Pamela Dean (36 page)

"I forget how young you are," said Nick, beginning to brush her hair.

"You, of course, are as old as Methuselah."

"Not quite."

"Come on, you're a freshman too."

"I took a long time to get through high school."

"How come?"

"That," said Nick, "is a very good question. Let us answer it together."

They both fell asleep afterward, sleep being in as short supply as free time at this point in the term. Janet woke up first. Luckily Nick was not sleeping on her watch arm. She looked at the watch; it was three-fifteen. Nick could have another half hour or so.

She lay staring at the ceiling, blue and gray with snow light, and found her brain picking over the day's conversations as if they were a poem. A clichéd question about the shortness of life had been greeted oddly; Nick had said she was young, as if he were not; and there were other remarks, Thomas's about how long Nick and Robin had known one another; the large number of plays they seemed to have been in together. She had called Robin an alien; what if that were true? On the other hand, Nick, for all his affected speech and peculiar notions, was as human as he could be; and Robin, however maddening, was not nearly as weird as people could get. Anyway, why in the world should old aliens attend a liberal-arts college in Minnesota? If they could get here without being noticed, they must have better sources of information than this. It was a nice plot for a science-fiction novel, but it really made about as much sense as
The Revenger's Tragedy.

"Insufficient data," muttered Janet, and went back to sleep herself.

Tina was intolerable for two weeks. Janet and Molly finally got together and made a schedule, based on the difficulty and urgency of their classes on a given day, of which of them was required to be nice to her and which could retreat to the library or be monosyllabic. Molly ended up with a heavier burden, since she and Tina shared a class and a lab period, but she professed not to mind.

Tina spent so much time listening for the telephone and flying out to answer it that Nick suggested she take her mattress out into the hall and camp out under the phone cabinet; it would just fit, he said, between Nora's door and the bathroom. This piece of wit caused Tina to flee wailing. If it had not been Molly's day to be kind to her, Janet might have come to blows with Nick. As it was, she lacked the energy.

On the eve of finals, Thomas called Thursday afternoon at three-thirty. Peg answered the phone, and banged on the door. Janet was dressing; she buttoned her shirt in a hurry and went barefoot to answer it. "It's Thomas for Tina," said Peg.

"I'll take it," said Janet, and marched grimly out into the hallway.

"This is Janet. Tina's got lab, you know that."

"How is she?" said Thomas's resonant voice.

Janet was strongly tempted to tell him she was happy and singing and going out with one of the football players in Dunbar. "How the hell do you think she is, you dimwit?"

"Bad, huh?"

"As bad as you can imagine, and add seventy-five percent."

"Well, shit. Will she speak to me?"

"I'm sure she will. I don't know what exactly she'll say, though. If you have something fireproof and waterproof, I suggest you put it on. She won't know whether to sear you to a crisp and serve you up in Taylor, or weep all over you."

"I couldn't help it."

"Don't practice your excuses on me." There was a silence at the other end; Janet suddenly remembered that Thomas had been through an ordeal that was probably worse than Tina's, even if equally self-inflicted. "Are you staying?"

"Yes. I am now a proud member of the English Department."

"Congratulations, I think."

"We'll see. Will you ask Tina to call me?"

"Don't be so stupid! Get over here with a dozen roses and look as sorrowful as you can."

"That won't be hard," said Thomas. "I'll see you this evening."

"You will not. Molly and I are going to be absent. Don't you have any idea how to conduct an apology in a romance?"

"Apparently not," said Thomas, and hung up.

Janet slammed the receiver down and stamped back to her room, full of the particular anger that meant she was ashamed of herself. What was the point of snapping at Thomas?

And why encourage him to make things up with the detestable Christina? The first sign of trouble and she turned into a whining brat. On the other hand, Thomas had no business breaking up with her by disappearing for two weeks and then not apologizing properly. She rounded the corner from the little hallway into the room proper. Nick was sitting up in her bed, dressed but very tousled.

"That was Thomas," said Janet. "I yelled at him."

"I heard you," said Nick. "Anybody would think Tina was worth defending."

