Pamela Dean (41 page)

"He's very charming," said her mother, reflectively. "I just wonder if he's reliable."

"What do you mean?"

"I wonder what he'd do if you got pregnant." She shot Janet a sort of look that Janet had been more accustomed to receiving when she was ten, and said, "You are on the pill, aren't you?"

"No," said Janet, staggered into the truth; and seeing how very alarmed her mother looked, she added hastily, "I'm using a more old-fashioned method, but it's quite reliable."

"None of them are a hundred percent reliable," said her mother, darkly.

Janet had often wondered if Andrew was an accident, but she would not have asked it for the world. "Nick is a gentleman," she said, a little hotly. "I'm sure he'd be honorable."

"Even if he would," said her mother, "you might not like it very much, if you want to go on to graduate school."

"I'm being as careful as I can."

"Well, I suppose one can't ask for more," said her mother. "I hope you're right about your swain, that's all."

"I wouldn't sleep with somebody I didn't trust," said Janet; and though she had spoken with perfect sincerity, she immediately wondered if it was true.

They went on rocking—they were sitting in the porch swing—and presently Janet's mother asked her what her hours were at the greenhouse next day, and they passed on to harmless topics.

Danny called her the next evening and, after he had been congratulated for retaining the use of his brain, asked if he could have three days to sleep and then bicycle with her to the Dundas Book Fair. He said he hadn't read a book all summer and was worried that he had forgotten how.

It was all very well for him: he had been sweating in the sun for three months, while Janet had been doing light work in a greenhouse, going for twilight walks, and lurking inside the rest of the time. It was a cloudless and ferociously hot day and the secondary roads they bicycled along were a welter of dust, which combined with the sweat to make a salty mud. Janet got mad at Danny for getting so far ahead of her and madder when he stopped to wait.

The book fair was held in and around a disused barn. The sun and the dust were about the same as on the road. The books were, as always, varied, fascinating, and very cheap.

But in the first fifteen minutes Danny beat her to a complete set of the D'Artagnan romances, a huge volume of sixteenth-century maps,
Lord Hornblower
in hardcover, and six of the Rick Brant books. She did find two minor works of Dorothy Sayers in hardcover, and four Nancy Drews, the old ones where Nancy drove a roadster and there were words longer than two syllables. But it seemed a poor compensation.

They settled with their booty and paper cups of fruit punch in the shade of a huge maple. Danny's sun-dark, sweaty face was blissful. He looked like a statue of an especially smug Buddha that its caretakers had neglected to clean recently. All he needed was some bird droppings. No birds obliged. Janet finished her punch and began to be ashamed of her temper. It was Danny's youngest sister's birthday and he had to be home for dinner, so if she wanted to talk to him this was the only time to do it.

Danny was gloating over his book of maps. Janet paused t

o gather her thoughts. But

like Danny and Nick, they would not come together in the same place. What she had was not a series of events connected by necessity and probability, as both Aristotle and Danny would require; not tangible proof of strange goings-on; not reasonable suspicions backed by evidence. She felt what confounded her as she had felt the weight of Christianity on English literature. Something pervasive and all-embracing manifested itself from time to time, in books thrown out of windows, in Nick and Robin's conspiratorial glances, in Thomas's costuming of the Classics Department, in Melinda Wolfe's gorgeous refreshments and Professor Medeous's grave demeanor.

"So," said Danny, closing the book carefully, "seen any ghosts lately?"

Tina was returning a day before Molly, which made Janet a little uneasy. She dutifully met Tina at the bus station, however, and helped her carry her suitcases up the hill, past the Morgue, past Taylor and the chapel and the tilting M&D Center and the narrow ends of Ericson and Forbes, and up all the stairs to their new room at the top of Eliot. Then they carried all their own boxes and as many of Molly's as they could find up from the basement of Eliot, where they had been deposited last June.

Molly's toy theater they made a special effort to find; setting it up for Molly had been a brainwave of Janet's, mostly so they would have some common goal to talk about. They found a stray lounge table from the previous (and rather sturdier) issue of college furniture, and lugged it cursing up the steps. Janet expended a few longing thoughts on the boring new dormitories, which had elevators in them. But after all, one had to carry only twice a year; one had to live with the walls and woodwork and the proportions of the windows and the height of the ceilings day in and day out.

