Authors: Elizabeth Hand
In the front of the room someone giggled. I twisted around to see a heavyset young man in mirrored sunglasses staring at Angelica, his face expressionless, a cigarette dangling from one hand. I had a glimpse of dark eyes and a handsome, broad face with Asian features. Then with deliberate slowness he turned away.
“Are you related to
the
Wilde?” Angelica was asking Oliver. Her innocent emerald gaze made me kiss the pre-Columbians good-bye.
“Ah, yes.
‘The old somdomite,’”
he said, giving her one of his vulpine smiles. “As a matter of fact Vyvyan—his son, Vyvyan—”
But at that moment Professor Warnick cleared his throat.
“Good morning, gentlemen and ladies. Welcome to the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine.”
One of the other students called back, “Good
morning!”
and another laughed. Professor Warnick gave a small tight smile, more like a stoat baring its teeth, and glanced at the papers in his hand. He was a diminutive man, his longish black hair touched with grey, but with a young, rosy face and blue eyes that blazed almost angrily beneath thick black eyebrows. He looked comfortable at his podium, despite clothes as ill suited to the weather as my own: a stylish and expensively tailored suit of charcoal black worsted, cream-colored shirt, and an expansive paisley tie of purple and poison green. The podium he leaned against had been specially designed for him. Its brass fittings were set into richly gleaming wood—rowan, I was to learn, and ancient oak imported from Aylesbury—the whole thing set upon polished casters that squeaked malevolently when it was wheeled from classroom to classroom. It might have been all of four feet tall, and Professor Warnick himself perhaps a foot taller.
“Ahem.” He inclined his head toward the back of the room. “Perhaps the Ghostly Trio would like to join the rest of us—?”
A titter from the other students. I gathered my things, abashed. Oliver stumbled noisily from his chair and took my elbow, looking past me at Angelica. She stared at Professor Warnick before giving him a small smile. His own cool gaze remained fixed as Oliver led me through the maze of empty chairs to the front of the room, Angelica behind us.
“Will this be sufficient, sir?” Oliver asked. He paused beside three seats and cocked his head. Professor Warnick smiled slightly.
“That will be fine,” he murmured, and began handing out sheaves of Xeroxes.
We settled into our chairs. Oliver looked at Angelica. He whispered, “Have you a writing implement? And some paper?”
She rumbled in her bag and came up with a gold Cross pen, tried to tear a sheet of paper silently from one of her pristine notebooks. Professor Warnick looked up as she hurriedly passed the contraband to Oliver. Immediately he began sketching cartoonish figures in the margins. I glanced back at Angelica. She had opened a notebook with marbled cover and endpapers, and was writing carefully at the top of the first page with a Rapidograph pen, drawing elegant cursives in peacock blue ink. I looked at my own battered notebook and my pen: leaky Bic ballpoint, black ink, cap missing. I decided not to take notes.
Professor Warnick’s class was strange. He began by dismissing other methods of teaching the subject at hand—
“Anthropology is very good as far as it goes, which is not very, since the discipline itself is only as old as
The Golden Bough.
And archaeology you will find is
more,
rather than less, problematical. Ah! you think, but how can that be so, since with archaeology we have, at least, the physical evidence in hand, it is only up to us to apprehend the culprit! But, I ask you, how many of you, looking upon a truly ancient artifact from a truly unknown culture, would have the slightest idea of
what it was?”
Professor Warnick’s clear tenor rang through the room’s musty air. Dead silence from his students. Only from Oliver’s desk came faint scratchings and squeakings as he continued to sketch. Professor Warnick swept us all with a dismissive gaze. Then from somewhere (but where? it seemed too bulky to have fit in his pocket) he swept forth an object consisting of a straight upright metal rod with crossbars and several dangling narrow strips of metal. Although cleaned and burnished to a warm bronze color, it still looked stained and worn and undeniably ancient.
“What is this?” he asked. When no one answered he pointed to the heavyset Asian boy in the front row. “Mister”—craning his neck to read a computerized class list—”José Malabar?”
Mr. José Malabar removed his sunglasses and squinted, stretched a hand to touch one of the dangling bits.
“Uh uh uh,” scolded Professor Warnick. “No touching. Quick!—”
“A cattle prod?”
