Pamela Dean (22 page)

Sharon went off to the library to work on a term paper. Molly tried to persuade Tina to come help her with her math, but Tina sat obdurately eating fruit cocktail until Nick suggested that they all go for a walk. "You, too," he said to Molly. "You can do your perishing mathematics while the rest of us are carousing in the city."

He then took a firm hold of Janet's hand and kept it through an extensive ramble into the Lower Arboretum, past Janet's favorite island, away from the river and any paths she knew, through drifts of last year's brown leaves, through yellowing ferns and bright yellow black-eyed Susans and the pale gray-blue asters, through the constant flutter of the red and yellow and brown leaves, falling and falling in the sunlit air.

"I love autumn," said Molly, scuffing along in the crispest leaves with her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and her bell-bottoms—not a style she usually favored—dragging behind her and adding to the enormous noise she was making. "It's sad."

"It always reminds me of
Fahrenheit 451,
" said Janet. "Everything burning to death, all the metaphors and all the uses for fire."

"Play the man, Master Ridley," said Nick, very softly.

Janet could feel Christina about to ask what the hell they were blathering about. She looked at her quickly. Tina's eyes were on Nick's downbent face. After a moment she shook her head, bounded ahead of the other three, and returned with a handful of horse chestnuts. "Let's throw them in the river," she said.

They did this, and when that palled they spent half an hour finding the right flat stones, and had skipping contests. Molly lost cheerfully; Nick got very grim about it, finally beating Tina, who gave up with perfect good humor, and then tying with Janet, who did not really want to be beaten, and especially did not want to be in the position of somebody who let her lover win. She meant to win—but the last rock she chose sank like the rock it was the first time it hit the water, while Nick's skipped three times, hit a log with a hollow thunk, and slid quietly under. Janet looked at her hand accusingly, and then held it out to Nick. "Congratulations."

Nick had the grace to look embarrassed, he drew her hand through his arm and said,

"It's getting cold; we should turn back now."

"God, yes," said Tina, "I've got to read a chapter of biology and take a shower and get dressed for the theater."

They trudged back in silence. Janet took a shower while Tina read her biology, and sat around in her bathrobe reading Plato, which for some reason felt extremely decadent.

Tina's dressing took forty-five minutes, to Molly's vocal admiration and Janet's silent scorn. She ended up looking as if she had just pulled her gray-and-pink-striped shirt dress over her head; and given that she had a marvelously clear skin to start with and was endowed with nice pink cheeks, Janet failed to see why she had spent half an hour on her makeup.

Janet herself put on the green velvet dress at a quarter to six, asked Molly to pin on the lace collar for her, brushed out her red hair, and was absurdly gratified when Molly exclaimed over her too. "I wish I had a camera," said Molly, sitting on her bed in her most ragged pair of jeans and the University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt and a very old pair of blue slippers with chewed white fur around the edges. "I feel like a proud mother sending my daughters off to the prom. Don't get pregnant, now."

Janet laughed at her and picked up her knapsack; Tina, astonishingly, blushed.

"Don't break the spine of that math book," said Janet to Molly, and followed Tina out the door.

It was colder than it had been last night. The sunlight made everything look warm, but the sky was a brittle and comfortless blue. Tina had snagged a huge gray shawl from her closet as she went out, and when they stepped out of the shelter of Ericson into the blasting wind, she wrapped it around her head and tucked her hands into it. Janet glanced sideways as they labored past the Music and Drama Center, and burst out laughing. "We look like a peasant woman and her daughter going to market."

"I really hate to trade you for a cow, dearie," said Tina, in a cracked voice, "but there's no help for it."

"I keep telling you," said Janet petulantly, "you'd do far better to get a batch of chickens."

"Too noisy," said Tina, shaking her head in the heavy shawl. "Always cackling; my poor head couldn't stand it, not for a moment."

"Pigs," said Janet.

"I can't get pigs for you, dearie; not enough flesh on you."

"You're not selling me to be
eaten!
" said Janet. "After what you've fed me this summer? They'll take one bite and come lynch you. Tell them I can work."