Their room was furnished with three single beds, which was a blessing. The furniture in Eliot was like that in Ericson, though, like the rest of the building, a little shabbier. They had a green carpet instead of a red one. They put the old striped curtains up anyway, to see if they would get along with the carpet or not. They spent several hours moving furniture, so as to make a place for the toy theater where nobody would bump into it.

Tina was very easy to work with; she was strong and coordinated and didn't complain about being tired or about pounding her thumb with the hammer when they put the hardware for the curtains up. It occurred to Janet that she would probably make a very good sister; she would be easy to live with if there were no expectation of strenuous friendship.

Maybe they could manage this. They went down to dinner at six in a very amiable spirit, and found Diane Zimmerman and Sharon Washington at the table Sharon and Nora used to occupy.

Diane had been working for a children's puppet theater, and Sharon had been doing all the dirty work for a couple of geologists in Arizona. They were both very pleased with themselves and their summers. Janet had a sudden shamed feeling that, despite a fair amount of work in the greenhouse, surely a worthy institution, she had squandered her own vacation on self-indulgence.

Tina too looked depressed, and confessed to Janet later, when they were completing the unpacking and trying to decide where to hang some botanical prints Tina had brought back with her, that she was mostly downcast because her own job and summer had been so ordinary. Janet, standing on a desk chair and adjusting a lovely curlicued drawing of wild hyacinth, looked at her uneasily. If Tina really was ordinary, then making her unhappy about it would serve no purpose whatsoever. She could not think how to ask if Thomas had been putting ideas into Tina's head.

She finally tried, "Well, Thomas had a very ordinary summer, didn't he?"

"No," said Tina, with the utmost gloom, "he was collating two manuscripts of Euripides for Professor Medeous. He just went home to do it because he doesn't like this place in the summer."

"Well," said Janet, "I had an ordinary summer myself."

"It didn't sound ordinary."

"That's style, not substance. I made it sound interesting, that's all."

"I don't see how you did it."

Janet began to recommend the works of some eminent and fascinating diarists, but Tina interrupted her. "No, that's no good—because I wouldn't be able to see that what they were talking about had ever been ordinary, if they wrote it up so well."

Janet was becoming exasperated, but she reminded herself that they had nine months in one another's company to come, and that Molly liked Tina. "Okay, look," she said, after some thought accomplished while they put their respective books on their shelves. "I've been meaning to start keeping my diary again. I'll write up some of the things you're around for—dinners in Eliot, and walks in the Arb, and a party if we have one—and I'll type it up for you, without the private parts, and you can read it, and compare it to what happened, and then maybe you'll see."

Tina looked so radiant that Janet felt both oppressed and guilty. But she was committed now.

Molly came back; Nick came back; Robin and Thomas and Peg came back. Molly had a new daishiki with blue tigers on it, and said cheerfully that she had six million new freckles; but she looked just the same to Janet. Peg was pale, thin, and abstracted; questioned, she squinted through her glasses and said that working as a bookkeeper for a children's clinic had been lucrative but not restful.

"You should have come to Wisconsin," said Nick.

They were sitting in Janet and Molly and Tina's room after supper, drinking mint tea provided by Peg and eating cinnamon cookies provided by the RA, who had turned out to be Kit Lane. He had left a little packet of them inside everybody's door and then vanished.

Janet was reserving judgment on whether this was a good way to handle one's responsibilities. There was no need to reserve judgment on his baking. The cookies were as good as Melinda Wolfe's, if not so pretty.

Peg put hers down untouched on the pink paper napkin provided by Tina and gave Nick an oblique look. "I thought it would be better to get away."

"You can't get away from Blackstock, not really," said Nick. He had traded in his unruly mop of hair for a neat cap of curls, turned almost as brown as Danny, and gotten the earpiece of his glasses mended. He looked as if he had managed to get very far away indeed from anything that troubled him.