Laughter. The girl beside José Malabar suggested a hair curler. Professor Warnick stalked with quick small steps around the room, holding the rod aloft like a torch. Finally he stopped, turning all the way around once, like a dancer. I was terrified he would call on me. But no, his mouth was opening to say something, obviously he was about to reveal the true purpose of his toy, when …
“It’s a sistrum,” said Oliver. He didn’t raise his head. His glasses balanced precariously on the very tip of his nose as he scribbled away. Angelica drew her breath in sharply and glanced at me. I slid lower in my seat and watched Professor Warnick.
At Oliver’s words our teacher had frozen. Now he pivoted neatly, turning until he faced Oliver.
“That’s
right,”
Professor Warnick said in a soft voice. “And what is a
sistrum,
Mister Crawford—?”
“An Egyptian instrument used in the worship of Isis.” Oliver narrowed his eyes pensively. “Fourth Dynasty, I believe.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Professor Warnick.
“Third!”
He raised the instrument and shook it. It made a harsh jangling, the sound of nails slowly being dropped onto glass. My scalp prickled. The sound died away, but for an instant I thought I heard something else. Another sound, like the distant sawing of cicadas in long grass, hot and tremulous and anxious.
Then it was gone. I lifted my head, chagrined to find myself yawning, and Professor Warnick staring at me with an odd smile.
“I will see you all on Wednesday,” he said, and minced back to the front of the room. “Please have read
The Golden Ass
by then—don’t complain, you’ll find it goes very quickly! The Adlington translation, I believe the bookstore should have it in by now. Oh—”
He looked up from piling papers and sistrum and the end of his tie into a cracked leather briefcase. “I am supposed to mention that there is a reception tonight for Molyneux scholars, at Garvey House. At—”
He peered at a stack of papers rustling between his fingers. “Oh, I don’t know. Seven, I think. Are there any Molyneux scholars here?”
Students paused in their flight to the door. I stood uncertainly between Oliver stumbling to his feet and Angelica carefully inscribing
Golden Ass, Adlington Trans.
into her notebook.
“None?” Professor Warnick said. His gaze flicked across the room. “Mister Crawford? Your friends?”
Angelica looked up, then slowly raised her hand. In the front of the room José Malabar did the same.
And so did Oliver.
“Ah,” said Professor Warnick, and returned to gathering his things.
In the hallway I tried to get a better look at José Malabar, but he hurried off, fingers twitching around a cigarette.
“What’s a Molyneux scholar?” I wondered aloud, but Oliver had already swept past. Angelica halted in the middle of the corridor, poring over a burgundy leather datebook.
“Damn,” she muttered. “Can you tell me what that says? Is it 102 or 202 Reardon?”
I read the fine italicized print as 102. Angelica nodded absently, digging in her bag until she came up with a pair of eyeglasses. “It’s my contacts,” she explained, holding the glasses to her face and staring at her miniscule handwriting. “I’ve got those new tinted lenses and I really can’t see out of them. Okay 102. You were right.”
Tinted lenses! Well, that would account for the eyes, at least. Angelica flashed me a smile and closed her bag. “Thanks, Sweeney. He’s a little strange, isn’t he?”
I thought she was talking about Professor Warnick, but then I saw her gaze dart to where Oliver leaned against the wall. “Java?” he called, snapping his fingers.
Angelica shook her head. “I have a class at Reardon.”
“We’ll walk you over.” Oliver waited for us to catch up with him. “Sweeney looks half-asleep, anyway.”
“I can’t—I’ve got Medieval History—”
Oliver gave me a smug grin. “Me too: kid stuff. Lecture. Origins of civilization, conversion of Constantine. Pseudo-Ambrose and the Avicennian heresy. Got the notes from a guy on my floor who took it last year. We can catch up on the reading tomorrow.”
I laughed, then saw he was serious. “We-ell—”
Behind us footsteps echoed. I caught a faint whiff of sweetly scented pipe tobacco. “So! You’re this year’s crop of scholars.”
It was Professor Warnick. He walked beside us with small neat steps, his blue eyes glittering. “You, of course, Angelica.”
Angelica gave me a queer, almost apologetic look, then nodded.
Professor Warnick smiled. “And you?” He raised his eyebrows at Oliver, who clicked his heels and bowed. “What a silly question! Yet another scion of the Crawford clan. And you?” He looked up at me roguishly.
“N—no—”
“No?”
There was a world of disappointment in the word. I flushed, started to stammer some excuse but stopped.
