Pamela Dean (33 page)

"That girl certainly gets around," said Molly. "She's always slinking at Thomas; Tina's going to bop her with a spare ski if she doesn't watch out." She drew a breath; then she picked up her notebook and pen and began to write.

Janet sat on the carpet until Molly let the breath out again, and then got up quietly and retrieved her astronomy book. It was usually a mistake to push Molly, and it was always bad manners to interrupt anybody's studying. Did Molly know something about Robin and Anne, or, like Janet, did she merely wonder?

In the eighth week of the term, Nick and Robin's production of
The Revenger's
Tragedy
began its five-night run. Janet had not gotten around to reading it. She had gathered from all the discussion that it was Jacobean rather than Elizabethan: complex, bloody, grotesque, with a bitter and maniacal humor. Nick and Robin usually spoke deprecatingly of the verse. She had never gotten them to say why they wanted to produce it; it seemed to have been an idea they had had always.

She and Molly and Tina, neither of whom had read the play either, or helped with the production, college being what it was, arrived early on the first night, and sat in the front row. Ericson Little Theater was a high, narrow room with twelve rows of four dusty red velvet seats in the center, and varying numbers and sizes of rows tucked into its sides. The stage was tiny, but Robin had pronounced it large enough for a sword fight, though, he said, you would not wish to try to produce something like
Henry V
on it, or anything whatsoever by Shaw. It had a bit of carved and gilded woodwork adorning its ceiling and door frames, mostly figures abstracted from the convoluted arms of the college and presented in unaccustomed isolation: the lion looked startled, the dove embarrassed, and the snake extremely smug.

Tina and Molly were arguing about invertebrate biology. Janet rested her chin on the back of her seat and watched people come in. Professor Evans and his wife, looking resigned; Professor Davison and her husband, looking amused; Odile Beauvais and her roommates, looking svelte; a scattering of other English professors and a few from Music and Modern Languages and History. A sprinkling of curious students. Diane Zimmerman, without her sulky brother but with Miss Andrews and Mr. Hecht from English 10 last term.

Peg and Sharon and Kevin and Nora—and good heavens, that must be Nora's boyfriend, never glimpsed till this minute, a lanky young man with long dark hair. Janet started to nudge Molly, and stopped, gaping.

Melinda Wolfe, in a long black velvet skirt and a white blouse, had come in, followed by a whole line of pale, stern people variously dressed, and in the midst of them Professor Medeous in a brisk green linen suit with all her mad-colored hair streaming down her back in a most unbusinesslike manner. She was the woman who had worn red and green tatters and ridden a black horse on Hallowe'en. Janet had not recognized her; but that was Medeous, and that was the same woman.

She and her entourage filled two rows in the middle of the room. Behind them again came a group of eight or nine Classics majors; none of the ones Janet knew well, though, because all of those were in the play. When they had all sat down, the room, from being half-empty, became almost full. And just in time, too; even as Janet caught Melinda Wolfe's eye and boldly grinned at her, the lights went halfway down and the curtain came up.

They had certainly worked hard on the set. The stage floor was a smooth reflective black—marine paint, Janet remembered, very difficult to get off the hands. The walls were draped with green and red—glowering green, smoldery red, like colors full of gray, or obscured by smoke. Spaced between the hangings were enormous reproductions of woodcuts Janet recognized from the medieval part of English 10: devils stamping naked souls into a boiling caldron; the bony arms and legs and grinning skull of Death showing through a rich robe and a smiling youthful mask; another bony Death, in cap and bells, leading a reluctant Queen away from her palace and out of the clutching arms of her King and her ladies; a brawny fellow in a fig leaf vainly hiding behind a tree from the sun, the all-seeing eye of God; a serpent lurking among the innocent leaves of a stylized strawberry plant; and one of those peculiar medieval lions, like a large dog with a mane, its paw on the neck of a meek but much more realistic boar, while on a branch a bove their heads a shabby

vulture watched.