That was a Robin remark, and Janet had no intention of responding to it. "Let's put our shoes on and make the bed," she said. "Molly gets so embarrassed if she sees any signs of what she knows perfectly well goes on in here."

Janet and an unembarrassed Molly dragged Nick and Robin off across the frozen lake for an early dinner in Dunbar. Normally one did not eat in Dunbar in the winter; it was glass on three sides, pleasant in spring, summer, and fall, but chilly and depressing with frost crawling up the outside of the glass and condensation running down the inside. The lighting was bad, too; they relied on nature to supplement it, and during a Minnesota March nature was not cooperative.

Robin and Nick took the news that Thomas had managed the switch to the English Department, apparently without being expelled, in the same irritating way they took so much other information. They looked at one another with eyebrows raised; then Nick shrugged and Robin rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

"He's sticking with Tina, still?" said Robin.

"If she'll let him," said Janet.

"She'll let him," said Molly. "If he gives her a good dramatic scene first."

"Oho," said Robin. "Disillusionment comes to the tolerant."

"That sounds like the title of another goddamned Jacobean play," said Molly.

"It sounds like a Greek comedy, really," said Nick. "But Robin, my lad, if disillusionment really ever does come to the tolerant, you are going to be in a great deal of trouble."

"How is it," said Janet hastily, "that we know more about Thomas than you do?"

"There's departmental gossip," said Nick, "which is how we know these things, but it hasn't caught up with events yet. You, I presume, have talked to Thomas directly—an unconscionable shortcut, which we will now put to its proper use by going about the Classics majors and telling them all about it, with distortions."

"Rumor," said Robin, "all stuck about with tongues."

"Painted full of tongues," Molly corrected him instantly. The few stage directions in Shakespeare had fascinated her, and she was particularly fond of this one.

Nick burst out laughing in a manner more like Robin's than his own; Robin merely smiled. "I cry you mercy," he said.

"That's okay," said Molly kindly. "You're only a Classics major, after all."

Nick got up and left the room, hooting.

"And he might as well be one also," said Robin, "the way he acts."

"Everybody gets weird before exams," said Molly.

Janet, watching the dining-hall doors swing in Nick's wake, thought resignedly that at least this was better than turning pale and wan at a recitation of Keats.

After dinner Janet and Molly found themselves a corner of the library—you could not expect a whole padded room to yourself on the eve of exams—and studied diligently for several hours. At nine-thirty Janet looked over at Molly, who seemed wholly absorbed in her despised physics book, and decided to get her something to drink without bothering to ask. They could always take it back to the room and freeze it on the windowsill.

The soda machine on their level was empty. Janet went down a flight of steps. The machine there was still stocked, but there were six people waiting to use it, and the one presently in possession had been reduced to hitting the side of the machine with her fist and threatening it in Spanish. She was a typical Minnesota Swede, but had obviously been studying Spanish for some time. Janet was stiff from sitting so long; she decided to take a turn through the third-floor stacks and see how matters stood when she got back.

It was not really possible to take a turn around the third floor. The warm room, bright with fluorescent lighting and smelling of library bindings and stale coffee, was full of people. Every carrel was occupied, and if you walked by them half the people hunched their shoulders in unconscious irritation and a few actually glared at you. The long oak tables under the western windows were full, mostly of desperate researchers who should have done their term papers a month ago. Every aisle between stacks had at least two people in it, their heads tilted sideways like parakeets.

Janet gave up and wandered out of the stacks and down a short corridor that contained offices and a few classrooms. There might be another Coke machine down here, or at least a drinking fountain. But there wasn't, just the bare concrete emergency staircase with its red EXIT sign glaring. Janet turned around and walked back up the hallway, and then down it again, reading the signs on the doors, LIBRARY 304; LIBRARY 306; LIBRARY 308—RARE

BOOK ROOM, OPEN M-F 9:00-1:00, 2:00-8:00, SAT 12:00-4:00; LIBRARY 310—MRS.

KNUDSON; LIBRARY 312—THOMPSON COLLECTION. Janet stopped. No hours were listed.

She pressed her nose against the frosted glass of the door, but the room was dark. She put her hand on the knob and turned, and the door opened without a sound.

