Pamela Dean (49 page)

But she had Medeous's
Odyssey
to read first. She read it a book at a time, every night before bed. It was not quite so fine an experience as reading
The Iliad
in the original, but she could read this in the original her senior year, under the kind but ruthless eye of Professor Ferris. This was a very different story from that of the wrath of Achilles. Quite apart from anything else, it had some sympathetic and clever women in it. Janet remembered Professor Ferris's saying, in Greek 33, that
The Iliad
was a tragedy and
The
Odyssey
a comedy. She thought of the women in Shakespeare's comedies, and of those in the few tragedies she had read; and wondered if she had hold of something; if the women in comedies were always more real than those in tragedies.

About halfway through July and
The Odyssey,
she remembered that in junior high school Danny Chin had always been nagging her to read it. She wrote him a letter about it, and entered upon the most satisfying correspondence of the summer. Danny was, in some unpejorative way, a nice ordinary person, who moreover had acquired, from what he said, a nice ordinary girlfriend, who was passionately interested in Depression glassware and espionage thrillers. He said what he meant; he was not difficult; as long as you didn't mention ghosts to him he was as patient and whimsical as anybody could wish for. He was an enormous relief. When he got home they made one visit to Sheila's, one to the used-book stores in the city, and one to see a movie; and Janet felt September as something of a shock when it landed her back at Blackstock.

Robin and Thomas were rooming together. They had a double on the ground floor of Eliot, because Nick had let his Room Draw number go to his head, and had secured a single—a rather narrow and utterly unprepossessing single, but his own—in Holmes.

He and Janet had a very satisfactory reunion in it, among the unpacked boxes shipped from England—a reunion that he spoiled almost immediately by telling her he was adding Music Theory to his schedule to make another twenty-four-credit term. This would be like his senior year in many regards, because as a student with two majors he had to take his comprehensives in one of them. He had decided it had better be Music, in which he felt he had a head start. The Listening Test was administered in the winter, so as not to interfere with the Senior Recital in the spring, so he expected to spend those moments not used up in class or in studying sitting inside a pair of headphones in the Music Library. He already looked tired and harried: England must be less restful than Wisconsin with Medeous.

"Shall we make a date for once a month?" said Janet acidly.

"Yes," said Nick, with the utmost seriousness. "That's a fine idea." He reached over the edge of the bed for his jacket, which had ended up on the floor, and extracted his pocket calendar from it. "I'm glad you are taking this so calmly."

"I'm not, actually," said Janet.

"Certainly you are. Nine girls out of ten would have set up a terrible wailing. Are Friday evenings good for you, or have you got Saturday classes?"

Walking back to Eliot under a mild autumn sky, Janet tried to fume, but found herself laughing instead. She was not sure what she was angry about—not the neglect of her for education's sake, which she sympathized with; more, she thought, the form of Nick's announcement and the failure of that usually ironic young man to understand irony when he heard it. He had not appeared in the least distressed at the prospect of giving her up for the pleasures of sitting in a stuffy room and analyzing classical pieces of music for hours on end—that was what stung, and that was what was funny, too. She remembered Thomas's advice about time. She and Nick hadn't had any time, except for that first summer, which she had squandered mooning over Christopher Fry and feeling put-upon. I wasted time, and now time doth waste me. And what was she in such a hurry for, anyway?

She climbed the stairs to the second floor of A column, went into their room (much like last year's, but with a very shabby blue carpet, and one wall painted bright red by departing students who had been supposed to repaint it white and preferred to pay a fine instead), and poured out her troubles to Molly and Tina, whom she found swearing and agonizing over their fall-term schedules. Since Tina was still enjoying her loverless state and Molly had been putting up with Robin's sulks and absences and general unaccountability for going on three years, neither of them was very helpful, though Molly seemed willing to be indignant; she said she would have thought better of Nick.

"But why better?" said Janet. "That's how I feel, too, but it's not reasonable. What are we here for, anyway?"

Tina burst out laughing, and Molly said solemnly, "'It is co ncerned with facilitating the continuous self-development and self-fulfillment of each individual, as well as with the natural and social environment in which the individual must live and work.'"

