Pamela Dean (38 page)

"Double major," said Thomas to her, exactly as if there were nobody else present.

"For a seven-year stay, that will do well," she said, and signed the form.

Odile giggled. Medeous gave her a quelling look, and Odile swallowed hard and sat up very straight. Janet looked at Thomas, but he was still holding out his hand to Medeous for his green slip, and when he had gotten it back and turned to face the class, he looked perfectly blank. He sat down behind Janet, which annoyed her; and the class began.

Medeous taught them the Greek alphabet, which was entertaining; and the maddening and erratic system of accents, which was not. Thomas, of course, knew the Greek alphabet perfectly and had also mastered the accents. His gorgeous voice, too large for the little room, made music of the nonsense syllables the rest of them were stumbling over. What the hell was he doing here?

Medeous was pleasant and patient, but not at all comfortable to deal with. Janet could not believe that this was the woman who had been suspected of making up dirty jokes for her class in Aristophanes. The rest of the class, especially Odile, seemed willing to laugh at their own mistakes in pronunciation; but nobody tried it twice. A profound lack—indeed a positive denial—of humor seemed to be Medeous's primary characteristic, if you left out her mere physical presence. She made the little room seem crowded. Janet found herself tucking her feet far back under her desk, in case Medeous should trip over them. And yet there was really plenty of room. It was enough to make you go get a ruler and measure the distance between your desk and the teacher's table.

Medeous dismissed them a little early, with instructions to do the exercises in Chase and Phillips associated with the alphabet and the accent system, and to glance at Lesson 3, which had alarmingly to do with something called the First Declension.

Janet left in a hurry, but Thomas caught up with her beside the fountain.

"Look, I know you hate my guts," he said, "but just don't act like it in there, all right?"

"I thought Medeous was a jealous god?"

"I want her to be jealous about the wrong thing."

"What's the right thing, for God's sake?"

"Nick, you idiot."

"You've got to be kidding."

"Nope."

"And look. Could she really get you expelled just for mocking her in a play?"

"Not exactly. Not through normal college channels, no, so you don't need to give me

that lecture you're contemplating about the Student Council and the Grievance Committee and all that. Look, Tina's got a class; are you meeting anybody, or do you want to have lunch?"

"I'm meeting Peg and Diane in Dunbar, so we can watch the lake melt. Come on, if you want."

"Peg gives me the creeps."

"What?"

"She's so quiet."

"That's just because she doesn't know you very well. Come on. Tina will like it if I take care of you."

"I'll be sure and praise you to the skies. Are you three rooming together next year?"

"I don't know," said Janet.

At Blackstock, the spring of 1972 was a miracle. You could not say of it, as one commonly said of spring in Minnesota, "If it falls on a weekend, let's have a picnic," or "I missed it this year, I was in the shower." It began in a leisurely manner in early April, and hindered only by a few sodden snowfalls that had vanished before sunset next day, it opened itself out slowly like a gigantic paper fan, and bestowed its gifts one at a time, instead of dumping them wholesale on your unsuspecting head and vanishing with a nasty chuckle into the wilting heat of summer.

There was an entire week in which nothing bloomed but snowdrops and bloodroot and the rue anemone, which Janet refrained from picking and giving to Thomas. The willows turned a brilliant yellow-green all along their drooping boughs. Nick and Janet, crossing the wooden bridge to Dunbar in order to wander happily among the trees on that side of the stream, found a mass of writhing garter snakes, brown and yellow with here and there a bit of black. A nest of vipers. I die after a nest of Dukes, thought Janet, adieu. She liked snakes; but looking at these squirming on the sunny bank, she shivered.

Her classes were splendid—rather a waste, when one could have ignored them altogether in favor of the weather. Medeous always made your heart jump when she walked into the room, but she was a very patient and careful teacher who could always find some inspired way to explain something somebody was stuck over. She needed this talent, since two of the members of the class were no good at languages. Why they had chosen a knotty and practically useless one like Classical Greek, Janet could not imagine; it transpired that one of them wanted to enter seminary and the other had a Greek grandmother. The one drawback of the class would probably have been advertised as an advantage: there were so few students, you could not hide if you were having an off day.