Janet felt for a light switch, found it to the left of the door, and pushed both switches up. One of them, it appeared, controlled the fluorescent light in the ceiling, which, after the manner of its kind, flickered and hesitated before blinding you. The other controlled incandescent lighting in three glass cases in the middle of the room. Well, all right. She had been meaning to visit this room since Thanksgiving, but not unnaturally had not gotten around to it. Molly would be fathoms deep in her physics for hours, and they had agreed to stay until the library closed.

Janet walked forward. The books of the collection were on shelves around the edges of the room. In the usual cockeyed manner of Blackstock, you could check them out. She found, widely scattered, the Liddell and Scott, McGuffey's
Fifth Eclectic Reader,
with its four sister volumes, and the Matthew Arnold essay. Newton's
De Rerum Natura,
in Latin; yellowing nineteenth-century texts in astronomy and mathematics; more Greek, Homer and Herodotus and Xenophon and Sophocles. The poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley; no Byron.

A multivolume set of Shakespeare bound in green and gold. Pope and Dryden, Addison and Steele, Elizabeth Barrett Browning but not her husband, Dickens but not Hardy.

Janet considered the glass cases. Victoria Thompson, who had died in 1897, had owned an ivory comb and an ivory-backed mirror carved with a dolphin, and a couple of scrimshaw hair combs. She had owned a ruby bracelet and several rings, opal and amethyst and garnet; and she had been fond of red dresses. There were a velvet one and a red-and-blue calico and a red silk. She had also had a great deal of embroidered underwear that anybody today might be happy to wear as a dress or a pantsuit. Janet moved on around the cases, reading the typed cards interspersed with the exhibits. One of them referred to Miss Thompson, as Peg or somebody had indeed done on Janet's first day here, as a member of the class of 1899.

Janet felt as if she had been hit in the stomach. Yes, of course she must have died here, or why would her ghost run about tossing her college books out the window? But the thought of her dying as a sophomore at college made the entire display suddenly obscene.

Good God, thought Janet, are they going to collect the underwear belonging to that girl who killed herself a couple of years ago and put it in a glass case with her favorite record albums and her high-school class ring and her goddamned Poli-Sci books?

Maybe they would at that. Janet had been going at the display backward, and now came to the long typed scroll that introduced it. The books comprising the Thompson Collection had been given to the College at Victoria's death by her parents, and had been housed in the college library since about 1925. But the other articles were displayed as a result of the efforts of the Women's Caucus, because Victoria Thompson had not died by accident. She had thrown all her books out the window and taken laudanum—and where had she gotten it, for heaven's sake—because she was pregn ant. "In 1897?" said Janet

hollowly.

She turned off the lights, shut the door, and went back to Molly, passing the soda machine with only a momentary twinge. Their padded room had cleared out; now there was only a thin dark-brown boy writing feverishly on a yellow legal pad, and Molly, who was making origami cranes out of the scratch paper from her calculations. She took one look at Janet and got up off her pillow in a hurry. "What's the matter?"

"Let's go, I'll tell you on the way home."

They climbed the stairs to the top of the library, took off their slippers and stuffed them into their knapsacks, struggled into their heavy boots and put on coats and hats and mittens, and went through the glass doors into the freezing night. There were seventeen inches of snow on the ground, the top two soft, fresh, and still clean. The sky was clear, the stars impossibly distant, and the air like thin ice. Because there was no wind, it was pleasant.

"So what's wrong?" said Molly. They passed Masters Hall, its columns luminous like the snow, and turned right to pass Chester, which was only a dark block behind its larches.

"The Women's Caucus has a special display in the Thompson Collection."

"That's right, I read about it in the newsletter."

A lump of snow fell out of a larch onto the swept sidewalk in front of them.

"It says Victoria Thompson killed herself because she was pregnant."

"In 1897?"

Another lump fell behind them. Janet walked faster. Chester Hall's blind dark windows were like openings into a whole lot of very unpleasant alternate dimensions. The architect must have gotten the proportions wrong or something. She said, "That's exactly what I thought."