"But you can't, dearie. Head always in a book, the dust could be over our heads before you'd notice."

They went past the chapel, with the yellow leaves whirling around its tower and the pigeons starting from its roof; and the force of the wind blowing across the open ground beyond it made speech impossible. Janet looked sideways at Tina. Did she know what she was saying? Tina's wind-pink face, in the depths of the shawl, looked half-pleased and half-desperate, as if she were finding her own game too much. She needed encouragement if she were being fanciful; she needed squashing if she were being malicious. Which?

Ahead of them, Nick jumped up from the steps of the Student Union and began waving.

"There's Nick," said Janet, and walked faster.

As they crossed the asphalt road, Thomas came out the scuffed red doors of the Student Union and walked down the steps to stand by Nick. He was a foot taller. He wore a red shirt rather than a white one, but otherwise was dressed as he had been yesterday evening. The wind blew his curling pale hair straight back from his thin face and swirled leaves around him like a magician's scarves.

Nick had put on a dark blue suit and a sedate tie, but he was wearing that same maroon sweater under the suit jacket. His hair looked like a squirrel's nest. Janet walked right up to him and kissed him on the nose. He dug his fingers into her hair and rubbed the back of her neck. "You look splendid," he said. "Like a Victorian story book illustration. Tina, how

elegant you are under all that wool. I hope you'll take it off in the theater?"

"If it's warm in the theater," said Tina, beaming.

"I didn't know you owned a suit," said Janet.

"It's Rob's," said Nick. "Hence the sweater. He's bigger in the shoulders than I am."

"Thomas, aren't you cold?" said Tina.

"Nope," said Thomas. "This is just about how I like it." He shook out the silk folds of one sleeve, and grinned. "Besides, the color of my shirt keeps me warm. Look, here comes the bus."

They got on, and sat down on the proper side to get the good view of Blackstock, Janet with Nick, and Tina with Thomas in front of him. They shared the bus with a noisy group of music students and Professor Rivers, going up to hear a concert at Orchestra Hall, and with a morose-looking couple on their way to an assigned production of Anouilh's

Antigone,
which they did not seem to expect to enjoy.

The bus ground up a hill and rounded the curve, and Janet tugged at Nick's arm and leaned across him to look out the window. Thomas had made Tina look. The still small clump that was Blackstock smiled at them in the late evening sunlight. The air was clearer tonight, so that the buildings seemed better rooted. Janet smiled back at them. She had been craning her neck at this view since she could barely see over the lower edge of the car window. First it had been where Daddy worked, and then it had been where she would go to college; and now, suddenly, it was home. Four years, thought Janet, with a quite inexpressible pleasure. She looked at Nick's blunt, interested profile. He was only a freshman himself. They would have a great deal of time.

Right on this thought, Tina's voice was raised in mingled delight and dismay. "You're a
junior?
" she said to Thomas.

"Cheer up," said Nick. "He came so late to his major he's going to have to take an extra year."

"Not if I have anything to say about it," said Thomas.

"Don't you like it here?" said Tina.

"I love it here," said Thomas, flatly, as if he were asserting the year in which Elizabeth ascended the throne. "But I have other things to do."

"And miles to go, before you sleep," said Nick.

"My high-school English teacher," said Tina over the back of her seat, "said that line was about death. I never really believed it."

"You can't ask Robert Frost," said Nick, reflectively. "He's dead."

"What did you think it meant, Tina?" said Thomas, a little hollowly.

"I thought it meant he had miles to go before he slept," said Tina. "He's driving a horse through a snowstorm after dark and he's a long way from home. That's what it says. It doesn't say a single thing about death."

Nick and Janet looked at each other. After a moment Nick said, "While there is a great deal to be said, in the abstract, for that view of poetical criticism, I think it does miss a something in this poem. Did you like it?"

"Yes," said Tina.

"Why?"

"I liked the way it sounded and the way it described the snow. Snow does that."

"The pleasure of recognition," said Nick.

"What?"

"Aristotle validates your reaction."