Since the play's beginning seemed to be delayed, she turned around and surveyed the audience again, and was in time to see her parents, harassed, enter with Lily-Milly, rebellious. She had probably nagged them into saying she could come to the play and then decided she didn't want to, and they had—unwisely, in Janet's opinion, but thank God Lily wasn't her kid—determined to keep her to her word. They sat down just behind Medeous and her group of long-limbed, long-haired, long-faced cohorts, and Janet's father waved to her and then leaned forward to speak to Medeous. She listened to him with a cool and remote expression, and then smiled briefly, shaking her head.

The lights went down the rest of the way, and Janet turned back to the stage. A procession of indistinct figures marched across it by the light of two rather dim torches, from left to right. About halfway across they got a light on the face of the procession's leader. It was Jack Nikopoulos, his dark face made darker by a gray wig and beard. He wore green, inappropriately enough; it was the same vivid summer green as Professor Medeous's suit.

"Duke," said Thomas's resonant voice from somewhere near the front, stage right, in a friendly tone that made the hairs on Janet's neck stand up, "royal lecher: go, gray haired Adultery And thou his son, as impious-steeped as he." At this point, by accident or design Janet never did determine, they got a light on him, too.

Janet heard Molly take her breath in. She was staring herself. Thomas was holding a skull; but that was not why. Thomas was beautiful; everybody agreed with that. But he did occasionally, in his usual dress, look a little pale and washed-out, like a bad print of himself. He was wearing black, doublet and hose and cloak and hat with feather, with just a little lace showing at the cuffs and neck. He made every view of him Janet had ever seen seem like a bad print of this one. She hoped none of the more impressionable girls in the audience would swoon or shriek. Really, you would think a voice like that was blessing enough for any one person.

The voice like that had been going on, serenely, with its speech; it had just addressed the skull when Janet gathered herself to pay attention. "Thou sallow picture," said Thomas, uncannily, "of my poisoned love." I'd hate that if I were Tina, thought Janet. She didn't like it much herself. Even less did she like the lascivious telling-over of the charms of the character's poisoned love: to say that one's beloved could make a moral man sin eight times a day instead of seven, and could make a usurer's son give up all his inheritance for a kiss, and then to rant because the Duke, reacting in exactly the same way, had poisoned the woman for refusing him, seemed to Janet to be a peculiar sort of love and perhaps to miss the point.

It was a crazy play; that was evident in no time. Thomas abjured the skull to be merry, merry, because murder never did go unavenged. Then Nick came in, wearing green velvet and looking wonderfully rakish, and said, in a resigned tone that raised a chorus of laughter from the audience, "Still sighing o'er Death's vizard?"

Nick, it appeared, was Thomas's brother (Janet wished for a program book). His news was that the Duke's son had asked him to hire a pandar. If Thomas cared to come disguised to court and apply for the position, he would then be in a position to exact his revenge.

This determined, Odile and Anne Beauvais came drifting onto the stage, trailing clouds and green gauze and wearing dreamy expressions that just escaped the foolish. The audience made a few titters, uncertainly. Odile and Anne were, respectively, Nick and Thomas's mother and their sister. They asked for news, and were regaled with court gossip, which dealt with the Duke's son being on trial for the rape of one Lord Antonio's wife. It also came out that the whole family felt that the Duke had killed Nick and Thomas's father indirectly, by making him die of "discontent, the nobleman's consumption." The audience, being democratic in nature, thought this was fairly funny. They hissed at Thomas, however, when he made the aside, "Wives are but made to go to bed and feed." Janet noted that his character was excessively given to aphorism.

The next scene was the trial of the Duke's son for rape. The Duchess and the prisoner's two older brothers pleaded for mercy. Another son, apparently a bastard of the Duke's, made a number of highly amusing asides expressing his hope that the rogue would hang as he deserved; he said, in fact, that he wished the entire court would become a corpse. He was played by the southern boy who thought one should make stew of the squirrels. He still had his accent; it worked surprisingly well, perhaps because it marked him apart from the others.

The youngest brother, whom Janet did not recognize, did not appear to be suffering from remorse, and made a number of jokes that might have been funnier to an audience with fewer feminists in it. Janet did hear Professor Evans's unregenerate laugh, and deduced that Junior Brother was probably going to come to a bad end.