"What?"

"That's what it says in the catalog about a liberal education."

"You have got to be kidding."

Molly tossed her the 1973-74 catalog, bound in royal-blue paper and checkered with pictures of college life. Medeous stood in front of a blackboard looking quizzical; Anne Beauvais slept in a library chair with
Pride and Prejudice
open facedown on her stomach, Kit Lane sat in a larch tree, holding a paper airplane and grinning like a maniac; the rest of the pictures were of strangers.

"Page six," Molly said. "It's been in all the catalogs, we just never bothered to read it."

"Jesus Christ," said Janet, reading. This was worse than the anthropologists. "It gets worse, too. 'To develop an appreciation—often by doing—of the creative arts and literature.' Who
wrote
this—President Phelps? I don't believe it."

"Have a heart," said Tina. "He's an administrator, not a writer."

"Well, my God, couldn't he have asked his own English Department for advice? A freshman turning in prose like this would get blasted clear to Wisconsin."

"Oh, come on—it's grammatical, at least."

"So what? My gosh, what does the stuff at the beginning of the English section look like—no, that's okay. I bet Evans wrote it; there's something about the parallelism of the advice to majors."

"Anyway,"
said Tina, "romance is part of your natural and social environment, isn't it?"

"How should I know? What is my natural environment? Is he talking about the Arboretum, or what?"

"You know perfectly well what he means," said Tina.

"Well, if I do, I shouldn't. If I do, it just means my mind is every bit as murky as his."

"You are mad at Nick, aren't you?"

"I'd hate bad prose whether I was mad at Nick or about to marry him," snapped Janet.

Tina looked at her.

"All right, all right, I might hate it but I wouldn't yell at you about it."

"You'll feel better without him," said Tina. "You'll have time to yourself."

"That reminds me," said Janet, giving up on the whole discussion. "I want to keep a watch for the Fourth Ericson ghost this Hallowe'en."

She had photocopied and brought along her father's notes and chapters on Victoria Thompson's manifestations. Tina and Molly, who were already worried about taking Microbiology and Biochemistry in the same term, repudiated the documents with cries of dismay, but consented to be told all about them. They then wandered off on a discussion of how to make a really scientific study of a ghostly apparition. Janet wished them well of it, but there was something about Victoria Thompson's ghost that she was trying to remember.

She had still not remembered it when they went to bed.

She missed Nick acutely at times: when somebody came whistling up the stairs and turned out to be Tina; when the Old Theater put on
Richard III
and even Molly had no time to go see it with her; when she walked along the river or through the autumn wildflowers by herself, or with Molly and Robin or Peg or Sharon and Kevin or Tina and Susan or Diane Zimmerman who had taken up with Jack Nikopoulos but complained about not seeing him either; and when she watched the yellow leaves sweep the bright air clean and carpet the woods with gold.

The Friday once-a-month dates with Nick were very pleasant, but they could barely keep one another up-to-date on their mundane doings, let alone engage in anything like intimate confidences.

She could not fret for long over these problems, being engaged in a very busy term herself. Evans could have filled an entire term all on his own, especially with Boswell and Johnson. Diane Zimmerman was taking that class with her, and they gossiped about Boswell's youthful excesses as if he lived down the hall from them. Janet hoped Hesiod's strictures did not apply to historical characters.

New Testament Greek, though linguistically maddening in the way it collapsed its vowels together and slurred its endings, was taught by Mr. Fields, who was even-tempered, energetic, and fond of Hebrew poetry; and Sociology 11, while all its textbooks had obviously been written by the star graduates of the Mangled-English School that had taught all the anthropologists, at least had an articulate teacher. Hallowe'en came along with astonishing rapidity.