"Be quiet," said Thomas, "leave the girl alone. I don't mind talking about poetry, but I'm damned if I'll talk about critics."

"And you so eager to get on to graduate school, where they do nothing else," said Nick.

Oh, dear, thought Janet, looking at the back of Thomas's head and the stiff set of his shoulders, this will never do. "Tell us about what you're going to do with
The Revenger's
Tragedy,"
she said.

This occupied them thoroughly, if not altogether happily, for the remainder of the journey. Nick disapproved of something Thomas wanted to do with the costumes. They argued about the Duke and Vindice and Castiza and a whole horde of other Italians, until the bus pulled into the parking lot of the theater.

Having arrived early, they waited together in the theater's lobby. The conversation was not lively, and Janet had an uneasy feeling that this was simply one of those groups that would not coalesce into a decent conversation. It was lacking a particular flexible type of personality. She had had two of them around last night; she would have to remember this when putting together expeditions in the future.

For the present, she asked Tina to help her, when they got to the gift shop, to pick out a birthday present for Molly.

"What, the stage for
The Lady's Not for Burning?
" said Thomas. "It would be hard to get it home on the bus. Maybe they could ship it."

"We can't afford that," said Janet. "I was thinking of—"

"I'll go in with you," said Thomas. "Molly's the only person I've ever met who could stifle Robin for a moment."

Nick looked at him with both eyebrows raised and what might have been a smile.

"Count me in," he said.

"I suppose you know a dozen," said Thomas; he sounded more resigned than angry.

"Not that many," said Nick.

"How long have you known Robin?" said Janet. Something vaguely trapped in Nick's face made her add, "Maybe Molly can apply to you for advice on how to woo him."

"She's welcome," said Nick. "We are old friends. We met young."

"Embryonic, in fact," said Thomas.

"Only twins do that," said Nick, mildly; Janet thought that Thomas had tried to provoke him, but apparently what he had said made no more sense to Nick than it did to her.

Janet gave up on both of them. Tina must have felt the quality of the silence too. She said, "Thomas, you're a junior, so tell us, how early in the term is it reasonable to be behind on all your classwork?"

"Early in the term is fine," said Thomas. "It's late in the term that you have to worry about. How far behind are you?"

"Two chapters in Chemistry and a problem set in Bio."

"Didn't you get your chem class changed?" demanded Nick.

"Yes, I did, that's why I'm two chapters behind."

"And what's the excuse for the Bio?" said Thomas.

Tina smiled at him. "I'm going to a play."

Nick and Janet looked at each other; Janet thought of the long, wasted afternoon by the river, Tina's refusal to go and help Molly with her math problems. Besides, it didn't make sense; Tina didn't have bio class until Tuesday. If it were a problem set from her previous class, then some event previous to the class it was due in must be responsible for her not having done it.

None of this was worth saying, of course—or indeed worth figuring out in the first place. It was a shame that Thomas might take up with somebody willing to be, even in minor matters, underhanded; but if she exposed Tina's foolery, she would look a great deal worse than Tina and Thomas would pay no attention anyway. Besides, he was a junior, and could presumably look out for himself.

Janet steered them over to the model Molly had wanted. She was mildly annoyed at having her present turned into a group project; but Molly certainly wanted the model more than she wanted anything Janet could afford on her own.

"We should ask Robin if he wants to come in on this," she said.

"Don't push him," said Nick. "He's skittish. We can manage, I think, if the shipping is not too dear."

He went up to the desk to inquire about this, and Janet went on poking about in the prints and calendars and greeting cards, looking for a birthday one to go with the model.

Thomas and Tina had drifted over to examine the puppets; Thomas said something, and Tina laughed.

None of the cards was at all right for Molly. Janet left them and flipped through the calendars. Cats; Sierra Club; British castles; German mountains;
Hamlet.
Janet cast a glance at Thomas, who was giggling with Tina, and stealthily eased the calendar out of its envelope. It began with a woodcut of the Globe Theater, skidded through a few sketches of later theaters and their actors, and round about April settled down to a gorgeous series of photographs from famous productions of
Hamlet.