The judges sounded in a hanging mood. The Duke suddenly broke off the proceedings. The Duchess was angry because her husband had not simply refused to let the law touch his child at all. She decided to seduce the bastard son in revenge; the bastard son was not at all averse to this, saying that since adultery begot him, it was only reasonable that he in his turn should commit it.

The audience was amused. It was even more so when Nick reappeared, followed by a Thomas now garbed in dull brown and wearing an unreal wig of black hair streaked with red. When Thomas said, "What, brother, am I far enough from myself?" the entire room erupted in laughter, and there was a scattering of applause. When Nick tugged the wig into place and buttoned Thomas's coat for him before answering, again resignedly, "As if another man had been sent whole Into the world and none wist how he came," there was another wave of laughter. Janet was glad they were getting this reaction, but she was not exactly amused herself.

But Robin came in as the Duke's eldest son, who had not attended the trial. He was dressed in red, and professed himself delighted to employ Thomas. They engaged one another in a series of bawdy puns and remarks that had two meanings if you knew who Thomas was, and Janet did laugh. So did Molly. When it turned out that the virgin whom Robin had his eye on was Thomas's own sister, Janet laughed until she cried.

She stopped, though Molly didn't, when Robin suggested that Thomas might approach the girl through her—and Thomas's—mother. She did admire, in Thomas's following soliloquy, the deft transition from shock, outrage, and horror to the thoughtful mischief with which he pronounced his decision to go disguised to his mother and try her standards.

In the next scene Rob Benfield came on as Antonio, the l

ord whose wife had been

raped by the Duke's youngest son. The wife was now dead, having preferred death to dishonor. Janet was once again rather disconcerted to hear the wife's virtues praised: though she excited lust, she "ever lived As cold in lust as she is now in death." Nick, whose name, it transpired, was Hippolito, swore on his sword—"thou bribeless officer"—to avenge the lady's death, since everybody assumed the Duke would contrive to get his son cleared of the charges. Antonio then made the extraordinary statement that his greatest joy was that it should be called a miracle that he, being an old man, had yet a wife so chaste; and they all trooped out.

Anne Beauvais drifted back on and pronounced a short, touching meditation on the difficulty of being a maid with no fortune but her honor. Janet found it very difficult to keep a straight face, but somehow nudging Molly in the ribs did not seem like a reasonable action.

To Anne entered Professor Ferris with his round angelic face, and proceeded to enact a clown. He brought on the disguised Thomas, whom Anne dealt with briskly by smacking him in the face. Janet glanced covertly at Molly—after all, here was Robin pining after Anne Beauvais, who wouldn't have him, and Thomas pretending to act on Robin's behalf while secretly hoping that Anne would continue to refuse. Molly looked perfectly serene.

After this things got wilder and wilder, and in fact funnier and funnier, except that everybody, and especially Thomas, kept saying things like, "Without gold and women there would be no damnation, Hell would look like a lord's great kitchen without fire in't."

And women were either chaste—which meant you not only behaved yourself, but didn't wish to do otherwise—or utterly wanton; there was no middle ground. Janet began to wonder if the author had done all this on purpose; it seemed that every time the play warmed and grew funny, somebody would say something like that.

The disguised Thomas had no luck persuading his sister to the Duke's bed, but he did succeed, to his mingled chagrin and delight, in bribing his mother to force the girl to give up her chastity. Janet had no tender feelings for chastity at the moment, but the disguised Thomas and the greedy mother made her skin creep. She was relieved when the intermission came.

"Whew!" said Molly.

Tina said, "I don't know whether to laugh or go under the seat."

Janet had expected a querulous demand to have the entire plot explained, and was much cheered by this response. "I don't either," she said.

Molly got up and fetched a program book from a stack that had appeared near the main door. "This says," she said, strolling back to her roommates and sitting down, "that the play is a satirical tragedy."

"What does that mean?" said Tina.

"I'm not sure," said Janet. "People die, but you don't care?"

"
Women
die," said Molly savagely.

"You noticed that, too? I thought maybe it was just me."

"What I want to know," said Molly, "is whether those boys are emphasizing that element on purpose. They're so good, it's hard to tell. What do you think of your Thomas, Tina?"