it?" she said. "But I don't get this part. How can a miracle unveil the atheist's universe; and you haven't got buds and trees in winter anyway."

Janet looked over her shoulder, scowling; and then laughed. "Oops," she said. "That was dumb. Here. 'Not veiled by miracle.' How's that? It scans the same, and it's what I actually meant."

"Oh, all right." She read the rest of it through without a word, her face perfectly

solemn, and then she dropped the notebook on top of her own notes and said, "Brrrr."

"What?"

"I never thought religion was scary before. I thought it was either stupid or comforting." She picked up the notebook again. "There's something about this last rhyme."

"It's awful," said Janet. "But that's the way it wanted to go. I might be able to fix it later."

"I had no idea you could do this."

"It really isn't very good, but I'm glad you like it."

"What a thing to say!" said Molly. "How does that reflect on my taste, I'd like to know? No, I really like it, it made me think differently. So what if it's not perfect?"

"It's a sonnet," said Janet. "They're supposed to be."

"Have you been looking at tidepools?"

"No, it's Chaucer and Milton and Euripides."

"Oh my," said Molly, absently.

"Doesn't scan."

"Say Ferris, then; Euripides is his fault."

Janet burst out laughing.

"Well?" said Molly.

"You might as well say, genetics is Mendel's fault."

"You might just as well say, I breathe when I sleep is the same thing as I sleep when I breathe."

"It
is
the same thing with you!" said Janet, and they collapsed laughing on one another's shoulders.

"Whew," said Molly, wiping her eyes. "They always said too much study makes women hysterical. Don't tell anybody. Are you and Nick all right? It seems weird to me that Chaucer and Milton make you write poetry but Nick doesn't."

"It seems weird to me, too," said Janet. "He writes me poetry. But I think he's a lot more used to this than I am."

"He can't be much more used to it, can he?"

"He's mentioned at least two previous girlfriends," said Janet. "And I see Anne Beauvais looking at him sometimes."