Molly had borrowed a Polaroid camera from a boy in her American history class. Tina had wanted to bring a thermometer, but since nobody had reported a sudden drop in temperature before the appearance of the ghost—or rather, of the ghost's books—this was deemed unnecessary. After being questioned, the afternoon of Hallowe'en, for half an hour by Molly and Tina, who seemed to feel that one Polaroid camera did not a collection of scientific apparatus make, Janet finally said, "You know what it is. Whenever I've seen the ghost, somebody always comes and takes the books away. Peg did it; and then Melinda Wolfe did it."

"All right," said Molly. "Books to be retained at all costs. Did you talk to those girls on Fourth Ericson?"

"They obviously thought I was crazy, but they said two of them will be in studying, and they'll keep an eye out for books flying around."

"Well, I guess that will have to do."

"Did you enlist Robin?" asked Janet.

"Nope—he's got to play the bagpipes for Medeous's party."

"It sounds as if we should have assigned somebody to keep an eye on Peg and Melinda Wolfe," said Tina.

"We're not being very efficient, are we?" said Janet. "I can ask Sharon to deal with Peg. I don't see how anybody's to do anything about Melinda Wolfe."

She went and called Sharon, who first laughed, and then allowed as how Peg did often sleepwalk on Hallowe'en. "You want me to keep her awake," she said, probably with some humorous intention, "or just follow her around if she sleepwalks?"

"Whichever is more convenient," said Janet.

She went back to the room.

"Look," said Molly the moment she got in the door, "what
time
on Hallowe'en does this poor girl throw books?"

Janet dragged her photocopies from under her bed and skimmed through them. "It was eleven forty-five the first time," she said, "and midnight the second. Dr. Bishop was assaulted much earlier in the evening, but that might have been real students."

"It would explain why we missed her the first Hallowe'en when we lived in Ericson,"

said Molly. "We were chasing pipers after our party, between eleven and midnight."

"We should start at ten or so, just to be safe," said Tina.

They accordingly betook themselves, a couple of blankets, some flashlights, the camera, a thermos of tea, and an empty knapsack to put the books in, out to the grassy space between Forbes and Ericson, and sat down far enough from Ericson to be out of the range of flying books. The windows of their old room were lit; the present occupants had bright red curtains with white lace around the bottom.

At eleven-fifteen, the mournful noise of the bagpipes swam over the roof of Forbes, from the direction of Dunbar and the lilac maze. "Do you want to go find Robin?" Janet asked Molly. "I can work the camera."

"No, not particularly. You can go if you want a glimpse of Nick."

"I think I do," said Janet, slowly. "I think—" Yes. The last time anybody had thrown books out of Ericson, they had been thrown at Medeous and her riders. So if she just waited, they might show up here, but the last Hallowe'en she had seen them, they had not come this way.

"Yes, I'm going," said Janet, dropped her empty tea mug onto the blanket, and took off down the hill, over the wooden bridge, up past Dunbar, down and up and down again, to the highway. She crossed it in a hurry and dropped into the bushes beside the gravel path that led down to the bridge over the stream.

She had just managed to quiet her breathing when she heard the sedate
tock, tock
of horses crossing the bridge. It felt for some reason far more frightening to be noticed when she was the only spectator than it would have been when she was accompanied by her entire Hallowe'en party; she lay flat and pulled her turtleneck over her nose and mouth and her green beret of Scottish wool, a belated birthday present from Nick, over her forehead It was not a very useful angle, unless you wanted to study the undersides of horses.

But she was able to see that all their trappings were jeweled and glowing right around and under, and by twisting her neck very uncomfortably, she was able to distinguish Medeous, and Melinda Wolfe, and the Beauvais sisters, as well as the usual remote and foreign-looking people one never seemed to see around campus. There were more brown horses this time; and surely that was Nick on one of them—yes. Nick, and Jack Nikopoulos, and Rob Benfield, when the hell had
he
come back? And two other Classics majors who had graduated last year; and Kit Lane and bad-tempered John. Here came the white horses, just two—one of them ridden by Professor Ferris, who looked ghastly in the greeny light—unless it was just the angle she was viewing him from—and the other one, which Ferris was leading, with an empty saddle. Who was playing hooky this year, then?

Nobody Janet knew.

They walked gently over the bridge, and up the path, and gathered on the highway.