Especially with the two linguistic dimwits fumbling all the questions, almost everything would come around to everybody. But learning Greek was, on the whole, satisfactory. And Medeous had more humor than one might suppose. The first sentence she gave them contained a pun. It translated as "The evil women in the tent are hitting the road," where the Greek meant only, "striking the thoroughfare," and not "embarking on a journey." Janet wrote it up in nice big letters and posted it over her bed, where it made an odd contrast to the colorful signs saying, "TAKE PILL!" that Molly and Tina had been obliged to tape up over their own pillows.

English 11 was such a wild delight that she could hardly bear it. She had not expected this reaction to the authors with whom the course began: Pope, Swift, Johnson. But they inhabited the period of Evans's expertise, and his enthusiasm for them was so great and the clarity of his understanding so compelling that Janet found herself reading them as she might read a particularly misty far-future work of science fiction. She was by nature and training an adherent of the Romantic school, but she was at the moment a little frightened of it and all its works. It produced a bewildering and infinite universe devoid of answers.

The Augustans, with every bit as keen a feeling for those aspects of existence, had chosen to deal with them very differently. And when you were in love with someone who perplexed you, and friends with people you could hardly stand half the time and didn't understand even when you could, there was a great deal more c omfort in the Augustans than in the Romantics. She remembered the moment in which Nick had quoted Addison on happiness, and thought she knew why he had chosen so moderate an author.

History 12, which was parceled out by the department for its own convenience, so that all you registered for was a class period, turned out to concern the French Restoration, and to be taught by Mr. Wallace, a chunky, bearded young man who was rumored to be a Marxist. He certainly had a very startling classroom manner; it involved a great deal of shouting and thumping of his fist on the table. He never shouted at or about the students, no matter how stupid they were being, what incensed him appeared to be the idiot fluctuations of history and the imbecility of humanity in general. Janet found him amusing but not very comprehensible; but it didn't matter. You were allowed to go pretty much your own way in this class, and what Janet found herself doing was reading the complete works of Honore de Balzac (in translation, in old editions out of the college library whose yellowing pages had never been cut). And this was another form of science fiction, an alien culture faithfully described, complex, alive, and fascinating.

She was able to express all this, at considerable length, to Molly, who had been greatly taken with their Shakespeare course, and mourned continually that one was not required to read poetry in order to become a marine biologist.

It was a blissfully quiet term. Nobody had any upheavals.

Thomas did not show any temper. Nick, thank goodness, had stopped making digs at Thomas, and Robin unbent enough to play tennis with Tina. She said he had a very peculiar notion of the rules, but at least he never got tired before she did.

Nick and Robin pulled their exasperating mysterious act only once, at lunch in Eliot on a glorious day at the end of April. Janet was complaining bitterly about a class of Greek verbs that upset all she had learned previously. Just as she got her feet on the ground, this new set of endings leapt up to confound her.

"Well, learn them if you know what's good for you," said Nick, scraping the pineapple filling out of the middle of his cake and giving it to Tina, who was going to make a sandwich out of it. "Medeous won't hear anything against the language."

"I don't know," said Thomas. "She's been uncommonly patient this term. I can't help thinking she's pulled off some coup, somehow, somewhere; she's as smug as a cat in a dairy."

Nick and Robin looked at him, both their heads cocked at the same angle and each with the left eyebrow raised. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, thought Janet, grinning.

Thomas found them less appealing, apparently; he scowled and said sharply, "And she hasn't once sworn at the two dunces in our class."

"And I have," said Janet. "We play this awful game where one student has to ask another a grammatical question—and you've got to know the answer, when you're asking, in case your victim doesn't. And I took pity on one of the dunces—Mr. Caspar, wasn't it, Thomas? I asked him for the future subjunctive of the verb
blapto.
It means to hit or harm; but that doesn't matter."