"I felt so far away I thought I'd never get back," said Tina gloomily.

Thomas smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and she smiled at him. Thomas too was brown and serene, with his hair bleached almost white and his gray eyes startling pools in all that tan. Janet looked at Robin, who was perched on Molly's dresser surveying the rest of them, on the floor, like a supercilious vulture. He was still his pale self, but his hair and beard were sleek as the pelt of an otter.

"What in the world did you guys do in Wisconsin?" she said.

"Meditation," said Nick.

"Nothing too much," said Robin, gravely. "Know thyself. We thought on hubris, and were translated."

"Somebody needs to translate
that,
" said Molly, tossing Tina's teddy bear at him.

"O Robin," said Janet, without thinking, "how thou art translated."

Nick laughed; so, after a moment, did Molly. Tina looked puzzled. Thomas had withdrawn himself from the entire conversation and was staring out the window at the red-streaked evening sky.

Robin sat perfectly still, holding the teddy bear on one knee. Then he smiled slightly.

"Robin is he who translates, not he who is translated," he said.

"Were you ever in
A Midsummer Night's Dream?
" said Janet. She had just called him an ass. But you could almost always placate Robin by asking about acting.

"A time or two," said Robin.

Like Professor Ferris in
The Revenger's Tragedy,
Robin seemed always to play the Fool. So, for this play—"Puck?" said Janet.

"And made an ass of Nicholas there," said Robin.

"Now somebody say, 'That's not hard to do,'" said Nick, "and we can all laugh."

Peg said, "Is that the play where they say the course of true love never did run smooth?"

"Yes," said Thomas, turning his head suddenly. "It's a comfort to them—they're having trouble, true love always has trouble, therefore theirs is true love."

"Shakespeare's
always
like that!" said Peg. "When you find out where the quotations came from, they always seem to mean something else."

"That's what happens when you're all things to all men," said Nick.

Peg frowned; Thomas looked at him and said, "And has he saved some?"

"New Testament!" said Peg triumphantly. "St. Paul. I am made all things to all men . .

."

". . . That I might by all means save some," said Kit Lane from the doorway. "What are you playing here?"

"Eating all the RA's cookies up without him," said Molly. "Thank you very much, and do come in."

Kit came in like the cat they called him, his long black hair floating around his rosy-dark, fine-boned face. If the room had been dimmer, he would have given off light like the trappings of the horse he had ridden on Hallowe'en. He must have been in Wisconsin too. Or maybe it wasn't Wisconsin at all; Janet remembered the day a year ago that Peg pointed out the clump of boys in Taylor's dining hall. Maybe she had just gotten used to them over the school year, and a summer's absence had shown her the quality they had always.

"Were you in Wisconsin, Kit?" she said. "With all these maniacs?"

"Oh, yes," said Kit.

"Like calls to like," said Nick.

"And where were you, Peg?" said Kit, folding himself to the carpet beside her.

"Earning my living," said Peg, with no expression. She was looking not at him but at the patched left thigh of her blue jeans.

"We missed you," said Kit, in a cajoling tone that no other voice in the world—except possibly Thomas's—could have made better than laughable.

"Professor Medeous didn't," said Peg, still to the patch.

She said the title as if it were an insult. Kit tugged gently at the fat braid that hung down her back. "You'd be surprised," he said. "And she's not the sole member of the department."

Peg looked straight at him and said, "I'm going to go find out if Sharon's back. I'll see you later." She stood up and shook out the ruffles of her shirt. "Thank you for the tea, Molly."

"You brought it," said Molly; but Peg was already shutting the door behind her.

"Sharon got back yesterday," said Janet.

Kit tapped his temple with a forefinger.

"No more than the rest of us," said Thomas, sharply.

"The rest of us do what we're told," said his brother.

"The more fools we," said Robin.

"What are you all blathering about?" said Molly. "At leas t Vindice did something, even if he never once shut his mouth while he was doing it."

All the Classics majors looked at her consideringly, as if she were a semilegible manuscript. Thomas's mouth was tight; everybody else just looked interested.