Because from somewhere down the hall came that sound again, the droning noise that had seemed an echo of the sistrum’s graceless note. For a moment the hallway seemed to vibrate, as though we all stood inside some huge drum that had been struck. Then silence. I was staring into Professor Warnick’s bright feral eyes, and he was staring back at me with pity and what might have been relief.
“I see,” he said softly. “Well, I think you will all enjoy
The Golden Ass,
and
I
will enjoy meeting with you again on Wednesday.” A mocking smile as he tilted his head in farewell. “And some of you I may see tonight at the reception.”
We watched him march off, his silhouette growing smaller and more gnomelike as he approached the end of the hallway. Abruptly he disappeared, leaving us alone and at a loss for words.
“Well,” Angelica said at last, “I don’t want to be late.”
We clattered down the steps without talking. I felt overwhelmed and a little shaken. At first I was afraid to say anything, but then the heat began to work at me like a drug. Relief flooded me, and exhilaration, and fear: as though I had just escaped some terrible accident.
“God,” I said as we finally burst out into daylight. “Is it just me, or was that, like, the weirdest class you’ve ever seen?”
Angelica and Oliver looked at me curiously. “Guess not,” I said, and shut up.
The campus had come alive since last night. There were students everywhere, and enough anachronistically dressed clerical types to cast
The Greatest Story Ever Told.
As we headed toward the Strand, Oliver pointed out things of interest—
“Dutch elm trees, planted in 1689 by Goodman Prater and Arthur Simons. They’ve died of blight everywhere else in the United States, except on the seventh fairway of the back nine at Winged Foot.”
Or, “That’s Brother Taylor Messingthwaite. He was ethical consultant on the Manhattan Project, teaches postgrad Confucian Ethics and Modern Christian Problems. Last year he got a Pemslip Grant for five hundred thousand dollars.”
Or, “That’s the
Ma es-Sáma
mosque. This sheik donated a million dollars to build it, so Islamic students here would have a place to worship. No one else’s allowed inside. It’s got a sixty-foot lap pool underneath.”
Or, “Wild Bill! He’s on my floor, grows psilocybin mushrooms in a terrarium, plus he has this hash oil factory with Martin Sedgewick—yo,
Bill
!”
Angelica laughed at each pronouncement. I said nothing. The effort of trying to maintain my poise had given me a headache. And it seemed like a bad omen, to be skipping class on my first day at college. The heat blurred my vision. My velvet pants felt as though they’d been dipped in hot wax. In the nether distance, the soaring towers of the Shrine shone like glimpses of some watched-for shore. It all made me light-headed. Not giddy, but a cheerless dizziness, as though I had opened my front door at home and somehow found myself at the edge of some windswept chasm.
“Reardon Hall. Designed by Emmet Thorson, the pedophile—he hanged himself in the foyer after it was completed,” Oliver announced as we approached a small Palladian-style building. “Same architect as designed Rossetti—”
“What’s a Molyneux scholar?”
Oliver halted, teetering on the curb with one grimy wing tip toeing into the grass. He stared at me nonplussed.
“I mean, is it some secret thing?” I went on. “Like I’m not supposed to ask?”
Oliver and Angelica exchanged a look. After a moment Angelica said, “Well, yes, it is. It’s a—it’s something they test you for, before admitting you here.”
“But I never—I mean, they didn’t ask
me.
I don’t think. Is it like an advanced placement thing?”
Oliver pursed his lips. “You sacrifice some accuracy in describing it that way.”
I tried not to sound petulant. “So what’s the big deal? I mean, Warnick was talking about it in class. It can’t be
that
secret.”
“It’s not that kind of thing,” Angelica said slowly. The warm wind stirred her tangle of curls. She brushed the hair from her face and turned, sighing, to stare at Reardon’s neoclassical facade. “Some of it’s hereditary, a legacy—I mean if your father went here or something. It’s more like—well, like Skull and Bones. Have you ever heard of that? At Yale?”
“Sure. If you’re a member and somebody asks you about it, you have to leave the room.”
“Right. It’s more
that
kind of secret—”
“But what do they test you for?”
Angelica smiled wryly and shrugged. A few yards away, students lolling on the steps of Reardon were starting to gather their books and knapsacks, extinguishing spent cigarettes or lighting new ones. “I have to go. You’re in Rossetti, aren’t you? I saw your name on a dorm list. I’m on the third floor. You want to meet for dinner?”