Robin and Nick burst out laughing; Tina and Molly looked patient. "So he made it up," said Janet, "properly, I guess; he stuck the sigma between the root and the first-person singular subjunctive ending."

"And Janet," said Thomas, also laughing, "said, 'no, no, no, there
is
no fucking future subjunctive!'"

"What did Medeous say to that?" said Nick, looking suddenly sober.

"She made me figure out what part of speech 'fucking' was in that sentence," said Janet. "And then she made me translate it."

Nick looked at Thomas, who nodded Nick looked at Robin. Robin made a wry mouth, as if he had eaten something sour. They went on staring at one another. Thomas grimaced at them and began to eat his dessert. "Did she finally wrench Chester Hall away from the Music Department?" said Nick to Robin.

"No," said Robin, "and she won't, either. They haven't anywhere to move those pianos, since the practice rooms in the M&D Center all leak."

"This bodes some strange eruption to our state," said Nick.

"You just hope that's all," said Robin,

"What are you talking about?" said Tina.

"Departmental politics," said Thomas, soothingly, and hit her in the forehead with a grape.

The ensuing food fight involved two other tables and took them all out onto the balcony.

May ninth was Thomas's birthday. Tina was taking him out to dinner at the only fancy restaurant the town afforded, and had been dampening about suggestions for a cake or a surprise party or an expected party. Janet decided she would have to give him the Hamlet calendar before or after Greek class. She had found some wrapping paper in the college bookstore with Greek letters on it in green and red and yellow, which was satisfying.

Molly, seeing her wrapping the calendar that morning, said, "Is that for Thomas? Are you going to see him in class? Can you give him my present?"

"Sure," said Janet, and Molly fetched a box containing three jars of orange marmalade, one with whiskey in it, one bitter, and one sweet, and proceeded to wrap it in some silver paper she had been hoarding for months. "Since Tina is being selfish," she said.

Janet was startled. "They don't get to see much of each other; why shouldn't they spend Thomas's birthday on their own?"

"It's not that," said Molly. "It's the way she scotched all the suggestions for a party later, or earlier. We could all use some diversion. Sharon's crabby, and Peg looks like a ghost, and Nora's fretting over her comps. And I think Thomas would have liked it. He doesn't seem like he's used to having a fuss made about him."

"Well, I'll do the best I can in the time I have. Do you want to come to lunch with us—I thought I'd do it then, instead of handing the stuff to him on the sidewalk."

"Can't—bio class."

"Can't you skip it for once?"

"I could if it was for once. I skipped it last time to go for a walk with Robin."

Something in her voice made Janet look at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair falling in twists across her face, making the blue ribbon of the package into a coil of little fringes. Janet said, "Does Robin need diversion too?"

"Mmmm," said Molly.

"Is there anything good at the theater? We haven't been to a play since last fall."

"Diane says they're doing something odd—
Godspell,
I thin k."

"Sounds more religious than diverting."

"It's a musical version of the Gospel According to St. Matthew," said Molly, snipping off her extra ribbon and handing the package up to Janet.

"I guess Nick might like it," said Janet, dubiously.

"Nobody really has time, is the problem."

"Well, what's the senior play this year? At least there's no commuting time for that."

"Something awfully modern with a long title." Molly got up and rummaged in her desk.
"Here.
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the
Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
Yuck,"

said Molly, emphatically.

"Well, let's go anyway; we can always leave."

"Okay; I'll talk to Robin. Oh, Lord, I'm going to be late. Say happy birthday to Thomas."

Janet, with less distance to travel, since Appleton was just up the road, made a more leisurely departure. Greek was especially trying that day, and Medeous seemed a little out of temper by the end of class. Janet escaped with relief, and waited for Thomas outside.

The silly metal fountain was spurting merrily, and people had as usual been throwing pennies into it. They gazed up at her like dozens of eyes. An oriole was singing madly somewhere in the larches. She was craning her neck after it when somebody bumped solidly into her. It was Thomas. Janet staggered a little and sat down on the wet rim of the fountain.